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Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, the few distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and were separated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into two opposing camps Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the others Papists.
Possessing a keen eye for men he began to recognise now why Berknowles had not chosen the easy-going Hennessey to look after Phyl and her affairs, and he guessed, just by the little bit he had seen of Kilgobbin and the servants, the slipshoddedness and waste going on behind the scenes in the absence of a master and mistress.
"I suppose you handed them over to Mr. Berknowles?" "No, sor; the master always tould me to keep any bit of money I might draa from anything I planted extra for me perkisites, that was the understandin' I had with him." "And over the farmyard, I suppose anything you could make by selling any extra animals you planted was your perquisite?" "Yes, sor."
He was a bit of a patriarch in his way, too well, he's gone and more's the pity. He's like an old house pulled down. No one can ever build it again as it was. The South's a big industrial region now. Not only cotton ore and coal and machinery. We supply the North and East with pig-iron, machinery, God knows what. Berknowles was very keen on Southern industries, regularly bitten.
That's why Berknowles wanted me to look after the girl's interests. As for anything else, I guess Maria Pinckney will be the real guardian." "Well, I don't know," said Hennessey.
Hennessey, the family lawyer, who had been a crony of her father's and who had known her from infancy, came down to Kilgobbin to arrange matters. It seemed that Mr. Berknowles before dying had made a will and that the will was being brought over from the States by Mr. Pinckney, his wife's cousin in whose house he had died.
The turf fire burning on the great hearth threw out a rich steady glow that touched the black oak panelling of the room, the book backs, and the long-nosed face of Sir Nicholas Berknowles "attributed to Lely" and looking down at his last descendant from a dusty canvas on the opposite wall. The girl made a prettier picture.
"Upon my word, I've never thought of that," replied the other. "I want to see things settled up here and to go over the accounts with you. Berknowles said the house had better be let I should think it would be easy to find a good tenant then I want to go to London on business and get back as quick as possible. She need not come back with me, it would scarcely give her time to get things ready.
It came by the early post, so that she got it in her bedroom before coming down. Phyl had few correspondents and she looked at the envelope curiously before opening it. "Miss Berknowles, at Vernons. Charleston." ran the address written in a large, boyish, yet individual hand. She knew at once and by instinct whom it was from.
It was twenty years old and it had lost half of its bristles in the service of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacity purely Irish. "Sure, that old brush is a disgrace to the table," was the comment Phyl's father had made on it once, just as though he were casually referring to some form of the Inevitable such as the state of the weather.
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