The Earl's promise

When Mr. Brady found the Rileys had by accident or design checkmated him, he was, as a young clerk who chanced to be favoured with many of his inquiries about that period, remarked, “Neither to hold nor to bind.”

To ruin the Rileys, to oust the proud beggars—so he styled them—out of Woodbrook, to bring the old man to his level, and to humble the pride of “that fellow out in India,” had been the dearest desires of his heart for years previously.

In order to compass them he had not spared his time or his trouble; he had not objected to wade through very dirty water, he had not grumbled when asked to eat humble pie in quantity; he had not bemoaned himself when compelled to cringe to people he longed to kick, or be civil to those he hated; and now in a moment all he had saved, toiled, lived for was snatched from his grasp.

When a man first conceives the plot of either a good or a bad project it is, comparatively speaking, a small matter to find another has forestalled him in its execution. Let him, however, have nursed, tended, perfected the scheme, lain with it in his bosom at night, and taken it for his companion by day, he finds it a cruel hardship to have the one thing he fancied his own, the one good he asked in life, claimed by another.

If the punishment of deliberate wrong-doing ever could enlist our sympathies on behalf of the wrong-doer, I think it might be in a case like this, when a man having spent his all to compass his object finds at the last that it eludes his grasp; when having staked everything he possesses on the success of some villanous trick in the game of life, his intended victim, at a moment least expected, says “Checkmate” and leaves him to curse the board whereon his best designs, his longest-matured schemes, have been defeated.

On Mr. Brady the news of his enemy being at the last moment delivered out of his hands, fell with such a shock that at first he could not realize the depth of his own disappointment. Although the interest being paid might have prepared him for the settlement of the principal, he refused to believe his lawyers when they told him the whole amount had by some means been raised.

To incredulity succeeded all the fury of a balked revenge, and in his rage he accused both solicitors and capitalist with having conspired in General Riley’s favour against himself. He declared it was through them the owner of Woodbrook had heard of his own interest in the matter, to which the former replied by ordering him out of their office, and the latter remarked that if Mr. Brady did not put some restraint upon his tongue all transactions must end between them.

“I am willing to make some allowance for you,” he went on, “as I dare say the matter is as great a blow to you as it has proved a surprise to me; but I will not have such language as you used just now addressed to me by any man living; so you can take your choice, either try to be civil, or else I will have done with you and your affairs at once and for ever.”

Whereupon Mr. Brady muttered something intended for an apology, adding in a louder tone,—

“If I only knew who has been meddling in my affairs I would make it pleasant. He would think twice before thrusting himself into other people’s business, I can tell him!”

“Well, when you find out who it is that has upset your plans, you can tell him what you like so far as I am concerned; but, meantime, I will not have you vent your temper on me. Remember that for the future, sir, if you please.”

Whether it pleased him or not, Mr. Brady knew he must remember the hint, and act upon it; and, therefore, set his face homeward full of anger and mortification.

This was the first severe check his plans had ever received, and in proportion to the magnitude of the venture appeared the shock of his failure.

Independent altogether of his desire to beggar and humble a family he hated, Mr. Brady had looked upon Woodbrook as the El Dorado whence he should in the future dig fortune and position. He and his friend (who, so far as disposition and character were concerned, might be considered a not unworthy match-horse even to Mr. Brady), had long previously laid their plans, not merely for the acquisition of Woodbrook, but also how they intended to make that acquisition valuable to them.

It had been proposed by Mr. Brady’s coadjutor to give that gentleman a share of the profits in consideration of his fertile brain having devised the scheme, and of his unwearying industry being necessary to carry it to success.

Mr. Brady’s idea, on the other hand, was by degrees to work the capitalist out. He had not decided how the feat was to be performed, but he was well aware that it would be an extremely good thing for him if he could manage to get the whole power into his own hands.

In the first instance he would require assistance, and that to a large extent, but he did not despair of finding himself ultimately the owner of, at all events, a large portion of the property.

Money and revenge—these two desirable things he hoped to compass at a single blow—and now the castle of his dreams, the fairy palace which he had mentally erected from foundation to lofty pinnacle, was level with the dust.

He had been beaten and by the Rileys. Whoever else might realize the project he had been perfecting for years, Mr. Daniel Brady should reap no advantage from it.

About the time when he first began to think of annexing Woodbrook, “going to the salt water for the benefit of sea bathing” was becoming a recognized necessity even amongst those who had never previously thought of permitting their families such an indulgence.

From inland rural districts, as well as from the towns great and small, people came trooping for that “month at the shore,” which it was believed made weakly children strong, and kept healthy children strong and robust.

Each summer Kingslough was crowded by visitors. Poor cottages—no matter how small or poor, provided they were situated close on the bay—were eagerly taken by those to whom economy was an object; and it must have been plain even to a much less intelligent gentleman than Mr. Brady that, if the accommodation in Kingslough and its neighbourhood had been twice as great, willing guests might still be found to avail themselves of it.

So far, however, no one had thought of building houses solely and simply for the benefit of season residents, and it was by a plan of this kind Mr. Brady hoped to make Woodbrook pay.

Part of the property stretched down to the sea. The water at that distance from Kingslough was represented better for bathing than that which washed the grey shore below Ballylough Abbey. The beach was of finer sand, a headland stretched out into the sea sufficiently far to suggest the idea of erecting a quay, at which steamers could anchor at almost all conditions of the tide. The scenery was wilder and more beautiful than that surrounding Kingslough. Already there was a talk of a short sea route being inaugurated not merely between Scotland and Ireland, but between England and Ireland; and Mr. Brady, though he did not erect his castle on the strength of either English or Scotch money, considered it quite on the cards that from the great manufacturing towns in Lancashire, and even from Glasgow, people might come to spend the summer at Glendare.

That was the name he proposed to confer on the new watering-place, not because he was especially fond of the Glendares, but because he considered the title one likely to recommend itself to natives and foreigners alike. He had seen enough of English people to understand the horror which seizes them at sight or sound of a long Irish name, such as Ballinascraw, for instance; on the other hand, he knew the inhabitants of the Green Isle still retained a preference for words indigenous to the soil.

The fashion of wiping out old landmarks, by rechristening romantic spots with prosaic British names, had not then begun, and he would indeed have been considered an adventurous man—adventurous to madness—who founding a settlement on the other side of the Channel, blew the trumpets and assembled the people to hear the town christened Piccadilly, Kensington, or Wandsworth, as is the case at present.

Mr. Brady therefore decided on Glendare, as a name likely to wear well and find favour in the minds of the multitude. Lying idly on his oars, looking with his bodily eyes at the land dotted with trees, sloping so lovingly to the beach,—his mental sight beheld villas filling up the landscape, snug cottages scattered along the shore, a town perhaps climbing up the sides of the headland. The vision grew more real every day. He had drawn his plans, he had decided from which quarry stone should be carted; he had thought how much money he could himself afford as a beginning, how much and at what rate he could raise to complete the scheme; pleasure-boats in imagination he saw drawn up on the shore, small gardens filled with flowers, lawns on which walked ladies gaily dressed,—gentlemen rich enough to pay long rents for convenient, comfortably furnished houses. There was not another property so suitable for the purpose as Woodbrook in all that part of the country; and the beauty of it was that, whilst those few acres by the sea could be so admirably utilized, the domain itself might remain almost intact, the farms still be left as they were, the former tenants still permitted to pay rents to new owners.

And all the while unconscious of the evil-eye coveting his home, his lands, his son’s inheritance, General Riley pursued his way, never imagining beggary was coming to him as fast as the feet of misfortune could bring it.

Lulled into a state of fancied security—suspecting no trick, thinking of no worse trouble in the future than a day when the arrears would have to be paid—the old man was, by reason of utter ignorance, and, it may be, natural carelessness, drifting on rocks from which his ship could never have been hindered breaking to pieces,—when he was saved as by a miracle.

What would be the ultimate end it might have puzzled a wiser than the General to say, but for a time, at least, Woodbrook was though not out of debt, out of danger. Every one connected with the matter felt nothing more could be done in the affair till John came home.

Meantime it oozed out, as indeed no one strove to prevent the story doing, that Mr. Brady and his friend had laid a deliberate trap for the General, and people began to say some very hard things about the master of Maryville in consequence; all the sins of his youth and his manhood were rehearsed, as sins will be on such occasions; all the wrong he had done in his lifetime, all the right he had left undone, all his errors of omission and commission, all his subterfuges and tricks, his faults social and domestic, the grief he had caused to many an honest father and mother; these things and others like them were disinterred from the always open grave of the past, and discussed alike in mansion and cottage in the town of Kingslough, and in other towns, besides in the country districts throughout all that part.

After a fashion, he had, up to this time, been making way with his fellows. His wife was not visited by any lady higher in rank than the wife of the minister who preached at the barn-like little meeting-house a couple of miles or so from Maryville, but men of a better class, though of a bad way of living, did not object to be seen in Mr. Brady’s company, and were willing to drink, smoke, make small bets and play cards with him, not merely at various hotels and inns in Kingslough and the other towns, but at his own house.

Now there came a change, nameless, perhaps, but certain. There was no direct cut, no absolute incivility, no alteration in manner of which it was possible to take notice, but his former acquaintances were always in a hurry when he met them, always had an engagement, always had to meet some one or go somewhere, and rarely now could find time to spend an hour or two in the evening at Maryville.

After all it was not right, these men opined, to have tried to drive the old General out of Woodbrook. The line must be drawn somewhere, and Kingslough drew it at that point which Mr. Brady had tried to cross.

Kingslough considered he ought to have refrained from meddling with a gentleman. Nothing could have revealed so certainly the taint in Mr. Brady’s blood as an attempt of such a nature. The marquis went up at once in public estimation. Many persons who had long been wishing to change their political creed, since Radical notions had begun to make Liberalism rather the creed of the vulgar, took that opportunity of turning their coats.

“It was a very fine thing of Ardmorne to do,” said Kingslough, Kilcurragh, Glenwellan, and the neighbouring districts. He had gone with General Riley to the Bank of Ireland himself, it was stated; he had found the extra money required beyond what the bank would advance. He had written to request Mr. John Riley’s presence, and arranged that his prospects should not suffer in consequence. In a time of trouble he had proved more than a friend, and then it was so clever of him to have found out that danger menaced the Rileys, and of what nature.

Of course, some one must have given him a clue, but he followed it up to the last inch of thread. Then came the question, who could have hinted the matter to him?

Conjecture, which it is never possible to balk, guessed every likely and unlikely person in the county. Rumour, which is the readiest inventor of fiction on earth, prepared a score of circumstantial tales on the subject, and ran them through society with as much regularity as any other serial writer might.

On the whole, public opinion inclined to the belief that Mr. Dillwyn was the person who had opened Lord Ardmorne’s eyes. It was well known that when the new earl succeeded to the title, Mr. Brady had taken a journey in order to malign Mr. Dillwyn, and secure the agency for himself, and so much unpleasantness had in consequence arisen that Mr. Somerford’s stepfather actually did resign, offered on certain conditions to vacate Rosemont, and expressed his opinion of Mr. Brady and the Glendares in language as remarkable for its force as its plainness.

It was only at the earl’s earnest entreaty he continued to act until another agent could be found.

“And that other agent will not be Mr. Daniel Brady in this earl’s time,” said Mr. Dillwyn triumphantly, on his return from foreign travel—which remark clearly proved that the feelings he entertained towards the owner of Maryville were not strictly Christian in their nature.

Society at Kingslough had for so long a time been accustomed to disagreements between the Glendares and their agents, that it had paid comparatively little attention to this last dispute, except to marvel whether Mr. Dillwyn would really go, and if so who would step into his shoes. But now when every one was anxious to know who it was that enlightened Lord Ardmorne, the passage between the agent and Mr. Brady was remembered, and a certain significance attached to it.

In a word, though rumour invented and circulated fifty stories, this was the one to which people, as a rule, inclined. Mr. Brady himself was perhaps the only person who attached no importance to it. As at first, he believed that either his own or his friend’s lawyer, or his friend himself, had proved unfaithful; so at last he believed that one or other of the persons with whom he was most closely connected by ties of interest had—by imprudence or of malice prepense—betrayed his plans.

No one else, he was positive, had the faintest knowledge of them. By intuition Mr. Dillwyn could not have guessed his tactics, and it mattered little who it was that had finally carried the news to Lord Ardmorne, when once the secret escaped from the custody of those who ought to have held it secure.

To discover the person who originally betrayed it, suddenly became the most paramount business of Mr. Brady’s life, and Nettie often wondered to herself whether the best thing she could do might not be to run away to the uttermost ends of the earth, taking the children with her.

“For if he ever finds it out he certainly will kill me,” thought the wretched woman, and she thenceforth lived in a constant agony of fright. After all, no matter how tired a person may be of the business of existence, one would like to have a choice as to the mode of getting rid of the toil and the sorrow; and perhaps the most repulsive way of having the trouble ended seems that of being murdered.

There had been times when Nettie felt tempted to bring matters to a conclusion for herself—and that method of shortening the weary day now seemed luxurious by comparison with any termination which involved the ceremony of un mauvais quart d’heure, with Mr. Brady as an essential preliminary.

So far as affairs at the Castle Farm were concerned, General Riley’s business took precedence of Amos Scott’s. Having quarrelled with his own solicitors, Mr. Brady had to carry the Scott difficulty elsewhere. Out, Mr. Brady was determined the farmer, his wife, and his children should go; but short of pulling the house down about their ears, there seemed no possibility of getting rid of them; and for all his braggart airs, he was not prepared to take a step of that kind if he could avoid doing so.

That rough-and-ready method of ejectment, which found such favour in the south and west, never recommended itself to the northern understanding. The thing has been done, of course: the roofs have been stripped off; the windows taken out; the doors torn from their hinges; in extreme cases the very walls undermined, and the house razed with the ground; but patient as the northern temperament is, I doubt if a landlord could enjoy much ease of mind supposing he saw a man like Amos Scott sitting by his naked hearth—with the heavens for his rooftree, and the wind and the rain blowing and beating on his head.

Upon the whole, supposing imagination presented the picture of such a reality, the landlord’s dreams—let right be on his side or wrong—would be of coffins and of a violent exit into that other world where all the vexed questions of this will—as we fondly hope—be settled to the satisfaction of the poor, the oppressed, the brokenhearted.

Curious to say, although Mr. Brady was a bully he was not also a coward; which seems as inconsistent a statement as to say a negro is not black. Nevertheless, it is the truth. The man was not destitute of physical courage. He had writhed mentally under the taunts hurled at him by the Rileys; but he would not have feared a stand-up fight with the son—a hand to hand struggle, with liberty given to each to kill if he were able.

Nevertheless, Mr. Brady had gone almost as far with the Scotts as he cared to do. He had dug their potatoes and sold them, cut the grass and saved it, reaped the corn and carried it, sown the land with seed, that was again hastening to fruition; but beyond this he hesitated to go. The law must do the rest, he said; but spite of the fact of justice being on his side, he found the law liked the task of turning Amos Scott out on the world rather less than he did.

When a bailiff came to take possession of the household goods, gathered together carefully, anxiously, in the first part of the Scott’s married life, he was received by husband and wife, one armed with a blunderbuss and the other with a pike, a relic of ninety-eight.

“Honest man,” said Amos, miscalling him in an access of civility, “honest man, if ye want to sit down to rest ye’re kindly welcome; if ye want bite or sup, we can give ye share of what we have ourselves, water and a meal bannock; but if ye lay a finger on anything in this house and claim for that devil Brady I’ll shoot ye dead. I’ve made up my mind to slay the first who meddles with the inside of that half-door, so if anything happens your blood will be upon your own head, not upon mine.”

The result of which speech was that the man neither stopped nor took breath till he found himself in Kingslough again. There was a steady light in Scott’s eye, and a suggestiveness about the way in which he kept his finger on the trigger, ill-calculated to make visiting at the Castle Farm pleasant to a person of the bailiff’s profession.

Afterwards Amos declared, “He only meant to fear the man;” but if this were so his sport was sufficiently like earnest to carry conviction with it.

Matters had arrived at this pass, in a word: people whispered Scott was dangerous and that Mr. Brady went armed. Further, popular sympathy was with Scott, and the very ballad singers had long slips of badly printed doggrel reciting the doings of Mr. Daniel Brady from his youth upwards, and enlarging upon the fact not only of his having “decoyed a lovely maiden to a land beyond the seas,” but of his trying subsequently

Some kind friend managed that Nettie should be favoured with a sight of one of these precious productions.

“If he kills me one day they will sing all about that through the streets,” she thought with a shiver.

Blue eyes and golden hair, what a day’s work you wrought when in the bright sunshine you went away with Daniel Brady, trusting the whole future of your young life in his hands.