“Perhaps not, but it is useful, my dear,” said Mrs. Hartley. “For instance, had your grandfather squandered the fortune he made instead of leaving it to you, he might have been a more popular old gentleman, but he could scarcely have proved himself so admirable a person in his domestic relations as was the case.”
“I sometimes wish he had never left me a penny,” remarked Grace a little bitterly.
“What a shame for you to make such a remark, Miss Moffat, at a time when your fortune enables you to step forward to the rescue of your old friends,” exclaimed Lord Ardmorne, with an affectation of playful raillery which sat upon him about as gracefully as a cap and bells might have done.
“Yes, it is a shame,” Grace answered quietly; “for about the first time in my life I feel really thankful now that I am as rich as I am.”
“Many other opportunities for thankfulness from the same cause will present themselves in the years to come, believe me,” said their visitor.
“I only hope they may not have to leave Woodbrook,” exclaimed Miss Moffat, a little irrelevantly to the conversation as it seemed.
“Then you ought not to hope anything of the kind,” rebuked Mrs. Hartley. “You should hope that John may have enough resolution and sufficient sense to free himself and his family from the incubus of debt, that must have made existence a daily and hourly torture and humiliation to the whole of them. As I said before, if a law were passed compelling the owners of heavily mortgaged properties to sell them, there might be a chance of Ireland’s regeneration. As matters stand there is none.”
If with prophetic eye Mrs. Hartley had been able to look forward a very little way, how she would have longed for the Encumbered Estates Court, and welcomed the changes every one predicted must be wrought by it.
In those days capital and civilization were the favourite panaceas the English proposed for all Irish troubles. In these the same remedies are indirectly suggested, but the English are now quite content to leave their sister to find both for herself.
And no doubt the present course is the correct one. The curse of all former administrations has been that instead of leaving Ireland’s diseases to be cured by time and nature, each fresh political doctor has thought it necessary to try his own new course of treatment on the patient.