Lord Kilgobbin | Page 4

as other than 'My lord,' he would not have
deigned him a notice.
Strangely enough, this divided allegiance did not merely prevail with
the outer world, it actually penetrated within his walls. By his son,
Richard Kearney, he was always called 'My lord'; while Kate as
persistently addressed and spoke of him as papa. Nor was this
difference without signification as to their separate natures and
tempers.

Had Mathew Kearney contrived to divide the two parts of his nature,
and bequeathed all his pride, his vanity, and his pretensions to his son,
while he gave his light-heartedness, his buoyancy, and kindliness to his
daughter, the partition could not have been more perfect. Richard
Kearney was full of an insolent pride of birth. Contrasting the position
of his father with that held by his grandfather, he resented the downfall
as the act of a dominant faction, eager to outrage the old race and the
old religion of Ireland. Kate took a very different view of their
condition. She clung, indeed, to the notion of their good blood; but as a
thing that might assuage many of the pangs of adverse fortune, not
increase or embitter them; and 'if we are ever to emerge,' thought she,
'from this poor state, we shall meet our class without any of the shame
of a mushroom origin. It will be a restoration, and not a new elevation.'
She was a fine, handsome, fearless girl, whom many said ought to have
been a boy; but this was rather intended as a covert slight on the
narrower nature and peevish temperament of her brother--another way,
indeed, of saying that they should have exchanged conditions.
The listless indolence of her father's life, and the almost complete
absence from home of her brother, who was pursuing his studies at the
Dublin University, had given over to her charge not only the household,
but no small share of the management of the estate--all, in fact, that an
old land-steward, a certain Peter Gill, would permit her to exercise; for
Peter was a very absolute and despotic Grand-Vizier, and if it had not
been that he could neither read nor write, it would have been utterly
impossible to have wrested from him a particle of power over the
property. This happy defect in his education--happy so far as Kate's
rule was concerned--gave her the one claim she could prefer to any
superiority over him, and his obstinacy could never be effectually
overcome, except by confronting him with a written document or a
column of figures. Before these, indeed, he would stand crestfallen and
abashed. Some strange terror seemed to possess him as to the peril of
opposing himself to such inscrutable testimony--a fear, be it said, he
never felt in contesting an oral witness.
Peter had one resource, however, and I am not sure that a similar
stronghold has not secured the power of greater men and in higher

functions. Peter's sway was of so varied and complicated a kind; the
duties he discharged were so various, manifold, and conflicting; the
measures he took with the people, whose destinies were committed to
him, were so thoroughly devised, by reference to the peculiar condition
of each man--what he could do, or bear, or submit to--and not by any
sense of justice; that a sort of government grew up over the property
full of hitches, contingencies, and compensations, of which none but
the inventor of the machinery could possibly pretend to the direction.
The estate being, to use his own words, 'so like the old coach-harness,
so full of knots, splices, and entanglements, there was not another man
in Ireland could make it work, and if another were to try it, it would all
come to pieces in his hands.'
Kate was shrewd enough to see this; and in the same way that she had
admiringly watched Peter as he knotted a trace here and supplemented
a strap there, strengthening a weak point, and providing for casualties
even the least likely, she saw him dealing with the tenantry on the
property; and in the same spirit that he made allowance for sickness
here and misfortune there, he would be as prompt to screw up a lagging
tenant to the last penny, and secure the landlord in the share of any
season of prosperity.
Had the Government Commissioner, sent to report on the state of
land-tenure in Ireland, confined himself to a visit to the estate of Lord
Kilgobbin--for so we like to call him--it is just possible that the Cabinet
would have found the task of legislation even more difficult than they
have already admitted it to be.
First of all, not a tenant on the estate had any certain knowledge of how
much land he held. There had been no survey of the property