Berna Boyle. A love story of the County Down

Chapter I

Reverse the glass of the nineteenth century, let the sands of time sift swiftly backwards for nearly thirty-four years, and I will show you a tiny village nestling among the green slopes of Down. But the merest hamlet ! Spite of the railway station less than a mile distant ; the post-office and public-house combined, situated just where the Comber Road branches off from the Newtonards ; the smithy hard by ; the church, perched aloft on one of those quaint low hills that have won for the county a not inapt comparison to a basket of eggs ; the police barracks, the remarkable-looking Rectory, the mail-car running along the highway twice a day, the Presbyterian meeting-house— surely, the smallest and most unpretending of picturesque villages 1 Only one side to it, and that extremely imperfect !

First a row of one-storied cottages, where dwelt the local cobbler and tailor, both deadly jealous of town ways and town notions. Then fields advanced boldly to the front, succeeded, after a short space, by the police barracks, a couple of its occupants, privates in the Irish constabulary, being generally encountered lounging on the footpath opposite. A little further, a few more cottages were scattered beside the road ; at the extreme E end of the village, beyond the lane which still winds up to the gate of the graveyard, stood proudly forth the shop, where nothing could be bought, it might have been supposed, that any human creature would desire to purchase. Close to the turning leading to the Rectory was a second smithy, for the neighbourhood was (and is) one much given to farming, and found constant need of a farrier's services ; a few detached houses, farm and otherwise, lay back from the left-hand side of the road— the right being skirted, as stated, by humble cottages ; the whole place looked green and white by reason of the green fields and the white-washed houses.

Up on the hillsides lay great masses of trees and belts of plantation, and higher still you could see roads winding over the heights whence lovely views were to be obtained of Belfast Lough, and the Antrim mountains, of Scrabo close at hand, and, on a clear day, a glimpse of Scotland — as the crow flies, little more than twenty miles distant from that extreme point of the county Down, close to which the English steamers plough their way, while, keeping between the Copelands and Donaghadee, they shape an almost direct course southward down the Channel. It was a summer's morning in the July of 1850 ; the barley and the flax both needed sun ; the potatoes, anxiously watched for signs of that fatal blight, could have borne any amount of heat and been the better for it. The grass had grown well and was more than ready for the scythe, and the rain was >coming down in torrents.

It was a morning to make sad the heart of any farmer. All through the district, from the Rectory to the hovel, there was " mourning and lamentation and woe :" the labourers could not work ; the horses were standing idle in the stable, eating their heads off. Masters and men, for once of one mind, looked mournfully out at the weather. Steadily the rain held on — dripping through the leaves, plashing into the pools, swelling the streams, soaking the earth. In the whole of that village there were no creatures happy but the ducks, which waddled about quacking, literally embarrassed by the wealth in the way of dirt Providence was providing for them. About a mile out of the village, in the Craigantlet direction, which is the nearest route to Bangor — not on the crest of the rising ground, that opens to any one who has patiently toiled up the long incline such an unexpected and magnificent stretch of sea, and mountain, and headland, and smiling, restful land ; but admirably placed on the slope of the hill, so as to be protected from the north-east wind— stood a house of some pretension.

It was enbowered in trees. It was approached by an avenue upon which the foot fell almost as noiselessly as on the turf of the lawn. There was a great silence about the place. When you entered the gate the world seemed left behind. It was an old mansion — once the Dower House of a noble family — but it had descended in the social scale, till it simply "went with the land" — was thrown in as a mere makeweight with the farm. Scarcely charged for in the rent — the tenant was continually grumbling concerning the expense entailed upon him by the "tumbledown old barrack" — where ladies in stomachers and farthingales, and patches and high heeled shoes, and powdered hair, once rustled through the wainscoted rooms ; and handsome gallants came wooing, and dark deeds, it was said, were done — notably one which caused the imprint of a blood-stained hand on the wall, and the drip of blood on the black oak staircase ; and the legend that now and then the ghost of a murdered woman might be seen by some human being more especially favoured than his fellows.

Through the years the house had been persistently falling from its once high estate. As the family to whom it belonged grew greater it grew less. Time went on, and the mansion, as the winters and summers came and went, got more and more dilapidated ; each successive tenant refused it even one poor coat of paint ; each occupier left it in worse plight than his predecessor. The ladies of the great family had long ceased to inhabit a nook so utterly out of the world. In London, or Bath, or Paris, or any other favourite resort, they spent the few pounds the Dower House brought them by way of rental. The memory of man could not extend to the time when a Dame Bountiful, residing under the shadow of those ancient trees, blessed the neighbourhood with her gracious presence. The former days were gone, and the prestige of the old Dower House with them.

It had sunk surely, if slowly. First it was let to a Newtonards man, who, having gone out to India without a penny, came back, to quote the country-side gossip, possessed of " millions and millions." Unfortunately, he brought back in addition a native wife and half a dozen dark-skinned black-eyed children, all of whom, being regarded as intruders, and treated as such, the " rajah " — so his neighbours generally called him — sold off his furniture, packed up his belongings, and took boat for England. Then a sporting character, in great request at mess and bachelor dinners, who, it was credibly asserted, fought mains of cocks in the dining room and had boxing matches in the great barn, remained in Ardilaw for the space of two years, at the expiration of which term he drank himself to death, greatly to the satisfaction of many worthy people.

After that the place was let for the summer to persons able to drive across to Holywood " for the bathing." Then it went down another step, and was rented by a Belfast shopkeeper, who wanted country air for his children, and grass where those children could tumble about and grow up wild. AVhen it had been knocked almost out of human recog nition by the young fry, their papa died ; his business collapsed, and Ardilaw was again in the market. This time a gentleman farmer thought he would essay a wrestle with the poor hill side land, and a contest with ignorance and the elements ; but five successive bad seasons, to say nothing of relays of in competent labourers and dishonest bailiffs, compelled his departure. For a year and four months the house stood empty. AVeeds grew rank in the orchard and kitchen garden, roses bloomed and faded in the parterres once tended by My Lady, moss covered the drive, the leaves lay where they had fallen on the lawn, from the windows no men's or women's eyes looked out upon a landscape destitute of the attraction of human life and human movement.

Some few persons came to view, but no one remained to rent. Then suddenly the whole village was astounded, and possibly shocked, to hear Hewson Muir, of Kilmoon Farm, had rented the Dower House — stock, lock, and barrel; land, water, wood, and bog — as tenant-at-will, under the great family, who " ought to have known better " than let the " old place to a man little more nor a labourer." Presumably the great family, like lesser families, understood its own business at least as well as its critics. It was a family which had its personal interests at heart, and always found a way, spite of settlements and entails, of getting rid of unre munerative and troublesome property. To cut a long story short, before Mr. Muir had been a year in possession, Ardilaw changed hands, and passed into the keeping of a certain Lyle Garnsey, commonly reported to be the " wickedest man in the county."

The sinister reputation of that gentleman who fought cocks in his dining-room, and hob-nobbed with the Heenan of his day, paled when contrasted against the scorching sins of Lyle Garnsey. In Mr. Garnsey's case distance lent enchantment to the view : what were a few cocks mangled and bleeding near Belfast in comparison with crimes committed in Dublin and London and " furrin parts " ? Over many a turf sire the misdoings of " the Squire " were spoken of with bated breath, the future of his only child, a daughter, discussed, and his own eventual destination more than hinted at. Between this new landlord and Mr. Muir the most friendly relations were soon established ; though the former was almost an infidel and the latter a red-hot Orangeman, though one was a Liberal and the other a Tory, Mr. Muir sternly maintained " ye might chance to meet worse nor Lyle Garnsey," while Mr. Garnsey was wont to declare he considered " Mr. Muir a most excellent person."

Twice a year, when he went to pay his rent, Mr. Muir dined at Beechfield, and it was a sight to behold him gravely accepting viands he did not like, served in a fashion to which he was not accustomed, from the hands of a footman who had much ado to conceal the disgust he felt at having to wait " upon such a fellow." The years went by, and Mr. Muir, at all events, made money out of Ardilaw. If nobody else had ever managed to ex tract a profit from the land, Mr. Muir did. He rarely worked himself, but he was without peer in the matter of seeing that other people " wrought " as they should. Sometimes he might have been seen guiding the plough, dressed in decent black, his coat a swallow-tail, and his shirt white as snow ; but, as a rule, he preferred watching the turning up of the clods, and following while some one else harrowed and cast seed into the ground.

He was tall, over six feet in height — " six feet two in my stocking soles," he often stated — of spare habit, long-limbed, loosely made, with no depth in his shoulders and no width across his chest ; a man who looked as if he had been thrown together instead of built ; a person no human being could have called handsome. On that wet July morning he stood beside one of the windows in the old wainscoted dining-room, splicing the handle of a gig whip and looking out at the weather. It was indeed, as has been said, a day to try the faith of any farmer. Ordi narily, Mr. Muir — as became a man who hated the Pope, and loved " Protestant Boys," Orange Lilies, and the rousing cry of " No Surrender !" — had sufficient faith in the wisdom and justice of his Maker; but as he watched the rain coming down faster and faster, the avenue getting wetter and wetter, the heavens growing darker and darker, he felt there must be something utterly wrong somewhere.

Could it possibly have happened (trying circumstances will give rise to doubt even in minds not ordinarily prone to scepticism) that Providence, finding the whole scheme of creation too vast for individual attention, had given Ireland, as regarded its weather, over to a sort of Viceregent, who was making as great a mess of physical matters as Lord Lieutenants usually do of political ? This was a view of the question which in the then state of the hay crop seemed to Mr. Muir so extremely probable, he felt he should have liked to " threep " it out with " some sensible person ;" but as there chanced to be no human being in the room except his eldest daughter "Bell," the farmer, though big with thought, decided he had best hold his tongue, " women folk being as a rule fools to talk to." Miss Bell Muir was a lady who might have been guessed at any age, according to the fancy of the spectator.

Really but six-and-twenty, she had that hard and battered appearance it is competent for even quite young women to assume who have always cultivated the utile to the exclusion of the duke. There was not much duke about Miss Muir. She never could be con sidered happy except when half-killing herself, and harassing everybody about her, with a perfect plague of labour. Like her fathei, she loved to see other persons hard at work ; unlike her father, nothing pleased her better than to work harder than them all. About the house she was a " besom of destruction." She .hought it the height of bliss to spend hours in a hurricane of sweeping, scouring, bustling, grumbling, scolding. On those evil occasions the cats were harried from the hearth ; the dogs, if they put their noses inside the kitchen door, were received with the contents of a pail of water ; chanticleer, leading his wives across the threshold with great cur-a-rooing and much uplifting of his feet like a high-stepping horse, had to retrace Ms way at a different pace and in a different fashion ; while Mr. Muir himself was constantly asked "if he couldn't come into the house some different road nor across the wet flags."

Not a labourer on the farm but knew and detested Saturday — till the evening, that is to say — when Bell, refreshed and satisfied with the results of her campaign against the powers of dirt, either took to baking griddle-bread, which scented the whole neighbourhood with a sweet wholesome smell; or else, when one of her sisters offered tomake"fadge," or wheaten or oaten cake, sat down to knit coarse stockings in a leisure so thoroughly earned. On that particular wet morning in July, Miss Muir, occasionally looking at her father askance, the while a certain bright and brisk number seven needle glanced in and out of some fine white " shirting," was adorned in the fullest war-paint she had ever assumed when merely arming herself for domestic conflict. It consisted of a clean and stiffly-starched print dress — colour, lilac; tone, dark; pattern, hideous; a calico apron, white as soft water and grass-bleeching could make and keep it; a small woollen shawl, checked black and red, pinned securely across her bosom ; and a linen cap, with two goffered borders made of the same uncompromising material, tied under her chin by a pair of linen strings about two inches wide, drawn into a cravat bow, framing her face till she looked like some sunburnt old baby.

This was Bell — the eldest female hope of Mr. Muir's three matrimonial essays — this was Bell, secretly dreaded even by her stern papa, who had not " much opinion of any of the sex" — meaning the softer portion of creation — this was Bell, so famous through all the country-side for her powers of work and management, that many a man had cast sheep's eyes upon her, and would have proposed long enough before, but for the knowledge that Miss Muir had a high opinion of her value '.n the matrimonial market, and for a doubt as to the amount wifa which Mr. Muir meant to endow her. " Carry's first steed in his stable," said many a canny father and mother, when discussing matters over with sons anxious to better their position ; " Carry and Robert '11 have the pick off Ardilaw. For all she's been to him, for all she's done for him, the old man hasn't the heart for Bell Muir he ought, considering there's not such a hand for butter in the county as hers."

It was the butter question Miss Muir was considering while she sat " working on " a new shirt of her father's. Nevertheless, magnanimously ignoring her own anxieties, she essayed to converse with her parent as he stood beside the window commanding a comprehensive view of the village, the lawn, the trees, the drive, and the rain. " Have you had any further word from Sam Dopp about the cottage ?" she asked, her voice sounding much older and harsher than the voice of so young a woman had any right to sound. " Ay — his brother came over yesterday between the lights, and said Sam would agree to rising the pound there was between us if I would put him up a pigstye ; but I told him I would do no such thing ; that if Sam wanted to keep pigs he must do it some place else than at my cottage." "Why, what ails you at the pigs, poor things?

AVhat would the Dopps do with all the leavings from so big a family without a pig to eat them up ?" "I don't know, and I don't care," answered Mr. Muir defiantly. " I'll neither have pigs rooting up the garden nor children destroying the clean papers and the fresh paint in the house. Mr. Orr made a sort of small paradise of the place, and if I can't get somebody that will keep it as it ought to be kept, why, it shall stay empty, that's all." Miss Muir put in a few energetic stitches before she observed, " You set great store by the cottage." " And what would hinder me to set great store by it ? AVhere could you find its like — a picture inside and out ? I just stood and looked at it the other day, and thought the man did right well to call it Clear Stream. The birds were singing, and the flowers were all abloom, and the air was scented with them, and the bit of grass was green as a fairy ring, and smooth and soft like the velvet in Miss Garnsey's mantilla, and the stream was running away under the plank bridge as hard as it could go, laughing back at the sun and making merry as it went ; and the myrtle-tree was a sheet of blossom — it looked for all the world as if there had been a heavy snowstorm ; and tufts of it were hanging so thick as to hide the polished green leaves — the very ground below the tree was white.

I made up my mind at that minute Dopp and his swarm of children should never spoil what Mr. Orr spent such a lot of time and thought over." " What are you going to do, then ? Let it stop idle till the wet is running down the walls, and the garden is a wilderness, and you might stand up to your middle in the grass ?" Mr. Muir winced a little; he knew such things had happened before, and he saw no great cause to doubt such things might happen again ; but still he replied with dogged determination, " I have not wholly decided ; only Dopp's not going to be any tenant of mine, and I told John as much." " Sam will be finely pleased when he hears the notion you have taken." " I don't care whether he's pleased or displeased ; and there's no reason that I'm aware of why I shouldn't have my way as well as another."

" You're right there; there is no reason at all." " Still, there is no call why the house should stand empty, if that can be helped ; so I've put an advertisement in the News Letter that Clear Stream Cottage, Dundonald, is to be rented by the year." " The whole of Belfast will be running after it," commented Miss Muir, with a fine sneer. " It may, but I hope it won't be on a day like this ;" and, having got a confession off his mind which had been weighing upon it, Mr. Muir resumed his occupation ; while Miss Muir, proceeding with her sewing, considered how she could " pay her father off for not letting the cottage to that decent man Sam Dopp." "It's 'teeming' still," she began, seizing the opportunity threading her needle afforded for changing her attitude and "looking fair" at the author of her being.

" An' the Lord alone knows when it intends to leave off," said Mr. Muir, so entirely suspending the business of splicing that the released length of string immediately uncoiled itself. " But what the deuce can ye expect when it rains on Sant Swethen's Day — Devil take him, whoever he was ! He couldn't have been much of a Sant, in my opinion, or he'd have given a thought to honest folk trying to make an honest living between and the north-east wind, as somebody says." "You don't believe in all that old story, I'm very sure, father," observed Miss Muir, who, like her surviving parent, had her own special form of scepticism. " What would hinder me believing it ? My father and my grandfather, and, I'm very sure, my great-grandfather before that, believed in St. Swethen's Day ; and I never was one to fly in the face of my elders.

AVhy wouldn't I — " " It's just a legend got up by the Romans for their own ends," persisted the lady. " Have your way in the matter, as I'm very sure you will," said Mr. Muir ; " but ye can't deny it mostly does rain on the fifteenth of July, Old Style—" "Ay, and it rains many an odd time besides," retorted Bell. "Well, it's an ill wind blows nobody good. If it hadn't been for the wet, you and Carline and Sail would have had to do the churning among ye this morning." " Me and Sail you mean ; it's little help, but disturbance, we'd have got from Carline." " AVhat's the young officer doing with himself now he can't limp out to the lawn or down to the river ?" asked Mr. Muir, discreetly changing the subject. " He's just painting the beech-tree from the passage window ; Carline carried him out a table, and set his things ready after breakfast ; and as for limping, he can put his foot to the ground as well as either of us when he likes.

I saw him yesterday going up the stairs three at a time, but he didn't know I was near. If he had, it's holding on by the baluster he'd have been, and groaning with the pain." Having completed which vivid outline, a vast deal more true to nature than any Ensign Ludham ever sketched, Miss Muir proceeded with her work, and left her father to fill in such details as pleased, or did not please, him at his leisure. " It's just awful to look at yon rain," observed the farmer, when he had quite finished splicing the whip, and stood, idly twisting the lash round the handle, looking out at the steady downpour which bade fair ere long to swell the rivers, and bring a second curse of water over the land. " It is that," agreed Miss Muir. " AVhat a pity you would mow that grass in the long meadow ! it'll every bit rot on the ground ; I doubt if it'll even come in for litter."

" Ye've a pleasant way of putting things, my woman." " AVell, what I say's true. You wouldn't have me tell you a lie, would you ?" " I'm not just so sure it's always agreeable to hear the truth." " AVe're not of the same way of thinking, then," observed Miss Muir, in a spirit of the sternest virtue. " I don't know that, either, Bell. For instance, if one said you were a very ordinary sort of woman to look at, it wouldn't be a lie ; but I doubt if you'd be best pleased, after all." " I never did set up to be anything beyond the common," returned Miss Muir, with a sublime composure, though her father's remark cut her to the quick. " Maybe it was just as well," retorted her father. On hearing which remark, Miss Muir — Christian name Isabella — rose with great dignity, and, observing, " As you are in the mind to pay me such fine compliments, I think I'll go and print the butter ; my hands are cool now," left the room.

" Your hands may be cool," soliloquised Mr. Muir, " but your temper isn't." An idea apparently so comforting that though, looking at the sodden earth, he again anathematised the good St. Swithin, it was not with half the fervour which distinguished his previous utterances.

Chapter II

A deluge of summer rain was sweeping the Belfast streets clean. Dawn had appeared, clad in delicate gray wrappings of sad misty cloud, and it is only fair to say the fulfilment of day did not belie the promise of morn. The sun remained resolutely out of sight, the heavens were leaden, the earth was sodden ; Devis, the Cave Hill, and the Black Mountain had not merely "put their nightcaps on," but retired altogether from view. A good stream, swift as a mountain torrent, was running down each filthy gutter. On Lettuce and Carrick Hills rosy, curly-headed, barefooted children were in the turbid water which rushed to flush the sewers, disporting themselves like ducklings. Upon the Crumlin Road, past the Court-house, where Justice — her eyes bandaged with a stone fillet — sits high aloft, holding her scales, utterly crooked, car-drivers, with shout and whip, urged fast horses recklessly ; Hercules Street, then lined with butchers' shops, was foul with garbage, borne onward to the gullies ; in Sandy Row peace reigned ; the weather was so bad the Orangemen had not a thought to spare for their friend Pious William or their foe the Pope ; at the Docks wretchedness unspeakable prevailed, miserable cattle awaiting shipment were penned together in sheds open to wind and rain ; in the air there was that raw, moist chilli ness which makes the Irish climate so trying ; the Lough resembled a sea of liquid mud, where white-crested billows tossed restlessly ; the soft green slopes of Down and the bold scenery of Antrim were alike impartially hidden from mortal eye.

Belfast was looking its worst — and that worst can be very bad indeed — on the dreary summer's morning when Mr. Muir stood splicing the handle of his whip and contemplating the pouring rain, and thinking of his rotting hay, and saying injurious things concerning St. Swithin. In a room on the first floor of Cunningham's Hotel, which commanded the spectacle of York and Donegall Streets being swept by " sheets " of rain, sat two ladies dressed in deep mourning. Not the slightest likeness could be traced between them, yet they stood in the relation of mother and daughter. The latter was tall ; her complexion pale, with the delicate creamy pallor of Mary's lilies ; her eyes large, liquid, and of that dark deep blue rarely seen out of Ireland, shaded with long brown lashes that would have made them at times look black, had it not been for their tender melting softness ; her face was of the truest shape of Irish beauty, narrowing somewhat to a perfect chin.

(Those of my readers who have seen at Hardwicke Castle the portrait of that famous lady, Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, will understand what I mean.) Her forehead was broad, not high ; her nose short, straight, and decided ; her upper lip short also, and perhaps a trifle scornful, telling of a latent pride which might have been fully developed in her character had circumstances proved propitious ; her mouth — but ah, how can I — with the mists of years rising between that frank sweet mouth, with its thousand suggested loves and griefs, and to-day — hope, through the cold, hard medium of pen and ink, to do justice to that most exquisite mouth ! The light and shadows playing at hide-and-seek on a hillside, or chasing each other over the water, or coming and going, flickering and changing on the turf through a tracery of green leaves, could not have told more surely the story of cloud and sunshine than did the sweet lips and the sensitive curves reveal, to an understanding eye, the joy or the trouble agitating the girl's young heart.

For though she had known bitter sorrow, and shed those salt tears wrang from the deepest depths of human suffering, the anguish of which can never be quite forgotten during the happiest after experience, she was still young — little more than seventeen — with only her face for her fortune, a face which, in the opinion of her mother, could by the most partial individual only be considered a most con temptible dowry. Twenty years previously Mrs. Boyle's beauty had been of the pink shepherdess type ; what it was on that wet morning when, after an absence long as the period of her married life, she sat looking at the dreary vista of York Street, swept by driving rain, might have tried the courtesy of her old admirers to say. Under the most favourable circumstances it is a style too apt to fade, and certainly the widow had faded a good deal.