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Lever

      Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2

      CHAPTER I

THE DOCTOR’S TALE.1

      “It is now some fifteen years since – if it wasn’t for O’Shaughnessy’s wrinkles, I could not believe it five – we were quartered in Loughrea. There were, besides our regiment, the Fiftieth and the Seventy-third, and a troop or two of horse artillery, and the whole town was literally a barrack, and as you may suppose, the pleasantest place imaginable. All the young ladies, and indeed all those that had got their brevet some years before, came flocking into the town, not knowing but the Devil might persuade a raw ensign or so to marry some of them.

      “Such dinner parties, such routs and balls, never were heard of west of Athlone. The gayeties were incessant; and if good feeding, plenty of claret, short whist, country dances, and kissing could have done the thing, there wouldn’t have been a bachelor with a red coat for six miles around.

      “You know the west, O’Mealey, so I needn’t tell you what the Galway girls are like: fine, hearty, free-and-easy, talking, laughing devils, but as deep and ‘cute as a Master in Chancery; ready for any fun or merriment, but always keeping a sly look-out for a proposal or a tender acknowledgment, which – what between the heat of a ball-room, whiskey negus, white satin shoes, and a quarrel with your guardian – it’s ten to one you fall into before you’re a week in the same town with them.

      “As for the men, I don’t admire them so much: pleasant and cheerful enough when they’re handicapping the coat off your back, and your new tilbury for a spavined pony and a cotton umbrella, but regular devils if you come to cross them the least in life; nothing but ten paces, three shots apiece, to begin and end with something like Roger de Coverley, when every one has a pull at his neighbor. I’m not saying they’re not agreeable, well-informed, and mild in their habits; but they lean overmuch to corduroys and coroners’ inquests for one’s taste farther south. However, they’re a fine people, take them all in all; and if they were not interfered with, and their national customs invaded with road-making, petty-sessions, grand-jury laws, and a stray commission now and then, they are capable of great things, and would astonish the world.

      “But as I was saying, we were ordered to Loughrea after being fifteen months in detachments about Birr, Tullamore, Kilbeggan, and all that country; the change was indeed a delightful one, and we soon found ourselves the centre of the most marked and determined civilities. I told you they were wise people in the west; this was their calculation: the line – ours was the Roscommon militia – are here to-day, there to-morrow; they may be flirting in Tralee this week, and fighting on the Tagus the next; not that there was any fighting there in those times, but then there was always Nova Scotia and St. John’s, and a hundred other places that a Galway young lady knew nothing about, except that people never came back from them. Now, what good, what use was there in falling in love with them? Mere transitory and passing pleasure that was. But as for us: there we were; if not in Kilkenny we were in Cork. Safe out and come again; no getting away under pretence of foreign service; no excuse for not marrying by any cruel pictures of the colonies, where they make spatch-cocks of the officers’ wives and scrape their infant families to death with a small tooth-comb. In a word, my dear O’Mealey, we were at a high premium; and even O’Shaughnessy, with his red head and the legs you see, had his admirers. There now, don’t be angry, Dan; the men, at least, were mighty partial to you.

      “Loughrea, if it was a pleasant, was a very expensive place. White gloves and car hire, – there wasn’t a chaise in the town, – short whist, too (God forgive me if I wrong them, but I wonder were they honest), cost money; and as our popularity rose, our purses fell; till at length, when the one was at the flood, the other was something very like low water.

      “Now, the Roscommon was a beautiful corps; no petty jealousies, no little squabbling among the officers, no small spleen between the major’s wife and the paymaster’s sister, – all was amiable, kind, brotherly, and affectionate. To proceed, I need only mention one fine trait of them, – no man ever refused to indorse a brother officer’s bill. To think of asking the amount or even the date would be taken personally; and thus we went on mutually aiding and assisting each other, – the colonel drawing on me, I on the major, the senior captain on the surgeon, and so on, a regular cross-fire of ‘promises to pay,’ all stamped and regular.

      “Not but the system had its inconveniences; for sometimes an obstinate tailor or bootmaker would make a row for his money, and then we’d be obliged to get up a little quarrel between the drawer and the acceptor of the bill; they couldn’t speak for some days, and a mutual friend to both would tell the creditor that the slightest imprudence on his part would lead to bloodshed; ‘and the Lord help him! if there was a duel, he’d be proved the whole cause of it.’ This and twenty other plans were employed; and finally, the matter would be left to arbitration among our brother officers, and I need not say, they behaved like trumps. But notwithstanding all this, we were frequently hard pressed for cash; as the colonel said, ‘It’s a mighty expensive corps.’ Our dress was costly; not that it had much lace and gold on it, but that, what between falling on the road at night, shindies at mess, and other devilment, a coat lasted no time. Wine, too, was heavy on us; for though we often changed our wine merchant, and rarely paid him, there was an awful consumption at the mess!

      “Now, what I have mentioned may prepare you for the fact that before we were eight weeks in garrison, Shaugh and myself, upon an accurate calculation of our conjoint finances, discovered that except some vague promises of discounting here and there through the town, and seven and fourpence in specie, we were innocent of any pecuniary treasures. This was embarrassing; we had both embarked in several small schemes of pleasurable amusement, had a couple of hunters each, a tandem, and a running account – I think it galloped– at every shop in the town.

      “Let me pause for a moment here, O’Mealey, while I moralize a little in a strain I hope may benefit you. Have you ever considered – of course you have not, you’re too young and unreflecting – how beautifully every climate and every soil possesses some one antidote or another to its own noxious influences? The tropics have their succulent and juicy fruits, cooling and refreshing; the northern latitudes have their beasts with fur and warm skin to keep out the frost-bites; and so it is in Ireland. Nowhere on the face of the habitable globe does a man contract such habits of small debt, and nowhere, I’ll be sworn, can he so easily get out of any scrape concerning them. They have their tigers in the east, their antelopes in the south, their white bears in Norway, their buffaloes in America; but we have an animal in Ireland that beats them all hollow, – a country attorney!

      “Now, let me introduce you to Mr. Matthew Donevan. Mat, as he was familiarly called by his numerous acquaintances, was a short, florid, rosy little gentleman of some four or five-and-forty, with a well-curled wig of the fairest imaginable auburn, the gentle wave of the front locks, which played in infantine loveliness upon his little bullet forehead, contrasting strongly enough with a cunning leer of his eye, and a certain nisi prius laugh that however it might please a client, rarely brought pleasurable feelings to his opponent in a cause.

      “Mat was a character in his way; deep, double, and tricky in everything that concerned his profession, he affected the gay fellow, – liked a jolly dinner at Brown’s Hotel, would go twenty miles to see a steeple-chase and a coursing match, bet with any one when the odds were strong in his favor, with an easy indifference about money that made him seem, when winning, rather the victim of good luck than anything else. As he kept a rather pleasant bachelor’s house, and liked the military much, we soon became acquainted. Upon him, therefore, for reasons I can’t explain, both our hopes reposed; and Shaugh and myself at once agreed that if Mat could not assist us in our distresses, the case was a bad one.

      “A pretty little epistle was accordingly concocted, inviting the worthy attorney to a small dinner at five o’clock the next day, intimating that we were to be perfectly alone, and had a little business to discuss. True to the hour, Mat was there; and as if instantly guessing that ours was no regular party of pleasure, his look, dress, and manner were all in keeping with the occasion, – quiet, subdued, and searching.

      “When the claret had been superseded by the whiskey, and the confidential hours were approaching, by an adroit allusion to some heavy wager then pending, we brought our finances upon the tapis. The

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