“And Nancy?”
“It’s hard on the poor gurl, for there are any quantity uv the byes who wants to marry her, but she, with her grandmudther on her hands, knows all about it, and she has sense enough to wait for something to toorn up. It will come, we hope, some day; but it’s weary waitin'.”
And so the two, who in any other country would be wedded and have a cottage of their own, with plenty to eat, and drink, and wear, two who owe the world by this time at least three chubby urchins, the girls like their mother and the boys like their father, are kept apart by this more than inhuman system of landlordism, which is the bottom, top and sides of Irish misery. Others who never knew what it was to live better, would marry and would add to the eternal roll of paupers that make up the population of Ireland; but a residence in God’s country unfitted this man for that. He discovered that man’s natural inheritance was not rags, and filth and starvation, and he determined not to marry till he could get, somehow, to the country where that crowning achievement of the devil’s most astute prime minister, a landlord, is unknown.
OLD AND NOT CHEERFUL.
But the poor fellow will have to wait a long time. He is like a bear chained to a post—he can neither fight nor run. My Lord has a mortgage on him, and My Lord’s agent will never let up on him so long as there is a penny to be squeezed out of him. What to My Lord is Nancy and her woes or her hopes? He would be willing she should marry and multiply and replenish the earth, for it would give him more muscle to enslave in time, or rather, the young lord who is riding by on his gaily caparisoned pony, with two flunkies after him, would, when he came into the estate, have the children of the boatman and Nancy to fleece, as the present lord fleeces Nancy and the boatman. But as for his having any care for the welfare of Nancy and the boatman, that is preposterous. The cost of the trappings of the young lord’s pony would make them comfortable, but he would be a bold man who would suggest such a thing to him.