With these few preliminary remarks, now offered once for all, I shall end the tedious task of introduction, and plunge at once into the business of my story, merely reiterating, by way of supplemental caution, that names and titles, and a few details of locality, which I fancied might indicate individuals, and lead to detection, have been suppressed and altered; but that in the substance, and, indeed, with those exceptions, in all the minor details of these narratives, I shall observe a strict adherence to the facts, as they were either related to me, or came within my own personal knowledge.
The story which I am about to relate, carries me back somewhere about half a century; at which time, it is needless to say, Dublin was, in point of society, a very different city from what it now is. It had then a resident aristocracy, and one whose equipages and housekeeping were maintained upon a scale which put plebeian competition wholly out of the question. I do not mean to offer any ungracious reflections upon the existing state of Dublin society. We have now, alas! more tuft-hunters than tufts to boast of; magnificent pretensions, based, like the Brahmin’s world, nobody can exactly say upon what, strive and strain to fill the void, which a legitimate aristocracy have left; and men, whose grandfathers—but what matters it? the thing is after all but natural. What was a metropolis, is a capital no longer; and it is but lost time sighing after the things that once were, or snarling at those that are.
At the time of which I speak, there resided in Dublin a certain worthy baronet, whom I shall call Sir Arthur Chadleigh. He was then considerably past sixty, and was a venerable monument of what was called hard living, in all its departments. He had been, until gout disabled him, a knowing gentleman on the turf; he was a deep player and a deep drinker, and covered, with an exterior of boisterous jollity, a very cold and selfish heart. He was thoroughly a man of the world, and what was then an essential ingredient in that amiable character, whenever occasion prompted, a very determined duellist. Whatever good nature he was possessed of, was expended upon society at large. In his dealings with his own family, he was arbitrary and severe; and if he did possess any natural affections, he had managed to get them all admirably under control, and never was known, under any circumstances, to suffer from their overindulgence. This old gentleman had been blessed, in his prime, with an helpmate; but Lady Chadleigh, having been, in her own way, about as domestic a person as Sir Arthur, one fine morning, at three o’clock precisely, when her spouse was entering upon his fourth bottle of claret in the parlour, absconded with young Lord Kildalkin. The happy pair were overtaken at Havre by the baronet, who, at ten paces, duly measured, shot off Kildalkin’s thumb—a feat which satisfied his honour, as some of the sterner brethren of the hair-trigger averred, at much too reasonable a rate. The worthy baronet, however, on his return, explained satisfactorily to a select circle of friends. “For,” said he, “had I shot him through the head, I should not have known what the ⸻ to do with Lady C.” As it was, he left his wife in the hands of his rival, as a moderate equivalent for the joint.
Lady Chadleigh had not been cruel enough to leave her lord without some objects on which to exercise those domestic virtues, for which he was so justly celebrated. She had been just five years married, when she took her departure, as I have stated; and she left behind her, for the consolation of her spouse, along with an extensive assortment of macaws, avadavats, lapdogs, and other sundries, three children—two sons and a girl. The macaws, etc., were easily disposed of, but there was no getting rid of the children; so Sir Arthur called in a grim old spinster sister, who, for fourteen years, dating from that day, presided at the baronet’s tea-table, and ruled his little flock. At the end of this period she died, and much about the same time died also the unfortunate Lady Chadleigh, forsaken and heartbroken, in some obscure town in France.
Lady Chadleigh’s name had been proscribed—in Sir Arthur’s presence none dared to mention it; and, with the exception of little Mary, the daughter who, since infancy, had never seen her, no human being appeared to feel the smallest concern about the event. Little Mary Chadleigh, however, felt it deeply; with the yearnings of unavailing affection, she had always clung to the idea, that some time or other her mother would come back, and be fond of her. The reasons of the separation were, of course, wholly unknown to her, and her childish eagerness to learn something of her mother, had been systematically repulsed with a mysterious discouragement, in which she had come gradually to acquiesce. But though she had long learned to look upon her mother’s absence as in some way a necessary and unavoidable privation, and even as a natural thing, and a matter of course, which scarcely required to be accounted for, yet her mind had been constantly busied with the one thought, that at last she would return, and love her as she wished to be loved. And now came these strange tidings, never looked for in her childish dreams, and these black dresses, to tell her that all the little plans and hopes that had silently fluttered her innocent heart so many a time for so many years, must end forever; that the being for whose return she had been watching and wishing ever since she could remember, was never to come again. This
