‘Done! Why, it’s only beginning I am,’ cried she. ‘Not but I’d bear a deal of blackguarding from the press—as the old woman said when the soldier threatened to run his bayonet through her: “Devil thank you, it’s only your trade.” But when we come to see the head of an old family making ducks and drakes of his family property, threatening the old tenants that have been on the land as long as his own people, raising the rent here, evicting there, distressing the people’s minds when they’ve just as much as they can to bear up with—then it’s time for an old friend and neighbour to give a timely warning, and cry “Stop.’”
‘Have you done, Miss Betty?’ And now his voice was more stern than before.
‘I have not, nor near done, Mathew Kearney. I’ve said nothing of the way you’re bringing up your family—that son, in particular—to make him think himself a young man of fortune, when you know, in your heart, you’ll leave him little more than the mortgages on the estate. I have not told you that it’s one of the jokes of the capital to call him the Honourable Dick Kearney, and to ask him after his father the viscount.’
‘You haven’t done yet, Miss O’Shea?’ said he, now with a thickened voice.
‘No, not yet,’ replied she calmly—‘not yet; for I’d like to remind you of the way you’re behaving to the best of the whole of you—the only one, indeed, that’s worth much in the family—your daughter Kate.’
‘Well, what have I done to wrong her?’ said he, carried beyond his prudence by so astounding a charge.
‘The very worst you could do, Mathew Kearney; the only mischief it was in your power, maybe. Look at the companion you have given her! Look at the respectable young lady you’ve brought home to live with your decent child!’
‘You’ll not stop?’ cried he, almost choking with passion.
‘Not till I’ve told you why I came here, Mathew Kearney; for I’d beg you to understand it was no interest about yourself or your doings brought me. I came to tell you that I mean to be free about an old contract we once made—that I revoke it all. I was fool enough to believe that an alliance between our families would have made me entirely happy, and my nephew Gorman O’Shea was brought up to think the same. I have lived to know better, Mathew Kearney: I have lived to see that we don’t suit each other at all, and I have come here to declare to you formally that it’s all off. No nephew of mine shall come here for a wife. The heir to Shea’s Barn shan’t bring the mistress of it out of Kilgobbin Castle.’
‘Trust me for that, old lady,’ cried he, forgetting all his good manners in his violent passion.