“Sure! a man’s never sure of any thing in this world, but of being abused. But one comfort, my own conscience, for which I’ve a trifling respect, can’t reproach me; since my jobs, good or bad, have cost my poor country nothing.”
On this point Sir Ulick was particularly sore, for he had the character of being one of the greatest jobbers in Ireland. With a face of much political prudery, which he well knew how to assume, he began to exculpate himself. He confessed that much public money had passed through his hands; but he protested that none of it had stayed with him. No man, who had done so much for different administrations, had been so ill paid.
“Why the deuce do you work for them, then? You won’t tell me it’s for love—Have you got any character by it?—if you haven’t profit, what have you? I would not let them make me a dupe, or may be something worse, if I was you,” said Cornelius, looking him full in the face.
“Savage!” said Sir Ulick again to himself. The tomahawk was too much for him—Sir Ulick felt that it was fearful odds to stand fencing according to rule with one who would not scruple to gouge or scalp, if provoked. Sir Ulick now stood silent, smiling forced smiles, and looking on while Cornelius played quite at his ease with little Tommy, blew shrill blasts through the whistle, and boasted that he had made a good job of that whistle any way.
Harry Ormond, to Sir Ulick’s great relief, now appeared. Sir Ulick advanced to meet him with an air of cordial friendship, which brought the honest flush of pleasure and gratitude into the young man’s face, who darted a quick look at Cornelius, as much as to say, “You see you were wrong—he is glad to see me—he is come to see me.”
Cornelius said nothing, but stroked the child’s head, and seemed taken up entirely with him; Sir Ulick spoke of Lady O’Shane, and of his hopes that prepossessions were wearing off. “If Miss Black were out of the way, things would all go right; but she is one of the mighty good—too good ladies, who are always meddling with other people’s business, and making mischief.”
Harry, who hated her, that is, as much as he could hate any body, railed at her vehemently, saying more against her than he thought, and concluded by joining in Sir Ulick’s wish for her departure from Castle Hermitage, but not with any view to his own return thither: on that point he was quite resolute and steady. He would never, he said, be the cause of mischief. Lady O’Shane did not like him—why, he did not know, and had no right to inquire—and was too proud to inquire, if he had a right. It was enough that her ladyship had proved to him her dislike, and refused him protection at his utmost need: he should never again sue for her hospitality. He declared that Sir Ulick should no more be disquieted by his being an inmate at Castle Hermitage.
Sir Ulick became more warm and eloquent in dissuading him from this resolution, the more he perceived that Ormond was positively fixed in his determination.
The cool looker-on all the time remarked this, and Cornelius was convinced that he had from the first been right in his own opinion, that Sir Ulick was “shirking the boy.”
“And where’s Marcus, sir? would not he come with you to see us?” said Ormond.