“‘A word to whishper,’” repeated O’Daly, glancing at Jerry with severity from under his beetling black brows, and speaking so loudly that even Mrs. Sullivan in the kitchen might have heard—“times is that hard, and work so scarce, that bechune now and midsummer I’d have ye look about for a new place.”
Jerry stared across the table at his co-trustee in blank amazement. It was no surprise to him to be addressed in tones of harsh dislike by O’Daly, or to see his rightful claims to attention contemptuously ignored. But this sweeping suggestion took his breath away.
“What place do ye mane?” he asked confusedly. “Where else in Muirisc c’u’d I live so aisily?”
“’T is not needful ye should live in Muirisc at all,” said O’Daly, with cold-blooded calmness. “Sure, ’t is manny years since ye were of anny service here. A lad at two shillings the week would more than replace ye. In these bad times, and worse cornin’, ’t is impossible ye should stay on here as ye’ve been doin’ these twelve years. I thought I’d tell ye in sayson, Higgins—not to take ye unawares.”
“Glory-be-to-the-world?” gasped Jerry, sitting upright in his chair, and staring open-eyed.
“’T is a dale of other alterations I have in me mind,” O’Daly went on, hurriedly. “Sure, things have stuck in the mire far too long, waiting for the comin’ to life of a dead man. ’T is to stir ’em up I will now, an’ no delay. Me step-daughter, there, takes the vail in a few days, an’ ’t is me intintion thin to rebuild large parts of the convint, an’ mek new rules for it whereby gerrels of me own family can be free to enter it as well as the O’Mahonys. For, sure, ’t is now well known an’ universally consaded that the O’Daly’s were the most intellectual an’ intelligent family in all the two Munsters, be rayson of which all the ignorant an’ uncultivated ruffians like the MacCarthys an’ The O’Mahony’s used to be beseechin’ ’em to make verses and write books an’ divert ’em wid playin’ on the harp—an ’t is high time the O’Daly’s came into their own ag’in, the same that they’d never lost but for their wake good-nature in consintin’ to be bards on account of their supayrior education. Why, man,” the swart-visaged little lawyer went on, his black eyes snapping with excitement—“what d’ ye say to me great ancestor, Cuchonnacht O’Daly, called na Sgoile, or ‘of the school,’ who died at Clonard, rest his soul, Anno Domini 1139, the most celebrated pote of all Oireland? An’ do ye mind thim eight an’ twenty other O’Dalys in rigular descint who achaved distinction—”
“Egor! If they were all such thieves of the earth as you are, the world’s d———d well rid of ’em!” burst in Jerry Higgins.
He had sprung to his feet, and stood now hotfaced and with clenched fists, glaring down upon O’Daly.
The latter pushed back his chair and instinctively raised an elbow to guard his head.
“Have a care, Higgins!” he shouted out—“you’re in the presence of witnesses—I’m a p’aceable man—in me own domicile, too!”