Chapter XV: Man and Beast

There is a great pathos about the life of a common man, about the story of any one whose wishes are moderate, whose pleasures are limited, whose hopes are small, whose way through existence is along the river instead of across the sea, adown the valley rather than over the mountains; and for this reason that little deserted cottage close by Duranmore Bay, looking white and ghostly in the moonlight, was as pitiful an object as Maxwell Drewitt’s eyes could have rested on.

No person knew better how Ryan had loved that cottage; how he had delighted in the look out over the bay, in the view up the ravine. He had seen him pacing beside the stream and superintending the mowing of his little crop of hay. He remembered the various articles of additional furniture with which Ryan had adorned the rooms in honour of Jenny’s arrival; how he had planted creepers by the porch, and nailed trellis-work together for the honeysuckle and the clematis to clamber over; how he had laid out his little garden sloping towards the south, and filled it with London-pride and lavender, with red daisies and hepaticas, with cabbage roses and sweet Williams, with daffodils, and pinks, and southernwood, and tulips, and gentianallas, and all the common flowers which are so beautiful in their homely simplicity and sweetness.

As a man plants and sows and beautifies for his wife that is to be, so Ryan, knowing that dream could return no more, that love could never come back again with its freshness, planted and sowed and beautified for the young sister who was going to make his house a home for him at last.

All this Maxwell Drewitt remembered. He recollected also what a different man Ryan seemed after his sister’s return; how much more comfortable he appeared to be; how he used to hurry home from Duranmore to his little cottage; how busy he was wont to make himself with spade, and rake, and hoe.

The simple pleasures of a common life came back to Maxwell’s memory separately and singly with the power of a curse. He had driven Ryan away from Inchnagawn; it was he who had laid the garden waste; he who had broken down the trellis-work and left the cottage desolate.

As regarded the horsewhipping, he and Ryan had long been even; for Maxwell had worked on and till he got Waller’s agency withdrawn from Ryan and given to a _protégé_ of Mr. Samuel Turner.

He had made no secret of this to the lawyer, for he knew for his sister’s sake Mr. Ryan would make no complaint of unfairness to Mr. Waller.

“You’ll spy again, Ryan, will you?” he asked.

“Yes, and thrash you again if I catch you meddling with her,” was the spirited reply.

At which answer Maxwell laughed.

“I owe you a good turn for your interference, though I have done you a bad one for meddling in my affairs. But for you, I really think I should have married Miss Bourke.”

“I am greatly obliged for the intended condescension,” said Ryan.

“You would have been more obliged to me for the actual condescension, I suppose?” suggested Maxwell.

“I told you once I would rather put Jenny in her coffin than give her to you,” answered the other.

“Nonsense,” retorted young Drewitt; “you only said that because you thought I never would ask her honourably.”

“Repeat that sentence—I wish you would repeat it,” said Ryan, facing round on his tormentor, who, however, declined to oblige him.

“You understood my meaning well enough. I need not go over the ground again. You are wrong. There was a time when I loved your sister very much; when—when I might have made a lady of her. But you cured me of my folly; and I vowed then to be revenged. I am revenged. Let bygones be bygones.”

The pair had never ceased to be on speaking terms. Maxwell was too wise and Ryan too careful to permit the little world of Duranmore to imagine there was any open rupture between them.

They nodded in the street, they shook hands when they met in a room; only Ryan did not go to Headlands, and Maxwell never entered Ryan’s office in Duranmore. Ryan never ceased keeping a watchful eye on Jenny, and Maxwell carried his pebble in his pocket, and turned it every now and then, biding his time.

He had sworn to be revenged, and he was revenged. Did that fact comfort him now, as he looked down on Inchnagawn, lying white and silent in the moonlight?

This man had owned no wide acres, no fine park, no great house. He had but a little patch of land, and behold he was cast out of it! He had been doing very well, and all at once the ground was cut from below his feet. Every man over whom Maxwell had any influence left him and went to the opposition lawyer. Poor Ryan’s conduct had not in all cases been above fear and above reproach; and Maxwell, having once been his confidant, fought and killed him with his own weapons.

He had almost to commence again, and there were times when he thought of leaving Duranmore altogether, and seeking his fortune elsewhere.

That was what Maxwell wanted to make him do. He wished to see the back of Mr. Timothy Ryan, and of his sister also.

It was the old story of the poor man and his ewe lamb over again. Ryan had not much, but what he had Maxwell took from him. Maxwell was gaining great possessions; but, like Ahab, he longed for the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite as well.

Besides, Ryan knew too much of him and of his affairs, and he desired to be rid of his former friend. When you have made all the use you can of a weapon, it is as well to break it, so that the steel may not prove dangerous in other hands. That was what Maxwell wanted to do. He wished to get Ryan out of his way, and he had not stood over-nice about compassing his end.

Was it pleasant for him to remember these things as he rode slowly homeward under the moonlight? Was there nothing pathetic even to him in Ryan’s worn face, in Jenny’s pale cheeks?

“If she will marry Connor,” was the conclusion Mr. Maxwell Drewitt arrived at that night, “I will try to push him on; but I cannot do anything for her brother. He must leave Duranmore.”

And Jenny at that very moment was lying awake in the moonlight, thinking, with the tears in her eyes, of him; whilst Ryan was sitting in his office, facing his affairs and cogitating concerning ways and means.

Maxwell could have made them both happy, had he chosen; but he elected not to make them happy, and fell asleep contented.

There had been many minor changes in Duranmore during the four years I have spoken of. There was an opposition doctor in the town, and another attorney. A queer old bachelor had taken up his quarters, for a permanency apparently, at the “Marsden Arms.” Mr. Murphy was gone to London, from which place he sent occasionally notes of rare and exquisite cases to Dr. Sheen, who, not having the same enthusiasm for his profession, thought that the “good old way” seemed best after all.

“I cannot help fancying,” he wrote back on one occasion to his late assistant, “that the operation you mention (laryngotomy) must have been excruciatingly painful to the patient.”

“No doubt it was,” replied Mr. Murphy, in dudgeon; “but, good God, sir, consider how interesting!”

“That is all very true,” remarked Dr. Sheen to Mr. Murphy’s successor, “but I never was fond of diseases out of the common;” which was all the more fortunate for Dr. Sheen, as he did not meet with many singular cases amongst his patients, and could not have cured them if he had.

The most out-of-the-way ailment he ever had to puzzle over was that of an old lady named Connor, who lived with her son in the cottage near Eversbeg Head (on the Duranmore side), which, at the time Mrs. Drewitt first beheld the Atlantic, was tenanted by a retired sea captain.

Mrs. Connor’s complaint was gastric carcinoma—a disease which was, in those days, to the faculty precisely what an unclassified animal or a strange fish proves to the naturalist. Mr. Murphy would have been enchanted with the case, but not so Doctor Sheen.

To Mrs. Connor herself it seemed as terrible an affliction as could have been laid upon her. She found nothing interesting or entertaining in the matter. It was dying by inches. It was sinking in the ocean with help all around. It was wasting off the face of the earth under the influence of a disease more depressing than consumption, and equally hopeless—a disease of which science could give no account—for which skill could prescribe no remedy.

There were no alternations in this ailment—no days of hope, no times of relief. It was like hiring a hearse, and driving by slow stages to the grave. It was not life; it was not death; but it was dying, day after day, week after week, month after month, with starvation for the end.

Starvation, though she had plenty of nourishment, and was able to eat. A disease as strange and inexplicable to the spectator as perplexing to a doctor; a disease for which there was no cure but death, no palliation but patience; in which there was no stay, no pause—which picked the flesh off her bones, and pinched her cheeks, and exhausted her strength, and tried her temper—which it was hard to bear alone in that solitary cottage by the sea-shore.

Her son could not stay with her all the day. He had to be away from early in the morning till six o’clock in the evening, at the marble quarries, where he was a kind of overseer, and both mother and son consequently felt very grateful when Jenny Bourke took her needlework in her hand, and went to pass a few hours at Duranmore Cottage.

She was quiet and sad enough in these days, it is true; but she seemed none the less sweet and loveable for that. She would sing her plaintive songs, and talk to the old lady about her ailments, and lead her out in the sunshine round by Eversbeg Head, or up towards the mountains where the marble quarries were; and poor Mrs. Connor took kindly to the girl, and prayed her when she was gone to try and love Dennis, and become in due time his wife.

But Jenny only shook her head.

It was a few days after Maxwell’s night ride home from Cragantlet that Jenny and Mrs. Connor climbed to the top of Eversbeg Head—no great ascent after all—and sat them down there.

The summer’s sun was shining over the scene—over the wide Atlantic, over Duranmore and Eversbeg Bays, over the old Abbey, and over the Headlands, towards which Jenny’s eyes turned longingly.

She had not seen Maxwell for some time, and she loved him. How much? More than Dennis Connor loved her; more than Jenny could ever love any one again.

The two women sat side by side, each busy with her own thoughts. Mrs. Connor was gazing over the fair earth, upon which she should so soon have to close her eyes. Jenny was looking at Maxwell’s home and wishing she could see him.

Jenny was a good little soul, and she had a kind heart beating in her breast; and she was very sorry for Mrs. Connor, and very glad to help her to while away the time; but, yet, Jenny was not quite disinterested.

Duranmore Cottage was not a great distance from Headlands, and she could sometimes catch a glimpse of Maxwell.

She caught a glimpse of him on the day in question when he came with a new horse Lady Emmeline had sent him along the avenue from his house.

The drive was rough and the horse intractable. So Maxwell led him up to the main road, accompanied on his way so far by a couple of his men, who were curious to see the animal in harness.

The creature had been used to the saddle, and rebelled against the indignity of a vehicle. He had been used likewise to jib, but a pair of spurs prevented much harm coming of that habit, so long as he had a rider on his back. With a conveyance behind him, however, the case was different; and the moment Maxwell jumped into his tax-cart and touched the animal with his whip the brute began to back.

All this Jenny, from her seat among the grass and the heather, was able to see, and she could see also Maxwell shouting and gesticulating, although she could not hear what he said.

“Take his head, Lynch, and lead him on a bit,” Mr. Drewitt ordered.

But leading him on proved a matter beyond Lynch’s capability, for which reason Maxwell began flogging the creature unmercifully.

A jibbing horse being one of those circumstances which tries a man’s temper too much, is, I think, one of those struggles which a woman ought never to see; but Jenny, being on the height above the Headlands, could not help seeing, and neither could Mrs. Connor, for that matter.

“What a wretch—what a brute!” exclaimed the old lady indignantly.

“If the horse won’t go on, what is he to do?” demanded Jenny, ready to do battle for Maxwell, though she could have run down the hill and prayed him to cease beating the creature for her sake.

For all the good flogging did, Maxwell might as well have flogged one of the granite pillars against which Lady Emmeline’s present had backed the tax-cart, and after he had lashed the thong off his whip the young man sprang with a curse to the ground, and, taking the reins short in his hand, tugged and tore at the horse’s mouth like a madman. And the more he tore the bit the higher the brute lifted his head, while he lowered his hind quarters and backed as well as he was able.

It was a trial of brute strength now. There was no skill, no horsemanship, no science in the matter; it was whose will should be fiercest, whose power greatest.

As I have said before, a man is not to be judged by his conduct towards a jibbing horse; but yet to the outsider—to the spectator whose temper is not tried, whose blood is not up, whose strength is not defied—the struggle between an unreasoning animal with a bit in his mouth, with harness on his back, with a conveyance behind him, and a man free to go, free to think, free to act, always seems cowardly and terrible.

With her breath coming thick and short, Jenny watched the combat. A woman cannot bear these kind of struggles, perhaps because she knows that in the hands of man she is oftentimes but as a creature having a bit in her mouth herself.

Which would win? Maxwell turned his whip in his hand and struck the horse with the butt-end again and again, with such force that Jenny could hear the blows, and feel each stroke go through her own tender heart.

He sent for a heavy cart-whip and showered blows on the animal with that. His men took each a wheel and shoved, while he kicked and damned and flogged.

“That man is a perfect devil!” said Mrs. Connor, solemnly.

“Let us go, oh, let us go!” cried Jenny, rising; but still fascinated, she stood still and watched.

Then she saw that which through all her after life it made her turn sick and faint to remember—Maxwell stoop and scoop up a handful of gravel off the road.

“Get up,” he said to one of the men, and the man jumped in and took the reins.

“Lash him on,” continued Maxwell, and he handed the fellow the whip.

Then Maxwell thrust the gravel up the animal’s nostrils, rubbing the small sharp stones into the quivering flesh; and while the creature, mad with pain, sprang forward, he leaped to his seat, and taking both reins and whip, kept flogging the horse far as Jenny’s eyes could follow him.

“I think, Mrs. Connor, I will go home,” she said, when she had walked in silence back to Duranmore Cottage, and helped Mrs. Connor off with her shawl and settled her in her chair by the window. “I think that horse has made me feel a little ill.”

Mrs. Connor looked into the girl’s face as she said this, and saw there what she never told to Dennis, or Jenny, or any human being; only she sat for a long time after Jenny left her, crying all alone.

Meanwhile Jenny walked back to Duranmore, heartsick, faint, and weary, and when she was near her own door she was met by Mrs. Sheen, the doctor’s wife—for among other changes, Dr. Sheen had taken unto himself a wife—who said:

“How pale you look, Miss Bourke! What is wrong with you?”

“I have walked too far in the heat, Mrs. Sheen,” answered Jenny. “I sat out in the sun with poor Mrs. Connor, and it has made me feel faint.”

“It is no wonder Mr. Connor is fond of you,” replied Mrs. Sheen, with a knowing look; “but you must not overdo the thing, my dear. Even for his sake you must not.”

“I do not know what you mean at all,” answered Jenny; but she blushed up to the roots of her hair, nevertheless.

“I did not mean anything, of course,” explained Mrs. Sheen; “and talking of marriages—have you heard the news?”

“News! I did not know there was ever any news in Duranmore,” said Jenny.

“There is news now, at any rate,” was the reply. “Mr. Maxwell Drewitt is going to be married to Lady Emmeline Vervensoe.”

The houses danced up and down before Jenny’s eyes, and the street went round and round.

“Will you tell me all about it to-morrow?” she asked, while she felt blindly about for the wall, and held on by a window-sill. “I feel so sick and faint now, Mrs. Sheen.”

“Had not I better bid the Doctor come round and see you?” said the lady; but Jenny answered:

“It is only the heat. I shall be well to-morrow.”

Then she walked into the house and ran up the staircase, and locked herself into her own room, where she fell on the floor in a dead swoon.