Chapter XIII: Maxwell’s Improvements

Three years passed away—slowly enough, for in a place like Duranmore time’s flight is never very rapid; and during the course of those three years the novelty of having a son had worn off, and Mr. Drewitt cut down trees, and renewed leases, and took fines, and raised money without the slightest reference to his heir’s interests. In the house matters were better managed; out-of-doors, worse. Every day the property was going more surely to the dogs; every day money seemed more difficult to be had, more impossible to be kept.

When Brian lay in his cradle, Mr. Drewitt proposed building a house on the farm he had settled on his wife before her marriage. “It will increase the value of the place,” he said; “and if I live till Brian grow up and marry, he can reside there and be independent of us altogether; while, on the other hand, should you, dearest, ever have to leave Kincorth, it would be a home for you.”

All in vain Mrs. Drewitt remonstrated. All in vain she entreated him to wait, observing that it would surely be time enough to build a house for Brian’s wife when Brian was put into jacket and trousers. She pointed out that money was not very plentiful; that workmen would have to be paid; that somebody must live in the house if it were finished; and that it would be a continual expense and worry.

Mr. Drewitt overbore all her objections. He insisted that the thing, being proper to be done, should be done at once; that a dower-house ought immediately to be erected; that the expense would be nothing, the advantages incalculable; and straightway he had granite quarried and drawn to the farm, chose a site, set labourers to dig at the foundations, and neglected every other concern of his life in order to ride over each day and see how the work progressed.

“Where are you drawing those stones to?” Maxwell asked one of his uncle’s men who was driving a cart and horse across the hills.

“To Analore, yer honour,” was the answer.

“What for?” pursued the young man.

“To build a house for Masther Brian. The masther is greatly taken on with the notion entirely.”

“Fools build houses,” thought Maxwell, “and, my God, what a fool he is!”

Twelve months afterwards Maxwell rode over to Analore, and tying his horse to a gate walked leisurely up the hill to see how Brian’s castle was getting on. Analore lay inland; it was, as Lady Ebbutt had said, a mountain: the farm was nothing more than a sheep-run. Nature had not made it a garden, and Art had left Nature’s handiwork alone. Over the short grass Maxwell picked his way: there were boulders, there were brambles, there was bog, there was morass—Maxwell rounded them all, still keeping up the hill to the site Mr. Drewitt had chosen.

It was a winter’s morning, bright, clear, and bracing; but there was nothing of elasticity in Maxwell’s step—nothing youthful about his movements.

Every now and then he stopped and looked about him; not that the place was unfamiliar, for the young man knew every rood of his uncle’s property much better than his uncle did himself. He was scrutinising the land professionally; he surveyed it as a jockey might a horse. He was contrasting it with Headlands, and thinking he had made a mistake in choosing a farm by the sea. He dug up the turf with the heel of his shoe, and taking a piece of the earth in his hand examined it minutely.

“Curse him!” said Mr. Maxwell Drewitt as he threw the mould away, “this soil is better than mine,” and he pursued his walk up the hill, thinking while he walked, till he reached the place where Mr. Drewitt had thought to build his house.

It was a lovely site. “A property in such a situation, within twenty miles of London, would be worth a king’s ransom; the view alone would be a fortune,” thought Maxwell, while he looked over lake and valley, over gorge and mountain, and then he laughed, to see nothing but the foundations built up, no sign of bricklayer or labourer at hand. There were cartloads of granite on the ground; there were heaps of sand and marks of where mortar had been mixed; there was the earth that they dug out of the foundations wheeled away on one side, and in this state the edifice was left.

“If he had given this to me instead of settling it on her; if he had said, ‘Maxwell, you have been hardly done by, and it is not much I can give you, but there is Analore, take it, for you and your heirs for ever;’ if he had made it over by any binding legal document and helped me to raise a thousand pounds upon it, or lent me a thousand himself, as he might readily have done, I should not have cared to call the king my cousin,” were the thoughts that chased one another through Maxwell Drewitt’s mind. “I could have built a house of those boulders; I could have drained this land; I could have grown potatoes here till the ground was fit for oats; I could have made a fortune out of the place, and so might he, if he were not what he is—a purposeless idiot, a thickheaded ass.”

All the world over, the man who has got hold of a new idea abuses the man who sticks to the old: in Ireland, as in England, the man of business hates the man of pleasure; the worker detests the idler.

Mr. Drewitt might be a fool, an ass, an idiot; in some things, indeed, I am afraid he was all three; but had Maxwell been born to a great estate, he would scarcely have seen his uncle’s shortcomings so clearly; he would not have looked so closely after soils himself.

Give a property to a man whose eyes have once been opened and he can see clearly enough how to improve it; but till necessity has sharpened their inventions, I think few people notice everything which is lying within their ken. It was his uncle’s marriage that sharpened Maxwell Drewitt, that enabled him to see exactly to what extent the rent-roll of Kincorth might be increased.

“If it were clear to-morrow it would be worth fifteen thousand a year; increase those mortgages, and I could make it worth forty thousand a year.” This was Maxwell’s calculation as he sat on a great stone, looking over the lake, and the valley, and the distant mountains. “I must try to get some land in this neighbourhood, and so make the most of my rights of sea-weed,” was the practical conclusion he arrived at ere he left Analore.

“A man like this deserved to succeed,” I hear some say at this juncture; and my answer is, “He did succeed—he did lay house to house and acre to acre.” He gained all that he set out determined to achieve, and if he did not secure the great prize, towards which all human efforts aim—happiness—it was only because, thinking he should find it in wealth and position, in lands, in smiling fields, in verdant pastures, he strove to become the owner of these good things, and of these only.

Knowing what need Ireland has of such men, fresh from the sight of her wretched poverty, her miserable management, her forlorn condition, I could almost wish I had chosen a different hero, and taken a better man to show what energy and perseverance may do for an individual as well as for a people.

There are such in Connemara; there are little oases, formed by their industry and talent, in the wilderness; there are gardens in the desert; there are resting-places where the tired mind and the weary heart may sit down and take refreshment, seeing what even one man has been able to effect. Kincorth is one of these; but the mind that saw what Kincorth might be made has long ceased to fret itself with schemes, to vex itself over disappointment; while the man who owns Kincorth now is grave beyond all mortal comprehension.

Let me go on with my story, friends, for I must not write of the end yet.

All the plans of Mr. Drewitt’s life came to nothing, like the dower-house at Analore. All the good he purposed died in the birth, all the reforms he intended were never carried out.

The road to ruin was the one he voluntarily chose in youth, and he always lacked strength of mind enough to turn back at any stage of his journey and try to make for fortune.

For a time Mrs. Drewitt endeavoured to mend matters, urging him to look his affairs boldly in the face, and not to allow them to get more and more involved; but before she had been married two years she, too, learned that speaking was useless, and contented herself with entreating that he would not mortgage the house and demesne of Kincorth; that he would endure any inconvenience, practise any economy, rather than jeopardize _the_ inheritance of their son.

Mr. Drewitt promised, and then broke his promise, comforting himself exceedingly the while by thinking that his wife need never know he had done so.

Mortgaging in one class is very like pawning in another. Money is wanted, and a few thousands can easily enough be raised. Money is needed, and it is only a step to the three balls.

But in either case it is the repayment that proves difficult, and with Mr. Drewitt repayment was simply impossible. Still on—on—along the road to ruin he pursued his way, riding his hacks, keeping his hunters, making guests welcome, running into debt recklessly as he travelled.

There was plenty of good company taking the same journey with the owner of Kincorth.

His was no isolated case—no exception to a general rule—only perhaps there were few who, while beggaring themselves, made so little show of wealth as he—few who seemed to do so small an amount of good, either to their families or to their friends, as this weak, amiable, purposeless, loveable Archibald Drewitt, who put down his misfortunes to every cause save the real one, who shifted the blame to any man’s shoulders rather than carry it himself.

Much as she loved her husband, Mrs. Drewitt could not be blind to his shortcomings; she could not avoid seeing that different management might have produced different results.

She heard how well Maxwell was doing, and asked his uncle whether he could not reclaim some portion of his own land likewise.

“If I had started unencumbered as he has done,” replied Mr. Drewitt, with a sigh, “things might have been very different; but I have been in debt from the first. I had a heavy establishment to keep up. I had those children to maintain.”

And the owner of Kincorth spoke in a tone of such sincere self-pity that Mrs. Drewitt had no courage left to remind him of the fact of his having started with eight thousand a-year clear, spite of the mortgages. She held her peace, and Mr. Drewitt still continued traversing the road that for him could have but one end.

Three years passed away. Kathie was dead, Susan had eloped, Wilhelmina rode as fast, as far, and as fearlessly as ever. There was another child at Kincorth—a daughter named after its paternal grandmother, Geraldine. There was a third infant coming, and Mrs. Drewitt’s face was beginning already to tell tales of sorrow and anxiety. Poor lady! four years of married life, of an irregular household, of a dissatisfied family, of regret, of sickness, of struggle, had rubbed some of the beauty of youth off her countenance, had altered and saddened her expression.

She had mourned for Kathleen, she had wept over the girl in the watches of the night; she had kept her with her so long as human love and human care could avail; and when at length Kathleen floated out from the river to the sea, Mrs. Drewitt watched her as she drifted towards the great ocean with eyes dimmed by crying, with a heart bowed down by grief.

Though she had her baby, though she did now own that great and powerful king, still she missed the friendship and the companionship of the girl who had taken to her so kindly.

She had never feared to talk to Kathie about her perplexities, her difficulties, and now she knew that through the years to come she must live entirely without sympathy, and without assistance.

If anything had been wanting to fill her cup of sorrow at that time, a remark of Maxwell’s, which through the officiousness of an acquaintance came to her ears, would have caused it to overflow.

He said what he knew to be false, that if Kathie had been properly attended to when she first returned from school, she need not then be lying in Eversbeg Abbey.

It was not true; and Mrs. Drewitt herself chanced to be aware that no care or attention could have saved Kathie at any stage of her disease; but the blow went home for all that.

She reproached herself; she thought she had not noticed Kathie’s malady so soon as she might; she remembered that she had mistaken the flush on her cheeks for strength—the brightness of her eyes for health.

She knew she had been taken up with herself and the baby; for a time she remembered she felt so ill that exertion of any kind was a trouble; and then she was so happy about the birth of her son, that she did not pay much attention to any one save the young autocrat.

She had put the boy first (this was what she thought), and, being her own, she ought to have seen to poor motherless Kathie, even before thinking of her child. Heaven help her!—many a time that winter the baby went a little to the wall, while the sick girl was nursed and tended.

If Maxwell had exhausted all his ingenuity in trying to make her wretched, he could not have succeeded better.

She had been selfish, she had been absorbed, and it was wrong for her to be either, though nothing could have saved Kathie, though no help of man could have averted the decree of death.

She and Mr. Drewitt had both been foolish. She, gentle soul, could see it all clearly enough when the idol had been taken down from its pedestal, when its father ceased to consider its future prospects every moment in the day, when she found life had its duties, though she was a mother—when she discovered that even a baby may usurp too much attention, and lead with its fat toes, with its plump legs, with its soft, yielding body, with its clenched fists, with its meaningless face, its unseasonable grief, and its maniacal merriment, the wisest parent into temptation every day.

Poor Kathie! Mrs. Drewitt mourned for her as no one of her own flesh and blood sorrowed.

Maxwell was busy with his schemes; Susan was full of her lover; Willy thought the house dull, and lived as much out of it as possible; Mr. Drewitt had his own anxieties and troubles, and besides, he said “he always expected Kathie to follow her mother.”

Mrs. Drewitt alone, did not forget the girl, but thought of her when the winter snows were on the ground, when the February rains deluged the earth, when the spring flowers were blooming and the summer splendour glorifying the hills. Nothing could be quieter than Eversbeg Abbey, nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, and Kathie always longed for peace and quietness.

It was best so—it was best.

The birds built their nests in the ivy that grew over the window beneath which the vault of the Drewitts lay. They went twittering in and out, chirping and singing all the day, from early morning till late at night. The sheep came in over the broken wall, and browsed at will among the graves, undisturbed by resident or stranger. The ferns grew among the old walls, and the grass was long and rank in the hollows between the tombs. Nettles tall and luxuriant flourished where the priest had once performed mass, where the worshippers had once knelt before the altar.

There was no roof to the Abbey, save the sky. The once perfect arches of doors and windows were falling to decay. The evening wind lightly stirred the leaves of the ivy. In the stillness the ripple of the waves upon the shore could be distinctly heard, and it was in this quiet nook—quiet and neglected, desolate and beautiful—that Kathie, with her hands folded on her breast, slept among her kindred, far beyond the reach of sorrow or regret.

One trouble drives away the memory of another, and Susan’s elopement proved even a greater trial to Mrs. Drewitt then Kathie’s death. She knew where the one was, but did not know what had become of the other. She only felt that the evil she was unable to avert had come at last. She had spoken to Susan, to Maxwell, to Mr. Drewitt, and behold the end was an empty room one morning, and a note from Miss Drewitt, stating that as anything seemed preferable to remaining at Kincorth, she had determined to cast her lot with the only man who loved her.

“What lot has she chosen, Maxwell, what lot?” asked poor Mrs. Drewitt, as with blanched face she showed this note to her nephew, and entreated him to trace his sister and bring her back.

“Would she stay, do you think?” asked Maxwell. “Could you or I, or anybody living, keep Susan here if she made up her mind to go away? But I will follow them to Dublin. I will see whether they are married, and if not, he shall marry her.”

But the fugitives were gone to England, and at Liverpool Maxwell lost all traces of them. He could not devote his life to running after his sister. He had not the time, he had not the money, he had not the inclination.

“As Susan had sown she must reap,” he remarked to Mrs. Drewitt, and he went back to his farm by the shore.

What more could be done for Susan was done by Mrs. Drewitt, who wrote to her brother-in-law, Sir Everard Ebbutt, begging him to ascertain Captain Ellenham’s antecedents, and to give her tidings of her niece, if possible. Further, she asked him not to mention the matter to his wife.

Sir Everard lost no time in replying to this letter. To begin with, he stated that Captain Ellenham could not have married Miss Drewitt, because he had at that moment a wife and three children living in London. Further, Captain Ellenham’s regiment having been ordered abroad, it was more than probable Susan had gone abroad with him. Should he obtain any further information he would let her know.

“It is a blessing she has gone abroad. I hope she will die there!” was Maxwell’s only remark when Mrs. Drewitt communicated these particulars to him. “And if ever I come across that fellow, I will shoot him. Meantime it will be as well to say to every one that they are married.” Having summed up the duty of the family in which explicit sentence, Maxwell dropped the subject, and never, of his own free will, mentioned his sister afterwards.

He was building a house at the time on the piece of barren land that had come to him from his grandfather, and he paid particular attention to the masons during the whole of the summer following Kathie’s death.

“A bare staring place,” Mr. Drewitt told his wife, “that it made him feel cold even to look at. What a pity for him not to have chosen a better site! It is a good house too;” and then he asked Maxwell why he had not selected some finer position, somewhere on the side of a hill, and where there was more of a view.

“Beggars cannot afford to be choosers,” answered the younger man; “besides, wait a while, sir, and you will not call my choice so bad a one. Further, remember the land I am laying money out on now is _my own_, and that I am not in a position to both build and buy.”

“But money can always be raised, you know,” suggested Mr. Drewitt.

“Can it?” was the reply. “That is not my opinion, and I hope you will never find reason to alter yours.”

This little rap ended the conversation. It is not easy to talk with a man who has always the last word and the best word; and besides, it suddenly occurred to Mr. Drewitt that the house at Analore was not two feet above the ground, and that perhaps Maxwell might inquire why he did not raise money to finish it.

“He must be excessively clever, I think,” sighed Mrs. Drewitt, when she heard in the following spring how Maxwell was buying young trees from Waller of Eversbeg, and planting them round his new abode.

“They won’t live—they can’t live; it is impossible,” said Mr. Drewitt, who, although he did not exactly grudge Maxwell his success, still thought that such innovations ought not to be encouraged by Providence. “They cannot live; consider the sea-breeze—the exposed situation.”

And Mrs. Drewitt, of course, was of her husband’s opinion. Maxwell had made a mistake at last; the trees could do no good. But the trees throve for all that. Maxwell had considered the matter before ever Mr. Drewitt thought of it. He had a south aspect; he was well sheltered from the north and east; he knew that the woods surrounding Eversbeg must have been planted by some one, and he thought he would risk something at any rate, and make the experiment.

There is many a lovely place across the water, many a sweet nook in the Green Isle, but I doubt whether in its way—which, of course, is not a grand way, but only very quiet and enchanting—the tourist could chance to see a prettier spot than “Headlands” at this day.

If you row across the bay from the little fishing village of Eversbeg, you see the house built of granite lying among the trees. The lawn slopes quite down to the edge of the shore, while the woods, spreading out like a semicircle, enclose this piece of green, which is soft as velvet. Down almost to high-water mark the plantations extend, and when the tide is in the willow, and the birch, and the spruce-fir droop their branches over the tide. See it on a fine day, when the bay resembles an opal; when the new-mown grass appears in the distance to be an emerald set in a darker band of green; when the rugged headland shows dark and steep against the calm unruffled ocean; when there is hardly a ripple on the sea, when there is scarcely the lightest breeze stirring among the treetops; when the little fishing village nestling on the side of Eversbeg Point looks white and picturesque in the bright sunlight; when the mountains look higher and nearer than usual, and rear their great heads towards the sky; when the ruins of Eversbeg Abbey appear close at hand; when the fresh-shorn sheep are climbing the hill-sides; when no sound breaks the stillness save the plash of the oars as the rowers pull across the bay, and the drip drip of the water from the blades, as they hold them above the sea and float gently towards the shore;—see it thus, I say, and you can well fancy you have beheld fairyland. It is a place you cannot bear to leave—that you turn back and look at with an indescribable emotion—that you wave your adieu to with the tears filling your eyes, though you could not give a reason why or wherefore.

Maxwell Drewitt found it a wilderness—this is the paradise he left it. Think of that as you lean over the stern, and the rowers bear you away from the garden of Eden, and think, also, if you had such a nest on earth you might find it hard to leave the world, and that, perhaps, it is best for you to own nothing so perfect, so exquisite of its kind.

Headlands is too beautiful—that is all any person can say. It seems too charming to be real; and when you have left Eversbeg behind you, and are travelling away towards Oughterard through the valley of desolation, through the land of a thousand Dead Sea lakes, you come gradually to believe that “Headlands” was a dream—that such a place never existed—that the lawn does not slope down to the glassy sea—that the trees do not overhang the water—that Maxwell Drewitt never planted the ground at all, but that it remains barren and sterile to this very day.

Nevertheless that modern garden of Eden lies in Connemara, on the shores of the wide Atlantic; within sight of its tremendous billows, of its restless waves. Eversbeg Bay is much more open than Duranmore, which almost resembles a lake. On the north side of Duranmore stands Kincorth, well sheltered from all breezes save the south, high up on the hill, the house conspicuous for miles; on the north side of Eversbeg, lying low by the shore, is the modest mansion Maxwell reared for himself in the days when he was a poor and a struggling man.

The trees grew and spread out their branches, the land improved and began to pay him well.

While difficulties increased at Kincorth, everything grew smoother and easier at Headlands; and yet one difficulty had arisen in Maxwell Drewitt’s path.

Colonel Vervensoe was dead; and Lady Emmeline, by consequence, was left a widow.

It took Maxwell a few days to realize the difference that this fact might make in his position; and then he drew back his breath and paused, asking himself, “What next?”