Womanlike, she was not over pleased that he should permit his private worries to take the edge off his pen when he was writing to her, and she determined to leave the letter unanswered.
It was November, and it had been raining for a week.
The sun had vanished, the hills had vanished, the land had all but vanished--nothing remained but the wind and the rain, the rain and the wind.
Effie's short lessons only consumed a couple of hours of each rain-soaked, wind-blown day. No one ever came to Drumgool except, maybe, a farmer now and then to see Mr. French; and the long-drawn "hoo-hoo" of the wind through the Devil's Keyhole, the rattling of windows fighting with the wind, and the tune of wastepipes emptying into over-full waterbutts were beginning to prey upon Miss Grimshaw's nerves.
Even Mr. Giveen would have been a distraction these times; but Mr. Giveen was now at open enmity with his kinsman, and spoiling with all the bitterness of his petty nature to do him an injury.
And Giveen was not French's only enemy just now. The United Irish League was against him. He had let farms on the eleven months' system, and he had let farms for grazing, two high offences in the eyes of the league.
"The time has come to put an end to the big grazing ranches and to plant the people on the soil," says the league, as though the people were seed potatoes. "You mustn't take a farm on an eleven-month agreement," goes on this Areopagus of plunderers and short-sighted patriots. "For," continues the league, "if you do, we'll drive the cattle off your land with hazel sticks, and on you we will commit every dirty outrage that the black heart of a low-down Irishman can invint, Begob!" And they do.
The law of the league is the law of the west of Ireland. King Edward does not reign there in the least.
"Come down here," cried Mr. French one morning, standing in the hall and calling up the stairs, where he had caught the flutter of Miss Grimshaw's skirt. "Come down here till I show you something you've never seen before. Come in here."
He led the way into a small room, where he received farmers and tenants, and there, sitting on a chair, was an old man with a face furrowed like a ploughed field. His battered old hat was on the floor, and he held in his hand two cows' tails, and there he sat, purblind, and twisting the tails in his hands, a living picture of age and poverty and affliction.