The Earl's promise

At one time, a pernicious habit obtained across the channel, a habit which unfortunately appears to have latterly been imported into England, of bestowing Christian names on country-seats. A son, fond of his mother, bought a property possessed of some old Irish cognomen, and forthwith the place became Kittymount, or Hannah Ville, or Jinny Brook, or St. Margaret’s. Sometimes men also came in for their share of this delicate attention, and Robertsford, and Williamsford, and Mount George, or Knock Denis, perpetuated the name of some favoured member of the race.

To this custom Maryville, the seat of Mr. Daniel Brady, owed its nomenclature.

A certain heiress, in the days when the Bradys owned a considerable amount of property, married a younger son of that family.

With her money a small estate, on which stood an unpretending cottage residence, was purchased, a large house erected, a park fenced in, gardens laid out, lodge and lodge-entrance provided, and then Mr. and Mrs. Theophilus Brady took up their abode at Maryville.

Acre after acre the principal estate changed hands; one by one the older branches of the family died out. My Lord Ardmorne owned all the broad lands that had once belonged to the old Bradys, but Maryville still remained to the descendants of Theophilus. The porter’s lodge was in ruins, the gates hanging on one hinge stood wide, the park was a wilderness, in the gardens weeds grew knee-deep, and the currant and gooseberry trees were smothered with bind-weed and convolvulus.

As for the house, a few of the rooms were habitable, and these Mr. Daniel Brady occupied. He lived there all alone, in company with an elderly housekeeper, whose age and looks were sufficient guarantee for her propriety; lived there, a man at war with society, a man who was at feud with the world, a man who said he was determined some day to get the better of society, and make those who had once snubbed him glad of his company.

“It is all a question of money,” he said openly. “If they thought I was rich, they would be glad enough to ask me to their houses, hang them.”

However great a cad a man may be, it is extremely unlikely he should acknowledge the fact, even to himself. Indeed, he is always the only person who remains entirely unconscious of the circumstance, and therefore, although Mr. Brady was aware that for a considerable period those of his race who had preceded him had found themselves neglected by the upper ten of Kingslough and its neighbourhood, that for generations his people had dropped out of the rank of gentry, and that his own existence was virtually tabooed by persons who made the slightest pretension to respectability; still he persisted this social ostracism originated in circumstances entirely independent of character; that the Bradys had gone down, not because they were, in their humbler way, as bad, and wild, and reckless, and selfish, and self-willed as the Glendares, but because his great-grandfather had married a shopkeeper’s daughter, and his aunt had elected to go off with the particularly handsome son of a small farmer, who was no higher in rank than a labourer, while his mother, sick, doubtless of the Bradys and people like them, chose for her second husband an Englishman who made her comfortable, though he did drop his h’s, and whose connexion with himself Mr. Daniel utterly repudiated.

After her marriage, the youth, then in his very early teens, was taken by his maternal grandfather, who, spite of wars and rumours of wars, spite of various threats expressive of an intention to kick his grandson out of his house, spite of the contempt he felt for “that cur,” as he habitually designated Daniel, left to that young man everything of which he died possessed, and passing by his daughter, devised and bequeathed his small corn-mill, his farm, held at an almost nominal rent for a long term, his furniture, his horses, and his blessing to the youthful reprobate.

No one ever believed Mr. Farrell signed that will knowing its contents. Most people went so far as to believe he never signed it at all, and amongst the latter number was included the heir’s mother. This idea and a stormy interview with her first-born were the proximate causes of her death. She had three children by her second marriage, and counted no doubt on inheriting the greater portion of her father’s property, which in turn she would be able to bequeath to them. From the day of Mr. Farrell’s funeral, she never held up her head. Gradually she drooped, and pined, and died of a broken heart, that disease which doctors try to diagnose in vain.

Clear of all relations, possessed of a sum of money which, if really small, seemed comparatively large to a man whose family had for so long a time been drifting in a rotten boat along the river of incapable expenditure to the river of ruin, Mr. Daniel Brady removed his grandfather’s furniture to Maryville, which had long stood empty, gave the man who had rented the land during his minority notice to quit, let his corn-mill to a Scotch Irishman, whose soul was not above grinding and meal, as was the soul of the heir, and began to lead that life for which he had long panted—a life of cheap debauchery, of economical villany, of consistent moneymaking.

Looking at the moss-covered drive, at the rusty gates, at the desolate park, at the weed-covered gardens, a stranger might have said, rashly, “The owner of this place must be a beggar.”

But Mr. Brady knew what he was about. A well-kept avenue, gates that opened noiselessly, grass closely mown, gardens filled with fruit and flowers, all these things would have cost much whilst they returned nothing. They could return nothing to a man who wanted no help such as the appearance of wealth occasionally enables people to obtain. What he seemed would not, he was shrewd enough to understand, have the smallest weight with a community who mentally counted every sixpence of his inheritance the moment he laid claim to it. What he had would, he knew, be regarded ultimately with respect. Perhaps the Irish may not like moneyed men, but certainly they reverence them.

The almighty dollar will exercise its influence as well amongst persons who swear against it as amongst those who swear by it. Mr. Daniel Brady was no fool in worldly matters, and he had early recognized the truth of that maxim which states, “Money is power.”

What would the end find him? A pretentious snob, or a grubbing miser? The soil on which both grow is the same. The earth of which he was made could be moulded as readily into one as the other. He had youth in his favour, and youth is pliable. If a selfish, self-indulgent, insolent, meanly extravagant braggart be preferable in the reader’s opinion to a wretched old miser, there is a chance for Mr. Daniel Brady exhibiting himself in the former character. At the time this story opens, however, he was in training for a miser. He was that most wonderful thing in creation, a young man niggardly even over his pleasures, calculating even concerning the things his soul most longed for, who was never led away by the voice of praise, or turned by that of censure, who had no impulses of generosity, kindliness, remorse; a wonderful thing, but not an uncommon. The world has a great many Daniel Bradys travelling through it, though we may reck not of their existence.

If the characters of men could be revealed when they give up their railway-tickets at the end of their morning journeys, it might surprise a good many unsuspecting people to discover the number of unmitigated scoundrels who have lent them the Times, or discoursed to them about the state of the weather and the funds.

Mr. Brady was an unmitigated scoundrel. The higher orders tabooed his existence; the middle regretted he had come to Maryville; the lower hated him.

Now the love of the lower orders is often open to be viewed with suspicion. Meretricious qualities may win it, adventitious circumstances secure it. About their hate there is no such mistake. They hate a man because of such and such qualities, which he possesses or does not possess, and there is an end of the matter. Had Mr. Brady announced to the beggars of Kingslough and its neighbourhood that on a given day he would distribute fifty pounds in charity, they would have known he had an ulterior object in view.

As it was, he never gave them a halfpenny, and that seemed a vice to the majority in those remote days, ere the Marquis of Townshend had begun his crusade against mendicants.

Then most people gave according as he or she could, gave to beggars who asked, and gave to the decent and reticent poor who would not ask, but whom they sought out and assisted.

Not a practicable thing to do, perhaps, at this time of the world, when the workhouse doors stand hospitably open to receive those who like to enter in and relinquish hope. Certainly not a practicable thing to do now, when the labouring classes say they are the dictators; that they will have pence, and sixpences, and sovereigns out of the pockets of capitalists, whether capitalists lose or gain; but then—then—ah! heaven,—what was not a gift thrown to a half-naked beggar? It meant a day’s food. What good did not the present stealthily bestowed on a family too proud too ask, too lonely to have friends, effect? It enabled struggling people to turn many an ugly corner, to keep a home, poor though it was, together, and avoid that last vague necessity of “going out on the world,” a phrase which expresses in such few words a fearful calamity.

But neither openly nor by stealth did Mr. Brady perform any of those small acts of charity so universal and so needful at that time in his country, and his sins of omission were as duly set down to the debit of his account by an observant and exacting population as those of commission.

The very beggars hated him. The idiots, who then wandered loose about every town and village in Ireland, never with grotesque gesture and jabbering tone entreated a halfpenny of him. Instinctively the blind, knowing the sound of his horse’s hoofs slunk on to the side path, or close up beside a wall or a hedge, on his approach; the ragged, shoeless, homeless children never ran after that rider, praying him to throw them a “farden;” the deaf and dumb, who, according to popular belief, had “knowledge,” and whom it was not well to anger, looked at him menacingly and raised clenched fists when he had passed; whilst “Trust in the Lord,” so named because he was the religious begging impostor of Kingslough, maddened the young man by piously folding his hands when Mr. Brady crossed his path, and uttering ejaculatory and audible prayers for all sinners, more especially “for this sinner, who may be called the chief of them all.”

As for Katty Clancy, who had begged her bread, and worn the same scanty petticoat, and covered her shoulders with the same washed out, ragged, picturesque, patchwork counterpane for forty long years, “a dissolute orphan,” as she styled herself, till the absurdity of the lament was pointed out by Mrs. Hartley; as for Katty, Mr. Daniel Brady hated that woman with a completeness of detestation to which no words could do justice.

Others of her profession refrained from asking him for alms, but she took a delight in doing so, and in flinging some bitter taunt or jibe back in his face when he refused, generally with an oath, to give her one copper.

Their conversations were usually carried on somewhat as follows:—

“Good mornin’, Mr. Brady, isn’t that the beautiful day, God bliss it? Yer astir airly. An’ where is it yer honour’s goin’ to in sich a hurry?”

“To ——,” Mr. Brady replied, mentioning what Lord Stowell, in one of his judgments, styled a “favourite place of consignment.”

“Ach, well yer honour, it’s a long journey, and I wish ye safe there,” said Katty, with persistent courtesy, and then Mr. Brady, muttering an oath, walked off, while Katty solemnly shook her head, and said sotto voce, “There’s many a true word spoken in jest, and it’s my belief, Dan Brady, ye are thravellin’ that road as fast as time will let ye.”

Before Nettie O’Hara, however, Mr. Brady had contrived to appear the incarnation of every manly virtue. He told the girl how much he loved her, spoke of his own lonely life at Maryville, of his solitary home, of the unjust stories his enemies had circulated to his prejudice, of the manner in which he was excluded from society for no reason in the world except that some of his family had made mésalliances, and that he himself was poor.

“But I mean to be rich one of these days, Nettie,” he finished, “if you will only help me—if you will only try to grow fond of me.”

Nettie, unhappily, had no occasion to try to grow fond of him. She loved his handsome face, and the notion of sharing his lonely home had no terrors for her.

She knew and he knew, it would be idle to ask her friends’ consent. Indeed, he did not want it. He wanted her and he had got her. Flight was sudden at the last, but Nettie had long understood she meant to go off with him some day.

And that day, and many, many other days had come and gone, and Nettie was home at Maryville, walking about the weed-covered garden, when her relatives the Rileys, father and son, paid their first visit to the house.

Amongst the other rarities and attractions Maryville had once boasted were a fish-pond and a sundial. The first was green with slime and choked with the leaves of water-plants, whilst round the rotting pillar of the dial climbed briony and convolvulus.

Beside the pond, with one hand resting on the slate time-teller, Nettie stood motionless. She did not hear the footsteps of her relatives as they fell silently on moss-covered walks and grass-grown paths. She was dressed in white, she had a blue ribbon round her waist, and another of the same colour kept back her hair—her long, bright, beautiful hair. Never afterwards did General Riley forget that picture, never could he quite efface from his memory the sight of that girl, almost a child, standing amongst that wilderness of rank vegetation, looking across the pond at a belt of dark firs which separated this portion of the gardens from the open park beyond.

“Nettie,” John said softly; then with a start she turned and saw them, a colour rising in her face, and smiles dimpling her cheeks the while.

“Oh, General! Oh, John! this is kind of you,” she said eagerly; “I did not think—that is, I did not hope—” and then she stopped and looked at them both, and General Riley looked at his son, and John at his father, perplexed as to what they were to do next.

“Are you quite well, Nettie?” asked the young man, after a moment’s pause, looking a little doubtfully in her face, which, now the flush caused by their sudden appearance had died away, looked paler and thinner than ever he remembered to have seen it.

“Yes, very well, thank you,” with an unnecessary emphasis on the very. “I am a little tired; we only came home the evening before last, and you know I am not much accustomed to travelling.”

“Did you like Scotland?”

“Greatly, but I think I like Ireland best.” There was a wistful anxious look in the blue eyes that neither man could help noticing, and Nettie perceiving that they did so, went on to ask, quickly, “How is Grace?”

“Well, I believe,” John answered.

“You believe?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I have not seen Grace for some weeks. The fact is, she has refused me, and I am going away. You have not been in the neighbourhood, or you would have heard all about that long ago.”

Nettie did not reply, she stood looking at the fir-trees with great serious eyes. She seemed prettier then than John had ever before thought her—poor little girl.

“We were told we should find Mr. Brady here,” broke in General Riley at this juncture. “I suppose the servant made some mistake.”

“Then you did not come to see me!” she exclaimed, taking her eyes from the firs and fastening them on their faces.

“Of course we came to see you,” said John falsely, but kindly. He could not endure the dumb anguish of her expression.

“You did not,” she said vehemently. “Don’t tell untruths to me, John Riley; you have come to talk to my husband about me, and to meddle in my concerns, but you did not come to see me as relations should come to see one another. You think I have disgraced myself by marrying out of your rank—yours, what is it?—and you do not want to visit me yourselves or to let your sisters do so. When my husband has a large property like yours, and money to keep it up, which he will have, and you never will, then I shall be able to pick and choose my friends, but till then I must be content to live without any.”

Then, with a catching sob, she stopped, her eyes flashing, her cheeks aflame, while John Riley, preventing his father answering, and passing over the sting her words held, said,—

“No one will be better pleased than we to hear you and your husband are happy and prosperous, Nettie. It would be useless to deny that we did, and do, regret the step you have taken, but that step has been taken, and it behoves us, as your nearest male friends, to see that its consequences prove as little disastrous to you as may be.”

“You are very kind,” said Nettie sarcastically.

“Our intentions are so, at all events,” answered John, with a temper and a humility which touched even Nettie.

“I believe,” she said, “you are the best person in the world, and I am sure your intentions are always good and kind, but you have made a mistake this time. It is not well to meddle between man and wife.”

“When were you made man and wife?” asked the General, charging like an old soldier direct to the point he wanted to reach.

“What business is that of yours, General Riley?” she retorted. “It was not you Mr. Brady married.”

“Be reasonable, Nettie,” interposed John. “On my word we do not want to make or to meddle; we only desire to protect. If we fail in our duty now, the day may come when you will say to us, ‘I was but a girl, ignorant of the world, and you left me to bear the consequences of my rashness; you never advised, you never helped me.’ All we want to know is that you have been so securely married no doubt can be thrown upon the matter, and afterwards——” he stopped.

“What about afterwards?” she asked.

“We must leave afterwards to take care of itself, having done all it seemed possible in the present.”

“Do you think I am not married, then?” she asked; “that I would come back to Kingslough if—if——”

“There is no necessity for you to get into a passion with us, Nettie,” interrupted her cousin. “We think no evil of you, but you are only a young and inexperienced girl, and to put the argument in a nutshell, we have taken this matter up, and mean to have it put in proper form.”

“You had better see my husband, then,” she exclaimed. “I do not suppose he will give you much of a welcome, but if you choose to insult a man in his own house, you have only yourselves to thank if you meet with scant courtesy,” and with her head up in the air, and her blue ribbons floating, and her golden curls glinting in the sunlight, Nettie led them out of the garden, and by a side door, into a small sitting-apartment, which had, in the days when Maryville was in its glory, been an inner drawing-room or boudoir—my lady’s closet, perhaps, where she conducted her correspondence, or worked at her embroidery.

A second door led to the drawing-room, which was bare of all furniture, unless a huge chandelier, a cracked girandole, and a rickety sofa could be so considered; but the door was closed, and the Rileys could not see the nakedness of the land.

Instead, they beheld an apartment furnished with a few chairs and a couple of tables, the floor covered with a somewhat faded Kidderminster carpet; but, taking one thing with another, the place did not look poverty stricken or uncomfortable.

“It is not much of a home I am able to welcome you to,” said Nettie, turning defiantly upon her relations, “but at least it is clear of debt.”

“Nettie,” replied John Riley, “you cannot hurt us, so say what you please; at the same time I would ask if you think it worth while to try and insult those who have no object in being here beyond that I have stated.”

“Some day, child,” added the General, “you may understand it is better to be honestly indebted than dishonestly clear of debt.”

“I never could understand paradoxes,” said Nettie, and she sat down beside the window, her white hands linked together in her lap, and her pretty head averted from her visitors till Mr. Brady, for whom she had sent, entered.

Ere long Mr. Brady appeared. He came in with a slight swagger, looking a little nervous, but handsome and defiant as ever.

“This is a pleasure I did not hope for so soon,” he began. “Glad to see you, General. How do you do, Squire?” and he extended his hand to the visitors, but General Riley crossed his behind his back, and John thrust his in his pockets.

It was not a pleasant position for any one of the four, most unpleasant of all, perhaps, for Nettie, and yet she alone was equal to the occasion.

“Do you mean, John Riley,” she said, turning upon him like a fury, “that you refuse, having voluntarily come into this house, to shake hands with its master, my husband?”

“No man will be more ready than I, Nettie, to give my hand to Mr. Brady when he has proved himself worthy to take it,” John answered steadily.

“I understand you,” answered Mr. Brady, “this is a business visit?”

“Strictly so,” was the reply.

“You had better leave us to discuss business, Annette,” said Mr. Brady slowly. “Pray be seated, gentlemen;” then after the sound of Nettie’s footsteps had died away he went on, “Now what do you want? what is it?”

“We want to know if you are married to my cousin?” said John.

“You had better have put that question to her.”

“We have.”

“And what answer did she give you?”

“She evidently considers she is legally your wife.”

“Then, what more do you want?”

“Proof that her idea is correct.”

“Supposing I refuse to give it?”

“We will make you give it, sir,” interposed the General.

“Two to one is scarcely fair,” remarked Mr. Brady, “still curiosity makes me inquire how you propose to make me open my mouth if I choose to keep it shut?”

“I do not know—” the General was beginning, when his son interrupted him with—

“One moment, father. I hope you misunderstood Mr. Brady’s reply. This is not a matter, I should think, about which he would wish to keep us in the dark. It is absolutely essential,” he went on, speaking to Mr. Brady, “that we should understand my cousin’s position.”

“Why?”

“Because if she be not your wife already, you must immediately make her so.”

“Again I ask, why?”

“Do you suppose we should allow her to remain with you an hour longer excepting as your wife?”

“I really do not see how you are to help yourselves.”

“Mr. Brady,” began John, “I cannot believe you are speaking seriously. I think you must be trying to annoy us by persisting in what is at best but a very sorry sort of jest. We have not come here to reproach you for the scandal you have caused a respectable family, for the advantage you have taken of an ignorant and unprotected girl. We merely desire to know if you have made her the only reparation in your power. Is she legally your wife?”

“That is a question I decline to answer.”

“Is she not your wife?”

“That, likewise, is a question I decline to answer.”

“You villain!” exclaimed the General, “we will find means to make you answer,” and he was advancing with raised hand and threatening gesture towards Mr. Brady, when his son stepped between them.

“We shall not do any good by using violence, father,” he said, putting a curb on his own temper, and clenching his fingers, which were itching to grasp his riding-whip, and lay it about the shoulders of the self-possessed scoundrel who stood before him, smiling contemptuously.

“There is only one course left open for us to pursue now; we must take Nettie away, and get legal advice as to what we ought to do next.”

“I apprehend your legal adviser will say that even loving relatives like you cannot separate husband and wife,” replied Mr. Brady.

“It will be for you then to prove that you are her husband.”

“And what if Annette refuses to go?”

“She will not remain here when I tell her how she has been deceived,” was the answer, and John Riley took up his hat and whip, and was following his father to the door, when Mr. Brady stopped them.

“A moment,” he said; “do not be in such a hurry, gentlemen. If you, General, will kindly restrain your temper, and you, Mr. Riley, will kindly hold your tongue, perhaps some arrangement may be come to. I have declined,” he went on, after a pause, “to tell you whether the young lady in whose affairs you have interfered so officiously is my wife or not, for the extremely simple reason that I am not at all clear on the point myself. I think she is my wife if I like to claim her; I think she is not my wife if I choose to repudiate her. It is an awkward position for her, certainly, and I do not imagine it can be a pleasant one for her relatives.”

“Well, sir?” said General Riley, to whom this speech was specially addressed.

“To make the thing secure for her we certainly ought to go through some sort of ceremony, otherwise I do not see how she is either to prove that she is married or unmarried. It is an awkward affair for me, too. I am a poor man. I had enough burdens before, without hampering myself with a wife. I cannot say I have much taste for domestic felicity; and after the specimen of good breeding you have given me to-day, I can imagine many things more desirable than a connexion with the Riley family.”

“In heaven’s name what are you driving at?” asked the General. “We do not want a dissertation on your tastes and prejudices, we want to know, in a word, whether you will marry Nettie, or whether you will leave us to seek our remedy elsewhere.”

“Meaning at law?”

“Meaning at law, and also that I will give you a thrashing you shall remember to your dying day,” said John Riley.

“I requested you to hold your tongue, did I not?” retorted Mr. Brady coolly. “As I was saying,” he continued, addressing the General, “the holy state of matrimony is not one into which I have the least desire to enter, more especially with such a remarkably useless young lady as your relative; still I am willing to meet your views. I am not desirous of raising any scandal, and if you like to make it worth my while I will take her for better for worse.”

“Make it worth your while?” repeated the General.

“Yes, you do not expect me to do something for nothing, do you? I shall have to board and clothe a young woman for the remainder of her days, and resign my liberty in addition. I do not want, however, to drive a hard bargain, or take advantage of your difficulty. The girl has, I believe, a hundred pounds or so of her own. Make it up five hundred, and I will send for the minister here, or marry her in church, whichever you like.”

“I’ll see you——”

To what lot or in what place General Riley intended to say he would see the speaker may be imagined, but can never now be exactly known, for while he was uttering these words the door between the outer and the inner drawing-room opened, and Nettie herself appeared.

“Take me away, John,” she said, “take me anywhere out of this house, away from him.”

“You have been listening,” observed Mr. Brady, disconcerted for the first time.

“Yes, it was my affair and I had a right to hear. Take me away, John, from that bad, false man. Do you understand what I say? Oh! and I was so fond of him, and I believed him. I did,” and she burst into a fit of hysterical weeping, and her face, her shamed, grief-stained face, covered with her hands, hurried from the room.

“Go after her, John,” said the General, “and keep her in the garden till I have settled this matter one way or other.”

“And hark ye, mister,” called out Mr. Brady, “she does not leave this place without my consent; ay, and, for all her crying, she does not want to leave it.”

Which last clause was hard to believe in the face of Nettie’s passionate entreaties for John to take her away, away at once.

“And to think of how I trusted him,” she moaned. “If the whole world had spoken ill of him it could not have changed me. I thought I knew him better than anybody, and this is the end of it all, this is the end.”

And so she moaned on for some fifteen minutes, whilst John stood leaning against a tree.

In truth he did not know what to say. His heart was full of compassion for her, but he could not think of a word of comfort good to speak. She had done so evil a thing for herself that he did not see how any one could make a better of it, and so, whilst she, seated amongst the long rank grass, made her bitter lamentations, sobbed her tears, and bewailed her lot, John Riley did, perhaps, the kindest and wisest thing possible under the circumstances, he held his peace, he let her alone.