Willy Reilly: The Works of William Carleton, Volume OneCarleton, William
General
Willy Reilly: The Works of William Carleton, Volume One
Carleton, William
Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
This vindictive suggestion took at once, and the impetuous old squire
started as if a new light had been let in upon his mind. We call him
impetuous, because, if he had reflected only for a moment upon the
diabolical persecution, both in person and property, which Reilly had
sustained at the baronet's hands, he ought not to have blamed him had!
he shot the scoundrel as if he had been one of the most rabid dogs that
ever ran frothing across a country. We say the suggestion, poisoned
as it was by the most specious falsehood, failed not to accomplish the
villain's object.
Folliard grasped him by the hand. “Never-mind,” said he; “keep yourself
quiet, and leave Reilly to me; I have him,that's enough.”
“No,” replied the baronet, “it is not enough, because I know what will
happen: Miss Folliard's influence over you is a proverb; now she will
cajole and flatter and beguile you until she prevails upon you to let
the treacherous Jesuit slip through your fingers, and then he will get
off to the Continent, and laugh at you all, after having taken her with
him; for there is nothing more certain, if he escapes death through
your indulgence, than that you will, in the course of a few years,
find yourself grandfather to a brood of young Papists; and when I say
Papists, need I add rebels?”
“Come,” replied the hot-headed old man, “don't insult me; I am master of
my own house, and, well as I love my daughter, I would not for a moment
suffer her to interfere in a public matter of this or any other kind.
Now good-by; keep your spirits up, and if you are to die, why die like a
man.”
They then separated; and as Folliard was passing through the hatch, he
called the jailer into his own office, and strove to prevail upon him,
not ineffectually, to smuggle in some wine and other comforts to the
baronet. The man told him that he would with pleasure do so if he dared;
but that the caution against it which he had got that very day from the
Board rendered the thing impossible. Ere the squire left him, however,
his scruples were overcome, and the baronet, before he went to bed that
night, had a rost duck for supper, with two bottles of excellent claret
to wash it down and lull his conscience into slumber.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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