“Well, Mr Moylan,” he said, “then I can only say your own conduct is very disinterested;—and I might even go so far as to say that you appear to me foolishly indifferent to your own concerns. Here’s the agency of the whole property going a-begging: the rents, I believe, are about a thousand a-year: you might be recaving them all by jist a word of your mouth, and that only telling the blessed truth; and here, you’re going to put the whole thing into the hands of young Kelly; throwing up even the half of the business you have got!”
“Who says I’m afther doing any sich thing, Mr Daly?”
“Why, Martin Kelly says so. Didn’t as many as four or five persons hear him say, down at Dunmore, that divil a one of the tenants’d iver pay a haporth [30] of the November rents to anyone only jist to himself? There was father Geoghegan heard him, an Doctor Ned Blake.”
“Maybe he’ll find his mistake, Mr Daly.”
“Maybe he will, Mr Moylan. Maybe we’ll put the whole affair into the courts, and have a regular recaver over the property, under the Chancellor. People, though they’re ever so respectable in their way,—and I don’t mane to say a word against the Kellys, Mr Moylan, for they were always friends of mine—but people can’t be allowed to make a dead set at a property like this, and have it all their own way, like the bull in the china-shop. I know there has been an agreement made, and that, in the eye of the law, is a conspiracy. I positively know that an agreement has been made to induce Miss Lynch to become Martin Kelly’s wife; and I know the parties to it, too; and I also know that an active young fellow like him wouldn’t be paying an agent to get in his rents; and I thought, if Mr Lynch was willing to appoint you his agent, as well as his sister’s, it might be worth your while to lend us a hand to settle this affair, without forcing us to stick people into a witness-box whom neither I nor Mr Lynch—”
“But what the d––––l can I—”
“Jist hear me out, Mr Moylan; you see, if they once knew—the Kellys I mane—that you wouldn’t lend a hand to this piece of iniquity—”
“Which piece of iniquity, Mr Daly?—for I’m entirely bothered.”
“Ah, now, Mr Moylan, none of your fun: this piece of iniquity of theirs, I say; for I can call it no less. If they once knew that you wouldn’t help ’em, they’d be obliged to drop it all; the matter’d never have to go into court at all, and you’d jist step into the agency fair and aisy; and, into the bargain, you’d do nothing but an honest man’s work.”
The old man broke down, and consented to “go agin the Kellys,” as he somewhat ambiguously styled his apostasy, provided the agency was absolutely promised to him; and he went away with the understanding that he was to come on the following day and meet Mr Lynch.