He paused for a while, and began walking up and down the room hastily, angrily. Presently his thoughts took another turn.
"It's fortunate I said nothing to Madge. She must know by this time how I feel towards her, and I don't think her people would have any objection if this infernal affair was not hanging over me. But I could not speak to her father if I had to say: 'Will you, sir, be good enough to bring your daughter over to Kilbarry, and see her married to me in the poor-house?' It would not look swell. Not a bit of it! Why, 'twould look quite squalid and ungenteel. Never mind, Madge. I'll fight them, darling, to the last. I won't leave a stone unturned, and every one I turn I'll fling at these rapacious fools."
He paused in his walk at the table.
He took up the letter again and looked at the end of it.
"He says I must go over at once-that I must start to-night. That's peremptory and but short notice. Never mind; it may be all for the best. I know the people at Dulwich will not think I am running away from them after bringing this fresh trouble upon them. They are the most generous people in the world. My honour is perfectly safe with them. I have plenty of time to catch the mail. This letter must have come at noon, and fallen off the table. I'll write a letter to Carlingford House explaining matters, and then when I have packed a portmanteau I shall be all right for the road." He sang in a low voice:
He got writing materials, gave Mr. Paulton a short account of the reason for his unexpected departure from London; then he ordered his dinner, packed his portmanteau, ate his dinner, and caught the mail train for Holyhead easily.
He slept half the way from Euston to Holyhead, and nearly all the way from Holyhead to Kingstown. In Dublin, at an hotel close to the Westland Row Station, he got his breakfast, and then drove to Kingsbridge, where he booked and took train for Kilbarry, an important town in the south of Ireland.
A railway journey in the early part of the year from Dublin to the south of Ireland is far from exhilarating. Half the way may be performed at a fair, but the second half is done at a funereal pace. The country looks damp, and is ill-clad with trees. It has not yet donned its summer vesture of astonishing green. The towns are small, far apart, and generally invisible from the train. Few people are on the platforms, and the stations of even important towns are paltry and forlorn. There are occasionally lovely mountains and pastoral streams, but the whole effect is dulling, depressing, from the absence of trees and the melancholy thinness of the population. It is a country empty of its children, and desolate at the loss of them.
Jerry O'Brien was of a mercurial nature, and when he was down he was at zero, and when up, at boiling. This last stage of his journey plunged him into the profoundest gloom. Overhead there was a sick, watery sun, which gave a feeble white glare more dejecting than a pall of thunder cloud. Tobacco was powerless to ameliorate the chill influence of that changing landscape. He tried to read a newspaper, but found he could not fix his attention on one word of what he read. After ascertaining there was nothing in it about Fishery Commissioners, he gave it up as a bad job, and laid it with resignation on the rug which covered his knees.
When he arrived at Kilbarry he was in the lowest and most desponding state of mind. He was firmly persuaded that nothing could save his weirs, and was almost
convinced that the first news he should hear was that his weirs had been destroyed, and that the commissioners had resolved to lynch him if they could lay hands on him before he died of hunger.
He left the station in an omnibus and drove along the mile of broad quays beside the noble river Bawn to the "Munster Hotel." Here the prospect was more cheering than on the bleak, cold journey down. The river was thick with shipping; the quays noisy with traffic; the stores, warehouses, wharfs, and shops alive with people. Sailing vessels were discharging corn and coal, and steamers taking in cattle, and cases of eggs, and bales of bacon, and firkins of butter. Here the stream of humanity was vivid and strong. Moderate prosperity asserted its presence blithely. The weather had cleared and brightened, and the sun hung in the clear western air, a pale golden shield of light.
O'Brien was well known at "The Munster," and as he went up the steps of the hotel, was greeted cordially by the cheerful landlord and a few loungers with whom he was acquainted. He did not see a trace of the hated Fishery Commissioners, and by the time he had eaten a light luncheon, he began to think they were little more than an amiable fiction of a jovial Government. No one he met seemed to think his fortunes were in peril. The manners of John, the old waiter, were respectful and joyous as though the traveller had just returned from far distant lands, after an absence of many years, to enter into possession of a princely patrimony.