Chapter II: The Charm Tried

The house of Patrick Daly was ever a favourite resort on festive occasions; he was himself much liked for his hospitality and genial manner; and wherever Eliza was, there the male portion of the population of the place were eager to go; although many amongst them had given up their claims to her hand in favour of the young farmer Hogan, they now stood by to see whether he who had defeated them would himself be defeated by any still more powerful rival.

There was a merry gathering at the farm on the eve of All-Hallows. Many bright pretty faces were present that might well have consoled the disappointed ones; but beside the radiant young hostess who, in more than usual beauty, dispensing smiles and hospitality at the head of the table, they all paled into insignificance. At least so thought Hogan, as he sat by her and watched her graceful movements, and listened with rapture to her sweet ringing laughter; the merriest and most silvery of all, it seemed to him.

On his other side a fair gentle-looking girl was seated, who divided with Eliza the duties of hostess-ship. But though her soft blue eyes rested often on his face, and she evidently listened to him with more attention than the other, he seldom turned to address her. This was Eliza's cousin, Mary Conlan, who lived at the farm. Daly had risen to his present comfort by his own efforts, but had relations who were in a very different position; and Mary's parents when living, had occupied a very poor cottage. On their death Daly brought her to reside with him. Though her attractions of person, and still more so those of fortune, could bear no comparison with Eliza's, she was still not without her admirers; but notwithstanding her gentleness, it seemed that she could be saucy too, for none had as yet succeeded in winning her. Daly, however, was not anxious for her marriage, for she was invaluable in his household. Though Eliza had decorated the room and filled the vases with autumn flowers, Mary it was who had made the cakes which the company seemed to appreciate so highly, and whose skill as a housewife had in a great measure won for the farm its reputation of always having everything of the best description. That Mary Conlan would make a model farmer's wife, everybody declared. Eliza was unusually gracious this evening, smiling upon Hogan almost as of old, and playing off a hundred arch little tricks at his expense. Daly looked on well pleased, for there was nothing he desired so much as a marriage between his daughter and the young farmer. Whispers went round that 'to be sure it was no one but Will Hogan Eliza would marry after all, and it was only nonsense to think she'd ever had any other idea in her head.'

Thus pleasantly, amidst talk and laughter, the tea and cakes were passing round, when suddenly the door was thrown open, and a young man, whose dress and bearing unmistakably stamped him as belonging to a very different class from any of those assembled, appeared on the threshold. He started as if surprised, on seeing the company; but a close observer might have noticed something a little studied in the movement, as if the intruder were not altogether so taken aback as he would have it appear. He advanced easily, however, and going up to the young hostess, apologised gracefully for his intrusion, requesting at the same time that as chance had led him there, he might not now be excluded from so pleasant a gathering. Eliza, blushingly, but with warmth, gave the desired permission that he should remain; whereupon he drew a chair to her side, heedless of one, farther removed, offered him by Daly, who did not seem by any means so flattered as might be expected by the condescension of his landlord's son in thus honouring his house.

There was a constrained pause. Charles Crofton, however, leant back in his chair, conversing with Eliza, and throwing out two or three general remarks of a nature to provoke laughter, soon contrived to restore things to their former state. But for Hogan all enjoyment was gone. He sat moody and silent, a frown knitting his usually open brow.

The two competitors for Eliza Daly's favour were as great contrasts in appearance as in rank. Hogan was the taller of the two, being above six feet, and of more powerful and vigorous, though less graceful build. Could he have settled his claim to Eliza by personal combat, it is likely that the other would have fared but ill at his hands. Both were handsome--Crofton particularly so; and it is probable that the cultivated expression of his features and the play of his handsome eyes, which he knew well how to make the best use of, would have a greater charm for Eliza than the frank sun-burnt countenance and straightforward untutored orbs of her rustic lover.

'All-Hallows eve, is it not?' inquired the new-comer, bending close to Miss Daly. 'Has any one got a ring? Have you?'

'No, indeed; no one has yet, I believe.'

'Then I'm in luck, for here is one in my cake; and there, Miss Daly, why you have the other half.'

'Well now,' whispered some of those near, 'if that isn't an omen, to get a ring the same minute!'

''Tisn't the right half,' exclaimed Hogan, somewhat roughly. 'I have that.--Don't you know, Eliza,' he whispered, 'I got one before.'

'This fits exactly,' said Crofton, trying his own and Eliza's together. And so they did; but it seemed that seeing was not believing, in Hogan's case.

'No,' he persisted; 'they aren't fits at all. Let me try.' He stretched out his hand, and almost snatched the little shining crescent from the white fingers of Crofton, who relinquished it quietly, and with a provoking smile watched the other's vain efforts to make it fit.

'You see now it won't do,' he said banteringly. 'What haven't been made for each other won't go together, no matter how you may try. But cheer up; you'll find the match yet.'

The young farmer, however, returned his smile with a very black frown, and stood up. As he did so he perceived Crofton whisper to Eliza, who laughed merrily and glanced at him. He could willingly have struck the young gentleman at that moment. He determined, however, not to let him have altogether his own way if possible; and when the tea was removed and dancing begun, he went up to Eliza and requested her hand. But Eliza was engaged, and told him so.

'Dance the next with me then, won't you?' he pleaded earnestly.

'No; I won't: I don't want such a sulky partner,' answered she with a saucy laugh.

'I am not sulky, Eliza; indeed I am not. I'm only sorry and vexed that you should turn from me so, and for a stranger. It is not fair treatment.'

'Not fair treatment indeed!' returned the girl, with a queenly toss of her graceful little head and a curl of her rosy lip. 'Ah, now say no more, Will Hogan.' And away she went round and round with Crofton, while the fiddles struck up a merry tune.

Hogan stood still between two minds whether he would go away at once; but he was reluctant to let his rival see him abandon the field. When, however, the dance was finished, and the burning of nuts and other Hallow-eve rites began, he still found no opportunity of approaching Eliza; and all the omens which in other years had been favourable to his cause were against him. At last, when Eliza's nut being placed beside his, instantly bounded away and fell into the fire, there was silence for a moment, and glances were exchanged.

Dancing having recommenced, several came round Eliza requesting her hand; but she answered hurriedly that she could not take part in this dance, but would in the next. She had things to look after just now, and must leave them for a little while. Saying which, she quietly quitted the room.

A few minutes after, a slight figure wrapped in a cloak might have been seen gliding through the farm-stead. On emerging by the back-gate on the road, it stood still for a moment and looked behind. The pale moonbeams gleamed on the face; but so blanched were the features, so altered the expression, that even had any of her friends been near they might almost have failed to recognise Eliza. With a shiver, as if the chill wind pierced her after the heated room she had left, she drew the hood of her cloak closer over her face and began to speed rapidly along. Nor did she pause or again look around till, some distance from home, she at last stopped, breathless, at the gate of a potato-field. For a minute or two she stood before it, as if irresolute.

'Shall I go back without trying it after all?' she murmured. 'No; I will go on, and see what comes of it.'

She entered the field and began to walk slowly across the ridges, counting them as she went till she had numbered TWELVE; then she stood still and listened intently. The wind, which was high, swept over the wide unsheltered space around. Was that its murmur she heard? She held her breath. Low moans and sobbing sighs seemed to mingle with it. Surely no wind ever wailed with such human anguish as that. Louder and clearer it rose, swelling on the breeze, full of more piercing passionate sorrow. She remained rooted to the spot, terror-stricken, her heart almost ceasing to beat. The sounds seemed to come along the ground. As she listened, a slender figure rose up slowly, as if from off the earth, confronting her in the uncertain light, and gazing upon her with a cold sorrowful eye. Shrieking, Eliza rushed back, stumbling and sometimes falling over the ridges as she ran. How she gained the road, she scarcely knew, but she found herself flying along it, with the cry of 'Doomed, doomed!' ringing in her ears. She had heard it, low and despairing, as she left the field, as if wrung from some soul in mortal terror and anguish; now it seemed repeated by a hundred voices exclaiming: 'Doomed, doomed!' She flew before it, pressing her hands to her ears, to shut out the sound.

The farm-house was reached in a shorter time than one could have imagined possible. She wrenched open the gate, rushed up the garden-path, and with trembling hands knocked loudly at the door. The summons rang through the house, above the music and dancing, and the buzz of laughing voices. Everybody flew into the hall. On the door being opened, Eliza rushed in, and would have sunk fainting on the threshold if Hogan had not caught her in his arms. She was carried into the room and laid on the sofa, while every remedy for fainting was procured. Where had she been? was the question each asked the other. Her hair, damp and dishevelled, hung about her, her dress was torn and soiled, her hands covered with clay, and bleeding. At length the remedies had effect; consciousness began to return, and when it did, it came quickly. She opened her eyes and gazed earnestly round, as if seeking for some face. If it was Crofton she sought, he was not there, having left some time before.

'What has happened, dearest Eliza?' whispered Hogan, close by her side. 'Where have you been?'

'I went out, and was frightened,' she murmured.

'And what frightened you, mavourneen?' asked he coaxingly, as if speaking to a wayward child.

But she made no reply, nor could any questioning draw from her an explanation. The party broke up, and each went home indulging in all manner of conjectures as to what had happened. It was whispered by some that Eliza had gone to the Twelfth Rig.

VITAL FORCE.

Though we have not the slightest conception of what life is in itself, and consequently could not define it, we may, for the sake of convenience, think of it in this paper as some kind of force.

'In the wonderful story,' says Professor Huxley in his _Lay Sermons_, 'of the _Peau de Chagrin_, the hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass's skin, which yields him the means of gratifying all his wishes. But its surface represents the duration of the proprietor's life; and for every satisfied desire, the skin shrinks in proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at length life and the last handbreadth of the _peau de chagrin_ disappear with the gratification of a last wish. Protoplasm or the physical basis of life is a veritable _peau de chagrin_, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of life results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm. Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some physical loss; and in the strictest sense, he burns that others may have light--so much eloquence, so much of his body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and urea. It is clear that this process of expenditure cannot go on for ever. But happily, the protoplasmic _peau de chagrin_ differs in its capacity of being repaired and brought back to its full size, after every exertion. For example, this present lecture is conceivably expressible by the number of grains of protoplasm and other bodily substance wasted in maintaining my vital processes during its delivery. My _peau de chagrin_ will be distinctly smaller at the end of the discourse than it was at the beginning. By-and-by I shall have recourse to the substance commonly called mutton, for the purpose of stretching it back to its original size.'

This explanation may be very philosophical, but it is only a roundabout way of saying that, within reasonable bounds, we can recover the effects of exhaustion by proper food and rest; which, as a fact, people are pretty well acquainted with. The error to be avoided is, in any shape to make such a pull on the constitution as to be beyond the reach of recovery. Life-force, or call it protoplasm, is an inherent quantity not to be heedlessly wasted; and this truth becomes more apparent the older we grow. Why is one man greater, in the sense of being more powerful than another? Because he knows how to get out of himself a greater amount of work with less waste of life-force.

We see from experience that the more men have to do the more they can do. And this paradox is only reasonable, for it is the necessity of great work that forces upon us systematic habits, and teaches us to economise the power that is in us. With the cares of an empire on their shoulders, prime-ministers can make time to write novels, Homeric studies, anti-papal pamphlets. It is the busy-idle man who never loses an opportunity of assuring you that 'he has not a moment in the day to himself, and that really he has no time to look round him.' Of course idle people have no time to spare, because they have never learned how to save the odd minutes of the day, and because their vital energy is expended in fuss rather than in work.

'He hath no leisure,' says George Herbert, 'who useth it not;' that is to say, he who does not save time for his work when he can, is always in a hurry. One of the most sublime conceptions of the Deity we can form is that He is never idle, and never in a hurry.

The following words from a newspaper description of the sublime calmness of power manifested by the huge hydraulic crane used to lift Fraser's celebrated eighty-one ton gun, we take as our type of the powerful man who knows how to economise his vital force instead of wasting it by fussing: 'Is there not something sublime in a hydraulic crane which lifts a Titanic engine of destruction weighing eighty-one tons to a considerable height above the pier, with as noiseless a calm and as much absence of apparent stress or strain as if it had been a boy-soldier's pop-gun? When we further read of the hydraulic monster holding up its terrible burden motionless in mid-air until it is photographed, and then lowering it gently and quietly on a sort of extemporised cradle without the least appearance of difficulty, one can readily understand that the mental impression produced on the bystanders must have been so solemn as to manifest itself in most eloquent silence.' With the same freedom from excitement and difficulty does the strong man who saves his force for worthy objects, raise up morally and physically depressed nations, take cities, or what is harder to do still, rule his own spirit. It is the fashion nowadays to say that people are killed or turned into lunatics by overwork, and no doubt there is much truth in the complaint. Nevertheless it would seem that vital force is wasted almost as much by the idle man as by him who overworks himself at high-pressure for the purpose of 'getting on.' It is indolence which exhausts, by allowing the entrance of fretful thoughts into the mind; not action, in which there is health and pleasure. We never knew a man without a profession who did not seem always to be busy. It may be he was occupied in worrying about the dinner or the place where he should spend his holiday--which he did not work for--in correcting his wife, in inventing pleasures, and abusing them when found, in turning the house upside down by doing little jobs foolishly supposed to be useful. And women too, when stretched on the rack of a too-easy chair, are they not forced to confess that there is as much vital force required to enable them to endure the 'pains and penalties of idleness,' as would, if rightly directed, render them useful, and therefore happy? The fact is there are far more who die of selfishness and idleness than of overwork, for where men break down by overwork it is generally from not taking care to order their lives and obey the physical laws of health.

Let us consider a few of the many ways in which we waste the stuff that life is made of. It has been well said that 'the habit of looking on the bright side of things is worth far more than a thousand pounds a year;' and certainly it is a habit that must add many years to the lives of those who acquire it. Really every fit of despondency and every rage take so much out of us, that any one who indulges in either without a great struggle to prevent himself doing so should be characterised as little less than--to use an American expression--'a fearful fool.' How silly it seems even to ourselves after cooling, to have acquired a nervous headache, and to have become generally done up, stamping round the room and shewing other signs of foolish anger, because the dinner was five minutes late, or because some one's respect for us did not quite rise to the high standard measured by our egotism! As if it were not far more important that we should save our vital energy, and not get into a rage, than that the dinner should be served exactly to the moment.

One day a friend of Lord Palmerston asked him when he considered a man to be in the prime of life; his immediate reply was 'Seventy-nine. But,' he added with a playful smile, 'as I have just entered my eightieth year, perhaps I am myself a little past it!' How is it that such men work on vigorously to the end? Because they treasure their ever-diminishing vital force. They studiedly refrain from making a pull on the constitution. Reaching the borders of seventy years of age, they as good as say to themselves: 'We must now take care what we are about.' Of course, they make sacrifices, avoid a number of treacherous gaieties, and living simply, they perhaps give some cause of offence, for the world does not approve of singularity. But let those laugh who win. They hold the censorious observations of critics in derision, and maintain the even tenor of their way. In other words, they conserve their vital force, and try to keep above ground as long as possible. Blustering natures forgetful of the great truth, that 'power itself hath not one-half the might of gentleness,' miss the ends for which they strive just because the force that is in them is not properly economised.

Then as regards temper: any man who allows that to master him wastes as much energy as would enable him to remove the cause of anger or overcome an opponent. The little boy of eight years old who in the country is often seen driving a team of four immense dray-horses, is one of the innumerable instances of the power of reason over mere brute-force, which should induce violent tempers to become calm from policy, if from no higher motive.

Many people squander their life's energy by not living enough in the present. They enjoy themselves badly and work badly, because they are either regretting mistakes committed in the past, or anticipating future sorrows. Now, certainly no waste of force is so foolish as this, because if our mistakes are curable, the same energy would counteract their bad effects as we expend in regretting; and if they are incurable, why think any more about them? None but a child cries over spilt milk. The mischief is done, and let it be forgotten, only taking care for the future. Sometimes people keep fretting about troubles that may never take place, and spend life's energy on absolutely nothing. Real worry from Torturations of various sorts is quite enough, and causes a greater draught on our vital force than hard work. Let us not, therefore, aggravate matters by anticipations of troubles that are little better than visionary.

In looking ahead, it is of immense importance not to enter into any transaction in which there are wild risks of cruel disaster. There we touch on the grand worry of the age. A violent haste to get rich! Who shall say how much the unnaturally rapid heart-beats with which rash speculators in shares in highly varnished but extremely doubtful undertakings receive telegraphic messages of bad or good fortune, must use up their life's force? Hearts beating themselves to death! Rushing to trains, jumping up-stairs, eating too fast, going to work before digestion has been completed--these are habits acquired naturally in days when it is the fashion to live at high-pressure; but such habits are surely not unavoidable, and would be avoided if we thoroughly valued our vital force.

There are persons of a nervous temperament who seem to be always upon wires. Nature has given them energy; but their physique is in many cases inadequate to supply the demands made upon it. The steam is there, but the boiler is too weak. Duke d'Alva, according to Fuller, must have been of this nature. 'He was one of a lean body and visage, as if his eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of his body, desired to fret a passage through it.' The same thought was wittily expressed by Sydney Smith when he exclaimed: 'Why, look there, at Jeffrey; and there is my little friend ----, who has not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.' Now these are just the sort of people who should not kill themselves, for though wrapped in small parcels, they are good goods. They owe it as a duty to themselves and others not to allow their fiery souls 'to fret their pygmy bodies to decay'--not to throw too much zeal into trifles, in order that they may have a supply of life-force for things important. He who desires to wear well must take for his motto 'Nothing in excess.' Such a one, as we have had occasion more than once to urge, avoids dinners of many courses, goes to bed before twelve o'clock, and does not devote his energy to the endurance of overheated assemblies. When young men around him have got athletics on the brain, he keeps his head and health by exercising only moderately. He is not ambitious of being in another's place, but tries quietly to adorn his own. 'Give me innocence; make others great!' When others are killing themselves to get money, and to get it quickly, that with it they may make a show, he prays the prayer of Agur: 'Give me neither poverty nor riches,' for he thinks more of the substance than of the shadow. This is the truly wise and successful man, and to him shall be given, by the Divine laws of nature, riches (that is, contentment) and honour (that is, self-respect), and a long life, because he did not waste the steam by which the machine was worked. In homely proverb, he 'kept his breath to cool his porridge,' and most probably was a disciple of Izaak Walton.

At this point, perhaps the secret thoughts of some who have not yet learned how 'it is altogether a serious matter to be alive,' may take this shape. 'What after all,' they may ask, 'is the good of economising life's force? Often I hardly know what to do with myself, nor have I much purpose in life beyond eating, drinking, and sleeping.' To such thoughts we should give somewhat of the following answer: There is a work for every single person in the world, and his happiness as well as his duty lies in doing that work well. This is a consideration which should communicate a zest to our feelings about life. We should rejoice, as experience teaches us that each of us has the means of being useful, and thus of being happy. None is left out, however humble may be our position and limited our faculties, for we all can do our best; and though success may not be ours, it is enough if we have deserved it. Certainly if there be any purpose in the universe, a day will come when we shall all have to answer such questions as these: 'You were given a certain amount of life-force; what have you done with it? Where are your works? Did you try to make the little corner in which you were placed happier and better than it was before you came into it?' It is said that Queen Elizabeth when dying exclaimed: 'My kingdom for a moment;' and one day we shall all think nothing so valuable as the smallest amount of that force without which we cannot live.

THE LAST OF THE HADDONS.