“Don’t worry yourself now, Father,” he said, consolingly, “I’ll undertake to say it will be all right about the site for the chapel, and what’s more, I’ll undertake to say there’ll be nothing done about it, or the tenants, or anything else, till you’re well.  The people will do nothing without you!”

He looked at his huge, old-fashioned gold watch.

“Oh, b’ Jove, I must be off!  Tell me, did you hear they have Larry Coppinger chosen to be the candidate, when Prendergast retires, as he says he will, before the next election?  There won’t be much talk of tea-parties for Larry at Mount Music then!  Any tea-party there that he’d go to once he was a Nationalist M.P., I think he’d be apt to get ‘his tay in a mug!’”

The Doctor got up and moved towards the door.

“I’ll support him, so!” Father Sweeny called after him.

CHAPTER XXII

There are families, as there are nations, that are like those ships that, launched under a lucky star, sail their appointed courses ever serenely and eventlessly, and though they may indeed look on tempests, yet are never shaken by them.  But of such was not, it must regretfully be said, the family of Talbot-Lowry.  It can only be supposed that the gods had preordained its destruction, for on no other assumption can the dementia of its chief representative be comprehended.  It would be out of place, even, if not impertinent, absurd, to discuss here the Act of Parliament that in the year nineteen hundred and three, made provision to change the ownership of Irish land, and to transfer its possession from the landlords to the tenants.  It is sufficient to say that those of both classes who were endowed with the valuable quality of knowing on which side of a piece of bread the butter had been applied, lost as little time as was possible in availing themselves of the facilities that the Act offered them.  The ceremony of Hari Kiri, even if entered upon with the belief that it will lead to another and a better world, is not an agreeable one, but it was obvious to most Irish landlords that, with bad or good grace, sooner or later, that grim rite had to be faced, and that the hindmost in the transaction need expect only the fate proverbially promised to such.  It is, possibly, superfluous to say that of the company of the hindmost was our poor friend, well-meaning and stupid Dick Talbot-Lowry, and also that his fate, as such, was sedulously pointed out to him by those friends of his own class, who, like the fabled fox, having lost their brushes, were eager in explanation of the superiority of their position.

“I don’t own a stick outside my own demesne wall!” says Colonel St. George.  “Of all the hundreds of acres of mountain that my father had, there isn’t as much as one patch of bog left that I could cut a sod of turf in!”

This whisk of a vanished brush was a gesture well calculated to enrage Major Dick.  It was senseless of St. George to boast of his limitations, and yet no one better than Dick knew what must be the feeling of emancipation that prompted the boast.