Grace blushed, and smiled, and sighed, and was consoled. But then she
recollected her new relation, Mr. Reynolds, her grandfather, whom she
had never seen, who had for years disowned her--treated her mother
with injustice. She could scarcely think of him with complacency: yet,
when his age, his sufferings, his desolate state, were represented,
she pitied him; and, faithful to her strong sense of duty, would
have gone instantly to offer him every assistance and attention in
her power. Lady Berryl assured her that Mr. Reynolds had positively
forbidden her going to him; and that he had assured Lord Colambre he
would not see her if she went to him. After such rapid and varied
emotions, poor Grace desired repose, and her friend took care that it
should be secured to her for the remainder of the day.
In the mean time, Lord Clonbrony had kindly and judiciously employed
his lady in a discussion about certain velvet furniture, which Grace
had painted for the drawing-room at Clonbrony Castle.
In Lady Clonbrony’s mind, as in some bad paintings, there was no
_keeping_; all objects, great and small, were upon the same level.
The moment her son entered the room, her ladyship exclaimed, “Every
thing pleasant at once! Here’s your father tells me, Grace’s velvet
furniture’s all packed: really Soho’s the best man in the world of his
kind, and the cleverest--and so, after all, my dear Colambre, as I
always hoped and prophesied, at last you will marry an heiress.”
“And Terry,” said Lord Clonbrony, “will win his wager from Mordicai.”
“Terry!” repeated Lady Clonbrony, “that odious Terry!--I hope, my
lord, that he is not to be one of my comforts in Ireland.”
“No, my dear mother; he is much better provided for than we could
have expected. One of my father’s first objects was to prevent him
from being any encumbrance to you. We consulted him as to the means
of making him happy; and the knight acknowledged that he had long
been casting a sheep’s eye at a little snug place, that will soon be
open in his native country--the chair of assistant barrister at the
sessions. Assistant barrister!’ said my father; ‘but, my dear Terry,
you have been all your life evading the laws, and very frequently
breaking the peace; do you think this has qualified you peculiarly for
being a guardian of the laws?’ Sir Terence replied, ‘Yes, sure; set
a thief to catch a thief is no bad maxim. And did not Mr. Colquhoun,
the Scotchman, get himself made a great justice, by his making all the
world as wise as himself, about thieves of all sorts, by land and by
water, and in the air too, where he detected the mud-larks?--And is
not Barrington chief-justice of Botany Bay?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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