Castle Richmond II

CASTLE RICHMOND

‘‘Oh,’’ said Clara, turning away as though she were now satisfied. And then Herbert, escaping from the house as quickly as he could, rode home with a renewal of that feeling of triumph which he had once enjoyed before when returning from Desmond Court to Castle Richmond.

On the next day Herbert started for London. The parting was sad enough, and the occasion of it was such that it could hardly be otherwise. ‘‘I am quite sure of one thing,’’ he said to his sister Emmeline, ‘‘I shall never see Castle Richmond again.’’ And, indeed, one may say that small as might be his chance of doing so, his wish to do so must be still less. There could be no possible inducement to him to come back to a place which had so nearly been his own, and the possession of which he had lost in so painful a manner. Every tree about the place, every path across the wide park, every hedge and ditch and hidden leafy corner, had had for him a special interest, — for they had all been his own. But all that was now over. They were not only not his own, but they belonged to one who was mounting into his seat of power over his head.

He had spent the long evening before his last dinner in going round the whole demesne alone, so that no eye should witness what he felt. None but those who have known the charms of a country-house early in life can conceive the intimacy to which a man attains with all the various trifling objects round his own locality; how he knows the bark of every tree, and the bend of every bough; how he has marked where the rich grass grows in tufts, and where the poorer soil is always dry and bare; how he watches the nests of the rooks, and the holes of the rabbits, and has learned where the thrushes

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build, and can show the branch on which the linnet sits. All these things had been dear to Herbert, and they all required at his hand some last farewell. Every dog, too, he had to see, and to lay his hand on the neck of every horse. This making of his final adieu under such circumstances was melancholy enough.

And then, too, later in the evening, after dinner, all the servants were called into the parlour that he might shake hands with them. There was not one of them who had not hoped, as lately as three months since, that he or she would live to call Herbert Fitzgerald master. Indeed, he had already been their master — their young master. All Irish servants especially love to pay respect to the ‘‘young masther;’’ but Herbert now was to be their master no longer, and the probability was that he would never see one of them again.

He schooled himself to go through the ordeal with a manly gait and with dry eyes, and he did it; but their eyes were not dry, not even those of the men. Mrs. Jones and a favourite girl whom the young ladies patronized were not of the number, for it had been decided that they should follow the fortunes of their mistress; but Richard was there, standing a little apart from the others, as being now on a different footing. He was to go also, but before the scene was over he also had taken to sobbing violently.

‘‘I wish you all well and happy,’’ said Herbert, making his little speech, ‘‘and regret deeply that the intercourse between us should be thus suddenly severed. You have served me and mine well and truly, and it is hard upon you now, that you should be bid to go and seek another home elsewhere.’’

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‘‘It isn’t that we mind, Mr. Herbert; it ain’t that as frets us,’’ said one of the men.

‘‘It ain’t that at all, at all,’’ said Richard, doing chorus; ‘‘but that yer honour should be robbed of what is yer honour’s own.’’ ‘‘But you all know that we cannot help it,’’ continued Herbert; ‘‘a misfortune has come upon us which nobody could have foreseen, and therefore we are obliged to part with our

old friends and servants.’’

At the word friends the maid-servants all sobbed. ‘‘And ‹deed we is your frinds, and true frinds, too,’’ wailed the cook.

‘‘I know you are, and it grieves me to feel that I shall see you no more. But you must not be led to think by what Richard says that anybody is depriving me of that which ought to be my own. I am now leaving Castle Richmond because it is not my own, but justly belongs to another; — to another who, I must in justice tell you, is in no hurry to claim his inheritance. We none of us have any ground for displeasure against the present owner of this place, my cousin, Sir Owen Fitzgerald.’’

‘‘We don’t know nothing about Sir Owen,’’ said one voice. ‘‘And don’t want,’’ said another, convulsed with sobs. ‘‘He’s a very good sort of young gentleman — of his own

kind, no doubt,’’ said Richard.

‘‘But you can all of you understand,’’ continued Herbert, ‘‘that as this place is no longer our own, we are obliged to leave it; and as we shall live in a very different way in the home to which we are going, we are obliged to part with you, though we have no reason to find fault with any one among you. I am going to-morrow morning early, and my mother and sisters

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will follow after me in a few weeks. It will be a sad thing too for them to say good-bye to you all, as it is for me now; but it cannot be helped. God bless you all, and I hope that you will find good masters and kind mistresses, with whom you may live comfortably, as I hope you have done here.’’

‘‘We can’t find no other mistresses like her leddyship,’’ sobbed out the senior housemaid.

‘‘There ain’t niver such a one in the county Cork,’’ said the cook; ‘‘in a week of Sundays you wouldn’t hear the breath out of her above her own swait nathural voice.’’

‘‘I’ve driv’ her since iver — ‘‘ began Richard; but he was going to say since ever she was married, but he remembered that this allusion would be unbecoming, so he turned his face to the door-post, and began to wail bitterly.

And then Herbert shook hands with them all, and it was pretty to see how the girls wiped their hands in their aprons before they gave them to him, and how they afterwards left the room with their aprons up to their faces. The women walked out first, and then the men, hanging down their heads, and muttering as they went, each some little prayer that fortune and prosperity might return to the house of Fitzgerald. The property might go, but according to their views Herbert was always, and always would be, the head of the house. And then, last of all, Richard went. ‘‘There ain’t one of ‹em, Mr. Herbert, as wouldn’t guv his fist to go wid yer, and think nothing about the wages.’’

He was to start very early, and his packing was all completed that night. ‘‘I do so wish we were going with you,’’ said Em-

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meline, sitting in his room on the top of a corded box, which was to follow him by some slower conveyance.

‘‘And I do so wish I was staying with you,’’ said he.

‘‘What is the good of staying here now?’’ said she; ‘‘what pleasure can there be in it? I hardly dare to go outside the house door for fear I should be seen.’’

‘‘But why? We have done nothing that we need be ashamed of.’’

‘‘No; I know that. But, Herbert, do you not find that the pity of the people is hard to bear? It is written in their eyes, and meets one at every turn.’’

‘‘We shall get rid of that very soon. In a few months we shall be clean forgotten.’’

‘‘I do not know about being forgotten.’’

‘‘You will be as clean forgotten, — as though you had never existed. And all these servants who are now so fond of us, in three months’ time will be just as fond of Owen Fitzgerald, if he will let them stay here; it’s the way of the world.’’

That Herbert should have indulged in a little morbid misanthropy on such an occasion was not surprising. But I take leave to think that he was wrong in his philosophy; we do make new friends when we lose our old friends, and the heart is capable of cure as is the body; were it not so, how terrible would be our fate in this world! But we are so apt to find fault with God’s goodness to us in this respect, arguing, of others if not of ourselves, that the heart once widowed should remain a widow through all time. I, for one, think that the heart should receive its new spouses with what alacrity it may, and always with thankfulness.

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his head down over the tea to sip it and took the knife in his hand, and then he looked up at them, for he knew that their eyes were on him; he looked up at them to show that he could still endure it. But, alas! he could not endure it. The struggle was too much for him; he pushed his plate violently from him into the middle of the table, and dropping his head upon his hands he burst forth into audible lamentations.

Oh, my friends! be not hard on him in that he was thus weeping like a woman. It was not for his lost wealth that he was wailing, nor even for the name or splendour that could be no longer his; nor was it for his father’s memory, though he had truly loved his father; nor for his mother’s sorrow, or the tragedy of her life’s history. For none of these things were his tears flowing and his sobs coming so violently that it nearly choked him to repress them. Nor could he himself have said why he was weeping.

It was the hundred small things from which he was parting for ever that thus disturbed him. The chair on which he sat, the carpet on the floor, the table on which he leaned, the dull old picture of his great-grandfather over the fireplace, — they were all his old familiar friends, they were all part of Castle Richmond, — of that Castle Richmond which he might never be allowed to see again.

His mother and sisters came to him, hanging over him, and they joined their tears together. ‘‘Do not tell her that I was like this,’’ said he at last.

‘‘She will love you the better for it if she has a true woman’s heart within her breast,’’ said his mother.

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‘‘As true a heart as ever breathed,’’ said Emmeline through her sobs.

And then they pressed him to eat, but it was in vain. He knew that the food would choke him if he attempted it. So he gulped down the cup of tea, and with one kiss to his mother he rushed from them, refusing Aunt Letty’s proffered embrace, passing through the line of servants without another word to one of them, and burying himself in the post-chaise which was to carry him the first stage on his melancholy journey.

It was a melancholy journey all through. From the time that he left the door at Castle Richmond that was no longer his own, till he reached the Euston Station in London, he spoke no word to any one more than was absolutely necessary for the purposes of his travelling. Nothing could be more sad than the prospect of his residence in London. Not that he was without friends there, for he belonged to a fashionable club to which he could still adhere if it so pleased him, and had all his old Oxford comrades to fall back upon if that were of any service to him. But how is a man to walk into his club who yesterday was known as his father’s eldest son and the heir to a baronetcy and twelve thousand a year, and who to-day is known as nobody’s son and the heir to nothing? Men would feel so much for him and pity him so deeply! That was the worst feature of his present position. He could hardly dare to show himself more than was absolutely necessary till the newness of his tragedy was worn off.

Mr. Prendergast had taken lodgings for him, in which he was to remain till he could settle himself in the same house with his mother. And this house, in which they were all to live,

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had also been taken, — up in that cheerful locality near Har- row-on-the-Hill, called St. John’s Wood Road, the cab fares to which from any central part of London are so very ruinous. But that house was not yet ready, and so he went into lodgings in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Mr. Prendergast had chosen this locality because it was near the chambers of that great Chancery barrister, Mr. Die, under whose beneficent wing Herbert Fitzgerald was destined to learn all the mysteries of the Chancery bar. The sanctuary of Mr. Die’s wig was in Stone Buildings, immediately close to that milky way of vice-chancellors, whose separate courts cluster about the old chapel of Lincoln’s Inn; and here was Herbert to sit, studious, for the next three years, — to sit there instead of at the various relief committees in the vicinity of Kanturk. And why could he not be as happy at the one as at the other? Would not Mr. Die be as amusing as Mr. Townsend; and the arguments of Vice-Chan- cellor Stuart’s court quite as instructive as those heard in the committee room at Gortnaclough?

On the morning of his arrival in London he drove to his lodgings, and found a note there from Mr. Prendergast asking him to dinner on that day, and promising to take him to Mr. Die on the following morning. Mr. Prendergast kept a bachelor’s house in Bloomsbury Square, not very far from Lincoln’s Inn — just across Holborn, as all Londoners know; and there he would expect Herbert at seven o’clock. ‘‘I will not ask any one to meet you,’’ he said, ‘‘because you will be tired after your journey, and perhaps more inclined to talk to me than to strangers.’’

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