Tom Burke Of "Ours", Volume II

The reader is already aware of the catastrophe which concluded his career in the rebel army. It only remains now to be told that he escaped to America, where he entered as a sailor on board a merchantman; and although his superior acquirements and conduct might have easily bettered his fortune in his new walk in life, the dread of detection never left his mind, and he preferred the hardships before the mast to the vacillation of hope and fear a more conspicuous position would have exposed him to.

The vessel in which he served was wrecked off the coast of New Holland, and he and a few others of the crew were taken up by an English ship on her voyage outward. In a party sent on shore for water, Fortescue came up with Darby, who had made his escape from the convict settlement, and was wandering about the woods, almost dead of starvation, and scarcely covered with clothing. His pitiful condition, but perhaps more still, his native drollery, which even then was unextinguished, induced the sailors to yield to Fortescue’s proposal, and they smuggled him on board in a water cask; and thus concealed, he made the entire voyage to England, where he landed about a fortnight before the trial. Fearful of being apprehended before the day, and determined at all hazards to give his evidence, he lay hid till the time we have already seen, when he suddenly came forward to my rescue.

Mulcahy, who worked in the same gang with Darby, or, to use the piper’s grandiloquent expression, – for he burst out in this occasionally, – was “in concatenated proximity to him,” told the whole story of his own baseness, and loudly inveighed against Crofts for deserting him in his misfortunes. The pocket-book taken from Crofts by Darby amply corroborated this statement. It contained, besides various memoranda in the owner’s handwriting, several letters from Mulcahy, detailing the progress of the conspiracy: some were in acknowledgment of considerable sums of money; others asking for supplies; but all confirmatory of the black scheme by which Fortescue’s destruction was compassed.

Whatever might have been the sentiments of the crowded court regarding the former life and opinions of Fortescue and the piper, it was clear that now only one impression prevailed, – a general feeling of horror at the complicated villany of Crofts, whose whole existence had been one tissue of the basest treachery.

The testimony was heard with attention throughout; no cross-examination was entered on; and the judge, briefly adverting to the case which was before the jury, and from whose immediate consideration subsequent events had in a great measure withdrawn their minds, directed them to deliver a verdict of “Not guilty.”

The words were re-echoed by the jury, who, man for man, exclaimed these words aloud, amid the most deafening cheers from every side.

As I walked from the dock, fatigued, worn out, and exhausted, a dozen hands were stretched out to seize mine; but one powerful grasp caught my arm, and a well-known voice called in my ear, —

“An’ ye wor with Boney, Master Tom? Tare and ‘ounds, didn’t I know you’d be a great man yet.”

At the same instant Fortescue came through the crowd towards me, with his hands outstretched.

“We should be friends, sir,” said he, “for we both have suffered from a common enemy. If I am at liberty to leave this – ”

“You are not, sir,” interposed a deep voice behind. We turned and beheld Major Barton. “The massacre at Kil-macshogue has yet to be atoned for.”

Fortescue’s face grew actually livid at the mention of the word, and his breathing became thick and short.

“Here,” continued Barton, “is the warrant for your committal. And you also, Darby,” said he, turning round; “we want your company once more in Newgate.”

“Bedad, I suppose there’s no use in sending an apology when friends is so pressing,” said he, buttoning his coat as coolly as possible; “but I hope you ‘ll let the master come in to see me.”

“Mr. Burke shall be admitted at all times,” said Barton, with an obsequious civility I had never witnessed in him previously.

“Faix, maybe you ‘ll not be for letting him out so aisy,” said Darby, dryly, for his notions of justice were tempered by a considerable dash of suspicion.

I had only time left to press my purse into the honest fellow’s hand, and salute Fortescue hastily, as they both were removed, under the custody of Barton. And I now made my way through the crowd into the hall, which opened a line for me as I went; a thousand welcomes meeting me from those who felt as anxious about the result of the trial as if a brother or a dear friend had been in peril.

One face caught my eye as I passed; and partly from my own excitement, partly from its expression being so different from its habitual character, I could not recognize it as speedily as I ought to have done. Again and again it appeared; and at last, as I approached the door into the street, it was beside me.

“If I might dare to express my congratulations,” said a voice, weak from the tremulous anxiety of the speaker, and the shame which, real or affected, seemed to bow him down.

“What,” cried I, “Mr. Basset!” for it was the worthy man himself.

“Yes, sir. Your father’s old and confidential agent, – I might venture to say, friend, – come to see the son of his first patron occupy the station he has long merited.”

“A bad memory is the only touch of age I remark in you, sir,” said I, endeavoring to pass on, for I was unwilling at the moment of my escape from a great difficulty to lose temper with so unworthy an object.

“One moment, sir, just a moment,” said he, in a low whisper. “You’ll want money, probably. The November rents are not paid up; but there’s a considerable balance to your credit. Will you take a hundred or two for the present?”

“Take money! – money from you!” said I, shrinking back.

“Your own, sir; your own estate. Do you forget,” said he, with a miserable effort of a smile, “that you are Mr. Burke of Cromore, with a clear rental of four thousand a year? We gained the Cluan Bog lawsuit, sir,” continued he. “‘Twas I, sir, found the satisfaction for the bond. Your brother said he owed it all to Tony Basset.”

The two last words were all that were needed to sum up the measure of my disgust and I once more tried to get forward.

“I know the property, sir, for thirty-eight years I was over it. Your father and your brother always trusted me – ”

“Let me pass on, Mr. Basset,” said I, calmly. “I have no desire to become a greater object of mob curiosity. Pray let me pass on.”

“And for Darby M’Keown,” whispered he.

“What of him?” said I; for he had touched the most anxious chord of my heart at that instant.

“I’ll have him free; he shall be at liberty in forty-eight hours for you. I have the whole papers by me; and a statement to the privy council will obtain his liberation.”

“Do this,” said I, “and I ‘ll forgive more of your treatment of me than I could on any other plea.”

“May I call on you this evening, or to-morrow morning, at your hotel? Where do you stop, sir?”

“This evening be it, if it hasten M’Keown’s liberation. Remember, however, Mr. Basset, I’ll hold no converse with you on any other subject till that be settled, and to my perfect satisfaction.”

“A bargain, sir,” said he, with a grin of satisfaction; and dropping back, he suffered me to proceed.

Along the quays I went, and down Dame Street, accompanied by a great mob of people, who thought in my acquittal they had gained a triumph. For so it was; every case had its political feature, and seemed to be intimately connected with the objects of one party or the other. Partisan cheers, – the watchwords of faction, – were uttered as I went, and I was made to suffer that least satisfactory of all conditions, which bestows notoriety without fame, and popularity without merit.

As I entered the hotel, I recognized many of the persons I had seen there before; but their looks were no longer thrown towards me with the impertinence they then assumed. On the contrary, a studied desire to evince courtesy and politeness was evident. “How strange is it!” thought I; “how differently does the whole world smile to the rich man and to the poor!” Here were many who could in nowise derive advantage from my altered condition, – as perfectly independent of me as I of them; and yet even they showed that degree of deference in their manner which the expectant bestows upon a patron. So it is, however. The position which wealth confers is recognized by all; the individual who fills it is but an attribute of the station.

Life had, indeed, opened on me with a new and very different aspect; and I felt, as I indulged in the daydreams which the sudden possession of fortune excites, that to enjoy thoroughly the blessings of independence, one must have experienced, as I had, the hard pressure of adversity. It seemed to me that the long road of gloomy fate had at length reached its turning point, and that I should now travel along a calmer and happier path. Thoughts of the new career that lay before me were blended with the memories of the past; hopes they were, but dashed with the shadows which a blighted affection will throw over the whole stream of life. Still that evening was one of happiness; not of that excited pleasure derived from the attainment of a long coveted object, but the calmer enjoyment felt in the safety of the haven by him who has experienced the hurricane and the storm.

With such thoughts I went to rest, and laid my head on my pillow in thoughtfulness and peace. In my dreams my troubles still lingered. But who regrets the anxious minutes of a vision which wakening thoughts dispel? Are they not rather the mountain shadows that serve to brighten the gleam of the sunlight in the plain?

It was thus the morning broke for me, with all the ecstasy of danger passed, and all the crowding hopes of a happy future. The hundred speculations which in poverty I had formed for the comfort of the poor and the humble might now be realized; and I fancied myself the centre of a happy peasantry, confiding and contented. It would be hard, indeed, to forget “the camp and the tented field” in the peaceful paths of a country life. But simple duties are often as engrossing as those of a higher order, and bring a reward not less grateful to the heart; and I flattered myself to think my ambition reached not above them.

The moments in which such daydreams are indulged are the very happiest of a lifetime. The hopes which are based on the benefits we may render to others are sources of elevation to ourselves; and such motives purify the soul, and exalt the mind to a pitch far above the petty ambitions of the world.

To myself, and to my own enjoyments, wealth could contribute less than to most men. The simple habits of a soldier’s life satisfied every wish of my mind. The luxuries which custom makes necessary to others I never knew; and I formed my resolution not to wander from this path of humble, inexpensive tastes, so that the stream of charity might flow the wider.

These were my waking thoughts. Alas, how little do we ever realize of such speculations! and how few glide down the stream of life unswayed by the eddies and crosscurrents of fortune! The higher we build the temple of our hopes, the more surely will it topple to its fall. Who shall say that our greatest enjoyment is not in raising the pile, and our happiest hours the full abandonment to those hopes our calmer reason never ratified?

As yet it had not occurred to me to think what position the world might concede to one whose life had been passed like mine, nor did I bestow a care upon a matter whereon so much of future happiness depended. These, however, were considerations which could not be long averted. How they came, and in what manner they were met must remain for a future chapter of my history.

CHAPTER XXXVII. HASTY RESOLUTION

In my last chapter I brought my reader to that portion of my story which formed the turning-point of my destiny. And here I might, perhaps, conclude these brief memoirs of an early life, whose chief object was to point out the results of a hasty and rash judgment, which, formed in mere boyhood, exerted its influence throughout the entire of a lifetime. Only one incident remains still to be told; and I shall not trespass on the good-natured patience of my readers by any delay in the narrative.

From being poor, houseless, and unknown, a sudden turn of fortune had made me wealthy and conspicuous in station; the owner of a large estate, – almost a lead-ing man in my native county. My influence was sufficient to procure the liberation of M’Keown; and my interference in his behalf mainly contributed to procure for Fortescue the royal pardon. The world, as the phrase is, went with me; and the good luck which attended every step I took and every plan I engaged in was become a proverb among my neighbors.

Let not any one suppose I was unmindful or ungrateful, if I confess, that even with all these I was not happy. No: the tranquil mind, the spirit at ease with itself, cannot exist where the sense of duty is not. The impulse which swayed my boyish heart still moved the ambition of the man. The pursuits I should have deemed the noblest and the purest seemed to me uninteresting and ignoble; the associations I ought to have felt the happiest and the highest appeared to me vulgar, and low, and commonplace. I was disappointed in my early dream of liberty, and had found tyranny where I looked for freedom, and intolerance where I expected enlightenment; but if so, I recurred with tenfold enthusiasm to the career of the soldier, whose glories were ever before me. That noble path had not deceived me; far from it. Its wild and whirlwind excitement, its hazardous enterprise, its ever-present dangers, were stimulants I loved and gloried in. All the chances and changes of a peaceful life were poor and mean compared to the hourly vicissitudes of war. I knew not then, it is true, how much of enjoyment I derived from forgetful ness; how many of my springs of happiness flowed from that preoccupation which prevented my dwelling on the only passion that ever stirred my heart, – my love for one whose love was hopeless.

How thoroughly will the character of an early love tinge the whole of a life! Our affections are like flowers, – they derive their sweetness and their bloom from the soil in which they grow: some, budding in joy and gladness, amid the tinkling plash of a glittering fountain, live on ever bright and beautiful; others, struggling on amid thorns and wild weeds, overshadowed by gloom, preserve their early impressions to the last, – their very sweetness tells of sadness.

To conquer the memory of this hopeless passion, I tried a hundred ways. I endeavored, by giving myself up to the duties of a country gentleman, to become absorbed in all the cares and pursuits which had such interest for my neighbors. Failing in this, I became a sportsman; I kept horses and dogs, and entered, with all the zest mere determination can impart, upon that life of manly exertion, so full of pleasure to thousands. But here again without succeeding.

I went into society; but soon retired from it, on finding, that among the class of my equals the prestige of my early life had still tracked me. I was in their eyes a rebel, whose better fortune had saved him from the fate of his companions. My youth had given no guarantee for my manhood; and I was not trusted. Baffled in every endeavor to obliterate my secret grief, I recurred to it now, as though privileged by fate, to indulge a memory nothing could efface. I abandoned all the petty appliances by which I sought to shut out the past, and gave myself up in full abandonment to the luxury of my melancholy.

Living entirely within the walls of my demesne, never seen by my neighbors, not making nor receiving visits, I appeared to many a heartless recluse, whose misanthropy sought indulgence in solitude; others, less harshly, judged me as one whose unhappy entrance on life had unfitted him for the station to which fortune had elevated him. By both I was soon forgotten.

The peasantry were less ungenerous, and more just. They saw in me one who felt acutely for the privations they were suffering; yet never gave them that cheap, delusive hope, that legislative changes will touch social evils, – that the acts of a parliament will penetrate the thousand tortuous windings of a poor man’s destiny. They found in me a friend and an adviser. They only-wondered at one thing, – how any man could feel for the poor, and not hate the rich. So long had the struggle lasted between affluence and misery, they could not understand a compromise.

Bitter as their poverty had been, it never extinguished the poetry of their lives. They were hungry and naked; but they held to their ancient traditions, and they built on them great hopes for the future. The old family names, the time-honored memories of place, the famous deeds of ancestors, made an ideal existence powerful enough to exclude the pressure of actual daily evils; and they argued from what had been to what might be, with a persistency of hope it seemed almost cruel to destroy. So deeply were these thoughts engrained into their natures, they felt him but half their friend who ventured to despise them. The relief of present poverty, the succor of actual suffering, became in their eyes an effort of mere passing kindness. They looked to some great amelioration of condition, some wondrous change, some restoration to an imaginary standard of independence and comfort, which all the efforts of common interference fell sadly short of; and thus they strained their gaze to a government, a ruling power, for a boon undefined, unknown, and illimitable.

To expectations like these advice and slight assistance are as the mere drop of water to the parched tongue of thirst; and so I found it. I could neither encourage them in their hopes of such legislative changes as would greatly ameliorate their condition, nor flatter them in the delusion that none of their misfortunes were of home origin; and thus, if they felt gratitude for many kindnesses, they reposed no confidence in my opinion. The trading patriot, who promised much while he pocketed their hard-earned savings; the rabid newspaper writer, who libelled the Government and denounced the landlord, – were their standards of sympathy; and he who fell short of either was not their friend.

In a word, the social state of the people was rotten to its very core. Their highest qualities, degraded by the combined force of poverty, misrule, and superstition, had become sources of crime and misery. They had suffered so long and so much, their patience was exhausted; and they preferred the prospect of any violent convulsion which might change the face of the land, whatever dangers it might come with, to a slow and gradual improvement of condition, however safe and certain.

To win their confidence at the only price they would accord it, I never could consent to; and without it I was almost powerless for good. Here again, therefore, did I find closed against me another avenue for exertion; and the only one of all I could have felt a fitting sphere for my labor. The violence of their own passionate natures, the headlong impulses by which they suffered themselves to be swayed, left them no power of judgment regarding those whose views were more moderate and temperate. They could understand the high Tory landlord, whom they invested with every attribute of tyranny, as their open, candid opponent; they could see a warm friend in the violent mob-orator of the day; but they recognized no trait of kindness in him who would rather see them fed than flattered, and behold them in the enjoyment of comfort sooner than in the ecstasy of triumph.

From “Darby the Blast” – for he was now a member of my household – I learned the light in which I was regarded by the people, and heard the dissatisfaction they expressed that one who “sarved Boney” should not be ready to head a rising, if need be. Thus was I in a false position on every side. Mistrusted by all, because I would neither enter into the exaggerations of party, nor become blind to the truth my senses revealed before me, my sphere of utility was narrowed to the discharge of the mere duties of common charity and benevolence, and my presence among my tenantry no more productive of benefit than if I had left my purse as my representative.

Years rolled on, and in the noiseless track of time I forgot its flight. I now had grown so wedded to the habits of my solitary life, that its very monotony was a source of pleasure. I had intrenched myself within a little circle of enjoyments, and among my books and in my walks my days went pleasantly over.

For a long time, I did not dare to read the daily papers, nor learn the great events which agitated Europe. I tried to think that an interval of repose would leave me indifferent to their mention; and so rigidly did I abstain from indulging my curiosity, that the burning of Moscow, and the commencement of the dreadful retreat which followed, was the first fact I read of.

From the moment I gave way, the passion for intelligence from France became a perfect mania. Where were the different corps of the “Grand Army”? where the Emperor himself? by what great stroke of genius would he emerge from the difficulties around him, and deal one of his fatal blows on the enemy? – were the questions which met me as I awoke, and tortured me during the day.

Each movement of that terrible retreat I followed in the gazettes with an anxiety verging on insanity. I tracked the long journey on the map, and as I counted towns and villages, dreary deserts of snow, and vast rivers to be traversed, my heart grew faint to think how many a brave soldier would never reach that fair France for whose glory he had shed his best blood. Disaster followed disaster; and as the news reached England, came accounts of those great defections which weakened the force of the “Grand Army,” and deranged the places formed for its retiring movements.

They who can recall to mind the time I speak of, will remember the effect produced in England by the daily accounts from the seat of war; how heavily fell the blows of that altered fortune which once rested on the eagles of France; how each new bulletin announced another feature of misfortune, – some shattered remnant of a great corps d’armée cut off by Cossacks, – some dreadful battle engaged against superior numbers, and fought with desperation, not for victory, but the liberty to retreat. Great names were mentioned among the slain, and the proudest chivalry of Gaul left to perish on the far-off steppes of Russia.

Such were the fearful tales men read of that terrible campaign; and the joy in England was great, to hear that the most powerful of her enemies had at length experienced the full bitterness of defeat. While men vied with one another in stories of the misfortunes of the Emperor, – when each post added another to the long catalogue of disasters to the “Grand Army,” – I sat in my lonely house, in a remote part of Ireland, brooding over the sad reverses of him who still formed my ideal of a hero.

I thought how, amid the crumbling ruins of his splendid force, his great soul would survive the crash that made all others despair; that each new evil would suggest its remedy as it arose, and the mind that never failed in expedient would shine out more brilliantly through the gloom of darkening fortune than even it had done in the noonday splendor of success. When all others could only see the tremendous energy of despair, I thought I could recognize those glorious outbursts of heroism by which a French army sought and won the favor of their Emperor. The routed and straggling bodies which hurried along in seeming disorder, I gloried to perceive could assume all the port and bearing of soldiers at the approach of danger, and form their ranks at the wild “houra” of the Cossack as steadily as in the proudest day of their prosperity.

The retreat continued: the horrible suffering of a Russian winter added to the carnage of a battle-tide, which flowed unceasingly from the ruined walls of the Kremlin to the banks of the Vistula: the battle of Borisow and the passage of the Berezina followed fast on each other. And now we heard that the Emperor had surrendered the chief command to Murat, and was hastening back to France with lightning speed; for already the day of his evil fortune had thrown its shadow over the capital. No longer reckoned by tens of thousands, that vast army had now dwindled down to divisions of a few hundred men. The Old Guard scarce exceeded one thousand; and of twenty entire regiments of cavalry, Murat mustered a single squadron as a bodyguard. Crowds of wounded and mutilated men dragged their weary limbs along over the hardened snow, or through dense pine forests where no villages were to be met with, – a fatuous determination to strive to reach France, the only impulse surviving amid all their sufferings.