Grenfell had promised him overnight to be up and stirring by an early hour, but when called he refused to rise; he had his lazy fit on him, he said; he might have called it rather a malady than a paroxysm, for it was chronic. He declared that the view from the rock before the door fully satisfied him; he was no glutton about scenery; a little did for him, and here was a feast. “Besides,” said he, “I have been reading those atrocious magazines all night, and I mean to devote my day to some rebel colloquies with my host.”
Perhaps, after all, Vyner was scarcely sorry to set out alone; Gren-fell’s companionship was of so essentially worldly a character, his qualities were best exercised when they discussed the men, the things, and the topics of his day: such a man saw in the wild sublimity of a mountain scene little else than its desolation, and Vyner bethought him how often this town-bred gentleman had jarred upon him in moments of peaceful reverie and errant fancy.
O’Rorke served his breakfast in silence; either he was not in communicative mood, or he mistrusted his guest. He answered with brevity the few questions about the road, only adding, “that it was a pity the gentleman had not mentioned before where he was going, for there was an old man and his granddaughter had just set out on that very road.”
“The child I saw here yesterday?”
“The same.”
“Have they been long gone? Could I overtake them, think you?”
“Easy enough; they’ve taken some bread and a bottle of milk for their breakfast, and you’ll come up with them, if you walk briskly, before they reach the Gap.”
He lost no further time, but strapping on a light knapsack, and armed with a stout stick, set out at once.
“If it’s a gauger you are, you’d wish yourself back in the place you came from before night,” said O’Rorke, as he looked after him. Vyner was a good walker, and trained to the mountains, so that his eye quickly detected any available short cut, and enabled him at a glance to choose his path. If there was not actual peril in his position—thus alone and companionless in a wild region, where any suspicion may attach to the stranger—there was that amount of adventure that summons a man’s courage to its post, and tells him that he must look to his own safety; and who that has felt this sensation, this proud sense of self-dependence, does not know its ecstasy! Who has not tasted the small heroism of being alone on the mountain, on the wild heath at midnight, on the rolling sea with a gathering storm in the distance, and who, having felt, has not gloried in it?
But to the man who leaves behind a home of every comfort, where all that can adorn and embellish existence are to be found, the contrast of present privation with past indulgence has something wonderfully exciting. He pictures the pleasant drawing-room with its cheerful fire, and the happy faces round the hearth; he fancies he hears the merry laugh, the melodious chords of the piano, the swell of some sweet voice, and then he bends his ear to the rugged plash of the breaking sea, or the whistling wind as it sweeps through some Alpine “crevasse.” If no sense of such dangers arose to Vyner’s mind, yet there was enough to make him feel how different was his present position from anything that his daily life exacted. The chances that we voluntarily confront have a wondrous fascination.
From his map he learned that the estate which he wished to purchase began at the Gap of Inchegora, a solemn gorge visible for many a mile off! It was indeed a grand portal that same Gap, not fully fifty feet in width, and more than nine hundred in height—a mere fissure, in fact, as complete as though made by the stroke of a giant’s scimitar. With his eyes directed constantly to this spot, he went onward, and came at length to a little stream, at the margin of which, and under the shelter of a solitary ash, sat the old peasant and his granddaughter at their breakfast.
“I have walked hard to come up with you,” said Vyner. “I wanted to have your company to the Gap.” The old man touched his hat in acknowledgment of this speech, and then bent down his head, while the child spoke to him in Irish.
“ ’Tis deaf my grandfather is, Sir, and he didn’t hear you,” said the girl.
“Tell him I would be glad he’d be my guide as far as Mort-na———”
She laughed merrily at his poor attempt at the name, and said, with a racy intonation, “Mortnagheela. ’Tis there we live ourselves.”
The old peasant munched his bread and lifted the bottle twice to his lips before he answered the girl’s question, and then said, “Ask him is he a gauger.”
“No,” said Vyner, laughing; “I have not come here to molest any one. I want nothing more than to look at your big mountains and grand old cliffs.”
“You’re a surveyor,” said the old man, whose hearing seemed to have not lost one word Vyner uttered.
“Not even that, my good friend—a mere idler, no more.”
The peasant said something in Irish to the child, and she laughed heartily at it, looking up the while in Vyner’s face, as though it made the jest more poignant.
“Well, will you let me bear you company, Katherine?” asked he. As the girl repeated the question, the old fellow gave a half impatient shrug of the shoulders, and uttered a few sentences in Irish with a voluble energy that savoured of passion.
“ ’Tis what he says, Sir,” said the child; “that he was in trouble once before, and found it hard enough to get out of it, and if misfortune was to come to you, that he’d be blamed for it.”
“So, then, he’d rather have nothing to do with me,” said Vyner, smiling. “What does he mean by trouble?”
The old man looked up full in his face, and his eyes took an almost defiant expression as he said, “Isn’t the assizes trouble?—isn’t it trouble to be four months in gaol waiting for them?—isn’t it trouble to stand up in the dock, with two sons of your own, and be tried for your life?”
“Yes, that indeed may be called trouble,” said Vyner, compassionately, as he sat down on the bank and took out a cigar. “Do you smoke? Will you have one of these?”
The old man looked at the cigar and shook his head; either he did not value, or did not understand it.
“That’s the reason I come up here,” resumed the peasant. “I’m a Mayo man, and so is all belongin’ to me, but after that”—he laid an emphasis on the last word—“the landlord, ould Tom Luttrell, wouldn’t renew my lease, and so I come up to this wild place, where, praise be to the Virgin, there’s no leases nor landlords either.” “How does that happen? The land surely has an owner?” “If it has, I never saw him, nor you neither. And whoever he is, he knows better than to come here and ax for his rents.” The bitter laugh with which the old fellow finished his speech was scarcely short of an insult—indeed, Vyner half winced as he felt that it might have been meant as a menace to himself. “No,” continued he, as though following out the flow of his own thoughts; “there’s the Gap of Inchegora before us, and through that Gap tithe-proctor, agent, or bailiff, never passed, and if they did, they’d never pass back again!”
“And who is supposed to own these lands?” asked Vyner, mildly. “The College of Dublin has some of them; Lord Landsborough has more; John Luttrell of Arran says that there’s part of them his; and, for the matter of that, I might say that the mountain there was mine—and who’s to contradict me?—or what better am I after saying it?”
Pouring out