Denys the dreamer; a novel

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Denys Is Dreaming ..... 7

II The New Agent . . . . 17

Chapter I

D enys Fitzmaurice of Murrough sat on the edge of the bog looking away to where the river ran through purple and gold of heather and ragwort, widening white under the rays of light that shot down from behind an immense cloud. It was a scene very well worth looking upon. Far away the blue line of mountains showed dimly fair, with a promise of fine weather. There was a great sky stretching over the wide land, overarching it, with a sense of immensity and light. At the boy’s feet the grey green of the rushes was relieved by the pale aromatic blobs of meadow-sweet and the white of the bog-cotton that stirred in the faint, light breeze.

The bog was intersected by stretches of cultivated land. Across the Little Bog at Denys Fitzmaurice’s feet he could see, grazing the little fields, his father’s cattle, as well as other things that were not there. All sorts of strange bird-songs and calls came to him, for the bog harbored every variety of bird. His sleepy grey eyes carried an immense distance. If it had not been for the haze of heat he might have seen the eagle poised motionless against the great sky over Nephin.

His hand caressed the silken head of Rory, his red setter, who lay as near to him on the sunny bank as might be. He took up one soft, feathered ear and let it drop through his fingers. Rory would have liked better to go over the bog, racing and running before his master till he was called to heel; but he knew his master’s moods and that this was a time for silence. If a dog was tired and content to be 7 still — they had been many miles over the bog that morning — there could be nothing better than to lie on a sunny bank half-asleep and to have his ear played with gently by the hand he loved best in the world.

Denys was half asleep with his dreams, or perhaps only dazed by the shimmering haze over the bog — it was very hot — when he became aware of voices close at hand. For some reason, even before he looked in the direction of the voices, he was vaguely annoyed because the dried mud of a bog hole, into which he had slipped earlier, was plastered on his boots and clothing. He glanced shyly over his shoulder, then stumbled to his feet. The newcomers were three: his father, Lord Leenane and Dawn Finucane, Lord Leenane’s sixteen-year-old daughter.

Denys lifted his hat, blushing all over his clear, freckled skin. He had not forgotten to be a gentleman even if the Fitzmaurices were come down in the world. His eyes, grey, lightly dappled with hazel, seemed as though they had been freckled too. His long dark lashes, with the upward curling sweep at the end, gave his eyes a great, softness. His father had said they could be as hard as agates when Denys was bent on going his own way, but usually they were full of dreams. He was tall and straight. Even though his shabby homespuns were plastered with mud and stained by the wind and weather, he looked a gentleman.

The girl, with a green velvet cap on her fair hair, which hung down in a pigtail over her emerald-green frock, looked at him with interest in her blue eyes. She had not many companions of her own age, since her only brother had been drowned in an accident on the ice three years earlier, and her father, as though the loss of the boy had frightened him, would hardly let Dawn out of his sight, so that she missed school and the companionship of children of her own age. Her aunt, Mrs. Metcalfe, who had lived at Castle Clogher and kept house for her widowed brother since her own widowhood, had been heard to say plaintively that Turlough’s daughter must eventually be an old maid, since her father would never allow her to leave him; or else he must find a son-in-law who would sit down by his hearth. Little Dawn did not seem to find her father’s prohibitions irksome. They were always together, riding and hunting, walking and fishing. Dawn, in her green frock, with one little hand thrust carelessly through her father’s arm, was a very pleasant sight.

It was the first time Denys Fitzmaurice had seen Lord Leenane’s daughter. Castle Clogher was five miles away with the Lakes between, and Denys was one for staying at home. Lord Leenane he had seen several times when he came to buy horses from Denys’s father, Patrick Fitzmaurice, who had come down in the world, and been reduced to making a living as best he could. The best way he knew, beyond his farming, was to breed horses. His horses, which he sold for a song had often been lucky with their new owners. It was his pride to say that he had bred a winner of the Irish Oaks, the Irish Derby, and, — crowning splendor — the Grand National. But he had not sold with judgment. He was fond of saying that if the skies rained gold not one coin would fall into the lap of a Fitzmaurice.

“Hello !” said Leenane, in a loud jolly voice. He had been the jolliest man in the West before his son’s death, and he still kept a manner of jollity, although people said the heat had gone out of it as the color went out of his face when the news came that Maurice was drowned and had never altogether returned to it.

“Hello!” he said to Denys, who was blinking in the sun or the radiance of Dawn’s face and hair. “The last time I saw you, you were sitting on the sunny side of the ditch, just as you are sitting to-day. Did you ever move out of it since?”

Denys blushed, for the straight regard of Dawn’s serious eyes rather than for Lord Leenane’s jocosity.

“I did, now and again,” he said sheepishly.

“He’s very good with the horses,” his father said apologetically. “And he has an eye for a bullock. But it’s true that he idles a great deal. His schoolmaster, Peter Reddy, used to say that he could get him to do only what he wanted to do. ‘Buy him a penny whistle,’ he said, ‘and let him play tunes on it all day long like a fairy piper. He’ll never get into Sixth Book,’ he said.”

“He mustn’t grow up a dreamer and idler,” said Leenane, and suddenly choked. He was remembering all the promise of his own boy who had been a Winchester scholar and had great things prophesied of his future. Leenane never knew how his son came to be so brilliant. He himself had not been one for books and had managed to get along very well without them. He used sometimes to produce a bundle of his Eton birches, dusty and tied up with faded blue ribbon, to show what a dunce he had been. But Maurice had taken after his mother’s family and bade fair to be a brilliant classical scholar. The sight of Denys Fitzmaurice, shapely and beautiful in his rough clothes, had reminded Leenane sharply of his loss. A pity the boy had had no better chance than the National School. Leenane had a vague wish that he might have done something for this boy, for Maurice’s sake, but it was too late now; and perhaps Fitzmaurice would not have taken a ii favor. The Fitzmaurices were gentlefolk even if they had come down in the world. One had only to look at the boy to see it. And his name, Denys, stood in proof of his Norman ancestry and that the Fitzmaurices had not forgotten it He had a certain compunction for the color that surged into Denys’ face and ebbed away when his idleness was talked of. He put his grief from him impatiently. When would he cease to feel the stab through his heart that came at the sight of other boys alive and beautiful, while his lay dead and moldering in earth?

“What were you thinking of when we came up behind you?” he asked in a gentler voice. “You were lost in your thoughts. Never mind about the Sixth Book. Many a one has done well in the world without too much book learning. A penny for your thoughts, boy.”

“I was thinking about draining the bog, the Little Bog, I mean. I saw cattle grazing there and houses and people. If the river was to be widened and trenches cut the water would run away. This bit is more marsh than bog. The bog begins at the little trees out there with their feet in the water.”

Leenane stared.

“I don’t agree with Mr. Reddy,” he said, turning to Patrick Fitzmaurice. “The boy’s dreams are fine dreams, dreams of doing. Let us see if he can drain the bog. Do you hear, Dawn? Denys Fitzmaurice thinks he can drain the bog and bring the cattle and the houses and the people. Isn’t it a fine dream?”

“I should like to see him do it,” said Dawn. “Would the flowers go then and the bog-cotton and the little blue butterflies like bits of sky? The bog is a lovely place.”

“There’ll be plenty of it left,” said Leenane. “This would be a nice strip if only it was reclaimed,

— as far as the little trees with their feet in the water.”

“Oh, yes, please, do make a field of this little bit,” cried Dawn.

“I’ll try to,” said Denys, very straight, and his eyes like agates.

Then they went to see the horses. There was a beautiful one to see, a two-year-old filly that would make a lovely mount for Dawn a little later, but she was as yet unbroken.

“Not that she needs breaking,” said Denys, with the filly’s silken nose pressed hard into his breast. “She has a little mouth like satin, and there was never as sweet a temper. Only she’s a terrible pet. She’d walk up the walls of the loose-box to follow me, and many’s the time I’ve had to take my tea in the box 'with her when she couldn’t have Timmie Daly that she likes second best to me.”

“Do you hear that, Dawn?” Lord Leenane asked again. “You’ll have to take your tea in this lady’s loose-box unless you can find her a groom she will like nearly as well as you.”

“I should love to have tea with her,” said Dawn. “It would be much nicer than tea in a drawing-room with silly ladies talking about clothes and servants.”

Lord Leenane and his household were moving away for the winter. Lady, as the little filly was called, was bought, but to Denys Fitzmaurice’s great relief, left at Murrough till they came back, — he could never bear parting with the horses — and they were not to return till the following spring, so Lady would be his for a long time yet — but the winter passed quickly, for Denys was very busy.

Dawn and her father and Mrs. Metcalfe had wintered at Rome and returned home in the early part of May. The eight months had made a great change in Dawn. She was no longer a child. Her i3 little figure had rounded and taken shape. She was going to miss the awkward age of girlhood. She had sprung up and had a delicate slenderness. She had a long beautiful neck that carried her little head in very stately fashion.

“Dawn is going to be very pretty,” Mrs. Metcalfe had said to Lord Leenane. “You will have to find her a husband who will sit down in your house with your girl, Turlough.”

“It will be time enough to talk about such things ten years hence,” said Leenane huffily.

They were not long home before Leenane and Dawn rode across the hills to where Murrough Farm sat under the lee of a green hill. It was a delightful little house, long, low, and white, with all manner of quaintness in its dim little rooms. They had called it “Murrough” from the old ruined castle of the Fitzmaurice’s, roofless now, and a place of four square walls with a few fine window-spaces to show what it had been, and a winding staircase that led from one tiny room to another. Sheep had grazed between the four walls of the tower before Stephen Fitzmaurice, Denys’s grandfather, had enclosed it.

Half way down the hillside, Leenane pulled up so suddenly that the mare he was riding almost backed into Dawn’s little horse following, causing him to jump about a little, but not with the least intention of unseating his young mistress. He, too, had been bred at Murrough Farm, and although he had accepted Dawn with his whole heart as the one to whom he owed devotion, he had yet been showing a lively interest, sniffing the air and whinnying from the time he began to ascend by the long leisurely road that climbed to the gap from the lakes.

“Hello!” Leenane said and pointed excitedly with his whip. “Do you see that, Dawn?”

Dawn looked, having got the little horse under control. She saw nothing unusual for a moment or two. There was the thatched roof, neatly wattledover in a criss-cross pattern. There was the garden around the house deepened with color at this distance and the little fields with the moving dots of the sheep and cattle. There was the row of little trees with their feet in the water and the whispering wood beyond.

“What is it, Papa?” she asked; and then she saw. On the near side of the row of trees that stood with their feet in the water, blobs of creamy white were moving about on an emerald pasture, — sheep.

“By Heavens!” said Leenane. “The boy has drained the bog. I never thought he could do it. I thought he was only dreaming when he talked of such a thing. Better than a penny whistle, — eh, Dawn? and there is the man himself.”

They cantered down the hillside to Murrough. It was true that Denys had drained the bit of bog, by hard manual labor, by making trenches with the spade, deepening and widening the channels that already existed, so that the water could escape. He looked browner and harder than when he had dreamed on the side of the ditch in the late summer weather, playing with Rory’s silken ears, but his eyes had still the quietness of dreams in them.

Patrick Fitzmaurice stood by, while his son was praised by Lord Leenane, wearing a well-pleased but not over-pleased air.

“I always knew it was in him,” he said. “It was great impudence for that Reddy to say Denys was only good for playing a penny whistle. Give me an old pedagogue for impudence. Time was, he’d have come hat in hand to a Fitzmaurice of Murrough. We were protecting him and his likes in the old days, before we were brought down by reason of the re* ligion. I was never sorry for it.”

i S

“While my ancestor made the best of this world, lest there should be no other,” said Leenane, with a wheezy chuckle. “Well, well, I’m not sorry he did. Castle Clogher was worth a few old prayers, as he said. But this boy of yours, Fitzmaurice of Murrough — he should have a chance — a boy of his breeding. It was rotten luck he should have gone to the National School with the sons of peasants. Not that it has hurt him. I read somewhere the other day that Sir William Napier, the historian, and his brother, went to the village school. They had the blood of kings. I daresay many a fine fellow did the same. I expect you can do your sums, Denys, more than I can after five years at Eton. How old is he, Fitzmaurice?”

“Seventeen.”

“Time enough to do something with him. I’ll see to it. Not such schooling as will wean him away from this — your one son.”

He waved his hand round the low room, lit dimly by four little windows of eight panes set deeply in the thick walls. Roses and honeysuckle looked in at the window in full summer. Now there was yellow jessamine and the hardy Scotch roses. A little gravel path ran round the house, under the windows, and the thatch above was tunnelled with the nests of starlings and house-martins. The house sat in a garden, a lovable garden of mixed fruit and vegetables, with flower-borders within the box.

The room was very pleasant although littered with the belongings of two male persons. They were not ugly belongings, tall Dawn reflected, remembering with a fastidious inward shudder of a visit she had paid to an English farmhouse where the greasy collar and tie of the farmer had lain on the window-seat among the roses and honeysuckle. Books, pipes, fishing tackle, a couple of bits polished to brightness, a penknife, a lantern, had intruded

1 6 into the room which Denys’s mother had called the parlor. Her china still gleamed out of diamond-paned cupboards on either side of the fireplace. The furniture was old and good. There were a couple of portraits on the longest stretch of wall. A needlework picture of “Daniel in the Lions’ Den” attracted Dawn by the glitter of the Lions’ yellow eyes which were in bead-work. There was a little bookcase with a green silk curtain half drawn over the contents. The carpet and curtains were faded but still good.

A delightful room, Dawn thought it, with the wood-fire talking to itself through its spurts of flame and Rory lying on his side on the hearth-rug.

Her father was discussing his plans for Denys’s schooling. He had an old friend in Norfolk who had given up an Oxford Fellowship for a quiet country rectory. Pollock would be delighted to get a boy like Denys to coach. After a year with Pollock Denys could go to school. He named a public school which had arrived at the democratic spirit. Leenane knew the Headmaster, a crank politically, but a good Headmaster and a sound scholar.

“It will be hard on you,” he said with a hand on Patrick Fitzmaurice’s shoulder. “I know what it will cost you — your one boy. But it is worth it ; and he will come back.”

He turned away his head. Dawn Finucane was delighted with her father’s plan for Denys, of whom she thought as “a very nice boy.” She smiled at Denys and he blinked as though he had looked into the sun and was half blinded by it, while the color flooded his candid face. So Dawn Finucane took possession of Denys Fitzmaurice’s heart.

Chapter II

Y ) enys Fitzmaukice at twenty-three had abundantly justified Lord Leenane’s interest in him. He had done well at school after his year with Mr. Pollock. His education had cost very little. He had taken many scholarships and prizes and had finally won a travelling studentship for three years at a Continental University.

As he stood up with his back to the fire, looking down the long drawing-room of Castle Clogher, between the glittering lines of the chandeliers, he was a very goodly youth to look upon. So thought Lord Leenane, coming towards him with an outstretched hand and a hearty welcome on his lips. Not so often nor so sharply now did the thought of his dead son stab him; yet there was something of a film on his eyes as he looked at the tall young figure with its air of distinction.

“I have been telling Mr. Fitzmaurice that we are most unpunctual people in this house, Turlough,” said Mrs. Metcalfe, who was sitting by the fire, her quick knitting-needles catching the sparkle of the drops of the chandeliers as they flew to and fro. “Even dinner is a movable feast with us.”

“Oh, Denys won’t mind. I daresay he’s very glad to get back to Irish ways,” Leenane said, wringing Denys’s hand hard. The film was clearing off. After all, he did not grudge the boy his health and good looks, because Maurice had been dead for a sufficient number of years to have passed out of other people’s thoughts and talk. If anyone remembered to talk of Maurice now, it was in an 17 i8 ordinary way without the lowered voice of sympathy. So much the better, thought the father. Maurice was more his own now when other people had forgotten him.

“Why didn’t your father come? A deucedly unsociable fellow,” said Leenane, in his hearty voice. The film had quite cleared away by this time.

“He likes his dinner in the middle of the day still,” Denys answered. “He says it suits his work best. I’ve been leaving too much to him. He has aged without me. Going off to fairs at four in the morning and he with a young strong son to lift his burdens ! I shall relieve him of all that. He looks wonderfully better since I’ve come.”

“You think you’ll stay with him? There won’t be much at Murrough to interest you.”

Leenane was feeling somewhat dismayed. Was all the result of Denys’s fine doings that he should come back to pull what remained of Murrough property out of the bog. It was not good enough for Denys, with his record of scholarship.

“I could not leave him alone,” Denys answered simply.

“Ah, you are right, you are right,” Leenane said hastily, and added, “after all, I have Dawn,” without further explanation of his thoughts.

Mrs. Metcalfe clicked away busily with her needles. Never was such a placid person. Her placidity amused and sometimes gently irritated her brother, who was very fond of her. She had theories founded on an unwavering faith in the One who ruled the world. Nothing ever happened amiss, however it might seem so, if one trusted Him. A deal of trouble in the world came from people not being content to trust Him. When something much desired came to naught, Mrs. Metcalfe immediately discovered, if she possibly could, the most wonderful reason for the disappointment, that turned it into a kindness. If she could discover no reason, she just trusted.

Somewhere at the back of his mind Leenane was comforted by what he called Sophie’s fatalism.

“I couldn’t have stuck it,” he had said, “if she had not arrived at it through her own trouble. Dick Metcalfe, the straightest rider I ever knew, broke his neck at the big jump at Punchestown. Her two children died in the same week from scarlet fever. She says that people always die at the most merciful moment for them. I asked her what about suicides. She said they took it out of God’s hands, and reminded me that A

Betwixt the saddle and the ground Was Mercy sought and Mercy found.

It suits Sophie, that comfortable belief of hers. She’ll never see fifty again and she has the skin and the eyes of a child.”

Dawn came up the long room, between the mirrors, under the glittering chandeliers, her golden head rising from a green silk frock, all billowy softness, like a snowdrop from its sheath. Something passed over Denys Fitzmaurice’s face, — a quiver; he lifted his hand to his eyes as though he were dazzled. Leenane noticed the gesture and was pleased with the homage to his girl’s beauty.

Something was stirring in his mind. He kept Denys unusually long in the dining-room after the ladies had left, pushing the decanter of port wine toward him along the polished table, which reflected the wines and fruits richly, as though it was going to be a lengthy sitting.

“All this looks very well, Denys,” he said, indicating by a wave of the hand the table with its beautiful silver and glass, the pictures on the wall, the sideboard with its burden of old silver, its golden tores and collars dug from the bog, the gold box which contained Elizabeth’s Charter handing over Clogher to the Queen’s Finucane and dispossessing the recusant Finucane. Only in Ireland, would such treasures have been openly, even carelessly displayed.

“It does, Lord Leenane,” Denys said and wondered what was coming.

“All sham and show,” went on Leenane, “glitter and nothing behind it. It isn’t mine. I’m in the hands of the Jews. I am going to sell all the stuff I can get rid of. Cecil’s box should yield a pretty bit of money, to say nothing of the Queen’s autograph.”

“I am very sorry,” said Denys, feeling the inadequacy of the remark. “I did not know.”

“So am I — deucedly sorry. So will Dawn be when she knows; she loves the place. We can’t keep it up. The Brothers of St. Gall want it for a Novitiate. Comical that! You remember the hooks in the cellars below, where they used to hang the priests’ heads in the Penal Days till the official came down from Dublin Castle to verify the bag before he paid the hunter! I’m not proud of my ancestor who made this old house the centre of such traffic.”

“It was the spirit of the times,” said Denys, “and after all, it was an ancestress of yours who put an end to it and sheltered the last victim of the priesthunter, defying all the world to take him from her.”

“Yes, yes; she was a Blake of Galway, and the Blakes never break their word. She had promised the priest safety. I hope Lady Sabina will blot out her husband’s stain. But, — good Lord, what a vengeance for the Church to slip into the seat of the Finucanes. They will make a chapel of the cellars, you’ll see. I don’t care. It will be better than letting some farmer have it who would tear out all the beautiful things and sell them, and store potatoes in my wife’s drawing-room.”

He was silent for a second during which Denys looked the sympathy he did not speak. If the Finucanes were to be gone from Castle Clogher his own sacrifice to filial duty would be harder than he had expected. Not that he repented it.

“After all,” Lord Leenane went on, “I’ve no son. It would be worse if I had a son. We’ll go travelling, Dawn and I, if the money runs to it; if not, when the debts are all paid it will be Bath or Cheltenham or maybe Tunbridge Wells. Some tabbyplace anyhow. I’ll end my life as a tom-cat, or a tame cat among the old women and the parsons.”

There was a note of anguish in his voice at the prospect before him which made Denys smile, although he felt serious enough.

“How will Miss Finucane like it?” he asked quietly.

“Oh, Dawn! She’ll loathe it, poor child and she’ll shock the tabbies. She adores this place. I’ll keep a pied-a-terre for her. There is that long low house on the edge of Cloona Lake that the doctor died out of the other day. It has a pretty garden. I shan’t part with more of the land than I can help — not at present at least. I have my responsibilities towards the people.”

He lifted his head with a gesture that revealed him as a man proud of his responsibilities. If the Finucanes had got dipped, the tenants had not suffered for it. They kept up the traditions of good landlordism even when all the conditions had changed.

“I’ll tell you what, Denys,” he broke out suddenly. “There won’t be enough for you to do at Murrough. Take my agency, such as it is. It’s been to let since old Valentine died. If I go travelling I shan’t want to be bothered with the affairs of what is left of the estate. There’ll be something for you in it, though it won’t be what it used to be.”

“There are resources on the estate,” said Denys gravely. His heart was beating fast but he did not betray the elation he felt.

“Not minerals. I’ve been after that ignis fatuus long enough.”

“Not necessarily minerals. The whole country is lying fallow, — money wasted everywhere.”

Once again Denys’s eyes were full of dreams. Once again he saw people and houses and cattle in the barren places. His father had said that he had the second sight, that he inherited it from his mother. Denys would like to think he had the second sight. Then his dreams need not come to nought. His dreams had great power over him. He came back to realities and heard Lord Leenane chuckle.

“There you are !” he said. “You remember when you drained the Little Bog and made me your friend for life? You’ve no money of mine to play with. That’s certain. All such playthings ask for money.”

“I know. The money will come.”

Denys lifted his eyes under the curling lashes and directed a long, slow, considering glance at Lord Leenane.

“I accept the agency,” he said. “I owe you everything. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, except the things you would not ask me to do. Keep as much of the property as you can; you won’t be sorry in the long run.”

“I shall. It is selling men, women, and children. Not that things are as they once were. But the are fond of me. I’d never be hard on them, see what the house and furniture will fetch. I owe Aarons two thousand pounds and it’s increaspeople

We’ll

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