Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  Meanwhile I was standing alone, very sorrowful, on the hearth in the great drawing-room, waiting to hear how it could be managed, when in came Mr. M’Hugh, and coming quite close up to me, said, “Them Galway boys will not know the way across the bogs as I should: I’d be at Outerard in half the time. I’ll go, if they’ll let me, and with all the pleasure in life.”

  “Such a night as this! Oh no, Mr. M’Hugh!”

  “Oh yes; why not?” said he. And this good-hearted, wild creature would have gone that instant, if we would have let him!

  However, we would not, and he gave instructions to the Galway boy how to keep clear of the sloughs and bog-holes; observing to me that “them stranger horses are good for little in Connemara — nothing like a Connemara pony for that!” As Ulick Burke said, “The ponies are such knowing little creatures, when they come to a slough they know they’d sink in, and their legs of no use to them, they lie down till the men that can stand drag them over with their legs kneeling under them.”

  The Galway boy got safe to Outerard, and next morning brought back Dr. Davis, a very clever, agreeable man, who had had a great deal of experience, having begun life as an army surgeon: at any rate, he was not thinking of himself, but of his patient. He thought Isabella dangerously ill — unsettled gout. I will not tire you with all the history of her illness, and all our terrors; but never would I have left home on this odd journey if I could have foreseen this illness. I cannot give you an idea of my loneliness of feeling, my utter helplessness, from the impossibility of having the advantage of the sympathy and sense of any of my own family. We had not, for one whole week, the comfort of even any one letter from any of our distant friends. We had expected to be by this time at Castlebar, and we had desired Honora to direct our letters there. Sir Culling with great spirit sent a Connemara messenger fifty miles to Castlebar for the letters, and when he came back he brought but one!

  No mail-coach road comes near here: no man on horseback could undertake to carry the letters regularly. They are carried three times a week from Outerard to Clifden, thirty-six miles, by three gossoons, or more properly bog-trotters, and very hard work it is for them. One runs a day and a night, and then sleeps a day and a night, and then another takes his turn; and each of these boys has £15 a year. I remember seeing one of these postboys leaving Ballinahinch Castle, with his leather bag on his back, across the heath and across the bog, leaping every now and then, and running so fast! his bare, white legs thrown up among the brown heath. These postboys were persons of the greatest consequence to us: they brought us news from home, and to poor Lady Culling Smith accounts of her baby, and of her friends in England. We began to think we should never see any of them again.

  I cannot with sufficient gratitude describe to you the hospitality and unvaried kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Martin during all these trials. Mr. Martin, rough man as he seemed outside, was all soft and tender within, and so very considerate for the English servants. Mrs. Martin told me that he said to her, “I am afraid that English man and maid must be very uncomfortable here — so many things to which they have been used, which we have not for them! Now we have no beer, you know, my dear, and English servants are always used to beer.” So Mr. Martin gave them cider instead, and every day he took to each of them himself a glass of excellent port wine; and to Isabella, as gout-cordial, he gave Bronte, the finest, Sir Culling said, he ever tasted. And never all the time did Mr. and Mrs. Martin omit anything it was in their power to do to make us comfortable, and to relieve us from the dreadful feeling of being burthensome and horrible intruders! They did succeed in putting me completely at ease, as far as they were concerned. I do not think I could have got through all the anxiety I felt during Lady Culling Smith’s illness, and away from all my own people, and waiting so shockingly long for letters, if it had not been for the kindness of Mrs. Martin, and the great fondness I soon felt for her. She is not literary; she is very religious — what would be called VERY GOOD, and yet she suited me, and I grew very fond of her, and she of me. Little things that I could feel better than describe inclined me to her, and our minds were open to one another from the first day. Once, towards the end, I believe, of the first week, when I began some sentence with an apology for some liberty I was taking, she put her hand upon my arm, and with a kind, reproachful look exclaimed, “Liberty! I thought we were past that long since: are not we?”

  She told me that she had actually been brought up with a feeling of reverence for my father, and particularly for me, by a near relation of hers, old Mr. Kirwan, the President of the Royal Irish Academy, who was a great friend of my father’s and puffer of me in early days. Then her acquaintance afterwards with Mr. Nimmo carried on the connection. She told me he showed her that copy of Harry and Lucy which you had in making the index, and showed her the bridge which he helped me over when Harry was building it. But what touched and won me first and most in Mrs. Martin was the manner in which she spoke of William — her true feeling for his character. “Whenever he could get me alone,” she said, “he would talk to me of Honora or Mrs. Edgeworth and his aunt Mary and you.”

  Some of the expressions she repeated I could not but feel sure were his, and they were so affectionate towards me, I was much touched. Too besides Mrs. Martin made herself very agreeable by her quantity of anecdotes, and her knowledge of the people with whom she had lived in her youth, of whom she could, with great ability and admirable composed drollery, give the most characteristic traits.

  Miss Martin — though few books beyond an Edinburgh or Quarterly Review or two appeared in the sitting-room — has books in quantities in a closet in her own room, which is within her mother’s; and “every morning,” said Mrs. Martin, “she comes in to me while I am dressing, and pours out upon me an inundation of learning, fresh and fresh, all she has been reading for hours before I am up. Mary has read prodigiously.”

  I found Mary one of the most extraordinary persons I ever saw. Her acquirements are indeed prodigious: she has more knowledge of books, both scientific and learned, than any female creature I ever saw or heard of at her age — heraldry, metaphysics, painting and painters’ lives, and tactics; she had a course of fortification from a French officer, and of engineering from Mr. Nimmo. She understands Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and I don’t know how many modern languages. French she speaks perfectly, learned from the French officer who taught her fortification, M. Du Bois, who was one of Buonaparte’s legion of honour, and when the Emperor was ousted, fled from France, and earned his bread at Ballinahinch by teaching French, which Miss Martin talks as if she had been a native, but not as if she had been in good Parisian society; with an odd mixture of a ton de garnison which might be expected from a pupil of one of Buonaparte’s officers. She imbibed from him such an admiration, such an enthusiasm for Buonaparte, that she cannot bear a word said to his disparagement; and when Sir Culling sometimes offended in that way, Miss Martin’s face and neck grew carnation colour, and down to the tips of her fingers she blushed with indignation.

  Her father the while smiled and winked at me. The father as well as the mother dote upon her; and he has a softened way of always calling her “my child” that interested me for both. “My child, never mind; what signifies about Buonaparte?”

  One morning we went with Miss Martin to see the fine green Connemara marble-quarries. Several of the common people gathered round while we were looking at the huge blocks: these people Miss Martin called her TAIL. Sir Culling wished to obtain an answer to a question from some of these people, which he desired Miss Martin to ask for him, being conscious that, in his English tone, it would be unintelligible. When the question had been put and answered, Sir Culling objected: “But, Miss Martin, you did not put the question exactly as I requested you to state it.”

  “No,” said she, with colour raised and head thrown back, “No, because I knew how to put it so that people could understand it. Je sais mon métier de reine.”

  This trait gives you an idea of her character and manner, and of the
astonishment of Sir Culling at her want of sympathy with his really liberal and philanthropic views for Ireland, while she is full of her tail, her father’s fifty-miles-long avenue, and Aeschylus and Euripides, in which she is admirably well read. Do think of a girl of seventeen, in the wilds of Connemara, intimately acquainted with all the beauties of Aeschylus and Euripides, and having them as part of her daily thoughts!

  There are immense caves on this coast which were the free-traders’ resort, and would have been worth any money to Sir Walter. “Quite a scene and a country for him,” as Miss Martin one day observed to me; “don’t you think your friend Sir Walter Scott would have liked our people and our country?”

  It is not exactly a feudal state, but the tail of a feudal state. Dick Martin, father of the present man, was not only lord of all he surveyed, but lord of all the lives of the people: now the laws of the land have come in, and rival proprietors have sprung up in rival castles. Hundreds would still, I am sure, start out of their bogs for Mr. Martin, but he is called Mister, and the prestige is over. The people in Connemara were all very quiet and submissive till some refugee Terry-alts took asylum in these bog and mountain fastnesses. They spread their principles, and soon the clan combined against their chief, and formed a plan of seizing Ballinahinch Castle, and driving him and all the Protestant gentry out of the country. Mr. Martin is a man of desperate courage, some skill as an officer, and prodigious bodily strength, which altogether stood him in stead in time of great danger. I cannot tell you the whole long story, but I will mention one anecdote which will show you how like the stories in Walter Scott are the scenes that have been lately passing in Connemara. Mr. Martin summoned one of his own followers, who had he knew joined the Terry-alts, to give up a gun lent to him in days of trust and favour: no answer to the summons. A second, a third summons: no effect. Mr. Martin then warned the man that if he did not produce the gun at the next sessions he would come and seize it. The man appeared at the house where Mr. Martin holds his sessions — about the size of Lovell’s schoolroom, and always fuller than it can hold: Mr. Martin espied from his end of the room his friend with the gun, a powerfully strong man, who held his way on, and stood full before him.

  “You sent for my gun, your honour, did you?”

  “I did — three times; it is well you have brought it at last; give it to me.”

  The man kneeled down on one knee, and putting the gun across the other knee, broke it asunder, and throwing the pieces to Mr. Martin, cried, “There it is for you. I swore that was the only way you should ever have it, dead or alive. You have warned me, and now I warn you; take care of yourself.”

  He strode out of the crowd. But he was afterwards convicted of Terry-alt practices and transported. Now all is perfectly quiet, and Mr. Martin goes on doing justice in his own peculiar fashion every week. When the noise, heat, and crowd in his sessions court become beyond all bearing, he roars with his stentorian voice to clear the court; and if that be not done forthwith, he with his own two Herculean arms seizes the loudest two disputants, knocks their heads together, thrusts them bawling as they go out of the door and flings them asunder.

  In his own house there never was a more gentle, hospitable, good-natured man, I must say again and again, or else I should be a very ungrateful woman.

  Miss Martin has three ponies, which she has brought every day to the great Wyatt window of the library, where she feeds them with potatoes. One of them is very passionate; and once the potato being withheld a moment too long at the hall door he fell into a rage, pushed in at the door after her, and she ran for her life, got upstairs and was safe.

  I asked what he would have done if he had come up to her?

  “Set his two feet on my shoulders, thrown me down, and trampled upon me.”

  The other day the smith hurt his foot in shoeing him, and up he reared, and up jumped the smith on the raised part of his forge — the pony jumped after him, and if the smith had not scrambled behind his bellows, “would have killed him to be sure.”

  After hearing this I declined riding this pony, though Miss Martin pressed me much, and assured me he was as quiet as a lamb — provided I would never strike him or look cross. Once she got me up on his back, but I looked so miserable, she took me down again. She described to me her nursing of one of these ponies; “he used to stand with his head over my shoulder while I rubbed his nose for an hour together; but I suppose I must throw off these Bedouin habits before I go to London.”

  They are now spending the season in town. I had an opportunity of seeing her perfect freedom from coquetry in company with a Mr. Smith — no relation of Sir Culling’s — a very handsome fine gentleman who came here unexpectedly.

  All this time poor Isabella has been left by me in torture in her bed. At the end of three weeks she was pronounced out of danger, and in spite of the kind remonstrances of our hospitable hosts, not tired of the sick or the well, on a very wet odious day away we went. As there are no inns or place where an invalid could pass the night, I wrote to beg a night’s lodging at Renvyle, Mr. Blake’s. He and Mrs. Blake, who wrote Letters from the Irish Highlands, were not at home, in Galway on a visit, but they answered most politely that they begged me to consider their house as my own, and wrote to their agent who was at Renvyle to receive us.

  Captain Bushby, of the Water Guard — married to a niece of Joanna Baillie’s — was very kind in accompanying us on our first day’s journey. “I must see you safe out,” said he. “Safe out” is the common elision for safe out of Connemara. And really it was no easy matter to get us safe out; but I spare you a repetition of sloughs; we safely reached Renvyle, where the agent received us in a most comfortable well-furnished, well-carpeted, well-lighted library, filled with books — excellent dining-room beyond, and here Lady Smith had a day’s rest, without which she could not have proceeded, and well for her she had such a comfortable resting-place.

  Next day we got into Joyce’s Country, and had hot potatoes and cold milk, and Renvyle cold fowl at The Lodge, as it is styled, of Big Jacky Joyce — one of the descendants of the ancient proprietors, and quite an original Irish character. He had heard my name often, he said, from Mr. Nimmo, and knew I was a writing lady, and a friend to Ireland, and he was civil to me, and I was civil to him, and after eyeing Sir Culling and Lady Smith, and thinking, I saw, that she was affecting to be languishing, and then perceiving that she was really weak and ill, he became cordial to the whole party, and entertained us for two hours, which we were obliged to wait for the going out of the tide before we could cross the sands. Here was an arm of the sea, across which Mr. Nimmo had been employed to build a bridge, and against Big Jack Joyce’s advice, he would build it where Jack prophesied it would be swept away in the winter, and twice the bridge was built, and twice it was swept away, and still Nimmo said it was the fault of the masons; the embankment and his theory could not be wrong, and a third time he built the bridge, and there we saw the ruins of it on the sands — all the embankments swept away and all we had for it was to be dragged over the sand by men — the horses taken off. We were pushed down into a gully-hole five feet deep, and thence pulled up again; how it was I cannot tell you, for I shut my eyes and resigned myself, gave up my soul and was much surprised to find it in my body at the end of the operation: Big Jacky Joyce and his merry men having somehow managed it.

  There was an end of our perils by gullies, sloughs, and bog-holes. We now got on Mr. Nimmo’s and Mr. Killalla’s really good roads, and now our four horses began to tell, and that night we reached Westport, and in consequence of Mrs. Martin’s introduction to her friend Lord Sligo were received by him and Lady Sligo most courteously.

  Westport is a beautiful place, with a town, a port, industrious people all happy, and made so by the sense and energy of a good landlord and a good agent. We regretted that we could stay only this night and the next morning to breakfast; it was so delightful and extraordinary to us again to see trees and shrubberies, and to find ourselves again in the midst of flo
wers from green-house and conservatory. Isabella said she was so delighted, she could hardly forbear, with her crippled, gouty hands, embracing every tree she met. Lord Sligo, himself a martyr to the gout, and with a son at Eton just then attacked with gout, had great compassion for her: he and all his family high-bred and cordial.

  The next morning we pursued our journey, and at the next stage came upon a real mail-coach road, where we had post-horses again, and dismissed our Galway horses. This night brought us to Lough Glyn, where Mr. Strickland received us very kindly, and we had the joy of finding letters waiting for us from home; but we found that the cholera had been for the last ten days killing the poor people at Edgeworthstown — Condy Keegan’s son-in-law, M’Glaughlin the carpenter, and a great many more. How dreadfully anxious Honora must have been with the charge of baby, and this cholera close to our gates!

  The last day’s journey was the longest of all, from the suspense, though all was smooth upon the road. When we saw the lights in the windows at home, you may guess how our hearts went pit-a-pat. We found all WELL; and glad we all were to meet again, and to have Isabella safe with her child: not in her arms, poor crippled creature — it was not possible for her to hold the infant; she could but just hobble about, and was a quarter of an hour going upstairs. Aunt Mary and Honora, after all the warnings my letters had given, were surprised and shocked at the first sight of her. For ten days after her arrival she was unable to travel, impatient as they both were to be at home again. They did reach it, baby and all, safely at last, and you may imagine how relieved we were when we heard of her being safe with her own family again, and with London physicians: five months since then and she is not yet quite re-established. We feel now how very serious her illness was.