A MISTAKE.

I ordered my horses at an early hour; and long before Sparks—lover that he was—had opened his eyes to the light, was already on my way towards Gurt-na-Morra. Several miles slipped away before I well determined how I should open my negotiations: whether to papa Blake, in the first instance, or to madame, to whose peculiar province these secrets of the home department belonged; or why not at once to Baby?—because, after all, with her it rested finally to accept or refuse. To address myself to the heads of the department seemed the more formal course; and as I was acting entirely as an “envoy extraordinary,” I deemed this the fitting mode of proceeding.

It was exactly eight o’clock as I drove up to the door. Mr. Blake was standing at the open window of the breakfast-room, sniffing the fresh air of the morning. The Blake mother was busily engaged with the economy of the tea-table; a very simple style of morning costume, and a nightcap with a flounce like a petticoat, marking her unaffected toilet. Above stairs, more than one head en papillate took a furtive peep between the curtains; and the butler of the family, in corduroys and a fur cap, was weeding turnips in the lawn before the door.

Mrs. Blake had barely time to take a hurried departure, when her husband came out upon the steps to bid me welcome. There is no physiognomist like your father of a family, or your mother with marriageable daughters. Lavater was nothing to them, in reading the secret springs of action, the hidden sources of all character. Had there been a good respectable bump allotted by Spurzheim to “honorable intentions,” the matter had been all fair and easy,—the very first salute of the gentleman would have pronounced upon his views. But, alas! no such guide is forthcoming; and the science, as it now exists, is enveloped in doubt and difficulty. The gay, laughing temperament of some, the dark and serious composure of others; the cautious and reserved, the open and the candid, the witty, the sententious, the clever, the dull, the prudent, the reckless,—in a word, every variety which the innumerable hues of character imprint upon the human face divine are their study. Their convictions are the slow and patient fruits of intense observation and great logical accuracy. Carefully noting down every lineament and feature,—their change, their action, and their development,—they track a lurking motive with the scent of a bloodhound, and run down a growing passion with an unrelenting speed. I have been in the witness-box, exposed to the licensed badgering and privileged impertinence of a lawyer, winked, leered, frowned, and sneered at with all the long-practised tact of a nisi prius torturer; I have stood before the cold, fish-like, but searching eye of a prefect of police, as he compared my passport with my person, and thought he could detect a discrepancy in both,—but I never felt the same sense of total exposure as when glanced at by the half-cautious, half-prying look of a worthy father or mother, in a family where there are daughters to marry, and “nobody coming to woo.”

“You’re early, Charley,” said Mr. Blake, with an affected mixture of carelessness and warmth. “You have not had breakfast?”

“No, sir. I have come to claim a part of yours; and if I mistake not, you seem a little later than usual.”

“Not more than a few minutes. The girls will be down presently; they’re early risers, Charley; good habits are just as easy as bad ones; and, the Lord be praised! my girls were never brought up with any other.”

“I am well aware of it, sir; and indeed, if I may be permitted to take advantage of the apropos, it was on the subject of one of your daughters that I wished to speak to you this morning, and which brought me over at this uncivilized hour, hoping to find you alone.”

Mr. Blake’s look for a moment was one of triumphant satisfaction; it was but a glance, however, and repressed the very instant after, as he said, with a well got-up indifference,—

“Just step with me into the study, and we’re sure not to be interrupted.”

Now, although I have little time or space for such dallying, I cannot help dwelling for a moment upon the aspect of what Mr. Blake dignified with the name of his study. It was a small apartment with one window, the panes of which, independent of all aid from a curtain, tempered the daylight through the medium of cobwebs, dust, and the ill-trained branches of some wall-tree without.

Three oak chairs and a small table were the only articles of furniture, while around, on all sides, lay the disjecta membra of Mr. Blake’s hunting, fishing, shooting, and coursing equipments,—old top-boots, driving whips, odd spurs, a racing saddle, a blunderbuss, the helmet of the Galway Light Horse, a salmon net, a large map of the county with a marginal index to several mortgages marked with a cross, a stable lantern, the rudder of a boat, and several other articles representative of his daily associations; but not one book, save an odd volume of Watty Cox’s Magazine, whose pages seemed as much the receptacle of brown hackles for trout-fishing as the resource of literary leisure.

“Here we’ll be quite cosey, and to ourselves,” said Mr. Blake, as, placing a chair for me, he sat down himself, with the air of a man resolved to assist, by advice and counsel, the dilemma of some dear friend.

After a few preliminary observations, which, like a breathing canter before a race, serves to get your courage up, and settle you well in your seat, I opened my negotiation by some very broad and sweeping truisms about the misfortunes of a bachelor existence, the discomforts of his position, his want of home and happiness, the necessity for his one day thinking seriously about marriage; it being in a measure almost as inevitable a termination of the free-and-easy career of his single life as transportation for seven years is to that of a poacher. “You cannot go on, sir,” said I, “trespassing forever upon your neighbors’ preserves; you must be apprehended sooner or later; therefore, I think, the better way is to take out a license.”

Never was a small sally of wit more thoroughly successful. Mr. Blake laughed till he cried, and when he had done, wiped his eyes with a snuffy handkerchief, and cried till he laughed again. As, somehow, I could not conceal from myself a suspicion as to the sincerity of my friend’s mirth, I merely consoled myself with the French adage, that “he laughs best who laughs last;” and went on:—

“It will not be deemed surprising, sir, that a man should come to the discovery I have just mentioned much more rapidly by having enjoyed the pleasure of intimacy with your family; not only by the example of perfect domestic happiness presented to him, but by the prospect held out that a heritage of the fair gifts which adorn and grace a married life may reasonably be looked for among the daughters of those themselves the realization of conjugal felicity.”

Here was a canter, with a vengeance; and as I felt blown, I slackened my pace, coughed, and resumed:—

“Mary Blake, sir, is, then, the object of my present communication; she it is who has made an existence that seemed fair and pleasurable before, appear blank and unprofitable without her. I have, therefore, to come at once to the point, visited you this morning, formally to ask her hand in marriage; her fortune, I may observe at once, is perfectly immaterial, a matter of no consequence [so Mr. Blake thought also]; a competence fully equal to every reasonable notion of expenditure—”

“There, there; don’t, don’t!” said Mr. Blake, wiping his eyes, with a sob like a hiccough,—“don’t speak of money! I know what you would say, a handsome settlement,—a well-secured jointure, and all that. Yes, yes, I feel it all.”

“Why, yes, sir, I believe I may add that everything in this respect will answer your expectations.”

“Of course; to be sure. My poor dear Baby! How to do without her, that’s the rub! You don’t know, O’Malley, what that girl is to me—you can’t know it; you’ll feel it one day though—that you will!”

“The devil I shall!” said I to myself. “The great point is, after all, to learn the young lady’s disposition in the matter—”

“Ah, Charley, none of this with me, you sly dog! You think I don’t know you. Why, I’ve been watching,—that is, I have seen—no, I mean I’ve heard—They—they,—people will talk, you know.”

“Very true, sir. But, as I was going to remark—”

Just at this moment the door opened, and Miss Baby herself, looking most annoyingly handsome, put in her head.

“Papa, we’re waiting breakfast. Ah, Charley, how d’ye do?”

“Come in, Baby,” said Mr. Blake; “you haven’t given me my kiss this morning.”

The lovely girl threw her arms around his neck, while her bright and flowing locks fell richly upon his shoulder. I turned rather sulkily away; the thing always provokes me. There is as much cold, selfish cruelty in such coram publico endearments, as in the luscious display of rich rounds and sirloins in a chop-house to the eyes of the starved and penniless wretch without, who, with dripping rags and watering lip, eats imaginary slices, while the pains of hunger are torturing him!

“There’s Tim!” said Mr. Blake, suddenly. “Tim Cronin!—Tim!” shouted he to, as it seemed to me, an imaginary individual outside; while, in the eagerness of pursuit, he rushed out of the study, banging the door as he went, and leaving Baby and myself to our mutual edification.

I should have preferred it being otherwise; but as the Fates willed it thus, I took Baby’s hand, and led her to the window. Now, there is one feature of my countrymen which, having recognized strongly in myself, I would fain proclaim; and writing as I do—however little people may suspect me—solely for the sake of a moral, would gladly warn the unsuspecting against. I mean, a very decided tendency to become the consoler, the confidant of young ladies; seeking out opportunities of assuaging their sorrow, reconciling their afflictions, breaking eventful passages to their ears; not from any inherent pleasure in the tragic phases of the intercourse, but for the semi-tenderness of manner, that harmless hand-squeezing, that innocent waist-pressing, without which consolation is but like salmon without lobster,—a thing maimed, wanting, and imperfect.

Now, whether this with me was a natural gift, or merely a “way we have in the army,” as the song says, I shall not pretend to say; but I venture to affirm that few men could excel me in the practice I speak of some five-and-twenty years ago. Fair reader, do pray, if I have the happiness of being known to you, deduct them from my age before you subtract from my merits.

“Well, Baby, dear, I have just been speaking about you to papa. Yes, dear—don’t look so incredulous—even of your own sweet self. Well, do you know, I almost prefer your hair worn that way; those same silky masses look better falling thus heavily—”

“There, now, Charley! ah, don’t!”

“Well, Baby, as I was saying, before you stopped me, I have been asking your papa a very important question, and he has referred me to you for the answer. And now will you tell me, in all frankness and honesty, your mind on the matter?”

She grew deadly pale as I spoke these words, then suddenly flushed up again, but said not a word. I could perceive, however, from her heaving chest and restless manner, that no common agitation was stirring her bosom. It was cruelty to be silent, so I continued:—

“One who loves you well, Baby, dear, has asked his own heart the question, and learned that without you he has no chance of happiness; that your bright eyes are to him bluer than the deep sky above him; that your soft voice, your winning smile—and what a smile it is!—have taught him that he loves, nay, adores you! Then, dearest—what pretty fingers those are! Ah, what is this? Whence came that emerald? I never saw that ring before, Baby!”

“Oh, that,” said she, blushing deeply,—“that is a ring the foolish creature Sparks gave me a couple of days ago; but I don’t like it—I don’t intend to keep it.”

So saying, she endeavored to draw it from her finger, but in vain.

“But why, Baby, why take it off? Is it to give him the pleasure of putting it on again? There, don’t look angry; we must not fall out, surely.”

“No, Charley, if you are not vexed with me—if you are not—”

“No, no, my dear Baby; nothing of the kind. Sparks was quite right in not trusting his entire fortune to my diplomacy; but at least, he ought to have told me that he had opened the negotiation. Now, the question simply is: Do you love him? or rather, because that shortens matters: Will you accept him?”

“Love who?”

“Love whom? Why Sparks, to be sure!”

A flash of indignant surprise passed across her features, now pale as marble; her lips were slightly parted, her large full eyes were fixed upon me steadfastly, and her hand, which I had held in mine, she suddenly withdrew from my grasp.

“And so—and so it is of Mr. Sparks’s cause you are so ardently the advocate?” she said at length, after a pause of most awkward duration.

“Why, of course, my dear cousin. It was at his suit and solicitation I called on your father; it was he himself who entreated me to take this step; it was he—”

But before I could conclude, she burst into a torrent of tears and rushed from the room.

Here was a situation! What the deuce was the matter? Did she, or did she not, care for him? Was her pride or her delicacy hurt at my being made the means of the communication to her father? What had Sparks done or said to put himself and me in such a devil of a predicament? Could she care for any one else?

“Well, Charley!” cried Mr. Blake, as he entered, rubbing his hands in a perfect paroxysm of good temper,—“well, Charley, has love-making driven breakfast out of your head?”

“Why, faith, sir, I greatly fear I have blundered my mission sadly. My cousin Mary does not appear so perfectly satisfied; her manner—”

“Don’t tell me such nonsense. The girl’s manner! Why, man, I thought you were too old a soldier to be taken in that way.”

“Well, then, sir, the best thing, under the circumstances, is to send over Sparks himself. Your consent, I may tell him, is already obtained.”

“Yes, my boy; and my daughter’s is equally sure. But I don’t see what we want with Sparks at all. Among old friends and relatives as we are, there is, I think, no need of a stranger.”

“A stranger! Very true, sir, he is a stranger; but when that stranger is about to become your son-in-law—”

“About to become what?” said Mr. Blake, rubbing his spectacles, and placing them leisurely on his nose to regard me,—“to become what?”

“Your son-in-law. I hope I have been sufficiently explicit, sir, in making known Mr. Sparks’s wishes to you.”

“Mr. Sparks! Why damn me, sir—that is—I beg pardon for the warmth—you—you never mentioned his name to-day till now. You led me to suppose that—in fact, you told me most clearly—”

Here, from the united effects of rage and a struggle for concealment, Mr. Blake was unable to proceed, and walked the room with a melodramatic stamp perfectly awful.

“Really, sir,” said I at last, “while I deeply regret any misconception or mistake I have been the cause of, I must, in justice to myself, say that I am perfectly unconscious of having misled you. I came here this morning with a proposition for the hand of your daughter in behalf of—”

“Yourself, sir. Yes, yourself. I’ll be—no! I’ll not swear; but—but just answer me, if you ever mentioned one word of Mr. Sparks, if you ever alluded to him till the last few minutes?”

I was perfectly astounded. It might be, alas, it was exactly as he stated! In my unlucky effort at extreme delicacy, I became only so very mysterious that I left the matter open for them to suppose that it might be the Khan of Tartary was in love with Baby.

There was but one course now open. I most humbly apologized for my blunder; repeated by every expression I could summon up, my sorrow for what had happened; and was beginning a renewal of negotiation “in re Sparks,” when, overcome by his passion, Mr. Blake could hear no more, but snatched up his hat and left the room.

Had it not been for Baby’s share in the transaction I should have laughed outright. As it was, I felt anything but mirthful; and the only clear and collected idea in my mind was to hurry home with all speed, and fasten a quarrel on Sparks, the innocent cause of the whole mishap. Why this thought struck me let physiologists decide.

A few moments’ reflection satisfied me that under present circumstances, it would be particularly awkward to meet with any others of the family. Ardently desiring to secure my retreat, I succeeded, after some little time, in opening the window-sash; consoling myself for any injury I was about to inflict upon Mr. Blake’s young plantation in my descent, by the thought of the service I was rendering him while admitting a little fresh air into his sanctum.

For my patriotism’s sake I will not record my sensations as I took my way through the shrubbery towards the stable. Men are ever so prone to revenge their faults and their follies upon such inoffensive agencies as time and place, wind or weather, that I was quite convinced that to any other but Galway ears my exposÉ would have been perfectly clear and intelligible; and that in no other country under heaven would a man be expected to marry a young lady from a blunder in his grammar.

“Baby may be quite right,” thought I; “but one thing is assuredly true,—if I’ll never do for Galway, Galway will never do for me. No, hang it! I have endured enough for above two years. I have lived in banishment, away from society, supposing that, at least, if I isolated myself from the pleasures of the world I was exempt from its annoyances.” But no; in the seclusion of my remote abode troubles found their entrance as easily as elsewhere, so that I determined at once to leave home; wherefor, I knew not. If life had few charms, it had still fewer ties for me. If I was not bound by the bonds of kindred, I was untrammelled by their restraints.

The resolution once taken, I burned to put it into effect; and so impatiently did I press forward as to call forth more than one remonstrance on the part of Mike at the pace we were proceeding. As I neared home, the shrill but stirring sounds of drum and fife met me; and shortly after a crowd of country people filled the road. Supposing it some mere recruiting party, I was endeavoring to press on, when the sounds of a full military band, in the exhilarating measure of a quick-step, convinced me of my error; and as I drew to one side of the road, the advanced guard of an infantry regiment came forward. The men’s faces were flushed, their uniforms dusty and travel-stained, their knapsacks strapped firmly on, and their gait the steady tramp of the march. Saluting the subaltern, I asked if anything of consequence had occurred in the south that the troops were so suddenly under orders. The officer stared at me for a moment or two without speaking, and while a slight smile half-curled his lip, answered:—

“Apparently, sir, you seem very indifferent to military news, otherwise you can scarcely be ignorant of the cause of our route.”

“On the contrary,” said I, “I am, though a young man, an old soldier, and feel most anxious about everything connected with the service.”

“Then it is very strange, sir, you should not have heard the news. Bonaparte has returned from Elba, has arrived at Paris, been received with the most overwhelming enthusiasm, and at this moment the preparations for war are resounding from Venice to the Vistula. All our forces, disposable, are on the march for embarkation. Lord Wellington has taken the command, and already, I may say, the campaign has begun.”

The tone of enthusiasm in which the young officer spoke, the astounding intelligence itself, contrasting with the apathetic indolence of my own life, made me blush deeply, as I, muttered some miserable apology for my ignorance.

“And you are now en route?”

“For Fermoy; from which we march to Cove for embarkation. The first battalion of our regiment sailed for the West Indies a week since, but a frigate has been sent after them to bring them back; and we hope all to meet in the Netherlands before the month is over. But I must beg your pardon for saying adieu. Good-by, sir.”

“Good-by, sir; good-by,” said I, as still standing in the road, I was so overwhelmed with surprise that I could scarcely credit my senses.

A little farther on, I came up with the main body of the regiment, from whom I learned the corroboration of the news, and also the additional intelligence that Sparks had been ordered off with his detachment early in the morning, a veteran battalion being sent into garrison in the various towns of the south and west.

“Do you happen to know a Mr. O’Malley, sir?” said the major, coming up with a note in his hand.

“I beg to present him to you,” said I, bowing.

“Well, sir, Sparks gave me this note, which he wrote with a pencil as we crossed each other on the road this morning. He told me you were an old Fourteenth man. But your regiment is in India, I believe; at least Power said they were under orders when we met him.”

“Fred Power! Are you acquainted with him? Where is he now, pray?”

“Fred is on the staff with General Vandeleur, and is now in Belgium.”

“Indeed!” said I, every moment increasing my surprise at some new piece of intelligence. “And the Eighty-eighth?” said I, recurring to my old friends in that regiment.

“Oh, the Eighty-eighth are at Gibraltar, or somewhere in the Mediterranean; at least, I know they are not near enough to open the present campaign with us. But if you’d like to hear any more news, you must come over to Borrisokane; we stop there to-night.”

“Then I’ll certainly do so.”

“Come at six then, and dine with us.”

“Agreed,” said I; “and now, good-morning.”

So saying, I once more drove on; my head full of all that I had been hearing, and my heart bursting with eagerness to join the gallant fellows now bound for the campaign.