



Produced by Charles Bowen from page scans provided by
Google Books (Oxford University)











Transcriber's Notes:

     1. Page scan source: Google Books
        http://books.google.com/books?id=GyAGAAAAQAAJ
        (Oxford University)






                            THE LAST CALL.






                            THE LAST CALL.


                              A Romance.



                                  BY

                           RICHARD DOWLING,

       AUTHOR OF "THE MYSTERY OF KILLARD," "THE WEIRD SISTERS,"
                         "SWEET INISFAIL," ETC.





                         _IN THREE VOLUMES_.

                               VOL. I.




                               LONDON:
             TINSLEY BROTHERS, 8, CATHERINE ST., STRAND.
                                1884.
                       [_All rights reserved_.]






                      CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS
                        CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.






                            THE LAST CALL.


                              * * * * *


                               Part I.






                            THE LAST CALL.


                              CHAPTER I.


The sun was low behind a bank of leaden cloud which stood like a wall
upon the western horizon. In front of a horse-shoe cove lay a placid
bay, and to the westward, but invisible from the cove, the plains of
the Atlantic.

It was low water, and summer. The air of the cove was soft with
exhalations from the weed-clad rocks stretching in green and brown
furrows from the ridge of blue shingle in the cove to the violet
levels of the sea.

On the ridge of shingle lay a young man, whose eyes rested on the sea.
He was of the middle height and figure. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight
seemed to be his age. He had a neat, compact forehead, dark gray eyes,
ruddy, full cheeks, a prominent nose, full lips, and a square chin.
The face looked honest, good-humoured, manly. The moustaches were
brown; the brown hair curled under the hat. The young man wore a gray
tweed suit and a straw hat.

He lay resting on his elbow. In the line of his sight far out in the
bay a small dot moved almost imperceptibly. The lounger knew this dot
was a boat: distance prevented his seeing it contained a man and a
woman.

Dominique Lavirotte, the man in the boat, was of the middle height and
figure, twenty-four years of age, looking like a Greek, but French by
descent and birth. The eyes and skin were dark, the beard and
moustaches black. The men of Rathclare, a town ten miles off, declared
he was the handsomest man they had ever seen, and yet felt their
candour ill-requited when their sweethearts and wives concurred.

With Dominique Lavirotte in the boat was Ellen Creagh. She was not a
native of Rathclare, but of Glengowra, the small seaside and fishing
town situate on Glengowra Bay, over which the boat was now lazily
gliding in the cool blue light of the afternoon.

Ellen Creagh was tall and slender, above the average height of women,
and very fair. She had light golden-brown hair, bright lustrous blue
eyes, and lips of delicate red. The upper lip was short. Even in
repose her face always suggested a smile. One of the great charms of
the head was the fluent ease with which it moved. The greatest charm
of the face was the sweet susceptibility it had to smile. It seemed,
when unmoved, to wait in placid faith, the advent of pleasant things.
During its moments of quiet there was no suggestion of doubt or
anxiety in it. To it the world was fair and pleasant--and the face was
pleasant and wonderfully fair. Pleasant people are less degraded by
affectation than solemn people. Your solemn man is generally a
swindler of some kind, and nearly always selfish and insincere. Ellen
Creagh looked the embodiment of good-humoured candour, and the ideal
of health and beauty. She was as blithe and wholesome as the end of
May; she was a northern Hebe, a goddess of youth and joy.

The name of the young man lying on the shingles was Eugene O'Donnell.
He lived in the important seaport of Rathclare, where his father was
the richest and most respected merchant and shipowner. There had James
O'Donnell been established in business for many years, and they now
said he was not worth less than a quarter of a million sterling. Mrs.
O'Donnell was a hale, brisk, bright-minded woman of fifty-seven, being
three years her husband's junior. The pair had but one child, Eugene,
and to him in due time all the old man's money was to go. The
O'Donnells were wealthy and popular. The father had a slow, methodical
way, which did not win upon strangers, but among those who knew him no
one was more highly respected. Without any trace of extravagance,
James O'Donnell was liberal with his money. He was a good husband, a
good father, and a good employer.

He had only one source of permanent uneasiness--his son Eugene was not
married, and showed no inclination towards marriage. The old man held
that every young man who could support a wife should take one. He
himself had married young, had prospered amazingly, and never for a
moment regretted his marriage. He was prepared to give his son a share
in his business, and a thousand a year out of the interest of his
savings, if the young man would only settle. But although Eugene
O'Donnell was as good-humoured and good-hearted a young fellow as the
town of Rathclare, or the next town to it, could show, and although
there was not in the whole town one girl who would be likely to refuse
him, and although there were plenty of handsome girls in Rathclare,
Eugene O'Donnell remained obdurate. It was lamentable, but what could
anyone do? The young man would not make love, the father would not
insist upon his marrying whether he loved or no, and there being at
Rathclare little faith in leap-year, no widow or maiden of the town
was bold enough to ask him to wed her.

While the young man lying on the shingle was idly watching the boat,
the young man in the boat was by no means idle. The sculls he was
pulling occupied none of his attention. He swung himself mechanically
backward and forward. His whole mind was fixed on the face and form of
the girl sitting in the stern.

"And so, you really must go back to Dublin?" he said ruefully.

"Yes," she answered with a smile. "I must really go back to Dublin
within a fortnight."

"And leave all here behind," he said tenderly.

"All!" she exclaimed, looking around sadly. "There is not much to
leave besides the sea, which I always loved, and my mother, whom I
always loved also."

"There is nothing else in the place, I suppose, Miss Creagh, you love,
but the sea and your mother?"

"No," she answered, "nothing. I have no relative living but my mother,
and she and the sea are my oldest friends."

"But have you no new friend or friends?"

She shook her head, and leaning over the side of the boat, drew her
fingers slowly through the water.

"The Vernons," she said, "are good to me, and I like the girls very
much. But I am only their servant--a mere governess."

"A mere queen!" he said. "I have known you but a short time. That has
been the happiest time of my life. _I_ at least can never forget it.
May you?"

Suddenly a slight change came over her. She lost a little of her
gaiety, and gathered herself together with a shadow of reserve.

"I do not think, Mr.. Lavirotte, I shall soon forget the many pleasant
hours we have spent together and the great kindness you have shown to
me."

"And you do not think you will forget _me?_"

"How can I remember your kindness and forget you?" she asked gravely.

"Yes, yes," he said eagerly, "but you know what I mean, and are
avoiding my meaning. Perhaps I have been too hasty. Shall I sing you a
song?"

"Yes, please, if you will row towards home."

Then he sang:


    "The bright stars fade, the morn is breaking,
       The dew-drops pearl each flower and leaf,
     When I of thee my leave am taking,
       With bliss too brief.
     How sinks my heart with fond alarms,
       The tear is hiding in mine eye,
     For time doth chase me from thine arms:
       Good-bye, sweetheart, good-bye."


The boat was now well inshore.

"Lavirotte! Lavirotte's voice, by all the gods!" cried Eugene
O'Donnell, raising himself into a sitting posture. "Doing the
polite--doing the lover, for all I know. Why has he stopped there? He
will begin again in a moment."

"When you go, Ellen, will you give me leave to bid you adieu in these
words?"

"Mr. Lavirotte," she said, in doubt and pain, "I am exceedingly sorry
that----"

"It is enough," he said. "Say no more. I am a ruined man."

"He will not finish it," said O'Donnell. "He is ungallant. I will
finish it for him.


    "The sun is up, the lark is soaring,
       Loud swells the song of chanticleer;
     The leveret bounds o'er earth's soft flooring:
       Yet I am here.
     For since night's gems from heaven did fade,
       And morn to floral lips must hie,
     I could not leave thee though I said,
       Good-bye, sweetheart, good-bye."


The girl raised her head and listened for a moment, and then bent her
head in some confusion. There was to her a sense of surprise in
feeling that this song had, bearing its present associations, been
completed by an unknown voice.

Lavirotte noticed the look of disquietude on the girl's face, and said
lightly and bitterly: "You need not be uneasy, Miss Creagh. I know the
man who finished my song for me, when there was no use in my going on
with it. He and I are rival tenors. I will introduce you to him when
we get ashore. We are the closest friends. He is the best of good
fellows, and reputed--ah, I envy him--to be a woman-hater."

At length the boat glided slowly through the green channel that led
from the plain of the violet bay to the ridge of blue shingle.

Lavirotte handed the girl out as soon as they reached the beach, and,
as he did so, said: "You have no objection to know my friend?"

She was anxious to conciliate him in any way she might. "No," she
whispered. "What a lovely voice he has."

"Better than mine?" he asked abruptly and harshly.

"I--I," she hesitated, "am but a poor judge."

"Which means," he said bitterly, "that you are a good judge, and
decide against me."

By this time they were close to where O'Donnell was. He was standing,
and looking out to sea.

"Comrade," said Lavirotte, touching him on the shoulder, "I am
delighted to see you. I am in sore need of a _friend_. Miss Creagh has
admired your singing very much. Mr. O'Donnell--Miss Creagh."

"Am I dreaming," thought O'Donnell, "or is this beauty real?"




                         CHAPTER II.


There was around Dominique Lavirotte an air of mystery which kept the
good simple folk of Glengowra at bay. Although, theoretically,
Frenchmen have always been popular in Ireland, this applies rather to
the mass than to the individual.

There was nothing repulsive about Dominique Lavirotte. On the
contrary, he had attractive manners, and although he spoke English
with a broken accent, he spoke it fluently and faultlessly. He was
agreeable in company, well-read, and possessed a shallow
encyclop[ae]dic knowledge, by means of which he was enabled to give
great brilliancy and point to his conversation.

Yet at certain moments he was taciturn, and if one attempted to break
in upon his reserve he turned swiftly and snarled even at his best
friend.

According to his own account, he was descended from Louis Anne
Lavirotte, medical doctor, born at Nolay, in the diocese of Autun,
somewhere about a hundred years ago, who was a most skilful physician,
and one well versed in the English language. This dead doctor of a
hundred years ago had devoted much of his attention while on earth to
more or less obscure forms of mental disease, and had written a
treatise on hydrophobia.

Dominique was very proud of this learned ancestor, and paid his
relative of the last century the compliment of devoting some of his
own time to the consideration of abnormal mental developments. Indeed,
some of those who knew him best said that there was a twist in his own
mind, and that under extreme provocation, mental or physical, the
brain would give way.

Lavirotte and O'Donnell were as close friends as it is possible for
men to be; and, notwithstanding the ten miles which separated their
homes, they saw much of one another. Each was young and enthusiastic,
each sang tenor, and sang uncommonly well.

In the town of Rathclare, no young man was more popular than Eugene
O'Donnell, and the people there thought it a thousand pities that he
should select as his favourite friend a man who was not only not a
resident of Rathclare, but a foreigner, with mysterious ways and an
uncertain temper. O'Donnell laughed off all their expostulations and
warnings, and said that in so far as his friend was a stranger and
afflicted with a bad temper, there was all the more reason why someone
should do him any little kindness he could.

But the people of Rathclare shook their heads gravely at the young
man's temerity, and prophesied that no good would come to O'Donnell of
this connection. They did not like this foreigner, with his strange
ways and mysterious retirements into himself. They were free and
open-hearted themselves, and they liked free and open-hearted souls
like O'Donnell. They did not like swarthy skins; and now and then in
the newspapers they read that men with swarthy skins drew knives and
struck their dearest friends; that foreigners were treacherous, and
not to be trusted with the lives, into the homes, or with the honour
of law-abiding folk. They knew, it being a seaport, that foreigners
spoke a gibberish which they affected to understand, and which was in
reality no better than the language of Satan. Once a Greek, an
infamous Greek, had been hanged in their town for an intolerable crime
of cruelty committed on board ship; and somehow, ever since then, all
foreigners, particularly swarthy foreigners, seemed in their eyes
peculiarly prone to atrocious cruelties.

What a luxury it must have been for this swarthy man of uncertain
temper to meet and speak with Ellen Creagh, who was the very
embodiment of all that is fair in the rich, warm sense of fairness in
the North; and free in the sense of all that is open and joyous, and
full of abounding confidence, in the North!

During the fortnight in which he had been admitted to what he
considered the infinite privilege of her society, he had fallen
helplessly, hopelessly, madly in love. He had drunk in the subtle
poison of her beauty with an avidity almost intolerable to himself.
All the poetry and passion of his nature had gone forth ceaselessly
towards that girl, as only the poetry and passion of southern blood
can go forth. The violence of his feelings had astonished even
himself. These feelings had grown all the more intense by the fierce
repression in which he had kept them. For until that day in the boat
he had never seemed to take more than a passing, polite interest in
Ellen. Even then, in his dark and self-restrained nature, he had given
no indication of the struggle within. The frenzy of his worship found
no expression, and he took his dismissal with as much apparent
indifference as though he had put the question to her merely out of
regard to the wishes of others.

Yet when he said the words, "I am a ruined man," he meant the words,
or rather he meant that he was determined to take an active part in
his own destruction.

"If I die," he thought, "what is death to me? The sun is dead, the
moon is dead, the stars are dead, earth is dead, and perdition will be
a release from this valley of phantoms. When life is not worth living,
why should one live? I will not live. I have no cause against her, but
I have cause against myself, for I am a failure."

He had determined to make away with himself; he had made up his mind
that he would not survive this terrible disappointment; he would go
home that night and take some painless and swift poison, and so pass
out of this vain world to the unknown beyond; he would not declare his
intention to anyone, least of all to O'Donnell, whose voice he
recognised in the second stanza of the song; he knew where he could
get the poison--from a friendly apothecary. They would hold an inquest
on him, no doubt, and discover that he had done himself to death. Her
name might even get mixed up in the affair, but he could not help
that. He meant to do her no harm; he simply could not and would not
endure.

When that meeting took place on the beach, whereat he introduced Ellen
to O'Donnell, he had noticed the latter's start of amazed admiration.

"What," thought Lavirotte, "is he hit too; he, the invincible! he, the
adamantine man, who has hitherto withstood all the charms of her
lovely sex? It would be curious to watch this. Will he too make love,
and fail--succeed? Ah."

When this thought first occurred to Lavirotte he paused in a dim,
dazed way. Of all men