The scandal of Matilda and her cobbler caused little concern, and even Mrs. Flower, who might have been expected to die of shame, merely heaved a sigh and declared that "poor Tilly" had never been quite the same after she fell off a horse at the age of fourteen, and really poor Sullivan was quite a good sort of fellow, and so obliging the way he came to do odd jobs about the castle for nothing.
"The person who takes it hardest is Bob," said Fanny-Rosa, putting away one of Edward's small gowns to send to her sister, "and it really must be rather trying to come home on leave, with one of your friends, and have your brother-in-law touch his hat to you at the gate, and Tilly scream "How are you. Bob?"' from the window of the lodge. It is inconvenient that both Tilly and I are expecting at the same time. This gown of Edward's would have come in for our baby, but, poor girl, I cannot very well grudge it to her."
Yes, it was a strange country, thought Doctor Armstrong, and he wondered sometimes why he continued to live in it, for his original reason for retiring from the army and taking up the practice in Doon-haven was there no longer. All that remained was a picture on the wall of the dining-room at Clonmere to remind him of a dream that could never be. He attached himself to the family for the sake of her who had gone, and it seemed to him that there was a quality each one shared in common with her, a smile, a gesture, a turn of speech, a softness of the voice, from Copper John with his dry humour, seldom shown these days, down to the infant Edward, with his warm brown eyes and slow baby chuckle. Clonmere might become like Castle And-riff, and indeed when Fanny-Rosa and her children were in residence there seemed every likelihood of its doing so, with the dogs, and the toys, and the sewing that littered the rooms, and John might become another Simon Flower, now he was putting on weight and taking no exercise, but the charm they brought upon the place was greater than the disturbance they created, the castle itself seemed the warmer and the brighter for their presence.
"The fact is," thought the doctor, "John, and Fanny-Rosa, and that tumbling godson of mine belong to the country, belong to Clonmere; they are part of the air and the soil, and they thrive here, like the pigs and the geese and the cattle. The Brodricks are Doonhaven, and Doonhaven is this country."
Two days afterwards he stood by the bedside of the oldest representative of the family, Ned Brodrick, the agent, seized by a stroke while riding round the estate, like his father before him, and as the old fellow breathed his last he winked solemnly at the doctor, fumbling with his hand under the bed-clothes, and produced a bag of coins he had hidden there for years, part of the rent roll of Clonmere, which he should have handed long since to the brother who employed him.
The whole family attended his funeral, Copper John and his daughters standing with bowed heads beside the agent's grave, and it seemed to the people of Doonhaven, who wailed aloud as was their custom, the most natural thing in the world that the coffin should be borne upon the shoulders of Ned's four illegitimate sons.
It was in September 1837 that Thomas Dowding, the Clerk to the Doonhaven Mining Company, returning from the mine in the late afternoon with the sum of able300 upon him, to be banked in the Post Office in Doonhaven until the following day, when the money would be taken to Slane, had his unfortunate encounter in the market-square with Sam Donovan, Sam Donovan's sister Mary Kelly, and James Kelly, his sister's husband. Mary Kelly, a foolish, excitable woman, was selling vegetables at her stall hard by the Post Office, as was her weekly custom, and, according to accounts given later by people standing by, a cabbage rolled from the stall at the feet of Dowding's horse, causing the animal to rear on his hind legs and throw the rider.
The Clerk, irritated by the circumstance of his fall, rose to his feet from the dust, and accused Mary Kelly of deliberately rolling the cabbage in the hope of an accident. Whereupon Sam Donovan and James Kelly, who emerged at that moment from the public-house opposite, proceeded to set upon the Clerk, and one of them, whether it was Kelly or Donovan no one seemed to know, seized his purse and scattered the contents on the ground.
Bank-notes and coins flew about the market-square, and the Clerk, alarmed at the turn of events, reached for his blunderbuss, with which he had been armed by Copper John for fear of robbers, and discharged it into the air, with the idea of subduing the people, who were by this time grubbing on hands and knees in search of the scattered notes. Unfortunately the shot struck James Kelly in the eye, wounding him mortally, and in a few moments the whole of Doonhaven was in an uproar. The Clerk, terrified for his life, took refuge in the Post Office, where the postmaster, with con siderable wisdom, had the sense to bar his doors and windows and send a lad, by a back entrance, for the police, and also for the Director of the mines, Copper John himself. Before very long order was restored, the body of the luckless James Kelly was removed to the house of his brother-in-law, Sam Donovan, where his widow had already preceded him in a state of hysteria, and Thomas Dowding, the Clerk to the Company, was taken in a closed carriage to the county jail in Mundy.
He came up for trial at the next Assizes, where he was acquitted, after a great deal of contradictory evidence had been heard, and dispatched from court with no more than a severe reprimand to the effect that he must in future be more careful in his use of firearms. The Clerk, considerably shaken by the whole event, was glad enough to relinquish his post to the Company and take himself to another part of the country, where it was hoped that time, and the change of scenery, would banish all memory of the affair from his troubled mind.
That was not the case, however, in Doonhaven. The old hatred of the mines, which had sunk into abeyance now for ten years, flared up again, and the Brodricks were looked upon askance in the village of Doonhaven or as they rode about the countryside. Once again the Clonmere tenants had their fences broken, their crops burned, and their cattle maimed. It could not be forgotten that the blunderbuss carried by the Clerk had come from the walls of Clonmere Castle itself, which fact, according to the supporters of the Donovans, made Copper John no more nor less than a murderer.
James Kelly, who in his lifetime had been a slow-witted fellow, with a partiality to strong ale, became in his death a martyour, the very paragon among men. He was, or so his widow declared, made in the likeness of the Saints, and never an angry word had she received from him in the fifteen years of their married life.
"He was too good for the world and for me, God help him," she said; "and as for those same Brodricks who set themselves to destroy his sweet life, the good God will see fit to punish them in His own time."
It so happened that John, who with Fanny-Rose and the children was spending the summer at Clonmere, became involved in the affair through chance, since it was he who had given the blunderbuss to the Clerk a few weeks previous to the accident. John found himself summoned as a witness, and was obliged to attend the Assizes with his father. The whole proceeding seemed to him fantastic and absurd, and it was only when he discovered two of his favourite greyhounds, which he had left in great health and spirits the night before, dead by poison that he realised he now had incurred the hatred of the Donovans in place of his father. It appeared to him the basest sort of revenge, to strike at a man through the torture of dumb animals, which were guiltless of any crime whatever.
"What the devil am I to do?" asked John of Fanny-Rosa, when they had buried poor Lightfoot and his brother under the old walnut tree in the walled garden. "I can't go down to Sam Donovan's shop and ask him if he poisoned my dogs. The fellow would smile in that sickening sly way of his, and tell me he did not know I owned a dog."