The Poor Clare | Page 8

descendants of the younger branch of a family to
whom some valuable estates had descended in the female line. The
Irish lawyer whom I had seen was weary of the case, and would
willingly have given up the property, without further ado, to a man who
appeared to claim them; but on laying his tables and trees before my
uncle, the latter had foreseen so many possible prior claimants, that the
lawyer had begged him to undertake the management of the whole
business. In his youth, my uncle would have liked nothing better than
going over to Ireland himself, and ferreting out every scrap of paper or
parchment, and every word of tradition respecting the family. As it was,
old and gouty, he deputed me.
Accordingly, I went to Kildoon. I suspect I had something of my
uncle's delight in following up a genealogical scent, for I very soon
found out, when on the spot, that Mr. Rooney, the Irish lawyer, would
have got both himself and the first claimant into a terrible scrape, if he
had pronounced his opinion that the estates ought to be given up to him.
There were three poor Irish fellows, each nearer of kin to the last
possessor; but, a generation before, there was a still nearer relation,

who had never been accounted for, nor his existence ever discovered by
the lawyers, I venture to think, till I routed him out from the memory of
some of the old dependants of the family. What had become of him? I
travelled backwards and forwards; I crossed over to France, and came
back again with a slight clue, which ended in my discovering that, wild
and dissipated himself, he had left one child, a son, of yet worse
character than his father; that this same Hugh Fitzgerald had married a
very beautiful serving-woman of the Byrnes--a person below him in
hereditary rank, but above him in character; that he had died soon after
his marriage, leaving one child, whether a boy or a girl I could not learn,
and that the mother had returned to live in the family of the Byrnes.
Now, the chief of this latter family was serving in the Duke of
Berwick's regiment, and it was long before I could hear from him; it
was more than a year before I got a short, haughty letter--I fancy he had
a soldier's contempt for a civilian, an Irishman's hatred for an
Englishman, an exiled Jacobite's jealousy of one who prospered and
lived tranquilly under the government he looked upon as an usurpation.
"Bridget Fitzgerald," he said, "had been faithful to the fortunes of his
sister--had followed her abroad, and to England when Mrs. Starkey had
thought fit to return. Both his sister and her husband were dead, he
knew nothing of Bridget Fitzgerald at the present time: probably Sir
Philip Tempest, his nephew's guardian, might be able to give me some
information." I have not given the little contemptuous terms; the way in
which faithful service was meant to imply more than it said-- all that
has nothing to do with my story. Sir Philip, when applied to, told me
that he paid an annuity regularly to an old woman named Fitzgerald,
living at Coldholme (the village near Starkey Manor- house). Whether
she had any descendants he could not say.
One bleak March evening, I came in sight of the places described at the
beginning of my story. I could hardly understand the rude dialect in
which the direction to old Bridget's house was given.
"Yo' see yon furleets," all run together, gave me no idea that I was to
guide myself by the distant lights that shone in the windows of the Hall,
occupied for the time by a farmer who held the post of steward, while
the Squire, now four or five and twenty, was making the grand tour.

However, at last, I reached Bridget's cottage--a low, moss-grown place:
the palings that had once surrounded it were broken and gone; and the
underwood of the forest came up to the walls, and must have darkened
the windows. It was about seven o'clock--not late to my London
notions--but, after knocking for some time at the door and receiving no
reply, I was driven to conjecture that the occupant of the house was
gone to bed. So I betook myself to the nearest church I had seen, three
miles back on the road I had come, sure that close to that I should find
an inn of some kind; and early the next morning I set off back to
Coldholme, by a field-path which my host assured me I should find a
shorter cut than the road I had taken the night before. It was a cold,
sharp morning; my feet left prints in the