A low, faint cough from the old man warned his granddaughter of the dangers of the night air, and she arose and closed the windows. They still continued their conversation, but Linton, unable to hear more, returned to his inn, deeply reflecting over the strange disclosures he had overheard.

CHAPTER XXIV. BREAKFAST WITH MR. CORRIGAN.

How cold is treachery.

_Play_.

"Who can Mr. Linton be, my dear?" said old Mr. Corrigan, as he sat at breakfast the next day, and pondered oyer the card which, with a polite request for an interview, the servant had just delivered. "I cannot remember the name, if I ever heard it before; but should we not invite him to join us at breakfast?"

"Where is he, Simon?" asked Miss Leicester.

"At the door, miss, and a very nice-looking gentleman as ever I saw."

"Say that I have been ill, Simon, and cannot walk to the door, and beg he'll be kind enough to come in to breakfast."

With a manner where ease and deference were admirably blended, Linton entered the room, and apologizing for his intrusion, said, "I have come down here, sir, on a little business matter for my friend Roland Cashel, and I could not think of returning to town without making the acquaintance of one for whom my friend has already conceived the strongest feeling of interest and regard. It will be the first question I shall hear when I get back, 'Well, what of Mr. Corrigan, and how is he?'"

While making this speech, which he delivered in a tone of perfect frankness, he seemed never to have noticed the presence of Miss Leicester, who had retired a little as he entered the room, and now, on being introduced to her, made his acknowledgments with a grave courtesy.

"And so our young landlord is thinking of taking up his residence amongst us?" said Corrigan, as Linton a.s.sumed his place at the breakfast-table.

"For a few weeks he purposes to do so, but I question greatly if the tranquil pleasures and homely duties of a country life will continue long to attract him; he is very young, and the world so new to him, that he will scarcely settle down anywhere, or to anything, for some time to come."

"Experience is a capital thing, no doubt, Mr. Linton; but I 'd rather trust the generous impulses of a good-hearted youth in a country like this, long neglected by its gentry. Let him once take an interest in the place and the people, and I'll vouch for the rest. Is he a sportsman?"

"He _was_, when in Mexico; but buffalo and antelope hunting are very different from what this country offers."

"Does he read?--is he studious?" said Mary.

"Not even a newspaper, Miss Leicester. He is a fine, high-spirited, dashing fellow, and if good-nature and honorable intentions could compensate for defective education and training, he would be perfect."

"They'll go very far, depend on it, Mr. Linton. In these days, a man of wealth can buy almost anything. Good sense, judgment, skill, are all in the market; but a generous nature and a warm heart are G.o.d's gifts, and can neither be grafted nor transplanted."

"You'll like him, I'm certain, Mr. Corrigan."

"I know I shall. I have reason for the antic.i.p.ation; Tiernay told me the handsome words he used when according me a favor--and here comes the doctor himself." And as he spoke, Dr. Tiernay entered the room, his flushed face and hurried breathing bespeaking a hasty walk.

"Good-morrow, Tiernay. Mr. Linton, let me present our doctor; not the least among our local advantages, as you can tell your friend Mr.

Cashel."

"We've met before, sir," said Tiernay, scanning, with a steady gaze, the countenance which, wreathed in smiles, seemed to invite rather than dread recognition.

"I am happy to be remembered, Dr. Tiernay," said Linton, "although I fancy our meeting was too brief for much acquaintance; but we'll know each other better, I trust, hereafter."

"No need, sir," whispered Tiernay, as he pa.s.sed close to his side; "I believe we read each other perfectly already."

Linton smiled, and bowed, as though accepting the speech in some complimentary sense, and turned toward Miss Leicester, who was busily arranging some dried plants in a volume.

"These are not specimens of this neighborhood?" said Linton, taking up some heaths which are seldom found save in Alpine regions.

"Yes, sir," interrupted Tiernay, "you 'll be surprised to find here productions which would not seem native to these wilds."

"If you take an interest in such things," said old Corrigan, "you can't have a better guide than my granddaughter and Tiernay; they know every crag and glen for twenty miles round; all I bargain for is, don't be late back for dinner. You 'll give us your company, I hope, sir, at six?"

Linton a.s.sented, with a cordial pleasure that delighted his inviter; and Mary, so happy to see the gratified expression of her grandfather's face, looked gratefully at the stranger for his polite compliance.

"A word with you, sir," whispered Tiernay in Linton's ear; and he pa.s.sed out into the little flower-garden, saying, as he went, "I 'll show Mr.

Linton the grounds, Miss Mary, and you shall not have to neglect your household cares."

Linton followed him without speaking, nor was a word interchanged between them till they had left the cottage a considerable distance behind them. "Well, sir," said Linton, coming to a halt, and speaking in a voice of cold and steadfast purpose, "how far do you propose that I am to bear you company?"

"Only till we are beyond the danger of being overheard," said Tiernay, turning round. "Here will do perfectly. You will doubtless say, sir, that in asking you for an explanation of why I see you in this cottage, that I am exceeding the bounds of what right and duty alone impose."

"You antic.i.p.ate me precisely," said Linton, sarcastically, "and to save you the embarra.s.sment of so obviously impertinent a proceeding, I beg to say that I shall neither afford you the slightest satisfaction on this or any other subject of inquiry. Now, sir, what next?"

"Do you forget the occasion of our first meeting?" said the doctor, who actually was abashed beneath the practised effrontery of his adversary.

"Not in the least, sir. You permitted yourself on that occasion to take a liberty, which from your age and other circ.u.mstances I consented to pa.s.s unnoticed. I shall not always vouch for the same patient endurance on my part; and so pray be cautious how you provoke it."

"It was at that meeting," said the doctor, with pa.s.sionate earnestness, "that I heard you endeavor to dissuade your friend from a favorable consideration of that man's claim, whose hospitality you now accept of.

It was with an insolent sneer at Mr. Cashers simplicity--"

"Pray stop, sir; not too far, I beseech you. The whole affair, into which by some extraordinary self-delusion you consider yourself privileged to obtrude, is very simple. This cottage and the grounds appertaining to it are mine. This old gentleman, for whom I entertain the highest respect, is _my_ tenant. The legal proof of what I say, I promise to submit to you within the week; and it was to rescue Mr.

Cashel from the inconsistency of pledging himself to what was beyond his powers of performance, that I interfered. _Your_ very ill-advised zeal prevented this; and rather than increase the awkwardness of a painful situation, I endured a very unprovoked and impertinent remark. Now, sir, you have the full explanation of my conduct, and my opinion of yours; and I see no reason to continue the interview." So saying, Linton touched his hat and turned back towards the cottage.

CHAPTER XXV. TUBBERMORE TRANSFORMED.

Ay, sir, the knave is a deep one.

Old Play.

To save our reader the tedious task of following Mr. Linton's movements, however necessary to our story some insight into them may be, we take the shorter, and therefore pleasanter course, of submitting one of his own brief notes to Roland Cashel, written some three days after his arrival at Tubbermore:--

"Still here, my dear Cashel, still in this Tipperary Siberia, where our devotion to your service has called and still retains us,--and what difficulties and dangers have been ours! What a land!--and what a people! Of a truth, I no longer envy the rich, landed proprietor, as, in my ignorance, I used to do some weeks back. To begin: Your Chateau de Tubbermore, which seems a cross between a jail and a county hospital without, and is a downright ruin within, stands in a park of thistles and docks whose luxuriant growth are a contemptuous reflection upon your trees, which positively don't grow at all. So ingeniously placed is this desirable residence, that although the country, the river, and the mountains, offer some fine landscape effects, not a vestige of any of them can be seen from your windows. Your dining-room, late a nursery for an interesting family of small pigs, looks out upon the stables, picturesque as they are in fissured walls and tumbling rafters; and one of the drawing-rooms--they call it the blue room, a tint so likely to be caught up by the spectators--opens upon a garden,--but what a garden! Fruit- trees, there are none--stay, I am unjust, two have been left standing to give support to a clothes-line, where the amiable household of your care-taker, Mr. Cane, are pictorially represented by various garments, crescendo from the tunic of tender years to the full-grown 'toga.' But why enumerate small details? Let me rather deal in negatives, and tell you there is not a whole pane of gla.s.s in the entire building, not a grate, few doors, little flooring, and actually no roof. The slates, where there are such, are so loose that the wind rattles among them like the keys of a gigantic piano, and usually ends with a grand Freischutz effect, which uncovers a room or two. The walls are everywhere so rotten, that if you would break a loop-hole, you throw down enough to drive a 'break' through; and as for the chimneys, the jackdaw may plead the Statute of Limitations, and defy to surrender a possession which certainly dates from the past century! Perystell is in despair; he goes about sticking his thumb through the rotting timbers, and knocking down part.i.tions with a tick of his foot, and exclaiming against the ignorance of the last age of architects, who, I take it, were pretty much like their successors, save in the thefts committed from Greek and Roman models. This is not tempting, nor the remedy for it easy. Stone and mortar are as great luxuries here as ice- cream at Calcutta; there are no workmen, or the few are merely artificers in mud. Timber is an exotic, gla.s.s and iron are traditions; so that if you desire to be an Irish country gentleman, your pursuit of territorial ascendancy has all the merit of difficulty. Now, _que faire?_ Shall we restore, or, rather, rebuild, or shall we put forty pounds of Dartford gunpowder in one of the cellars, and blow the whole concern to him who must have devised it? Such is the course I should certainly adopt myself, and only feel regret at the ign.o.ble service of the honest explosive.

"Perystell, like all his tribe, is a pedant, and begins by asking for two years, and I won't say how many thousand pounds. My reply is, 'Months and hundreds, _vice_ years and thousands'--and so we are at issue. I know your anxiety to receive the people you have invited, and I feel how fruitless it would be to tell you with what apologies I, if in your place, should put them off; so pray instruct me how to act. Shall I commission Perystell to go to work in all form, and meanwhile make a portion of the edifice habitable?

or shall I--and I rather admire the plan--get a corps of stage artificers from Drury Lane, and dress up the house as they run up a provincial theatre? I know you don't care about cost, which, after all, is the only real objection to the scheme; and if you incline to my suggestion about the fireworks for a finish, it will be perfectly appropriate.

"'My own cottage'--so far, at least, as I could see of it without intruding on the present occupant--is very pretty: roses, and honeysuckle, and jasmines, and such-like ruralities, actually enveloping it. It is well placed, too, in a snug little nook, sheltered from the north, and with a peep at the river in front,--just the sort of place where baffled ambition and disappointment would retire to; and where, doubtless, some of these days, Tom Linton, not being selected by her Majesty as Chief Secretary for the Home Office, will be announced in the papers to have withdrawn from public life, 'to prosecute the more congenial career of literature.' There is a delicious little boudoir, too,--such is it at present, you or I would make it a smoking crib,-- looking over the Shannon, and with a fine bold mountain, well wooded, beyond. I should like a gossip with you in that bay-window, in the mellow hour, when confidence, which hates candles, is at its full.

"Have I told you everything? I scarcely know, my head is so full of roof-trees, rafters, joists, gables, and parapets.

Halt! I was forgetting a pretty--that is not the word--a handsome girl, daughter or granddaughter of our tenant, Mr.