Passage Illustrated: A Serious Moment on the Field of Honour after a Comic Scene

As he spoke, Trevyllian’s features grew deadly livid; his half-open mouth quivered slightly, his eyes became fixed, and his arm dropped heavily beside him, and with a low moan he fell fainting to the ground.

As we bent over him I now perceived that another person had joined our party; he was a short, determined-looking man of about forty, with black eyes and aquiline features. Before I had time to guess who it might be, I heard O’Shaughnessy address him as Colonel Conyers.

“He is dying!” said Beaufort, still stooping over his friend, whose cold hand he grasped within his own. “Poor, poor fellow!”

“He fired in the air,” said Baker, as he spoke in reply to a question from Conyers.

What he answered I heard not, but Baker rejoined,

“Yes, I am certain of it. We all saw it.”

“Had you not better examine his wounds?” said Conyers, in a tone of sarcastic irony I could almost have struck him for. “Is your friend not hit? Perhaps he is bleeding?”

“Yes,” said O’Shaughnessy, “let us look to the poor fellow now.” So saying, with Beaufort’s aid he unbuttoned his frock and succeeded in opening his waistcoat. There was no trace of blood anywhere, and the idea of internal hemorrhage at once occurred to us, when Conyers, stooping down, pushed me aside, saying at the same time, “your fears for his safety need not distress you much: look here.” As he spoke he tore open his shirt, and disclosed to our almost doubting senses a vest of chain-mail armor fitting close next the skin and completely pistol-proof. [Chapter LXII, "The Duel," 311]

Commentary: The Cheating Duellist Gets His Just Desserts

Through a series of short chapters Lever recounts how Major O'Shaughnessy arranges the affair of honour between the malicious Trevyllian and O'Malley that the protagonist had to abandon as a consequence of his assignment to Monsoon's forces on the Spanish border. He has agreed to arrange the duel before Sir Arthur returns, as soon as the antagonist has come back from his foraging mission. Suddenly O'Malley learns from Baker that the meeting is set for half-past six some three miles away, and must catch the drag or tax-cart immediately at the close of Chapter LXI.

Arrived at the appointed spot, O'Malley and his party encounter Beaufort, Trevyllian's second. As the only supporter of the antagonist, he accepts that Baker accompany them as there should be only three witnesses to the combat. At the coin toss, O'Shaughnessy wins the right for O'Malley to discharge his duelling pistol first at fifteen paces of Beaufort's measuring. With a hair-trigger piece, O'Malley fires as Beaufort counts "two." When the smoke clears, Trevyllian lies on the ground, apparently wounded, but then rises with a vengeful grin: "Now it's my turn!" O'Malley is now in extreme danger. However, interrupted by the arrival of an officer on horseback, Trevyllian misfires, narrowly missing O'Malley's head but untruthfully asserting that he has deliberately fired into the air; and then he suddenly drops to the ground. Here, then, is the moment realized.

Immediately we wonder why Trevyllian is again on the ground, but can appreciate why the narrator has described his contortions of pain as counterfeited. The sixth figure in the illustration is Colonel Conyers, whose galloping up at the crucial moment had spoiled Trevyllian's vengeance. The perfidious officer, his mail shirt now revealed, lies on the field of honour. O'Malley, his pistol still in hand, stands to the far left. Only through the facing page can reader piece together what is transpiring at the well under the stone cross. Beaufort is stooping over his friend as O'Shaughnessy unbuttons Trevyllian's shirt, trying to see if O'Malley has seriously wounded him. There is no wound so internal haemorrhaging is suspected, but then Conyers points to the steel shirt against Trevyllian's skin which should have preserved him. There is no bullet hole, and yet he lies lifeless. In the text both O'Shaughnessy and Conyers stoop over the antagonist, but the illustrator must have felt that the composition would be more effective with the senior officer standing as he makes his pronouncement about Beaufort's innocence in Trevyllian's cunning duplicity. Here is Nemesis indeed: the fatal bullet has never entered the body, but is discovered in Trevyllian's clothing, so that it almost certainly hit but failed to penetrate the mailed shirt:

O’Shaughnessy was perfectly speechless. He looked from one to the other, as though some unexplained mystery still remained, and only seemed restored to any sense of consciousness as Baker said, “I can feel no pulse at his wrist, — his heart, too, does not beat.”

Conyers placed his hand upon his bosom, then felt along his throat, lifted up an arm, and letting it fall heavily upon the ground, he muttered, “He is dead!”

It was true. No wound had pierced him,—the pistol bullet was found within his clothes. Some tremendous conflict of the spirit within had snapped the cords of life, and the strong man had perished in his agony. [Chapter LXII, "The Duel," 311]

Necessary Background

• Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon (1840-41)
• Duelling in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Duelling among Gentleman in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Bibliography

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. "Edited by Harry Lorrequer." Dublin: William Curry, Jun. London: W. S. Orr, 1841. 2 vols.

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Published serially in The Dublin University Magazine from Vol. XV (March 1840) through XVIII (December 1841). Dublin: William Curry, March 1840 through December 1841. London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1842; rpt., Chapman and Hall, 1873.

Lever, Charles. Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. Novels and Romances of Charles Lever. Vol. I and II. In two volumes. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: 2 September 2016.

Steig, Michael. Chapter Two: "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-50.

Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter V, "Renegade from Physic, 1839-1841." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. Pp. 73-93.

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Created 19 February 2023