"You"d scarcely guess what brought her here. It was to make over to you, as the rightful owner, the property on the Arran Islands. We explained to her that it was a distinct deed of gift--that your late father bequeathed it to her as a means of support--for she has really nothing else--and that legally her claim was una.s.sailable. She was not to be shaken from her resolution. No matter how we put the case--either as one of law or as one of necessity, for it is a necessity--her invariable reply was, "My mind is made up, and on grounds very different from any you have touched on;" and she left us with full directions to make the requisite conveyances of the estate in your favour. I entreated her to defer her final determination for a week or two, and all I could obtain was a promise that if she should change her mind between that time and the day of signing the papers, she would let me know it. She has also given us directions about taking a pa.s.sage for her to Australia; she is going out to seek occupation as a governess if she can, as a servant if she must."
Harry started, and grew pale and red by turns as the other said this. He thought, indeed, there was some want of delicacy in thus talking to him of one so nearly allied to him. His ignorance of life, and the Irish attachment to kindred together, made him feel the speech a harsh one.
"How will it be, Sir," asked he, curtly, "if I refuse to accept this cession?"
"The law has no means of enforcing it, Sir. There is no statute which compels a man to take an estate against his will. She, however, can no more be bound to retain, than you to receive, this property."
"We had three hours" talk," said Harry, in writing this to Captain Dodge, "and I ascertained that this very property she is now so anxious to be free of, had formed up to this the pride and enjoyment of her life. She had laboured incessantly to improve it, and the condition of the people who lived on it. She had built a schoolhouse and a small hospital, and, strange enough, too, a little inn, for the place was in request with tourists, who now found they could make their visits with comfort and convenience. Cane also showed me the drawing of a monument to my father"s memory, the "Last Luttrell of Arran," she called him; and I own I was amazed at the simple elegance and taste of the design made by this poor peasant girl. Even if all these had not shown me that our old home has fallen into worthy hands, I feel determined not to be outdone in generosity by this daughter of the people. She shall see that a Luttrell understands his name and his station. I have told Cane to inform her that I distinctly refuse to accept the cession; she may endow her school or her hospital with it; she may part.i.tion it out amongst the cottier occupiers; she may leave it--I believe I said so in my warmth--to be worked out in ma.s.ses for her soul--if she be still a Catholic--if all this while none of her own kith and kin are in want of a.s.sistance; and certainly times must have greatly changed with them if it be not so. At all events, I"ll not accept it.
"I own to you I was proud to think of the high-hearted girl, bred up in poverty, and tried by the terrible test of "adoption" to forget her humble origin. It was very fine and very n.o.ble of her, and only that I fear if I were to see her the illusion might be destroyed, and some coa.r.s.e-featured, vulgar creature rout for ever the pleasant image my mind has formed, I"d certainly make her a visit. Cane presses me much to do so, but I will not. I shall go over to the island to see the last resting-place of my poor father, and then leave it for ever. I have made Cane give me his word of honour not to divulge my secret, nor even admit that he has more than seen me, and I intend to-morrow to set but for Arran.
"I asked Cane, when I was leaving him, what she was like, and he laughingly answered, "Can"t you imagine it?" And so I see I was right.
They were a wild, fierce, proud set, all these of my mother"s family, with plenty of traditions amongst them of heavy retributions exacted for wrongs, and they were a strong, well-grown, and well-featured race, but, after all, not the stuff of which ladies and gentlemen are made in _my_ country at least. _You_ have told me a different story as regards _yours_.
"You shall hear from me from the island if I remain there longer than a day, but, if my present mood endure, that event is very unlikely."
CHAPTER LXIV. ON THE ISLAND
It was late at night when Harry landed on Arran. Dark as it was, however, his sailor"s eye could mark that the little jetty was in trim order, and that steps now led down to the water where formerly it was necessary to clamber over rugged rocks and slippery seaweed. A boatman took his carpet-bag as matter of course, too, as he stepped on sh.o.r.e, and trifling as was the service, it had a certain significance as to the advance of civilisation in that wild spot. More striking, again, than these was the aspect of the comfortable little inn into which he was ushered. Small and unpretending, indeed, but very clean, and not dest.i.tute of little ornaments, sketches of the scenery of the island, and specimens of ore, or curious rock, or strange fern, that were to be found there. A few books, too, were scattered about, some of them presents from former visitors, with graceful testimonies of the pleasure they had found in the trip to Arran, and how gratefully they cherished the memory of its simple people.
Harry amused himself turning over these, as he sat at the great turf fire waiting for his supper. Of those who served him there was not one he recognised. Their looks and their language bespoke them as belonging to the mainland, but they spoke of the island with pride, and told how, in the season, about July or August, as many as fifteen or twenty strangers occasionally came over to visit it.
"There _was_ a day," said the man, "in the late Mr. Luttrell"s time, when n.o.body dare come here; he"d as soon see ould Nick as a stranger; and if a boat was to put in out of bad weather, or the like, the first moment the wind would drop ever so little, down would come a message to tell them to be off."
Harry shook his head; an unconscious protest of dissent it was, but the other, interpreting the sign as condemnation, went on:
"Ay, he was a hard man! But they tell me it wasn"t his fault; the world went wrong with him, and he turned against it."
"He had a son, hadn"t he?" asked Harry.
"He had, Sir. I never saw him, but they tell me he was a fine boy, and when he was only ten years old, got a broken arm fighting with a seal in one of the caves on the sh.o.r.e; and, what"s more, he didn"t like to own it, because the seal got away from him."
"What became of him?"
"He was lost at sea, Sir. I believe he turned pirate or slaver himself, and it was no great matter what became of him. They were all unlucky men and women. No one ever heard of a Luttrell coming to good yet."
"That"s a hard sentence."
"You"d not think so, Sir, if you knew them; at least, so the men tell me about here. They liked the man that was here last well enough, but they said that nothing he could do would ever prosper."
"And who owns it now?"
"Kitty O"Hara that was--Neal O"Hara"s daughter--he that was transported long ago--she"s now the mistress of the whole island, and her name--she took it by his will--is Luttrell--Luttrell of Arran!"
"Do the people like her?"
"Why wouldn"t they like her? Isn"t she working and slaving for them all day long, nursing them at the hospital, visiting them in their cabins, teaching them in the school, getting them seed potatoes from Belmullet, and hasn"t she set up a store there on the sh.o.r.e, where they can buy pitch, and hemp, and sailcloth, and all kinds of cordage, for less than half what it costs at Castlebar?" "How has she money to do all this?"
"Just because she lives like the rest of us. Sorrow bit better dinner or supper she has, and it"s a red cloak she wears, like Molly Ryan, and she makes her own shoes, and purtier ones you never looked at." "And who taught her to manage all this so cleverly?" "She taught herself ont of books; she reads all night through. Come here, now, Sir! Do you see that light there? That"s her window, and there she"ll be till, maybe, nigh five o"clock, stodyin" hard. Molly says there"s nights she never goes to bed at all." "That light comes from the tower."
"So it does, Sir, however you knew it," said the man; "but it was the favourite room of him that"s gone, and she always sits there." "And are strangers permitted to see the Abbey?" asked Harry. "Yes, Sir. All they"ve to do is to write their names in this book and send up a message that they want to see the place, and they"d see every bit of it but the two little rooms Mr. Luttrell that was used to keep for himself."
"And if one wished to see these also?"
"He couldn"t do it, that"s all; at least, I"d not be the man that axed her leave!"
"Take my name up there in the morning," said Harry, as he wrote "H.
Hamilton" in the book, that being a second name by which he was called after his father, though he had long ceased to use it.
The supper made its appearance at this moment, and little other conversation pa.s.sed between them. As the man came and went, however, he continued to speak of Miss Luttrell, and all she had done for the people in terms of warmest praise, winding up all with the remark, "That no one who had not lived the life of hardship and struggle of a poor person could ever be able to know what were the wants that press hardest--what the privations that cut deepest into the nature of the poor. And that"s the reason," he said, "that she"ll never let any one be cruel to the children, for it was as a child herself she knew sorrow!"
Long after the man had left him, Harry sat at the fire thinking over all he had heard. Nor was it, let us own, without a certain irritation that he thought of the contrast the man drew between his father and this girl--his father, the man of mind and intellect, the scholar, the orator, the man whose early career had been a blaze of success, and yet all his acquirements and all his knowledge paled beside the active energy of a mere peasant. The reflection pained him; it chafed him sorely to admit, even to his own heart, that birth and blood were not always the superiors, and he causistically suspected that much of the praise he had heard bestowed upon this girl was little other than the reflex of that selfish esteem the people felt for qualities like their own.
And out of these confused and conflicting thoughts he set to work to paint her to his mind and imagine what she most be. He pictured her a coa.r.s.e, masculine, determined woman; active, courageous, and full of expedients, with some ability, but far more of self-confidence, the great quality of those who have been their own teachers. From what Mr.
Cane had told him, she was one who could take a proud view of life and its duties. That very resolve to cede the property, when she heard that there was yet a Luttrell alive to inherit it, showed that there was stuff of no mean order in her nature. "And yet," he thought, "all this could consist with vulgar looks and vulgar manners, and a coa.r.s.eness of feeling that would be repugnant." With these imaginings he went to bed, and dreamed the whole night through of this girl.
"Have you taken my message up to the Abbey?" asked he, as he sat at breakfast.
"Yes, Sir; and Miss Luttrell says you are to go where you like. She"s off to the far part of the island this morning to see a woman in fever, and won"t be back till night."
"Then perhaps I may be able to see those two rooms you spoke of?"
The man shook his head in silence, perhaps not over-pleased at the obstinacy of the stranger to investigate what was deemed sacred.
"I want no guide," said Harry. "I see the Abbey, and I"ll find my own way to it."
And with these words he sauntered along, every step and every stone of the path familiar to him. As he drew nigh he saw some changes. The railing of the little garden had been repaired, and the garden itself was better tilled than of yore, and close by the wall of the Abbey, where shelter favoured, a few flowers were growing, and some attempt there seemed making to train a creeper to reach the window-sill.
Molly Ryan was out, and a strange face that Harry knew not received him at the door, leaving him, as he entered, to go where he pleased, simply saying, "There"s the way to the Abbey, and that"s where _she_ lives!"
He turned first to the aisle of the church, paved with the tombstones of bygone Luttrells, and where now a cross in blue limestone marked his father"s grave. The inscription was, "To the Memory of the Last of the Luttrells, by one who loved him, but not merited his love."
"Strange that she should have said so," thought he, as he sat down upon the stone. But it was soon of the long past his mind was filled with. Of the days of his boyhood, no happy, careless, sunny youth was it, but a time of loneliness and sorrow--of long solitary rambles through the island, and a return at nightfall to a home of melancholy and gloom. He bethought him of his poor mother"s tears as they would fall hot upon his face, and the few words, stern and harsh, his father would meet him with; and yet, now in his utter desolation, what would he not give to hear that voice again whose accents were wont to terrify him?--what would he not give to see the face whose slightest sign of reproof had once overwhelmed him with shame?
How fervently, how faithfully, will the heart cling to some memory of kindness for those whose severity had once been almost a terror! What a sifting process do our affections go through where death has come, tearing away the recollections of what once had grieved and pained us, and leaving only the memory of the blessed word that healed, of the loving look that rallied us. John Luttrell had been a hard, stern, unforgiving man; it was but seldom that he suffered his heart to sway him, but there had been moments when his love overcame him, and it was of these Harry now bethought him, and it was in such guise he pictured his father now before him.
"Oh! if he were here to welcome me back--to let me feel I was not homeless in the world--what a moment of joy and happiness had this been!" How keen can sorrow make memory. There was not a little pa.s.sing word of praise his father ever spoke--there was not a kindly look, not a little gesture of fondness, that did not recur to him as he sat there and wept.
With slow steps and heavy heart he turned into the house, and sought the little room where his father usually sat during the day. There was the great old chair of bog oak, and there the ma.s.sive table, and over the fireplace the great two-handed sword, and the stone-headed javelin crosswise over the ox-hide shield; all these he knew, but other objects there were new and strange to him--so strange, that he could not but wonder at them. A half-finished water-colour on an easel, done by no common hand, was at one side of the window, and in a deep chair, as though left hurriedly there, was a guitar. Music, and pen sketches, and books, were strewn about, and a solitary rose in a gla.s.s of water bore an almost painful testimony to the rareness of flowers on the spot.
A basket of some sewing work--capes of frieze for her school children--stood beside the fire. It was plain to see that this peasant girl had caught up tastes and pursuits which belong to another sphere, and Harry pondered over it, and questioned himself if she were the happier for this cultivation. "Was it better for her, or worse, to be endowed with what, in imparting a resource, removes a sympathy?"
Seated on the little window-stool--the same spot where he had often sat silent for hours--he fell into a train of melancholy thought. His poor father--the broken-down, crushed man, without a companion or a friend--rose before his mind, and filled each spot he turned to, and it was with a feeling of deep self-reproach he recalled how he himself had left him--deserted him, he called it now--to live on in sorrow and die forlorn. Out of this dreamy half-stupor he was roused by the woman hurriedly telling him that her mistress was, coming up the path to the house, and entreating him to go away before she entered.
He arose at once, and, pa.s.sing through the kitchen, issued forth by the back of the Abbey at the very instant that Kate crossed the door.