The Daltons; Or, Three Roads In Life. Volume I. Lever Charles James

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      “And why not, father? Of what use all this good blood, of which I have been told so often and so much, if it will not enable a man to compete with the low-born peasant. And see how well this knapsack sits,” cried he, as he threw it on his shoulder. “I doubt if the Emperor’s pack will be as pleasant to carry.”

      “So long as you haven’t to carry a heavy heart, boy,” said Dalton, with deep emotion, “I believe no load is too much.”

      “If it were not for leaving you and the girls, I never could be happier, never more full of hope, father. Why should not I win my way upward as Count Stephen has done? Loyalty and courage are not the birthright of only one of our name!”

      “Bad luck was all the birthright ever I inherited,” said the old man, passionately; “bad luck in everything I touched through life! Where others grew rich, I became a beggar; where they found happiness, I met misery and ruin! But it’s not of this I ought to be thinking now,” cried he, changing his tone. “Let us see, where are the girls?” And so saying, he entered a little kitchen which adjoined the room, and where, engaged in the task of preparing the dinner, was a girl, who, though several years older, bore a striking resemblance to the boy. Over features that must once have been the very type of buoyant gayety, years of sorrow and suffering had left their deep traces, and the dark circles around the eyes betrayed how deeply she had known affliction. Ellen Dalton’s figure was faulty for want of height in proportion to her size, but had another and more grievous defect in a lameness, which made her walk with the greatest difficulty. This was the consequence of an accident when riding, a horse having fallen upon her and fractured the hip-bone. It was said, too, that she had been engaged to be married at the time, but that her lover, shocked by the disfigurement, had broken off the match, and thus made this calamity the sorrow of a life long.

      “Where’s Kate?” said the father, as he cast a glance around the chamber.

      Ellen drew near, and whispered a few words in his ear.

      “Not in this dreadful weather; surely, Ellen, you didn’t let her go out in such a night as this?”

      “Hush!” murmured she, “Frank will hear you; and remember, father, it is his last night with us.”

      “Could n’t old Andy have found the place?” asked Daiton; and as he spoke, he turned his eyes to a corner of the kitchen, where a little old man sat in a straw chair peeling turnips, while he croned a ditty to himself in a low singsong tone; his thin, wizened features, browned by years and smoke, his small scratch wig, and the remains of an old scarlet hunting-coat that he wore, giving him the strongest resemblance to one of the monkeys one sees in a street exhibition.

      “Poor Andy!” cried Ellen, “he’d have lost his way twenty times before he got to the bridge.”

      “Faith, then, he must be greatly altered,” said Dalton, “for I ‘ve seen him track a fox for twenty miles of ground, when not a dog of the pack could come on the trace. Eh, Andy!” cried he, aloud, and stooping down so as to be heard by the old man, “do you remember the cover at Corralin?”

      “Don’t ask him, father,” said Ellen, eagerly; “he cannot sleep for the whole night after his old memories have been awakened.”

      The spell, however, had begun to work; and the old man, letting fall both knife and turnip, placed his hands on his knees, and in a weak, reedy treble began a strange, monotonous kind of air, as if to remind himself of the words, which, after a minute or two, he remembered thus.

      “There was old Tom Whaley,

      And Anthony Baillie,

      And Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glynn,

      And Father Clare,

      On his big brown mare,

      That moruin’ at Corralin!”

      “Well done, Andy! well done!” exclaimed Dalton. “You ‘re as fresh as a four-year-old.”

      “Iss!” said Andy, and went on with his song.

      “And Miles O’Shea,

      On his cropped tail bay,

      Was soon seen ridin’ in.

      He was vexed and crossed

      At the light hoar frost,

      That mornin’ at Corralin.”

      “Go on, Andy! go on, my boy!” exclaimed Dalton, in a rapture at the words that reminded him of many a day in the field and many a night’s carouse. “What comes next?”

      “Ay!” cried Andy.

      “Says he, ‘When the wind

      Laves no scent behind,

      To keep the dogs out ‘s a sin;

      I ‘ll be d – d if I stay,

      To lose my day,

      This mornin’ at Corralin.’”

      But ye see he was out in his reck’nin’!” cried Andy; “for, as if

      “To give him the lie,

      There rose a cry,

      As the hounds came yelpin’ in;

      And from every throat

      There swelled one note,

      That moruin’ at Corralin.”

      A fit of coughing, brought on by a vigorous attempt to imitate the cry of a pack, here closed Andy’s minstrelsy; and Ellen, who seemed to have anticipated some such catastrophe, now induced her father to return to the sitting-room, while she proceeded to use those principles of domestic medicine clapping on the back and cold water usually deemed of efficacy in like cases.

      “There now, no more singing, but take up your knife and do what I bade you,” said she, affecting an air of rebuke; while the old man, whose perceptions did not rise above those of a spaniel, hung down his head in silence. At the same moment the outer door of the kitchen opened, and Kate Dalton entered. Taller and several years younger than her sister, she was in the full pride of that beauty of which blue eyes and dark hair are the chief characteristics, and is deemed by many as peculiarly Irish. Delicately fair, and with features regular as a Grecian model, there was a look of brilliant, almost of haughty, defiance about her, to which her gait and carriage seemed to contribute; nor could the humble character of her dress, where strictest poverty declared itself, disguise the sentiment.

      “How soon you’re back, dearest!” said Ellen, as she took off the dripping cloak from her sister’s shoulders.

      “And only think, Ellen, I was obliged to go to Lichtenthal, where little Hans spends all his evenings in the winter season, at the ‘Hahn!’ And just fancy his gallantry! He would see me home, and would hold up the umbrella, too, over my head, although it kept his own arm at full stretch; while, by the pace we walked, I did as much for his legs. It is very ungrateful to laugh at him, for he said a hundred pretty things to me, about my courage to venture out in such weather, about my accent as I spoke German, and lastly, in praise of my skill as a sculptor. Only fancy, Ellen, what a humiliation for me to confess that these pretty devices were yours, and not mine; and that my craft went no further than seeking for the material which your genius was to fashion.”

      “Genius, Kate!” exclaimed Ellen, laughing. “Has Master Hans been giving you a lesson in flattery; but tell me of your success which has he taken?”

      “All everything!” cried Kate; “for although at the beginning the little fellow would select one figure and then change it СКАЧАТЬ