Chapter XXII: Brighter Days

When Maxwell Drewitt’s will came to be read, it was discovered that he had left everything which he possessed to his son; but, as Arthur died before Maxwell, this will became of none effect, and Brian, the heir-at-law, succeeded to the properties.

And what properties they were! There had never been a Drewitt so rich for many a long day—never been a Drewitt without mortgages—without debt—without incumbrances, until Maxwell made his fortune, as I have told you, and left it for Brian to enjoy.

Amongst the dead man’s papers were found the notes which had been stolen from Mr. Kearns; and these were delivered to the Dundalk and Drogheda Banking Company, in precisely the same state as that in which they were discovered.

Whatever could be done to clear Harold’s memory from the stain that had lain on it, was done: there were paragraphs inserted in the newspapers; there were statements read in court; there were communications made to friends. Mr. Blosse was induced to open his mouth; and every one agreed that Harold had been shamefully treated; but that the whole proceeding was “just on a piece” with the rest of Mr. Maxwell Drewitt’s performances.

“There is no chance now, old fellow, I suppose, of your coming into partnership with me,” said Mr. Francis Gyton, when he and Brian met once more at Highgate. “Like all the rest of your countrymen, you will begin to turn up your nose at business—cut the money-making establishment altogether, and take to doing the idle and patriarchal.”

“I’ll tell you what I have a great mind to do,” answered Brian.

“Listen attentively, Geraldine,” said Mr. Gyton. “Crœsus has a great mind to do something; perhaps it may be something for our benefit.”

“No, it is not,” Brian replied. “I have a very great mind to sell all those Irish properties, and go abroad.”

“Bless my soul!” exclaimed his brother-in-law elect.

“I hate the places!” went on Brian; “I hate the associations! I hate the country—”

“And you hate the people! That is right, go it, my boy!”

“I wish, Frank, that you would not interrupt me so continually,” said Brian Drewitt, a little irritably. “There is no human being but myself,” he proceeded, “can understand the misery I have endured in Ireland—nor the wretched memories it recalls! If I retain the properties I shall never reside in Connemara.”

“You need not offer any of them to me, if that is your benevolent intention,” said Mr. Gyton, hastily; “for I would not be hired to live in Ireland at a salary of ten thousand a year! It is all very well when the weather is fine—and it is all very well when you don’t want much society; but it is the devil when it rains! and when one is shut up in the house all day—with a fine sea-view and the toothache! London for me!” finished Mr. Gyton. “I am of London, Londony; I am of the streets, streety. I detest high tragedy; and your prodigious funerals; and your outrageous grief; and your excessive sensibilities; and your despairing remorse; and your eternal hatreds; and your desperate revenges, seem to me quite out of place in the civilized nineteenth century!”

“The end, and aim, and object of which civilized nineteenth century is to destroy all hatred, as it has destroyed all love!”

“Well, now, that is really too bad; what do you know about love, sir?—you who have, ever since I had the honour of making your acquaintance, been so occupied with a kind of Hibernian Vendetta, that you have had no leisure even to look at a pretty girl, let alone fall in love with her.”

“I was not talking about love of that sort, Frank,” answered Brian; “but about all descriptions of love—love of friends, parents, children, sisters, brothers.”

“If you have any compassion, Brian, do stop,” entreated Mr. Gyton; “do not treat me to a long dissertation on vehement attachments, or never-to-be-forgotten griefs. Allow me to remark that, had you been born in any other country than in Ireland, you would have been a much more agreeable individual than is the case.”

“Now, Francis,” interposed Geraldine.

“My sweet child, I am only speaking the truth. Had your brother stood in my shoes, he would either have been sent to Oxford or put to business about the time he began nourishing those romantic ideas on the subject of Kincorth, which ideas have, fortunately for him, been realised. Hem!—where was I?—oh! yes, at Oxford or the desk. There are two things in this world which leave a man very little time for developing his eccentricities, viz., business and pleasure. In a country where you have neither, as in Ireland, it follows naturally—”

“Excuse me interrupting you,” observed Brian, “but Ireland is usually considered to be a very pleasure-seeking country.”

“Is it really? where do the poor devils go to seek for it? Precious far afield I should say. It struck me as being one of the most melancholy corners of the earth that ever I set my foot in.”

“Yet I suppose you will allow that there is a small portion of wit in Ireland?”

“There may be; I never heard any Irish wit excepting in England.”

“Probably that was not the fault of the Irish,” answered Brian, with a slight sneer.

“Thank you for the implied compliment. What I meant to say when you tripped me up so short was, that one hears a certain number of stock anecdotes on this side the channel which spoil one for ordinary Irish conversation. Every Dublin car-driver is not a wit; on the contrary, I have never heard a really clever speech from one of them, nor am I acquainted with any person who has. The manner is amusing, I admit; but the matter will not bear inspection: all of which brings me round to what I said at first. I would not have to reside in Ireland—indeed I would not reside in any place at a great distance from London for ten thousand a year.”

“I certainly was not going to ask you to reside in Ireland,” observed Brian.

“Then we need not fear any misunderstanding on the subject,” remarked Mr. Gyton; “and you can proceed with what you were about to say.”

“I have said all I was about to say.”

“No, you have not; you were going to tell us why you thought of going abroad, where you intended travelling to, and what you purposed doing when you had reached your destination.”

“There is no use, Frank, in trying to talk seriously to you. Everything seems to you to bear a comical aspect. To hear you speak I am sure anybody might think the world was a place only intended by the Almighty for jibes and jeers, for the fool’s motley, for the cap and bells.”

“After all, the fool’s bells make more lively music than the passing bells; which appear to be what you delight to listen to. In sober earnest though, Brian, I do hate to see a man, a wise man, taking life after your fashion. Is not there happiness in this world, is not there sunshine, are not there women’s voices, are not there flowers, and birds and bees and butterflies? Do you think God ever intended we should let any sorrow or any suffering so dim our eyes that we should never again be able to look out on life with a sense of enjoyment, with a thrill of pleasure? Talk to him, Geraldine; tell him what a madman he is to dwell so sorrowfully on the past, instead of taking pleasure in the present. Brian,” he added, and for the first time during their acquaintance there came a touch of passionate entreaty into his voice, “Brian, my brother, for God’s sake, put that unhappy boy out of your mind; bury your dead, and leave their graves, and come and stand out in the sunshine, so that you may make both yourself and those belonging to you happy once more.”

With a gesture almost of despair, Brian lifted his head, and looking over the great city which lay below them, answered—

“It is too soon yet. You do not know, no man can know, what my life has been, what I have suffered, how I have sinned. You have never stood, as I have, at one death-bed after another, where the life had been either unhappy or wicked. Think of it, Frank: out of your own brighter experience, judge what mine must have been. Father, mother, brother, cousin, and cousin’s son—all in five years. Those whom I wanted to make happy, whom I would have laid down my life to save from grief and trouble, are all gone where the wealth that is now mine is unavailing. I never was young; I never had a boy’s heart; I never was like other men I met, gay and thoughtless and light-hearted. I think you are right, Frank, after all, and that I was wrong. I believe, had I been brought up in England, I should have been a better man and a happier than I am ever likely to be now. Like Maxwell, I have made a great mistake.”

“Well, rectify it then,” answered Mr. Gyton. “It is not too late; it is never too late while you have breath in your body. I know what you were going to say: you were going to make some remark about that Arthur, whose death you have taken a fancy to charge at your own door. There never was a better day’s work done for that young gentleman than when he was put so easily out of harm’s way.”

“What shocking things you do say, Frank!” remarked Geraldine.

“If being true makes things shocking, I have no doubt they are so,” he replied; “but the fact is this. Supposing he had escaped drowning, he would have lived to be hung to a certainty. I am as positive of that as I am that I am living. Those are just the kind of youths who come as surely to the gallows, let them start from what point they may, as that the sparks fly upward. My uncle is of the same opinion; he thinks that for the sake of all parties interested it was a great blessing Mr. Arthur Campnell, or Bourke, or Drewitt, or whatever his name might be, made his exit when he did. Just fancy that boy in possession of those properties. I ask you just to fancy it. He would have more misery than we should ever be able to estimate. Those notes! why you know the lad who could carry a thing of that kind through coolly must have been the making of a thorough scoundrel; and if it were only for the suffering he caused Harold, he richly deserved all he got.”

“That was the way I argued,” Brian groaned. “Heaven, forgive me!”

“There can be no worse article for every-day wear than a delicate conscience like yours; which first thinks it a duty to avenge the dead, and then turns round and repents having inflicted punishment on the object of its deadliest hatred. I think you were born a few centuries too late, Brian. You would have been a capital fellow for the sack-cloth and scourging days; and in one respect I think those days were a vast deal better than our own. Men then wore their sorrow out of sight, and their penitence too; now they go about with faces as long as my arm, making everybody they meet miserable, because of some trifling sin that they chance to have committed in years gone by.”

“That cap fits well, if it were made at random.”

“I did not make it for you,” answered Mr. Gyton, colouring with vexation at his own stupidity; “and I don’t want to say anything to vex you, only take my advice. Come out of your shell—mix in the world—share its pleasures—enjoy its sunshine—don’t go moping about the Continent alone, and beyond all things, don’t go shut yourself up in those old Irish estates till you become a monomaniac. Look out for a nice wife—marry—and forget. If you have done wrong, you must try and do right for the future. If you have made a mistake, thank God it is not on your death-bed you have found it out; but with life, years of it before you, I trust, to make a better thing of than any Drewitt I ever heard of dreamt of attempting.”

“What are you sermonizing about, Frank?” asked Mr. Pryor, who came at this moment into the room.

“I am preaching the doctrine of work and common sense in the ears of a morbid sinner,” was the reply.

“And is he converted?” inquired his uncle, with a smile.

“Give me time,” Brian answered, “give me time; only, of one thing be sure—I will not sit down with my hands folded and sorrow vainly. I will do my best. I will not fly my duties. I will not attempt to get rid of my responsibilities; and should it ever please God to remove the weight that is lying on my heart, I will become a laughing philosopher like you, Frank, and find sunshine in the darkest places.”

“That is right!” cried Mr. Gyton, clapping him on the back; while Mr. Pryor went up to Brian and silently took his hand.

Perhaps the barrister could better estimate the length and breadth, and height and depth, of the agony that Brian had passed through than any other man on earth. He had traced the boy’s progress to manhood, and seen how each year had brought its trial, each day its necessity for self-command and self-forgetfulness.

He knew, who better? how long even a slight wound takes to heal with some mental constitutions, and he could not marvel at the effect all his trials had produced on Brian Drewitt.

For himself, it was many a long day before he could forget either that night-scene on the coast of the wild West, or that darkened room to which the man who had thought once no domain large enough for him, was confined at last.

His life had been prosperous, but the end was so unutterably sorrowful that it left an impression on Mr. Pryor’s mind like the wail of a mournful melody, or the sobbing of the wind among the pines at night.

Unmourned, unlamented, the man had passed to his long home, without one to weep over him and say, “Alas! my brother.”

* * * * *

It was autumn in Connemara once again; the hills were clad in their robes of purple heather, and the country looked its loveliest, and there was a great peace on land, on lake, on sea; while under the arching trees a bridal party came forth from Kincorth; for the daughter of the house was going to be married to the man she had loved for so long.

As a matter of choice, and as a matter of convenience, the bridegroom would certainly have preferred that the wedding should be solemnized in London; but it was a fancy of Brian’s that Frank Gyton should take his sister from amongst her own people; that in the place where she had been born she should be married; that with much stately ceremony, with every festive rejoicing, the son of the English merchant should mate with the daughter of the Irish gentleman.

Brian would not have been a Drewitt had he not been likewise proud, and it was more out of pride than out of ostentation that he prepared so great a feast, and bade so many guests to partake of it. Duranmore had never seen such a wedding before; such strings of carriages, such strewing of flowers, such passing under wreaths and garlands, was unprecedented even in a place where many a well-born bride had been wooed, and won, and married.

It was a gay sight, and the hearts of the tenantry rejoiced to see such a cavalcade leaving the gates of Kincorth. Many a day it was since such a festival had been held at the old home of the Drewitts; and it seemed, as the people said, like the good old times come back again when the bride, blushing and happy, walked out of the church porch, leaning on her husband’s arm, and passed through the people who had known her from a child, receiving blessings and praises as she went by.

Half the county was at the wedding, and there were great folks from London staying at Durrow, and the whole country side was alive with carriages and servants, and spectators and guests.

Lady Emmeline graced the scene with her presence, and presented the bride with some sweet verses of her own composition, which she secretly hoped might be read aloud at the breakfast.

She was looking very old and very haggard, poor lady, but she enjoyed that wedding immensely, and told everybody how fond she had always been of Geraldine, and how “many people had taken them for mother and daughter when they were in London together.”

Mr. Gyton was in great force; he was perfectly stupendous in the way of waistcoat, and gold chain and pocket-handkerchiefs. He drank champagne, and he grew pathetic; he partook of all manner of good things, and did such justice to the viands set before him that Frank Gyton sent round a card to Brian Drewitt, on which he had written, in pencil—

“I hope there is a clever doctor among the company—dread apoplexy.”

Altogether it was, as Mr. Gyton, junior, declared, enormously jolly.

“I think that everybody should come to Ireland to be married,” said one tremendous young swell, who turned R into W in the most cruel and unintelligible manner imaginable. “I think every body should come to Ireland to be married, it is such fun.”

“Yes, and the ten miles’ drive gives one such an appetite,” remarked Mr. Gyton, senior.

“And, Frank, what did you mean about the climate?” asked his mother. “We have had three days without a single drop of rain.”

“That is because it never rains single drops in Ireland,” was the reply; “they always fall plenty at a time.”

“Well, now, you know this is charming,” said one City man. “If one could make certain of not being shot, I think I should like to end my days here.”

“Did you ever see such a view?”

“What a delicious house!”

“And how exquisitely furnished!”

“Don’t you wonder Mr. Drewitt has never married?”

“Hasn’t had the property long; was a clerk in Mr. Gyton’s office in the City.”

“Dear me, how singular!”

“And he proposed for her in her poverty?”

“Yes, and takes her from here with a handsome fortune, I am told.”

“How romantic!”

“Virtue rewarded.”

And so the talk ran on, while the groom’s-man implored one of the bridesmaids to tell him who that wonderful piece of antiquity was, seated on the other side of the table.

“That, sir,” said the young lady, demurely, “is my cousin, Lady Emmeline Drewitt.”

“I am sure, I beg your pardon; really that is—”

“She is the widow of the late proprietor of Kincorth,” proceeded Miss Vervensoe, who rather enjoyed her companion’s confusion. “She is very wealthy, and has been considered very handsome.”

“Really, now you speak of it—yes, to be sure, bears traces of having been very beautiful.”

“I have never detected those traces myself,” said the young Irish belle, “for it is little more than a tradition with us. Mr. Pryor, however, declares he can remember her a most graceful and fascinating woman when he stood for Duranmore in 1832.”

“I had not the least idea Pryor was so old—1832 carries us back into the remote ages of antiquity.”

“I suppose it does, to about the time the Pyramids were built,” answered Miss Vervensoe, a little pertly. She had some pretensions to talent, and indulged in satirical poetry, and on her return home wrote some very smart lines descriptive of the wedding-breakfast generally, and of her conversational friend particularly.

“Are you coming to the ball to-night?” she asked.

Of course he was. Did not every one intend coming to it, or rather staying for it, who had got an invitation? “For his part,” and here the speaker became slightly tender in his manner; “for his part, he quite agreed with Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Gyton, that everybody ought to come to Ireland to get married.”

Which observation Miss Vervensoe shrined in her poem with an addendum of her own, to the effect that she thought a good many people would have to bring the wives with them.

On the whole, Miss Vervensoe was not a nice young lady; not a young lady it would have been well for Brian Drewitt to marry; though it was her mother’s intention that he should marry her, if the thing were compassable.

Lady Emmeline, also, was very desirous that her sweetest “Anne” should become mistress of Kincorth; and Mr. Dolf Vervensoe told his daughter that he should think her a “damned deal cleverer even than she thought herself, if she could bring Brian Drewitt to book!”

But through that danger the young man passed scatheless. He was not a person very easy to satisfy, either in the matter of beauty or of anything else; and accordingly, he waited, and waited, till, quite by chance, as it seemed to them both, he met one day with a bright, loveable, English country-girl, who had been brought up very quietly in her father’s old-fashioned parsonage-house—whence Brian Drewitt took her to himself, without any fuss or ceremonial or excitement whatsoever.

Geraldine always declared he took a fancy to the girl because she resembled their mother; and Brian did not contradict her assertion.

When the spring was shyly putting out its soft green leaves—when the winter’s frosts were over, and the winter’s snows gone—when the balmy south wind began to blow, bringing flowers and buds on its genial breath, Brian Drewitt took his young wife home to Kincorth, which he has never talked of selling from that hour.

She was his home-angel! his sweet, pretty, cheerful treasure! and he told her so one day, when she began, in her winning way, to coax him to tell her why he ever married her—he, so rich! so grand! who might have wooed and won some wonderful heiress—some great beauty; and he added, also, a statement which was true as Holy Writ—viz., that, when he first looked in her face, he felt its expression comfort him as nothing else had comforted him since that sad day when he stood beside his mother’s coffin, and felt almost as though his heart were broken!