Ardtaraig

Pat was much older than I, my mother’s widowhood having been a protracted one, consequently I looked up to him with a worshipful admiration, while he petted, and teased, and played with me; at times, hardly knowing what to do with the little creature who had come to share with him the mother-love which for so long had been all his own. He grew up into a splendid manhood; gifted, wayward, with a determined will, but a most loving heart. Handsome in person, attractive in manner, he drew all men unto him, and all women, too, for that matter. Gaieties of all sorts were open to him, and pressed upon him, and he responded right willingly, until those who loved him most began to be sorely troubled. He was yet to become as steady as Old Time, but who was there gifted with prescience enough to foretell that miracle. At the period I write of he was like a fiery meteor, compared with some of his con¬temporaries, who shone like fixed stars serenely above his head, for all his six feet two of stature. No doubt my mother envied the fortunate mothers to whom Providence had granted such exemplary sons, church¬going, sober-minded young fellows, while she could hardly keep her own loving, winsome, wilful boy within the limits of conventional be¬haviour. It must have tried her sorely. And who knew this better or mourned over it more, in after years, than the thoughtless cause of it all himself, and that, too, long after he had become the joy and pride of her heart. How did he write to me when we were both mourning her loss, “You and I alone knew what her love was; I more than you, because I tried it more.” I have hitherto, in this record, kept silent about my brother. I think my very love for him and pride in him withheld my pen. I feared to praise too much, but as I said when writing of Ardtarig, “Why say too little?” He and Ardtarig are bound together in my thoughts; there he was born, there he spent his early years, and there the love and longing of his life were centred. I shall try to keep within bounds, and yet I must say that, take him all in all, a nobler-hearted, finer-dispositioned man never lived. Physically, towering high above most of his fellows; broad in proportion, and truly majestic in his bearing, he bore the stamp of race, if ever a man did. Like his grandfather, George of Ardtarig, he was intellectual in his tastes, given much to reading, and even to poetising, when the mood was on; dreamy at times, fond of solitary musings (this later), somewhat of a mystic, yet oddly enough, with a passion for athletics, a keen sportsman, and a crack shot. These two phases of a many-sided character came out strongly blended while at the Cape. There he would of a sudden cast all business cares behind him, get on his horse, and ride away into the interior solitudes, whence, after many days perhaps he would emerge laden with trophies of his gun, and settle down again into a quiet civilised existence. He was wont to say that grinding down one’s life for money was a mistake; the soul needed to expand, and that he would prefer a modest competence, with freedom; rather than wealth earned at too high a cost. It is a pleasure to me to me to think that he and my father were warmly attached, and thoroughly appreciated each other’s good qualities. Most of his life was spent in Cape Colony, where he married, and where he died in 1885. His wife was Miss Susanna Willet Potter. She survived him and became a Roman Catholic. The Cape papers of the day were united in paying their tributes of regard and respect to his memory, as one of the older, and most highly respected Cape merchants. There was a romance in his life, on which, however, I shall not touch. One return visit he paid to the old home in 1867. Like others who have come back, I daresay he might repeat the words of the old song, which used to be sung at our supper table, in “the long ago,” by his dear old chum, Montgomery Lacy¬ –

“There’s a hope for every woe,
and a balm for every pain,
But the first joys of our heart
Come never back again.”

Our Uncle Andrew left the Cape not long after Pat’s first arrival, and went to America, but soon tired of that great country, and came back, for good and all, to his native land. I was then about fifteen