“Oh! I paid as much as I thought they would think I ought to pay!” he responded, with that sly twinkle of the peasant’s eye one sees so often in rural France.
“Oh! I understand,” I said, laughing. “But if you come to terms now with Mr. Tener here, will you get that money back again?”
“Divil a penny of it!” he replied, with much emphasis.
Finally they got up together to take their leave, after a long whispered conversation together.
“And if we made it half the costs?”
“No!” said Mr. Tener good-naturedly but firmly; “not a penny off the costs.”
“Well, we’ll see the men, sir, just quietly, and we’ll let you know what can be done”; and with that they wished us, most civilly, good-morning, and went their way.
We walked in the park for some time, and a wild, beautiful park it is, not the less beautiful for being given up, as it is, very much to the Dryads to deal with it as they list. It is as unlike a trim English park as possible; but it contains many very fine trees, and grand open sweeps of landscape. In a tangled copse are the ruins of an ancient Franciscan abbey, in one corner of which lie buried together, under a monumental mound of brickwork, the late Marquis of Clanricarde and his wife. The walls of the Castle, burned in 1826, are still standing, and so perfect that the building might easily enough have been restored. A keen-eyed, wiry old household servant, still here, told us the house was burned in the afternoon of January 6, 1826. There were three women-servants in the house—“Anna and Mary Meehan, and Mrs. Underwood, the housekeeper”; and they were getting the Castle ready for his Lordship’s arrival, so little of an “absentee” was the late Lord Clanricarde, then only one year married to the daughter of George Canning. The fires were laid on in the upper rooms, and Mrs. Underwood went off upon an errand. When she came back all was in flames.
The deer-park is full of deer, now become quite wild. We heard them crashing through the undergrowth on all sides. There must be capital fishing, too, in the lake, and in the river of which it is an expansion.
While they were getting the cars ready for a drive, came up another son of the soil. This man I found had only a small interest in the battle on the Clanricarde estates, holding his homestead of another landlord. But he admitted he had gone in a manner into the “combination,” in that he had paid a certain, not very large, sum, which he named, to the trustees, “just for peace and quiet.” He considered it gone, past recovery; and he named another man with a small holding, but doing a considerable business in other ways, who had “paid £10 or more just not to be bothered.” Upon this Mr. Tener told me of a shopkeeper at Loughrea in a large way of business, a man with seven or eight thousand pounds, who, finding his goods about to be seized after the agent had turned a sharp strategic corner on him, and unexpectedly got into his shop, was about to own up to his defeat, and make a fair settlement, when the secretary of the League appeared, and requested a private talk with him. In a quarter of an hour the tradesman reappeared looking rather sullen and crestfallen. He said he couldn’t pay, and must let the goods be taken. So taken they were, and duly put up under the process and sold. He bought them in himself, paying all the costs.