And to make you understand how I became
connected with them, I must give you some little account of myself. My
father was the younger son of a Devonshire gentleman of moderate
property; my eldest uncle succeeded to the estate of his forefathers, my
second became an eminent attorney in London, and my father took orders. Like most poor clergymen, he had a large family; and I have no doubt was
glad enough when my London uncle, who was a bachelor, offered to take
charge of me, and bring me up to be his successor in business. In this way I came to live in London, in my uncle’s house, not far from
Gray’s Inn, and to be treated and esteemed as his son, and to labour with
him in his office. I was very fond of the old gentleman. He was the
confidential agent of many country squires, and had attained to his
present position as much by knowledge of human nature as by knowledge of
law; though he was learned enough in the latter. He used to say his
business was law, his pleasure heraldry. From his intimate acquaintance
with family history, and all the tragic courses of life therein involved,
to hear him talk, at leisure times, about any coat of arms that came
across his path was as good as a play or a romance. Many cases of
disputed property, dependent on a love of genealogy, were brought to him,
as to a great authority on such points. If the lawyer who came to
consult him was young, he would take no fee, only give him a long lecture
on the importance of attending to heraldry; if the lawyer was of mature
age and good standing, he would mulct him pretty well, and abuse him to
me afterwards as negligent of one great branch of the profession. His
house was in a stately new street called Ormond Street, and in it he had
a handsome library; but all the books treated of things that were past;
none of them planned or looked forward into the future. I worked
away—partly for the sake of my family at home, partly because my uncle
had really taught me to enjoy the kind of practice in which he himself
took such delight. I suspect I worked too hard; at any rate, in
seventeen hundred and eighteen I was far from well, and my good uncle was
disturbed by my ill looks. One day, he rang the bell twice into the clerk’s room at the dingy office
in Grey’s Inn Lane. It was the summons for me, and I went into his
private room just as a gentleman—whom I knew well enough by sight as an
Irish lawyer of more reputation than he deserved—was leaving. My uncle was slowly rubbing his hands together and considering. I was
there two or three minutes before he spoke. Then he told me that I must
pack up my portmanteau that very afternoon, and start that night by
post-horse for West Chester. I should get there, if all went well, at
the end of five days’ time, and must then wait for a packet to cross over
to Dublin; from thence I must proceed to a certain town named Kildoon,
and in that neighbourhood I was to remain, making certain inquiries as to
the existence of any 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.