“Well, I'll think about it and let you know; there's some silver for you, and good-by, honest Solomon.”
Woodward then rode on, reflecting on the novel and extraordinary character of this hypocritical old villain, in whose withered and repulsive visage he could not discover a single trace of anything that intimated the existence of sympathy with his kind. As to that, it was a tabula rasa, blank of all feelings except those which characterize the hyena and the fox. After he had left him, the old fellow gave a bitter and derisive look after him.
“There you go,” said he, “and well I knew you, although you didn't think so. Weren't you pointed out to me the night o' the divil's bonfire, that your mother, they say, got up for you; and didn't I see you since spakin' to that skamin' blaggard, Caterine Collins, my niece, that takes many a penny out o' my hands; and didn't I know that you couldn't be talkin' to her about anything that was good. Troth, you're not your mother's son or you'll be comin' to me as well as her. Bad luck to her! she was near gettin' me into the stocks when I sowld her the dose of oak bark for the sarvants, to draw in their stomachs and shorten their feedin'. My faith, ould Lindsay 'ud have put me in them only for bringin' shame upon his wife.” *
* Some of our readers may imagine that in the enumeration of
the cures which old Sol professed to effect we have drawn
too largely upon their credulity, whereas there is scarcely
one of them that, is not practised, or attempted, in remote
and uneducated parts of Ireland, almost down to the present
day. We ourselves in early youth saw a man who professed,
and was believed to be able, to cure jealousy in either man
or woman by a potion; whilst charms for colics, toothaches,
taking motes out of the eye, and for producing love, were
common among the ignorant people within our own
recollection.
CHAPTER VIII. A Healing of the Breach.
—A Proposal for Marriage Accepted.
On that evening, when the family were assembled at supper, Mrs. Lindsay, who had had a previous consultation with her son Harry, thought proper to introduce the subject of the projected marriage between him and Alice Goodwin.
“Harry has paid a visit to these neighbors of ours,” said she, “these Goodwins, and I think, now that he has come home, it would be only prudent on our part to renew the intimacy that was between us. Not that I like, or ever will like, a bone in one of their bodies; but it's only right that we should foil them at their own weapons, and try to get back the property into the hands of one of the family at least, if we can, and so prevent it from going to strangers. I am determined to pay them a friendly visit tomorrow.”
“A friendly visit!” exclaimed her husband, with an expression of surprise and indignation on his countenance which he could not conceal; “how can you say a friendly visit, after having just told us that you neither like them, nor ever will like them? not that it was at all necessary for you to assure us of that. It is, however, the hypocrisy of the thing on your part that startle? and disgusts me.”