Volume I Part 5 (1/2)

'Yes, Terence,' returned a cheery voice, 'or Councillor Crosbie, if you please, since I have the honour now to act as your wors.h.i.+p's junior. Where's Tone? Not gone. Thank goodness! I must clasp the dear lad's hand before he goes.'

Mr. Curran shook his mane back like a retriever that has bathed, which was a trick he had when worried.

'Donkey! what do you here?' he grumbled. 'Are we not fools enough without you? You belong to another race, which has nought in common with our troubles. Take my advice, and just trot home again. If you want to be silly, join the Cherokees as your brother has, or the Blasters, or the h.e.l.lfires. Leave plotting to the children of the soil.'

The young man, who was good-looking, with the comeliness which a fresh complexion gives, showed his white teeth, and broke into a merry laugh.

'In an evil temper,' he remarked. 'Gone without dinner, eh? If I am not a drunkard and a gambler, whose fault is it, sir, but yours? Who taught me that as a younger son I have my way to carve through life?

Who made me choose the Bar? Who superintended my studies, and gave a helping hand? _You_--you cross Curran! and, believe me, I'm not ungrateful, though a bit more idle than you like.'

'Then get you gone, and leave us to our folly,' was the testy rejoinder. 'I won't have your mother saying some day that I brought her boy to danger, and instilled ideas into his vacant mind which put his neck in danger.'

'Fiddlededee!' laughed the good-humoured scapegrace. 'You are no more a conspirator than I. Why are you here, and why have you brought my cousin if awful rites are going forward?'

'Because I'm an a.s.s!' growled the other. 'Conspirator--why not, pray?

My heart is sick when I look round me. Why should I not be maddened as others are? Do I love Erin less? Doreen belongs through her religion to the people, and it is fitting she should sorrow with them. Yes, it is maddening?' he pursued, kindling suddenly, and breaking through the crust in which for prudence' sake he cased himself, as the thoughts over which he had been brooding took form. 'What is to become of us?

It would have been merciful if Spencer's desire had been gratified, and the land turned into a seapool. Our travail is long, and endeth not. Our master gives us a hangman and a taxgatherer; what more should such as we require? His laws are like shoes sent forth for exportation. 'Twere idle to take our measures, for if they pinch us, what matters it? We stand between a social Scylla and Charybdis. Poets and visionaries, like this poor fool here, work on the hare-brained people, whose craving for freedom is whetted to voracity; and, led by the blind, they tumble into traps, at which a less ardent nation would be moved to laughter. Temerity, despair, annihilation--that is the _mot d'ordre_. See if I am not a true prophet. And the luxurious n.o.bles--do they help with their counsel? Not they! Their twin-G.o.ds are their belly and their l.u.s.t. They have nothing in common with the people.'

'The French shall drive them into the sea,' remarked Tone, placidly.

'The French, the French!' retorted Curran. 'Much good may they do us!

A revolution achieved by such means would merely mean a change of masters. You live in a fool's paradise, Theobald. I can see farther into futurity than you, for I'm older, worse luck. I see a time coming--nay, it's close at hand--when a spectre will be set up and nicknamed Justice; which, if G.o.d wills, it shall be my mission to tear down. Yet what may I do with my little weight? A mean weak man with feeble health. May I be the log to stop the wheels of the triumphal car? Verily, the ways of Heaven are inscrutable!'

It was rarely that the little advocate spoke out so plainly. His friends knew that he ever regarded his country with the idolatry of a lover, that to her he gave freely all he had to give; through the stages of her pride, her hope, her struggles and despondency, his heart was hers for better and for worse; and therefore many marvelled that, actively, he should have held aloof from the patriot band.

n.o.body could charge him with cowardice. Terence himself had never solved this mystery, although as his junior he saw more than most of the workings of Curran's mind. He had wondered at his chief's coldness in a careless way, till now, when it became patent to him, as to the rest, that Curran's second sight beheld the possibility of state trials in the future, where one would be needed to stand up for the accused whose heart was steadfast, whose courage was indomitable.

Terence felt sure his chief was wrong--the beardless are always wisest in their own esteem--for to the honest boy it seemed impossible that Albion could be so base.

Yet the notion was grand that, despising dignities, the little lawyer should be keeping himself in reserve for a Herculean labour, that he should be deliberately laying himself out to stand by those whom others would desert; and so, to the knot of bystanders in the gloaming, the ugly pigmy of a man appeared sublime, as he sat in an att.i.tude of profound dejection, with the sweat of strong emotion in beads upon his forehead and on the black elflocks of his untidy hair.

The jolly giant Ca.s.sidy rapped out a huge oath, and vowed with a string of expletives that he should be 's.h.i.+llooed' forthwith. The Emmett brothers fairly wept; tears stood in the eyes of the statuesque Doreen; Theobald knelt down before him on the dewy gra.s.s, and entreated a farewell blessing ere he went.

'The Lord bless and keep you, my poor friend!' Curran whispered in a broken voice. 'Whether He wills that you should die an exile, or that you should return to us with glory, G.o.d be with you! May it never be my lot to stand up in court for you! or if it must be so, may inspired words be given me to save you from your danger! Now we must be separating, or we'll have the Castle spies on us.'

Followed by many a G.o.d-speed Tone vanished in the darkness. All listened to his retreating steps, wondering when and how they might ever meet again. Curran heaved a sigh, and was the cynical man of the world once more, with the dancing eye and whimsical half-melancholy smile, who threw all the judges on circuit into convulsions with his wit, and stirred the jury to unseemly laughter.

'Terence,' he said, linking his arm in that of his junior, while the young ladies, helped by the Emmetts, mounted their horses, 'you were wrong to come here. My lady will be angry if you mix with the common riffraff. What would you say if she pulled her purse-strings tight, you extravagant young dog? The idea of one of your birth worrying himself about the people's wrongs is of course preposterous; therefore, to please your mother, you had best give them a wide berth.

My Lord Clare shall get you a snug post with nothing to do, and vast emoluments such as becomes a lord's brother, and then you'll be rich and independent in no time, while I am still prosing over briefs.'

Terence, in whose face the wicked Glandore expression was tempered by good-nature, was not pleased with the banter of his chief, for his cousin was at his elbow, who always persisted in looking on him as a boy, though he was a great fellow of four-and-twenty who was constantly arraying himself in gorgeous clothes to please her. A tantalising cousin was Miss Doreen to him; suggesting broidered capes and becoming ruffles when amiably disposed, which, when with pain and grief he got them made, received no notice from her whatsoever. He chose to imagine that he was desperately in love with the beautiful Miss Wolfe, and was proud of his pa.s.sion, though she laughed at him.

Vainly he sighed; yet no worm fed upon his damask cheek. Albeit he pretended to be very wretched, he was not; for his life was before him and he enjoyed it thoroughly, and was the victim of an amazing appet.i.te, and would probably have forgotten all about Miss Wolfe in a week (though he would have smitten you with a big stick if you dared to hint as much) if her lithe figure had been removed from his sight for that brief period. Sometimes he took it into his head that she fancied Shane, and then he was pierced through and through with jealousy, for the brothers never could get on, and the younger one knew my lord to be not only thick of skull, but drunken and dissolute too, even beyond the average of his compeers; a fire-eater, whose hand was never off his sword, who cared more for dogs than women, more for himself than either, and who as a husband would be certain to bring misery upon the girl. Then again he would be consoled for an instant by the reflection that it does not answer at all for first cousins to marry; and then his longings would get the better of him, as he marked the wealth of the brown hair which had a golden ripple through it, the finely developed bust, the eyes like peat.w.a.ter. She was interesting, and his heart was soft. He watched her furtively sometimes in her fits of sadness; when she sat behind a tambour at the Strogue hall-window, gazing, with eyes that saw nothing, at the fis.h.i.+ng-boats upon the bay, as they splashed along with yellow sails and clumsy oars upon their mirrored doubles, till tears fell one by one upon her work, like thunderdrops upon a window-pane; and he could tell that she was dreaming of her people. Then his heart yearned towards Doreen. He longed to seize her in his l.u.s.ty arms, crying:

'My beloved! I am poor, and you are rich' (for Mr. Wolfe had put by a cosy nest-egg). 'Our tastes are simple. I will try to live upon love and my allowance. You shall keep all your fortune to yourself--only be mine, my very own!' But somehow he never said the words, for something told him that she would only smile, and on second thoughts he was glad he had not spoken.

It would have been wrong in her to scoff, for the proposal would have been as unusual as disinterested; but girls will laugh at improper moments. Miss Wolfe was an heiress as times went, and likely to be richer; impecunious squires and squireens were legion; and the abduction clubs not yet quite stamped out. This, indeed, was one reason why she spent most of her time at Strogue instead of with her father in Dublin; for he, easygoing in most things, was painfully alive to the possibility of finding his daughter stolen one day when he was in court, to be bucketed about the country without a change of linen till his reluctant consent was wrung to a match with some ne'er-do-well.

At Strogue such a thing could hardly happen, for the prestige of the Glandores was hedged about with terror, and every ne'er-do-well knew that to play Paris to the Helen of the fair Doreen--to carry her off from the sanctuary of Strogue Abbey--would be to call down dolorous reprisals from her two stalwart cousins.