"Ah! Mr. Keegan, £1 a week is too little for the owld man; make it £100 a year for his life, and give Feemy £300, so that she, poor girl, may have some chance of neither begging or starving, if she shouldn't get married, and I'll not go against the bargain. I'd get a bit of land somewhere, though I couldn't be a tenant on Ballycloran. 'Deed for the matter of that, if we must part it, I don't care how long it is before I see a sod of it again."
"Nonsense, Mr. Thady; £100 a year is out of the question; why, your father's hardly to be called an elderly man yet. I couldn't think of advising Mr. Flannelly to give more than he has already proposed.—Don't you think, Mr. Macdermot,"—and he began speaking loudly to the old man;—"£1 a week, regularly paid, you know, would be a nice thing for you, now that your daughter is going to get married, and that Thady here thinks of taking a farm for himself?"
"I towld you before I'd nothing to say about it—and I will say nothing about it; the bill don't come round till November, and it's very hard you should be bothering the life out of me this way."
Keegan turned away, and taking Thady by the collar of his coat, led him to the window; he began to find he could do nothing with Larry.
"You see, Macdermot," he said in a half whisper, "it is impossible to get your father to listen to me; and therefore the responsibility must rest upon you as to advising him what he'd better do. And now let me put it to you this way: you know that you have not the means of raising the money to pay off this debt, and that Flannelly can sell the estate any day he pleases; well,—suppose you drive us to this, and suppose the thing fetches a little over what his claim is, don't you know there are great expenses attached to such a sale? All would have to come out of the property; and your father's other creditors would come on the little remainder, and where would you be then? You see, my boy, it's quite impossible the estate should ever come to you. Now, by what I propose, your father would sell the estate while still he had the power; he would get comfortably settled—and I'd take care to manage the annuity so that the other creditors couldn't touch it; and you'd get a handful of money to set you up something more decently than the way you're going on here with your tenants."
"But my sisther, Mr. Keegan; when the home came to be taken from over her head, what would become of Feemy? She and the owld man could hardly live on a pound a week. And when the owld man should die—"
"Why, nonsense, man! Isn't your sister as good as married? or if not, a strapping girl like her is sure of a husband. Besides, when she's a hundred pounds in her pocket, she won't have to go far to look for a lover. There's plenty in Carrick would be glad to take her."
"Take her, Mr. Keegan! Do you think I'd be offering her that way to any huckster in Carrick that wanted a hundred pound;—or that she would put up with the like of that?—Bad as we are, we an't come to that yet."
"There you go with your family pride, Thady; but family pride won't feed you, and the offer I've made will; so you'd better bring the old man round to accept it."
"Make it £80 a year for my father, and £250 for Feemy, and I'll do the best I can."