They had almost eaten the very heart out of him!"
"His substance I know they have," I said; "but not his good warm
heart."
"You would say so if you saw the poor wretches on his property," said
Harold. "The hovels in the Alfy Valley were palaces compared with
the cabins. Such misery I never saw. They say it is better since
the famine. What must it have been then? And he thinking only how
much his agent could squeeze from them!"
I could only say he had been bred up in neglect of them, and to think
them impracticable, priest-ridden traitors and murderers. Yes, Lady
Diana had said some of this to Harold already, It was true that they
had shot Mr. Tracy, but Harold had learnt that after a wild,
reckless, spendthrift youth, he had become a Protestant and a violent
Orangeman in the hottest days of party strife, so that he had
incurred a special hatred, which, as far as Harold could see, was not
extended to the son, little as he did for his tenants but show them
his careless, gracious countenance from time to time.
Yet peril for the sake of duty would, as all saw now, have been far
better for Dermot than the alienation from all such calls in which
his mother had brought him up. When her religious influence failed
with him, there was no other restraint. Since he had left the army,
he had been drawn, by those evil geniuses of his, deep into
speculations in training horses for the turf, and his affairs had
come into a frightful state of entanglement, his venture at Doncaster
had been unsuccessful, and plunged him deeper into his difficulties,
and then (as I came to know) Harold's absolute startled amazement how
any living man could screw and starve men, women, and children for
the sake of horseflesh, and his utter contempt for such diversions as
he had been shown at the races, compared with the pleasure of making
human beings happy and improving one's land, had opened Dermot's eyes
with very few words.
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