An enthusiast

Front matter

3V e.(E.SOM€R^ILLe

GIFT OF ^

The Friends of The Bancroft Library

Preface

There is something arrogant, if not offensive, in an attitude of Impartiality, and to he strictly impartial is to be equally disliked by all sides. In trying to keep an even keel in very stormy seas I have risked this disaster.

The people in this story all view Ireland from different angles, and each speaks for him or herself, and not for me.

On one point only are we all agreed — in love for the country that bore its, that ardent country in which the cold virtue of Impartiality is practically unknown.

E. CE. S.

May, ig2i.

Chapter I

Daniel Henry Palliser, long and gaunt and unshaven, in the bedroom array of unfinished influenza, defied his nurse, and, getting out of bed, accepted, perforce, the stout arm that she proffered, and tottered to the window to watch events.

These had now culminated. The sound of feet in the passages and on the stairs, first hurrying, finally burdened and shuffling, had ceased. The focus of interest was transferred from his father's bedroom to the broad gravelled space outside the hall door. Dan looked down, interested, and, as it seemed to him, unmoved. He couldn't understand himself. ' It isn't as if I didn't care,' he thought, apologising to his conscience on behalf of his heart, ' I used to feel it awfully when I said good-bye to him going back to the trenches.'

In the middle of the crowd, under Dan's window, of men and women and carriages and horsemen, was something that took and held the searching sunlight of a north-westerly March day. A Union Jack, its coarse red, white, and blue shouting to Dan its long story of victory, while it hid the coffin that was taking his father away from the life that had ended for him in what had virtually been defeat. Eight men separated themselves from the throng and ranged themselves by the bier. The old Coloners shining brass-scabbarded sword, and the shako of a long-past soldiering day, lay on the coffin. A girl placed an immense cross of blazing yellow daffodils upon the gaudy flag that intensified, if that were possible, its gaudiness.

Two black figures, Dan's mother and his cousin, Eileen Caulfield, the girl who had brought the cross, stood in an open space behind the coffin ; round them were gathered a circle of discs that represented to Dan the sky-ward aspects of the top-hats of uncles and cousins ; his father's younger brother. Sir James PalHser, K.C.M.G., and his son Ralph ; his mother's three brothers. Admiral Richard Caulfield, C.B., the Rev. Horace Caulfield, Mr. Trevor Caulfield. Gradually Dan identified them all, and tried not to feel indecently thankful that he was not among them.

Thronging round the top-hats were the men and women who had been Colonel Palliser's tenants. There was a hearse, but it was filled with flowers ; the men who had been his tenants had claimed the right to carry to his grave the man who had been their landlord.

The bearers braced themselves to their load and started, and from the hooded tenant-women rose the caoine, the Irish cry, a sound torturing in its poignancy, violent, desolating.

Dan, made feeble by illness, felt it physically ; it was like a stab of actual pain ; yet he thought, gloryingly, * They are keening him ! . . . I wonder if he hears. . . . He wouldn't care very much, but I do ! . . . They haven't given us up yet ! They know our hearts are Irish, even though our name isn't ! In spite of Sinn Fein, they haven't given up the Old Stock ! '

Between the bare trees the long procession went.

Many more carriages, motors, carts, and riders, came forth from the yard and the back avenue where they had bided their time, and followed, crawHng in the wake of the foot-people. In South and West Munster the true greatness of a funeral is measured by the number of riders. Colonel Henry Daniel Palliser was escorted from Monalour House to the vault in the old burying place by close on a hundred horsemen.

Dan stood watching the dancing, springy rise and fall of the single spot of brilliance in all that dark crowd. It was as if the brightest of the summer flower-beds had taken to itself legs and w^as gaily setting forth to see the world. The leafless branches bent in the gusts of wind that swept across the wide spaces of grass beyond the drive. The black cloud that had lain in wait behind the trees, beyond the lake, rushed up with the wind and hid the sun. The Union Jack, and the flashing scabbard, and the blazing daffodils, passed in shadow out of sight.

Dan did not wait, as did his nurse, to count the carriages and the riders. He walked shakily back to his bed, and felt that his temperature had gone up again and that intelligent thought was beyond his reach. He had never known his father other than as an old man ; he had loved him, not tremendously, but sincerely. His last distinct reflection was a congratulation to himself that his mother need never know that he had been unable to shed a tear. His mother hked things to be done decently and in order. Internal weeping was useless, and of no credit or advantage to anyone.

The position of landless landlord is now a familiar one. As young horses of this generation accept with

4 AN p:nthusiast

calm the bicycles and motors to which their parents died unreconciled, so did Daniel Henry PalHser step into the shoes that had caused acute suffering to his father, and find them endurable. What he found less endurable was the determination of his mother and his uncles to polish those shoes, to lace them up tightly, to act, as it were, the part of boot trees, and to keep them in shape, without reference to their new owner.

On the day when Dan first was well enough to go downstairs, it happened that his mother had convened a family council of such of her brothers as had temporarily assembled in honour of her husband's funeral. Dan, walking weakly into the drawing-room, already fatigued by the effort of coming downstairs, his forces all set towards the big sofa by the fireplace, and peace, found the big sofa covered with uncles, and a female cousin and two aunts-in-law encircling his mother and the tea-table.

' Why here's the Man of the House himself ! ' exclaimed Aunt Eleanor, with an attempt, ponderous as herself, at a touch of festivity in her welcome. She took Dan's large, bony hand, yellow and flabby from illness, and dragged him down to her level, protruding her lightly moustached lips until they touched his cheek.

Deep sounds came from three uncles on the sofa. Formless because of cake, but cordial.

' Can't get up, dear boy,' said Uncle Dick, the Admiral. ' Should capsize my tea if I stirred — very glad to see you down again ! '

Assenting murmurs, as from bumble-bees in the hearts of flowers, arose from the tea-cups of the remaining uncles, and blended with Dan's acknowledgments, drowned them in fact ; but the mutual good intention was sufficiently obvious.

Dan was six feet three inches in height ; squareshouldered, and long-legged. Although he was now six and twenty, he was still singularly unaware of his personal advantages, being, as a rule, engrossed in other and, as it seemed to him, more important matters. To-day, he felt that influenza had unnerved iiim for the eftort of looking down upon a roomful of seated people from that altitude where, like a star, he dwelt apart ; baulked of his anticipated sofa, he lowered himself to the fender-stool, coiling into an invertebrate heap upon it, as treacle pours from a spoon, and thought with anguish of his lonely bedroom fire.

' You'll have to let the house Georgina,' said Uncle Horace, in evident pursuance of an earlier theme. * Think of the Death Duties ! I simply ask you, my dear Georgina, to think of them ! '

Georgina, who was Dan's mother, replied grimly, and with some pardonable exaggeration, that she never thought of anything else, and — ■

But her brother, the Rev. Horace Caulfield, who had only paused oratorically, and disliked interruption, being unused to it either at home or in the pulpit, raised an arresting hand.

* Let the house ! ' he repeated. ' Dismiss the servants,

and the farm-people ' (he glanced at his nephew).

' Look at the position ! You ask me " What is to be done ? " ' Uncle Horace looked commandingly at his sister. Uncle Horace was the rector of a parish in a neighbouring county, and was an autocrat.

Nothing was farther from Mrs. Palliser's mind than asking for advice, except, perhaps, taking it, and her brother, being well aware of an idiosyncrasy which he shared with her, hurried on with his pronouncement.

* Go to London, take a little flat there, and hve within your means ! ' His eye met that of his nephew, and, with an artist's regret for a marred peroration, he added ' Ahem ! and you too, Dan ! '

' No thanks,' said Dan ; but since the uncles on the sofa were warmly expressing agreement, his dissent attracted no attention, and was not even heard by Aunt Sophie, Uncle Horace's wife, who was sitting near him in a tiny chair at the corner of the fireplace.

* But what will poor Dan do in London ? ' said Aunt Sophie, who was an almost imperceptible little Englishwoman, and was barely visible when Uncle Horace was in the room.

Dan shot a look at her from under his dark brows. It was amusing that little Aunt Sophie should step out as his champion. He liked her ; she seldom walked over him, and when she did she took off her boots ; unlike the rest of them, he thought.

* What will the robin do then, poor thing ? ' murmured Eileen Caulfield, the Admiral's daughter, catching Dan's eye.

Dan laughed, not because he was amused, but because he felt he was getting angry, and he did not wish it to be recognised.

His mother had heard Eileen's comment and Dan's laugh, and disapproved of both. She was in the habit of disapproving of most things that young people did or said.

* Dan must judge for himself,' she said coldly.

* I won't go to London,' said Dan, on the lowest note of his register, sinking deeper into his coils.

He abhorred this public discussion of what was to be done with the house, the land, the home, that were, after all, his. Uncles and aunts had formed a towering hedge round him since he was a baby. He had broken through it when he went to the War, and he would do so again ; in the meantime it was less trouble to let them talk.

* Now I've got an idea ! ' exclaimed Aunt Eleanor, with an explosive elation that suggested the rarity of the occurrence. * Get a tenant for this house, as Horace says, for a year or two, and Georgina and Dan can live at the Lake House ! '

Mrs. Palliser seldom cared for other people's ideas, and least of all for those of her sisters-in-law ; it was unfortunate that the suggestion seemed to her to be sound. Poor Henry had done up the Lake House so nicely for the Robertses, and then the tenants had come to terms, and an agent was not wanted ; and the house was still empty.

* So much depends on whether it would be even possible to let this house,' she said aloud with severity. * Who wants to come to Ireland now, I should like to know ? No one in their senses ! '

But Aunt Eleanor, as she said afterwards to Uncle Dick, saw that Georgina had realised at once that it was the thing to do, only she could not bear to admit it.

* ril tell you who'll take the house ! ' said Dan's youngest uncle, Mr. Trevor Caulfield, alertly, ' Ducarrig — Arnold Gilmour that was, y 'know— I met him at the Club last month, just before poor Henry's — h'm,

h'm ' Uncle Trevvie, who was not a day over fifty,

and was regarded by his elder brethren as a young and giddy worldling, checked himself, remembering in time that his widowed sister would disapprove of her bereavement being treated as a mere date in his social calendar.

* Ducarrig said,' he continued hurriedly, * that he was looking for a place in Ireland. Connaught, he said, because I remember old Frank Fitzmaurice said *' Hell or Connaught," and Ducarrig said he wasn't particular ! ' Uncle Trevvie laughed with the innocent pleasure that is often derived by such as he from the libertine use of a word with whose official and time-honoured wickedness familiarity has been unable to breed contempt.

* I met Ducarrig when he was Governor down at Santa Caterina — that red-hot hole just below the Line/ cut in the Admiral, a small and robust man, who was inclined to assume a professional breeziness. ' He's sampled hell, I can tell you ! No wonder he wants to try Connaught ! He's had a lot of Governorships all over the East. He did mighty well in a row somewhere, and they gave him a title. He made a pot o' money out of rubber, I believe. You could ask him a whacking rent, Georgina ! '

'He's got an uncommon pretty wife,' said Uncle Trevvie, anxious to regain the lead, ' but he looks old enough to be her father ! '

* And so he is too, he's twenty-five years older than she is, if he's a day 1 ' gobbled the Admiral, who, well aware that in this particular suit he held better cards than his brother, was resolved on playing them. * She hardly looked eighteen when I saw them — but that was nearly ten years ago. Children ? No, no children. I believe there was a baby, but it died — never was another.'

* Eighteen, was she, ten years ago, did you say, Dick ? ' said Aunt Eleanor, thoughtfully, ' then that would make her at least eight and twenty now.' She looked round the circle with some mild elation.

* Obviously 1 ' said Mrs. Palliser cuttingly ; she had not yet forgiven Mrs. Caulfield for having anticipated her in thinking of the Roberts' house.

* But that scarcely affects the position/ she continued, ' the points to be ascertained are whether Lord Ducarrig has aheady got a house, and if Munster would suit him. Lady Ducarrig 's age need not trouble us.'

Eileen Caulfield, daughter of the Admiral, looked at Dan, her only contemporary present. Their eyes met, and the thought travelled to and fro on the glances, how dull these elders were !

' Then there's the question of the demesne/ pursued Mrs. PalHser, ' I dishke letting it for grazing. Graziers' cattle do so much mischief.'

Dan uncoiled his long legs and stood up. Something in Eileen's vivid glance had stung his spirit ; he felt that she thought he also was old and stuffy and very poor-spirited. He squared his shoulders and looked round upon the council of elders with a frown. Eileen Caulfield, watching him, thought * He is good-looking ! I'm glad I annoyed him ! He ought always to be in a rage when he's photographed ! '

Dan was not in a rage, but colour had come to his face and his eyes were bright.

* After all, mother/ he said, ' as Aunt Sophie says, I must have something to do. Why shouldn't I farm the demesne ? '

He was too much of a gentleman to remind his mother that the place w^as his, but Eileen thought, with annoyance, that he was afraid of asserting himself.

Chapter II

A YOUNG summer morning ; one of those pale, shining mornings early in June when summer has hardly realised that she is out of the schoolroom, and is no longer spring, and hesitates on the threshold of her kingdom. Thus she wavered, palpitating in all her little leaves, down by the Lake of Monalour, with faint, all-pervading blue haze, breathed by the thin East wind, dimming the outlines of hill and wood, turning the mirror-still lake into a silver secret, without margin or limit. Rhododendrons in fullest blaze of blossom covered the two nearest islets, huge domes of that strange colour in which rose and mauve and azure fuse, with a passion that merges the individual tones into one unearthly, blinding pallor.

Young Lady Ducarrig stood on the lake shore, the mat of brown and grey broken rushes, washed up by the winter- waves, soft under her feet, the strip of brown and grey gravel curving away from her on either hand. The sky was of pearl, the water of pearl too, with the reeds doubled in its stillness. A cuckoo's voice, far away and sweet, tossed its challenge, soft and light as thistledown, across the lake.

Car Ducarrig took it all, wordlessly, into her soul. Words there must be to recall, or to attempt to recreate ; but there comes, sometimes, one ineffable instant when the spirit of the thing seen overwhelms the human spirit that sees, and vision and gazer unite in a single gesture of eternal beauty.

AN ENTHUSIAST ii

The wife of the new tenant of Monalour, having gazed her fill over what were now her husband's domains, heaved a long, almost, judging by her entirely prosperous appearance, an extravagantly long sigh. She was young, handsome, and, as the least skilled observer could have deduced from her clothes, rich. In short, the observer, noting these points, would have been justified in attributing the sigh to nothing more than an aesthetic emotion inspired by romantic surroundings. Lady Ducarrig herself, however, though often disposed to introspection, made, on this occasion, no attempt to analyse her emotions, and told herself without elaboration that this was an improvement on Santa Caterina, and (with memories, vague, it is to be feared, of long-ago Sunday lessons) that it was good to be here, and that she would like to build three altars. One should be to the philanthropist who planted the rhododendrons, and one to that dashing blade (not a day over fifty) whom she thought of (very unsuitably) as * Old Trevvie Caulfield ' ; and the third ? She was not sure about the third. To Arnold, perhaps, since he, having seen Monalour, had had the intelligence to fall in love with it. Yet, taking Arnold maturely into consideration, she could not but feel that altars weren't in his line. She laughed a little, and definitely decided that she would not raise an altar to Arnold. In any case, this was not the moment.

She had, as a matter of fact, a sterner task in hand. To her, that morning, had been preferred a grave complaint as to the inadequacy of the scullery drain, and she was now on her way to interview the landlord on the subject. She trusted that it might not be her fate to meet the landlady instead. She felt that Mrs. PaUiser might not be too easy to handle, while the large young man (thus she thought of Dan) would probably yield readily to treatment.

She left the shore and returned to the path that led through the shrubberies of Monalour to the Lake House. The path followed the line of the lake ; she loitered along it, with the lazy, irregular step of one who is better used to wasting time than to saving it ; noting everything, the satin-white stems of the young birches, the tall herons standing by their nests in the branches of a group of Scotch firs, the polished black coots, with their white phylacteries bound on their brows, fleeing across the path to their reed sanctuaries, pursued by her dogs, a white Highland terrier and a red setter, who had accepted her as a pretext for a hunting expedition, and were accompanying her intermittently. She was rather short-sighted ; a disabihty that is not without compensations ; in Lady Ducarrig's case the hmitation made chiefly for enhanced concentration on what she was able to see. Her interest in all people, and most things, was only intensified by the effort of seeing them.

Mrs. Palliser was away. The landlord, whom she met outside the house, stated the fact in his deep and gloomy voice, and Lady Ducarrig wondered if his mother's absence accounted for the gloom. ' Or perhaps it is that she's coming home ! ' she thought, with a backward glance at her impression of Mrs. Palliser. * If he's like most landlords, he'll be considerably gloomier by the time I've done with him and the scullery drain ! '

She addressed herself to her task, but that Dan did not share the reluctances of his class was even absurdly apparent.

* Poor is the conquest of the timid hare ! ' thought the hare's tenant. ' Mamma would have been a far more sporting proposition ! '

Lady Ducarrig was but two years older than her landlord, but she knew by instinct (which, being unreasonable, cannot be disputed) that were she to die to-morrow, and he to live to the fullest span of human life, he would never be as old as she felt. In her outlook upon the world, the spirit of the collector was combined with that of the connoisseur. To try the flavour of a temperament, to weigh the relative social values of good looks and good clothes, of good talk and good nature, of good features and good colouring, these, and such as these, were matters on which, with a fellow expert, she would wrangle, languidly, tenaciously, agreeably, for as long as the fellow expert could or would face her. Since, two months before, she had come to Monalour, she had seen Dan but seldom, and ever in the large and heavy shadow of his mother. To-day it seemed possible to discover him. His type was new to her collection. A zealot and an enthusiast, his eyes told her that ; and a reformer ; this she had gathered from his uncle Trevor (who had a low opinion of such). Finally, he had the not unusual, yet indisputable merit of being a man. Car Ducarrig had many and devoted friends among women, and, from the more intelh gently devoted of such, she did not attempt to conceal the fact that she found men, in general, more interesting to her than women. She was accustomed to apologise for this preference, admitting its old-fashioned conventionality, as weD as its tendency to cause trouble. Just as she adored and cultivated the affectations and absurdities of dogs, so did she regard with amused interest and indulgence the foibles of the men of her acquaintance. Possibly she recognised the old plea for forgiveness of sins, that they ' loved much ' ; if she forgot it, it was certainly seldom their fault that she was permitted to do so.

The view from the bench on the lawn of the Lake House was beautiful enough to make nothing seem more important than the need of looking at it. Lady Ducarrig had refused to go into the house, and having drifted to the bench, found herself incapable of leaving it. Were any further inducement needed to idle away the shining morning, it would have been supplied to her by her dogs, who, having made the discovery, fraught with delirium, that two ladies of their race were concealed under the bench on which their mistress and Dan were seated, were now, by every device known to them, from coquetry to intimidation, endeavouring to lure them forth.

From the beleaguered charmers came a continuous chorus of indrawn, sob-like growls, and while the landlord, with masculine conscientiousness, solemnly dealt with the methods by which he proposed to subjugate the erring scullery drain, his tenant, absorbed in expert appreciation of the humours of the contest, heard no word of his painstaking explanations.

' So you see. Lady Ducarrig,' Dan concluded, ' I'm afraid I could hardly get the mason and the plumber before — ' — '

' Oh, Mr. Palliser,' interrupted the tenant ardently, ' make them come out and be civil ! '

' Who ? What ? ' said Dan, ' the mason ? ' He paused, regarding her with grave eyes of bewilderment. * What ? Oh, the dogs — Oh, certainly ! Here Peggy ! Lizzie 1 Come out o' that ! ' He twisted a leg under the bench, and with his foot scooped out a corpulent black spaniel and a little wizened fox-terrier, who instantly sped to the house, pursued as by a storm by their admirers.

* Did you want them ? ' asked Dan, still bewildered. Lady Ducarrig did not spend time in explanation.

' The masons, yes ! The dogs, no ! ' she said, enjoying his conscientiousness in much the same discriminating spirit as that in which she had adored the colour of the rhododendrons or the proceedings of the dogs. ' I don't want them in the least ! I believe I'm wasting your time horribly, and keeping you from your work — ■ I don't know what it is ? Not desperately important, I hope ? '

Her voice was low and slow and seductive ; Dan had never heard a voice like it. His eyes, steelcoloured or hazel. Car had not yet decided which, met hers. He had the eyes that are seen oftenest in Southern countries, deep-set, with thick black lashes, short and curled. As he looked at her she perceived that they held a grievance.

* Farming is my work. Important enough, though no one seems to think so ! ' he said, in his deep voice.

' Oh 7 do ! '

' Do you really ? ' He hung fire for a moment, eyeing her uncertainly. He was unused to either sympathy or perfidy, and was unable to realise that they may go hand in hand. Then his subject mastered him. ' I'm up against every sort of tradition and prejudice — I'm trying to farm the demesne here — you can hardly imagine the difficulties ! '

* Sinn Fein ? ' Lady Ducarrig exhibited less interest than she felt. She was curious as to his politics, having been told that they were ' shaky.'

' No, not as yet — the trouble is with my own men and their prehistoric methods.'

Car's grey eyes were raised to his.

' Oh, Mr. PalHser, how maddening ! '

Dan opened Hke a long-tentacled sea-anemone in the warni tide of sympathy. He told her how he wanted to break up the Big Lawn (' that's the grass between the house and the lake, what you would call the park,' he explained), and expatiated on its poverty and its weeds ; on the obstinacy of all farm-men, and their assurances that weeds were to be valued and respected as a mark of good land — ' Weeds ! ' His smouldering resentment burst into flame. ' Docks and thistles ! '

Car was touched. Weedy land seemed to her a pathetically dull subject to take seriously. Presenting to her host a sympathetic attention that effectually over-laid the amused under-current of critical analysis that she was bringing to bear upon him. Car sat, idle and entertained, on the bench on the Lake House lawn, and the sea-anemone continued to expand.

She had smoked two of Dan's cigarettes, and had tapped his confidence on many matters as to which her ignorance was only equalled by her skill in conceaUng it, before she decided that the investigation had, for the present, gone far enough.

' Now, having thoroughly wasted your morning, I'm going away.'

Her manner, languidly blunt, had a charm of its own. ' Car has a delightful manner, and no manners,' ♦ said one of her friends.

' Good-bye ! Oh, my stick — under the seat, I'm afraid '

Dan went down on his hands and knees and groped for the stick. She thought his back looked as long as a polo-pony's. Then, still on his knees, he handed it to her. Car Ducarrig never checked an impulse, however unconventional or absurd. She laid the stick lightly across his shoulders, and said,

' Rise, Sir Daniel Palliser ! '

Dan, bewildered anew, stared up at her, still on his knees, and Eileen Caulfield, who was, as it happened, at that moment getting out of her boat at the end of the garden, found the situation difficult of comprehension.

Car moved serenely away, satisfied that she had achieved something of an artistic climax to an interview that in less capable hands might not have risen above the level of the scullery drain.

' It's a nice monster,' she said to herself, as she strolled along the path through the flickering greens of the young leaves, ' and delightful looks ! I like eyes that look like burnt holes in a blanket ! And a very good figure — remarkably so — for a monster. And that Caulfield girl's got good looks too — I really am mad about looks ! ' she told herself, with a laugh. ' I wonder how poor Sir Daniel will explain the affair of the walking-stick ! She'll think I'm mad certainly !