Leon Uris by Redemption

to subvert himself to your insatiable drive.
    “Only myself sees that inner rage in you now, but soon all of Ireland will know about it. Nae, all the world. Do I make any sense to you at all? Now I close as I opened this letter. I love you, but not in that way.”
    Was Jack Murphy too weak for her or simply too wise? He knew her truths and said he could not match them. It was an elegant rebuff. He called himself a quitter. Nonetheless, Atty felt anger with her pain. Why couldn’t Jack hold up? Or was it all just his way of saying he didn’t really love her?
    After her seventeenth birthday, Atty announced to her parents that she was not returning to London for further schooling but was off to Dublin instead.
    “Is this an advisement or a consultation?” her father asked.
    “I’ve made my decision, Father. Seek whatever justifications you need.”
    There was no call going into all that trash about disinheriting her, Charles Royce-Moore wisely concluded. It was a small miracle he was able to keep her close for seventeen years. “I suppose,” he said, “that you are intent on joining this Gaelic mutiny going on in Dublin.”
    “I’m not all that certain.”
    “Well, since Parnell,” he said, trying to manage not to make a mock spit, “the clans have been gathering to run the Anglo rascals out with a new birth of ancient Celtic tribalism. Gaelic sports, Gaelic literature, and all those bloody newspaper articles—how in the name of the Almighty did this one little place sprout so many writers? They’re like mushrooms growing wild near a moldy swamp.”
    “Perhaps it is because you have made Ireland a moldy swamp,” she answered.
    “Can we negotiate?” her father said candidly.
    “One does not negotiate with the English without getting buggered,” she replied, only half joking.
    “I’ve watched you wander among the lepers for years,” he said. “I’ve had my moments of great consternation. More than once I’ve asked myself, what the hell are we doing here? Well, I was born here. My estate is out there. Things have been done a certain way for centuries and despite a pang of conscience now and then, I have always known I could not change things.”
    “That’s a very pleasant line of justification for picking the Irish carcass clean in a most hideous way. Your class—”
    “Our class, Atty.”
    “Your class,” she continued, “has reduced these people to the most destitute in Western civilization. Their larder is empty,” she said.
    “That’s a fact. The time of the estates is coming to an end. Although it is all beyond my reach, there must be a supplanting of new ideas, the kind that you are up to. Look here, my velvet collar has turned shiny. I’m not going to keep up the pretense, and I know you won’t, either. This is a shabby place, growing shabbier.”
    “I will say, Father, that you have been better than some.”
    “I shall not turn against my class, Atty. The radical goings-on in Dublin are beyond me, yet I see a time coming when we will completely fade from the landscape. I suggest there will be very few Irish tears shed for us when we leave. Now, do you want to listen to my proposition or not?”
    Atty loved her father almost as much as she despised his class. Is it more evil to be aware of his evil and not do anything about it? Most of his goodfellows accepted the fortunate circumstances of their inheritances without a ha’penny of guilt. Sneering down on the inferior croppy Irish justified the exploitation. At least her father did not do that.
    “Here is my proposal. As you know by your study of the estate books, I have transferred a decent sum to London to see out your mother’s and my days. I am quite provincial myself and am actually very fond of Ireland. Yet, I cannot bear the thought of doing my declining years in a townhouse in Dublin. Dublin is seedy. A few stone facades scarcely cover a shantytown soggy with all those pubs and their bad poets. I am going to retire to the