Читать книгу The Wild Irish Girl - Lady Sydney Morgan - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTO J. D. ESQ., M. P.
I perceive my father emulates the policy of the British Legislature, and delegates English ministers to govern his Irish domains. Who do you think is his fac totum here? The rascally son of his cunning Leicestershire steward, who unites all his father’s artifice to a proportionable share of roguery of his own, I have had some reason to know the fellow; but his servility of manner, and apparent rigid discharge of his duties, has imposed on my father; who, with all his superior mind, is to be imposed on, by those who know how to find out the clew to his fallibility: his noble soul can never stoop to dive into the minute vices of a rascal of this description.
Mr. Clendinning was absent from M———— house when I arrived, but attended me the next morning at breakfast, with that fawning civility of manner I abhor, and which, contrasted with the manly courteousness of my late companion, never appeared more grossly obvious. He endeavoured to amuse me with a detail of the ferocity, cruelty, and uncivilized state of those among whom (as he hinted,) I was banished for my sins. He had now, he said, been near five years among them, and had never met an individual of the lower order, who did not deserve a halter at least: for his part, he had kept a tight hand over them, and he was justified in so doing, or his lord would be the sufferer; for few of them would pay their rents till their cattle were driven, or some such measure was taken with them. And as for the labourers and workmen, a slave-driver was the only man fit to deal with them; they were all rebellious, idle, cruel, and treacherous; and for his part, he never expected to leave the country with his life.
It is not possible a better defence for the imputed turbulence of the Irish peasantry could be made, than that which lurked in the unprovoked accusations of this narrow-minded sordid steward, who, it is evident, wished to forestall the complaints of those on whom he had exercised the native tyranny of his disposition (even according to his own account,) by every species of harrassing oppression within the compass of his ability. For if power is a dangerous gift even in the regulated mind of elevated rank, what does it be come in the delegated authority of ignorance, meanness, and illiberality? *
* A horde of tyrants exist in Ireland, in a class of men
that are unknown in England, in the multitude of agents of
absentees, small proprietors, who are the pure Irish
squires, middle men, who take large farms, and squeeze out a
forced kind of profit by letting them in small parcels;
lastly, the little farmers themselves, who exercise the same
insolence they receive from their superiors, on those
unfortunate beings who are placed at the extremity of the
scale of degradation—the Irish peasantry.—An Enquiry into
the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland.
My father, however, by frequent visitations to his Irish estates (within these few years at least,) must afford to his suffering tenantry an opportunity of redress; for who that ever approached him with a tear of suffering, but left his presence with a tear of gratitude! But many, very many of the English nobility who hold immense tracts of land in this country, and draw from hence in part the suppliance of their luxuries, have never visited their estates, since conquest first put them in the possession of their ancestors. Ours, you know, fell to us in the Cromwellian wars, but since the time of General M————, who earned them by the sword, my father, his lineal descendant, is the first of the family who ever visited them. And certainly, a wish to conciliate the affections of his tenantry, could alone induce him to spend so much of his time here as he has done; for the situation of this place is bleak and solitary, and the old mansion, like the old manor houses of England, has neither the architectural character of an antique structure, nor the accommodation of a modern one.
“Ayant l’air delabri, sans l’air antique.”
On enquiring for the key of the library, Mr. Clendinning informed me his lord always took it with him, but that a box of books had come from England a few days before my arrival.
As I suspected, they were all law books—well, be it so; there are few sufferings more acute than those which forbid complaint, because they are self-created.
Four days have elapsed since I began this letter, and I have been prevented from continuing it merely for want of something to say.
I cannot now sit down, as I once did, and give you a history of my ideas or sensations, in the deficiency of fact or incident; for I have survived my sensations, and my ideas are dry and exhausted.
I cannot now trace my joys to their source, or my sorrows to their spring, for I am destitute of their present, and insensible to their former existence. The energy of youthful feeling is subdued, and the vivacity of warm emotion worn out by its own violence. I have lived too fast in a moral as well as a physical sense, and the principles of my intellectual, as well as my natural constitution are, I fear, fast hastening to decay I live the tomb of my expiring mind, and preserve only the consciousness of my wretched state, without the power, and almost without the wish to be otherwise than what I am. And yet, God knows, I am nothing less than contented.
Would you hear my journal? I rise late to my solitary breakfast, because it is solitary; then to study, or rather to yawn over Giles versus Haystack, until (to check the creeping effects of lethargy) I rise from my reading desk, and lounge to a window, which commands a boundless view of a boundless bog; then, “with what appetite I may,” sit down to a joyless dinner. Sometimes, when seduced by the blandishments of an even ing singularly beautiful, I quit my den and prowl down to the sea shore where, throwing myself at the foot of some cliff that “battles o’er the deep,” I fix my vacant eye on the stealing waves that
“Idly swell against the rocky coast,
And break—as break those glittering shadows,
Human joys.”
Then wet with the ocean spray and evening dew, return to my bed, merely to avoid the intrusive civilities of Mr. Clendinning. Thus wear the hours away.”
I had heard that the neighbourhood about M———— house was good: I can answer for its being populous. Although I took every precaution to prevent my arrival being known, yet the natives have come down on me in hordes, and this in all the form of haut ton, as the innumerable cards of the clans of Os and Macs evince. I have, however, neither been visible to the visitants, nor accepted their invitations: for “man delights me not, nor woman either.” Nor woman either! Oh! uncertainty of all human propensities! Yet so it is, that every letter that composes the word woman! seems cabalistical, and rouses every principle of aversion and disgust within me; while I often ask myself with Tasso,
“Se pur ve nelle amor alcun dileito.”
It is certain, that the diminutive body of our worthy steward, is the abode of the transmigrated soul of some West Indian planter. I have been engaged these two days in listening to, and retributing those injuries his tyranny has inflicted, in spite of his rage, eloquence, and threats, none of which have been spared. The victims of his oppression haunt me in my walks, fearful lest their complaints should come to the knowledge of this puissant major domo.
“But why,” said I to one of the sufferers, after a detail of seized geese, pounded cows, extra labour cruelly extorted, ejectments, &c. &c.. given in all the tedious circumlocution of Irish oratory,—“why not complain to my father when he comes among you?”
“Becaise, please your Honour, my Lord stays but a few days at a time here together, nor that same neither; besides, we be loth to trouble his Lordship, for feard it would be after coming to Measther Clendinning’s ears, which would be the ruination of us all; and then when my Lord is at the Lodge, which he mostly is, he is always out amongst the quality, so he is.”
“What Lodge?” said I.
“Why, please your Honour, where my Lord mostly takes up when he comes here, the place that belonged to Measther Clendinning, who call ed it the Lodge, becaise the good old Irish name that was upon it did not suit his fancy.”
In the evening I asked Mr. Clendinning if my father did not sometimes reside at the Lodge? He seemed surprised at my information, and said, that was the name he had given to a ruinous old place which, with a few acres of indifferent land, he had purchased of his hard labour, and which his Lord having taken an unaccountable liking to, rented from him, and was actually the tenant of his own steward.
O! what arms of recrimination I should be furnished with against my rigidly moral father, should I discover this remote Cassino, (for remote I understand it is) to be the harem of some wild Irish Sultana; for I strongly suspect “that metal more attractive” than the cause he assigns, induces him to pay an annual visit to a country to which, till within these few years, he nurtured the strongest prejudices. You know there are but nineteen years between him and my brother; and his feelings are so unblunted by vicious pursuits, his life has been guided by such epicurian principles of enjoyment, that he still retains much of the first warm flush of juvenile existence, and has only sacrificed to time, its follies and its ignorance. I swear, at this moment he is a younger man than either of his sons; the one chilled by the coldness of an icy temperament into premature old age, and the other!!!———Murtoch has been to see me. I have procured him a little farm, and am answerable for the rent. I sent his wife some rich wine; she is recovering very fast. Murtoch is all gratitude for the wine, but I perceive his faith still lies in the bacon!
