Sir Jasper Carew: His Life and Experience. Lever Charles James

XII. SHOWING THAT “WHAT IS CRADLED IN SHAME IS HEARSED IN

      SORROW.”

      Accustomed all his life to the flattery which surrounds a position of some eminence, my father was not a little piqued at the coldness of his friends during his illness. The inquiries after him were neither numerous nor hearty. Some had called once or twice to ask how he was; others had written brief excuses for their absence; and many contented themselves with hearing that it was a slight attack, which a few days would see the end of. Perhaps there were not many men in the kingdom less given to take umbrage at trifles than my father. Naturally disposed to take the bold and open line of action in every affair of life, he never suspected the possibility of a covert insult; and that any one could cherish ill-feeling to another, without a palpable avowal of hostility, was a thing above his conception. At any other time, therefore, this negligence, or indifference, or whatever it was, would not have occasioned him a moment’s unpleasantness. He would have explained it to himself in a dozen ways, if it ever occurred to him to require explanation. Now, however, he was irritable from the effects of a malady peculiarly disposed to ruffle nervous susceptibility; while the chagrin of the late Viceregal visit, and its abrupt termination, was still over him. There are little eras in the lives of the best-tempered men, when everything is viewed in wrong and discordant colors, and when, by a perverse ingenuity, they seek out reasons for their own unhappiness in events and incidents that have no possible bearing on the question. Having once persuaded himself that his friends were faithless to him, he set about accounting for it by every casuistry he could think of. I have lived too long abroad; I have mixed too much in the great world, thought he, to be able to conform to this small and narrow circle. I am not local enough for them. I cannot trade on the petty prejudices they love to cherish, and which they foolishly think means being national. My wider views of life are a rebuke to their pettiness; and it ‘s clear we do not suit each other. To preserve my popularity I should have lived at home, and married at home; never soared beyond a topic of Irish growth, and voted at the tail of those two or three great men who comprise within themselves all that we know of Irish independence. “Even idolatry would be dear at that price,” cried he, aloud, at the end of his reflections, – bitter and unpleasant reveries in which he had been sunk as he travelled up to town some few days after the events related in the last chapter.

      Matters of business with his law agent had called him to the capital, where he expected to be detained for a day or two. My mother had not accompanied him, her state of health at the time requiring rest and quietude. Alone, an invalid, and in a frame of, to him, unusual depression, he arrived at his hotel at nightfall. It was not the “Drogheda Arms,” where he stopped habitually, but the “Clare,” a smaller and less frequented house in the same street, and where he hoped to avoid meeting with his ordinary acquaintances.

      Vexed with everything, even to the climate, to which he wrongfully ascribed the return of his malady, he was bent on making immediate arrangements to leave Ireland, and forever. His pecuniary affairs were, it is true, in a condition of great difficulty and embarrassment; still, with every deduction, a very large income, or at least what for the Continent would be thought so, would remain; and with this he determined to go abroad and seek out some spot more congenial to his tastes and likings, and, as he also fancied, more favorable to his health.

      The hotel was almost full, and my father with difficulty obtained a couple of rooms; and even for these he was obliged to await the departure of the occupant, which he was assured would take place immediately. In the mean while, he had ordered his supper in the coffee-room, where now he was seated, in one of those gloomy looking stalls which in those times were supposed to comprise all that could be desired of comfort and isolation.

      It was, indeed, a new thing for him to find himself thus, – he, the rich, the flattered, the high-spirited, the centre of so much worship and adulation, whose word was law upon the turf, and whose caprices gave the tone to fashion, the solitary occupant of a dimly lighted division in a public coffee-room, undistinguished and unknown. There was something in the abrupt indifference of the waiter that actually pleased him, ministering, as it did, to the self-tormentings of his reflections. All seemed to say, “This is what you become when stripped of the accidents of wealth and fortune, – these are your real claims.” There was no deference to him there. He had asked for the newspaper, and been curtly informed “that ‘Falkner’ was engaged by the gentleman in the next box;” so was he left to his own lucubrations, broken in upon only by the drowsy, monotonous tone of his neighbor in the adjoining stall, who was reading out the paper to a friend. Either the reader had warmed into a more distinct elocution, or my father’s ears had become more susceptible by habit, but at length he found himself enabled to overhear the contents of the journal, which seemed to be a rather flippant criticism on a late debate in the Irish House of Commons.

      A motion had been made by the Member for Cavan for leave to bring in a bill to build ships of war for Ireland, – a proposition so palpably declaring a separate and independent nationality that it not only incurred the direct opposition of Government, but actually met with the disapprobation of the chief men of the Liberal party, who saw all the injury that must accrue to just and reasonable demands, by a course of policy thus exaggerated. “Falkner” went even further; for he alleged that the motion was a trick of the Castle party, who were delighted to see the patriots hastening their own destruction, by a line of action little short of treason. The arguments of the journalist in support of this view were numerous and acute. He alleged the utter impossibility of the measure ever being accepted by the House, or sanctioned by the Crown. He showed its insufficiency for the objects proposed, were it even to become law; and, lastly, he proceeded to display all the advantages the Government might derive from every passing source of disunion amongst the Irish party, – schisms which, however insignificant at first, were daily widening into fatal breaches of all confidence. His last argument was based on the fact that had the Ministry anticipated any serious trouble by the discussion, they would never have displayed such utter indifference about mustering their forces. “We saw not,” said the writer, “the accustomed names of Townley, Tisdale, Loftus, Skeffington, and fifty more such, on the division. Old Roach did n’t whistle up one of his pack, but hunted down the game with the fat poodles that waddle after the Viceroy through the Castle-yard.”

      “M’Cleary had a caricature of the Portland hunt this morning in his window,” cried the listener; “and capital likenesses there are of Bob Uniack and Vandeleur. Morris, too, is represented by a lame dog that stands on a little eminence and barks vigorously, but makes no effort to follow the chase.”

      “Much they care for all the ridicule and all the obloquy you can throw on them,” replied the reader. “They well know that the pensions and peerages that await them will survive newspaper abuse, though every word of it was true as Gospel. Now, here’s a list of them alphabetically arranged; and will you tell me how many will read or remember one line of them a dozen years hence? Besides, there is a kind of exaggeration in these attacks that deprives them of credit; when you read such stories as that of Carew, for instance, throwing a main with the dice to decide whether or not he’d vote with the Government.”

      “I would not say that it was impossible, however,” broke in the other. “Carew’s a confirmed gambler, and we know what that means; and as to his having a particle of principle, if Rutledge’s story be true, he has done far worse than this.”

      My father tried to arise from his seat; he even attempted to call out, and impose silence on those whose next words might possibly contain an insult irreparable forever: but he could not do either; a cold sweat broke over him, and he sat powerless and almost fainting, while they continued: —

      “I’d be slow to take Master Bob’s word, either in praise or dispraise of any man,” said the first speaker.

      “So should I, if he could make it the subject of a wager,” said the other; “but here is a case quite removed from all chance of the betting-ring.”

      “And what does it amount to, if true?” said the other. “He married somebody’s illegitimate daughter. Look at the peerage; look at one half the small sovereignties of Europe.”

      “That’s not the worst of it at all,” broke in the former. “It was the way he got his wife.”

      “Then