Dark Rosaleen (8 page)
Authors: Marjorie Bowen
As the carriage stopped in the inn yard the travellers were met by General Dumouriez and General Egalité, as M. de Chartres was called. Both wore the uniform of the Republic; the Bourbon prince, not yet twenty years old, had a graceful, romantic appearance; the other was a noble-looking man well past middle age. Both had adopted the classic Republican style, their hair was short and unpowdered, they wore the tricolour sash, they seemed in a considerable nervous agitation.
Mademoiselle Adelaide rushed to her brother and clung to him. Fitzgerald glanced at them with compassion, their situation seemed to him to hold a peculiar humiliation, a peculiar terror.
‘I trust,’ M. de Chartres exclaimed, after Madame de Sillery’s rapid introductions, ‘that M. d’Orléans is safe?’
Neither M. Dumouriez nor Madame de Sillery noticed this use of an abolished title which was unwise in public. The young soldier, holding his sister closely, added:
‘He’s to be arrested! And I no longer have any influence!’
‘So many misfortunes, so much injustice!’ exclaimed Madame de Sillery, who was overcome by fatigue. ‘It is incredible!’
Fitzgerald drew Pamela away from all of them, out of the dark, the cold thin snow, into the warm light of the inn. Tony followed with the hand valises. The young man, between the woman and the Negro, felt himself still clouded by that childhood’s adventure; the slave had come down from the tapestry to put himself under his protection, and Louise had grown into his bride who was leaning on his arm. But, attendant on them, were a thousand nameless shadows that seemed to menace, to overcast all his happiness. He would not heed them; he held Pamela closely to him and kissed her cold mouth by the little patch that she wore to please him.
*
The little estate had an odd charm, and seemed far away from reality.
A stranger, who had come with an air of assurance up the narrow lane, paused, and glanced about him with a frown.
It was a soft day with an opal coloured sky. The high elm trees were covered with their first green, and the shrubs showed small and shining leaves.
The traveller slightly shrugged his shoulders as if resolutely dismissing uneasy thoughts, and proceeded to a small gate in the fence which gave on to a gravel court surrounded by high old trees. At the back was the little white house soft with shadows cast by the boughs of a tall ash tree. Red roses and golden honeysuckle grew up to the bay windows, and among them hung wicker cages in which thrushes were singing.
The estate was enclosed by a high wall like a rampart which was set with carefully clipped bushes and small trees that gave a deep and pleasant border of shade. In parts the wall sank until it was no higher than the knees and disclosed a long, distant blue view across pretty cultivated country to the Curragh.
This was Kildare Lodge, situated a little way out of Kildare town, and the man who had come there on pressing business had found some difficulty in discovering this rural retreat.
A perfect summer stillness lay over everything. There was no one in sight, and no sound except the song of the captive thrushes.
The stranger paused at the small gate; he seemed in half a mind to return without executing his errand, but, putting this aside, he advanced with a firm step up the gravel path to the toy-like white house. The two bay windows were wide open, the fine muslin curtains stirred faintly in the warm air. On one of the bottom sills was a stand of auriculas and mignonette; by it was a gilt work-box on which were baby’s caps in lace and cambric.
The stranger again hesitated. He could find no means of attracting attention in this place so invitingly open to all the world, so unprotected and, it seemed, so empty. But as he stood undecided and a little embarrassed, a lady appeared in the open doorway and stood between the waving tendrils of honeysuckle.
She wore a frilled muslin jacket and a gown of white lawn with a lilac sprig. She had an ivory thimble on her finger, and a pair of delicate scissors hung by a blue ribbon to her waist.
Her face was lovely and at the corner of her lips she had a little patch, a fashionable coquetry which seemed out of place with her simple dress.
‘Lady Edward Fitzgerald?’ asked the stranger.
‘I am she,’ the lady replied readily, in an English which had a foreign accent. ‘But I expect it is my husband you want. Will you come inside, sir?’
He followed her into a parlour which was, even more than the garden and exterior of the house, touching in its simplicity.
Everywhere there were flowers, growing in pots, arranged on stands and carefully tended (no cut bouquets or formal arrangements), with such a lavishness of bloom, that with its open window and fine breeze blowing in, the room just seemed to be a continuation of the garden.
A child of a little over a year old sat on the sofa and played with a large shell, which he now and then held to his ear to listen to the murmur of the sea, and now and then caressed with his fingers to feel the glossy surface.
The only expensive thing in the room was a service of fine china which had just been unpacked; cups and saucers still swathed in straw stood about on the table.
‘That is a present from my good mother-in-law,’ said the lady. She had the kind of manner which treats everybody alike and no one with either great coldness or great confidence. ‘It has been sent me to-day from England. See how pretty it is, fine as eggshell and the colours so bright. What name shall I give my husband?’ she added, fixing her large, clear eyes on the stranger. ‘He is out in the garden with Tony working at his beds. Of course he will be pleased to see you, yet I am sure he will be sorry to be disturbed. He is his own under-gardener, you see, and loves his work.’
‘I don’t know if Lord Edward will remember me, Madame. My name is Sheares, Mr. John Sheares. I didn’t know that I should be disturbing Lord Edward. Your home, Madame, I confess, puts me out of humour with my business.’
‘You come on politics?’ She frowned instantly. ‘Well, we have had enough of those.’
‘Politics! I will give it a less tedious name, Madame. Say, the affairs of Ireland. I am not very well known to Lord Edward, but I represent many friends of his.’
The lady looked at her child, her glance was poignant; the stranger interpreted it and said with emphasis: ‘Friends, Madame; believe me, I could intend no harm to this obvious felicity.’
‘My husband,’ replied Pamela briefly, ‘is, I believe, very happy here. Come, sir, let us find him.’
Mr. John Sheares followed her out of the little house and discovered the man whom he had come from Dublin to see at the back of the courtyard in a small flower garden, his coat off and a spade in his hand, on which he rested, while, under his directions, a huge Negro was delicately digging in the border of primroses, polyanthus, pinks and cloves.
Edward Fitzgerald looked up, and on seeing Mr. Sheares seemed for a moment startled, but quickly recovered, and, slipping on his coat, bade his visitor:
‘Welcome to Kildare Lodge, where you find me as happy as Adam before the fall.’
Pamela frowned a little; she did not seem as light-hearted as her husband. She went back to her little house, her child and her needlework, while the two men, by Mr. Sheares’s express wish, remained in the open air.
Fitzgerald’s welcome of this man, of whom indeed he remembered very little, was warm, but he asked candidly: ‘Why did you put yourself to the trouble to follow me out here into the wilderness? I am still sometimes to be seen at Dublin, and may be there next month.’
‘I thought, sir, we could meet here with less noise than in Dublin. A man travelling through Kildare may venture to call on an acquaintance without his attracting suspicion.’
‘Suspicion!’ echoed Lord Edward, lightly. ‘Now, what pass have we come to that you must use that word? Are there more troubles than I know of already from the public prints? An odious war on the Continent, this miserable government at home! I still read the papers, I assure you. They remain my principal diversion, after my flowers and shrubs.’
‘All the journals that speak the truth of the present state of affairs in Ireland have been suppressed,’ said Mr. Sheares briefly. He added: ‘I have come expressly, this juncture passes the need of compliments, on the behalf of others to ask how far your Lordship will go with us?’
Fitzgerald did not answer. He turned his eyes to the borders of flowers which Tony continued to rake diligently with his small hand fork.
‘I speak for the United Irishmen,’ added Mr. Sheares.
He was a tall, fine-looking man, a lawyer, but with the air of a soldier.
‘You are aware, sir, that we continue to exist, though all such societies and clubs have been suppressed by the Government?’
‘Yes, yes, I am aware of it,’ replied Fitzgerald, carelessly.
‘Yet you have not joined us, sir? Mere lack of a formality, I suppose?’
Fitzgerald still smiled:
‘It is difficult to take these affairs with full seriousness in a place like this — but pray continue, sir.’
‘I, perhaps,’ said Mr. Sheares, ‘have no right to endeavour to draw your Lordship from your rural retreat, but we cannot forget how you spoke for us. I mean, for the oppressed people of Ireland. Ay, and were even arrested for that generous protest, soon after your return from France in ’92. Yours was the one voice then, I think, my Lord, raised against the measures of the English Government. We were sorry that your Lordship did not speak again.’
‘I felt that I spoke to no purpose.’
‘I know,’ replied Sheares. ‘So do men like Grattan and Ponsonby. We are left to our own resources. Believe me, they are not ignoble.’
Lord Fitzgerald, leaning on his spade, smiled wistfully. ‘What can I do? You speak to a man who has no more than eight hundred a year, a small estate, a small family, a peaceful mind.’
‘Has your Lordship forgotten ’92 in Paris? I met you there. You remember Mr. Tone, Reynolds, Bond?’
‘Yes, I remember them all, and good patriotic fellows they were. I remember, too, how I felt myself, what excitement, exultation,’ he sighed. ‘I also took a resolution not to meddle too much in dangerous affairs, and I found a wife. Besides, what was it?’ he added, with increasing animation. ‘Under one’s very eyes France fell into anarchy, chaos, horror. One could not wish that for Ireland. Yet I don’t know.’ He added an impulsive question: ‘Are you thinking of foreign invasion, Mr. Sheares? I remember that was Mr. Tone’s design then.’
‘Some of us think of that as a desperate expedient, my Lord, and some of us believe that perhaps it is the only one. The English Government is weak both in authority and in military force.’
‘A display of foreign power on the coast!’ Fitzgerald interrupted with a frown. ‘I don’t like it. I’m partially English myself, you know. I’m deeply attached to many English people, am even a friend of the Prince and the Duke of York; I always feel my loyalty very divided, Mr. Sheares. Perhaps you had better tell me no more of your plans. I don’t wish to see Ireland under the French flag.’
‘But surely, sir, you wish to see it under its own flag?’
‘Is that possible?’ asked Fitzgerald. ‘Sometimes I wonder!‘
‘The present state of affairs can’t go on,’ declared Mr. Sheares, with his air of authority and his formidable glance fixed upon the other. ‘Even shut away here, sir, with your flowers and your wife and your child you must realise what is going on in the country. Look at the Catholics. Promised everything, a few poor concessions given, then most forcibly repulsed. They and the Dissenters are now joined in one common cause. The English Government, sir, under the iron rule of Mr. Pitt, is pledged to give nothing, not an inch, to Ireland. Their design now, more than ever, is to crush us, exterminate us.’
‘I have heard it said,’ interrupted Fitzgerald, ‘that the design may be — I tell you this in confidence, sir, I got it from my brother Leinster — to force Ireland to a rebellion, and thus obtain an excuse for sending over a powerful military expedition.’
‘That may be,’ replied Mr. Sheares. ‘If we are prudent and well organised, which I believe we shall be, we can defy such tricks. My Lord,’ he added urgently, ‘you must be aware that only through the force of arms have we any hope. Clare and Castlereagh, who once supported the Reformers, are now hot for the English supremacy, and,’ he added, with the firmness of a man who had flung down an unanswerable argument, ‘what do they mean by the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, sent as a moderate to pacify our troubles? Is not that in itself a declaration of enmity?’
‘It has certainly made me lose all patience with the Government,’ agreed Fitzgerald, ‘but I doubt if I am a man to help your cause save with the goodwill and the small subscription that any modest patriot may give you.’
‘We lack military men, my Lord. We have among us no soldiers, and then your Lordship’s influence and connections…’
Fitzgerald interrupted:
‘I could not answer for any of them. My brother Leinster has always had the cause of the people at heart, but it could not be expected that he would take any open action against the Government. Henry is settled in England; Charles, I know, would not meddle. I could not be expected to involve them. Should I go in with you I would not even let them know my designs nor my whereabouts. But shall I go in with you?’ he added, with a sudden half humorous sparkle in his dark eyes. ‘I doubt it. I have no great ability and find it difficult to make calculations or go into the ramifications of policies, or weigh up this or that. I was always known as rash, and something of a dreamer. I doubt if I’d do you any good.’