Lord Kilgobbin | Page 5

for years.
'It will be made up to you,' was Gill's phrase about everything. 'What
matters if you have an acre more or an acre less?' Neither had any one a
lease, nor, indeed, a writing of any kind. Gill settled that on the 25th
March and 25th September a certain sum was to be forthcoming, and
that was all. When 'the lord' wanted them, they were always to give him
a hand, which often meant with their carts and horses, especially in
harvest-time. Not that they were a hard-worked or hard-working

population: they took life very easy, seeing that by no possible exertion
could they materially better themselves; and even when they hunted a
neighbour's cow out of their wheat, they would execute the eviction
with a lazy indolence and sluggishness that took away from the act all
semblance of ungenerousness.
They were very poor, their hovels were wretched, their clothes ragged,
and their food scanty; but, with all that, they were not discontented, and
very far from unhappy. There was no prosperity at hand to contrast
with their poverty. The world was, on the whole, pretty much as they
always remembered it. They would have liked to be 'better off' if they
knew how, but they did not know if there were a 'better off,' much less
how to come at it; and if there were, Peter Gill certainly did not tell
them of it.
If a stray visitor to fair or market brought back the news that there was
an agitation abroad for a new settlement of the land, that popular
orators were proclaiming the poor man's rights and denouncing the
cruelties of the landlord, if they heard that men were talking of
repealing the laws which secured property to the owner, and only
admitted him to a sort of partnership with the tiller of the soil, old Gill
speedily assured them that these were changes only to be adopted in
Ulster, where the tenants were rack-rented and treated like slaves.
'Which of you here,' would he say, 'can come forward and say he was
ever evicted?' Now as the term was one of which none had the very
vaguest conception--it might, for aught they knew, have been an
operation in surgery--the appeal was an overwhelming success. 'Sorra
doubt of it, but ould Peter's right, and there's worse places to live in,
and worse landlords to live under, than the lord.' Not but it taxed Gill's
skill and cleverness to maintain this quarantine against the outer world;
and he often felt like Prince Metternich in a like strait--that it would
only be a question of time, and, in the long run, the newspaper fellows
must win.
From what has been said, therefore, it may be imagined that Kilgobbin
was not a model estate, nor Peter Gill exactly the sort of witness from
which a select committee would have extracted any valuable

suggestions for the construction of a land-code.
Anything short of Kate Kearney's fine temper and genial disposition
would have broken down by daily dealing with this cross-grained,
wrong-headed, and obstinate old fellow, whose ideas of management
all centred in craft and subtlety--outwitting this man, forestalling
that--doing everything by halves, so that no boon came unassociated
with some contingency or other by which he secured to himself
unlimited power and uncontrolled tyranny.
As Gill was in perfect possession of her father's confidence, to oppose
him in anything was a task of no mean difficulty; and the mere thought
that the old fellow should feel offended and throw up his charge--a
threat he had more than once half hinted--was a terror Kilgobbin could
not have faced. Nor was this her only care. There was Dick continually
dunning her for remittances, and importuning her for means to supply
his extravagances. 'I suspected how it would be,' wrote he once, 'with a
lady paymaster. And when my father told me I was to look to you for
my allowance, I accepted the information as a heavy percentage taken
off my beggarly income. What could you--what could any young
girl--know of the requirements of a man going out into the best society
of a capital? To derive any benefit from associating with these people, I
must at least seem to live like them. I am received as the son of a man
of condition and property, and you want to bound my habits by those of
my chum, Joe Atlee, whose father is starving somewhere on the pay of
a Presbyterian minister. Even Joe himself laughs at the notion of
gauging my expenses by his.
'If this is to go on--I mean if you intend to persist in this plan--be frank
enough to say so at once, and I will either take pupils, or seek a
clerkship, or go off to Australia; and