On the present occasion, a sharp canter of several miles had reduced Judy to a very quiet and decorous pace, so that Paddy and his mistress sat almost back to back--a combination that only long habit enabled Kate to witness without laughing.
‘Are you alone up at the castle, dear?’ asked Miss Betty, as she rode along at her side; ‘or have you the house full of what the papers call “distinguished company”?’
‘We are quite alone, godmother. My brother is with us, but we have no strangers.’
‘I am glad of it. I’ve come over to “have it out” with your father, and it’s pleasant to know we shall be to ourselves.’
Now, as this announcement of having ‘it out’ conveyed to Kate’s mind nothing short of an open declaration of war, a day of reckoning on which Miss O’Shea would come prepared with a full indictment, and a resolution to prosecute to conviction, the poor girl shuddered at a prospect so certain to end in calamity.
‘Papa is very far from well, godmother,’ said she, in a mild way.
‘So they tell me in the town,’ said the other snappishly. ‘His brother magistrates said that the day he came in, about that supposed attack--the memorable search for arms--’
‘Supposed attack! but, godmother, pray don’t imagine we had invented all that. I think you know me well enough and long enough to know--’
‘To know that you would not have had a young scamp of a Castle aide-de-camp on a visit during your father’s absence, not to say anything about amusing your English visitor by shooting down your own tenantry.’
‘Will you listen to me for five minutes?’
‘Two, then--one even--one minute, godmother, will convince you how you wrong me.’
‘I won’t give you that. I didn’t come over about you nor your affairs. When the father makes a fool of himself, why wouldn’t the daughter? The whole country is laughing at him. His lordship indeed! a ruined estate and a tenantry in rags; and the only remedy, as Peter Gill tells me, raising the rents--raising the rents where every one is a pauper.’
‘What would you have him do, Miss O’Shea?’ said Kate, almost angrily.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d have him do. I’d have him rise of a morning before nine o’clock, and be out with his labourers at daybreak. I’d have him reform a whole lazy household of blackguards, good for nothing but waste and wickedness. I’d have him apprentice your brother to a decent trade or a light business. I’d have him declare he’d kick the first man that called him “My lord”; and for yourself, well, it’s no matter--’