‘There is nothing would gratify the fellow’s vanity,’ thought he, ‘like a successful rivalry of him! Tell him he was preferred to me, and he would be ready to fall down and worship whoever had made the choice.’
By dwelling on all the possible and impossible issues of such an attachment, he had at length convinced himself of its existence, and even more, persuaded himself to fancy it was something to be regretted and grieved over for worldly considerations, but not in any way regarded as personally unpleasant.
As he came in sight of home and saw a light in the small tower where Kate’s bedroom lay, he determined he would go up to his sister and tell her so much of his mind as he believed was finally settled, and in such a way as would certainly lead her to repeat it to Nina.
‘Kate shall tell her that if I have left her suddenly and gone back to Trinity to keep my term, I have not fled the field in a moment of faint-heartedness. I do not deny her beauty. I do not disparage one of her attractions, and she has scores of them. I will not even say that when I have sat beside her, heard her low soft voice, and watched the tremor of that lovely mouth vibrating with wit, or tremulous with feeling, I have been all indifference; but this I will say, she shall not number me amongst the victims of her fascinations; and when she counts the trinkets on her wrist that record the hearts she has broken—a pastime I once witnessed—not one of them shall record the initial of Dick Kearney.’
With these brave words he mounted the narrow stair and knocked at his sister’s door. No answer coming, he knocked again, and after waiting a few seconds, he slowly opened the door and saw that Kate, still dressed, had thrown herself on her bed, and was sound asleep. The table was covered with account-books and papers; tax-receipts, law-notices, and tenants’ letters lay littered about, showing what had been the task she was last engaged on; and her heavy breathing told the exhaustion which it had left behind it.
‘I wish I could help her with her work,’ muttered he to himself, as a pang of self-reproach shot through him. This certainly should have been his own task rather than hers; the question was, however, Could he have done it? And this doubt increased as he looked over the long column of tenants’ names, whose holdings varied in every imaginable quantity of acres, roods, and perches. Besides these there were innumerable small details of allowances for this and compensation for that. This one had given so many days’ horse-and-car hire at the bog; that other had got advances ‘in seed-potatoes’; such a one had a claim for reduced rent, because the mill-race had overflowed and deluged his wheat crop; such another had fed two pigs of ‘the lord’s’ and fattened them, while himself and his own were nigh starving.
Through an entire column there was not one case without its complication, either in the shape of argument for increased liability or claim for compensation. It was makeshift everywhere, and Dick could not but ask himself whether any tenant on the estate really knew how far he was hopelessly in debt or a solvent man? It only needed Peter Gill’s peculiar mode of collecting the moneys due, and recording the payment by the notched stick, to make the complication perfect; and there, indeed, upon the table, amid accounts and bills and sale warrants, lay the memorable bits of wood themselves, as that worthy steward had deposited them before quitting his master’s service.
Peter’s character, too, written out in Kate’s hand, and only awaiting her father’s signature, was on the table—the first intimation Dick Kearney had that old Gill had quitted his post.