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It is entered, besides, by a different door from that of the kitchen, and while you stay there and you can pass into it without going through the kitchen I will try to let her know where you are. She has at present a maid who was sent by Sir Robert Whitecraft, and she is nothing else than a spy; but it'll go hard, or I'll baffle her."
This Whitecraft has succeeded in getting some young profligate Catholics to become Protestants, who have, consequently, ousted their fathers out of their estates and property; younger sons, who, by this act of treachery, will get the estates into their own possession. The thing is monstrous and unnatural.
Let us kneel down and offer up ten pathers, ten aves, and a creed, that the Lord may protect them both from their enemies, and grant them a happy marriage, in spite of laws, parliaments, magistrates, spies, persecutors and priest-hunters, and, as our hands are in, let us offer up a few that God may confound that villain, Whitecraft, and bring him snugly to the gallows."
"Well, Fergus, let his name and his crimes perish with him; but, as for you, what do you intend to do?" "Troth, sir," replied Fergus, "it's more than I rightly know. I had my hopes, like others; but, somehow, luck has left all sorts of lovers of late from Sir Robert Whitecraft to your humble servant."
"Well, sir," replied Cummiskey, "it's one comfort that he won't hang by himself." "No," said the other, "he and the Rapparee will stretch the same rope." "The Rapparee! faith, sir, hell have worse company." "What do you mean, sirra?" "Why, Sir Robert Whitecraft, sir; he always had gallows written in his face; but, upon my soul, he'll soon have it about his neck, please God."
In these affectionate calculations of her domestic persecution he was a good deal mistaken, however, Sir Robert Whitecraft had now gained a complete ascendancy over the disposition and passions of her father. The latter, like many another country squire especially of that day when his word and will were law to his tenants and dependants, was a very great man indeed, when dealing with them.
He was, in the true sense of the word, a priest-hunter; but yet, with all his bigotry, he was a brave man, and could appreciate courage wherever he found it. The reader already knows that his range of persecution was by no means either so wide or so comprehensive as that of the coward Whitecraft.
"From Sir Robert Whitecraft," replied Miss Folliard, "and the wages of your dishonesty and his corruption are the sources of your inspiration. Take the woman away, papa." "That will do, Molly that will do," exclaimed the squire, "there is something' additional for you. What you have told us is very odd very odd, indeed. Go and get your dinner in the kitchen."
She saw clearly, and had long known that in the tactics and stratagems of life, her blunt but honest father was no match at all for the deep hypocrisy and deceitful plausibility of Sir Robert Whitecraft, the consequence was, that she allowed her father to take his own way, without either remonstrance or contradiction.
In point of fact, this man had taken the farm for Reilly's father, in his own name, a step which many of the liberal and generous Protestants of that period were in the habit of taking, to protect the property for the Roman Catholics, from such rapacious scoundrels as Whitecraft, and others like him, who had accumulated the greater portion of their wealth and estates by the blackest and most iniquitous political profligacy and oppression.
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