The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 by Maria Edgeworth

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Isabella did not make her appearance, but this I accounted for by her
having been much tired. She had complained of rheumatic pains, but I had
thought no more about them. Little was I aware of all that was to be.
"L'homme propose: Dieu dispose." Lady Culling Smith at last appeared,
hobbling, looking in torture, leaning on her husband's arm, and trying
to smile on our hospitable hosts, all standing up to receive her. Never
did I see a human creature in the course of one night so changed. When
she was to sit down, it was impossible: she could not bend her knees,
and fell back in Sir Culling's arms. He was excessively frightened. His
large powerful host carried her upstairs, and she was put to bed by her
thin, scared-looking, but excellent and helpful maid; and this was the
beginning of an illness which lasted above three weeks. Little did we
think, however, at the beginning how bad it would be. We thought it only
rheumatism, and I wrote to Honora that we should be detained a few days
longer--from day to day put off. Lady Culling Smith grew alarmingly ill.
There was only one half-fledged doctor at Clifden: the Martins disliked
him, but he was sent for, and a puppy he proved, thinking of nothing but
his own shirt-buttons and fine curled hair. Isabella grew worse and
worse--fainting-fits; and Mrs. and Miss Martin, both accustomed to
prescribe for the country-people in want of all medical advice in these
lone regions, went to their pharmacopoeias and medicine-chest, and
prescribed various strong remedies, and ran up and down stairs, but
could not settle what the patient's disease was, whether gout or
rheumatism; and these required quite different treatment: hands and lips
were swelled and inflamed, but not enough to say it was positively gout,
then there was fear of drawing the gout to the stomach, and if it was
not gout!--All was terror and confusion; and poor Sir Culling,
excessively fond of Isabella, stood in tears beside her bed. He had sat
up two nights with her, and was now seized with asthmatic spasms himself
in his chest. It was one of the worst nights you can imagine, blowing a
storm and raining cats and dogs. Mr. and Mrs. Martin and Sir Culling
thought Lady Smith so dangerously ill that it was necessary to send a
man on horseback thirty miles to Outerard for a physician: and who could
be sent such a night? one of the Galway postillions on one of the
post-horses (you will understand that we were obliged to keep these
horses and postillions at Ballinahinch, as no other horses could be
procured). The postillion was to be _knocked up_, and Sir Culling and
Mr. Martin went to some den to waken him.

Meanwhile I was standing alone, very sorrowful, on the hearth in the
great drawing-room, waiting to hear how it could be managed, when in
came Mr. M'Hugh, and coming quite close up to me, said, "Them Galway
boys will not know the way across the bogs as I should: I'd be at
Outerard in half the time. I'll go, if they'll let me, and with all the
pleasure in life."

"Such a night as this! Oh no, Mr. M'Hugh!"

"Oh yes; why not?" said he. And this good-hearted, wild creature would
have gone that instant, if we would have let him!

However, we would not, and he gave instructions to the Galway boy how to
keep clear of the sloughs and bog-holes; observing to me that "them
stranger horses are good for little in Connemara--nothing like a
Connemara pony for that!" As Ulick Burke said, "The ponies are such
knowing little creatures, when they come to a slough they know they'd
sink in, and their legs of no use to them, they lie down till the men
that can stand drag them over with their legs kneeling under them."

The Galway boy got safe to Outerard, and next morning brought back Dr.
Davis, a very clever, agreeable man, who had had a great deal of
experience, having begun life as an army surgeon: at any rate, he was
not thinking of himself, but of his patient. He thought Isabella
dangerously ill--unsettled gout. I will not tire you with all the
history of her illness, and all our terrors; but never would I have left
home on this odd journey if I could have foreseen this illness. I cannot
give you an idea of my loneliness of feeling, my utter helplessness,
from the impossibility of having the advantage of the sympathy and sense
of any of my own family. We had not, for one whole week, the comfort of
even any one letter from any of our distant friends. We had expected to
be by this time at Castlebar, and we had desired Honora to direct our
letters there. Sir Culling with great spirit sent a Connemara messenger
fifty miles to Castlebar for the letters, and when he came back he
brought but one!

No mail-coach road comes near here: no man on horseback could undertake
to carry the letters regularly. They are carried three times a week from
Outerard to Clifden, thirty-six miles, by three gossoons, or more
properly bog-trotters, and very hard work it is for them. One runs a day
and a night, and then sleeps a day and a night, and then another takes
his turn; and each of these boys has £15 a year. I remember seeing one
of these postboys leaving Ballinahinch Castle, with his leather bag on
his back, across the heath and across the bog, leaping every now and
then, and running so fast! his bare, white legs thrown up among the
brown heath. These postboys were persons of the greatest consequence to
us: they brought us news from home, and to poor Lady Culling Smith
accounts of her baby, and of her friends in England. We began to think
we should never see any of them again.

I cannot with sufficient gratitude describe to you the hospitality and
unvaried kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Martin during all these trials. Mr.
Martin, rough man as he seemed outside, was all soft and tender within,
and so very considerate for the English servants. Mrs. Martin told me
that he said to her, "I am afraid that English man and maid must be very
uncomfortable here--so many things to which they have been used, which
we have not for them! Now we have no beer, you know, my dear, and
English servants are always used to beer." So Mr. Martin gave them cider
instead, and every day he took to each of them himself a glass of
excellent port wine; and to Isabella, as gout-cordial, he gave Bronte,
the finest, Sir Culling said, he ever tasted. And never all the time did
Mr. and Mrs. Martin omit anything it was in their power to do to make us
comfortable, and to relieve us from the dreadful feeling of being
burthensome and horrible intruders! They did succeed in putting me
completely at ease, as far as they were concerned. I do not think I
could have got through all the anxiety I felt during Lady Culling
Smith's illness, and away from all my own people, and waiting so
shockingly long for letters, if it had not been for the kindness of Mrs.
Martin, and the great fondness I soon felt for her. She is not literary;
she is very religious--what would be called VERY GOOD, and yet she
suited me, and I grew very fond of her, and she of me. Little things
that I could feel better than describe inclined me to her, and our minds
were open to one another from the first day. Once, towards the end, I
believe, of the first week, when I began some sentence with an apology
for some liberty I was taking, she put her hand upon my arm, and with a
kind, reproachful look exclaimed, "Liberty! I thought we were past that
long since: are not we?"

She told me that she had actually been brought up with a feeling of
reverence for my father, and particularly for me, by a near relation of
hers, old Mr. Kirwan, the President of the Royal Irish Academy, who was
a great friend of my father's and puffer of me in early days. Then her
acquaintance afterwards with Mr. Nimmo carried on the connection. She
told me he showed her that copy of _Harry and Lucy_ which you had in
making the index, and showed her the bridge which he helped me over when
Harry was building it. But what touched and won me first and most in
Mrs. Martin was the manner in which she spoke of William--her true
feeling for his character. "Whenever he could get me alone," she said,
"he would talk to me of Honora or Mrs. Edgeworth and his aunt Mary and
you."

Some of the expressions she repeated I could not but feel sure were his,
and they were so affectionate towards me, I was much touched. _Too
besides_ Mrs. Martin made herself very agreeable by her quantity of
anecdotes, and her knowledge of the people with whom she had lived in
her youth, of whom she could, with great ability and admirable composed
drollery, give the most characteristic traits.

Miss Martin--though few books beyond an _Edinburgh_ or _Quarterly
Review_ or two appeared in the sitting-room--has books in quantities in
a closet in her own room, which is within her mother's; and "every
morning," said Mrs. Martin, "she comes in to me while I am dressing, and
pours out upon me an inundation of learning, fresh and fresh, all she
has been reading for hours before I am up. Mary has read prodigiously."

I found Mary one of the most extraordinary persons I ever saw. Her
acquirements are indeed prodigious: she has more knowledge of books,
both scientific and learned, than any female creature I ever saw or
heard of at her age--heraldry, metaphysics, painting and painters'
lives, and tactics; she had a course of fortification from a French
officer, and of engineering from Mr. Nimmo. She understands Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew, and I don't know how many modern languages. French
she speaks perfectly, learned from the French officer who taught her
fortification, M. Du Bois, who was one of Buonaparte's legion of honour,
and when the Emperor was _ousted_, fled from France, and earned his
bread at Ballinahinch by teaching French, which Miss Martin talks as if
she had been a native, but not as if she had been in good Parisian
society; with an odd mixture of a _ton de garnison_ which might be
expected from a pupil of one of Buonaparte's officers. She imbibed from
him such an admiration, such an enthusiasm for Buonaparte, that she
cannot bear a word said to his disparagement; and when Sir Culling
sometimes offended in that way, Miss Martin's face and neck grew
carnation colour, and down to the tips of her fingers she blushed with
indignation.

Her father the while smiled and winked at me. The father as well as the
mother dote upon her; and he has a softened way of always calling her
"my child" that interested me for both. "My child, never mind; what
signifies about Buonaparte?"

One morning we went with Miss Martin to see the fine green Connemara
marble-quarries. Several of the common people gathered round while we
were looking at the huge blocks: these people Miss Martin called her
TAIL. Sir Culling wished to obtain an answer to a question from some of
these people, which he desired Miss Martin to ask for him, being
conscious that, in his English tone, it would be unintelligible. When
the question had been put and answered, Sir Culling objected: "But, Miss
Martin, you did not put the question exactly as I requested you to state
it."

"No," said she, with colour raised and head thrown back, "No, because I
knew how to put it so that people could understand it. _Je sais mon
métier de reine."

This trait gives you an idea of her character and manner, and of the
astonishment of Sir Culling at her want of sympathy with his really
liberal and philanthropic views for Ireland, while she is full of her
tail, her father's fifty-miles-long avenue, and Aeschylus and Euripides,
in which she is admirably well read. Do think of a girl of seventeen, in
the wilds of Connemara, intimately acquainted with all the beauties of
Aeschylus and Euripides, and having them as part of her daily thoughts!

There are immense caves on this coast which were the _free-traders'_
resort, and would have been worth any money to Sir Walter. "Quite a
scene and a country for him," as Miss Martin one day observed to me;
"don't you think your friend Sir Walter Scott would have liked our
people and our country?"

It is not exactly a feudal state, but the _tail_ of a feudal state. Dick
Martin, father of the present man, was not only lord of all he surveyed,
but lord of all the lives of the people: now the laws of the land have
come in, and rival proprietors have sprung up in rival castles. Hundreds
would still, I am sure, start out of their bogs for Mr. Martin, but he
is called _Mister_, and the prestige is over. The people in Connemara
were all very quiet and submissive till some _refugee Terry-alts_ took
asylum in these bog and mountain fastnesses. They spread their
principles, and soon the clan combined against their chief, and formed a
plan of seizing Ballinahinch Castle, and driving him and all the
Protestant gentry out of the country. Mr. Martin is a man of desperate
courage, some skill as an officer, and _prodigious_ bodily strength,
which altogether stood him in stead in time of great danger. I cannot
tell you the whole long story, but I will mention one anecdote which
will show you how like the stories in Walter Scott are the scenes that
have been lately passing in Connemara. Mr. Martin summoned one of his
own followers, who had he knew joined the Terry-alts, to give up a gun
lent to him in days of trust and favour: no answer to the summons. A
second, a third summons: no effect. Mr. Martin then warned the man that
if he did not produce the gun at the next sessions he would come and
seize it. The man appeared at the house where Mr. Martin holds his
sessions--about the size of Lovell's schoolroom, and always fuller than
it can hold: Mr. Martin espied from his end of the room his friend with
the gun, a powerfully strong man, who held his way on, and stood full
before him.

"You sent for my gun, your honour, did you?"

"I did--three times; it is well you have brought it at last; give it to
me."

The man kneeled down on one knee, and putting the gun across the other
knee, broke it asunder, and throwing the pieces to Mr. Martin, cried,
"There it is for you. I swore that was the only way you should ever have
it, dead or alive. You have warned me, and now I warn you; take care of
yourself."

He strode out of the crowd. But he was afterwards convicted of Terry-alt
practices and transported. Now all is perfectly quiet, and Mr. Martin
goes on doing justice in his own peculiar fashion every week. When the
noise, heat, and crowd in his sessions court become beyond all bearing,
he roars with his stentorian voice to clear the court; and if that be
not done forthwith, he with his own two Herculean arms seizes the
loudest two disputants, knocks their heads together, thrusts them
bawling as they go out of the door and flings them asunder.

In his own house there never was a more gentle, hospitable, good-natured
man, I must say again and again, or else I should be a very ungrateful
woman.

Miss Martin has three ponies, which she has brought every day to the
great Wyatt window of the library, where she feeds them with potatoes.
One of them is very passionate; and once the potato being withheld a
moment too long at the hall door he fell into a rage, pushed in at the
door after her, and she ran for her life, got upstairs and was safe.

I asked what he would have done if he had come up to her?

"Set his two feet on my shoulders, thrown me down, and trampled upon
me."

The other day the smith hurt his foot in shoeing him, and up he reared,
and up jumped the smith on the raised part of his forge--the pony jumped
after him, and if the smith had not scrambled behind his bellows, "would
have killed him to be sure."

After hearing this I declined riding this pony, though Miss Martin
pressed me much, and assured me he was as quiet as a lamb--provided I
would never strike him or look cross. Once she got me up on his back,
but I looked so miserable, she took me down again. She described to me
her nursing of one of these ponies; "he used to stand with his head over
my shoulder while I rubbed his nose for an hour together; but I suppose
I must throw off these Bedouin habits before I go to London."

They are now spending the season in town. I had an opportunity of seeing
her perfect freedom from coquetry in company with a Mr. Smith--no
relation of Sir Culling's--a very handsome fine gentleman who came here
unexpectedly.

All this time poor Isabella has been left by me in torture in her bed.
At the end of three weeks she was pronounced out of danger, and in spite
of the kind remonstrances of our hospitable hosts, not tired of the sick
or the well, on a very wet odious day away we went. As there are no inns
or place where an invalid could pass the night, I wrote to beg a night's
lodging at Renvyle, Mr. Blake's. He and Mrs. Blake, who wrote _Letters
from the Irish Highlands_, were not at home, in Galway on a visit, but
they answered most politely that they begged me to consider their house
as my own, and wrote to their agent who was at Renvyle to receive us.

Captain Bushby, of the Water Guard--married to a niece of Joanna
Baillie's--was very kind in accompanying us on our first day's journey.
"I must see you _safe out_," said he. "Safe out" is the common elision
for safe out of Connemara. And really it was no easy matter to get us
safe out; but I spare you a repetition of sloughs; we safely reached
Renvyle, where the agent received us in a most comfortable
well-furnished, well-carpeted, well-lighted library, filled with
books--excellent dining-room beyond, and here Lady Smith had a day's
rest, without which she could not have proceeded, and well for her she
had such a comfortable resting-place.

Next day we got into _Joyce's Country_, and had hot potatoes and cold
milk, and Renvyle cold fowl at The Lodge, as it is styled, of Big Jacky
Joyce--one of the descendants of the ancient proprietors, and quite an
original Irish character. He had heard my name often, he said, from Mr.
Nimmo, and knew I was a writing lady, and a friend to Ireland, and he
was civil to me, and I was civil to him, and after eyeing Sir Culling
and Lady Smith, and thinking, I saw, that she was affecting to be
languishing, and then perceiving that she was really weak and ill, he
became cordial to the whole party, and entertained us for two hours,
which we were obliged to wait for the going out of the tide before we
could cross the sands. Here was an arm of the sea, across which Mr.
Nimmo had been employed to build a bridge, and against Big Jack Joyce's
advice, he would build it where Jack prophesied it would be swept away
in the winter, and twice the bridge was built, and twice it was swept
away, and still Nimmo said it was the fault of the masons; the
embankment and his theory could not be wrong, and a third time he built
the bridge, and there we saw the ruins of it on the sands--all the
embankments swept away and all we had for it was to be dragged over the
sand by men--the horses taken off. We were pushed down into a gully-hole
five feet deep, and thence pulled up again; how it was I cannot tell
you, for I shut my eyes and resigned myself, gave up my soul and was
much surprised to find it in my body at the end of the operation: Big
Jacky Joyce and his merry men having somehow managed it.

There was an end of our perils by gullies, sloughs, and bog-holes. We
now got on Mr. Nimmo's and Mr. Killalla's really good roads, and now our
four horses began to tell, and that night we reached Westport, and in
consequence of Mrs. Martin's introduction to her friend Lord Sligo were
received by him and Lady Sligo most courteously.

Westport is a beautiful place, with a town, a port, industrious people
all happy, and made so by the sense and energy of a good landlord and a
good agent. We regretted that we could stay only this night and the next
morning to breakfast; it was so delightful and extraordinary to us again
to see trees and shrubberies, and to find ourselves again in the midst
of flowers from green-house and conservatory. Isabella said she was so
delighted, she could hardly forbear, with her crippled, gouty hands,
embracing every tree she met. Lord Sligo, himself a martyr to the gout,
and with a son at Eton just then attacked with gout, had great
compassion for her: he and all his family high-bred and cordial.

The next morning we pursued our journey, and at the next stage came upon
a real mail-coach road, where we had post-horses again, and dismissed
our Galway horses. This night brought us to Lough Glyn, where Mr.
Strickland received us very kindly, and we had the joy of finding
letters waiting for us from home; but we found that the cholera had been
for the last ten days killing the poor people at Edgeworthstown--Condy
Keegan's son-in-law, M'Glaughlin the carpenter, and a great many more.
How dreadfully anxious Honora must have been with the charge of baby,
and this cholera close to our gates!

The last day's journey was the longest of all, from the suspense, though
all was smooth upon the road. When we saw the lights in the windows at
home, you may guess how our hearts went pit-a-pat. We found all WELL;
and glad we all were to meet again, and to have Isabella safe with her
child: not in her arms, poor crippled creature--it was not possible for
her to hold the infant; she could but just hobble about, and was a
quarter of an hour going upstairs. Aunt Mary and Honora, after all the
warnings my letters had given, were surprised and shocked at the first
sight of her. For ten days after her arrival she was unable to travel,
impatient as they both were to be at home again. They did reach it, baby
and all, safely at last, and you may imagine how relieved we were when
we heard of her being safe with her own family again, and with London
physicians: five months since then and she is not yet quite
re-established. We feel now how very serious her illness was.

But now that it is all over, and I can balance pains and pleasures, I
declare that, upon the whole, I had more pleasure than pain from this
journey; the perils of the road were far overbalanced by the diversion
of seeing the people, and the seeing so many to me perfectly new
characters and modes of living. The anxiety of Isabella's illness,
terrible as it was, and the fear of being ill myself and a burthen upon
their hands, and even the horrid sense of remoteness and impossibility
of communication with my own friends, were altogether overbalanced by
the extraordinary kindness, and tenderness, and generous hospitality of
the Martins. It will do my heart good all the days of my life to have
experienced such kindness, and to have seen so much good in human nature
as I saw with them--red M'Hugh included. I am sure I have a friend in
Mrs. Martin: it is an extraordinary odd feeling to have made a friend at
sixty-six years of age! You, my dear young Pakenham, can't understand
this; but you will live, I hope, to understand it, and perhaps to say,
"Now I begin to comprehend what Maria, poor old soul! meant by that
_odd_ feeling at the end of her Connemara journey."

When we were regretting to Lord Sligo that we had missed seeing so many
persons and places on our tour whom we had at first setting out made it
our object to see--Clifden, the Barony of Erris, and the wonderful Major
Bingham--Lord Sligo comforted us by saying, "Depend upon it, you have
seen more really of Connemara than any strangers who have ever travelled
through it, exactly because you remained in one place and in one family,
where you had time to see the habits of the people, and to see them
nearly and familiarly, and without their being shown off, or thinking of
showing themselves off to you."

_March 29_.

I have been so busy at rents and odious accounts, that I have never been
able to go on to you. Your mother returned home a few days ago, after
seven months' absence! You may guess how happy we were to have her
again, and how we have been talking and hearing. Lucy bore the parting
with her wonderfully well; indeed, she was anxious that her mother
should return to us.

Young Walter--now Sir Walter--Scott has been quartered at Longford, and
is now going to Dublin: he dined here on Saturday, and was just the same
as when we saw him in 1825. Sophy and her three children round her must
have surprised him not a little. [Footnote: Mrs. Fox, as Sophy
Edgeworth, had been with her sister at Abbotsford in 1823.] It is a pity
Maxwell was not in the group. Little fair-haired Willy, nothing daunted
by the nearly seven-feet-high major in full uniform, marched up to him
and patted his knee, and in return the major patted his head. His soft
Scotch voice, and often the kind and playful turns in his conversation,
reminded me both pleasurably and painfully of his father. Sophy wished
that her children should hear the band of the regiment, and he promised
that he would halt at Tuite's gate, as a _select_ party with the band
were to go by Castle Pollard; and this morning, when I opened my eyes, I
saw it was snowing so bitterly, I gave up all hopes of our being able to
take the children to hear the band; but between seven, when I wakened,
and half after nine, the appointed hour, many changes of the sky took
place, and at the right moment the sun shone out, the clouds blew over
the beech-trees, and Sophy was drawn in Willy Waller's little carriage,
with him in her lap; Honora, Mary Anne, Charlotte, and I accompanying.
We had to wait some time, and went into what you would call Tuite's
house, but it is now Jem Newman's; and there was his nice little wife,
with her mouth full of the last potato she had eaten for breakfast; and
she put away the half-full potato basket, and the boy with his can of
milk retreated from the stool by the fire, and she welcomed us with
Irish heart's welcome in lip and eye; and the children were delighted
watching the pig and the chickens feeding at the door.

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