Julia

Front matter

aO ^»V% > V

.0^ «»“»»

rv V o " a A >

Chapter I

Denis Driscoll MacCormac O’Kavanagh of the Keep, Glensaggartmore, co. Kerry, was the father of six daughters.

Of these six, five were fair and buxom as their mother had been before them. They were very much admired by the country people, whose ideal of beauty is the blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, golden-haired type.

Of Julia, the youngest, the same people were apt to speak disparagingly.

'‘Sure, God help her, isn’t she as yellow as a kite’s claw ? ” they would say ; “ an’ a hardy, bad breed. You wouldn’t be fattening her if she was to have mate every day for a twelvemonth.”

Julia had heard such things said of her from the time she could walk alone. Among a vivacious people like the Irish there is safe to be a considerable

B sprinkling of malice in addition to the insensibility of uneducated people where personal defects are concerned. No one in Ireland can be club-footed or a stutterer, wide-mouthed or cross-eyed, without hearing a good deal about it. And Julia heard a good deal about her supposed lack of good looks, which was the greater offence in her case that her sisters were so blooming.

The iron of it had eaten into the child's soul. It had made her shy of seeing strangers, lonely of nature, more sensitive and shrinking than she need have been, very distrustful of herself. But it had not made her bitter. She had accepted her fate of being ugly with entire and simple resignation. Some people had to be ugly as some people were given beauty. It never occurred to her as a cause for grievance that she only of all her sisters was chosen to be unsightly.

Once she heard her sisters discussing what they would do when they were married.

“ And I,” said little Julia, forgetting that she was the ugly one, when I am married I shall "

What Julia would do when she was married was destined never to be spoken.

“ You ! ” said Bella, the eldest sister, witheringly. “ No one will ever marry you. You are too ugly."

Julia's cousin on her mother's side, Joe Quinlan, a rough boy, taunted her after the same manner on an occasion when he had pulled her hair and made her cry. If he had pulled Bella’s, or Winnie’s, or Mary’s, or Katie’s, or Philomena’s they would have promptly pulled his. Julia, whose cuticle was as sensitive as her soul, and who was startled by the horse-play, simply wept.

Go on, cry-baby ! ” said the unmannerly cousin. ** You ought to be glad for a boy to notice you. You are a yellow, ugly thing, and all the people say you will be an old maid.”

The speech, so far as Joe Quinlan himself was concerned, might have had no great power to hurt Julia. She was unconsciously fastidious, and Joe’s red hair, prominent blue eyes and very large white teeth, repelled her as much as his dirty finger-nails and his boots that smelt of the byre. Still, as representing a masculine opinion, his speech had power to hurt ; and JuHa wept over it bitterly.

She often asked herself how it was that she did not grow used to being so ugly, that she was still so sensitive about it, that a rude speech had yet such power to hurt. She had a great tenderness for ugly creatures like herself. The discarded puppy of a litter, the deformed kitten, doomed to drowning, were saved from their fate by Julia and nursed tenderly to an ugly maturity. When Julia read romances — and she had found a store of them in an unused cupboard at the top of the house — she would lose herself for a time, and then remember and shrink from the accusing eyes of the magnificent heroes. “ Alas ! such things are not for me,” she would sigh, while the glamour faded from off her story-book.

The sensitiveness might perhaps have permanently injured her whole nature — there were times when JuHa felt as though she must creep through life like a dog that is afraid of a stone — if her grandmother had not made all the difference.

Mrs. O’Kavanagh was the mistress of her son’s household. She had never ceased to be mistress for an hour, even while his pink-and-white doll-wife, as the old woman called her in her contemptuous thoughts, was nominally mistress. Not Bella, nor any of the other girls, would ever dispute her mistressship so long as she lived. She had had a contemptuous tolerance of Denis’s odd infatuation — in which his deeper nature had never for a moment been involved — for Kosy Quinlan, as she still called her daughter-inlaw in her own mind. Men must needs be fools sometimes. She was tolerant to many things which one would have thought she could not have understood, since they were so far removed from her own possibilities. She was tolerant of her rosy granddaughters and their flirtations, their little vanities, and vulgarities, and folHes. Only for Julia she had something deeper, more passionate than tolerance. Julia was no child of Kosy Quinlan’s at all, she had said to herself in proud exultation.

At the crucial moment of Julia’s despair with herself — the theologians were wise who set despair as the corresponding sin to presumption — the grandmother stepped in. She had found Julia in tears, and had wrung from her the secret of her sensitiveness, which the child had kept guarded with her two hands close above her heart.

“ Come with me, Julia,” she said.

The house was very quiet. A sweet, warm smell of ironing linen which had been sun-dried came up the stairs from the kitchen. Julia’s sisters were out at some merry-making. Their grandmother had been ironing their clean print and muslin frocks. She was a past-mistress in the art of “getting-up,” and she did all the fine things of the week’s laundry with her own hands.

She took Julia’s hand in hers with a fondness she did not often show her, and they went down the stairs side by side. The ticking of the eight-day clock made quite a noise in the sunny, silent house. They went into the parlour, which was too fine to be used every day, and was associated, in Julia’s mind, with tea-drinkings and other uncomfortable merry-makings.

The chairs were like sheeted ghosts in their light chintz coverings, which old Mrs. O’Kavanagh calendered once a year. The mirror above the chimney-piece had a swathing of yellow gauze. There were white shavings with a coil of silver in the grate. The walls were decked with the impossible drawings of Julians sisters which they had brought home from the Convent School ; their Berlin-wool work was on the backs of the chairs. The Brussels carpet had a pattern of cabbageroses and enormous ferns. There was a prevailing smell of dampness and closeness, for the windows were seldom opened. Only the old chintz of the chairs and the old china in the corner cupboard relieved the room from positive ugliness ; and, perhaps, the picture of Sir Mortimer O’Kavanagh above the mantelpiece.

Sir Mortimer had been the Queen’s O’Kavanagh in the days before there was fighting to be done. His ruff, his doublet, his trunk hose, his pointed beard, were in the fashion of the great Queen’s court. He was the Queen’s O’Kavanagh till there was fighting to be done. Then he had fiung off his silkenness and fought with the Desmond, and died with him. His younger son had taken the estates, and there had still been a Queen’s O’Kavanagh ; while Eoderick, the elder, had been proscribed, and had sunk into poverty and obscurity.

Look at Sir Murty ! ” said the grandmother.

J ulia had been looking at Sir Murty from the time she had been old enough to understand anything, with an awe and reverence equal to the grandmother's own. Mrs. O’Kavanagh had been her husband’s distant cousin, and an O’Kavanagh. Kow Julia looked as she was bidden. He was their patent of nobility, the broadstone of honour, to Julia, as to her father and grandmother.

Look up at Sir Murty ! ”

J ulia looked.

What do you see, child ? ”

Julia shook her head.

‘‘You are as like him as if you were his own child. Do you never look at yourself in the glass that I have to tell it to you ? ”

Julia murmured something about her sisters requiring the glass so much that she had never learned to need it. A light had come into her eyes and a flush to her cheek. In a shamefaced way she stood on tip-toe and peered into the dim glass. Yes, the likeness was there. The finely arched brows, the dark eyes, the broad forehead, the straight, delicate nose, the beautifully formed lips. She was a feminine replica of Sir Murty.

She looked from herself in the glass back to the old portrait, spotted and stained, with an incredulous delight growing in her candid face.

The likeness was there, although the portrait of

Sir Murty did nothing to reassure her on the score of her ugliness. The artist who had painted him at Court had been a disciple of the great Holbein. He had given Sir Murty the odd width and flatness, the angularity, which we associate with Tudor portraits.

But what did that matter ? To be like Sir Murty, to carry the sign-manual of her honourable ancient descent in her face was enough for Julia.

''Your sisters are Quinlans. They have not a drop of O’Kavanagh blood,’’ the grandmother said, with her good-natured contempt. "How, are you comforted, child ? ”

" Comforted ! ” repeated Julia, with an immense sigh. "More than comforted. Ho one ever told me before that I was like Sir Murty.”

" You are more like him. I’ll be bound, than young Sir Murty that is to be. But don’t be vain about it, child. If you were it might be a greater snare to you than beauty. Do you remember the blessed St. Eose, of Lima, that when her hands were admired she plunged them into the thorns and tore and scratched them with the briars ? ”

"Ho one is ever likely to admire me,” said Julia, simply.

Her likeness to Sir Murty was her shield, as her grandmother had meant it to be, against casual hurt. Ho one had ever told her before, but it was quite true that she might have been sprung straight from that hero. The untrained eyes about her had not seen it, as they had not seen the beauty of her dark slenderness, of her spirited, spiritual, sensitive face, of her mournful dark eyes with the golden light in them, of her satiny golden skin and hair that matched her eyes. NTo one was sensible of the air of race and breeding that belonged to her as much as to any of the young racehorses bred by Lord Kilmacreddan, the great man of the neighbourhood, a little greater even than Sir J asper O’Kavanagh, the descendant of Donal O’Kavanagh, Murty’s younger son. No one was sensible — that is to say, except her grandmother and, in a duller way, her father.

Denis O’Kavanagh favoured his mother in the hawk-nosed, high-coloured, smooth-skinned handsomeness which was her share of the O’Kavanagh inheritance. Like her he was tall and broad-shouldered and moved with a certain massive dignity. Neither of them were common persons ; but the mother had by far the stronger character of the two.

She was regarded by her son with mingled adoration and awe. He never remembered her that she had not been splendidly efficient as well as loving. Her calm collectedness had been invaluable in case of sickness, or accident, or trouble. If he had married Eosy Quinlan and honestly believed himself her lover.

it had been because he despaired of finding his mother’s equal among the women of the world.

While she had inhabited a little house of her own during her son’s married life, he had been conscious all the time of a vague discomfort that was his need of her clear brain and ordered ways. Wlien the interlude of Eosy was done, and his mother once more took up the direction of his life as though she had never dropped it, he on his part accepted the return to the old ways with an unacknowledged relief. He was an affectionate father, yet there was a part of him which had nothing to do with the fine children to whom Eosy had faithfully transmitted her features and character. There was a world of the soul, which, for him, was inhabited only by three persons: his mother, himself, and Julia.

His mother’s ways with Julia sometimes puzzled him. She allowed her a great deal of latitude, as, indeed, she allowed her other granddaughters. He had often told his mother that she did too much in the house; to which she had as often responded, that when she was gone others might waste and spoil as they would, but while she was there she would not delegate to others the duties which she performed so much better. Ho one should wash up the dinnerservice of willow-pattern china, with gold bordering, but herself ; none darn the fine linen but herself ; none lay a rough hand on the silver, some of which was Jacobean, nor on the pieces of Waterford glass, heavy as rock crystal.

She made her other grandchildren good housewives of a rougher sort.

Only Julia could help her with a fine needle, or handle the precious china and silver. She let Julia wander whither she would, in fields and on mountains, as she let her sisters go merry-making, and made occasions of merriment for them at home, with a good-natured scorn on her fine mouth as she watched them at play.

But for Julia she made no occasion of merry-making; even when she was asked about by the neighbours she refused for Julia. Julia never went to the town to see the shops as did her sisters, who brought home yards of pink ribbon and cheap lace and tawdry finery of all descriptions. Julia was limited to a choice of two colours for her frocks. She might have white or black — no fal-lals, nor furbelows. When she chose white muslin for her best frock her grandmother clear-starched and ironed it with an enjoyment to herself which she did not derive from performing a like office for Julia's sisters.

*‘Does her grandmother mean to make a nun of her ? ” asked Bridget Quinlan, the mother of the Joe who had taunted Julia with her ugliness long ago.

“ She’ll spoil the girl. If I were you, Denis O’Kavanagh, I’d be thinking of marrying her.”

The suggestion passed unheeded over Denis’s head. The question, Does her grandmother mean to make a nun of her?” recurred to him again and again with annoying persistency.

Could it be that that foolish, blathering woman, Bridget Quinlan, had made a random shot and struck the truth ?

But why should the old woman want to make a nun of Julia ? Julia was the apple of her secret eye, as she was of his own. He would not lose her within the prison of a convent. If any of the other girls felt that she had a call that way he would say nothing ; he would provide her with a fortune just as though she were going to an earthly loVer.

But Julia! The others were good girls, as good and pretty as their mother before them, but none of them like Julia. He would not give Julia to the convent.

And yet so secure was his mother’s empire over him, so entire his confidence in her judgment for him and his, that he never asked her the question which would have set his doubts at rest and proved to him perhaps that his fears were unnecessary.

Chapter II The Retuen Of The Heir

The tenantry of the O’Kavanaghs of Moyle for some years past had transacted all the business of the estate with Mr, Craven, the agent, as though Sir Jasper were dead. It was quite a long time since Sir Jasper failed, so that he made mistakes with his accounts and mislaid sums of money and muddled the affairs of the estate ; and things would have gone badly for the heir, a schoolboy at Eton, if Mr. Craven had not stepped in and got the management of things into his own hands.

They were very just and capable hands, and the tenants had no great cause to complain of the agent ; yet they missed Sir Jasper when he was pushed to one side. In a manner of speaking he was like one of themselves. If a man asked for a reduction of rent he did not look at him as though he would read him through and through, expecting to find a rogue under his skin. He always knew if there had been sickness in the family, or a bad season with the cattle or the crops, and thought nothing of handing back a ten-pound note when the rent was paid. But, of course, when Mr. Craven got all the affairs of the estate into his hands there was no handing back of ten-pound notes; there was no extension of time for payments. It was “ pay or go.” To be sure, he was dealing with another man's money and not his own; and he was a just man if a hard one, as even the tenants acknowledged.

His unyieldingness had brought the estate into conflict with the Land League for a time, when the League was at the height of its power. That time of trouble was forgotten now by every one except old Sir Jasper, who had been hooted by an excited crowd one day in the village, where he had known man and boy, maid, woman, and child for sixty years and more.

Sir Jasper's mind was failing even then, but it had caught and laid hold upon an impression of love turned to hatred, of old friends changed to enemies, which puzzled and vexed him sorely in the years that followed. To be sure, the hooting had been led by boys from another village, and was not intended for him personally at all, but for Mr. Craven; Bloody Craven," as they were calling him in the heated hyperbole of the hour.

THE EETURN OF THE HEIR

But it frightened the lonely soul in old Sir Jasper : and the people would have been bitterly sorry if they had known of the hours and hours he sat, in his halfblindness, pondering over the causes of that strange and cruel enmity, quaking lest he should meet again the black looks in the faces that had been so friendly,

Mr. Craven had taken, as he considered it, all necessary measures for old Sir Jasper’s comfort. To be sure, the big house at Moyle was for the greater part shut up, the rooms only opened now and again for periodical airings and cleanings.

But Sir Jasper was given a suite of rooms overlooking the Dutch garden at the back, rooms that received the sun, and looked pleasantly away over the ships in full sail, the windmiUs and tufted dogs and peacocks of the yew and box and holly and privet hedges, to the mountains. He had a body-servant, Larry Callaghan, who had been soldier-servant to the young Captain, Sir Jasper’s only son, and had brought home the Captain’s belongings when he had been killed in a little frontier war. Larry was a handy fellow, as men like him are apt to be, and was attached to Sir Jasper in a fashion ; and Sir Jasper had a liking for having him near him because he had been associated with his son.

It had never occurred to Mr. Craven that the old man could be lonely. He visited him at intervals and gave him a perfunctory statement of the business of the estate, and felt that in doing so much he was doing the handsome thing, for, as he said to Mrs. Craven, it was plainly to be seen that the old man didn’t take in much of what he was told. He would sit looking out of his nearly blind eyes with a painful expression, as though he were searching after the understanding which perpetually escaped him.

“Thank you very much. Craven,” he would say at last. “I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you for the care of the estate, and I’m sure Mr. Mortimer will be also. I trust you to be good to the people Craven. The O’Kavanaghs have always been good to their people.”

Then Mr. Craven would reassure him, telling him that the estate was the most contented and improving in the county; and that was true enough, for Mr. Craven had a short way with ne’er-do-weels and wastrels which would have troubled Sir Jasper if he had known.

But as he did not know, and would relapse into a more clouded and dreamy state than ever after those efforts to follow Mr. Craven in his statement, he did not suffer on that account.

The heir, who was Sir Jasper’s grand-nephew never came near the place. He had had an English mother, and had been reared in England, and all the

THE RETURN OE THE HEIR influence of his life had been English, from his childhood, spent in an English home, to his schooldays at Eton and his young manhood at Christ Church, Oxford. It was two or three years now since he had left Oxford, and during that time he had been tied to his mother’s sofa in that villa in the Apennines where she had vainly sought for health. His mother had been dead now a year or more and he was travelling with friends in the East.

“Ho hurry there, Mary, to make himself acquainted with the Irish estates,” Mr. Craven said to his wife, after reading a letter from the heir.

“He’ll be an absentee landlord, Alexander,” Mrs. Craven responded, “and you’ll have all the work of the estate. I hope the young man will be sensible of what you’ve done for him.”

“ It would be a thousand pities if he were to meddle after I’ve got the estate in such order,” Mr. Craven responded. “ A pretty muddle he’d make of it if he began interfering. I don’t think I could stand it after all those years. You wouldn’t believe it, but I had some difficulty with the old man yesterday over the rights of turbary. He said the people always had them. I’d been telling him too much, trusting to his not understanding. I had to teU him, to satisfy him, that I had to act for the heir. It’s not the first time. For a moment I thought he was going c to have a fit of anger. Then he turned away, and I saw the tears in his eyes. I’ve been obliged to make an authority of the heir, or he would never be satisfied.’*

“ Poor old man ! ** said Mrs. Craven, softly. “ But, indeed, Alexander, they ought to be grateful to you. Aren’t they prosperous where so many are ruined ? And the people respect you, if they hated you once upon a time and threatened your life.”

She turned pale at the memory.

“They’d have attempted it, too,” said the agent, “if I’d made a show of myself, driving through the country with a car-load of police after me. But I went in and out among them. I gave them all the chances to shoot at me. I was never afraid. It’s the policy of shilly-shally ruins them. There isn’t an agent in the country better liked. Why should I give them the right of turbary when they can pay for it? They’re not poor squatters but prosperous farmers. I’d like to know what the estate would have been now if I hadn’t got complete control before the storm broke ! ”

At this time Sir Jasper was nearly eighty years of age. He wandered about perpetually with Larry Callaghan beside him, an old velvet hunting-cap pulled down over his soft, white hair, a very old hound — the last of the pack — at his heels. The village

THE RETURN OP THE HEIR cliildren called him Old Hunting Cap.’* They had never known him when he was Sir Jasper O’Kavanagh, and a great man. Indeed, he had been so long pushed on one side that some of their young parents did no more than remember it.

He gave very little trouble to his attendant. There was a certain tree in the grounds, on a knoll which overlooked the house and the woods. Sir Jasper’s proud father had planted it on the day on which his son was born. It had always been his tree. He could remember quite well his gentle young mother leading him, a white-pinafored child, to see how his tree grew. His memories were of things far back, as are the memories of the old. He saw himself planting a tree by his own the day Hugh was born. He remembered Hugh’s young mother coming to see how the tree throve, and how glad they had been when it shot up and put forth leaves, for it was a superstition of the people that the child throve or dwindled with the tree.

He only asked to be taken there in his bathchair and left with his tree and his memories. Larry Callaghan at this time was courting, and sure it did no harm to any one, and what could happen to Old Hunting Cap — the children’s name for him had grown to be the common one — if Larry slipped away for a talk with Kitty ?

The talk extended itself indefinitely. Kitty's mother had a public-house in the village, and Larry was a travelled man and an esteemed story-teller. A seat by the public-house fire, with a tumbler of steaming punch in his hand, a crowd of delighted faces about him, and pretty Kitty herself coming now and again to lean over the back of his chair and applaud the story-teller. These things were better than to sit out in the autumnal mists with Sir Jasper, in a dead silence that heard the fall of an acorn on the ground, the scurry of a rabbit to its burrow, the drops falling from the soddened branches. Sure the old man was safe and sound, let alone that old Teaser had yet a fang or two, and would rend any one that molested her master.

Hour after hour the old man would sit there unconscious of the passage of time, the hound’s head on his knee, his knotted, purple old hands absently fondling the creature’s silky ears. If he was damp and chilled to the bone he was little conscious of it. He was happier than Larry knew, for those were the hours when he had his gentle ghosts all about him.

The tree spread its protecting arms above him as though to shield him from the mist. The tree was in the first splendour of youth, although he was worn out. Hugh’s tree, that should have kept it company, was down, struck by lightning the summer Hugh was

THE RETURN OF THE HEIR 21

killed. But round and round the tree there circled, like the fairies the country people imagined there of summer nights, the ghosts of his happiness and his youth. His mother and his father were there and his young bride ; Hugh was there, a child, a boy, a youth, beautiful and brave and generous, with no shadow of his early death upon him. Hither came all the old friends, the kindly, devoted retainers who seemed to have passed away with the happy years.

He had missed them dreadfully. He had stayed too long after them, in a world where people frowned on him and were angry. He had left it in his will that the tree was to be cut down to make his coffin. It was his tree ; it had come with him ; it should go with him. It would be as weU if he were gone.

Of late years the world had been very unfriendly. People never came to see him now. Craven flouted his will. The servants yielded him no obedience. CaUaghan neglected him, yes, neglected him, and often scolded him. The heir only waited for him to go. The heir whom he had never seen wore, no doubt, a hard and just face like Craven’s, and would have a contempt for his ways with the people and would not understand them, and there would be more trouble in a world that was already full of unfriendly faces. How different it would have been if Hugh, his boy, had only lived !

One autumn day the chill of the mist had penetrated his outer garments, and he was shivering. It was the sense of physical discomfort that had driven away his gentle ghosts and set him to thinking, on the frets and vexations of his later years. Where was Callaghan ? Why had he left him so long ? Difficult tears sprang in the old man's eyes and travelled slowly down his cheeks.

The old dog growled and bristled under his hand. He peered through the fog, the wet fog that was streaming in rain from all the branches.

Is it you, Callaghan ? " he asked feebly. “ Take me home. I am famished. You have been neglecting me, you rascal.”

It was not Callaghan. It was a stranger, looming tall through the fog, straight, slender; the figure was like Hugh’s, but Hugh was dead those thirty years back.