Irish Memories

Robert was a nervous, warm-hearted boy, dark-eyed and romantic-looking; the sensitive nature that expanded to affection was always his, and made him cling to those who were kind to him. The vigorous and outdoor life of Ross was the best tonic for such a nature, the large and healthful intimacy with lake and woods, bog and wild weather, and shooting and rowing, learned unconsciously from a father who delighted in them, and a mother who knew no fear for herself and had little for her children. Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and logs, long drives, and the big Galway welcome at the end of them. One day was like another, yet no day was monotonous. Prayers followed breakfast, long prayers, beginning with the Psalms, of which each child read a verse in due order of seniority; then First and Second Lessons, frequently a chapter from a religious treatise, finally a prayer, from a work named “The Tent and Altar,” all read with excellent emphasis by the master of the house. In later years, after Robert had matriculated at Trinity College, I remember with what youthful austerity he read prayers at Ross, and with what awe we saw him reject “The Tent and Altar” and heard him recite from memory the Morning Prayers from the Church Service. He was at the same time deputed to teach Old Testament history to his brothers and sisters; to this hour the Judges of Israel are painfully stamped on my brain, as is the tearful morning when the Bible was hurled at my inattentive head by the hand of the remorseless elder brother.

Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in assimilating ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling; even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too keenly understood by him.

Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as if his hands fell on the right places without an effort.

A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board, Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,” adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he himself taking the title rôle. The performance took place privately in the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper. Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic yells of the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake not, for the principals, untimely bed.

It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat, and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles “Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman, shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head.

The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket prosper at Ross.

Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices, and wise men too, for they know its value.”

Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters, took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was deferred sine die.

Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and talking to him for long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous dispute between two of the tenants.

Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm, and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce, the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income.

The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and, last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted disposition.

One instance will give, in a few sentences, the relation between landlord and tenant, which, as it would seem, all recent legislation has sedulously schemed to destroy. I give it in the words of one of the tenants, widow of an eye-witness.

“The widow A., down by the lake-side” (Lough Corrib—about three miles away), “was very poor one time, and she was a good while in arrears with her rent. The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he walked down himself after his breakfast, and he took Thady” (the steward) “with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud to see him, and ‘Your Honour is welcome!’ says she, and she put a chair for him. He didn’t sit down at all, but he was standing up there with his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting down one side the fire. The tears came from the Master’s eyes; Thady seen them fall down the cheek. ‘Say no more about the rent,’ says the Master, to her, ‘you need say no more about it till I come to you again.’ Well, it was the next winter the men were working in Gurthnamuckla, and Thady with them, and the Master came to the wall of the field and a letter in his hand, and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show him but the Widow A.’s rent that her brother in America sent her!”

It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten régime, that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best impulses of Irish hearts. The end of that régime was not far away, and the beginning of the end was already on the horizon of Ross.

My grandfather, whose peculiar capacity might once have saved the financial situation, had fallen into a species of second childhood. He died at Ross, and I remember the cold thrill of terror with which I heard him “keened” by an old tenant, a widow, who asked permission to see him as he lay dead. She went into the twilit room, and suddenly the tremendous and sustained wail went through the house, like the voice of the grave itself.

It seemed as if Ross had borne a charmed life during the troubles of the later ’sixties. The Fenian rising of 1867 did not touch it; the flicker of it was like sheet lightning in the Eastern sky, but the storm passed almost unheard. It had been so in previous risings; Ross seemed to be geographically intended for peace. It is bounded on the east by the long waters of Lough Corrib, on the west by barren mountains, stretching to the Atlantic, on the north by the great silences of Connemara. Within these boundaries the mutual dependence of landlord and tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, almost akin to matrimony, and like a happy marriage, it needed that both sides should be good fellows. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church came in 1869, a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally direct tax upon landlords for the support of their Church, but of this revolution the tenants appeared to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone’s Land Act, which by a system of fines shielded the tenant to a great extent from “capricious eviction.” As evictions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross, this section of the Act was not of epoch-making importance there; its other provision, by which tenants became proprietors of their own improvements, was also something of a superfluity. It was 1872 that brought the first cold plunge into Irish politics of the new kind.

In February of that year Captain Trench, son of Lord Clancarty, contested one of the divisions of County Galway in the Conservative interest, his opponent being Captain Nolan, a Home Ruler. It went without saying that my father gave his support to the Conservative, who was also a Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that time it was a matter of course that the Ross tenants voted with their landlord. Captain Trench canvassed the Ross district, and there was no indication of what was about to happen, or if there were, my father did not believe it. The polling place for that part of the country was in Oughterard, about five miles away; my father drove there on the election day, and on the hill above the town was met by a man who advised him to turn back. A troop of cavalry glittered in the main street and the crowd seethed about them. My father drove on and saw a company of infantry keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness, afterwards Lord Ardilaun, as he convoyed to the poll a handful of his tenants from Ashford at the other side of Lough Corrib to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm. During that morning my father ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him. It was a futile search; with a few valiant exceptions the Ross tenants, following the example of the rest of the constituency, voted according to the orders of their Church, and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four to one. It was a priest from another part of the diocese who gave forth the mandate, with an extraordinary fury of hatred against the landlord side; one need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another. When my father came home that afternoon, even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable. A petition against the result of the election brought about the famous trial in Galway, at which Judge Keogh, himself a Roman Catholic, denounced the priestly intimidation that was established in the mouths of many witnesses. The Ballot Act followed in June, but these things could not soothe the wounded spirit of the men who had trusted in their tenants.

Startlingly, the death of a Galway landlord followed on the election. He was a Roman Catholic, and belonged to one of the oldest families in the county; on his death-bed he desired that not one of his tenants should touch his coffin. It was not in that spirit that my father, a few weeks afterwards, faced the end. In March he caught cold on one of his many journeys of inspection; he was taken ill at the Galway Club, and a slow pleurisy followed. He lay ill for a time in Galway, and the longing for home strengthened with every day.

“If I could hear the cawing of the Ross crows I should get well,” he said pitifully.

He was brought home, but he was even then past hope.

Some scenes remain for ever on the memory. In the early afternoon of the 23rd of April, I looked down through the rails of the well-stair case, and saw Robert come upstairs to his father’s room, his tall figure almost supported on the shoulder of one of the men. All was then over, and the last of the old order of the Landlords of Ross had gone, murmuring,

“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!”

Part III

With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.

Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the broad limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty; my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert, like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press.

For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early ’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing ménage, of the strange and starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript, and among and above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the agreeability of Willie Wills.[1]

Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire.

“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a courtly gesture.

In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the children in thrall—as he could always ensnare and hold children—with his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room—!” while, in the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on, Willie Wills!” would rise.

Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism, and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful companions in a tête-à-tête. Where sympathy is joined with imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely admired the efforts of those who endeavoured to systematise his belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the world.

Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the Globe and other papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at; he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power that underlay his facility.

London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place with a different meaning—a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy bags of woodcock after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation both missed much that lay in the power of each to give.

It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr. Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies, in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it will understand how strange, how wounding it is.

It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that was a proof of their nobility.”

There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her way alone to Ross, and found her master there.

In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life, political, theatrical and social, of Dublin.

My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a time of crisis,—it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity College,—she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying,

“Gladstone has resigned!”

That was how she and her family took their politics.

She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I think those days in Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street, with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end. There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness.

In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it, he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly, and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter.

With the close of the ’seventies came the burst into the open of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in full cry. Like hounds hunting confusedly in covert, they had, in the hands of Isaac Butt, kept up a certain amount of noise and excitement, keen, yet uncertain as to what game was on foot. From 1877 it was Parnell who carried the horn, a grim, disdainful Master, whose pack never dared to get closer to him than the length of his thong; but he laid them on the line, and they ran it like wolves.

Up to 1877 crops and prices were good, even remarkably so, and rents were paid. Following that year came, like successive blows on the same spot, three bad harvests that culminated in the disastrous season of 1879-80. It was in 1847 that the Famine broke the heart and the life of O’Connell; it was the partial failure of the crop of ’79 and ’80 that created Parnell’s opportunity—so masterful a factor has been the potato in the destinies of Irishmen.

In 1879 the rents began to fail. The distress was not comparable to that of ’47, but it brought about a revolution infinitely greater. At its close it left the Irish tenant practically owner of his land, with a rent fixed by Government, and the feudal link with the landlord was broken for ever. On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the “striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and, above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the equality bitter to those most concerned. It is probable that the discontent sank in and prepared the way for the mischief that was coming.

By the winter of 1879 the pinch had become severe. The tenants, by this time two or three years in arrear, did not meet their liabilities, and most landlords went without the greater part of their income. Robert, among many others, began to learn what it was to be deprived of the moderate income left to him after the charges on his estate were paid. He never again received any.

Three Relief Funds in Dublin coped as best they could with the distress of the Irish poor. One of them was worked with great enthusiasm and organising power by the Duchess of Marlborough, and by every means known to a most capable leader of Society she lured from Society of all grades a ready “rate in aid.” Entertainments sprang up—theatricals, bazaars, concerts—that helped the Fund and at the same time put heart into the flagging Dublin season, and Robert was in the thick of charitable endeavour. His first Irish song, the leader of a long line that culminated later in “Ballyhooly,” was written at about this time, “The Vagrants of Erin,” a swinging tune, that marched to words National enough for any party.

it began, with all its author’s geniality, and the Irish audience responded to its first chords with drowning applause. Once, as he sang it, accompanying himself, and swinging with the tune, the music stool began to sway in ominous accord. “First it bent, and syne it brake,” and Robert staggered to his feet, but just in time.

“This is a pantomime song, with a breakdown in it!” he said, while the head of the stool rolled from its broken stalk and trundled down the stage.

He had the gift of making friends with his audience; as he came on to the platform to sing, his air of enjoyment, his friendly eyes, even his single eyeglass, had already done half the business. He took them, as it were, to his bosom, and whatever might be their grade, he did his best for them. In spite of the liberties he took with time, words and tune, he was singularly easy to accompany, for anyone acquainted with his methods and prepared to cast himself (it was generally herself) adrift with him, and trust to ear instead of to book. However far afield Robert might range, whatever stories he told, he would surely drop back into the key and the words, like a wild duck into the water, with a just sufficient hint to the waiting coadjutor that his circling flight was ending. His topical songs of those early ’eighties have died, as all of their kind must die. He wrote down nothing, the occasion is forgotten, and the brain in which they had their being has passed from us. One or two points and hits remain with me. In the year that Shotover won the Oaks, a commemorating verse ended:

In one of the songs, the explanation of the failure of the ships Alert and Discovery to reach the North Pole was that “those on the Discovery were not on the Alert.”

In spite of the thunderous political background of the early ’eighties, in spite of the empty pockets of those dependent on Irish rents, in spite of the crime that drew forth the Crimes Act, the fun and the spirit were inextinguishable in Dublin.

But the political background was growing blacker, and the thunder more loud. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 had not pacified Ireland, even though it made the tenant practically owner of his land, even though the rents were fixed by Government officials, whose mission was to coax sedition to complacence, if not to loyalty. Ireland was falling into chaos. Arrears of rent, Relief Committees, No Rent manifestoes, Plan of Campaign evictions, Funds for Distressed Irish Ladies, outrages, boycotting, and Parnell stirring the “Seething Pot” with a steady hand, while his subordinates stoked the fire. Boycotting was responded to by the Property Defence Association, and in 1882 Robert went forth under its auspices as an “Emergency man.” His business was to visit the boycotted landlords and farmers and to supply them with men—from the North, for the most part—to do the farm work. Those who do not know Ireland, and for whom the word boycotting has no personal associations, can hardly realise what that dark time meant to its victims. The owners of boycotted lands, unable to get food or necessaries of any kind from the local tradespeople, imported supplies from England and the North, and opened stores in their stable yards for such of the faithful as stood firm. Ladies, totally unaccustomed to outdoor labour, saved crops and herded cattle, matters that in themselves might have been found interesting, if arduous, but the terror was over all, and in face of bitter antagonism the task was too great.

It was at this work that Robert knew, for the first time, what it was to have every man’s hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the jeer, and the side-long curse; to face endless drives on outside cars, with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops, and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death, when, by accidentally choosing one of two roads, he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. It taught him much of difficult men and of tangled politics, he learned how to make the best of a bad business, and how to fight in a corner; it made him a proficient in Irish affairs, and it added to his opinions a seriousness based on strong and moving points.

Gladstone had faced a dangerous Ireland with concession in one hand and coercion in the other, and however either may go in single harness, there is no doubt that they cannot with success be driven as a pair. There followed the Maamtrasna murders, the extermination of the Huddy family, the assassination in Phœnix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, the attempted assassination of Judge Lawson opposite Kildare Street Club. When Robert was entering into the deep places of his last illness, he spoke with all his wonted grasp of details of those webs of conspiracy. Tradesmen who came from Dublin to work in Kylemore Castle (then the property of Mr. Mitchell Henry) infected the mind of Northern Connemara with the idea that assassination was a fitting expression of political opinion. The murders of the Maamtrasna district followed. The stately mountains beheld the struggle and the slaughter, and the sweet waters of Lough Mask closed upon the victims.

Month by month the net of conspiracy was woven, and life was the prize played for in wonderful silence and darkness, and murder was achieved like a victory at chess. We know how the victories were paid for. I do not forget the face of Timothy Kelly, as he stood in the dock and was tried for participation in the Phœnix Park murders. There is a pallor of fear that is remembered when once seen, and to see that sick and desperate paleness on the face of a boy of seventeen is to feel for ever the mystery and enormity of his crime, and the equal immensity of the punishment. Unforgettable, too, is the moment when his mother took her seat in the witness chair to support the alibi put forward on his behalf, and looked her boy in his white and stricken face, white and stricken as he. Yet she did not waver, and gave her evidence quietly and collectedly.

A phrase or two from the speech for the defence has fixed itself in the memory.

“Take the scales of Justice,” said the Counsel, with a wide gesture of appeal towards the jury; “lift them far above the reach of passion and prejudice, into those serener regions above where Justice herself reigns supreme——”

Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed clear too, mystery requited with mystery.

When we came into the Court we were told that the jury would disagree, there being at least one “Invincible” on the list, and it was so. But with the next trial the end was reached, and the trapped creature in the dock, with the men who were his confederates, went down into the oblivion into which they had thrust their prey.

Many years ago a mission priest delivered a sermon in Irish in the bare white chapel that stands high on a hill above Ross Lake. I remember one sentence, translated for me by one of the congregation.

“Oh black seas of Eternity, without height or depth, bay, brink, or shore! How can anyone look into your depths and neglect the salvation of his soul!”[2]

It expresses all that need now be remembered of the Phœnix Park murders.

* * * * *

CHAPTER II

“THE CHIEF”

There was once a high magnate of a self-satisfied provincial town (its identity is negligible). An exhibition was presently to be held there, and it chanced that a visit from Royalty occurred shortly before the completion of the arrangements. It also chanced that a possible visit to Ireland of a still greater Personage impended—(this was several years ago). The lesser Royalty partook of lunch with the magnate, and the latter broached the question of a State opening of the exhibition by the august visitor to be.

“When ye go back to London, now,” he beguiled, “coax the Brother!”

How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness, uninvited, upon your knee.

I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a force to friendship.

Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their grandchildren, no more than shadows.

They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time of the Union, when there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of the existing arrangement.

Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from them will not come amiss among these memories.

It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers. The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known, are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy Saurin,” apostrophising “the blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B. himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed here.

The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more fascinating they prove themselves to be.

I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant quotation—(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots. Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)—and will try to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately within my scope.

The Chief’s letters cover a wide period, from about 1795 (a couple of years after his marriage) to 1837. One does not, perhaps, find in them the brilliance that is associated with his name in public life and in general society. Those from which I have made extracts were written to his wife. Deeply woven in them is the devotion to her that was the mainspring of his life, and in works of devotion one need not expect to find epigram.[3]

In one of them, written in 1807, he writes from Dublin, to her, in the country, telling her of “an unfortunate business” in which he, “without any personal ill-will to anyone,” “found it his duty to take a part.” He deplores that “among the Members of the Bar coldness and jealousy prevail, where there had been the utmost harmony and unanimity.” “It is not in my nature to like such a state of things,” he says, and, I believe, says truly, “and when I am alone my spirits are affected by it in a way that I wou’d not for the World confess to anyone but you. I am told that I am libell’d in the newspapers, which I dont know for I have not read them, and which I wou’d not care about, from the same motives that have so often, to your knowledge, made me indifferent about being prais’d in them.... You remember on a former trying occasion how I acted and I can never forget the heroism with which you supported me and encourag’d me in a conduct which was apparently ruinous in its consequences to yourself and our darling Babies. Ever since you left this, my mind has been agitated in the way I have described to you. I am seven years older and my nerves twenty years older than at the period of the Union. Judge, then, the delight I feel at the prospect of seeing again so soon, the bosom friend dearer than all, the only person upon whose heart I can repose my own when weary—I judge of it by the pleasure I feel in thus unburthening myself to you, and in the consciousness that the very writing of this letter has given me the only warm, comfortable and confidential glow of heart which I have felt since you left me. Adieu beloved Nan—Pray burn this immediately” (twice underlined) “and let no human being learn anything of those thoughts which to you alone I wou’d communicate. Ever yours C. K. B.”

It is a hundred and more years since this injunction was written. The paper is stained and brittle, and I think that perhaps a tear, perhaps also a kiss or two, have contributed a little to the staining. But though she disobeyed him I believe he has forgiven her. I hope he will also forgive a great-granddaughter who has chanced upon this record of a disobedience that few could blame and that any lover would extol.

Long afterwards the same thought came in nearly the same words to another Irishman, the poet, George Darley, and he wrote those lines that have in them the same note of whispered tenderness that still breathes from the discoloured page of the letter that should have been burned a hundred years ago.