Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon Volume Ii Part 47

"No more eating nor drinking! Why not? You've a nice notion of a convivial evening. Faith, we'll have the broiled bone sure enough, and, what's more, a half gallon of the strongest punch they can make us; an' I hope that, grave as you are, you'll favor the company with a song."

"Really, Mr. Free--"

"Arrah, none of your blarney! Don't be misthering me! Call me Mickey, or Mickey Free, if you like better."

"I protest," said the editor, with dismay, "that here we are two hours at work, and we haven't got to the foot of the great breach."

"And wasn't the army three months and a half in just getting that far, with a battering train and mortars and the finest troops ever were seen? And there you sit, a little fat creature, with your pen in your hand, grumbling that you can't do more than the whole British army. Take care you don't provoke me to beat you; for I am quiet till I'm roused. But, by the Rock o'

Cashel--"

Here he grasped the bra.s.s trumpet with an energy that made the editor spring from his chair.

"For mercy's sake, Mr. Free--"

"Well, I won't; but sit down there, and don't be bothering me about sieges and battles and things you know nothing about."

"I protest," rejoined Mr. Meekins, "that, had you not sent to my office intimating your wish to communicate an account of the siege, I never should have thought of intruding myself upon you. And now, since you appear indisposed to afford the information in question, if you will permit me, I'll wish you a very good-night."

"Faith, and so you shall, and help me to pa.s.s one too; for not a step out o' that chair shall you take till morning. Do ye think I am going to be left here by myself all alone?"

"I must observe--" said Mr. Meekins.

"To be sure, to be sure," said Mickey; "I see what you mean. You're not the best of company, it's true; but at a pinch like this--There now, take, your liquor."

"Once for all, sir," said the editor, "I would beg you to recollect that, on the faith of your message to me, I have announced an account of the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo for our morning edition. Are you prepared, may I ask, for the consequences of my disappointing ten thousand readers?"

"It's little I care for one of them. I never knew much of reading myself."

"If you think to make a jest of me--" interposed Mr. Meekins, reddening with pa.s.sion.

"A jest of you! Troth, it's little fun I can get out of you; you're as tiresome a creature as ever I spent an evening with. See now, I told you before not to provoke me; we'll have a little more drink; ring the bell.

Who knows but you'll turn out better by-and-by?"

As Mike rose at these words to summon the waiter, Mr. Meekins seized the opportunity to make his escape. Scarcely had he reached the door, however, when he was perceived by Mickey, who hurled the trumpet at him with all his force, while he uttered a shout that nearly left the poor editor lifeless with terror. This time, happily, Mr. Free's aim failed him, and before he could arrest the progress of his victim, he had gained the corridor, and with one bound, cleared the first flight of the staircase, his pace increasing every moment as Mike's denunciations grew louder and louder, till at last, as he reached the street, Mr. Free's delight overcame his indignation, and he threw himself upon a chair and laughed immoderately.

"Oh, may I never! if I didn't frighten the editor. The little spalpeen couldn't eat his oysters and take his punch like a man. But sure if he didn't, there's more left for his betters." So saying, he filled himself a goblet and drank it off. "Mr. Free, we won't say much for your inclinations, for maybe they are not the best; but here's bad luck to the fellow that doesn't think you good company; and here," added he, again filling his gla.s.s,--"and here's may the devil take editors and authors and compositors, that won't let us alone, but must be taking our lives and our songs and our little devilments, that belongs to one's own family, and tell them all over the world. A lazy set of thieves you are, every one of you; spending your time inventing lies, devil a more nor less; and here," this time he filled again,--"and here's a hot corner and Kilkenny coals, that's half sulphur, to the villain--"

For what particular cla.s.s of offenders Mike's penal code was now devised, I was not destined to learn; for overcome by punch and indignation, he gave one loud whoop, and measured his length upon the floor. Having committed him to the care of the waiters, from whom I learned more fully the particulars of his acquaintance with Mr. Meekins, I enjoined them, strictly, not to mention that I knew anything of the matter; and betook myself to my bed sincerely rejoicing that in a few hours more Mike would be again in that laud where even his eccentricities and excesses would be viewed with a favorable and forgiving eye.

CHAPTER XLI.

IRELAND.

"You'd better call your master up," said the skipper to Mickey Free, on the second evening after our departure from Bristol; "he said he'd like to have a look at the coast."

The words were overheard by me, as I lay between sleeping and waking in the cabin of the packet, and without waiting for a second invitation, I rushed upon deck. The sun was setting, and one vast surface of yellow golden light played upon the water, as it rippled beneath a gentle gale. The white foam curled at our prow, and the rus.h.i.+ng sound told the speed we were going at.

The little craft was staggering under every sheet of her canvas, and her spars creaked as her white sails bent before the breeze. Before us, but to my landsman's eyes scarcely perceptible, were the ill-defined outlines of cloudy darkness they called land, and which I continued to gaze at with a strange sense of interest, while I heard the names of certain well-known headlands a.s.signed to apparently mere ma.s.ses of fog-bank and vapor.

He who has never been separated in early years, while yet the budding affections of his heart are tender shoots, from the land of his birth and of his home, knows nothing of the throng of sensations that crowd upon him as he nears the sh.o.r.e of his country. The names, familiar as household words, come with a train of long-buried thoughts; the feeling of attachment to all we call our own--that patriotism of the heart--stirs strongly within him, as the mingled thrills of hope and fear alternately move him to joy or sadness.

Hard as are the worldly struggles between the daily cares of him who carves out his own career and fortune, yet he has never experienced the darkest poverty of fate who has not felt what it is to be a wanderer, without a country to lay claim to. Of all the desolations that visit us, this is the gloomiest and the worst. The outcast from the land of his fathers, whose voice must never be heard within the walls where his infancy was nurtured, nor his step be free upon the mountains where he gambolled in his youth, this is indeed wretchedness. The instinct of country grows and strengthens with our years; the joys of early life are linked with it; the hopes of age point towards it; and he who knows not the thrill of ecstasy some well-remembered, long-lost-sight-of place can bring to his heart when returning after years of absence, is ignorant of one of the purest sources of happiness of our nature.

With what a yearning of the heart, then, did I look upon the dim and misty cliffs, that mighty framework of my island home, their stern sides lashed by the blue waters of the ocean, and their summits lost within the clouds!

With what an easy and natural transition did my mind turn from the wild mountains and the green valleys to their hardy sons, who toiled beneath the burning sun of the Peninsula; and how, as some twinkling light of the distant sh.o.r.e would catch my eye, did I wonder within myself whether beside that hearth and board there might not sit some whose thoughts were wandering over the sea beside the bold steeps of El Bodon, or the death-strewn plain of Talavera,--their memories calling up some trait of him who was the idol of his home; whose closing lids some fond mother had watched over; above whose peaceful slumber her prayers had fallen; but whose narrow bed was now beneath the breach of Badajos, and his sleep the sleep that knows not waking!

I know not if in my sad and sorrowing spirit I did not envy him who thus had met a soldier's fate,--for what of promise had my own! My hopes of being in any way instrumental to my poor uncle's happiness grew hourly less. His prejudices were deeply rooted and of long standing; to have asked him to surrender any of what he looked upon as the prerogatives of his house and name, would be to risk the loss of his esteem. What then remained for me? Was I to watch, day by day and hour by hour, the falling ruin of our fortunes? Was I to involve myself in the petty warfare of unavailing resistance to the law? And could I stand aloof from my best, my truest, my earliest friend, and see him, alone and unaided, oppose his weak and final struggle to the unrelenting career of persecution. Between these two alternatives the former could be my only choice; and what a choice!

Oh, how I thought over the wild heroism of the battle-field, the reckless fury of the charge, the crash, the death-cry, and the sad picture of the morrow, when all was past, and a soldier's glory alone remained to shed its high halo over the faults and the follies of the dead.

As night fell, the twinkling of the distant lighthouses--some throwing a column of light from the very verge of the horizon, others s.h.i.+ning brightly, like stars, from some lofty promontory--marked the different outlines of the coast, and conveyed to me the memory of that broken and wild mountain tract that forms the bulwark of the Green Isle against the waves of the Atlantic. Alone and silently I trod the deck, now turning to look towards the sh.o.r.e, where I thought I could detect the position of some well-known headland, now straining my eyes seaward to watch some bright and flitting star, as it rose from or merged beneath the foaming water, denoting the track of the swift pilot-boat, or the hardy lugger of the fisherman; while the shrill whistle of the floating sea-gull was the only sound save the rus.h.i.+ng waves that broke in spray upon our quarter.

What is it that so inevitably inspires sad and depressing thoughts as we walk the deck of some little craft in the silence of the night's dark hours? No sense of danger near, we hold on our course swiftly and steadily, cleaving the dark waves and bending gracefully beneath the freshening breeze. Yet still the motion, which, in the bright suns.h.i.+ne of the noonday tells of joy and gladness, brings now no touch of pleasure to our hearts.

The dark and frowning sky, the boundless expanse of gloomy water, spread like some gigantic pall around us, and our thoughts either turn back upon the saddest features of the past or look forward to the future with a sickly hope that all may not be as we fear it.

Mine were, indeed, of the gloomiest; and the selfishness alone of the thought prevented me from wis.h.i.+ng that, like many another, I had fallen by a soldier's death on the plains of the Peninsula!

As the night wore on, I wrapped myself in my cloak and lay down beneath the bulwark. The whole of my past life came in review before me, and I thought over my first meeting with Lucy Dashwood; the thrill of boyish admiration gliding into love; the hopes, the fears, that stirred my heart; the firm resolve to merit her affection, which made me a soldier. Alas, how little thought she of him to whose whole life she had been a guide-star and a beacon! And as I thought over the hard-fought fields, the long, fatiguing marches, the nights around the watch-fires, and felt how, in the whirl and enthusiasm of a soldier's life, the cares and sorrows of every day existence are forgotten, I shuddered to reflect upon the career that might now open before me. To abandon, perhaps forever, the glorious path I had been pursuing for a life of indolence and weariness, while my name, that had already, by the chance of some fortunate circ.u.mstances, begun to be mentioned with a testimony of approval, should be lost in oblivion or remembered but as that of one whose early promise was not borne out by the deeds of his manhood.

As day broke, overcome by watching, I slept, but was soon awoke by the stir and bustle around me. The breeze had freshened, and we were running under a reefed mainsail and foresail; and as the little craft bounded above the blue water, the white foam crested above her prow, and ran in boiling rivulets along towards the after-deck. The tramp of the seamen, the hoa.r.s.e voice of the captain, the shrill cry of the sea-birds, betokened, however, nothing of dread or danger; and listlessly I leaned upon my elbow and asked what was going forward.

"Nothing, sir; only making ready to drop our anchor."

"Are we so near sh.o.r.e, then?" said I.

"You've only to round that point to windward, and have a clear run into Cork harbor."

I sprang at once to my legs. The land-fog prevented my seeing anything whatever, but I thought that in the breeze, fresh and balmy as it blew, I could feel the wind off sh.o.r.e. "At last," said I,--"at last!" as I stepped into the little wherry which shot alongside of us, and we glided into the still basin of Cove. How I remember every white-walled cottage, and the beetling cliffs, and that bold headland beside which the valley opens, with its dark-green woods, and then Spike Island. And what a stir is yonder, early as it is; the men-of-war tenders seem alive with people, while still the little village is sunk in slumber, not a smoke-wreath rising from its silent hearths. Every plash of the oars in the calm water as I neared the land, every chance word of the bronzed and hardy fisherman, told upon my heart. I felt it was my home.

"Isn't it beautiful, sir? Isn't it illigant?" said a voice behind me, which there could be little doubt in my detecting, although I had not seen the individual since I left England.

"Is not what beautiful?" replied I, rather harshly, at the interruption of my own thoughts.

"Ireland, to be sure; and long life to her!" cried he, with a cheer that soon found its responsive echoes in the hearts of our sailors, who seconded the sentiment with all their energy.

"How am I to get up to Cork, lads?" said I. "I am pressed for time, and must get forward."

"We'll row your honor the whole way, av it's plazing to you."

"Why, thank you, I'd rather find some quicker mode of proceeding."

"Maybe you'd have a chaise? There's an elegant one at M'Ca.s.sidy's."

"Sure, the blind mare's in foal," said the bow oar. "The devil a step she can go out of a walk; so, your honor, take Tim Riley's car, and you'll get up cheap. Not that you care for money; but he's going up at eight o'clock with two young ladies."

"Oh, be-gorra!" said the other, "and so he is. And faix, ye might do worse; they're nice craytures."