CHAPTER I.
THE BARONY OF DESMOND.
I wonder whether the novel-reading world--that part of it, at least,which may honour my pages--will be offended if I lay the plot ofthis story in Ireland! That there is a strong feeling against thingsIrish it is impossible to deny. Irish servants need not apply; Irishacquaintances are treated with limited confidence; Irish cousins areregarded as being decidedly dangerous; and Irish stories are notpopular with the booksellers.
For myself, I may say that if I ought to know anything about anyplace, I ought to know something about Ireland; and I do stronglyprotest against the injustice of the above conclusions. Irish cousinsI have none. Irish acquaintances I have by dozens; and Irish friends,also, by twos and threes, whom I can love and cherish--almost aswell, perhaps, as though they had been born in Middlesex. Irishservants I have had some in my house for years, and never had onethat was faithless, dishonest, or intemperate. I have travelled allover Ireland, closely as few other men can have done, and have neverhad my portmanteau robbed or my pocket picked. At hotels I haveseldom locked up my belongings, and my carelessness has never beenpunished. I doubt whether as much can be said for English inns.
Irish novels were once popular enough. But there is a fashion innovels, as there is in colours and petticoats; and now I fear theyare drugs in the market. It is hard to say why a good story shouldnot have a fair chance of success whatever may be its bent; why itshould not be reckoned to be good by its own intrinsic merits alone;but such is by no means the case. I was waiting once, when I wasyoung at the work, in the back parlour of an eminent publisher,hoping to see his eminence on a small matter of business touchinga three-volumed manuscript which I held in my hand. The eminentpublisher, having probably larger fish to fry, could not see me, butsent his clerk or foreman to arrange the business.
"A novel, is it, sir?" said the foreman.
"Yes," I answered; "a novel."
"It depends very much on the subject," said the foreman, witha thoughtful and judicious frown--"upon the name, sir, and thesubject;--daily life, sir; that's what suits us; daily English life.Now your historical novel, sir, is not worth the paper it's writtenon."
I fear that Irish character is in these days considered almost asunattractive as historical incident; but, nevertheless, I will makethe attempt. I am now leaving the Green Isle and my old friends, andwould fain say a word of them as I do so. If I do not say that wordnow it will never be said.
The readability of a story should depend, one would say, on itsintrinsic merit rather than on the site of its adventures. Noone will think that Hampshire is better for such a purpose thanCumberland, or Essex than Leicestershire. What abstract objection canthere then be to the county Cork?
Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most beautiful partof Ireland is that which lies down in the extreme south-west, withfingers stretching far out into the Atlantic Ocean. This consists ofthe counties Cork and Kerry, or a portion, rather, of those counties.It contains Killarney, Glengarriffe, Bantry, and Inchigeela; andis watered by the Lee, the Blackwater, and the Flesk. I know notwhere is to be found a land more rich in all that constitutes theloveliness of scenery.
Within this district, but hardly within that portion of it which ismost attractive to tourists, is situated the house and domain ofCastle Richmond. The river Blackwater rises in the county Kerry, andrunning from west to east through the northern part of the countyCork, enters the county Waterford beyond Fermoy. In its course itpasses near the little town of Kanturk, and through the town ofMallow: Castle Richmond stands close upon its banks, within thebarony of Desmond, and in that Kanturk region through which theMallow and Killarney railway now passes, but which some thirteenyears since knew nothing of the navvy's spade, or even of theengineer's theodolite.
Castle Richmond was at this period the abode of Sir ThomasFitzgerald, who resided there, ever and always, with his wife, LadyFitzgerald, his two daughters, Mary and Emmeline Fitzgerald, and,as often as purposes of education and pleasure suited, with his sonHerbert Fitzgerald. Neither Sir Thomas nor Sir Thomas's house hadabout them any of those interesting picturesque faults which are sogenerally attributed to Irish landlords and Irish castles. He wasnot out of elbows, nor was he an absentee. Castle Richmond had noappearance of having been thrown out of its own windows. It was agood, substantial, modern family residence, built not more thanthirty years since by the late baronet, with a lawn sloping downto the river, with kitchen gardens and walls for fruit, with amplestables, and a clock over the entrance to the stable yard. It stoodin a well-timbered park duly stocked with deer,--and with foxes also,which are agricultural animals much more valuable in an Irish countythan deer. So that as regards its appearance Castle Richmond mighthave been in Hampshire or Essex; and as regards his property, SirThomas Fitzgerald might have been a Leicestershire baronet.
Here, at Castle Richmond, lived Sir Thomas with his wife anddaughters; and here, taking the period of our story as being exactlythirteen years since, his son Herbert was staying also in those hardwinter months; his Oxford degree having been taken, and his Englishpursuits admitting of a temporary sojourn in Ireland.
But Sir Thomas Fitzgerald was not the great man of that part of thecountry--at least, not the greatest man; nor was Lady Fitzgerald byany means the greatest lady. As this greatest lady, and the greatestman also, will, with their belongings, be among the most prominentof our dramatis personae, it may be well that I should not even say aword of them.
All the world must have heard of Desmond Court. It is the largestinhabited residence known in that part of the world, where rumoursare afloat of how it covers ten acres of ground; how in hewing thestones for it a whole mountain was cut away; how it should have costhundreds of thousands of pounds, only that the money was never paidby the rapacious, wicked, bloodthirsty old earl who caused it to beerected;--and how the cement was thickened with human blood. So goesrumour with the more romantic of the Celtic tale-bearers.
It is a huge place--huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built ata time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither beauty,aptitude, nor economy. It is three stories high, and stands round aquadrangle, in which there are two entrances opposite to each other.Nothing can be well uglier than that great paved court, in whichthere is not a spot of anything green, except where the damp hasproduced an unwholesome growth upon the stones; nothing can wellbe more desolate. And on the outside of the building matters arenot much better. There are no gardens close up to the house, noflower-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in atthe square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mileoff; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, withhardly a scrap around it which courtesy can call a lawn.
Here, at this period of ours, lived Clara, Countess of Desmond, widowof Patrick, once Earl of Desmond, and father of Patrick, now Earl ofDesmond. These Desmonds had once been mighty men in their country,ruling the people around them as serfs, and ruling them with hot ironrods. But those days were now long gone, and tradition told little ofthem that was true. How it had truly fared either with the earl, orwith their serfs, men did not well know; but stories were ever beingtold of walls built with human blood, and of the devil bearing offupon his shoulder a certain earl who was in any other way quiteunbearable, and depositing some small unburnt portion of his remainsfathoms deep below the soil in an old burying-ground near Kanturk.And there had been a good earl, as is always the case with suchfamilies; but even his virtues, according to tradition, had been of auseless namby-pamby sort. He had walked to the shrine of St. Finbar,up in the little island of the Gougane Barra, with unboiled peas inhis shoes; had forgiven his tenants five years' rent all round, andnever drank wine or washed himself after the death of his lady wife.
At the present moment the Desmonds were not so potent either forgood or ill. The late earl had chosen to live in London all his life,and had sunk down to be the toadying friend, or perhaps I shouldmore properly say the bullied flunky, of a sensual, wine-b
ibbing,gluttonous--king. Late in life, when he was broken in means andcharacter, he had married. The lady of his choice had been chosen asan heiress; but there had been some slip between that cup of fortuneand his lip; and she, proud and beautiful, for such she had been--hadneither relieved nor softened the poverty of her profligate old lord.
She was left at his death with two children, of whom the eldest,Lady Clara Desmond, will be the heroine of this story. The youngest,Patrick, now Earl of Desmond, was two years younger than his sister,and will make our acquaintance as a lad fresh from Eton.
In these days money was not plentiful with the Desmonds. Not butthat their estates were as wide almost as their renown, and that theDesmonds were still great people in the country's estimation. DesmondCourt stood in a bleak, unadorned region, almost among the mountains,half way between Kanturk and Maccoom, and the family had some claimto possession of the land for miles around. The earl of the day wasstill the head landlord of a huge district extending over the wholebarony of Desmond, and half the adjacent baronies of Muskerry andDuhallow; but the head landlord's rent in many cases hardly amountedto sixpence an acre, and even those sixpences did not always findtheir way into the earl's pocket. When the late earl had attainedhis sceptre, he might probably have been entitled to spend some tenthousand a year; but when he died, and during the years just previousto that, he had hardly been entitled to spend anything.
But, nevertheless, the Desmonds were great people, and owned a greatname. They had been kings once over those wild mountains; and wouldbe still, some said, if every one had his own. Their grandeur wasshown by the prevalence of their name. The barony in which they livedwas the barony of Desmond. The river which gave water to their cattlewas the river Desmond. The wretched, ragged, poverty-stricken villagenear their own dismantled gate was the town of Desmond. The earl wasEarl of Desmond--not Earl Desmond, mark you; and the family name wasDesmond. The grandfather of the present earl, who had repaired hisfortune by selling himself at the time of the Union, had been DesmondDesmond, Earl of Desmond.
The late earl, the friend of the most illustrious person in thekingdom, had not been utterly able to rob his heir of everything, orhe would undoubtedly have done so. At the age of twenty-one the youngearl would come into possession of the property, damaged certainly,as far as an actively evil father could damage it by long leases, badmanagement, lack of outlay, and rack-renting;--but still into thepossession of a considerable property. In the mean time it did notfare very well, in a pecuniary way, with Clara, the widowed countess,or with the Lady Clara, her daughter. The means at the widow'sdisposal were only those which the family trustees would allow heras the earl's mother: on his coming of age she would have almost nomeans of her own; and for her daughter no provision whatever had beenmade.
As this first chapter is devoted wholly to the locale of my story, Iwill not stop to say a word as to the persons or characters of eitherof these two ladies, leaving them, as I did the Castle Richmondfamily, to come forth upon the canvas as opportunity may offer. Butthere is another homestead in this same barony of Desmond, of whichand of its owner--as being its owner--I will say a word.
Hap House was also the property of a Fitzgerald. It had originallybeen built by an old Sir Simon Fitzgerald, for the use and behoofof a second son, and the present owner of it was the grandson ofthat man for whom it had been built. And old Sir Simon had givenhis offspring not only a house--he had endowed the house witha comfortable little slice of land, either cut from the largepatrimonial loaf, or else, as was more probable, collected togetherand separately baked for this younger branch of the family. Be thatas it may, Hap House had of late years been always regarded asconferring some seven or eight hundred a year upon its possessor, andwhen young Owen Fitzgerald succeeded to this property, on the deathof an uncle in the year 1843, he was regarded as a rich man to thatextent.
At that time he was some twenty-two years of age, and he came downfrom Dublin, where his friends had intended that he should practiseas a barrister, to set up for himself as a country gentleman. HapHouse was distant from Castle Richmond about four miles, standingalso on the river Blackwater, but nearer to Mallow. It was apleasant, comfortable residence, too large no doubt for such aproperty, as is so often the case in Ireland; surrounded by pleasantgrounds and pleasant gardens, with a gorse fox covert belonging tothe place within a mile of it, with a slated lodge, and a prettydrive along the river. At the age of twenty-two, Owen Fitzgerald cameinto all this; and as he at once resided upon the place, he came inalso for the good graces of all the mothers with unmarried daughtersin the county, and for the smiles also of many of the daughtersthemselves.
Sir Thomas and Lady Fitzgerald were not his uncle and aunt, butnevertheless they took kindly to him;--very kindly at first, thoughthat kindness after a while became less warm. He was the nearestrelation of the name; and should anything happen--as the fataldeath-foretelling phrase goes--to young Herbert Fitzgerald, he wouldbecome the heir of the family title and of the family place.
When I hear of a young man sitting down by himself as the master ofa household, without a wife, or even without a mother or sister toguide him, I always anticipate danger. If he does not go astray inany other way, he will probably mismanage his money matters. And thenthere are so many other ways. A house, if it be not made pleasant bydomestic pleasant things, must be made pleasant by pleasure. And abachelor's pleasures in his own house are always dangerous. There istoo much wine drunk at his dinner parties. His guests sit too longover their cards. The servants know that they want a mistress; and,in the absence of that mistress, the language of the householdbecomes loud and harsh--and sometimes improper. Young men among usseldom go quite straight in their course, unless they are, at anyrate occasionally, brought under the influence of tea and small talk.
There was no tea and small talk at Hap House, but there werehunting-dinners. Owen Fitzgerald was soon known for his horsesand his riding. He lived in the very centre of the Duhallow hunt;and before he had been six months owner of his property had builtadditional stables, with half a dozen loose boxes for his friends'nags. He had an eye, too, for a pretty girl--not always in the waythat is approved of by mothers with marriageable daughters; but inthe way of which they so decidedly disapprove.
And thus old ladies began to say bad things. Those pleasanthunting-dinners were spoken of as the Hap House orgies. It wasdeclared that men slept there half the day, having played cards allthe night; and dreadful tales were told. Of these tales one-half wasdoubtless false. But, alas, alas! what if one-half were also true?
It is undoubtedly a very dangerous thing for a young man oftwenty-two to keep house by himself, either in town or country.