Battles have been won and the streams of History diverted to new
channels in the space of ten minutes. Ladies have been won, a fresh
posterity founded, and grand financial schemes devised, revolts
arranged, a yoke shaken off, in less of mortal time. Excepting an
inspired Epic song and an original Theory of the Heavens, almost
anything noteworthy may be accomplished while old Father Scythe is
taking a trot round a courtyard; and those reservations should allow the
splendid conception to pass for the performance, when we bring to mind
that the conception is the essential part of it, as a bard poorly known
to fame was constantly urging. Captain Con had blown his Epic bubbles,
not to speak of his projected tuneful narrative of the adventures of the
great Cuchullin, and his Preaching of St. Patrick, and other national
triumphs. He could own, however, that the world had a right to the
inspection of the Epic books before it awarded him his crown. The
celestial Theory likewise would have to be worked out to the last figure
by the illustrious astronomers to whom he modestly ranked himself second
as a benefactor of his kind, revering him. So that, whatever we may
think in our own hearts, Epic and Theory have to remain the exception.
Battles indeed have been fought, but when you survey the field
in preparation for them you are summoned to observe the preluding
courtesies of civilised warfare in a manner becoming a chivalrous
gentleman. It never was the merely flinging of your leg across a
frontier, not even with the abrupt Napoleon. You have besides to drill
your men; and you have often to rouse your foe with a ringing slap, if
he's a sleepy one or shamming sleepiness. As here, for example: and that
of itself devours more minutes than ten. Rockney and Mattock could be
roused; but these English, slow to kindle, can't subside in a twinkling;
they are for preaching on when they have once begun; betray the past
engagement, and the ladies are chilled, and your wife puts you the
pungent question: 'Did you avoid politics, Con?' in the awful solitude
of domestic life after a party. Now, if only there had been freedom
of discourse during the dinner hour, the ten disembarrassed minutes
allotted to close it would have afforded time sufficient for hearty
finishing blows and a soothing word or so to dear old innocent Mr.
Rumford, and perhaps a kindly clap of the shoulder to John Mattock,
no bad fellow at bottom. Rockney too was no bad fellow in his way. He
wanted no more than a beating and a thrashing. He was a journalist, a
hard-headed rascal, none of your good old-fashioned order of regimental
scribes who take their cue from their colonel, and march this way and
that, right about face, with as little impediment of principles to
hamper their twists and turns as the straw he tosses aloft at midnight
to spy the drift of the wind to-morrow. Quite the contrary; Rockney was
his own colonel; he pretended to think independently, and tried to be
the statesman of a leading article, and showed his intention to stem
the current of liberty, and was entirely deficient in sympathy with the
oppressed, a fanatical advocate of force; he was an inveterate Saxon,
good-hearted and in great need of a drubbing. Certain lines Rockney had
written of late about Irish affairs recurred to Captain Con, and the
political fires leaped in him; he sparkled and said: 'Let me beg you to
pass the claret over to Mr. Rockney, Mr. Rumford; I warrant it for the
circulating medium of amity, if he'll try it.'
''Tis the Comet Margaux,' said Dr. Forbery, topping anything Rockney
might have had to say, and anything would have served. The latter
clasped the decanter, poured and drank in silence.
''Tis the doctor's antidote, and best for being antedated,' Captain Con
rapped his friend's knuckles.
'As long as you're contented with not dating in double numbers,'
retorted the doctor, absolutely scattering the precious minutes to the
winds, for he hated a provocation.
'There's a golden mean, is there!'
'There is; there's a way between magnums of good wine and gout, and it's
generally discovered too late.'
'At the physician's door, then! where the golden mean is generally
discovered to be his fee. I've heard of poor souls packed off by
him without an obolus to cross the ferry. Stripped they were in all
conscience.'
'You remind me of a fellow in Dublin who called on me for medical
advice, and found he'd forgotten his purse. He offered to execute a deed
to bequeath me his body, naked and not ashamed.'
'You'd a right to cut him up at once, Forbery. Any Jury 'd have
pronounced him guilty of giving up the ghost before he called.'
'I let him go, body and all. I never saw him again.'
'The fellow was not a lunatic. As for your golden mean, there's a
saying: Prevention is better than cure: and another that caps it: Drink
deep or taste not.'
'That's the Pierian Spring.'
'And what is the wine on my table, sir?'
'Exhaustless if your verses come of it.'
'And pure, you may say of the verses and the fount.'
'And neither heady nor over-composed; with a blush like Diana confessing
her love for the young shepherd: it's one of your own comparisons.'
'Oh!' Con could have roared his own comparisons out of hearing. He was
angry with Forbery for his obstructive dulness and would not taste the
sneaking compliment. What could Forbery mean by paying compliments
and spoiling a game! The ten minutes were dancing away like harmless
wood-nymphs when the Satyr slumbers. His eyes ranged over his guests
despondently, and fixed in desperation on Mr. Rumford, whom his
magnanimous nature would have spared but for the sharp necessity to
sacrifice him.
The wine in Rumford at any rate let loose his original nature, if it
failed to unlock the animal in these other unexcitable Saxons.
'By the way, now I think of it, Mr. Rumford, the interpretation of your
Royal Standard, which perplexes you so much, strikes me as easy if you
'll examine the powerfully different colours of the two beasts in it.'
Mr. Rumford protested that he had abandoned his inquiry: it was a piece
of foolishness: he had no feeling in it whatever, none.
The man was a perfect snail's horn for coyness.
The circumstances did not permit of his being suffered to slip away: and
his complexion showed that he might already be classed among the roast.
'Your Lion:--Mr. Rumford, you should know, is discomposed, as a
thoughtful patriot, by the inexplicable presence of the Unicorn in the
Royal Standard, and would be glad to account for his one horn and
the sickly appearance of the beast. I'm prepared to say he's there to
represent the fair one half of the population.
Your Lion, my dear sir, may have nothing in his head, but his tawniness
tells us he imbibes good sound stuff, worthy of the reputation of a
noble brewery. Whereas your Unicorn, true to the character of the
numberless hosts he stands for, is manifestly a consumer of doctor's
drugs. And there you have the symbolism of your country. Right or
left of the shield, I forget which, and it is of no importance to the
point--you have Grandgosier or Great Turk in all his majesty, mane and
tail; and on the other hand, you behold, as the showman says, Dyspepsia.
And the pair are intended to indicate that you may see yourselves
complete by looking at them separately; and so your Royal Standard is
your national mirror; and when you gaze on it fondly you're playing the
part of a certain Mr. Narcissus, who got liker to the Lion than to the
Unicorn in the act. Now will that satisfy you?'
'Quite as you please, quite as you please,' Mr. Rumford replied. 'One
loves the banner of one's country--that is all.' He rubbed his hands. 'I
for one am proud of it.'
'Far be it from me to blame you, my dear sir. Or there's the alternative
of taking him to stand for your sole great festival holiday, and
worshipping him as the personification of your Derbyshire race.'
A glittering look was in Captain Con's eye to catch Rockney if he would
but rise to it.
That doughty Saxon had been half listening, half chatting to Mr.
Mattock, and wore on his drawn eyelids and slightly drawn upper lip a
look of lambent pugnacity awake to the challenge, indifferent to the
antagonist, and disdainful of the occasion.
'We have too little of your enthusiasm for the flag,' Philip said to Mr.
Rumford to soothe him, in a form of apology for his relative.
'Surely no! not in England?' said Mr. Rumford, tempted to open his
heart, for he could be a bellicose gentleman by deputy of the flag. He
recollected that the speaker was a cousin of Captain Con's, and withdrew
into his wound for safety. 'Here and there, perhaps; not when we are
roused; we want rousing, we greatly prefer to live at peace with the
world, if the world will let us.'
'Not at any price?' Philip fancied his tone too quakerly.
'Indeed I am not one of that party!' said Mr. Rumford, beginning to
glow; but he feared a snare, and his wound drew him in again.
'When are you ever at peace!' quoth his host, shocked by the
inconsiderate punctuality of Mrs. Adister O'Donnell's household, for
here was the coffee coming round, and Mattock and Rockney escaping
without a scratch. 'There's hardly a day in the year when your scarlet
mercenaries are not popping at niggers.'
Rockney had the flick on the cheek to his manhood now, it might be
hoped.
'Our what?' asked Mr. Rumford, honestly unable to digest the opprobrious
term.
'Paid soldiery, hirelings, executioners, whom you call volunteers, by
a charming euphemism, and send abroad to do the work of war while you
propound the doctrines of peace at home.'
Rockney's forehead was exquisitely eruptive, red and swelling. Mattock
lurched on his chair. The wine was in them, and the captain commended
the spiriting of it, as Prospero his Ariel.
Who should intervene at this instant but the wretched Philip, pricked
on the point of honour as a soldier! Are we inevitably to be thwarted by
our own people?
'I suppose we all work for pay,' said he. 'It seems to me a cry of the
streets to call us by hard names. The question is what we fight for.'
He spoke with a witless moderation that was most irritating, considering
the latest news from the old country.
'You fight to subjugate, to enslave,' said Con, 'that's what you're
doing, and at the same time your journals are venting their fine irony
at the Austrians and the Russians and the Prussians for tearing Poland
to strips with their bloody beaks.'
'We obey our orders, and leave you to settle the political business,'
Philip replied.
Forbery declined the fray. Patrick was eagerly watchful and dumb.
Rockney finished his coffee with a rap of the cup in the saucer, an
appeal for the close of the sitting; and as Dr. Forbery responded to
it by pushing back his chair, he did likewise, and the other made a
movement.
The disappointed hero of a fight unfought had to give the signal for
rising. Double the number of the ten minutes had elapsed. He sprang up,
hearing Rockney say: 'Captain Con O'Donnell is a politician or nothing,'
and as he was the most placable of men concerning his personality, he
took it lightly, with half a groan that it had not come earlier, and
said, 'He thinks and he feels, poor fellow!'
All hope of a general action was over.
'That shall pass for the epitaph of the living,' said Rockney.
It was too late to catch at a trifle to strain it to a tussle. Con was
obliged to subjoin: 'Inscribe it on the dungeon-door of tyranny.' But
the note was peaceful.
He expressed a wish that the fog had cleared for him to see the stars of
heaven before he went to bed, informing Mr. Mattock that a long look in
among them was often his prayer at night, and winter a holy season to
him, for the reason of its showing them bigger and brighter.
'I can tell my wife with a conscience we've had a quiet evening, and
you're a witness to it,' he said to Patrick. That consolation remained.
'You know the secret of your happiness,' Patrick answered.
'Know you one of the secrets of a young man's fortune in life, and give
us a thrilling song at the piano, my son,' said Con: 'though we don't
happen to have much choice of virgins for ye to-night. Irish or French.
Irish are popular. They don't mind having us musically. And if we'd go
on joking to the end we should content them, if only by justifying their
opinion that we're born buffoons.'
His happy conscience enabled him to court his wife with assiduity
and winsomeness, and the ladies were once more elated by seeing how
chivalrously lover-like an Irish gentleman can be after years of
wedlock.
Patrick was asked to sing. Miss Mattock accompanied him at the piano.
Then he took her place on the music-stool, and she sang, and with an
electrifying splendour of tone and style.
'But it's the very heart of an Italian you sing with!' he cried.
'It will surprise you perhaps to hear that I prefer German music,' said
she.
'But where--who had the honour of boasting you his pupil?'
She mentioned a famous master. Patrick had heard of him in Paris. He
begged for another song and she complied, accepting the one he selected
as the favourite of his brother Philip's, though she said: 'That one?'
with a superior air. It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular
Opera somewhat out of date. 'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her
impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery.
She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer,
she confessed, yet she sang as if possessed by him. Had she, Patrick
thought, been bent upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more
fire into the notes. And when she had done, after thrilling the room,
there was a gesture in her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical
loftiness. Patrick noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice
lingering in him: 'What is it you do like? I should so like to know.'
She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in
an undertone to Patrick: 'How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister
used to sing?'
Miss Mattock glanced at Philip. He had applauded her mechanically, and
it was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet
over her face. This time she could track it definitely to its origin.
A lover's favourite song is one that has been sung by his love. She
detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she
had sung a bar: it had been a very dim fancy: and she denounced herself
guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff
fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things
at the right moment vividly. The reminiscences of those pale intuitions
made them always affectingly vivid.
But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we
are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if
we ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows! The
interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little
tricks of her blood. Leaving her friend Miss Barrow at the piano, she
took a chair in a corner and said; 'Now, Mr. O'Donnell, you will hear
the music that moves me.'
'But it's not to be singing,' said Patrick. 'And how can you sing so
gloriously what you don't care for? It puzzles me completely.'
She assured him she was no enigma: she hushed to him to hear.
He dropped his underlip, keeping on the conversation with his eyes until
he was caught by the masterly playing of a sonata by the chief of the
poets of sound.
He was caught by it, but he took the close of the introductory section,
an allegro con brio, for the end, and she had to hush at him again, and
could not resist smiling at her lullaby to the prattler. Patrick smiled
in response. Exchanges of smiles upon an early acquaintance between two
young people are peeps through the doorway of intimacy. She lost
sight of the Jesuit. Under the influence of good music, too, a not
unfavourable inclination towards the person sitting beside us and
sharing that sweetness, will soften general prejudices--if he was Irish,
he was boyishly Irish, not like his inscrutable brother; a better, or
hopefuller edition of Captain Con; one with whom something could be done
to steady him, direct him, improve him. He might be taught to appreciate
Beethoven and work for his fellows. 'Now does not that touch you more
deeply than the Italian?' said she, delicately mouthing: 'I, mio tradito
amor!'
'Touch, I don't know,' he was honest enough to reply. 'It's you that
haven't given it a fair chance I'd like to hear it again. There's a
forest on fire in it.'
'There is,' she exclaimed. 'I have often felt it, but never seen it. You
exactly describe it. How true!'
'But any music I could listen to all day and all the night,' said he.
'And be as proud of yourself the next morning?'
Patrick was rather at sea. What could she mean?
Mrs. Adister O'Donnell stepped over to them, with the object of
installing Colonel Adister in Patrick's place.
The object was possibly perceived. Mrs. Adister was allowed no time to
set the manoeuvre in motion.
'Mr. O'Donnell is a great enthusiast for music, and could listen to it
all day and all night, he tells me,' said Miss Mattock. 'Would he not
sicken of it in a week, Mrs. Adister?'
'But why should I?' cried Patrick. 'It's a gift of heaven.'
'And, like other gifts of heaven, to the idle it would turn to evil.'
'I can't believe it.'
'Work, and you will believe it.'
'But, Miss Mattock, I want to work; I'm empty-handed. It 's true I want
to travel and see a bit of the world to help me in my work by and by.
I'm ready to try anything I can do, though.'
'Has it ever struck you that you might try to help the poor?'
'Arthur is really anxious, and only doubts his ability,' said Mrs.
Adister.
'The doubt throws a shadow on the wish,' said Miss Mattock. 'And can
one picture Colonel Adister the secretary of a Laundry Institution,
receiving directions from Grace and me! We should have to release him
long before the six months' term, when we have resolved to incur the
expense of a salaried secretary.'
Mrs. Adister turned her head to the colonel, who was then looking down
the features of Mrs. Rockney.
Patrick said: 'I'm ready, for a year, Miss Mattock.'
She answered him, half jocosely: 'A whole year of free service? Reflect
on what you are undertaking.'
'It's writing and accounts, no worse?'
'Writing and accounts all day, and music in the evening only now and
then.'
'I can do it: I will, if you'll have me.'
'Do you hear Mr. O'Donnell, Mrs. Adister?'
Captain Con fluttered up to his wife, and heard the story from Miss
Mattock.
He fancied he saw a thread of good luck for Philip in it. 'Our house
could be Patrick's home capitally,' he suggested to his wife. She was
not a whit less hospitable, only hinting that she thought the refusal of
the post was due to Arthur.
'And if he accepts, imagine him on a stool, my dear madam; he couldn't
sit it!'
Miss Mattock laughed. 'No, that is not to be thought of seriously. And
with Mr. O'Donnell it would be probationary for the first fortnight or
month. Does he know anything about steam?'
'The rudimentary idea,' said Patrick.
'That's good for a beginning,' said the captain; and he added: 'Miss
Mattock, I'm proud if one of my family can be reckoned worthy of
assisting in your noble work.'
She replied: 'I warn everybody that they shall be taken at their word if
they volunteer their services.'
She was bidden to know by the captain that the word of an Irish
gentleman was his bond. 'And not later than to-morrow evening I'll land
him at your office. Besides, he'll find countrywomen of his among you,
and there's that to enliven him. You say they work well, diligently,
intelligently.'
She deliberated. 'Yes, on the whole; when they take to their work.
Intelligently certainly compared with our English. We do not get the
best of them in London. For that matter, we do not get the best of the
English--not the women of the north. We have to put up with the rejected
of other and better-paying departments of work. It breaks my heart
sometimes to see how near they are to doing well, but for such a little
want of ballast.'
'If they're Irish,' said Patrick, excited by the breaking of her heart,
'a whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret.'
Captain Con backed him for diplomacy. 'You'll learn he has a head, Miss
Mattock.'
'I am myself naturally blunt, and prefer the straightforward method,'
said she.
Patrick nodded. 'But where there's an obstruction in the road, it's
permissible to turn a corner.'
'Take 'em in flank when you can't break their centre,' said Con.
'Well, you shall really try whether you can endure the work for a short
time if you are in earnest,' Miss Mattock addressed the volunteer.
'But I am,' he said.
'We are too poor at present to refuse the smallest help.'
'And mine is about the smallest.'
'I did not mean that, Mr. O'Donnell.'
'But you'll have me?'
'Gladly.'
Captain Con applauded the final words between them. They had the genial
ring, though she accepted the wrong young man for but a shadow of the
right sort of engagement.
This being settled, by the sudden combination of enthusiastic Irish
impulse and benevolent English scheming, she very considerately resigned
herself to Mrs. Adister's lead and submitted herself to a further
jolting in the unprogressive conversational coach with Colonel Adister,
whose fault as a driver was not in avoiding beaten ways, but whipping
wooden horses.
Evidently those two were little adapted to make the journey of life
together, though they were remarkably fine likenesses of a pair in the
dead midway of the journey, Captain Con reflected, and he could have
jumped at the thought of Patrick's cleverness: it was the one bright
thing of the evening. There was a clear gain in it somewhere. And if
there was none, Jane Mattock was a good soul worth saving. Why not
all the benefaction on our side, and a figo for rewards! Devotees or
adventurers, he was ready in imagination to see his cousins play the
part of either, as the cross-roads offered, the heavens appeared to
decree. We turn to the right or the left, and this way we're voluntary
drudges, and that way we're lucky dogs; it's all according to the turn,
the fate of it. But never forget that old Ireland is weeping!
O never forget that old Ireland is weeping
The bitter salt tears of the mother bereft!
He hummed the spontaneous lines. He was accused of singing to himself,
and a song was vigorously demanded of him by the ladies.
He shook his head. 'I can't,' he sighed. 'I was plucking the drowned
body of a song out of the waters to give it decent burial. And if I sing
I shall be charged with casting a firebrand at Mr. Rockney.'
Rockney assured him that he could listen to anything in verse.
'Observe the sneer:--for our verses are smoke,' said Con.
Miss Mattock pressed him to sing.
But he had saddened his mind about old Ireland: the Irish news weighed
heavily on him, unrelieved by a tussle with Rockney. If he sang, it
would be an Irish song, and he would break down in it, he said; and he
hinted at an objection of his wife's to spirited Irish songs of the sort
which carry the sons of Erin bounding over the fences of tyranny and the
brook of tears. And perhaps Mr. Rockney might hear a tale in verse as
hard to bear as he sometimes found Irish prose!--Miss Mattock perceived
that his depression was genuine, not less than his desire to please her.
'Then it shall be on another occasion,' she said.
'Oh! on another occasion I'm the lark to the sky, my dear lady.'
Her carriage was announced. She gave Patrick a look, with a smile, for
it was to be a curious experiment. He put on the proper gravity of a
young man commissioned, without a dimple of a smile. Philip bowed to her
stiffly, as we bow to a commanding officer who has insulted us and will
hear of it. But for that, Con would have manoeuvred against his wife
to send him downstairs at the lady's heels. The fellow was a perfect
riddle, hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild
jackass--if Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and
it's a moot point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning
and are not composers of zebra. 'No one knows but them above!' he said
aloud, apparently to his wife.
'What can you be signifying?' she asked him. She had deputed Colonel
Arthur to conduct Miss Mattock and Miss Barrow to their carriage, and
she supposed the sentence might have a mysterious reference to the plan
she had formed; therefore it might be a punishable offence. Her small
round eyes were wide-open, her head was up and high.
She was easily appeased, too easily.
'The question of rain, madam,' he replied to her repetition of his
words. 'I dare say that was what I had in my mind, hearing Mr. Mattock
and Mr. Rockney agree to walk in company to their clubs.'
He proposed to them that they should delay the march on a visit to his
cabin near the clouds. They were forced to decline his invitation to the
gentle lion's mouth; as did Mr. Rumford, very briskly and thankfully.
Mr. Rockney was taken away by Mr. and Mrs. Marbury Dyke. So the party
separated, and the Englishmen were together, and the Irishmen together;
and hardly a syllable relating to the Englishmen did the Irishmen say,
beyond an allusion to an accident to John Mattock's yacht off the Irish
west-coast last autumn; but the Irishmen were subjected to some remarks
by the Englishmen, wherein their qualities as individuals and specimens
of a race were critically and neatly packed. Common sense is necessarily
critical in its collision with vapours, and the conscious possessors of
an exclusive common sense are called on to deliver a summary verdict,
nor is it an unjust one either, if the verdict be taken simply for an
estimate of what is presented upon the plain surface of to-day. Irishmen
are queer fellows, never satisfied, thirsting for a shindy. Some of them
get along pretty well in America. The air of their Ireland intoxicates
them. They require the strong hand: fair legislation, but no show of
weakness. Once let them imagine you are afraid of them, and they see
perfect independence in their grasp. And what would be the spectacle if
they were to cut themselves loose from England? The big ship might be
inconvenienced by the loss of the tender; the tender would fall adrift
on the Atlantic, with pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew
playing Donnybrook freely. Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see
the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and
we have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us. There is the
capital blunder, fons et origo.
Their leaders now pretend to work upon the Great Scale; they demand
everything on the spot upon their own interpretation of equity.
Concessions, hazy speeches, and the puling nonsense of our present
Government, have encouraged them so far and got us into the mess. Treat
them as policemen treat highwaymen: give them the law: and the law must
be tightened, like the hold on a rogue by his collar, if they kick at
it. Rockney was for sharp measures in repression, fair legislation in
due course.
'Fair legislation upon your own interpretation of fair,' said Mattock,
whose party opposed Rockney's. 'As to repression, you would have missed
that instructive scene this evening at Con O'Donnell's table, if you
had done him the kindness to pick up his glove. It 's wisest to let them
exhaust their energies upon one another. Hold off, and they're soon at
work.'
'What kind of director of a City Company does he make?' said Rockney.
Mattock bethought him that, on the whole, strange to say, Con O'Donnell
comported himself decorously as a director, generally speaking on the
reasonable side, not without shrewdness: he seemed to be sobered by the
money question.
'That wife of his is the salvation of him,' Rockney said, to account for
the Captain's shrewdness. 'She manages him cleverly. He knows the length
of his line. She's a woman of principle, and barring the marriage, good
sense too. His wife keeps him quiet, or we should be hearing of him.
Forbery 's a more dangerous man. There's no intentional mischief in
Con O'Donnell; it's only effervescence. I saw his game, and declined
to uncork him. He talks of a niece of his wife's: have you ever seen
her?--married to some Servian or Roumanian prince.'
Mattock answered: 'Yes.'
'Is she such a beauty?'
Again Mattock answered: 'Yes,' after affecting thoughtfulness.
'They seem to marry oddly in that family.'
Mattock let fly a short laugh at the remark, which had the ring of some
current phrase. 'They do,' he said.
Next morning Jane Mattock spoke to her brother of her recruit. He
entirely trusted to her discretion; the idea of a young Irish secretary
was rather comical, nevertheless. He had his joke about it, requesting
to have a sight of the secretary's books at the expiry of the week,
which was the length of time he granted this ardent volunteer for
evaporating and vanishing.
'If it releases poor Grace for a week, it will be useful to us,' Jane
said. 'Women are educated so shamefully that we have not yet found one
we can rely on as a competent person. And Mr. O'Donnell--did you notice
him? I told you I met him a day or two back--seems willing to be of use.
It cannot hurt him to try. Grace has too much on her hands.'
'She has a dozen persons.'
'They are zealous when they are led.'
'Beware of letting them suspect that they are led.'
'They are anxious to help the poor if they can discover how.'
'Good men, I don't doubt,' said John Mattock. 'Any proposals from
curates recently?'
'Not of late. Captain O'Donnell, the brother of our secretary, is
handsomer, but we do not think him so trustworthy. Did you observe him
at all?--he sat by me. He has a conspirator's head.'
'What is that?' her brother asked her.
'Only a notion of mine.'
She was directed to furnish a compendious report of the sayings, doings,
and behaviour of the Irish secretary in the evening.
'If I find him there,' she said.
Her brother was of opinion that Mr. Patrick O'Donnell would be as good
as his word, and might be expected to appear there while the novelty
lasted.