The Earl's promise

Kingslough at high noon was ordinarily the stupidest, dullest, dirtiest little town that could have been found in the Province of Ulster. On market and fair, and party-procession days, the inhabitants seemed to expend the whole of their strength. An almost unbroken calm ensued after wild excitement, a death-like stillness followed the shouts and cries of faction, the shrieks of drunken merriment, the shrill piping of fifes, the braying of trumpets, and the bang-banging of drums.

Excepting on such and such-like festive occasions as those above enumerated, the town, figuratively speaking, looked as though it had gone to bed to sleep off the effects of its last excitement or debauch.

In the bright sunlight it appeared like a place deserted by its population—a place rich in every natural beauty, which there was neither man nor woman to admire.

So far as position was concerned, Kingslough had nothing left to desire. Situated on an arm of the sea, the town, well sheltered from the wild north winds by hills and far-spreading plantations, nestled its houses snugly along the shore, while the blue waves rippled gently in over the red sandstone beach.

Nature had indeed done everything for the little watering-place, and man had, as is usually the case, done his best to spoil Nature’s handiwork.

Seen from the sea Kingslough lay tranquil under its hills, the perfection of an artist’s ideal; but a nearer view dispelled this allusion, and it appeared to eyes from which the glamour was removed, just what it has already been described, the stupidest, dullest, dirtiest little town in Ulster.

Here was no dark Moorish architecture, lighted up by the bright costumes and brighter eyes of the Galway women. Here were no fantastic houses, no picturesque surprises, no archways lying in deep shadow, no recessed and highly ornamented doorways, no rich carvings, no evidences of a wonderful and romantic past. Everything was straight, strictly utilitarian, mean. The best houses presented outwardly no sign of the amount of actual accommodation they contained.

They were old, but they had not grown grey and softened with the lapse of years. The prevailing “finish” amongst the better class of residences was paint or rough-cast, whilst the dwellings inhabited by the trading and working members of the community were periodically covered with lime-white, which the rain as regularly washed off.

The side-paths were uneven, the streets unlighted, every sanitary regulation either unborn or in the earliest and weakest stage of infancy. From a picturesque point of view the fishing-boats drawn up on the beach formed a pleasing foreground to a charming landscape, acceptable to the eye; but the neighbourhood of these boats was disagreeable to the nose by reason of cods’ heads, and other fishy matters, that lay decomposing in the sun.

Time had been when Kingslough was known by a more distinctively Irish name, that of Ballylough, the A being pronounced very broad indeed, while a fine guttural sound was imparted to the “ough,”—as indeed is still the case with the terminal letters in Kingslough.

At that period, Ballylough was a very modest Bally indeed, and the lodgings it let in the boating season to strangers from Glenwellan were of the most primitive description.

The villa residences, the rows of terraces, the sea-wall, the grand promenade overlooking the bay, all of which now delight the eyes of tourists and others, had not yet emerged from the then future that has long since become the past.

The occasion on which the tiny seaport came to be re-christened, was that of the first gentleman in Europe succeeding to the British throne.

Mighty things were, by certain people and classes in Ireland, expected to result from that event.

His visit, when Prince of Wales, to the Isle of Saints had excited high hopes in the hearts of many of his Hibernian subjects.

The liberalism exhibited by the heir-apparent would, they felt satisfied, be brought into practice by the sovereign in remedying the wrongs of Ireland.

The Roman Catholics believed they should now have a friend and partisan in the highest places, able and willing to redress their grievances. The trading portion of the community, deceived by the fact of the honour or dishonour of knighthood having been conferred on a few Dublin shopkeepers, trusted the hour was at hand when commerce would be recognized as a power in Ireland; and that a good time was coming, when money made in mills and offices might be pleasantly spent in crushing the pride of those “aristocrats,” who spite of their poverty persisted in holding a semblance of state on their unproductive acres, and extending such hospitality as their narrow means permitted, solely and exclusively to those they considered born by God’s grace in the same rank of life as themselves.

As for the dissenters in the north,—that numerous and remarkable body to which successive monarchs and prime ministers have paid a curious amount of attention ever since the time of William the Third, who established that raison d’être of many a shabby, poorly attended place of worship, the Regium Donum—as for the dissenters they cherished a vague idea that, although his Most Gracious Majesty George IV. might be styled “Defender of the Faith,” which was not in some respects exactly their faith, still the light of his glorious countenance would not impossibly be lent to them for the purpose of placing those who worshipped in meetinghouses and other conventicles on a par, socially and pecuniarily, with their old enemy the Church as by law established. The labouring classes commonly cherished a conviction that an immediate rise of wages must follow the coronation; in fact, amongst those of the Irish who wanted and hoped for anything, there was a noisy and expectant accession of loyalty: and as a small evidence of this, the municipal rulers of Ballylough convened a meeting, at which with the almost unanimous consent of the inhabitants it was decided that for the future—

“The important seaport town of Ballylough, possessed of an almost natural harbour, situated on the direct route to America, in the centre of a supply of herrings practically speaking limitless, boasting a beach unrivalled in the three kingdoms, and which presented facilities for bathing unsurpassed by any other watering-place, having likewise in its immediate neighbourhood manufactories of no mean extent” and so forth, should for the future be known to those whom it might, and those whom it might not concern, as Kingslough.

In liberal and democratic matters the rulers over the town were strong. Amongst others of less note may be enumerated a woollen-draper who in the course of a long and laborious life had made much money, and what was more to the purpose, kept it when made; a certain sea-captain called Mullins, reputed to be worth nine thousand pounds, every sixpence of which he had made by smuggling; an apothecary; a Mr. Connor, who resided a little way out of the town, and who, possessing an income of one hundred and thirty pounds a year, did nothing, as his fathers had done before him.

These men, being ardent lovers of their country, its traditions, Brian Baroïhme, the Irish melodies (“Boyne Water” and “Protestant Boys” excepted), illicit spirits, and the Old Parliament House on Stephen’s Green, were, as might have been expected, uproarious with delight when this graceful tribute to the virtues of their new monarch had been offered.

From the demonstration, however, all those who belonged to the powerful though comparatively small Tory party held resolutely aloof.

They could generally, not always by ways and influence that would have borne the light, materially assist in sending one member for the county at least to the House of Commons, but in local and municipal matters they were impotent.

Ballylough was owned by the Earl of Glendare who to the disgust of Lord Ardmorne, his relentless political opponent, chanced to be ground-landlord of almost every house and public building the town contained.

For centuries the Glendares had been connected with that part of the country. All those members of the family who died in any place reasonably accessible to Ireland were carried up a very steep hill overlooking Ballylough, where among the ruins of Ballyknock Abbey the curious stranger could obtain an exquisite view over land and sea, and behold at the same time sheep nibbling the short sweet mountain herbage beside the family vault which contained all that death had left of youth and beauty—of rank, wealth, and earthly consideration.

It was a mighty strange contrast to meet Lady Glendare in her grand coach, a very Jezebel made up of pride, paint, deceit, extravagance and heartlessness, and then to toil up to that burying-place lying lonely among the desolate hills, and think of those women—once haughty and sinful, just like her, in life knowing no rest, making no happiness—who lay there mouldering into dust.

At the time of George the Fourth’s accession to the throne, Charles, the eighth Earl had not long succeeded to the title and estates of his father, and so far from objecting to Ballylough being changed into Kingslough gave the project his warmest support, being moved thereto by the reasons following.

First, because he trusted his eldest son, no longer a young man, would sooner or later hold an appointment about the Court of the new monarch; secondly, because a builder, who proposed the wild speculation of erecting a terrace of houses, and was willing to pay a handsome sum down for a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years, signified his belief that houses, and land intended as sites for houses, would let better if the place were, as he expressed himself, “given a fresh start;” and thirdly, because he knew the change would annoy Lord Ardmorne.

So the name was altered, and the town, after a sleepy, inconsequent sort of fashion, grew and prospered; so that by the time this story commences, it had established for itself the name of a highly respectable, not to say aristocratic, watering-place.

Travelling then was not what it is now. People did not go whisking about like comets; a journey was attended with many discomforts; the nearer home anxious mothers could obtain sea-bathing for their darlings, and change of air and scene for themselves, the better they were pleased; and accordingly, in the season, Kingslough was crammed from parlour to attic, and even ladies who, having seen better days, spoke much about their papas and mammas, and a radiant past which had once been theirs, did not disdain to let lodgings, or it might be to accept invitations during the summer months from various relations and friends, so as to leave their houses and furniture free for the use of Mr. and Mrs., or Sir and my Lady, at so much per month.

But even in the season it was not a lively place. People went there to bathe, not to form acquaintances. Let Mrs. Murtock, wife of Murtock, the great distiller, don what gorgeous array she pleased, not even a glance could she win from one of the upper ten as they sat in church trying to look blandly unconscious of her existence.

People made no experiments in acquaintanceship at Kingslough. The world, according to the then social gospel extant, meant the old stock and the new; and whenever the new held out the right hand of fellowship to the old, it got, metaphorically speaking, so cruelly slapped, that the experiment was rarely repeated.

Not a dweller in the Faubourg St. Germain was in reality one whit more bitterly proud than those Irish ladies, so charming in their manners to high and low, to those on the same rung of the social ladder as themselves, and those at the foot of it; but who refused to recognize even the existence of “such people” as the wives and daughters of men that could, to use the expression which frequently fell from their lips, have “bought and sold” the lands and goods and chattels of the old stock without a misgiving as to where the money was to come from to compass so laudable a purpose.

Altogether, unless a human being was excessively fond of his own society and natural scenery, Kingslough could not have been accounted a desirable place in which to settle for life.

Its aboriginal inhabitants—those, that is to say, who resided there all the year round, were principally a well-developed race of marvellously healthy, dirty, poor, ragged, happy children, shoeless and stockingless as regarded their legs and feet, soapless and combless as concerned their heads and faces.

From early morning till late at night these picturesque urchins held high revel in the gutters and along the side-paths of the poorer streets; scores of them disported themselves along the beach, wading out into the sea as far as their clothing—scanty enough, Heaven knows—would allow them, and when the sea, or tide as they called it, was out too far to be waded into, they pursued the entrancing amusement of hunting for crabs and periwinkles on the sands.

At intervals, shrill cries from some woman, got up in the costume of her class—a large white cap, with immense coiffured frills on her head, and a very small plaid shawl over her shoulders—shrieking for the return of her offspring, interrupted the pastimes indulged in by youth at Kingslough.

Occasionally these cries from the parents were succeeded by bitter lamentations from the children, who were not unfrequently hurried back to the duties and realities of life by slaps, and threats of more serious punishment.

Towards evening, young men and old men, who, following fishing as a profession, spent a considerable portion of the day in bed, appeared upon the scene. Stalwart weatherbeaten men, attired in pilot-coats and sou’westers, they made their way to the shore, where great tub-like smacks lay waiting their coming.

These fishers were brave and patient; kind, tender husbands to wives, who soon lost their good looks in that hard northern climate, and grew prematurely wrinkled and aged with the battle of life; good sons to widowed mothers or aged fathers; faithful lovers to girls who boasted exquisite complexions, tall, erect figures, and a wealth of beautiful hair rarely to be seen amongst their Saxon sisters; a grand, sturdy, hard-working race, who feared God exceedingly, and went out in the wild, dark winter nights to war with the winds and the waves as undauntedly as though each season did not leave some maid, or wife, or mother desolate.

Next to the fishermen came the shopkeeper class, who differed from each other as stars vary in magnitude, from Widow McCann, who set out her cottage-window with sweets, and cakes, and apples for the children, and who sold besides, halfpennyworths of everything that could possibly be sub-divided into that value, to Mr. Neill, proprietor of the shop of the town, a place where everything, from an ounce of tea to canvas for sails, from a boy’s kite to a plough, could be procured at a moment’s notice.

Mr. Neill at one time entertained ideas of making his way into drawing-rooms where only the élite of Kingslough society was to be found; but his pretensions being firmly and, truth to say, not over courteously repudiated, he afterwards revenged himself by buying from the Encumbered Estates Commissioners a great property in Munster, where, though it was darkly rumoured that he once stood behind a counter, impecunious gentry—real gentry as the poorer classes call them—made friends with his sons and daughters, hoping that the marriage of blood with money might yet save the rushy acres they lacked capital and energy to drain.

Time has done wonders in Ireland. It has taught the “old stock” that if they want money, and unhappily they cannot do without it, they must tolerate the people who have been able to make money.

But they do not like those persons yet, except as a means to an end; and possibly the faculty of adding sovereign to sovereign and acre to acre is not exactly that calculated to render a man socially popular anywhere.

The Kingslough upper ten held that opinion at any rate. They longed for Dives’ possessions, but Dives himself they would have consigned to a deeper hell than that mentioned in the parable, had their theology contained it.

Above the shopkeepers ranked the manufacturers, men who attended closely to their business, associated freely amongst themselves, and on the occasion of public dinners, meetings, and the like, were shaken by the hand by Lord Glendare, Lord Ardmorne, and the remainder of the élite of Kingslough.

They did not presume on these privileges. Residing out of the town, they came little in contact with its inhabitants, and were content with such civilities as the worthies of Kingslough thought fit to accord.

If they could afford to keep good horses, their sons followed the hounds; and they generally were able to give dowries to their daughters, when in due course of time they married men who likewise were connected with manufacture, either far off or near at hand.

They were select people, keeping themselves to themselves, marrying and intermarrying amongst their own class, neither meddling nor intermeddling with the affairs of their neighbours.

They gave employment and they paid good wages, and took care that neither their smoke nor their refuse caused offence to Kingslough.

The town might claim them, but they did not claim the town. If they interfered in politics, and had strong opinions about the return of members for the county, it was but human and Irish. As a rule they were quiet enough, harmless as doves, busy with their own gathering and storing of honey as bees.

Higher than the manufacturers, who? Old maids and poodles. The Court Circle at Kingslough was composed almost entirely of ladies who wore fronts, and fat, snapping wretches of dogs who had too much hair of their own. The men belonging to these women were dead, or serving the king in India, or captains on board men-of-war, or constabulary officers in remote parts of Ireland, or barristers in Dublin, or even it might be solicitors in the same city, who had a large connection amongst the landed gentry and were learned in the mysteries of conveyancing.

These men did not often visit Kingslough, but on the rare occasions of their coming, the sensation produced by their presence was profound.

Kingslough rubbed its eyes, so to say, and woke up, and the opinions and facts then brought from the great and wicked world to that garden of Eden where so many elderly Eves congregated, furnished conversation for years afterwards.

In addition to the inhabitants already enumerated, Kingslough reckoned amongst its gentry a clergyman, whose cure was four miles distant; a curate, on whose shoulders devolved the spiritual responsibilities of a rector, who was continually absent from his flock; a colonel, who had never been in active service, but who, on the strength of his rank in the army, was so fortunate as to marry an English lady possessed of a comfortable fortune; a priest, the soul of good company; a remarkably acute attorney, Lord Ardmorne’s agent; the police officer, and, may I add, the doctor?

Hardly. He attended all the population, gentle and simple, and was popular alike amongst high and low. He knew the secrets of most households, was personally acquainted with the history and appearance of those skeletons that do somehow contrive to get locked up in the cupboards of even the best regulated families; but he had sprung from the bourgeois class, he had relatives very low down in the worldly scale, he had friends whose existence and status could not be overlooked by old maids and old women of the other sex, and therefore, and for all these reasons he was socially only tolerated by his best patients.

Curious stories he could have told concerning some of them—stories compromising the honour of many an ancient house, but his name had never been tarnished by any indiscreet confidence.

Even to the wife of his bosom, a woman of an inquiring, not to say inquisitive turn of mind, who had as many wiles as a poacher, and changed her tactics as often as a fox, he presented an invulnerable front of lamb-like innocence.

Trusting her ostensibly with everything in and out of his professional experience, he kept her in a state of actual ignorance, worthy of admiration in these latter days.

The moment he started on his rounds in the morning, she started on hers—telling this, that, and the other as the most profound secret to each one of her acquaintances, who laughed at her when once she left the house—for had they not heard all she was able to communicate, and more, hours previously, from Molly the fish-wife, or Pat O’Donnel, one of the privileged beggars and newsmongers of the town?

So ends the list. If tedious, it has been necessary to indicate the history of Kingslough and glance at the élite of Kingslough society in order to save stoppages by the way hereafter.

After this needful digression, let us revert to the first sentence in this story once again, and enter the stupid, dull, dirty little town of Kingslough at noon.