Chapter VIII: Harold in Trouble

It was summer once again: summer twelve months after the events recorded in the last few chapters, and Mrs. Drewitt and Brian, and Harold and Geraldine, were living far away from Duranmore, far beyond the Connemara Alps, far beyond sound of the great ocean that washes the headlands of the “wild west.”

Brian had got a situation in Dublin, which however necessitated frequent absences from home. He was working hard, and giving great satisfaction to his employers; and Mrs. Drewitt, who had greatly crippled her income by feeing lawyers and running after all manner of people who advised her to dispute her husband’s will, resided with Harold and Geraldine in a small house in the outskirts of Dublin.

From whence Harold walked into the city every morning, and sat at a desk from nine o’clock till four; an amusement he was never weary of grumbling about; while his mother, likewise, never wearied in commiserating him for it.

In the present, as in the past, it was Harold she pitied, Harold she loved; it was the bold-eyed, bright-faced boy she clung to—her youngest born—the Benjamin of her life to her!

Such likings are natural, perhaps; but they do not generally tend to make matters pleasanter in the family circle, and perhaps it was quite as well that Brian’s occupation took him much from home, as otherwise he might have had less patience than was the case with Harold’s repinings—with Harold’s conduct.

For Harold was the same in Dublin as he had been in Connemara—wild, reckless, dissipated. His acquaintances were none of the most desirable, his life none of the most regular; but still the mother would not see—the mother would not believe.

He was her darling, and nothing it was in his power to do could make him otherwise. When he found she came to meet him in the summer afternoons, he walked by a circuitous route home; when he found she sat up for him at night, he came home early, went to bed with the rest of the household, and then stole down in his stocking-soles, with his boots in his hand, and let himself out, taking the door-key with him.

Of course their servant—who was often unfastening the shutters when Harold reappeared—knew of these pranks; but she had never the heart to tell his mother.

And if she had told Mrs. Drewitt, what difference could it have made? His mother had no influence over him—none whatever. He had nothing to say but “I will leave the house,” or “I will go and ask food and lodging from Maxwell,” and she was silent at once.

Whenever Maxwell came to Dublin, which was not seldom, Harold always dined with him, and always came back reeling drunk.

“Told him—I—bore—no grudge—welcome to—Madcap—poor—old—girl,” the young rascal would hiccup out, and when induced to go to bed, he invariably did so under protest, retiring from view between the sheets in his boots, coat, waistcoat and trousers, and refusing to let go of Mary’s hand—Mary was their maid-of-all work—until she promised to call him early.

“Don’t f—get, Marish. If you’re waking—you know—call me early, Marish dear.”

And indeed had it not been for Mary’s repeated calls, Harold could hardly have kept his situation so long as was the case.

“Damn business—curse work!” I think that was the refrain of almost every sentence Harold Drewitt uttered for some months after starting in the world on his own account, and Mrs. Drewitt listened sympathetically, and would oftentimes confide to Mary, the maid-of-all-work before honourably mentioned, the fact, “that she thought that office was killing her poor boy—he looked so pale, and ill, and thin since he left the country.”

Mary had her own opinions, which, seeing Master Harold was the lamb without blemish in his mother’s eyes, she wisely kept to herself.

But even the fondest parent cannot remain blind for ever, and accordingly there came a time when Mrs. Drewitt, instead of pitying Harold, went up to her own room and wept; when she prayed him not to go to the hotel where Maxwell stopped while in town; when she entreated him to remember that by business he must live, and that to live he must work.

“Look at Brian,” she would remark, and the injudicious speech invariably made Harold shrug his shoulders, and declare Brian “never was fit to be anything better than a horse in a mill, or a counting-house drudge, or a pack-horse which he is,” finished Harold.

“Now Harold, do not say such things of Brian!” Geraldine would exclaim, her cheeks all a-glow; and then Harold was wont to laugh and declare—

“Oh! we all know what makes you so much in love with business; don’t we, mamma?” For which speech Mrs. Drewitt invariably pulled Master Harold up.

In her heart, the mother did not like the way in which Mr. Gyton was always running over from London; she wished he would either propose or stay away; and yet, she argued, a man must have some opportunity for making up his mind. Altogether, I cannot say that the position of the Drewitt family was one perfectly free from care; but still time travelled on—on—and the seasons came and went; as they will do whether people are happy or whether people are sad.

It was summer once again, and though there is, perhaps, no town in the three kingdoms where the country seems so near and stone walls so little oppressive as in Dublin, still Mrs. Drewitt missed the hills, and the valleys, and the ocean more than she would have cared to acknowledge.

She had loved Connemara, and she had no other strong ties to any part of the earth. Mother, and father, and sister, had long been dead, and Sir Everard Ebbutt was married again, and her sister’s children were very aristocratic young ladies, who would scarcely have cared to acknowledge so very unfortunate an individual for their aunt. Altogether, she mourned greatly after Connemara; and many a time when she and Geraldine were walking along the Monkstown Road, or pacing slowly round Stephen’s Green, or sitting at work together in their modestly-furnished house, the poor lady would say suddenly—“I wonder how the Twelve Pins are looking now, Geraldine! Must not the sea seem calm seen from Durrow cliffs to-day?”

“Yes, mamma,” Geraldine would answer, a little guiltily conscious that she had kept one thing from her mother’s knowledge, viz., her own refusal of Durrow and its owner.

She could have given a comfortable home for life to her mother; she could have let her spend all the remaining days of her life among the scenes and the people she had learned to love so much—and she refused.

Had she done right? For many days Geraldine pondered that question over and over again, and at last took courage and referred it to her mother.

They were sitting side by side in one of the loneliest parts of the Phœnix Park—in one of the glades where the blackberries and the brambles grow—and in reply to a remark from Mrs. Drewitt about the quietness being pleasant—about the place being almost as solitary as Connemara, though so close to Dublin, Geraldine took her mother’s hand in hers, and said—

“Mamma, I want to ask you something.”

“He has proposed”—that was Mrs. Drewitt’s first idea, as she beheld her daughter’s face covered with blushes. “He has proposed”—the “he” having reference to Mr. Gyton, who was at that present moment galloping as fast as an Irish horse could take him to the Broadstone Terminus, whence he was soon travelling, at the mild pace which seems in fashion across the Channel by express train, to Galway.

“I wish you were coming down with me, old fellow,” he said to Harold Drewitt, who had accompanied him to the station, and who stood with his hands on the top of the carriage-door, looking very wretched and disconsolate. “A run into Connemara would do you good.”

“I know that,” Harold answered, mournfully.

“Ask leave, and come down on Saturday. There is a car or something that will bring you on from Galway to Durrow in no time; and my uncle will be delighted. Shall I tell him to expect you?”

“I don’t see how I can get away,” hesitated the boy.

“Nonsense; come on Saturday. Remember, I shall be looking out for you. Good-bye;” and the train steamed away from the platform, and went leisurely onwards into the country, through which it proceeded in a quiet, inoffensive manner, stopping at all sorts of out-of-the-way stations, where no passengers ever seemed to get in or out; but where there was always a knot of idlers collected to see the engine and carriages, as if the seventh wonder of the world were taking a little tour through Ireland.

“No need to ask where one is,” remarked Mr. Gyton to a fellow-passenger, who chanced to be an Englishman; “battered hats, short pipes, ragged clothes, and plenty of policemen—I beg their pardons—of the constabulary force.”

“Fine country, though,” returned the other.

“So I am told,” answered Mr. Gyton, drily.

“And the women are so handsome! positively, walking about Dublin yesterday I met hundreds of lovely faces!” pursued the enthusiastic gentleman.

“The town is not large,” remarked his companion, “and it is within the bounds of possibility that you may have met the same faces many times over.”

“There is something in that,” considered the other.

“And then,” continued Mr. Gyton, “if you pay particular attention to the subject, you will observe that most Irishwomen—the women who wear gloves I mean—have a slit in those gloves; either the lady’s hands are plump, in which case there is an aperture at the side; or her fingers are long, in which case the nails make a way for themselves through the tips; or the articles are of an inferior make, which causes gaps about the thumb; or they are too small and refuse to button. I have made gloves my study,” added the young swell, “and I never get into a railway carriage in which there is a woman without adding to my stock of information. I came up from Kingston yesterday morning with a young lady, and ’pon my honour, for a long time I thought she had on mittens, she was out at every finger down to the middle joint!” and Mr. Gyton complacently surveyed his own well-fitting glove, towards which his companion’s glance was directed also.

“Do you smoke?” asked the younger man at last, presenting his cigar-case to the stranger, who, being graciously pleased to avail himself of the offered politeness, lit one of Mr. Gyton’s prime Havannah’s, and the pair, stretched out one on each side the carriage, smoked until they reached Mullingar, at which point they abandoned their cigars, and wrapping their railway rugs about them, slept on until the guard came to collect the tickets and to inform them that “when they reached the next station they’d be there.”

“A most original and valuable piece of information,” remarked Mr. Gyton, yawning desperately. “Now what do you make out of that—we shall be there? Does he mean we shall be at the next station, or at Galway?”

“The next station is Galway,” replied the other, referring to his time-table, and failing in his sleepy condition of mind to perceive any wit in the young man’s brilliant remarks. “I hope we shall be able to get a bed.”

“If my memory serves me right, you can have your choice of about a hundred,” answered Mr. Gyton, collecting his effects, and humming an opera air softly the while.

This was the “he” to whom Mrs. Drewitt had mentally referred while waiting for the rest of her daughter’s sentence.

“You often talk, mamma, about Connemara, about the mountains, about the Atlantic, about those exquisite little bays, about all sorts of things, in fact,” and Geraldine leaned back her head till it rested gently on her mother’s shoulder as she spoke.

“Yes, love.”

“Would you like to go back there, mamma—to go back to live?” and the evening sunbeams rested upon the pair, upon the deep mourning of mother and child, and Mrs. Drewitt stretched out her hand towards those patches of golden light as though she could touch and retain them.

“That would depend, Geraldine,” was the answer. “Home to me is now wherever my children are: if you were all in Connemara, I should love the West; as you are all in Dublin, I am learning to love it.”

“You are certain, sure, positive, mamma?” and the pretty head nestled itself down on Mrs. Drewitt’s shoulder as well as was possible, considering the millinery miracle, which seemed to be stuck on the top of various rolls and twists of hair.

“Certain, love—why?”

“Because, mamma, we might all go back to Connemara—to Durrow, if I were to marry Mr. Pryor. He asked me, and I said no; and I have been miserable ever since—wondering, wondering, whether it was not wrong of me, when we are so poor, and when he likes me so much.”

There was a long pause, during the continuance of which Mrs. Drewitt held her daughter’s hand in hers, and stroked it slowly, slowly, very tenderly and very gently. “Poor fellow,” she said at last, and Geraldine began to cry.

“Have I done wrong, mamma? have I done wrong?”

“You do not love him, darling?”

“No, mamma.”

“You would only marry him for the sake of Durrow, and for what he might do for me, and Harold, and Brian?”

“Yes, mamma.”

“Then, Geraldine, you have done quite right, and never vex yourself about the matter again. Only it is a pity of him, a great pity!” And Mrs. Drewitt took up her daughter’s hand and commenced stroking it once more.

“I felt that, mamma,” whispered the girl, “but I could not help saying no. I thought only of myself then; but I have cried myself to sleep many a night since thinking about you.”

“My poor child, and I never knew anything about it,” said the mother, sorrowfully.

“I could not tell you. I was afraid you might be vexed; I was vexed myself, and——” Geraldine paused.

“And what, darling?”

“Oh, mamma—mamma!” that was all the confession, but it was enough. The mother knew the daughter’s secret, and the daughter knew her mother understood the whole business without another word being spoken.

They sat on for a few minutes longer in silence, and then they walked home side by side still saying little, and that little having no connexion with the subject on which they had been talking.

Mrs. Drewitt made no further remark, asked no single question; only that night Geraldine cried herself to sleep in her mother’s arms, and until the early dawning of the summer’s morning Mrs. Drewitt lay awake, and thought about the husband she should see no more on earth—about the children whose future seemed so vague and uncertain.

As for Harold, the household had not much of a life with him until he worried permission out of his employers to grant him a holiday; then the very same evening he started for Galway, and worked his way thence by car and coach to Duranmore, where Mr. Pryor met him.

“Your letter and Frank’s must have crossed each other,” he said. “He left for Dublin by the first train from Galway this morning, and wrote begging you to meet him at Morrison’s.”

“Then we both slept at the same hotel last night, and never knew it,” said Harold, disconsolately; “will he be long in Dublin?”

“Only a few hours. He leaves to-night for Holyhead, and is going direct to London. His father is very ill.”

“Wasn’t it queer we should both be in Galway together, and never know it?” repeated Harold, whose sympathies were none of the keenest, and who would not have cared very much who lived or who died providing he had his little comforts. Mr. Pryor, though he had known much more singular coincidences in the course of his life, agreed that it was “queer,” while he gave the reins into Harold’s eager hands, and let him drive back the ten miles to Durrow within the hour.

For the sister’s sake, Mr. Pryor was very kind to Harold, though his affection for the boy had never been overwhelming, and consequently Harold found his stay in Connemara exceedingly pleasant, and was very much grieved—grieved to the extent of tears when he had to leave.

“My time’s up,” he said disconsolately to Mr. Pryor.

“Is it?” remarked that gentleman, sympathetically; “you must get leave to come and see me next summer.”

“Ay; but that is such a devilishly long time to look forward to,” answered Harold.

“You must employ the interval in breaking yourself of a bad habit,” Mr. Pryor observed.

“What is that?” asked Harold, quickly.

“Swearing,” was the reply.

“There is no harm in swearing—everybody swears but you.” Fancy the feelings of a middle-aged gentleman who was obliged to bear such speeches from a lad. “I don’t know a fellow that does not swear,” went on Harold; “but then, to be sure, all the fellows I know are young.”

It would have done Mr. Pryor good to have pitched Master Harold over Durrow cliff, but one cannot always do as one likes in this world, and he refrained.

“You may think I am making fun,” resumed the boy, “but I am not: next summer does seem a devilishly long time away—that is not swearing, it is truth—and I sometimes feel when I am looking about me here that I am looking for the last time—you may laugh if you like, but I do.”

“What does the lad mean?” marvelled Mr. Pryor.

“Just what I say; neither more nor less: maybe I may see Connemara again, and maybe not; but most likely maybe not. I have gone to every place I could think of to-day, and said good-bye. I feel that I shall never come back—never—never—never.” And the boy twined his hand in the branch of a tree against which he was leaning, and, resting his head on his arm, sobbed aloud.

“Would you rather not return to Dublin at present?” asked Mr. Pryor, who really felt impressed by Harold’s grief. “I dare say I could make it all right with your employers.”

“No, I must go; but I feel that I am going to meet my fate, Mr. Pryor. If nothing comes of this, try not to think me a fool; but last night, after I had been asleep for about a couple of hours, I awoke suddenly in a cold perspiration and shivering from head to foot. I think you might have heard my heart beating. I was in such a horrible fright, and there was a dread on me—a terror; what was it? tell me;” and the boy turned towards Mr. Pryor, who thought in a moment about Maxwell’s words—

“He will never make old bones;” and it was true, poor Harold!

“You were ill,” answered the Englishman.

“I was not ill,” returned Harold, petulantly; “I was as well as you are. I had neither ache nor pain; only I was frightened: what frightened me?”

“You had been dreaming disagreeably.”

“I had not been dreaming at all—at least if I had I do not remember anything about it. I was wide awake in the time you could clap hands, and thinking about death, about Eversbeg, and my father, and that Kathie I used to hear them talking over when I was a child, Maxwell’s sister. I have not got over it all day. Do you think me a coward? I am not a coward; only—only it would be very hard to die and never see Connemara again.”

“It would, Harold; but I hope and believe you will see Connemara many times before you die. And promise me you will go (quietly by yourself, you know, and without alarming your mother) to some good doctor in Dublin, and tell him you are not very strong, and to give you a tonic. Promise me,” and Mr. Pryor slipped a five-pound note into the boy’s hand, which Harold looked at as well as tears would let him see it.

“In the night,” he began again, “I made good resolutions—I did, Mr. Pryor. I wish I could keep to them; I wish I could quit drinking; I wish I could quit vexing my mother. I’d like to be good. I think it must be nice to feel good when one wakes like that in the middle of the night.”

That was the note on which Harold’s sentences began and ended. It was the common chord of his conversation, until at last Mr. Pryor became really anxious.

“He would not get on this way if he were in good health,” thought the barrister, and when he parted with Harold he felt many misgivings as to whether he ought not to go so far as Galway, at any rate, with him.

But there was an absurdity on the face of the thing which could not fail to strike Mr. Pryor. “The boy does not want to go to work,” he thought; “and if we make too much of him he will never be good for anything.” As for spirits, out of doors, Harold’s were at fever-point!

“Put on your hat, man,” he said to Doyle, who, happy as a lord, was standing flourishing an old white apology for a hat in the middle of the High Street of Duranmore. “I have often been drunk myself.”

“And good-bye, Kitty,” he called out to the barmaid at the “Marsden Arms;” “see that you’re married against I come back.”

“Good-bye, Maxwell,” he shouted to his cousin, who was riding by on Trumpeter. “Take care of Madcap; I may come down some day in the hunting season, and ask you to let me have one more ride on her.”

“And good-bye, Mr. Pryor,” he said last of all; “try not to think about what I told you—it was folly.”

“Write to me what the doctor says, Harold,” entreated his friend. “All right,” was the reply and the car drove off.

Far as he could see, Harold kept waving first his hat and then his handkerchief, and it was not until the vehicle turned round the base of the mountain, on the road to Cragantlet, and bore the boy off through the land of a hundred lakes, that Mr. Pryor could prevail on himself to retrace his way towards Durrow.

He could not sleep for thinking of the lad; he resolved to write to Brian concerning him, and he worried himself almost into a fever over the matter, while Harold was shouting out snatches of songs, and pitching compliments to the pretty country girls as they tripped so daintily over the grass by the wayside, and telling stories, and plaguing the driver’s life out to let him take the reins, and eating his supper in Galway, and lying fast asleep in one of those huge beds at the Railway Hotel in which Finn Macoul and his whole family might find ample accommodation.

“If you believe me, sir,” said Harold, who travelled second class, to a fat priest, his fellow-passenger in the railway carriage the next morning as far as Athlone, “I had to ring the bell to find myself; I went wandering over the bed every time I woke trying to discover where on earth I was;” and the priest took kindly to the boy, and laughed at his light-hearted merriment, and all the way up to Dublin, Harold found some one to talk to, some one to laugh with.

As he drove along the streets leading from Broadstone Station to Carlisle Bridge, he chatted to the car-driver, and was, as the man expressed it, “in great heart entirely.” “Pull up at the first shop,” ordered Mr. Harold, “where they sell cigars; I want some;” and obedient to the command the man pulled up at a shop in College Green, where Harold alighted.

He picked over the cigars with the air of a connoisseur, and, selecting three dozen of what he considered the best, threw down a pound-note in payment. He had changed Mr. Pryor’s gift in Galway, and this pound-note was part of the proceeds.

“I must send out for silver, sir,” said the man behind the counter, who had never taken his eyes off Harold’s face (when Harold was not looking at him) for a moment.

“All right,” remarked Harold.

“Sorry to keep you so long waiting,” remarked the shopkeeper, politely handing his customer a chair.

“It is of no consequence;” but Harold was kicking his heels with impatience for all that.

Time went on. “I think,” said the lad, “they must be quarrying that silver.”

“Not at all,” said the shopkeeper; and at the words his messenger re-entered the place, in company with a policeman.

“There is your prisoner,” remarked the cigar-dealer; and the policeman laid his hand on Harold’s shoulder.

“Come along, young gentleman,” he said. “The less fuss you make, the better.”

Advice which Harold followed by striking the policeman right between the eyes, and then asking what the devil he meant by his cursed impudence.

“It is your cursed impudence, I think,” said the shopkeeper, “coming here to change another of your notes.”

“I never set foot in your doors before, to my knowledge,” answered Harold, amazed.

“Well, you have to mine, which is more to the purpose,” was the reply.

“Will you tell me what you all mean? Are you all mad?” asked Harold, who began to feel that the affair was getting serious.

Then half a dozen people began talking at once, and all Harold could make out as they dragged him along the streets was—

“Robbery of two thousand pounds—fifty pounds reward—assaulting a constable in the discharge of his duty—passing the stopped notes.”

“But now look here, sir,” remarked Harold, to the inspector. “I know no more what you are all talking about than a baby in arms. That is my name and address; and I have just come up from Galway, where I have been staying at Durrow Park with Mr. Geoffry Pryor.”

“You are not bound to criminate yourself,” interposed the inspector. “What you say after this caution will be used in evidence against you.”

“Let it. I am trying to vindicate myself—though, upon my conscience, I have not the remotest idea of the nature of the crime with which you charge me. I tell you what it is,” he added, “you have got the wrong bird in crib; you must have mistaken me for somebody else; before God, I know nothing of any two thousand pounds!” he added passionately. “I never saw so much money together in all my life—I never did!”

“If you can persuade his worship of that, it will be all the better for you,” was the incredulous reply; and forthwith Harold was locked up, but not before he sent this message to his mother:—

“Tell her,” he said to a policeman, “that I am in the station-house; I have not the remotest idea why. I have done nothing. I cannot think what you have brought me here for—unless you are all mad.”

But though the police delivered this message with tolerable accuracy, they persisted in hunting over all his little possessions, trying to find some trace of the missing money—of something to criminate the boy.

“You see he is innocent, you see,” Mrs. Drewitt kept saying, in her frantic sorrow.

“Yes, ma’am, we see,” answered the police; and all through that long, long night Geraldine and her mother kept repeating, as if to reassure their own faith, “He is innocent! Harold could never have done a thing like that!”