“I tell you I will not be dictated to!” cried she, wildly, for her face was now crimson with excitement, and her brain burning. “By what right do you come here into my room, and order me to do this or that? Do you know to whom you speak? I am a Luttrell of Arran. Ask him—that man below—if I am not speaking the truth. Is it not honour enough for your poor house that a Luttrell should stop here, but that you must command me, as if I were your servant? There—there, don’t cry; I did not mean to be unkind! Oh! if you but knew how my poor head is aching, and what a heavy, heavy load I am carrying here!” And she pressed her hand to her heart. And, with this, she fell upon her bed, and sobbed long and bitterly. At last she arose, and, assuring the hostess that after she had written a few lines she would do all that she asked her, she persuaded the kind-hearted woman to leave her, and sat down to the table to write. What she wrote, how she wrote, she knew not, but the words followed fast, and page after page lay before her as the clock struck six. “What!” cried she, opening her door, “is it too late for the post? I hear it striking six!”
“I’ll take it over myself to the office,” said O’Rorke, “and by paying a trifle more they’ll take it in.”
“Oh do! Lose no time, and I’ll bless you for it!” said she, as she gave him the letter.
“Come up here and sit with me,” said Kate to the woman of the house; and the honest creature gladly complied. “What a nice little place you have here,” said Kate, speaking with intense rapidity. “It is all so clean and so neat, and you seem so happy in it. Ain’t you very happy?”
“Indeed, Miss, I have no reason to be anything else.” “Yes; I knew it—I knew it!” broke in Kate, rapidly. “It is the striving to be something above their reach makes people unhappy. You never asked nor wished for better than this?”
“Never, Miss. Indeed, it’s better than ever I thought to be. I was the daughter of a poor labourin’ man up at Belmullet, when my husband took me.”
“What a dreary place Belmullet is! I saw it once,” said Kate, half speaking to herself.
“Ah! you don’t know how poor it is, Miss! The like of you could never know what lives the people lead in them poor places, with only the fishin’ to look to, God help them! And when it’s too rough to go to sea, as it often is for weeks long, there they are with nothing but one meal a day of wet potatoes, and nothing but water to drink.”
“And you think I know nothing about all that!” cried Kate, wildly—“nothing of the rain pouring down through the wet thatch—nothing of the turf too wet to burn, and only smouldering and smoking, till it is better to creep under the boat that lies keel uppermost on the beach, than stay in the wretched hovel—nothing of the poor mother, with fever in one corner, and the child with small-pox in the other—nothing of the two or three strong men huddled together under the lee of the house, debating whether it wouldn’t be better to go out to sea at any risk, and meet the worst that could happen, than sit down there to die of starvation?”
“In the name of the blessed Virgin, Miss, who towld you all about that?”