Charles Lever - Lord Kilgobbin

This was the whole of it. But a brief line to the bankers said that any expense they judged needful to her safe convoy across Europe would be gratefully repaid by him.

‘Is it all right, dear? Have I forgotten anything?’ asked he, as Kate read it over.

‘It’s everything, papa – everything. And I do long to see her.’

‘I hope she’s like Matty – if she’s only like her poor mother, it will make my heart young again to look at her.’

In that old square of Trinity College, Dublin, one side of which fronts the Park, and in chambers on the ground-floor, an oak door bore the names of ‘Kearney and Atlee.’ Kearney was the son of Lord Kilgobbin; Atlee, his chum, the son of a Presbyterian minister in the north of Ireland, had been four years in the university, but was still in his freshman period, not from any deficiency of scholarlike ability to push on, but that, as the poet of the Seasons lay in bed, because he ‘had no motive for rising,’ Joe Atlee felt that there need be no urgency about taking a degree which, when he had got, he should be sorely puzzled to know what to do with. He was a clever, ready-witted, but capricious fellow, fond of pleasure, and self-indulgent to a degree that ill suited his very smallest of fortunes, for his father was a poor man, with a large family, and had already embarrassed himself heavily by the cost of sending his eldest son to the university. Joe’s changes of purpose – for he had in succession abandoned law for medicine, medicine for theology, and theology for civil engineering, and, finally, gave them all up – had so outraged his father that he declared he would not continue any allowance to him beyond the present year; to which Joe replied by the same post, sending back the twenty pounds inclosed him, and saying: ‘The only amendment I would make to your motion is – as to the date – let it begin from to-day. I suppose I shall have to swim without corks some time. I may as well try now as later on.’

The first experience of his ‘swimming without corks’ was to lie in bed two days and smoke; the next was to rise at daybreak and set out on a long walk into the country, from which he returned late at night, wearied and exhausted, having eaten but once during the day.

Kearney, dressed for an evening party, resplendent with jewellery, essenced and curled, was about to issue forth when Atlee, dusty and wayworn, entered and threw himself into a chair.

‘What lark have you been on, Master Joe?’ he said. ‘I have not seen you for three days, if not four!’

‘No; I’ve begun to train,’ said he gravely. ‘I want to see how long a fellow could hold on to life on three pipes of Cavendish per diem. I take it that the absorbents won’t be more cruel than a man’s creditors, and will not issue a distraint where there are no assets, so that probably by the time I shall have brought myself down to, let us say, seven stone weight, I shall have reached the goal.’

This speech he delivered slowly and calmly, as though enunciating a very grave proposition.

‘What new nonsense is this? Don’t you think health worth something?’

‘Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive, and I don’t see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one hundred and fifty out of it. That’s the way they neglect arithmetic in our modern schools!’

‘Has he reduced your allowance?’

‘He has done more, he has extinguished it.’

‘Have you provoked him to this?’

‘I have provoked him to it.’

‘But is it not possible to accommodate matters? It should not be very difficult, surely, to show him that once you are launched in life – ’

‘And when will that be, Dick?’ broke in the other. ‘I have been on the stocks these four years, and that launching process you talk of looks just as remote as ever. No, no; let us be fair; he has all the right on his side, all the wrong is on mine. Indeed, so far as conscience goes, I have always felt it so, but one’s conscience, like one’s boots, gets so pliant from wear, that it ceases to give pain. Still, on my honour, I never hip-hurraed to a toast that I did not feel: there goes broken boots to one of the boys, or, worse again, the cost of a cotton dress for one of the sisters. Whenever I took a sherry-cobbler I thought of suicide after it. Self-indulgence and self-reproach got linked in my nature so inseparably, it was hopeless to summon one without the other, till at last I grew to believe it was very heroic in me to deny myself nothing, seeing how sorry I should be for it afterwards. But come, old fellow, don’t lose your evening; we’ll have time enough to talk over these things – where are you going?’

‘To the Clancys’.’

‘To be sure; what a fellow I am to forget it was Letty’s birthday, and I was to have brought her a bouquet! Dick, be a good fellow and tell her some lie or other – that I was sick in bed, or away to see an aunt or a grandmother, and that I had a splendid bouquet for her, but wouldn’t let it reach her through other hands than my own, but to-morrow – to-morrow she shall have it.’

‘You know well enough you don’t mean anything of the sort.’

‘On my honour, I’ll keep my promise. I’ve an old silver watch yonder – I think it knows the way to the pawn-office by itself. There, now be off, for if I begin to think of all the fun you’re going to, I shall just dress and join you.’

‘No, I’d not do that,’ said Dick gravely, ‘nor shall I stay long myself. Don’t go to bed, Joe, till I come back. Good-bye.’

‘Say all good and sweet things to Letty for me. Tell her – ’ Kearney did not wait for his message, but hurried down the steps and drove off.

Joe sat down at the fire, filled his pipe, looked steadily at it, and then laid it on the mantel-piece. ‘No, no, Master Joe. You must be thrifty now. You have smoked twice since – I can afford to say – since dinner-time, for you haven’t dined. It is strange, now that the sense of hunger has passed off, what a sense of excitement I feel. Two hours back I could have been a cannibal. I believe I could have eaten the vice-provost – though I should have liked him strongly devilled – and now I feel stimulated. Hence it is, perhaps, that so little wine is enough to affect the heads of starving people – almost maddening them. Perhaps Dick suspected something of this, for he did not care that I should go along with him. Who knows but he may have thought the sight of a supper might have overcome me. If he knew but all. I’m much more disposed to make love to Letty Clancy than to go in for galantine and champagne. By the way, I wonder if the physiologists are aware of that? It is, perhaps, what constitutes the ethereal condition of love. I’ll write an essay on that, or, better still, I’ll write a review of an imaginary French essay. Frenchmen are permitted to say so much more than we are, and I’ll be rebukeful on the score of his excesses. The bitter way in which a Frenchman always visits his various incapacities – whether it be to know something, or to do something, or to be something – on the species he belongs to; the way in which he suggests that, had he been consulted on the matter, humanity had been a much more perfect organisation, and able to sustain a great deal more of wickedness without disturbance, is great fun. I’ll certainly invent a Frenchman, and make him an author, and then demolish him. What if I make him die of hunger, having tasted nothing for eight days but the proof-sheets of his great work – the work I am then reviewing? For four days – but stay – if I starve him to death, I cannot tear his work to pieces. No; he shall be alive, living in splendour and honour, a frequenter of the Tuileries, a favoured guest at Compiègne.’