OLD PROVERBS.

“THERE’S LUCK IN LEISURE.”

“DELAYS ARE DANGEROUS.”

“James Scanlan wants to see you, sir. I told him you were hardly done dinner, but he begged me to let you know he is waiting.”

“Dear me,” said my father, “what can he want? Show him in, Carey.—Well, James, what is the matter?”

“Oh! your honour, sir, won’t you come see my poor father? He’ll speak to you, but we can’t get a word from him. He’s dying of grief, my mother is so bad.”

“Your mother, James!—what has happened her?”

“She took a heavy cold, sir, on Friday last, from a wetting she got going to Cashel; and when she came home, she took to her bed, and it’s worse and worse she has got ever since, and at last she began to rave this morning; and as Dr M’Carthy was going past to the dispensary, Pat called him in; and when he looked at her, he just shook his head and said he’d send her something, but that we must be prepared for any thing that might happen. Well, sir, when my father heard that, he went and sat down by the bedside, and taking my mother’s hand in his, says he, ‘Ah, then, Mary, a-cushla-machree, am I going to lose you? Are you going from me? Did I ever think I’d see this day? Ah, Mary, avourneen, sure you won’t leave me?’ And from that to this he has never stirred, nor spoken, nor taken the least notice of any one—not even of me—not even of me.”

The poor fellow burst into a flood of tears.

In a few minutes I was standing with my father by the bedside of Mrs Scanlan. She was quite unconscious of what was passing around. Her husband, who was my father’s principal tenant, and a substantial farmer, sat as his eldest and favourite son had described; and although the object of my father’s visit was to rouse him from his lethargy, it was long ere he addressed himself to the task. It seemed almost sacrilegious to disturb such hallowed grief.

At length he laid his hand upon Scanlan’s shoulder. “Come, James,” said he, “look up, man; don’t be so utterly cast down. You know the old saying, ‘Whilst there’s life, there’s hope.’”

“It’s kind of your honour to try and comfort me; but yours was always the good heart, and the kind one, and you never made the sight of your sunny face a compliment. But it’s no use—there’s no hope. The death’s on her handsome countenance.”

He groaned deeply, and rocked himself backwards and forwards.

“James,” said my father, “we must be resigned to the will of God, but we need not make ourselves miserable by anticipating evils.”

“Your honour was but a slip of a gossoon when you danced at the bright girl’s wedding, and you’re come now in time to see the last of the old woman—the old woman, the old woman,” repeated he, as if something struck him in the sound of the words as strange. “Two-and-forty is not old, but they called her ‘the old woman’ since the boys began to grow up. But she never grew old to me; she’s the same now that she was the first evening I told her, that she was the only treasure on the face of the earth that my heart coveted. Only, much as I loved her then, I love her more now. Oh! Mary, Mary, pulse of my heart, would to God I could die before you!”

The younger son Pat, his mother’s favourite, now entered the room in a state of pitiable excitement. He had been at the dispensary to procure the medicine prescribed by the doctor, and to his imagination every person and every thing seemed to have conspired to delay him, whilst the lookers on deemed his haste almost superhuman.

He immediately attempted to administer the draught he had brought, but his mother could not be made to understand what was wanted of her; and at length, as if teased by his importunities, she suddenly dashed the cup of medicine from her.

The look of unutterable anguish with which he regarded her, as she rejected and destroyed that upon the taking of which depended the last hope, was indescribable.

The almost fierceness of his haste, which he now saw had been utterly useless, had flushed his cheek and lighted up his countenance, and he stood with his hands clasped, and raised as if in prayer, with firmly shut lips, and his eyes, in which you could view the transition from eager hope to utter despair, fixed upon her face, like a being that was changing into stone.

At the other side of the bed was his father, who had resumed his former attitude, and beside him stood his eldest son, whose utterly wretched countenance, alternating from one parent to the other, showed that he suffered that lowest state of misery, which anticipates still further and greater woe as a consequence from that which overwhelms at present.

My father left the room. I looked upon the group one instant. I felt that I could have resigned the possession of worlds to be permitted the luxury of raising the load of grief from those afflicted hearts; but it could not be, and I retired to relieve my surcharged feelings in solitude.

Ere morning dawned, nature had received another instalment of her debt.

My father and I attended the funeral, and were surprised at the apparent fortitude of Mr Scanlan. We wished to bring him with us to the Hall after the sad ceremony, but he would not come. We then accompanied him to his own house. As we entered, I glanced at him: he was ghastly pale. He looked slowly round, fixed his eyes one moment on the countenance of his younger son, another on the elder, and sank upon a chair.

Since the period of which I now write, I have often witnessed the closing scene of mortality, and various are the opinions I have heard, as to which point of time, between the moment of death and the first appearance abroad of the survivors in their mourning apparel, is the saddest, the most afflicting, or the most trying—whether the moment of dissolution, the first appearance of the undertaker, the laying out in the apparel of death, the bringing of the coffin, the last frantic kiss and look, the screwing down, the carrying out, the dull thud of the clay upon the coffin lid. Oh! think not that I am coolly writing this, that I am probing with the surgeon’s calmness the deep, the sensitive (with many bleeding) wounds that death has given.

I am but a young man, yet my brain reels, and my eyes burn, and my heart swells to my throat, as memory holds the mirror to my view, and I see depicted in it the scenes, and feel again the feelings, that have been more than once or twice excited at the stages which I have just recounted in order. But of all the stabs thus given to the heart, of all those moments of anguish, the keenest is that felt when the survivor re-enters the house, where the form and the voice and the cheerful laugh of the departed one had made his home a little paradise, and feels that that home is now for ever desolate! Is there a desert so deserted?

“James,” said Mr Scanlan, after he had looked steadfastly at him for some time, “you were the first she brought me; and when you came into the world, I was almost beside myself with joy; and when I was allowed to enter the room where she was sitting up in bed, with you in her arms, I almost smothered you both with kisses; and I cried, and laughed, and danced about, as if I was mad. Sure I need’nt be ashamed to own it, now that she’s gone. And when I told her that they said you were the image of me, she answered me, ‘So he ought, for sure you were always before my eyes;’ and when I said that I could’nt be ‘always,’ she said that ’twas the eyes of her heart she meant. So, Pat, avourneen (addressing the younger, who had been all this time crying bitterly), though you’re the living image of her that’s dead, and though father could’nt love son more than I do you, you’re not surprised that I gave James the preference sometimes, though I never loved you the less.”

“Father dear,” said Pat, “I was never jealous of Jem, nor he of me; we both knew that our faces and tempers and dispositions took after you both—Jem’s after you, and mine after my mother. Oh! mother dear! mother dear!” He burst into a paroxysm of grief, ran wildly into his mother’s room, and threw himself across the bed, roaring in a frenzied manner, “James, honey, isn’t the house terrible lonesome?” and a violent shudder ran through poor Scanlan’s frame. “Isn’t there a great echo in it? It’s very chilly; I believe I had better go and lie down on the bed.”

He stood up, and, continuing the forward movement of his body after he had risen to a standing position, would have fallen, extended on his face, but that I caught him just as his watchful son had sprung to save him.

Poor Pat now mastered his feelings in some degree, and turned his entire attention to assist his surviving parent. He was laid on the bed, and shortly recovered himself, and addressed my father. “I know your honour feels for my trouble, and will excuse the boys and me for not showing the attention we ought to show for your goodness.”

“Say nothing about attention to me, James; I am sorry for your trouble, and, God knows, I wish I knew how to relieve and comfort you.”

“I’m sure you do, sir.—Boys, I won’t be long with you. The pulse of my heart is gone. Look up to his honour, and never forget, that, though there’s no clanship in these times, and though many a shoneen holds a higher head than his in the country now, you still owe him your love and fealty, for he’s one of the real old stock; and your forefathers followed his forefathers in war and peace, when, if you stood on the highest crag of the Bogaragh, you could’nt see to the bounds of their wide domains. And while his honour is present, and I have my senses clear about me, I’ll lay my commands on you both, boys; and if ever you break through them (though I am sure you never will), let his honour, and the young master here bear witness against you.”

He then delivered what was simply a verbal will, directing how they should dispose of and divide his property and effects, and concluded as follows:—

“When your mother and I were married, we were both of us full of old sayings and proverbs, and we thought, like most others, that their meaning should be taken in the plainest and fullest signification; and as most of them are universally allowed to contain a great deal of wisdom and good sense, we thought that whoever regulated his or her conduct strictly according to their rule, would of necessity be the wisest person in the world.

One of these sayings, that I had been taught to believe was one of the wisest ever pronounced by man, was, ‘there’s luck in leisure,’ and this was my most favourite maxim; but when I got married, I found that your mother—that your mother had a favourite one also—‘delays are dangerous.’

Well, the first year, when the corn was coming up, a corn factor came to this part of the country, and offered a middling fair price for an average crop. Mary bade me take it, as I’d have that much money certain, and if the season should turn out bad, the factor would be the sufferer, and I’d be safe.

‘Take it at once,’ said she; ‘you know “delays are dangerous.”’

I began to consider that if the season should be only middling, inclining to bad, I might get as much money still, as the factor offered; and if it should turn out fine, the crop would produce a great deal more, whilst it would be only in the event of a bad season that I’d be apt to lose. ‘There’s luck in leisure,’ said I; ‘I’ll wait.’

Well, the season was dreadful: most of the crops were totally destroyed, and we suffered more than almost any of the neighbours. I was afraid to look Mary in the face, when I had made out the extent of my loss, but she only said, ‘Come, Jemmy, it can’t be helped; the worse luck now, the better another time. You’ll attend more to wise old sayings for the future; they were made out of wiser heads than yours.’

‘Ah, but, Mary, a-cushla, it was following an old saying that I was; sure you have often heard say, “there’s luck in leisure.”’ ‘Poh,’ said she, ‘that’s only a foolish saying, take my word for it.’

Next year the sky-farmer came again. He had lost nothing, for no one would deal with him, on his terms, the year before; and to hear how heartlessly he’d jeer and jibe them that had the sore hearts in their bosoms, and calculate up for them how much they had lost, and then he’d say, he supposed they would’nt refuse a good offer another time. Well, I asked him was he going to make me a good offer, and he said he would’nt care if he did, and he offered as much as would hardly pay the rent, letting alone seed and labour. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘you’ll give as much as you offered last year.’ ‘Not I indeed,’ said he; ‘I bought experience instead of corn last year, and you paid for it;’ and he laughed, and shook himself with glee, and chuckled, and jingled the guineas in his pockets, until I was hardly able to keep from knocking him down.

Well, I higgled and bargained, and tried to raise him, but not another penny would he give; and at last he said that he was going away in the morning, and so I might take it or leave it, as I liked—he would’nt force his money on any man, not he. ‘Delays are dangerous,’ thought I; and, though it was a certain loss, I agreed.

A finer season than that, never came from the heavens. The factor came to see the crops, and such crops as they were! Several others had done like me; and if he laughed at us the year before, he laughed ten times more now. The year before he had lost nothing: this year he had made a fortune. He had laughed at our losses before, but he now laughed over his own gains. ‘They may laugh who win.’

If he had taken it quieter, he might have done the same thing again; but by acting as he did, he set every one against him, and he never after could buy up growing crops here.

‘Mary, my darling,’ said I, ‘we’re almost ruined, in the second year, by following old sayings. I’ll never believe in them again.’ ‘Jemmy, dear,’ said she, ‘I have been thinking the matter over, and I believe it’s not the sayings that are wrong, but the wrong use that’s made of them; for if we had said them the other way, we’d have made money instead of losing it; and for the future we’ll try to use the sense that God has given us, and the acquirements such as they are that He has enabled us to obtain, in directing us to the proper use and timely application of those proverbs that are really wise and useful when properly applied.’

As it was the will of the Almighty, boys, that your dear mother should not have had her senses about her when departing, and it’s likely that these are the last of her sensible words that I’ll ever be able to tell you, I’d have you take them, and think upon them as if they were her last addressed to you, and let neither proverbs, however apparently wise in themselves, nor superstitious remarks, ever guide your actions or sway your conduct until you have applied to them the touchstone of your own common sense.

May God bless and guide you, my darling boys; and now I have done with the world and its affairs.”

That day fortnight the funeral of James Scanlan was attended by

Naisi.