‘I’m certain it is not, sir,’ said Dick. ‘Gorman O’Shea has no liking for them, nor is he the man to sympathise with what he owns he cannot understand. It is a mere accidental row.’
‘At all events, we must see to set him at liberty. Order the gig, Dick, and while they are putting on the harness, I’ll finish this decanter of port. If it wasn’t that we’re getting retired shopkeepers on the bench, we’d not see an O’Shea sent to prison like a gossoon that stole a bunch of turnips.’
‘What has he been doing, I wonder?’ said Nina, as she drew her arm within Kate’s and left the room.
‘Some loud talk in the bar-parlour, perhaps,’ was Kate’s reply, and the toss of her head as she said it implied more even than the words.
CHAPTER LIV
HOW IT BEFELL
While Lord Kilgobbin and his son are plodding along towards Moate with a horse not long released from the harrow, and over a road which the late rains had sorely damaged, the moment is not inopportune to explain the nature of the incident, small enough in its way, that called on them for this journey at nightfall. It befell that when Miss Betty, indignant at her nephew’s defection, and outraged that he should descend to call at Kilgobbin, determined to cast him off for ever, she also resolved upon a project over which she had long meditated, and to which the conversation at her late dinner greatly predisposed her.
The growing unfertility of the land, the sturdy rejection of the authority of the Church, manifested in so many ways by the people, had led Miss O’Shea to speculate more on the insecurity of landed property in Ireland than all the long list of outrages scheduled at assizes, or all the burning haggards that ever flared in a wintry sky. Her notion was to retire into some religious sisterhood, and away from life and its cares, to pass her remaining years in holy meditation and piety. She would have liked to have sold her estate and endowed some house or convent with the proceeds, but there were certain legal difficulties that stood in the way, and her law-agent, McKeown, must be seen and conferred with about these.
Her moods of passion were usually so very violent that she would stop at nothing; and in the torrent of her anger she would decide on a course of action which would colour a whole lifetime. On the present occasion her first step was to write and acquaint McKeown that she would be at Moodie’s Hotel, Dominick Street, the same evening, and begged he might call there at eight or nine o’clock, as her business with him was pressing. Her next care was to let the house and lands of O’Shea’s Barn to Peter Gill, for the term of one year, at a rent scarcely more than nominal, the said Gill binding himself to maintain the gardens, the shrubberies, and all the ornamental plantings in their accustomed order and condition. In fact, the extreme moderation of the rent was to be recompensed by the large space allotted to unprofitable land, and the great care he was pledged to exercise in its preservation; and while nominally the tenant, so manifold were the obligations imposed on him, he was in reality very little other than the caretaker of O’Shea’s Barn and its dependencies. No fences were to be altered, or boundaries changed. All the copses of young timber were to be carefully protected by palings as heretofore, and even the ornamental cattle—the shorthorns, and the Alderneys, and a few favourite ‘Kerries,’—were to be kept on the allotted paddocks; and to old Kattoo herself was allotted a loose box, with a small field attached to it, where she might saunter at will, and ruminate over the less happy quadrupeds that had to work for their subsistence.