Читать книгу Lord Kilgobbin - Lever Charles James - Страница 6

THE ‘BLUE GOAT’

The ‘Blue Goat’ in the small town of Moate is scarcely a model hostel. The entrance-hall is too much encumbered by tramps and beggars of various orders and ages, who not only resort there to take their meals and play at cards, but to divide the spoils and settle the accounts of their several ‘industries,’ and occasionally to clear off other scores which demand police interference. On the left is the bar; the right-hand being used as the office of a land-agent, is besieged by crowds of country-people, in whom, if language is to be trusted, the grievous wrongs of land-tenure are painfully portrayed – nothing but complaint, dogged determination, and resistance being heard on every side. Behind the bar is a long low-ceilinged apartment, the parlour par excellence, only used by distinguished visitors, and reserved on one especial evening of the week for the meeting of the ‘Goats,’ as the members of a club call themselves – the chief, indeed the founder, being our friend Mathew Kearney, whose title of sovereignty was ‘Buck-Goat,’ and whose portrait, painted by a native artist and presented by the society, figured over the mantel-piece. The village Van Dyck would seem to have invested largely in carmine, and though far from parsimonious of it on the cheeks and the nose of his sitter, he was driven to work off some of his superabundant stock on the cravat, and even the hands, which, though amicably crossed in front of the white-waistcoated stomach, are fearfully suggestive of some recent deed of blood. The pleasant geniality of the countenance is, however, reassuring. Nor – except a decided squint, by which the artist had ambitiously attempted to convey a humoristic drollery to the expression – is there anything sinister in the portrait.

An inscription on the frame announces that this picture of their respected founder was presented, on his fiftieth birthday, ‘To Mathew Kearney, sixth Viscount Kilgobbin’; various devices of ‘caprine’ significance, heads, horns, and hoofs, profusely decorating the frame. If the antiquary should lose himself in researches for the origin of this society, it is as well to admit at once that the landlord’s sign of the ‘Blue Goat’ gave the initiative to the name, and that the worthy associates derived nothing from classical authority, and never assumed to be descendants of fauns or satyrs, but respectable shopkeepers of Moate, and unexceptional judges of ‘poteen.’ A large jug of this insinuating liquor figured on the table, and was called ‘Goat’s-milk’; and if these humoristic traits are so carefully enumerated, it is because they comprised all that was specially droll or quaint in these social gatherings, the members of which were a very commonplace set of men, who discussed their little local topics in very ordinary fashion, slightly elevated, perhaps, in self-esteem, by thinking how little the outer world knew of their dulness and dreariness.

As the meetings were usually determined on by the will of the president, who announced at the hour of separation when they were to reassemble, and as, since his niece’s arrival, Kearney had almost totally forgotten his old associates, the club-room ceased to be regarded as the holy of holies, and was occasionally used by the landlord for the reception of such visitors as he deemed worthy of peculiar honour.

It was on a very wet night of that especially rainy month in the Irish calendar, July, that two travellers sat over a turf fire in this sacred chamber, various articles of their attire being spread out to dry before the blaze, the owners of which actually steamed with the effects of the heat upon their damp habiliments. Some fishing-tackle and two knapsacks, which lay in a corner, showed they were pedestrians, and their looks, voice, and manner proclaimed them still more unmistakably to be gentlemen.

One was a tall, sunburnt, soldierlike man of six or seven-and-thirty, powerfully built, and with that solidity of gesture and firmness of tread sometimes so marked with strong men. A mere glance at him showed he was a cold, silent, somewhat haughty man, not given to hasty resolves or in any way impulsive, and it is just possible that a long acquaintance with him would not have revealed a great deal more. He had served in a half-dozen regiments, and although all declared that Henry Lockwood was an honourable fellow, a good soldier, and thoroughly ‘safe’ – very meaning epithet – there were no very deep regrets when he ‘exchanged,’ nor was there, perhaps, one man who felt he had lost his ‘pal’ by his going. He was now in the Carbineers, and serving as an extra aide-de-camp to the Viceroy.

Not a little unlike him in most respects was the man who sat opposite him – a pale, finely-featured, almost effeminate-looking young fellow, with a small line of dark moustache, and a beard en Henri Quatre, to the effect of which a collar cut in Van Dyck fashion gave an especial significance. Cecil Walpole was disposed to be pictorial in his get-up, and the purple dye of his knickerbocker stockings, the slouching plumage of his Tyrol hat, and the graceful hang of his jacket, had excited envy in quarters where envy was fame. He too was on the viceregal staff, being private secretary to his relative the Lord-Lieutenant, during whose absence in England they had undertaken a ramble to the Westmeath lakes, not very positive whether their object was to angle for trout or to fish for that ‘knowledge of Ireland’ so popularly sought after in our day, and which displays itself so profusely in platform speeches and letters to the Times. Lockwood, not impossibly, would have said it was ‘to do a bit of walking’ he had come. He had gained eight pounds by that indolent Phoenix-Park life he was leading, and he had no fancy to go back to Leicestershire too heavy for his cattle. He was not – few hunting men are – an ardent fisherman; and as for the vexed question of Irish politics, he did not see why he was to trouble his head to unravel the puzzles that were too much for Mr. Gladstone; not to say, that he felt to meddle with these matters was like interfering with another man’s department. ‘I don’t suspect,’ he would say, ‘I should fancy John Bright coming down to “stables” and dictating to me how my Irish horses should be shod, or what was the best bit for a “borer.”’ He saw, besides, that the game of politics was a game of compromises: something was deemed admirable now that had been hitherto almost execrable; and that which was utterly impossible to-day, if done last year would have been a triumphant success, and consequently he pronounced the whole thing an ‘imposition and a humbug.’ ‘I can understand a right and a wrong as well as any man,’ he would say, ‘but I know nothing about things that are neither or both, according to who’s in or who’s out of the Cabinet. Give me the command of twelve thousand men, let me divide them into three flying columns, and if I don’t keep Ireland quiet, draft me into a West Indian regiment, that’s all.’ And as to the idea of issuing special commissions, passing new Acts of Parliament, or suspending old ones, to do what he or any other intelligent soldier could do without any knavery or any corruption, ‘John Bright might tell us,’ but he couldn’t. And here it may be well to observe that it was a favourite form of speech with him to refer to this illustrious public man in this familiar manner; but always to show what a condition of muddle and confusion must ensue if we followed the counsels that name emblematised; nor did he know a more cutting sarcasm to reply to an adversary than when he had said, ‘Oh, John Bright would agree with you,’ or, ‘I don’t think John Bright could go further.’

Of a very different stamp was his companion. He was a young gentleman whom we cannot more easily characterise than by calling him, in the cant of the day, ‘of the period.’ He was essentially the most recent product of the age we live in. Manly enough in some things, he was fastidious in others to the very verge of effeminacy; an aristocrat by birth and by predilection, he made a parade of democratic opinions. He affected a sort of Crichtonism in the variety of his gifts, and as linguist, musician, artist, poet, and philosopher, loved to display the scores of things he might be, instead of that mild, very ordinary young gentleman that he was. He had done a little of almost everything: he had been in the Guards, in diplomacy, in the House for a brief session, had made an African tour, written a pleasant little book about the Nile, with the illustrations by his own hand. Still he was greater in promise than performance. There was an opera of his partly finished; a five-act comedy almost ready for the stage; a half-executed group he had left in some studio in Rome, showed what he might have done in sculpture. When his distinguished relative the Marquis of Danesbury recalled him from his post as secretary of legation in Italy, to join him at his Irish seat of government, the phrase in which he invited him to return is not without its significance, and we give it as it occurred in the context: ‘I have no fancy for the post they have assigned me, nor is it what I had hoped for. They say, however, I shall succeed here. Nous verrons. Meanwhile, I remember your often remarking, “There is a great game to be played in Ireland.” Come over at once, then, and let me have a talk with you over it. I shall manage the question of your leave by making you private secretary for the moment. We shall have many difficulties, but Ireland will be the worst of them. Do not delay, therefore, for I shall only go over to be sworn in, etc., and return for the third reading of the Church Bill, and I should like to see you in Dublin (and leave you there) when I go.’

Except that they were both members of the viceregal household, and English by birth, there was scarcely a tie between these very dissimilar natures; but somehow the accidents of daily life, stronger than the traits of disposition, threw them into intimacy, and they agreed it would be a good thing ‘to see something of Ireland’; and with this wise resolve they had set out on that half-fishing excursion, which, having taken them over the Westmeath lakes, now was directing them to the Shannon, but with an infirmity of purpose to which lack of sport and disastrous weather were contributing powerfully at the moment we have presented them to our reader.

To employ the phrase which it is possible each might have used, they ‘liked each other well enough’ – that is, each found something in the other he ‘could get on with’; but there was no stronger tie of regard or friendship between them, and each thought he perceived some flaw of pretension, or affected wisdom, or selfishness, or vanity, in the other, and actually believed he amused himself by its display. In natures, tastes, and dispositions, they were miles asunder, and disagreement between them would have been unceasing on every subject, had they not been gentlemen. It was this alone – this gentleman element – made their companionship possible, and, in the long run, not unpleasant. So much more has good-breeding to do in the common working of daily life than the more valuable qualities of mind and temperament.

Though much younger than his companion, Walpole took the lead in all the arrangements of the journey, determined where and how long they should halt, and decided on the route next to be taken; the other showing a real or affected indifference on all these matters, and making of his town-bred apathy a very serviceable quality in the midst of Irish barbarism and desolation. On politics, too – if that be the name for such light convictions as they entertained – they differed: the soldier’s ideas being formed on what he fancied would be the late Duke of Wellington’s opinion, and consisted in what he called ‘putting down.’ Walpole was a promising Whig; that is, one who coquets with Radical notions, but fastidiously avoids contact with the mob; and who, fervently believing that all popular concessions are spurious if not stamped with Whig approval, would like to treat the democratic leaders as forgers and knaves.

If, then, there was not much of similarity between these two men to attach them to each other, there was what served for a bond of union: they belonged to the same class in life, and used pretty nigh the same forms for their expression of like and dislike; and as in traffic it contributes wonderfully to the facilities of business to use the same money, so in the common intercourse of life will the habit to estimate things at the same value conduce to very easy relations, and something almost like friendship.

While they sat over the fire awaiting their supper, each had lighted a cigar, busying himself from time to time in endeavouring to dry some drenched article of dress, or extracting from damp and dripping pockets their several contents.

‘This, then,’ said the younger man – ‘this is the picturesque Ireland our tourist writers tell us of; and the land where the Times says the traveller will find more to interest him than in the Tyrol or the Oberland.’

‘What about the climate?’ said the other, in a deep bass voice.

‘Mild and moist, I believe, are the epithets; that is, it makes you damp, and it keeps you so.’

‘And the inns?’

‘The inns, it is admitted, might be better; but the traveller is admonished against fastidiousness, and told that the prompt spirit of obligeance, the genial cordiality, he will meet with, are more than enough to repay him for the want of more polished habits and mere details of comfort and convenience.’

‘Rotten humbug! I don’t want cordiality from my innkeeper.’

‘I should think not! As, for instance, a bit of carpet in this room would be worth more than all the courtesy that showed us in.’

‘What was that lake called – the first place I mean?’ asked Lockwood.

‘Lough Brin. I shouldn’t say but with better weather it might be pretty.’

A half-grunt of dissent was all the reply, and Walpole went on —

It’s no use painting a landscape when it is to be smudged all over with Indian ink. There are no tints in mountains swathed in mist, no colour in trees swamped with moisture; everything seems so imbued with damp, one fancies it would take two years in the tropics to dry Ireland.’

‘I asked that fellow who showed us the way here, why he didn’t pitch off those wet rags he wore, and walk away in all the dignity of nakedness.’

A large dish of rashers and eggs, and a mess of Irish stew, which the landlord now placed on the table, with a foaming jug of malt, seemed to rally them out of their ill-temper; and for some time they talked away in a more cheerful tone.

‘Better than I hoped for,’ said Walpole.

‘Fair!’

‘And that ale, too – I suppose it is called ale – is very tolerable.’

‘It’s downright good. Let us have some more of it.’ And he shouted, ‘Master!’ at the top of his voice. ‘More of this,’ said Lockwood, touching the measure. ‘Beer or ale, which is it?’

‘Castle Bellingham, sir,’ replied the landlord; ‘beats all the Bass and Allsopp that ever was brewed.’

‘You think so, eh?’

‘I’m sure of it, sir. The club that sits here had a debate on it one night, and put it to the vote, and there wasn’t one man for the English liquor. My lord there,’ said he, pointing to the portrait, ‘sent an account of it all to Saunders’ newspaper.’

While he left the room to fetch the ale, the travellers both fixed their eyes on the picture, and Walpole, rising, read out the inscription – ‘Viscount Kilgobbin.’

‘There’s no such title,’ said the other bluntly.

‘Lord Kilgobbin – Kilgobbin? Where did I hear that name before?’

‘In a dream, perhaps.’

‘No, no. I have heard it, if I could only remember where and how! I say, landlord, where does his lordship live?’ and he pointed to the portrait.

‘Beyond, at the castle, sir. You can see it from the door without when the weather’s fine.’

‘That must mean on a very rare occasion!’ said Lockwood gravely.

‘No indeed, sir. It didn’t begin to rain on Tuesday last till after three o’clock.’

‘Magnificent climate!’ exclaimed Walpole enthusiastically.

‘It is indeed, sir. Glory be to God!’ said the landlord, with an honest gravity that set them both off laughing.

‘How about this club – does it meet often?’

‘It used, sir, to meet every Thursday evening, and my lord never missed a night, but quite lately he took it in his head not to come out in the evenings. Some say it was the rheumatism, and more says it’s the unsettled state of the country; though, the Lord be praised for it, there wasn’t a man fired at in the neighbourhood since Easter, and he was a peeler.’

‘One of the constabulary?’

‘Yes, sir; a dirty, mean chap, that was looking after a poor boy that set fire to Mr. Hagin’s ricks, and that was over a year ago.’

‘And naturally forgotten by this time?’

‘By coorse it was forgotten. Ould Mat Hagin got a presentment for the damage out of the grand-jury, and nobody was the worse for it at all.’

‘And so the club is smashed, eh?’

‘As good as smashed, sir; for whenever any of them comes now of an evening, he just goes into the bar and takes his glass there.’

He sighed heavily as he said this, and seemed overcome with sadness.

‘I’m trying to remember why the name is so familiar to me. I know I have heard of Lord Kilgobbin before,’ said Walpole.

‘Maybe so,’ said the landlord respectfully. ‘You may have read in books how it was at Kilgobbin Castle King James came to stop after the Boyne; that he held a “coort” there in the big drawing-room – they call it the “throne-room” ever since – and slept two nights at the castle afterwards?’

‘That’s something to see, Walpole,’ said Lockwood.

‘So it is. How is that to be managed, landlord? Does his lordship permit strangers to visit the castle?’

‘Nothing easier than that, sir,’ said the host, who gladly embraced a project that should detain his guests at the inn. ‘My lord went through the town this morning on his way to Loughrea fair; but the young ladies is at home; and you’ve only to send over a message, and say you’d like to see the place, and they’ll be proud to show it to you.’

‘Let us send our cards, with a line in pencil,’ said Walpole, in a whisper to his friend.

‘And there are young ladies there?’ asked Lockwood.

‘Two born beauties; it’s hard to say which is handsomest,’ replied the host, overjoyed at the attraction his neighbourhood possessed.

‘I suppose that will do?’ said Walpole, showing what he had written on his card.

‘Yes, perfectly.’

‘Despatch this at once. I mean early to-morrow; and let your messenger ask if there be an answer. How far is it off?’

‘A little over twelve miles, sir; but I’ve a mare in the stable will “rowle” ye over in an hour and a quarter.’

‘All right. We’ll settle on everything after breakfast to-morrow.’ And the landlord withdrew, leaving them once more alone.

‘This means,’ said Lockwood drearily, ‘we shall have to pass a day in this wretched place.’

‘It will take a day to dry our wet clothes; and, all things considered, one might be worse off than here. Besides, I shall want to look over my notes. I have done next to nothing, up to this time, about the Land Question.’

‘I thought that the old fellow with the cow, the fellow I gave a cigar to, had made you up in your tenant-right affair,’ said Lockwood.

‘He gave me a great deal of very valuable information; he exposed some of the evils of tenancy at will as ably as I ever heard them treated, but he was occasionally hard on the landlord.’

‘I suppose one word of truth never came out of his mouth!’

‘On the contrary, real knowledge of Ireland is not to be acquired from newspapers; a man must see Ireland for himself —see it,’ repeated he, with strong emphasis.

‘And then?’

‘And then, if he be a capable man, a reflecting man, a man in whom the perceptive power is joined to the social faculty – ’

‘Look here, Cecil, one hearer won’t make a House: don’t try it on speechifying to me. It’s all humbug coming over to look at Ireland. You may pick up a little brogue, but it’s all you’ll pick up for your journey.’ After this, for him, unusually long speech, he finished his glass, lighted his bedroom candle, and nodding a good-night, strolled away.

‘I’d give a crown to know where I heard of you before!’ said Walpole, as he stared up at the portrait.