The Earl's promise

With much the same feeling as a Gipsy, who has been compelled to live for a time amongst the house-dwellers, returns to the camp on the common, to the savoury supper furnished gratuitously from his nearest neighbour’s farmyard, to the bed on the green-sward, with heaven for a canopy and ferns for his pillow, so Grace, after a not disagreeable or uninstructive sojourn in the foreign land of England, beheld once more the fair shores and heard the familiar accents of her own country.

Home, after all, is home be it ever so homely; and the tones and the voices familiar to childhood sound sweet after absence, let those tones and voices lack refinement though they may.

Grace had outgrown her prejudice against the English as affected. She had learned that their accent was as genuine and natural as the rougher tongue of her native land; but still just as a Londoner, coming south from the Land o’ Cakes, thanks God when he reaches Carlisle to hear again something approaching a civilized language, so her heart warmed at sound of the familiar intonation. She was home again; she was amongst her own country people; she was no longer lost in the great country of England; she was a person of importance once more; she had ceased to be a princess in disguise,—back in the old familiar places, she was Miss Moffat of Bayview again.

From the moment she set foot in Dublin, she recognized that fact; and once for all I may as well state, it was pleasant to her. She had been but one of many in England; she was a person of importance in Ireland. She had learned much near the head-quarters of civilisation, but she had not learned to be indifferent to the prestige given by wealth and rank and being well known by repute even beyond her county.

These weaknesses, which add so much to happiness, but which usually develope themselves later in life, were with Grace an integral part of her nature. She was of the soil; she was Irish and she loved everything Irish. There might be things in the country she could wish improved, but still the place was home to her. And Grace’s heart swelled and her eyes filled with tears as she heard the brogue floating around her, and those persuasive tones which in Dublin always seem addressed only to one person, and that the listener, fell upon her ear.

Dirty, picturesque, polite, plausible, unsuccessful, they were her countrymen and countrywomen; and for a moment, Grace, in the excitement of her return, forgot the errand which had brought her back, and said to Mr. Nicholson in an access of enthusiasm,—

“How delightful all this is after England!”

“It is very kind of you to say so, Miss Moffat,” he replied. “For my part, I think London is the only place worth living in on earth.”

“Oh! fie,” exclaimed Grace, “and you an Irishman!”

“It is precisely because I am an Irishman that I say so,” was the reply. “I have met with many English people who believe they should like always to reside in Dublin.”

“I never have,” and Grace sighed when she thought of Mrs. Hartley’s openly expressed opinions.

Ere long, however, her enthusiasm toned down. She had not reached Mr. Nicholson’s house before her thoughts were busy with the matter which had brought her to Ireland. Across the breakfast-table she talked to her companion about Amos Scott, and how it would fare with him.

“I fear badly,” said that gentleman, who had heard all about the farmer during the time he spent at Bayview, and read the reports that followed after the murder, in the papers. “Everything seems against him. His animus was no secret, and his stick was found beside the dead man.”

“Poor Amos,” ejaculated Grace. “His wrongs have driven him mad.”

“Neither wrongs nor madness will reconcile a north of Ireland jury to knocking a man over in the dark,” said Mr. Nicholson sententiously. “His chance might have been better in the south or west.”

“What do you think they will do to him?” asked Miss Moffat anxiously.

Mr. Nicholson paused for a moment, then he said,—

“I am afraid it will go against him, and if it does, unless he have powerful friends—”

“Oh!” she cried, “there is not one in all that part of the country but would speak for him. Every one knows how sorely he has been tried. Every one’s sympathy must be with him—”

“Surely, Miss Moffat, your sympathies are not with him?” interposed Mr. Nicholson gravely. “Let Mr. Brady be what he might, his right to the land was undoubted. A man is not to be murdered because he asks for his own.”

Having made which remark much in the interest of the servant, who, as is usual in Ireland, had both ears laid back to listen to the conversation of his betters, the lawyer relapsed into silence, leaving Grace to cogitate at her leisure over the plain truth contained in his sentence.

Her sympathies were with Amos Scott, but her common sense told her a man ought to be able to insist on having his own without paying for his temerity by his life.

Once again she was at sea, as every person is sooner or later who embarks on the study of Irish difficulties. “There was something rotten in the state of Denmark” she had long known. Dimly she was beginning to comprehend part of the rottenness lay in public feeling, popular prejudice, in that crass ignorance born of Romish supremacy, and nursed by self-asserting Dissent, till it might have puzzled a wiser than Solomon to say whether Catholic or Protestant were the most intractable—whether the senseless obedience of the south to its priests were worse than the bigoted intolerance of the north to every created being which differed in opinion from itself.

Every great virtue throws a shadow—the loftier the virtue the longer the shadow. Grace understood, who better?—the virtues of her hardworking, uncomplaining, patient, stubborn northern compatriots; but the dark shadows she had seen likewise; she was beginning to understand that the natives of no land are perfect, that God has conferred no more special patent of immunity from the taint of original sin on the poor than on the rich.

Though an enthusiastic, Grace was a thoughtful woman—a conjunction in one so quietly brought up, not merely possible, but probable, and the problem of humanity, which sooner or later troubles every one brought into contact with it, began to perplex her the first hour she again set foot in Ireland.

The same trouble which beset her is vexing English philanthropists at the present day. Even in happy England there is a cancer; who shall adventure to cut it out? there is a worm at the root; who shall dare turn up the ground, and show where it is? There are doctors who would palliate—there are men who would destroy the upper branches—who would prune and cut and lop and top the trees; but there are none, unless, indeed, it may be a few brave souls, who have wisdom enough and courage sufficient to turn round and tell the lower classes,—“The disease is in yourselves. We cannot cure it unless you will consent to help yourselves. You may lop and top for ever—you may cut down an ancient aristocracy, and try to dignify a mushroom nobility of your own creation, but your labour will be for nought, and your trouble loss utterly without gain, for wherever the evil may have begun it is with you it now lies. The rank and file of the social army are utterly demoralised. Each man wants to command. No man is willing to obey. The spirit of discontent is abroad. Work has become distasteful; in that state of life in which God has placed him no human being seems satisfied to stay.”

In one respect the fault of the Irish has always been that of resting satisfied too easily, and this idea was an integral part of Grace’s faith. At the same time she, being at once clear-sighted and critical, could not avoid seeing her country people were satisfied easily, or indeed at all, only when the satisfaction was given in the way that pleased them; that is to say, a dinner of fish, under certain conditions, was not objectionable, but a dinner, even off a stalled ox, unless it happened to be served exactly as they thought well, or in the place they saw fit to eat it, would not have met with their approval.

Had she not herself offered to Amos Scott the choice of farms as fertile, homesteads as substantial as that he could hope to hold no longer; and had he not refused her kindness almost with scorn. He said he would have the familiar acres or none. He would have the home rendered dear by the mere passage of time, by the events which had taken place within its walls, or else a dry ditch and the stars of heaven shining down on him and his. He would law and law and law until his last shilling was gone, in feeing men who could never put his wrong right on this earth; he would fight every inch of the ground only to be beaten at last; he said all this—what had come of it?

That he was lying in gaol, waiting his trial for murder; that, likely as not, he would walk out some morning on the scaffold—his grey hair floating in the wind—to end years of suffering, to expiate years of folly with his life.

Her sympathies were with him. How would it fare with the wrong-doers, if no one had compassion for those who err? If she could help him, if she could save him, she would. To Mrs. Hartley she had said, and said as she believed truly, she must return to Ireland chiefly for Nettie’s sake. Now she was in Ireland, Grace could not conceal from herself the fact that she had come home as much in the interests of the accused as in those of Mr. Brady’s widow.

“Poor Amos,” she thought, “the gentry will be all against him. They will forget what he suffered. They will remember only his sin.”

Notwithstanding Mrs. Nicholson’s entreaties, Grace made no longer stay in Dublin than it was possible to avoid. She longed to be in the north. It seemed to her she was needed there, and Mr. Nicholson, having been so fortunate as to find an acquaintance who was proceeding as far as Kilcurragh, put the heiress in his charge, and, it may as well be confessed with some misgivings as to how Grace would comport herself in so critical a position, saw her off.

“If you want my help,” he said, and he felt quite certain she would, “I will come at an hour’s notice.”

Very gratefully she gave him her hand, and thanked him with one of her rare and wonderful smiles.

“A woman, if she had been portionless, to have driven a man to distraction,” considered Mr. Nicholson, and he was right. An heiress is never so truly a woman as other women. Gold clothes her as with a garment, and it is a somewhat stiff robe in which to take her walks abroad.

Decidedly Grace would have been a more charming, even though a much less useful woman, had her face alone been her fortune.

As matters stood, however, she made friends so successfully with the elderly gentleman who was her travelling companion, that by the time they arrived at their journey’s end, he was sufficiently interested in Amos Scott to assist her in finding his solicitor, who chanced to be a gentleman famous for making the best of bad cases—for getting off notorious vagabonds, for taking advantage of legal quibbles, and saving men’s money and lives by the splitting of a legal straw.

“We are all friends here, I suppose,” he said looking doubtfully at Grace’s companion, whilst he stripped the feathers off a pen. “I may speak confidentially?”

“Most decidedly,” Grace answered.

“I can do nothing for him,” he remarked. “He will not trust me.”

“How do you mean?” she asked.

“He says he is innocent. What can any human being do in the face of such an assertion?”

For a minute or two Grace sat silent. The idea was as new to her as obnoxious to Scott’s lawyer. Hitherto it had never occurred to her that he would deny his guilt; but now—something—not born of reason or conviction, but a subtle instinct, prompted her to answer.

“If Amos Scott says he is innocent, you may believe him. I have known him since I was a child. At such a juncture he would not tell a lie.”

The lawyer smiled.

“Believe me, Miss Moffat,” he said, “the prospect of a halter has a wonderfully deterrent influence on the candour of most people.”

“Perhaps,” she replied; “but he would tell me the truth.”

“Will you see him?” asked the other eagerly.

“Yes, certainly.”

“And report the result of your interview to me?” he continued.

Only for an instant she hesitated, then she replied,—

“Word for word as far as I can recollect; what he says you shall hear.”

“Then I may save him,” he continued.

“If money—” began Grace, but he stopped her.

“I am not indifferent to money,” was the reply, “but I never work for it alone. A thousand pounds paid down could never quicken my intellect as much as a perfect knowledge of a case. With Scott I am utterly at sea. He will not confide in me, and I do not know what to do for him. And the Assizes are close at hand, that is the worst of it.”

“I shall see you again before the week is out,” said Grace. “Meantime—” and she laid some notes on the table, which the lawyer folded up and handed to her once again.

“Money could do no more than I have tried to accomplish,” he remarked. “When it is all over pay me if you will.”

“Upon the whole, Miss Moffat,” criticized her travelling companion, “it seems to me the rogues have the best of it in this life. No honest man could find a lawyer like that,” which is no doubt true. Perhaps it is part of the Eternal Justice to leave one world in which the rogues and the thieves and the plausible soft-spoken vagabonds have the best of it.

Spite of all the clergy tell us I am afraid, notwithstanding the hard lines many ragamuffins meet with, the paradise of sinners is earth.

Straight from Kilcurragh to Maryville drove Grace. Her travelling companion saw her and her slender luggage safely bestowed on the outside car, by which vehicle she elected to travel, and then made his farewell.

“Good-bye, Miss Moffat,” he said; “I shall watch the progress of the case with interest and anxiety.”

“He will tell the truth to me,” she answered. And strong in this faith, she started on the long drive which lay before her.

Anxious to avoid Kingslough, and for a short time, at least, all contact with its inhabitants, she told the man to take a road lying a little inland which would, she knew, bring her out near the gates of Maryville.

It was a lovely evening, the sea lay like a mirror under the clear blue sky, the woods in the distance stood dark and green, mellowed by flushes of sunlight, that stole over them warm and bright; up and down the hillsides crept waving shadows and patches of golden light; the white cabins, nestling among fields where the wheat was already in the ear, looked as if they had every one been freshly whitewashed. Over the calm home landscape Grace gazed, tears dropping down in her heart the while; whilst her eyes gathered the peace and the loveliness of the familiar scene, her thoughts were concentrated on a grave in Kingslough churchyard. Life seemed to have begun for her in earnest at her father’s death. Strangers dwelt under the remembered rooftree. To no hearth could she now creep close feeling it all her own. For others welcomes might sound, for others smiles might be wreathed, eyes brighten, tones grow softer, but for her with neither kith nor kin who cared that she was returning a lonely woman to comfort one almost as desolate as herself?

By the time she reached Maryville the sun had set, and the gloom of the dark avenue seemed to fall heavily upon her as they drove over the soft gravel, still wet from heavy rain which had fallen in the morning.

There was not a soul stirring about the place. At the lodge no one appeared, and the driver had to open the gates for himself. As they neared the house, it seemed like a building deserted.

Not a dog’s bark broke the stillness, not a sound came through the evening air to prove that life was near at hand.

The man laid that day in his grave was no quieter than the place of which he had so lately been master. Through the hall the noise of Grace’s knock echoed drearily. No city of the dead was ever more silent than Maryville on the first occasion that Miss Moffat set foot within its precincts.

Standing looking over the deserted lawn, Grace after a few moments heard the sound of footsteps coming apparently from some remote distance in the house. Across a stone passage, then along a wide corridor, then over the hall paved with black and white marble came that steady heavy tread. Next instant the door was opened sufficiently to admit of a head being thrust out to see who the intruder might be; a head, covered with luxuriant black hair, belonging to a woman from whose appearance Grace instinctively recoiled.

At sight of the visitor this woman opened the door a little wider, affording Miss Moffat a full view of a female of about seven or eight and twenty, tall, erect, bold.

Evidently she had been crying, but the traces of tears failed to soften the hard defiance of her dark eyes, or the tone in which she asked Grace what she was “pleased to want?”

“Is Mrs. Brady within?” inquired the visitor.

“She is,” was the reply, uttered in an accent and with a manner as uncompromising as a north wind.

“Can I see her?”

“It is not likely you can. Maybe you are a stranger, and have not heard what has happened.”

“It is because I have heard,” Grace answered, “that I am here. Be so good as to tell Mrs. Brady—”

“Who is it, Susan?” called out a weak, querulous voice at this juncture. “No matter who it is, tell them I am in trouble and can see no one—remember that—no one!”

“Not even Grace,” answered her old friend. “Oh, Nettie! I have travelled all the way from England to be with you. Let me come in and speak to you: let me stay—”

Before she had finished her sentence Mrs. Brady had crossed the hall and flung the door wide open.

“Grace! Grace!” she cried.

That was all. In a wordless agony she clung about the new-comer. She twined her arms around her, she laid her head on her shoulder, but she never cried nor sobbed. The years fraught with agony inconceivable, seemed to have taken the power of weeping from her.

“This is the first time she has come out of her room since—” began she of the black hair in explanation, but Mrs. Brady stopped her.

“Don’t!” she said in that faint irritable voice, which spoke volumes to Grace of the sufferings she had endured. “I cannot bear to talk,” she went on addressing her friend. “If you stay, if you really want to stay, you must never speak to me of it or him. Will you promise?”

“I never will unless you wish me to do so,” Grace answered readily, scarcely realizing how difficult she might find it to keep her word.

“Where will I put the portmantle?” inquired the car-driver, breaking across the conversation with an abruptness which one at least of the trio felt to be a relief.

It was almost dark inside the house—so dark that Grace, unable to see the contents of her purse, stepped out into the twilight to pay the man.

“Can I get a drop of water for my horse, Miss?” he asked as she counted the money into his hands, and turning she repeated the question to the servant who stood in the doorway.

“Not here,” answered the woman. “The men are gone, and the dogs are loose. There is a stream crosses the road less than a mile up it; the beast can drink his fill there.”

Never before—never in the whole of her life had Grace heard so inhospitable a sentence uttered. Involuntarily it caused her to double the amount of the man’s own gratuity, and to say to him in a low voice,—

“They are in great distress of mind here; perhaps you know.”

“Yes, Miss, I know,” was the reply; but Grace felt there was no sympathy in his tone, and she turned to re-enter the house with a conviction that even the circumstances of Mr. Brady’s death had failed to awaken popular sympathy in his behalf.

“Where is Mrs. Brady?” she asked, peering through the twilight in search of Nettie, who was, however, nowhere visible.

“She’s gone back to her room; if you want her, you’ll have to go there after her. She has never come down till to-night. She has not been to say quite right in her head ever since.”

“Perhaps she would rather be alone?”

“I don’t think it will make any differ one way or the other,” was the somewhat contemptuous answer which decided Grace on at once making her way to Nettie.

“Which is her room?” she inquired.

“Right opposite you when you get to the head of the stairs;” and thus directed, Grace without ceremony crossed the hall, ascended the staircase, and joined her friend.

She found Nettie pacing the apartment with slow, measured steps. Up and down, down and up, she marched like some animal on a chain, hopelessly, helplessly, wearily. Suddenly she stopped in this exercise.

“You ought not to stay here, Grace. I am no company for anybody now.”

“If I had wanted company I should have stayed where I was,” Grace answered. “I came here to see if I could not be of use to you, and I shall remain till I am quite satisfied I cannot be of any!”

“No one can help me,” said Nettie deliberately. Then finding Grace kept silence, she went on hurriedly to ask,—

“What are you thinking of?”

“I was thinking, dear—” the words came softly through the darkness—“that God in His own good time will help you.”

“He cannot,” was the reply, spoken sharply and quickly.

“We shall see,” and Grace sat down by one of the windows, while Nettie resumed her purposeless walk, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards enough to drive a bystander to madness.

After a time the door opened.

“I have made you some tea, mem. Will you come down or will I bring it up to you?”

Nettie never answered. Neither by sign nor token did she give evidence of having heard a word.

“I will come down,” said Grace after a moment’s pause, sufficient to permit Mrs. Brady to reply if she would. “Should you not like a light, Nettie?” she asked with a natural hesitation about making such a suggestion in another person’s house.

“I hate light,” was the answer.

“How long has she been like that?” whispered Miss Moffat as the door closed between her and the blue-eyed, golden-haired Nettie of the long-ago past.

“Ever since that night; except cold water, she has not had bite or sup in her lips for the last five days.”

“Where are the children?”

“I asked some of the neighbours to take them till—till—it was all over.”

There was an instant’s break in her voice. Next minute it was cold and hard and ringing as ever.

In the small ante-room where Mr. Brady had received the Rileys, Grace found tea prepared, and she sat down to it with what appetite she might.

She had been delicately nurtured, and the cup of coarse blue delft, the dark brown sugar, the battered tray, the black-handled knife, the smoked teapot, repelled her the moment she set eyes on the repast.

But she forced herself to eat. She had come to be useful, and she was determined to let no fastidious niceties cumber her at first starting. Her greatest trial was the woman, who after a grudging fashion strove to make her welcome. Grace’s experience had never previously brought her even mentally in contact with a person of the kind, but her instinct told her there was something wrong about dark eyes and darker hair; that if everything were right she and Nettie ought not to be under the same roof, with a person against whom every nerve seemed to be at war, whose very presence was a trial, whose interest in the late master of Maryville had evidently been very close and very great. By the light of the solitary candle with which her banquet-table was illumined, Grace, quick as is the nature of her sex, took in the personal appearance and attire of the solitary domestic Maryville seemed to boast.

Not an ill-looking woman; but hard, bold, bad—bad decidedly—one with whom wickedness had not prospered. Grace looked at her poor brown-stuff gown, scanty and ill-fitting, but covering a magnificent figure; at the poor attempt at mourning made in a little black neckerchief drawn round her throat and pinned in front of the half-high dress; at her hands red and hard with work, to grasp, dimly it might be but sufficiently, the fact sin had not paid this creature high wages for the loss of all women hold dear.

The man was dead. She had wanted to ask many questions, but with this idea before her and others looming behind, Grace could ask no question of her companion, who, comprehending that without a word of explanation the other knew her position, hardened herself and decided she would make this stranger’s stay unpleasant if she could.

Understanding this in a vague uncertain fashion, Grace said,—

“I suppose you do not know who I am. Mrs. Brady and I are old friends, and I have come from England to be with her in this affliction. I used to live near Kingslough; my father was Mr. Moffat of Bay view.”

“I have heard tell of you both,” was the reply sullenly spoken. “You’ll have come over to help Amos Scott as well as to see Mrs. Brady, I’m thinking.”

To which speech Miss Moffat deemed it prudent to make no reply.