as the heavy folds fell over each other on the table, his mouth twitched with a movement of convulsive pleasure. “Ring the bell, my lad,” said he; “the string is beside you. Send the master, Mary,” continued he, as the maiden entered.
Peter Mahoon soon made his appearance, rather startled at being summoned from his bed, and evidencing in his toilette somewhat more of zeal than dandyism.
“Is the house insured, Peter?” said Mr. O’Leary.
“No, sir,” rejoined he, with a searching look around the room, and a sniff of his nose, to discover if he could detect the smell of fire.
“What’s the premises worth, Peter?”
“Sorrow one of me knows right, sir. Maybe a hundred and fifty, or it might bring two hundred pounds.”
“All right,” said O’Leary briskly, as seizing my manuscript with both hands he hurled it on the blazing turf fire; and then grasping the poker, stood guard over it, exclaiming as he did so—“Touch it, and by the beard of the Prophet I’ll brain you. Now, there it goes, blazing up the chimney. Look how it floats up there! I never expected to travel like that anyhow. Eh, Hal? Your work is a brilliant affair, isn’t it?—and as well puffed as if you entertained every newspaper editor in the kingdom? And see,” cried he, as he stamped his foot upon the blaze, “the whole edition is exhausted already—not a copy to be had for any money.”
We threw ourselves back in our chair, and covered our face with our hands. The toil of many a long night, of many a bright hour of sun and wind, was lost to us for ever, and we may be pardoned if our grief was heavy.
“Cheer up, old fellow,” said he, as the last flicker of the burning paper expired. “You know the thing was bad: it couldn’t be other. That d——d fly-away harum-scarum style of yours is no more adapted to a work of real merit, than a Will-o’-the-wisp would be for a light-house. Another jug, Peter—bring two. The truth is, Hal, I was not so averse to the publication of my life as to the infernal mess you’d have made of it. You have no pathos, no tenderness—damn the bit.”
“Come, come,” said we: “it is enough to burn our manuscript, but, really, as to playing the critic in this fashion——”
“Then,” continued he, “all that confounded folly you deal in, laughing at the priests—Lord bless you, man! they have more fun, those fellows, than you, and a score like you. There’s one Father Dolan here would tell two stories for your one; ay, better than ever you told.”
“We really have no ambition to enter the lists with your friend.”
“So much the better—you’d get the worst of it; and as to knowledge of character, see now, Peter Mahoon there would teach you human nature; and if I liked myself to appear in print—”
“Well,” said we, bursting out into a fit of laughter, “that would certainly be amusing.”
“And so it would, whether you jest or no. There’s in that drawer there, the materials of as fine a work as ever appeared since Sir John Carr’s Travels; and the style is a happy union of Goldsmith and Jean Paul—simple yet aphoristic—profound and pleasing—sparkling like the can before me, but pungent and racy in its bitterness. Hand me that oak box, Hal. Which is the key? At this hour one’s sight becomes always defective. Ah, here it is look there!”
We obeyed the command, and truly our amazement was great, though possibly not for the reason that Mr. O’Leary could have desired; for instead of anything like a regular manuscript, we beheld a mass of small scraps of paper, backs of letters, newspapers, magazines, fly-leaves of books, old prints, &c., scrawled on, in the most uncouth fashion; and purporting from the numbers appended to be a continued narration of one kind or other.
“What’s all this?” said we.
“These,” said he, “are really ‘The Loiterings of Arthur O’Leary.’ Listen to this. Here’s a bit of Goldsmith for you—
“ ‘I was born of poor but respectable parents in the county———.’ What are you laughing at? Is it because I did’nt open with—‘The sun was setting, on the 25th of June, in the year 1763, as two travellers were seen,’ &c., &c,? Eh? That’s your way, not mine. A London fellow told me that my papers were worth five hundred pounds. Come, that’s what I call something. Now I’ll go over to the ‘Row.’ ”
“Stop a bit. Here seems something strange about the King of Holland.”
“You mustn’t read them, though. No, no. That’ll never do—no, Hal; no plagiarism. But, after all, I have been a little hasty with you, Perhaps I ought not to have burned that thing; you were not to know it was bad.”
“Eh! how?”
“Why, I say, you might not see how absurd it was; so here’s your health, Hal: either that tankard has been drugged, or a strange change has come over my feelings. Harry Lorrequer, I’ll make your fortune, or rather your son’s, for you are a wasteful creature, and will spend the proceeds as fast as you get them; but the everlastingly-called-for new editions will keep him in cash all his life. I’ll give you that box and its contents; yes, I repeat it, it is yours. I see you are overpowered; there, taste the pewter and you’ll get better presently. In that you’ll find—a little irregular and carelessly-written perhaps—the sum of my experience and knowledge of life—all my correspondence, all my private notes, my opinions on literature, fine arts, politics, and the drama.”
But we will not follow our friend into the soaring realms of his imaginative flight, for it was quite evident that the tankard and the tobacco were alone responsible for the lofty promises of his production. In plain English, Mr. O’Leary was fuddled, and the only intelligible part of his discourse was, an assurance that his papers were entirely at our service; and that, as in some three weeks time, he hoped to be in Africa, having promised to spend the Christmas with Abd-el-Kader, we were left his sole literary executor, with full power to edit him in any shape it might please us, lopping, cutting, omitting—anything, even to adding, or interpolating.
Such were his last orders, and having given them, Mr. O’Leary refilled his pipe, closed his eyes, stretched out his legs to their fullest extent, and although he continued at long intervals to evolve a blue curl of smoke from the corner of his mouth, it was evident he was lost in the land of dreams.
In two hours afterwards we were on our way back to Dublin, bearing with us the oaken box, which, however, it is but justice to ourselves to say, we felt as a sad exchange for our own carefully-written manuscript. On reaching home, our first care was to examine these papers, and see if anything could be made of them, which might prove readable; unfortunately, however, the mass consisted of brief memoranda, setting forth how many miles Mr. O’Leary had walked on a certain day in the November of 1803, and how he had supped on camel’s milk with an amiable family of Bedouins, who had just robbed a caravan in the desert. His correspondence, was for the most part an angry one with washerwomen and hotel-keepers, and some rather curious hieroglyphic replies to dinner invitations from certain people of rank in the Sandwich Islands. Occasionally, however, we chanced on little bits of narrative, fragments of stories, some of which his fellow-travellers had contributed, and brief sketches of places and people that were rather amusing; but so disjointed, broken up, and unconnected were they all, it was almost impossible to give them anything like an arrangement, much less anything like consecutive interest.
All that lay in our power was to select from the whole, certain portions, which, from their length, promised more of care than the mere fragments about them, and present them to our readers with this brief notice of the mode in which we obtained them—our only excuse for a most irregular and unprecedented liberty in the practice of literature. With this apology for the incompleteness and abruptness of “the O’Leary Papers”—which happily we are enabled to make freely, as our friend Arthur has taken his departure—we offer them to our readers, only adding, that in proof of their genuine origin, the manuscript can be seen by any one so desiring it, on application to our publishers; while, for all their follies, faults, and inaccuracies, we desire to