The Earl's promise

There is no sadder sound in nature than the plashing of the waves on a lonely shore in the twilight of a calm evening. As nothing more mournful can well be seen than an expanse of sand stretching away to the far-out tide under the first glimpse of light, so there is something melancholy beyond expression in that perpetually recurring sob with which the sea flings itself upon the land.

The sound is not soothing because it is intermittent, and the ear aches with waiting for its return. It lacks the fury of tempest, and consequently fails to kindle the imagination. Not even the soughing of autumn winds amongst the trees is so plaintive and depressing as the moaning of the sea. One could almost fancy that spirits haunted the shore, and kept weeping and making lamentations bitter, though low. The cry of the bittern cutting through the night is weird and sorrowful enough, but it does not sink the soul with such a burden of utter depression as that caused by the long drawn-out sigh of the quiet sea.

There are special times and particular moods of mind when, even to those who love the ocean best, the monotonous lament I have tried to describe becomes almost unendurable. It recalls unpleasant memories of the past, it awakens dismal forebodings concerning the future, it shadows the present with a mantle of gloom, and it tinges every thought and recollection with a touch of involuntary superstition. In darkness and loneliness people grow fanciful and imaginative. Provide melancholy with a calm evening, a quiet shore, and the sea lapping in upon the sands, and the solitary muser becomes her victim with scarce a struggle. Melancholy, at all events, held Grace Moffat captive as she walked slowly back from the Lone Rock, thinking as she went.

Given youth, beauty, health, fortune, should not her thoughts have been pleasant? To all outward appearance Grace Moffat had not a care; and, in reality, any trouble she might feel arose principally, if not entirely, from her high ideal of life’s responsibilities, from her intense sympathy with the sins, sorrows, and perplexities of her fellow-creatures.

Through the gathering darkness she sauntered slowly homeward, and her thoughts brooded thus: “Beauty! what does it profit? Has it won for me a single true heart? Wealth! what use have I made of it hitherto, of what avail shall it prove in the future? Youth! it passes away, it is gone in an hour; whilst the soft green buds of April open into leaf, behold May comes on us unawares; and almost ere we can scent the perfume of the hawthorn, June’s roses are blooming, have bloomed, are dead. Friends! they die, they change, they leave us. The plans and the projects of life, they are either incapable of fulfilment, or our power is not competent to perfect them. The hopes, the dreams, the aspirations of early spring are chilled, dispelled, disappointed, ere the first breath of winter has frosted over the fair landscape. And what is left?” the girl reflected, pausing as she asked the question.

Slowly and solemnly the waves swept in upon the shore, and then, flinging out a wreath of foam, retreated with a sob.

“The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together,” Grace murmured.

She was not free from the vice of quoting half-texts of Scripture and fancifully adapting them to personal impressions, which is the speciality of young people, but from which persons who are older and ought to know better are often unable altogether to excuse themselves.

Even the sea seemed to her imagination to be in pain.

“What is the matter with me to-night, I wonder?” she marvelled. It was not altogether the long, slow sweep of the tide; it was not the remembrance of an ideal existence still unfulfilled, destined possibly never to be fulfilled, it was something conceived by regret and repentance which struggled within her for expression.

The tones of Nettie’s voice, full at times of the bitterness of suppressed grief, at others of the pathetic tenderness of unshed tears, of unspoken suffering, had pierced Grace’s heart; and, mingling with the feelings of impotent regret which she expressed for the sorrow golden-haired Annette had wrought for herself, came other memories, of a man who had loved her very dearly, in whose voice she had once heard the same agony of repressed emotion, who, in the gathering twilight, with the scent of the flowers floating on the evening air, and the sound of the waters creeping in upon the shore, had received his final answer, and said “Good-bye” and “God bless you, Grace!” in the same breath.

Yes, he had loved her; Grace felt Nettie was right in this. Let her fortune have exercised as large an influence as it might, he must have entertained perhaps as true an affection for her as she had ever inspired.

“But he has got over that long, long ago,” she said to herself, with a faint, cynical smile which the darkness concealed. “How will it be with them all, though, if his father loses Woodbrook?”

How, indeed! Grace had already traced the outlines of a picture, the grouped figures in which and the grim accessories whereof filled her with dismay. She had not evolved it altogether out of the intricacies of her imagination, for once upon a time she chanced to behold a family party who might well enough have sat for the Rileys of the possible future.

This was before Mrs. Hartley left Kingslough, when it struck that lady duty required a visit to be paid to a certain Mrs. Wallace, of whose hospitality she and the late Mr. Hartley had partaken when the Wallaces lived near Glenwellan. With that curious fancy for returning to the scenes of bygone greatness which is characteristic of those whose greatness has been of a limited and local description, the family one summer decided on reuniting and “taking the sea” at Kilcurragh. Thither Mrs. Hartley invited Grace to accompany her; and Grace, though she hated a covered car, and that covered car a hired one, with a hatred which can only be appreciated by those who loathe that species of conveyance, consented.

Mrs. Hartley, who would neither make use of her friends’ carriages, nor keep one herself, hired a car for the expedition, and on the way entertained Grace with the exposition of those practical ideas for which she was famous.

First, she recited the glories of the Wallace family. She rehearsed the horses they rode, the carriages they drove, the servants they employed, the hangers-on they maintained. She described the dinners, where nothing was lacking save solvency; the open house, which provided everything for every one save peace of mind for the owners.

Nor were the glories of “The Castle” forgotten; the attire of Mrs. Wallace when she attended successive parties at the absurd little Dublin Court, more ridiculous in its way than the courts of petty states abroad which have only about five pounds a week of revenue to maintain their magnificence, was duly described. As beads and rum to the Indian squaws and chiefs, so Dublin Castle to those Irish ladies and gentlemen who could never hope to enter Buckingham Palace; and the analogy had not failed to strike so keen and bitter an observer of Hibernian character as Mrs. Hartley.

“But how did the ruin come about?” asked Grace, wearying of the detestable sideway motion of the car and her companion’s satire. “What had these unhappy people done or left undone that they should be poor as you say?”

“How did the ruin come about?” Mrs. Hartley repeated, putting on her judicial look and her black cap before pronouncing sentence upon the sins and shortcomings of those “misguided Irish Wallaces.” “My dear, how does ruin come about? It comes through folly or misfortune, or carelessness or thoughtlessness, which are in England synonymous terms for reckless hospitality, mad dissipation, unwarrantable expenditure, and utter selfishness. In this country, which may some day be a great and wonderful country, but not till it is repeopled, re-religioned, recropped, rebuilt, and remodelled, you have a somewhat coarse proverb about foolish people who eat the calf out of a cow. Grace, child, in Ireland everybody is either starving the cow or eating the calf. The Wallaces ate the calf, as the Somerfords ate theirs, as fifty others I could name devoured it, feet, head, and tail.”

“And they lost everything,” said Grace sorrowfully.

“They ate the calf, and then the cow, and then the cow’s pasture,” Mrs. Hartley replied. “They kept open house till after the bailiffs came; they danced, feasted, dressed, kept up an appearance to the last with a courage worthy of a better cause; then came the collapse; the girls were invited to stay ‘with friends;’ the young men ‘got appointments;’ the father and mother went away for the benefit of Mr. Wallace’s health. Then the place was sold; Lord Ardmorne bought it; then we knew Mr. Wallace was living on his wife’s small fortune; then we heard the boys had gone to the bad, as all such boys do; then we understood the young ladies were governesses and companions, voilà tout.”

“Do you think they will like to see you?” Grace asked, feeling that if she were in the Wallaces’ position her spirits would not be particularly elated by the visit.

“I cannot tell whether they will care to see me,” answered Mrs. Hartley, “but I know they will be glad to say I have called. The twelve-and-sixpence this expedition must cost me would have been better in their pockets, no doubt, but there is a difficulty about suggesting an idea of that kind. The young ladies occasionally send me purses and useless articles of a similar description to dispose of amongst my friends, but as I have no friends who would buy them—at least, as I should be very sorry to ask my friends to do anything of the sort—I send my own money to the fair sellers and the goods to the next bazaar held for charitable or religious purposes. It is always a pity for the children of the last owner in such a case as this; for them all the harass, all the mortification, all the petty shifts, all the contemptible meannesses which genteel poverty is forced to practise; for them no cakes and ale, other people have had all that before they were thought of.”

“It is very hard for them,” Grace agreed; and she thought it eminently hard for the Wallaces when she found them “taking holiday” in poor lodgings, where they could have only one sitting-room, filled at low water with a fine odour of wholesome tar, and unwholesome sea and land waif and decaying fish; when she beheld the once burly, reckless squire, who had ridden after the hounds so long as he could feed a hunter; who had sung the best song, told the best story, been the most jovial companion of any man in the county, sitting drearily in an easy-chair by the window, dressed in old clothes that hung about his body, amusing himself by looking through a telescope little bigger then a child’s plaything at the vessels in the offing.

And then there was the mother, careworn and prematurely old, dispensing tea, the last hospitable offer possible for her to make in their altered circumstances, too genuine a gentle-woman to apologize for the poverty of their surroundings, too absolutely a woman not to feel the change of position bitterly; the girls making the best of things and their holidays at the same time; talking of the kindness of the friends with whom they had been “staying,” of the pleasant places they had seen, of the great people, far enough away from Kilcurragh and their real life you may be sure—they had met.

But there were gray streaks in Miss Wallace’s hair, though any one, to have heard her talk, might readily have imagined she had really spent the years since her father left Glenwellan in travelling about for her own pleasure, and visiting on equal terms the nobility and gentry of the United Kingdom; whilst the beauty, the youngest, had lost her looks, and it was hopeless that even the size and colour of her once celebrated eyes should yet win her a husband rich enough and foolish enough to try to reinstate her family in their former rank.

Pitiful—yes, indeed it was—to see the struggle those people waged between trying to forget the privations of their actual present and striving to remember the adventitious glories of their best-to-be-forgotten past.

Terrible! ay, truly, the fight to preserve appearances, to keep up a semblance of their old position by means of that rank impostor called genteel poverty; as if poverty could ever be genteel, as though the moment it tried to be any thing besides respectable, it did not stand a good chance of becoming disreputable.

All the depth of this reverse Grace had seen with her own eyes, all the comments which friends, enemies, and acquaintances could make upon it she had heard with her own ears, and though none of the Rileys, excepting John and the General, had ever been prime favourites with this favoured one of fortune, still there was something dreadful in the bare idea of people who had once held up their heads in the land exchanging the anxieties of how to keep a fine estate for the worse trouble of considering how to provide daily bread. John would have to maintain them; but then, unless he was doing remarkably well, how could he compass that if he were ever to marry? Perhaps he never would marry, though that seemed an unlikely solution of the difficulty. Perhaps some of his sisters might marry, which, considering the state of Ireland and their fortunes, and the extreme disproportion of marriageable girls and marrying men, seemed more unlikely still.

Suddenly a fresh idea struck Grace. The girls would go to India. Why had not they gone before? All girls who had no money and any relations in India went there, and they all married well, and came home, according to Mrs. Hartley, lazy and delicate.

But then perhaps John, who had peculiar and straitlaced notions concerning women, would object to engage with his sisters in a matrimonial speculation of that description; and indeed Grace felt no doubt he would. Well, then, so long as he remained single, if the worst came to the worst, in other words, supposing Woodbrook were lost, he would be able to contribute to the support of his family; and when he married, his wife would ask one of the girls to go and live with them.

Then, supposing that one girl married well, she could invite another to stay with her, and so the whole family would in due time be provided for.

It was not a nice way, perhaps, of getting over the difficulty; but still, when people get very poor, and the choice lies between marrying a stranger and entering a strange family as governess, people generally choose, when practicable, to marry the strange man.

Grace had seen such cases, and had heard of many others, which set her wondering whether, in the event of her fortune making wings for itself, she could bring herself to contemplate a mariage de convenance.

No, she decided. She would rather go out as a governess or seek a situation as companion. Some people may say this showed she knew rather less of governesses and companions even than of marriage, but I think it was true for all that.

Spite of her money, her apparent worldliness, her determination to have no man for lover or husband who should not be able to bring as much in the way of fortune at least as she, Grace Moffat was really made of that sort of flesh and blood to whom the idea of being sold, or selling itself, is utterly and totally repugnant, impossible of achievement. She could, had reverses come, have earned her living as a governess, for she was very fond of children, loved them in the abstract, loved them practically; or she might have tried to humour the whims of sickness, and lighten the cares and ailments of age, for she had a high sense of duty, a keen comprehension of an often forgotten truth that when anything is given much has frequently to be returned, but she could not have married for a home.

There is not much praise perhaps due to her for this. Marriage and love, like many other things, are to a great extent matters of feeling. Her feeling concerning them was strong. For instance, when once she found Mr. Robert Somerford had been playing at fast and loose with her, not all the titles in England, not all the money in the Bank of Ireland, could have reconciled her to his suit.

It was quite on the cards she might make an insane match some day, and repent it to the last hour of her life; but at all events she would not make it with her eyes open.

For these and other reasons the notion of John Riley’s sisters going out to India to establish themselves as he had done, to seek his fortune, did not recommend itself to her sentiments, but it did to her common sense. After all, there was nothing so exceptionally refined about the Misses Riley as to render the idea repugnant to them. Why, then, did they not, had they not gone? Grace could only solve the problem in one way. John did not wish them to go—poor John—dear old plain-featured John? why could he not have been content and liked her as she liked him? Why had he gone away and left his father in the hands of the Philistines? Of course she should write to Mrs. Hartley. What could Mrs. Hartley do, what would she say?

Altogether it was so astounding a thing to contemplate, even the possibility of Mr. Brady ousting out the Rileys and ensconcing himself in the Woodbrook nest, that Grace’s mind refused to accept it as a possibility. Nevertheless she could not help wondering whether, in the event of the Rileys leaving, the next tenant would paint the entrance gates and repair the lodge.

“If John were at home, I should ask him to have the trelliswork on the West Lodge nailed up,” thought Grace; “but of course, as he is not, I dare not mention the matter to any one.”

People who have plenty of money are able to attend to details which to people who have only plenty of worry seem maddeningly small.

The latter, under the pressure of great trouble, consider trifles as of no importance, never thinking that trifles to the world are as straws, showing which quarter the winds of fortune blow from.

Spite of these incongruities of thought, however, the very idea of Mr. Brady taking possession of Woodbrook seemed like a hideous nightmare. That he should step into the Castle Farm was bad enough, but that he should also annex Woodbrook appeared impossible.

Nevertheless Nettie had assured her such a change of owners was not merely possible, but probable; and if this were really the case, and Grace’s common sense saw no reason to doubt the fact, steps ought immediately to be taken to avert such a calamity.

But how were they to be taken, and by whom? If, next day, Mrs. Hartley were put in possession of the facts, what would she do? what could she do if she would?

It was Nettie who had suggested Mrs. Hartley, but the result of Grace’s musings tended towards consulting her father.

He was a man, and, spite of her anti-matrimonial views, Grace had more faith in the capabilities of men than of women; of late she and her father had been much more together than was hitherto the case; her cousin was gone, and neither Mr. Moffat nor his daughter strove to fill her place with another companion.

They were happier alone. People said Grace was growing like her father, and that as she got older she would feel as great a distaste for general society as he; but this was not quite true; Grace loved long quiet walks, but the company of her fellows had its charms for her as well. Still she and her father had dovetailed into companionship. Her enthusiasm had fitted itself somehow naturally into his indifference. She was content he should laugh at her. He was more than content perhaps to tolerate her impetuosity, her indiscriminate charity, her wide sympathy with, and ready inclination to help, the poor.

If study had taught him as little as it usually does most scholars of things likely to be useful in daily life, it had at least imbued him with toleration towards his own daughter.

It enabled him to draw inferences about her which a less educated man would have arrived at by means of intuition.

Had she been more selfish, less unsophisticated, would she have loved him so much, herself so little? He had but one trouble about her, she was a very lonely maiden. Before he went he would like to have seen her married.

To whom? That was the difficulty. After Robert Somerford’s defection, he could not, looking around on the various men who aspired to his daughter’s hand, look upon one of them with favour.

“Well,” he reflected, “single happiness is better than double misery, nevertheless I could wish to have seen my Grace the wife of some honest gentleman ere this.”

Honest gentlemen, however, are always a little shy about trying to win heiresses, and so father and daughter, having been thrown much together of late, had learned to understand each other better and love each other more.

For which reason Grace resolved to take Mr. Moffat into her confidence. If she told him she was not at liberty to name her informant, he would trouble her with no questions, and his daughter had an instinctive feeling that, if by any means Woodbrook could be preserved to the Rileys, he would find that means.

He had been willing to help her in the matter of the Scotts, and only failed to do so because it was a matter in which no help could be given.

He would be able perhaps to make some useful suggestions, at any rate she would talk the matter over with him.