Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

oman authorities, since the day when the modern mind rew off the yoke of ecclesiasticism, have done little else but ɔndemn and silence every one, within their own borders, who aimed the right to engage in free scientific inquiry. And for cience, that has progressed only because it was, fortunately, dependent of her, and safe from her machinations, Rome as had nothing but curses and anathemas. Her accusers deght in brilliant metaphors about owls blinking in the noonay, the blind man denying that the sun is shining, upas trees oisoning all the vegetation around them. Modern knowledge s the dawn that has chased the darkness of mediæval supertition, and science is likened to the infant Hercules who bean his career by strangling the venemous serpent that would have killed him in his cradle. The Roman Church not opposed

science! Si monumentum quæris circumspice: examine the record of the Index from Paul IV. to Pius X., and if you are not yet convinced, cast an eye over the famous Syllabus of Pius IX. Besides, if we are to believe our opponents, in resisting intellectual progress, Rome was but obeying a profound instinct of self-preservation, for the triumph of science means her destruction. The progress made by rational knowledge may, we are told, be accurately expressed by the figures that indicate the decline of ecclesiasticism, and of Roman ecclesiasticism in particular.

In reply to these allegations, we can point to a long, glorious list of Catholics, from Copernicus to Secchi, from Ampère to Pasteur, who have been among the leaders in the advance of modern knowledge. But this argument, that would seem conclusive, is not allowed to count for us. The retort is that, of course, no instructed person would dream of denying that a Catholic may be a brilliant astronomer, or mathematician, a successful physicist, or chemist, or surgeon, or biologist; he may become famous in almost any science. The antagonism of Catholicism is not to the sciences, but rather to Science, to the spirit which vivifies all the sciences; which demands complete freedom to investigate every field of inquiry that opens to the human mind, and to follow truth whithersoever it may lead. Science scorns to acknowledge a power which claims the right to say to the thinker or the investigator: You may range at will through the boundless realm of mathematics; you may experiment upon molecules and gases and chemical affinities;

before I am twenty-one. Odd, isn't it, Uncle Hugh "-she always called Colonel Leonard, Uncle, although he was no kin of hers" that there is no medium in our family between extreme seriousness and extreme frivolity?"

She had just returned from a round of visiting among her English relatives, with a scornful and amused wonder over their indefatigable pursuit of amusement. She lived every hour of her life, and she could not imagine any one having the necessity for killing time. For her the happy days were

all too short.

The Colonel smiled.

"I don't ask you to have Lady Sylvia Hilton, Anne," he said; Lady Sylvia was a widowed sister of the late Lady Shandon. "Gad, how she would-wake us up!"

He had been going to say something stronger, but had made the harmless substitution just in time.

Lady Anne went her own way. By this time she knew the needs of the tenants as well as her father before her, and she was more modern than he in her ideas of what the needs demanded. She bided her time, saying nothing. It would be time enough when she was twenty-one to talk about the things she was powerless to do till then.

At last the fateful day arrived. There was to be a dinner to the tenants, a dance for the servants, and many other fine doings. The house was crammed with the English friends and connections, half of whom turned night into day with bridge, while the other half read The Christian and turned up their eyes at the wickedness of the world.

66

"My dear Anne," Colonel Leonard said, with an affectionate hand on his ward's shoulder. He had done what he called giving an account of their stewardship" for himself and Mr. Osborne, who was a tongue-tied person in matters of business. My dear Anne, you are now free and your own mistress by law. But I may say that you may count on Osborne and myself, in the future as in the past, to do all we can to help you in the difficult position in which you find yourself. You have succeeded to a big property and a big responsibility, too big I may say for a girl like yourself to support unaided. But your father's old friends will not fail you. My dear child, you must let us bear this burden for you till, in the most natural way, it devolves on your husband."

The Colonel paused for breath. Before he could go on again Lady Anne spoke quietly.

"Of

But I

Hugh," she said.
anything for me.
years to do what I know

"Thank you very much, Uncle course I know that you would do have been preparing myself all these papa wished, that is to manage the estate myself. I shall not even have an agent. A steward, perhaps, but not an agent. I do not intend that any one shall come between the tenants and myself. To-morrow I will look into those leases-"

"Good Lord!" gasped the Colonel. "Good Lord! You'll come a cropper, young lady, I tell you; you'll come a cropper!"

"You dear!" she said, jumping up and kissing him on top of his bald head. "I can never thank you enough, you and Mr. Osborne, for having taken such care of things for me. If I ever needed advice of course I should come to you, but I warn you frankly that I do not anticipate that I shall need advice."

"Good Lord

"Good Lord!" said the Colonel to himself. If it had been a lad now! If it had been a lad!"

CHAPTER III.

MISS 'STASIA.

There is a certain Dublin street which lies on a hilltop, surrounded by other streets, into which the dry rot has been eating for many a year past. This has not yet suffered the degradation of many of the others, which have fallen into disrepute as streets of tenement houses, but it has a dreadful melancholy by the side of which their squalid over-crowding is cheerful. The houses were houses of the nobility and gentry in the latter half of the eighteenth century. They were built over what once were cherry and apple orchards. The rooms are lofty and spacious, decorated with Italian stuccowork; they have doors of wine-red Spanish mahogany, and fine marble mantel-pieces, although where they have become tenement houses the enterprising builder has in most cases torn out the mantel-pieces, and replaced them by something com

moner.

Wharton Street is off the beaten track, runs away from the main thoroughfare, where the electric trams climb and descend

the hill. It connects two streets with an unnecessary connection, since you may take the high road a few steps further and make the connection more cheerfully. I doubt that anybody ever saves those few steps by turning up Wharton Street. There is something deadly to the spirits in its black housefronts. Its one solitary bit of renown is that a political murder took place some thirty years ago in a low archway in the middle of the street. For the rest the lower windows are screened from the public gaze by short wire blinds which go half-way up. The upper windows have curtains of red mo. reen, with the cheapest Nottingham white ones to indicate the drawing-room. One wonders how in this city of few manufactures, with the fields not half a mile away, the house-fronts could have become so black. The imaginative person passes Wharton Street with a shudder, thinking that a life within its precincts would be a living death.

Every house in the street lets lodgings, and the lodgers are all old ladies. They have seen better days. They hold aloof from each other as a rule in a proud isolation, wrapping themselves about in their memories of past glories. It is a sort of Béguinage for the widows and maiden sisters and maiden aunts of the Irish land-owners, whose provision for these helpless ones, which they thought as solid as the solid earth, went down in the wild storm of the early eighties.

At the very top of the dreariest, grimiest, blackest house of them all lived the Honorable Anastasia de Courcy L'Estrange Chevenix, Lord Shandon's cousin, seven times removed.

She was the greatest hermit of all the old ladies, never went out to tea with any of the others, not even to Mrs. Montmorenzy De Renzy on the drawing-room floor, nor to the Misses Burke Vandaleur on the third floor. For one thing, she could not have afforded to return the hospitality, and that was a thing she could not have borne. The old ladies expected a return of hospitality too. For another thing, she was desperately shy and sensitive. For yet another, she had a gnawing wolf at her vitals in her fear that as she grew older the tiny annuity she had saved out of the débacle would be insufficient to keep her. As it was she starved, inasmuch as she never had enough to eat. She would have literally starved if it had not been for the landlady, Mrs. Cronin, who had been kitchen-maid to Miss Chevenix's brother, Lord Moneymore, in

the great days, and now reared a large family, somewhere in the basement of the house, of discreet children, who from their earliest months learned to be quiet and demure so as not to disturb the old ladies.

- Mrs. Cronin sent up many a little dainty to Miss Chevenix's table which the tiny sum the lady paid for board did not warrant. Sometimes Miss Chevenix had compunction over those dainties.

"You are feeding me too well, Eliza," she would say. "I don't expect an egg with my tea when new-laid eggs are at famine prices. And that little sole yesterday. A Dublin Bay herring is a very dainty and sweet fish; I should have been quite content with one."

swer.

"Is it Dublin Bays, Miss 'Stasia?" Mrs Cronin would an"Sure, they're great commonalty, and besides they're scarce. That little sole now, the fishwoman had her basket full o' them. Take them at your own price,' says she, 'for I'm heart-scalded wid them. There was a terrible take o' them

last night,' she says. As for them eggs, my cousin Bridget brought me a present of a dozen. Sure it was a bit o' business dalin' I was doin' wid ye, sendin' you wan up for your tay."

After an interview like this, and there were many such, Mrs. Cronin would descend to her own premises, wiping her brow and hoping the Lord would forgive her.

"I'm after tellin' lies as fast as a dog 'ud trot," she would say to Mr. Cronin, who was a waiter by night, and in the daytime cleaned knives and chopped wood and polished boots and washed dishes. "Sure my tongue runs away wid me. She'd ha' been deceived wid the quarter o' the lies I told her. Indeed she's as aisy deceived as a child; aisier, for childher are sharp as needles-look at our own Mary Anne!"

Both John and Eliza Cronin-for, although John owed none of the special loyalty to the Chevenixes which his wife did as an old servant, he yet thought with Eliza in pretty nearly all matters-both John and Eliza would have been distressed if they could have known of that wolf of fear which was gnawing, gnawing at poor Miss Anastasia's heart.

It would never have occurred to Eliza that Miss 'Stasia . could have cause for fear. She was quite content to shoulder the burden of Miss 'Stasia's advancing years. Not that they need be apprehended for a long time. Why, Miss 'Stasia's sixtieth birthday was yet some way off. But when the time

« НазадПродовжити »