Extracted from Lord Kilgobbin by Charles Lever, published by Appletree Press
Lord Kilgobbin
by Charles Lever
Chapter One - part 4
The listless indolence of her father's life, and the almost complete absence from home of her brother, who was pursuing his studies at the Dublin University, had given over to her charge not only the household, but no small share of the management of the estate–all, in fact, that an old land steward, a certain Peter Gill, would permit her to exercise; for Peter was a very absolute and despotic grand Vizier, and if it had not been that he could neither read nor write, it would have been utterly impossible to have wrested from him a particle of power over the property. This happy defect in his education–happy so far as Kate's rule was concerned–gave her the one claim she could prefer to any superiority over him, and his obstinacy could never be effectually overcome, except by confronting him with a written document or a column of figures. Before these, indeed, he would stand crestfallen and abashed. Some strange terror seemed to possess him as to the peril of opposing himself to such inscrutable testimony–a fear, be it said, he never felt in contesting an oral witness.
Peter had one resource, however, and I am not sure that a similar stronghold has not secured the power of greater men and in higher functions. Peter's sway was of so varied and complicated a kind; the duties he discharged were so various, manifold, and conflicting; the measures he took with the people, whose destinies were committed to him, were so thoroughly devised, by reference to the peculiar condition of each man–what he could do, or bear, or submit to–and not by any sense of justice; that a sort of government grew up over the property full of hitches, contingencies, and compensations, and of which none but he who had invented the machinery could possibly pretend to the direction. The estate being, to use his own words, "so like the old coach-harness, so full of knots, splices, and entanglements, there was not another man in Ireland cou'ld make it work, and if another were to try it, it would all come to pieces in his hands."
Kate was shrewd enough to see this; and in the same way that she had admiringly watched Peter as he knotted a trace here and supplemented a strap there, strengthening a weak point, and providing for casualties even the least llikely, she saw him dealing with the tenantry on the property; and in the same spirit that he made allowance for sickness here and misfortune there, he would be as prompt to screw up a lagging tenant to the last penny, and secure the landlord in the share of any season of prosperity.
The iron grip on tenants' reality exercised by Peter Gill, Land Agent, is further detailed here
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