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

“You must have these things, surely,” exclaimed Grounsell; “they are the commonest of all medicines;” and then remembering himself, he made signs in the direction of the drawers and phials to express his meaning. Again the chemist uttered some dozen words.

The doctor produced his purse, where certain gold pieces glittered, as though to imply that he was willing to pay handsomely for his ignorance; but the other pushed it away, and shook his head in resolute refusal.

“This is too bad,” muttered Grounsell, angrily. “I ‘ll be sworn he has the things, and will not give them.” The chemist motioned Hans to approach, and whispered a few words in his hearing, on which the dwarf, removing his cap in courteous salutation, addressed Grounsell: “High-born and much-learned Saar. De laws make no oder that doctoren have recht to write physics.”

“What!” cried Grounsell, not understanding the meaning of this speech. Hans repeated it more slowly, and at length succeeded in conveying the fact that physicians alone were qualified to procure medicines.

“But I am a doctor, my worthy friend, a physician of long standing.”

“Das ist possible who knows?”

“I know, and I say it,” rejoined the other, tersely.

“Ja! ja!” responded Hans, as though to say the theme were not worth being warm about, one way or t’ other.

“Come, my dear sir,” said Grounsell, coaxingly; “pray be good enough to explain that I want these medicines for a sick friend, who is now at the hotel here, dangerously ill of gout.”

“Podagra gout!” exclaimed Hans, with sudden animation, “and dese are de cure for gout?”

“They will, I hope, be of service against it.”

“You shall have dem Saar on one condition. That ist, you will visit anoder sick man mit gout an Englessman, too verh ill verb sick; and no rich you understan’.”

“Yes, yes; I understand perfectly; I’ll see him with pleasure. Tell this worthy man to make up these for me, and I ‘ll go along with you now.”

“Gut! verh good,” said Hans, as in a few words of German he expressed to the apothecary that he might venture to transgress the law in the present case when the season was over, and no one to be the wiser.

As Hans issued forth to show the way, he never ceased to insist upon the fact that the present was not a case for a fee, and that the doctor should well understand the condition upon which his visit was to be paid; and still inveighing on this theme, he arrived at the house where the Daltons dwelt. “Remember, too,” said Hans, “that, though they are poor, they are of guten stamm how say you, noble?” Grounsell listened with due attention to all Hanserl’s cautions, following, not without difficulty, his strange and guttural utterances.

“I will go before. Stay here,” said Hans, as they gained the landing-place; and so saying, he pushed open the door and disappeared.

As Grounsell stood alone and in the dark, he wondered within himself what strange chances should have brought a fellow-countryman into this companionship, for there was something so grotesque in Hans’s appearance and manner, that it routed all notion of his being admitted to any footing of friendly equality.

The door at length opened, and the doctor followed Hans into a dimly lighted room, where Dalton lay, half dressed, upon his bed. Before Grounsell had well passed the entrance, the sick man said, “I am afraid, sir, that my little friend here has taken a bit of liberty with both of us, since I believe you wanted a patient just as little as I did a doctor.”

The anxious, lustrous eye, the flushed cheek, and tremulous lip of the speaker gave, at the same time, a striking contradiction to his words. Grounsell’s practised glance read these signs rapidly, and drawing near the bed, he seated himself beside it, saying, “It is quite clear, sir, that you are not well, and although, if we were both of us in our own country, this visit of mine would, as you observe, be a considerable liberty, seeing that we are in a foreign land, I hope you will not deem my intrusion of this nature, but suffer me, if I can, to be of some service to you.”

Less the words themselves than a certain purpose-like kindliness in the speaker’s manner, induced Dalton to accept the offer, and reply to the questions which the other proposed to him. “No, no, doctor,” said he, after a few moments; “there is no great mischief brewing after all. The truth is, I was fretted harassed a little. It was about a boy of mine I have only one and he ‘s gone away to be a soldier with the Austrians. You know, of course as who does n’t? how hard it is to do anything for a young man now-a-days. If family or high connection could do it, we ‘d be as well off as our neighbors. We belong to the Daltons of Garrigmore, that you know are full blood with the O’Neals of Cappagh. But what ‘s the use of blood now? devil a good it does a man. It would be better to have your father a cotton-spinner, or an iron-master, than the descendant of Shane Mohr na Manna.”

“I believe you are right,” observed the doctor, dryly.

“I know I am; I feel it myself, and I ‘m almost ashamed to tell it. Here am I, Peter Dalton, the last of them now; and may I never leave this bed, if I could make a barony constable in the county where the king’s writ could n’t run once without our leave.”

“But Ireland herself has changed more than your own fortunes,” remarked Grounsell.

“That’s true, that ‘s true,” sighed the sick man. “I don’t remember the best days of it, but I ‘ve heard of them often and often from my father. The fine old times, when Mount Dalton was filled with company from the ground to the slates, and two lords in the granary; a pipe of port wine in the hall, with a silver cup beside it; the Modereen hounds, huntsmen and all, living at rack and manger, as many as fifty sitting down in the parlor, and I won’t say how many in the servants’ hall; the finest hunters in the west country in the stables, there was life for you! Show me the equal of that in the wide world.”

“And what is the present condition of the scene of those festivities?” said Grounsell, with a calm but searching look.

“The present condition?” echoed Dalton, starting up to a sitting posture, and grasping the curtain with a convulsive grip; “I can’t tell you what it is to-day, this ninth of November, but I ‘ll tell what it was when I left it, eighteen years ago. The house was a ruin; the lawn a common; the timber cut down; the garden a waste; the tenants beggared; the landlord an exile. That ‘s a pleasant catalogue, is n’t it?”

“But there must come a remedy for all this,” remarked Grounsell, whose ideas were following out a very different channel.

“Do you mean by a poor-law? Is it by taxing the half ruined to feed the lazy? or by rooting out all that once was a gentry, to fill their places by greedy speculators from Manchester and Leeds? Is that your remedy? It ‘s wishing it well I am! No; if you want to do good to the country, leave Ireland to be Ireland, and don’t try to make Norfolk of her. Let her have her own Parliament, that knows the people and their wants. Teach her to have a pride in her own nationality, and not to be always looking at herself in shame beside her rich sister. Give her a word of kindness now and then, as you do the Scotch; but, above all, leave us to ourselves. We understand one another; you never did, nor never will. We quarrelled, and made friends again, and all went right with us; you came over with your Chancery Courts, and your police, and whenever we differed, you never stopped till we were beggared or hanged.”

“You take a very original view of our efforts at civilization, I confess,” said Grounsell, smiling. “Civilization! Civilization! I hate the very sound of the word; it brings to my mind nothing but county jails, bridewells, turnpikes, and ministers’ money. If it was n’t for civilization, would there be a receiver over my estate of Mount Dalton? Would the poor tenants be racked for the rent that I always gave time for? Would there be a big poor-house, with its ugly front staring to the highway, as they tell me there is, and a police barrack to keep it company, opposite? I tell you again, sir, that your meddling has done nothing but mischief. Our little quarrels you converted into serious animosities; our estrangements into the feuds of two opposing races; our very poverty, that we had grown accustomed to, you taught us to regard as a ‘national disgrace,’ without ever instructing us how to relieve it; and there we are now on your hands, neither English in industry, nor Irish in submission, neither willing to work, nor content to be hungry!”