The Earl's promise

By the time Miss Healey, attended by her maid Sarah (although Mrs. Larkins and her sisters had astonished the proprieties of Kingslough by opening a library, they would never have dreamt of outraging them by roaming about the streets after dusk unprotected), arrived at Miss Riley’s abode, that lady was in bed and asleep, lulled thereto by the united effects of excitement and that modest tablespoonful of sherry which Jane always mixed with the gruel she had nightly, for some dozen years previously, prepared for her mistress.

After mature deliberation Jane decided to let her sleep on.

“It would be only breaking her night’s rest,” she said to Miss Healey, “and what could an ould lady like her do at this time of night?”

“What, indeed! or even in the morning,” answered Miss Healey, in a tone of the most profound despondency, whilst Sarah in the rear murmured sympathetically, “The crayture.”

“But I’ll just slip on my bonnet,” continued Jane, “and turn the key, and put it in my pocket, and run down and tell the Colonel; some knowledgeable person ought to know about it,” and suiting her actions to her words, Jane dived back into the kitchen, took up her bonnet and shawl, and returning to the front door, resumed her conversation with Miss Healey, while she tied her strings and threw her shawl about her. It was thus she made her toilette.

“You’re not afraid of leaving your mistress?” suggested Miss Healey, delicately interrogative. Three as they were, such a thing had never happened to one of the sisters, as finding herself alone in the house after dark.

“Oh! I shan’t be away five minutes, Miss,” answered Jane confidently, as she closed the door and put the key in her pocket, and trotted off along the Parade, after bidding Miss Healey “Good night,” leaving that lady all unconscious that it had been Jane’s regular practice, when her mistress was settled, and Miss Riley settled very early indeed, to go out and have a gossip with her friends, not for five minutes only, but for many fives.

A willing servant, always good-tempered, always ready to wait upon that poor, feeble old lady, thankful for small wages, content with frugal fare,—a pattern domestic, but human nevertheless. And being human, the monotony of that monotonous existence would have been insupportable but for those stolen half-hours, of the theft of which Nettie O’Hara had been long aware.

And it was the knowledge of this fact which put a sting into Jane’s words when speaking of the girl’s elopement. She had trusted Nettie—perforce perhaps—but still she had trusted her with a confession of various visits, and interviews, and appointments, which she could not well confide to her mistress, and Nettie, having a secret herself, had heard all the servant found to say, and kept her own counsel the while.

Had she chosen any other man than Daniel Brady, and confided her love to Jane, Jane could have forgiven her; but she had chosen Daniel Brady and kept her confidence from Jane, therefore that model servant was very bitter indeed in her denunciation of Miss O’Hara’s slyness.

“And to think that never a one of us should have guessed it,” said Jane, in declamation to Colonel and Mrs. Perris. “Always with her books, as the mistress and me thought, taking them with her when she went to bathe, carrying them to the shore when she had a spare hour, and the tide was out, sitting in the parlour all by herself with her writing books and such like, I am sure I could have taken my Bible oath she had never so much as thought of a sweetheart. And that she should have taken up with the likes of him. It was lonesome for her,” added the woman, with a vivid memory of the unutterable loneliness and dreariness of that silent house recurring as she spoke. “It was lonesome, but sure if she had only waited, many a gentleman would have been proud and happy to marry an O’Hara, even if she hadn’t a halfpenny to her fortune.”

“It is a bad business, if true,” said Colonel Perris. “Let us hope it is not true.”

“I am afeard it is true enough,” Jane, who was beginning to be “wise afterwards,” exclaimed; “and the poor mistress will never hold up her head again. Can nothing be done, sir?”

“Not by me,” answered Colonel Perris decidedly. “Miss O’Hara is no relation of mine, and I cannot interfere;” and feeling that this speech naturally terminated the interview, Jane, after executing a curtsey, left the room, and, true to her determination of not leaving Miss Riley alone for a longer period than she could avoid, hurried back to that dark, silent house, from out of which Nettie O’Hara had taken whatever of sunshine her youth and beauty could confer, for ever.

“I will write a line to the General,” said Colonel Perris to his wife, after a few moments’ silence, “and then wash my hands of the whole business. Shall I begin my communication as Jane did hers? ‘One says Miss O’Hara has gone off;’ what a convenient phrase, commits no person, and imparts an air of mystery to the whole proceeding! I will not commit myself to the names of informants at all events,” and the Colonel wrote:—

“Dear Riley,—Rumour will have it that your pretty young cousin has eloped with, or been carried off by, Mr. Daniel Brady. I trust Rumour is in error, but at the same time think you ought to know what she says. Certain it is Miss Nettie disappeared mysteriously this morning, and has not since been heard of.

“That will bring him if Miss Riley’s shaky complaint does not,” remarked the writer, folding up the letter, which was written on a great sheet of paper such as one never sees nowadays, sealing it with red wax, and stamping that wax with a huge crest. “Tim shall ride over with it first thing to-morrow morning.”

“And then,” suggested Mrs. Perris.

“Then it will be for the family to decide what is best to be done,” said the Colonel significantly. “I am very much mistaken in Mr. Brady if there be no need of family interference.”

“Oh! Fred,” exclaimed his wife.

“Well, my dear,” he answered, then finding she made no further remark, he went on,—“Poor Nettie! She has done an evil day’s work for herself, I am afraid. So far as I can judge of the affair now, whether she be married or whether she be not, I would rather have seen her taken out of the Black Stream dead, than heard the news that woman brought here to-night.”

“What is this Mr. Brady, then?” inquired his wife.

“Simply the worst man between Kingslough and the Cove of Cork,” was the reply. “If that description be not comprehensive enough, say the worst man between Kingslough and St. Petersburg.”

“How could the girl have become acquainted with—with such a person?”

“Why, what sort of guardian was that doting, sightless, decrepit old woman, for a girl like Nettie? She might have had a hundred lovers and nobody been the wiser.”

“But, my dear, how many other girls are similarly situated, and it never occurs to anyone to imagine that harm will happen to them?”

“How many other girls?” he repeated, “very few I should hope.”

“Take Grace Moffat for instance—”

“Grace Moffat! How utterly you mistake the position. It was a leap, I admit, for him to speak to Nettie O’Hara, but he dared not have said even so much as good morning to Grace Moffat. You never will understand Irish ways or Irish ideas. Supposing a respectable man in trade had cast eyes on Miss Nettie, and offered himself to her family as her future husband, the Rileys and all who were interested in the girl might have lamented the necessity, but they would have accepted the man. But suppose a man in that rank offered himself to Grace Moffat? Why, there is not a labourer at Bayview who would not resent such an offer as a personal insult. Grace may marry whom she pleases. With Nettie it was a question of marrying whom she could. Of what use is beauty in a land where a poor man fears to admire? I put it to you, Lucy, is there a man in our station in Kingslough or twelve miles round, who could marry for love without money, unless he wished to make his wife and himself miserable.”

“What a misfortune to be an heiress!” sighed his wife.

“That sigh is not fair, Lucy,” he said, eagerly; “you know I should not have asked the richest woman living to marry me had I not loved her for herself, but wedding portionless wives with us Irish is just like looking into shop windows. The articles may be very beautiful, and we acknowledge they are so, but we cannot afford them; they are not suitable for poor men. Had this been otherwise, Nettie never would have been intended for a governess. India, or a situation. If India be impossible, as it was in her case, then a situation. No man in her own rank dared have taken her to wife, and so she was fain to flee from the delights of being a pupil-teacher, even with Daniel Brady; whilst Grace Moffat, possessed of not one-half her beauty—one-tenth indeed—may pick and choose, can afford to keep on shilly-shallying with John Riley.”

“My love, you make a mistake,” said Mrs. Perris, rousing herself into a state of active opposition, “Grace Moffat will be a magnificent woman.”

“Pooh! Lucy, what she may be hereafter signifies nothing, what she is now signifies everything. With Nettie O’Hara’s beauty and her own position, she might have married Robert Somerford. As it is—”

“There, do not speak another word. Robert Somerford, indeed! That idle, good-for-nothing, verse-writing, harp-playing, would-be man of fashion; Robert Somerford, a man without a fortune, a profession, or a trade; no match, in my opinion, even for your pink-and-white beauty, certainly no match for my charming Grace.”

“I see nothing charming about her,” was the reply.

“That is because you are a man,” said Mrs. Perris calmly. “Give her the chance, and ten years hence she will be the queen of society; but that is just what men cannot understand. They want a woman ready made. They cannot believe that the sort of beauty they admire in a girl in her teens will not last, cannot last. Now Grace’s loveliness will ripen day by day.”

“You are eloquent,” interrupted her husband, laughing.

“So will other people be on the same subject hereafter,” persisted the lady.

“Perhaps so,” he replied, “but I cannot say I agree with you. I have no spirit of prophecy, and in my opinion Grace is as plain as Nettie is pretty.”

“Pretty, yes; not that I ever did, or ever shall admire a girl whose only claims to beauty consist in a pink-and-white complexion, eyes as large as saucers and as blue as the heavens, and long golden curls. I detest blue eyes and golden hair, and I abominate curls.”

“Well, my dear, we need not quarrel about the matter. I suspect neither of us will see much more of the poor child’s eyes and curls. I only hope Riley will give the fellow a good horsewhipping.”

“That would not benefit her,” said Mrs. Perris.

“I am not sure of that,” answered her husband.

Riding into Kingslough the next morning, Mr. John Riley felt quite of the Colonel’s opinion. There was nothing he desired so much as opportunity and provocation to thrash the man who had stolen away his cousin.

An insult had been offered through her to the whole of her relations. Longingly, when he heard the news, did General Riley’s eyes turn towards his pistols; then remembering the degeneracy of the days he had lived to see, he muttered an ejaculation which had little beside brevity to recommend it, and asked his son, “What are we to do?”

“Follow them,” was the quiet reply; but there was a significance in the way Mr. Riley wound the thong of his whip round his hand, that gave a second meaning to his words.

“I wish I could go with you,” said the elder man, “but this confounded gout always lays me by the heels whenever there is any work to do.”

“Never mind, sir; you may trust me,” answered his son, laying an unmistakable emphasis on the last four words.

“You had better wait, and have some breakfast, Jack; the old lady never gives one anything except a cup of weak tea and a slice of brown bread and butter.”

“No. I will hear what fresh news there may be, and then ask Mrs. Hartley to give me something to eat.”

“I think you must be in love with that woman,” said his father.

“I am afraid she is the only woman who is in love with me,” was the reply, uttered lightly, yet with a certain bitterness, and, having so spoken, Mr. John Riley walked across the hall, mounted his horse, and, followed by Tim, went down the drive at a smart trot.

Grace Moffat was wont to say, a little contemptuously, that “any man could ride.” Had her sight been a little more impartial, she would have acknowledged that few men, even in Ireland, could ride like John Riley. But Miss Grace had her own ideal of what a male human being should be, and the lover popular rumour assigned to her did not, in the least degree, fulfil that ideal. She liked black curly hair, dark dreamy eyes, a dark complexion, a slight figure; and John’s hair was straight and brown, his eyes grey and keen, his frame strong and well knit. Her ideal had hands small and delicate, like those of a woman, feet which it was a wonder to behold, his voice was soft and pleading, whilst John—well, all that could be said in John’s favour she summed up in three words,—“He was good;” and Grace was not the first woman who thought—any more than she will be the last to think—goodness an exceedingly negative sort of virtue.

But if Grace did not love John, he loved her. The affection was all one-sided—it generally is—and the young man comprehended the fact.

As he rode along the hard, firm road, his thoughts keeping time to the beat of his horse’s feet, he took his resolution. Young though Grace was, he would ask her to be his wife, and if she refused, he meant to leave Ireland.

Considering his nation, considering his birth, considering his surroundings, considering the ideas of those with whom he was thrown in contact, this young man, with the straight brown hair and features far from faultless, was gifted with wonderful common sense.

Much, as he loved Grace Moffat, and how he loved her no one save himself could tell, he could not afford to let any woman spoil the whole of his future life. He could not drag on his present useless, purposeless existence, even for the pleasure of perpetually seeing Grace.

He was young: and the years stretched out indefinitely before him. How could he live through them if he had no goal to reach, no object to remember having achieved?

This matter of Nettie O’Hara’s put his own affairs into a tangible shape before him. Suppose, after he had waited and waited, and trusted and hoped, Grace chose some other man than himself—not like Daniel Brady, of course, but equally undeserving—what should he do? How should he endure the days, the months, the years which must succeed?

No! he would end it. Pink-and-white demureness itself, personified, had made her choice without consulting anybody, and why should not Grace, who was older and wiser, and who must know, and who did know, that everybody in Kingslough had assigned her to him.

Ay, there was the mischief. Young ladies do not like to be assigned. If Kingslough could only have kept silence; but then Kingslough never did keep silence. Well, he would try; he would take advantage of this terrible trouble which had befallen her friend, and avail himself of a time when he knew Grace must be full of sorrow, to speak to her about her own future and his.

Yes; whether together or apart, it meant hers and his. If she sent him adrift, he would try to make of that future something even she need not have been ashamed to share. If he wore the willow, it should be next his heart—other leaves he would wear where men could see them, where she might hear of them.

And this feeling governed his reply to Mrs. Hartley, when across the breakfast-table she said to him gravely,—

“John, you ought to marry Grace Moffat soon.”

“I mean to do so if she consents,” was his answer.

“She is very young,” remarked Mrs. Hartley, who did not quite like his tone.

“She is old enough to know her own mind,” he retorted quickly, then added, “I am sick of this uncertainty; she must end it one way or another.”

“You expect her to say ‘No’?”

“I expect her to say ‘No,’” he agreed.

“But you will not take that as final?”

“I shall take it as final,” he said, after a pause, speaking slowly and deliberately, “Grace is no coquette. If she likes me she will tell me so; if she does not—”

“If she does not,” repeated Mrs. Hartley.

“I must find something—not a girl—that will like me and that I can like. Love is not everything, Mrs. Hartley, though it is a great deal. I cannot help thinking that the man who lets any woman wreck the whole of his life for him is very little better than a coward.”

“John Riley,” said the widow solemnly, “you may thank heaven I am an old woman, or I should marry you whether you liked it or not.”

“Dear Mrs. Hartley,” he answered, “if you were quarter of a century younger, or I quarter of a century older, I should propose for you at once. Wherever I am, wherever I go, I shall always esteem it a privilege to have known you.”

“Do not go anywhere,” she said. “Marry Grace and settle down.” But he only shook his head, helping himself to another slice of ham the while.

After all, he was a prosaic lover, Mrs. Hartley, spite of her partiality, could not help admitting. She was a woman, and so overlooked many facts she might otherwise have been expected to remember.

First, he had ridden eight Irish miles, fasting; and eight miles, on a bright summer morning, with the fresh wind blowing, was sufficient to give an appetite to a young fellow, in good health, who was innocent, moreover, of the then almost universal vice of hard drinking every night.

Second, this matter of Grace had been to him like a long toothache, which he could endure no longer. He must either have the tooth out, or know it could be cured. Grace must decide to have him for her lover, or do without him altogether. It might be very well for her to have him hanging about Bayview, accompanying her and her elderly maiden cousin to flower-shows, launches, picnics, regattas, and other mild dissipations, but his idle, purposeless life was ruining his worldly prospects.

Had he meant to stay on at Woodbrook till his father’s death left that already heavily mortgaged estate his property, the case might have been different, but John Riley intended to do nothing of the sort. He was fully determined to make money. He was weary of the shifts that cruel interest compelled his family to practise. He could not be blind to the fact that by reason of the pressure put upon him, his father was forced to put a pressure upon his tenants—bad for the land—injurious to them.

There was no money to do anything except pay the interest upon that debt which had not been incurred by them, which had been hung round the neck of that lovely estate by a former Riley as reckless as prodigal, as cruel to those who were to follow after as any Glendare lying in Ballyknock Abbey.

There was no money—not a shilling to spare; father and son, mother and daughters, all had to bow under the yoke of that tyrant mortgage. There was no money to drain; no money to improve the land, and so enable it to yield its increase. The landlord was poor, and the tenants as a natural consequence were poor likewise, and John Riley, proud and impulsive, chafed under the bitterness of his lot, and would have left the country long before to try and win Fortune’s smiles in other lands, but his love for Grace prevented him.

Once upon a time—no long time previously to that morning when he sate at breakfast with Mrs. Hartley, it had seemed to the young man a good thing to consider that when he married Grace Moffat, he would secure at once the girl he loved and sufficient money to lighten the mortgage at Woodbrook, but a casual remark let drop by Miss Nettie O’Hara, who understood her friend at least as well as her friend understood Nettie, opened his eyes to the fact that Grace Moffat attached quite as much importance to her “dot” as any one of her admirers.

“It is a thousand pities Grace’s grandfather left her such a quantity of money,” said demure but deep-seeing Miss O’Hara; “she would have been so much happier without a halfpenny. I am certain she will never marry any man who cannot in some shape or other lay down as much as she.”

Now there was a significance in the way Nettie uttered this sentence which set Mr. John Riley thinking—what had he to lay down against Grace’s fortune? Himself—ah! but then there was Grace’s self—and her fortune still remained.

To the ordinary Irishman of that period—handsome, gallant, well bred, easy mannered—himself would have seemed a fair equivalent for the most beautiful woman and the finest fortune combined; but then, John Riley was not an ordinary Irishman, and Grace had in her foolish little head certain notions in advance of her time which did not tend to make her any happier.

For after all to be discreetly trustful is the best quality a woman can possess, and Grace did not quite trust John Riley any more than she loved him.

He did not possess the easy assurance—the confident self-assertion which usually marked his class. He was one of the exceptional men—one cast in the same mould as those who before and since have fought for their adopted mother, England, and saved her from defeat on many a hardly contested battle-field. So far as courage went he was made of the same stuff as those who fought the Affghans and stormed the Redan, and rode with the six hundred, and endured the lingering torments of Lucknow, and never talked of their courage or their patience afterwards; but he was ignorant of many things calculated, in those days especially, to win, by reason of their rarity, favour in a woman’s eyes.

Even with his small stock, however, of drawing-room accomplishments, had he been more demonstrative, had he paraded his abilities, had he, to use a very homely phrase, made much of himself, perhaps Grace might have viewed him through more loving spectacles. As it was, she did not care for him at all in the way he cared for her. She saw the good kindly-natured John, possessed of encumbered acres and a somewhat plain face, and she was amiable enough to let him bask in the smiles of an heiress until such time as it suited the heiress to warn him off.

Without any malice prepense, be it clearly understood. If Grace had her ideal, that ideal certainly was not realized in the person of any man she ever expected to marry, or thought of marrying. She had not brought marrying home to herself in any way. She was romantic—given to solitary wanderings in the twilight and by moonlight along the terraced walk, bordered by myrtles, strewed with the leaves of the gum cistus flower, which blooms and fades in a day, fragrant with the scent of syringa,—that overlooked the bay. There she dreamt her dreams—there she recited to herself scraps of poetry—detached verses that had caught her fancy—there she murmured snatches of songs, all melancholy, all breathing the language of unchanging love and endless constancy.

“Opinion,” remarks one of the wittiest of our living^[1] satirists, “does not follow language—but language opinion;” and if this be true as regards sentiment likewise, and doubtless it is, we cannot, judging from our songs, compliment the present generation either on its simplicity or its romance.

Foolish enough were the words young ladies warbled forty years since—but there was a tenderness and a grace and a fitness about the ditties of that long ago time which we seek in vain in modern verses. One merit at least was formerly possessed by the music and the story linked to music, that of intelligibility. Now when the story is intelligible, it is idiotic.

Not much of an ear could John Riley boast, yet he loved to listen to Grace’s singing, and hearkened with something between a pang and a hope to the little thrills of melody into which she would break—just as a bird breaks into a vocal ecstasy—while they walked through the rose-laden gardens, or floated, oars uplifted, over the moonlit sea, the water diamonds dripping from them, making an accompaniment to the last soft notes of the duet sung by his sister and Grace.

And there were sights and sounds and scents that for years he could scarcely endure by reason of the memories they recalled—simple things—moonlight on the water—a sprig of myrtle starred with white flowers—a spray of jessamine, nestling in the folds of a white dress—the words of a familiar song. Well, few people marry their first love, and if they do, they generally repent that their love was compliant.

But John Riley had not yet fallen on those evil days in which memory was fraught with bitterness, although vaguely his sense foreshadowed them, when seated opposite to Mrs. Hartley he ate his breakfast with as much appetite as though, to quote that lady’s mental observation, there were no such things in the world as love and disappointment, and marred lives and broken hearts!