Orange and Green | Page 2

a few hundred acres surrounding it.
Fortunately, the dowry which Mrs. Davenant had brought her husband
was untouched, and a new house was reared within the ruins of the
castle, the new work being dovetailed with the old.
The family now consisted of Mrs. Davenant, a lady sixty-eight years
old; her son Fergus, who was, when Cromwell devastated the land, a
child of five years; his wife Katherine, daughter of Lawrence McCarthy,
a large landowner near Cork; and their two sons, Walter, a lad of
sixteen, and Godfrey, twelve years old.
Two miles west of the castle stood a square-built stone house,
surrounded by solidly-constructed barns and outbuildings. This was the

abode of old Zephaniah Whitefoot, the man upon whom had been
bestowed the broad lands of Walter Davenant. Zephaniah had fought
stoutly, as lieutenant in one of Cromwell's regiments of horse, and had
always considered himself an ill-treated man, because, although he had
obtained all the most fertile portion of the Davenant estate, the old
family were permitted to retain the castle, and a few hundred acres by
the sea.
He was one of those who contended that the Amalekites should be
utterly destroyed by the sword, and he considered that the retention of
the corner of their domains, by the Davenants, was a direct flying in the
face of the providence who had given them into the hands of the
faithful. Not that, had he obtained possession of the ruined castle,
Zephaniah Whitefoot would have repaired it or set up his abode there.
The followers of Cromwell had no eyes for the beautiful. They were
too much in earnest to care aught for the amenities of life, and despised,
as almost sinful, anything approximating to beauty, either in dress,
person, or surroundings. The houses that they reared, in this land of
which they had taken possession, were bare to the point of ugliness,
and their interior was as cold and hard as was the exterior. Everything
was for use, nothing for ornament. Scarce a flower was to be seen in
their gardens, and laughter was a sign of levity, to be sternly repressed.
Their isolation, in the midst of a hostile population, caused them no
concern whatever. They cared for no society or companionship, save
that of their own households, which they ruled with a rod of iron; and
an occasional gathering, for religious purposes, with the other settlers
of their own faith. They regarded the Irish as Papists, doomed to
everlasting perdition, and indeed consigned to that fate all outside their
own narrow sect. Such a people could no more mix with the
surrounding population than oil with water. As a rule, they tilled as
much ground in the immediate vicinity of their houses as they and their
families could manage, and the rest of the land which had fallen into
their possession they let, either for a money payment, or, more often,
for a portion of the crops raised upon it, to such natives as were willing
to hold it on these terms.

The next generation had fallen away somewhat from their fathers'
standards. It is not in human nature to stand such a strain as their
families had been subjected to. There is an innate yearning for joy and
happiness, and even the sternest discipline cannot keep man forever in
the gloomy bonds of fanaticism. In most cases, the immediate
descendants of Cromwell's soldiers would gladly have made some sort
of compromise, would have surrendered much of their outlying land to
obtain secure and peaceful possession of the rest, and would have
emerged from the life of gloomy seclusion, in which they found
themselves; but no whisper of any such feeling as this would be heard
in the household of Zephaniah Whitefoot, so long as he lived.
He was an old man now, but as hard, as gloomy, and as unlovable as he
had been when in his prime. His wife had died very many years before,
of no disease that Zephaniah or the doctor he called in could discover,
but, in fact, of utter weariness at the dull life of repression and gloom
which crushed her down. Of a naturally meek and docile disposition,
she had submitted without murmuring to her husband's commands, and
had, during her whole married life, never shocked him so much as she
did the day before her death, when, for the first time, she exhibited the
possession of an opinion of her own, by saying earnestly:
"You may say what you like, Zephaniah, but I do think we were meant
to have some happiness and pleasure on earth. If we were intended to
go through life without laughing, why should we be able to laugh? Oh,
how I should like to hear one hearty, natural laugh again before I die,
such