“It was my father before me—your grandfather—the best hunter in the county. He could take his bottle of port and never turn a hair; and he rode to hounds! God bless you, Nora! I wish you could have seen your grandfather riding to hounds. It was a sight to remember. Well, he died—God bless him!—and there were difficulties. Before he died those difficulties began, and he mortgaged some of the outer fields and Knock Robin Farm—the best farm on the whole estate; but I didn't think anything of that. I thought I could redeem it; but somehow, child, somehow rents have been going down; the poor folk can't pay, and I'm the last to press them; and things have got worse and worse. I had a tight time of it five years ago; I was all but done for. It was partly the fact of the famine; we none of us ever got over that—none of us in this part of Ireland, and many of the people went away. Half the cabins were deserted. There's half a mile of 'em down yonder; every single one had a dead man or woman in it at the time of the famine, and now they're empty. Well of course, you know all about that?”
“Oh, yes, father; Hannah has told me of the famine many, many times.”
“To be sure—to be sure; but it is a dark subject, and not fit for a pretty young thing like you. But there, let me go on. It was five years ago I mortgaged some of the place, a good bit, to my old friend Dan Murphy. He lent me ten thousand pounds—not a penny more, I assure you. It just tided me over, and I thought, of course, I'd pay him back, interest and all, by easy stages. It seemed so easy to mortgage the place to Murphy, and there was nothing else to be done.”
The Squire had been walking slowly; now he stopped, dropped Nora's hand from his arm, and faced her.
“It seemed so easy to mortgage the land to Dan Murphy,” he said, dropping his voice, “so very easy, and that money was so handy, and I thought—”
“Yes, father?” said Nora in a voice of fear. “You said these words before. Go on—it was so easy. Well?”
“Well, a month ago, child, I got a letter from Murphy's lawyer in Dublin, to say that the money must be paid up, or they would foreclose.”
“Foreclose, father. What is that?”
“Take possession, child—take possession.”
“A month ago you got that letter? They would take possession—possession of the land you have mortgaged. Does that mean that it would belong to Squire Murphy, father?”