Chapter XIX: Durrow

Mr. Pryor had said he should not care for Durrow Park, but when he rode over there, accompanied by Maxwell Drewitt, his nephew, and Mr. Waller, he altered his opinion, and thought that, despite its drawbacks, Durrow would be a very pleasant residence for a couple of months in the year. “Non-resident again,” remarked Maxwell, laughing, while Mr. Gyton inquired—

“How the deuce he could expect a man to stay away from London any longer?

“More especially in such a hole as this, with only one post a day; with no railway-station within fifty miles; with no telegram nearer than fifty miles, also; with no books, no newspapers, no society. And a bachelor, too,” finished Mr. Gyton.

“That is his own fault, I suppose,” remarked Maxwell Drewitt, “if it be a fault; but I should rather call it a virtue.”

“Well said,” cried Mr. Waller, who was terribly under the influence of petticoat government at home.

“For my part, I consider a bachelor one of the most enviable beings under the sun,” went on Maxwell: “he can go as he likes, come as he likes. He is free as air, and yet knows that he can settle down whenever he pleases into husbandhood.”

“It is not so easy to settle down—at least, not to find any one to settle down with at my age,” answered Mr. Pryor.

“Why, you cannot be more than a year or two my senior; and if I were single to-morrow I could have my pick of a dozen—ay, and pretty girls, too.”

“I wish you would introduce me to some of them,” remarked Mr. Pryor.

“I am too much your friend,” replied Maxwell; “far be it from me to lead you up to the trap and help you to snap the spring on yourself. Wedlock is a padlock,” added the owner of the Headlands. “Not that I ought to speak against it, for my marriage made me; and my wife never had a will of her own, so far as I heard of; but for an independent man to marry—for a man like yourself, for instance—it is folly.”

“Drewitt is going to turn preacher, and expound the Gospel according to St. Paul,” said Mr. Waller.

“I shall hold you up as an example of a sinner’s end then,” retorted Maxwell.

“Hang it, man, you need not be so confoundedly personal!” observed Mr. Waller, whose domestic discomforts were too well known for him to attempt concealment. “It is not everybody knows how to marry so well, or manage a wife so well when he is married, as yourself.”

Maxwell looked away from his companions over the ocean, and a thought came across his mind that he had not married so very well after all.

He had given his youth—his liberty—all chances of happy love, for money; and now he could not get rid of his wife—could not get rid of that old, rouged, affected, ugly woman, who was jealous of every look he cast in the direction of those who were younger and prettier than herself; who had no homely graces, no fireside virtues; whom he could not even love like a mother and value as a friend.

Forty-three and sixty—seventeen years on the wrong side. It was of this Maxwell thought while he stood in front of Durrow House, and looked over the Atlantic which lay like a lake below.

They were four fine-looking men. Maxwell was much the same in figure as when we first saw him, but his face was more set and hardened; the lines were deeper, the look in his eyes was darker. He was getting a little bald, that is, the once-luxuriant hair was thinner, more especially about his temples, and his whiskers were turning grey. He was the oldest-looking man of the party, though Mr. Pryor was a year his senior; but then Mr. Pryor’s life had not been so hard a one, and his heart was younger too.

Mr. Pryor’s face was one that his sister said “it rested her to look at,” so calm, so trustworthy, so good. Maxwell Drewitt had lived twice as fast as this London barrister, and would be old twice as soon.

Some idea of this kind came into Mr. Waller’s mind, apparently, for he said—

“I wish I looked as young as you do, Geoffry. I wish you could give me the secret of wearing so well and keeping so handsome:” at which remark Maxwell Drewitt turned round and laughed.

“I know what you are laughing at,” went on Mr. Waller; “you are thinking that one must be handsome before one can keep handsome. That is the worst of being clever, Drewitt; it makes a man so devilishly sharp and disagreeable: but, now, do look at Pryor; there was not so much difference between us twenty years ago, and yet——”

“There is all the difference now—is that what you would say?” asked Maxwell. “If it be, perhaps there has been all the difference in the twenty years too; in how the twenty years has been passed. You have drunk hard, I have worked hard, while he has been addressing an attentive court or lounging in an easy-chair. It is the pace that kills, Waller, more than years.”

“As for pace,” muttered Mr. Waller, but a dangerous look in Maxwell’s face stopped him.

“We can but live,” said the latter, hastily; “if we grow old soon, we have lived much, that is all any one can make of the question; and yet,” he went on, “I think it must be a fine thing for a man in middle age to find himself free to begin the whole drama of existence over again. Free to settle, free to choose, free to reside in a great town; and yet, also, free to buy a place like this and keep it for a kind of dessert to the dinner of the year. You will buy it?” he added, turning to Mr. Pryor. “Can you resist?—can you look upon Durrow and yet flee from such temptation?”

“I cannot,” answered Mr. Pryor: “spite of right of way, and private stills and smugglers, and evicted tenants, and holy wells, I must have Durrow.”

“And we will get a jolly lot of fellows together, and come over and have such capital sport,” finished Mr. Gyton, who had kept silence for an unusual time.

“Thank you, Frank, you are very kind,” replied his uncle.

“And you might get my mother to matronize halfa-dozen girls; it would be such a lark,” went on Mr. Gyton; “dancing and boating, and riding and driving.”

“No fear of the rents of Durrow being spent off the soil,” said Mr. Pryor, “if Frank’s programme were carried out. I should spend as much in a couple of months as Durrow would return in a year.”

“First-rate for Connemara,” answered Maxwell.

“I will write to my mother to-night,” persisted Mr. Gyton, “and give her a description of Durrow. It is the very place she would delight in. Let me see, how can I describe it? Help my imagination, Mr. Drewitt.”

“Your imagination!” repeated Maxwell; “gracious heaven! there is no imagination about the matter; it is all fact, from beginning to end. There are the rocks, and the Atlantic, and the islands; and Durrow stands, say a hundred feet above the sea, and the ground is level from the house to the very edge of the cliff, which goes sheer down to the shore. There are no trees to speak of, no shrubs, no fields; it is all rock and mountain, and bog and morass. It is a place to make your teeth chatter in the winter-time; but in the summer—you see for yourself, young gentleman, what it is like now.”

“Cannot you buy the place at once, and let us all spend August here?” asked Mr. Gyton, with enthusiasm.

“I am afraid not,” said Mr. Pryor, with a smile; “but I dare say I can have it all ready for your mother by the spring.”

“And if you want a good fellow to manage your property and to reside in the house while you are away, let me recommend you a deserving man. His name is Connor; and he has been overseer at the marble quarries for sixteen or seventeen years past.”

“What—Ryan’s brother-in-law!” exclaimed Mr. Waller, with some surprise.

“Even so; do you know anything against Connor?” demanded Maxwell, facing sharp round on the last speaker.

“No; only you remember that you thought—that is—that Ryan himself—”

“Ryan himself is not Connor,” interrupted Maxwell; “and Mrs. Connor is a very worthy person.”

“And pretty too,” added Mr. Waller “though she is not so young as she used to be. By Gad! Geoffry, that was a girl! If she had been more thoroughbred she might have married a duke. Faith, I thought she stayed single so long waiting for some travelling prince to pick her up and carry her off with him. She must have been thirty before she took on with Connor; eh Drewitt?”

“I am not the parish clerk, sir,” answered Maxwell, hotly. “I do not keep a register of births in my head;” and with this civil speech the owner of the Headlands marched off to the edge of the cliff, where he flung himself down on the grass, and with one hand supporting his head, looked away and away over the sea across which white sails were glancing in the sunshine.

“What a damnable temper Drewitt has!” remarked Mr. Waller. “I am sure it is just wearing his body out,” and the trio turned into the house and walked through the empty rooms, and looked at all possible views, from all possible windows, discussing furniture and papers, and carpets and window-curtains the while.

After a time Mr. Pryor made his escape, and rejoined his host, and the two lay on the grass, near the edge of the cliff, talking about Duranmore, and Kincorth and Durrow, and Ireland and England, for nearly an hour.

“There is another thing,” said Maxwell, at last; “the last proprietor, Mr. Carford, was a Roman Catholic, and almost supported the priest of Durrow, besides paying tithes. Will you follow suit? I know that to English ears such advice must sound absurd; but, after all, the few things I have mentioned will not amount to a hundred a-year, and you will have five hundred a-year back in comfort. You cannot civilize a country in a day. You must give savages beads, and rum, and looking-glasses, if you take their land from them. They cannot understand the substance, so you must let them have the sham. I should like to come back to life in a hundred years’ time, say about 1950, and see Ireland then. Will there be butchers’ shops in a place like Duranmore, where the poor people will buy scraps for their Sunday’s dinner, as the Londoners do on Saturday night? Will yellow meal be a tradition, and the cup of tea an institution? Will the people wash themselves, and the women wear their flannel petticoats under their dresses instead of round their necks? Will the bare feet be covered? Will the children drop off their rags some night, and put on clean cotton frocks, like English children, when they get up in the morning? Will they comb their hair, and scrub their faces, and eat with a knife and fork? Will the men who drive the sheep into Ballinasloe fair ever know by experience what number of joints there are in one? Will they ever have wooden floors? and if they have, will they keep them clean? I wonder, Mr. Pryor, I wonder! And yet,” added Maxwell, “if that day ever do come, Ireland will he Ireland no longer, but only a more picturesque England—a Cumberland, in fact, across the channel.”

“On the whole, perhaps, you would not care to come back after the hundred years,” suggested Mr. Pryor.

“Yes, I should. I should like to have my land then, and to be able to sell it at the 1950 market price. A hundred years!—where shall we be then? where shall we be?”

“Certainly not on the top of Durrow Cliff, talking about Ireland,” answered Mr. Pryor, gravely. There was something about the fierce tone of Maxwell’s question which quivered through every nerve in his body.

“Is he afraid of death?” marvelled the barrister, and even while he was marvelling, Maxwell spoke again.

“I can remember,” he said, “when I was a boy coming across here with my father, and walking over the very spot where we are now talking, hand in hand with him. It was just such another day as this, warm and bright and clear; there were vessels coming and going; the sea was blue and calm; the fishermen were drying their nets in the sun. Well, the years have passed since then—passed like days. I have been lying here thinking how short a day life is after all, and wishing that we could endure through the centuries like the mountains, or the ocean yonder.”

“It would be very sad if we could, I think,” answered Mr. Pryor.

“Do you really mean what you say? But we are so differently constituted that one man’s meat is literally another man’s poison. To me it has always seemed that life is so short, while there is so much to be done in the world.”

“Ay! but by successive gangs of labourers,” replied Mr. Pryor.

“Shall we go?” asked Mr. Maxwell Drewitt, hastily springing to his feet. “Have you seen enough of Burrow? Shall we call at Kincorth as we return, and ask how my uncle is to-day?”

“I should like to call on Mr. Drewitt,” said the other. “The last time I saw him he was lying on Doctor Sheen’s bed, with his pretty young wife nursing him. I suppose twenty years has changed them both.”

“It has changed everybody excepting you, Geoffry,” exclaimed Mr. Waller, who heard the last words. “I think you must be one of the immortals.”

“It has changed me, Harry,” was the reply, spoken sadly, though with a smile. “Twenty years lie behind instead of before me; that is all the difference; but, after all, that difference is considerable.”

It was a long way from Durrow to Kincorth—ten Irish miles to ride, though probably not more than four, had the road followed the flight of the crow.

“But what road in Connemara ever did follow the flight of the crow?” demanded Mr. Waller; whereupon Maxwell asked what engineer could bridge the bays, and make a way through the rocks and precipices.

“Besides,” added Mr. Gyton, “to a man not pressed for time, the windings in and out are pretty and picturesque: but only fancy, uncle,” he said, turning to Mr. Pryor, “how one would curse these curves and turnings if one were riding for one’s life, or for a doctor.”

Maxwell Drewitt seemed impressed with this idea. “I never thought of that before,” he observed; “but then, I suppose, no man ever did ride for his life through Connemara. It would be all foot-work over the hills.”

And yet when they rounded the base of another mountain, as they turned another corner sharply, Maxwell pulled up.

“I cannot get that notion of yours out of my head,” he said, noticing that the others pulled up also. “Riding for one’s life—what a strange fancy!”

“I tell you what is a strange fancy to my mind, Drewitt—going to a sick man’s house with six horses and two servants, like a troop of dragoons,” exclaimed Mr. Waller.

“We need not ride up to the hall-door,” answered Maxwell; while Mr. Pryor said—

“Well thought of, Waller; we might have had enough sense for that ourselves.”

“But we had not, you see,” summed up Mr. Gyton, and the four rode on abreast.

“I never pass that old ruin,” said Mr. Waller, pointing to a tower and some walls belonging to an ancient castle lying back among the hills, “but I think of Murphy. You remember Murphy, don’t you, Drewitt, that used to be with Sheen?”

“I remember some fellow of that name, but what the devil had he to do with Castle Cronach?”

“Why, there was a squireen lived at that house in the hollow, where the honeysuckles are growing, and he had a wife who used to drink tremendously—spent every farthing on whiskey, and sold everything she could lay her hands on to get more. The poor fellow was almost at his wits’ end what to do about it (she did drive him to America in the long run), and so he went to Murphy for advice in the matter.

“‘Could the doctor give him nothing?’

“‘Is it poison you need?’ said Murphy; ‘because if it is, say so like a man.’

“‘Of course it was not poison he wanted, but only some trifle to cure her of drinking. Could Mr. Murphy not mix her up something?’

“‘If we could mix up anything to cure that disorder,’ says Murphy, ‘we should be made men: but I tell you what, take home a gallon of whiskey, and let her drink as much as she likes, and I will be round with you before night.’

“It was in the summer-time, but not moonlight, and when the woman was thoroughly drunk, Murphy and the husband carried her down into the vaults of that old castle and laid her down on some boards till she should come to.”

“I suppose she never ‘came to?’” suggested Mr. Gyton.

“Didn’t she, though? but she had a good sleep first, and when she woke about twelve o’clock she began calling out and asking where she was.

“‘Well, you are in the vaults underneath Eversbeg Abbey, ma’am,’ Murphy says.

“‘And how long have I been here?’ she inquired.

“‘A matter of ten or twelve months,’ he answered.

“‘Then I’m dead, in course?’ she says.

“‘As a doornail,’ wound up Murphy.

“‘And are you dead too?’

“‘Yes, ma’am.’

“‘And how long have you been here?’

“‘Somewhere about five years,’ he said.

“‘Then we are all dead?’

“‘Yes.’

“She sat down on the floor and thought the matter out a bit. Murphy said he could not imagine what she would say next, and was just trying to fancy, when she began—

“‘You must know the ways of his country a good deal better than me. Where can you get a drop of good whiskey now, reasonable?’

“‘That floored me,’ Murphy finished. ‘Squire,’ said he, ‘you’d better take your wife home; if she thinks there are whiskey-shops in Hades, it is of no use trying to frighten her with death. Take her home and let her live.’

“And he let her live; but she ruined him and died a beggar in Spanish Place, in Galway.”

“I wonder what has become of Murphy?” said Maxwell, while they rode, with loose bridles, at a slinging trot over the hard Connemara roads, neck and neck together, hoofs keeping time, all four abreast; the Irishmen with their feet well in their stirrups, riding only on the snaffle, bending a little over their horses’ manes; the Englishmen sitting more stiffly and more erect in their saddles, with only their toes in the irons, holding both bridles equally in their hands.

There is not much in these things perhaps, but there is something, and the grooms riding behind remarked the difference, as all Irish people do.

“Murphy is, I hear, doing very well indeed, in London,” answered Mr. Waller. “He was a clever fellow, a man who loved you for your ailments, who adored a complicated case, who—”

“Murphy!” repeated Mr. Gyton; “Murphy! a Mr. Murphy was telegraphed for once when my father met with an accident at Tunbridge Wells—an awful curiosity—he attended him afterwards in London. I remember the man perfectly. A long, loose fellow, with rusty hair and greenish-grey eyes, and an astonishing brogue. Is it likely to have been the same?” he asked, turning towards Mr. Waller.

“Had he tremendous legs and no body to speak of, arms like flails, and a habit of turning his side to you when he spoke?”

“Yes; and there was no one place where his clothes seemed to fit him. He was all joints, too, and he used to turn up his coat-cuffs and the wristbands of his shirt before he felt my father’s pulse. I remember tooling him over to the station one morning, and he kept me in screams all the way. He used to take people’s legs off ‘In the name of God.’ We never ceased laughing from the time he came into the house till he went out of it. He told us lots of stories about the notions of the Irish concerning physic—how they considered doctors liked red-haired men the best for ‘cutting up’—how they thought rhubarb was a decoction of dead bodies—how they believed fever came up the road in a ‘swirl’ of dust, and entered the house where it was destined to prove fatal like a visible simoom—how they believed in ‘possessions’—how he was told of a spirit who threw a bad man down stairs and broke his arm, and then called out to him, ‘I have not done with you yet.’ ‘And they went on to recount,’ added Mr. Murphy, ‘how the spirit twisted his head round on his shoulders, and how, for the future, whenever he walked forward, the back of his head came first. That was a case I should like to have attended,’ he finished. ‘I candidly confess I should.’”

“It must have been our Murphy,” said Mr. Waller; “there could not be two of the same kind of the same name.”

“This man was born in Roscommon, wherever that may be; for I remember him telling me the morning I went over with him to the station, that when the examiners were asking him for a certificate of baptism, he said—

“‘And, my God, gentlemen, do you know so little about Ireland in England as to ask a man from the County Roscommon for a certificate of his birth? I have heard my mother, and a decent old woman she was too as ever brought up a family on potatoes and buttermilk, say I was born the day Widow O’Flynn’s cow was lost in the bog, and that is all the information I can give you on the subject.’”

“What is he, surgeon, or physician, or what?” inquired Mr. Pryor.

“Surgeon,” answered Mr. Gyton. “My mother asked him something about it, and he said, ‘If you want a leg or an arm taken off I shall be most happy to oblige you, ma’am; but pills and potions are out of my line altogether.’ I had enough of physic in Connaught to last me my lifetime, and I prescribe for nobody. Operative surgery, ma’am, is enough for me; “_Satis supraque;_” which being freely translated, for I won’t insult a lady of your position by supposing you understand Latin, means, ‘Lashins and Lavins.’”

“How the devil,” demanded Maxwell Drewitt, “does such a fellow contrive to make his way into any respectable house?”

Mr. Gyton looked at him in surprise.

“There is nothing to prevent Mr. Murphy entering any house in England,” he answered, a little stiffly. “Perhaps the Irish are more exclusive. He stands very well in his profession; has a very good house in one of the West-end squares; and though he is eccentric, he is not more eccentric than many of our first-rate men have been.”

“John Hunter, for instance, was not merely eccentric, but vulgar,” chimed in Mr. Pryor.

“Well, Murphy was never vulgar,” said Mr. Gyton. “He never said a word to which you could have taken exception, and then he always brought such a cheerful face with him that he was half the cure himself.”

“Was that the person who was Dr. Sheen’s assistant at the time of the Duranmore election?” asked Mr. Pryor, looking towards Maxwell Drewitt.

“The same; a fellow without a second coat to his back, and possessed of no one single talent except impudence,” was the reply.

“He must have put out his capital to great advantage, then,” said the barrister dryly, “for it to have produced such results.”

“He married well,” explained Mr. Gyton; “he married a rich old maid, who was, I believe, the first paying patient he ever had in London, and that gave him a lift. Anyhow,” added Mr. Gyton, “he is a rising man now.”

They had been walking their horses up a steep hill during the latter part of this conversation, but as the young Englishman concluded his sentence they reached the top and saw Duranmore lying in the hollow below them. Duranmore and the road branching off to Kincorth!

“I wonder how we shall find my uncle to-day,” said Maxwell, looking at the woods in which the house lay sheltered; “perhaps if Mr. Murphy were here now he could cure him.”

“Is Doctor Sheen not able to do so then?” inquired Mr. Pryor.

“It would seem not,” was the answer, “for he grows worse rather than better,” and Maxwell Drewitt, after they got to the foot of the hill, gave his bridle a shake, and the rest taking the hint touched their horses lightly with whip and spur, and followed him at a hand gallop along the shore road to the entrance-gates of Kincorth.