Tony Butler. Lever Charles James

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Not to-day. She hopes to-morrow to be able. She asks if you are of the Maitlands of Gillie – Gillie – not ‘crankie,’ but a sound like it, – and if your mother’s name was Janet.”

      “And I trust, from the little you know of me, you assured her it could not be,” said he, calmly.

      “Well, I said that I knew no more of your family than all the rest of us up at the Abbey, who have been sifting all the Maitlands in the three kingdoms in the hope of finding you.”

      “How flattering! and at the same time how vain a labor! The name came to me with some fortune. I took it as I ‘d have taken a more ill-sounding one for money! Who wouldn’t be baptized in bank stock? I hope it’s not on the plea of my mother being Janet, that she consents to receive me?”

      “She hopes you are Lady Janet’s son, and that you have the Maitland eyes, which it seems are dark, and a something in their manner which she assures me was especially captivating.”

      “And for which, I trust, you vouched?”

      “Yes. I said you were a clever sort of person, that could do a number of things well, and that I for one did n’t quarrel with your vanity or conceit, but thought them rather good fun.”

      “So they are! and we ‘ll laugh at them together,” said he, rising, and preparing to set out “What a blessing to find one that really understands me! I wish to heaven that you were not engaged!”

      “And who says I am?” cried she, almost fiercely.

      “Did I dream it? Who knows? The fact is, my dear Miss Becky, we do talk with such a rare freedom to each other, it is pardonable to mix up one’s reveries with his actual information. How do you call that ruin yonder?”

      “Dunluce.”

      “And that great bluff beyond it?”

      “Fairhead.”

      “I ‘ll take a long walk to-morrow, and visit that part of the coast.”

      “You are forgetting you are to call on Mrs. Butler.”

      “So I was. At what hour are we to be here?”

      “There is no question of ‘we’ in the matter; your modesty must make its advances alone.”

      “You are not angry with me, cariasima Rebecca?”

      “Don’t think that a familiarity is less a liberty because it is dressed in a foreign tongue.”

      “But it would ‘out;’ the expression forced itself from my lips in spite of me, just as some of the sharp things you have been saying to me were perfectly irrepressible?”

      “I suspect you like this sort of sparring?”

      “Delight in it”

      “So do I. There’s only one condition I make: whenever you mean to take off the gloves, and intend to hit out hard, that you ‘ll say so before. Is that agreed?”

      “It’s a bargain.”

      She held out her hand frankly, and he took it as cordially; and in a hearty squeeze the compact was ratified.

      “Shall I tell you,” said she, as they drew nigh the Abbey, “that you are a great puzzle to us all here? We none of us can guess how so great a person as yourself should condescend to come down to such an out-o’-the-world spot, and waste his fascinations on such dull company.”

      “Your explanation, I ‘ll wager, was the true one: let me hear it.”

      “I called it eccentricity; the oddity of a man who had traded so long in oddity that he grew to be inexplicable, even to himself, and that an Irish country-house was one of the few things you had not ‘done,’ and that you were determined to ‘do’ it.”

      “There was that, and something more,” said Maitland, thoughtfully.

      “The ‘something more’ being, I take it, the whole secret.”

      “As you read me like a book, Miss Rebecca, all I ask is, that you ‘ll shut the volume when you ‘ve done with it, and not talk over it with your literary friends.”

      “It is not my way,” said she, half pettishly; and they reached the door as she spoke.

      CHAPTER VIII. SOME EXPLANATIONS

      If there was anything strange or inexplicable in the appearance of one of Maitland’s pretensions in an unfrequented and obscure part of the world, – if there was matter in it to puzzle the wise heads of squires, and make country intelligences look confused, – there is no earthly reason why any mystification should be practised with our reader. He, at least, is under our guidance, and to him we impart whatever is known to ourselves. For a variety of reasons, some of which this history later on will disclose, – others, the less imminent, we are free now to avow, – Mr. Norman Maitland had latterly addressed much of his mind to the political intrigues of a foreign country: that country was Naples. He had known it – we are not free to say how, at this place – from his childhood; he knew its people in every rank and class; he knew its dialect in all its idioms. He could talk the slang of the lazzaroni, and the wild patois of Calabria, just as fluently as that composite language which the King Ferdinand used, and which was a blending of the vulgarisms of the Chiaja with the Frenchified chit-chat of the Court. There were events happening in Italy which, though not for the moment involving the question of Naples, suggested to the wiser heads in that country the sense of a coming peril. We cannot, at this place, explain how or why Maitland should have been a sharer in these deeds; it is enough to say that he was one of a little knot who had free access to the palace, and enjoyed constant intercourse with the king, – free to tell him of all that went on in his brilliant capital of vice and levity, to narrate its duels, its defalcations, its intrigues, its family scandals and domestic disgraces, – to talk of anything and everything but one: not a word on politics was to escape them; never in the most remote way was a syllable to drop of either what was happening in the State, or what comments the French or English press might pass on it. No allusion was to escape on questions of government, nor the name of a minister to be spoken, except he were the hero of some notorious scandal. All these precautions could not stifle fear. The menials had seen the handwriting on the wall before Belshazzar’s eyes had fallen on it. The men who stood near the throne saw that it rocked already. There was but one theme within the palace, – the fidelity of the army; and every rude passage between the soldiery and the people seemed to testify to that faithfulness. Amongst those who were supposed to enjoy the sovereign confidence – for none in reality possessed it – was the Count Caffarelli, a man of very high family and large fortune; and though not in the slightest degree tinctured with Liberalism in politics, one of the very few Neapolitan nobles who either understood the drift, or estimated the force of the party of action. He foresaw the coming struggle, and boded ill of its result. With Mr. Maitland he lived in closest intimacy. The Italian, though older than the Englishman, had been his companion in years of dissipation. In every capital of Europe these two men had left traditions of extravagance and excess. They had an easy access to the highest circles in every city, and it was their pleasure to mix in all, even to the lowest Between them there had grown what, between such men, represented a strong friendship, – that is, either would readily have staked his life or his fortune; in other words, have fought a duel, or paid the play-debts of the other. Each knew the exact rules of honor which guided the conduct of the other, and knew, besides, that no other principles than these held any sway СКАЧАТЬ