BEERS COOPERAGE
THE Duchess of Trent would never call the little chamber which she used
for her devotions an oratory, thinking that term savoured of Romanism.
The furniture of the praying-closet was as downright and old-fashioned
as its name. There was a little table against the wall, supporting a
plain cross of silver, a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, a small book
of devotions called Bogatzky’s “Golden Treasury,” containing portions
of Scripture, with hymns and prayers for each day. An armchair and a
kneeling-cushion were the only other articles in the closet, except on
the walls, which were hung with a few illuminated texts of Scripture,
and a fine engraving of one of Holman Hunt’s pictures. It was such
a room as might have been used by the pious Countess of Huntingdon,
or one of those saintly dames who kept alive the lamp of Evangelical
Christianity through the days of the Regency.
Here the Duchess was accustomed to spend many hours in pious
meditation. Her nature was inclined to the tenets of the Quakers, but,
like the royal mistress whom she had formerly served, she deemed that
questions of ecclesiastical forms and government were unimportant,
provided they did not come between the soul and its Maker. Her horror
of Romanism had its root in the natural strength of her character; she
revolted from the devotional practices of that communion as a healthy
man might revolt from the use of crutches. Her education had taught
her to consider that the claims of the Roman Church were a deliberate
imposture, but she was too charitable to think evil of the individual
members of its priesthood. The great wave of medieval reaction which
was now sweeping over the English Church, and in a lesser degree
over the Nonconformist bodies, had passed her by. The ecclesiastical
subtleties which had exercised the mind of Newman and his followers
were meaningless to her. She lived, as she humbly believed, in direct
communion with God, whose Holy Spirit afforded her what light was
necessary to salvation, and the Sacraments she regarded as mere outward
tokens of a spiritual allegiance.
Believing thus, her piety overflowed, not in the observance of fasts,
nor in attendance at public services, but in works of benevolence. In
the country parish where she had formerly lived she had discharged all
the duties of a curate, except those connected with public worship.
The cottagers believed in her more than in the Rector; on several
occasions she had been asked to baptize some new-born infant whose
little life seemed to be guttering out. Those of such children who
survived were regarded as singularly blest, and their parents showed
great reluctance to let the ceremony be repeated in the church with the
proper forms. She had been in still greater request as a peacemaker;
no quarrel ever outlived her interference in that office. Yet she
never scolded the people, and seldom rebuked them. Her method was to
take the causes of mutual offence upon herself, and ask forgiveness
from each in turn. It became imprudent for her to speak severely to
any of the villagers, even when rebuke was called for. She found out
once that a drunkard whom she had sternly reproved for ill-treatment
of his children was set upon in consequence by the entire village and
beaten dangerously. Her removal to London was felt like death. The
whole country-side was downcast. She arranged to keep up the payment
of all her alms by the hands of the Rector, but this was not felt as
a consolation. Half the population of the parish followed her on the
day she went away from them, the mothers crying and holding up their
babes to take a last look at her, the children silent and hanging their
heads. The fathers at work in the fields cast down their tools as the
carriage went by, and came and stood in the road, with bared heads,
till it had disappeared.
Afterwards the Rector, himself a well-meaning but dull man, meeting one
of the men on his way home, said that he was glad to see so much love
shown by the people for her Grace.
The man stared at him.
“Us love she, sir? Why, that’s nought. ’Twere her as loved we, sir,
better than us love each other.”
When the Duchess settled in her son’s London house, she sought at
once for the spot where such service as hers was most needed. She
did not apply to the minister of the parish in which Colonsay House
was situated, lest, tempted by her great rank, he might exaggerate
the claims of his own district, and perhaps push out some humbler
worker. For though every Calvinist is something of a republican, and
the Duchess of Trent made it a point of conscience not to set value
on the title she bore, a wise prudence taught her never to forget the
importance attached to it by others, and the unwholesome influence
it was likely to have over a certain class of minds. She knew how
to distinguish with perfect clearness between the courtship paid to
her rank and the love which she inspired on her own account; in this
respect again resembling the monarch who was her friend.
After a careful investigation, carried out quietly by herself, the
Duchess chose for her sphere of charitable labour a district lying
in the south of the Thames, between Lambeth and Westminster Bridges.
Here, under the shadow of the Archbishop’s Palace, she found heathendom
as utter as, and vice more rank than that the Church was sending out
missionaries to cope with in China and Hindustan.
The Vicar of the parish in which this region was included, whose name
was Dr. Coles, was a pious, learned, and zealous divine, but he was
believed to construe his ordination vows according to a code of honour
more Roman than English. The services at St. Jermyn’s bore little
resemblance to those of a Protestant place of worship, and it was
suspected that they were but the outward and visible signs of a still
deeper cleavage between the Doctor’s private beliefs and those affirmed
in the articles of religion which he had subscribed. The Vicarage
was the resort of a great number of young men from the theological
colleges, among whom the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s appeared to enjoy an
authority not explained by his rank in the Church.
Being a man advanced in years, and not being able to afford more than
one curate, Dr. Coles was glad to avail himself of the services of
helpers from outside the parish. Most of these were women of wealth
and position, who came from their homes in the fashionable quarter to
minister to the dwellers in the back streets of Lambeth. The reader of
the society paragraphs in the daily press sometimes little suspected
that the women whose names he saw in the list of guests at a grand
dinner-party or dance the night before had spent their morning going
about the slums of St. Jermyn’s.
The Duchess of Trent and Colonsay went to work without fuss, calling
herself at the homes of the poor, and winning an easy entrance by
her own kindly and modest demeanour. The sullen drudges of these
dark precincts soon learned to look for her coming, not as that of a
patroness, but as that of a dear friend, who was interested in the
small details of their daily lives, and ever ready to sympathize if a
drunken husband overnight had left a black bruise on the poor thin arm,
or a ne’er-do-well son had been sent to the cells for fighting in the
streets. They never knew how closely their own stories often tallied
with the experience of the lady who listened to them so wistfully, and
who found in soothing their sorrows the means of living down her own.
It was to this district that the Duchess took her way on the morning
after she had seen her son.
The carriage set her down at the corner of a small street, called, as
if in mockery of a more splendid region, Little Bond Street. Walking
down this street, where she was well known, and nodding pleasantly to
those of its inmates who were at their doors, the Duchess presently
came to a small court or yard, which bore on the wall of the archway
opening out of the street the legend “Beers Cooperage.”
Beers Cooperage no longer retained any trace of the manufacture of
casks and barrels which some departed cooper had doubtless carried on
there in bygone days. It consisted of a row of half a dozen very small
cottages, with still smaller enclosures in front, which looked as
though they might once have been meant for gardens. A last reminder of
the time when Beers Cooperage had considered itself to be in a rural
neighbourhood lingered on the window-sills of some of these cottages,
which were ornamented with miniature wooden railings and five-barred
gates, a touch of rustic fancy of which the modern Londoner has become
incapable. Yet though the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage could not have
originated these quaint decorations, and had probably never seen the
country sights they were meant to recall, they took a pathetic pride
in possessing them, and as soon as one of the railings or gates showed
signs of decay it was carefully repaired.
Who knows what influence such trifles have over all of us? It is
certain that the dwellers in Beers Cooperage were generally quieter
and more decent in their lives than most of their neighbours. One
or two of them kept singing-birds, instead of terriers to kill rats
with. The inmate of one house, a poor cripple, had even set himself
resolutely to make his front garden a reality instead of a name, by
planting a row of wallflowers, bought full-grown from a coster-monger,
in what he evidently considered a bed. These plants, which perished
periodically, and were regularly renewed, were regarded with reverence
by the neighbours, and attracted pilgrims to view them from two or
three streets away. But on the rare occasions when they burst into
bloom of their own accord, no profane hand was allowed to come too near
them. After being reverently smelled at a distance by the dwellers in
the Cooperage, the blossoms were culled with anxious pride by their
proprietor, and made into a nosegay for the Duchess, who carried them
home with her, and set them on the table of her oratory. They were the
only flowers ever seen on that simple altar.
There was one house in Beers Cooperage, however, which differed
strikingly from the rest. This was the hovel at the upper end, where
the yard terminated in a high blank wall. There were no five-barred
gates on the window-sills here; nothing but fragments, which hung
rotting over the edge. Half the panes in the window were broken, and
stuffed with dirty scraps of paper. The paling before the house was
also fast disappearing, and the space in front was littered with broken
tins and refuse not sufficiently noisome to attract the notice of the
sanitary inspector. In the corner stood a kennel tenanted by a mongrel
bulldog, the terror of the small children in the Cooperage. The door
of this cottage generally stood half open, and through it came all
day and night long sounds of angry scolding, or of oaths and drunken
yells. The inside of the place matched with its outside. The floors and
stairs looked as if they were never washed; the germs of a dozen fevers
might have lurked in the dirt which was thickly piled everywhere. The
miserable crockery and kitchen stuff was in as deplorable a condition
as the windows. The bedding chiefly consisted of heaps of unwashed rags.
This was the one house in Beers Cooperage into which the Duchess had
never yet ventured to go. It was tenanted by an Irishman, who had
threatened to wring the neck of any ---- Protestant who came meddling
inside his doors.
For the last fortnight the Cooperage had enjoyed a blessed spell of
relief from the presence of this man, whose formidable strength, added
to his choleric temper, rendered him the terror of his neighbours.
He had been taken in the act of kicking an old man whom he had first
knocked down. The magistrate before whom he was brought, who had just
previously imposed a sentence of six months on a boy for the theft of
a pair of boots, desirous, perhaps, to show that he could be merciful
on occasion, sent the hooligan to prison for fourteen days, thereby
releasing the rest of the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage for that exact
length of time.
On this morning, as soon as the Duchess came out from under the archway
which formed the entrance to the Cooperage, she saw that something was
amiss.
Several of the cottages showed broken windows, and in one or two places
even the cherished gates and rails had been damaged or destroyed. A
broken birdcage lay on the ground in the far corner of the yard beside
the dog’s kennel. All the doors of the houses were closed, except the
Irishman’s, through which shrill screams were issuing. Lastly, the poor
lame gardener was standing in his little plot disconsolately regarding
the wreck of his cherished flowers, which looked as though they had
been trampled over by a regiment.
“Mike Finigan done it,” he explained, in answer to the Duchess’s
sympathetic exclamation. “’E got outer prison yisterday, and ’e come
in drunk lorst night with ’is crew, and played old ’Arry all over the
place.”
As if the presence of the Duchess had instantly become known, by what
is called mental telepathy, to every resident in the Cooperage, all
the other doors were thrown open, and the women crowded about her,
recounting the tale of the Irishman’s misdeeds, and denouncing their
author. The owner of the broken birdcage pointed to it, not without a
certain melancholy pride in her pre-eminence of wrong.
“’E broke it ’isself, and ’is mates killed my bird; and there I’m going
to let it lie till I ’aves the law of ’im, the roughing.”
Whether the woman believed that the continuance of the broken cage on
its present spot would be a strong confirmation of her story, like the
bricks in Jack Cade’s chimney, or whether she had some obscure feeling
like that which causes a Brahmin creditor to starve himself to death,
in a spirit of revenge, on his debtor’s doorstep, and considered the
wrecked cage as a talisman which would work harm to the wrongdoer,
she failed to explain. But the threat of legal proceedings was not
taken seriously by her neighbours, the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage
regarding an appeal to the constituted authorities with much the same
feeling as schoolboys do a complaint to a master. The poor have an
instinct which teaches them that the State is their enemy; they are a
subject population within the borders of the Raj.
While the group round the Duchess were still shrilly vociferating,
evidently with the object of making their reflections reach the ears of
the Irishman in his retreat, they were interrupted by the appearance of
two figures in the mouth of the archway.
One of these new-comers was a man, the other a girl of nineteen
or twenty. At the sight of the first the Duchess of Trent frowned
slightly, but her face brightened again as she caught sight of his
companion, whom she had come out this morning in the secret hope of
meeting.
There is a type of womanhood known all over the world as English,
and in that bright and gracious type Hero Vanbrugh was completely
moulded. It is not a type of classical perfection, like that associated
with the Roman virgin; it does not cast that intoxicating spell over
the passions of men which Southern poets mean by love. The Southern
language has no word for this type; it is only the dear old Northern
names of maid and sweetheart and wife which express its tender charm.
Hero Vanbrugh, as she stood framed in the archway, was a picture to
gladden the eyes. It was not only that her features were delicately
chiselled, and her body a harmony of slenderness and strength; there
were men who declared that at some moments she seemed to them to be
actually plain; but the freshness of the rain was in her face, and the
laughter of the wind in her hair, and the blue breath of the sea in
her eyes, and there were other men to whom at many moments she seemed
the fairest sight that they had ever looked upon.
The dress which she wore was of that unpretending serviceable pattern
which would have been deemed almost masculine a few years before. In
the eyes of a man the simple coat with its white collar, and the plain
skirt, might have appeared homely, but the eye of another woman would
have been quick to note the marks of an artist’s hand in the cut of
each garment, and would have credited the wearer with perfect taste,
coupled with the means to gratify it.
The man who stood beside her in the archway was as unlike her as it was
possible to be.
If Hero Vanbrugh might have been taken as a type of all that was best
in English humanity, the same could scarcely have been said of her
companion. Big and bull-necked, with coarse, flushed features, small,
deep-set eyes, and a round fleshy chin, he might have passed, in a
different dress, for a comrade of Mike Finigan himself. His costume
would have marked him out in any other country as a Roman priest. He
wore the shovel hat, with a long brim projecting before and behind,
which is associated with the stage priest of comic opera, and his whole
figure, from the neck to the ankles, was enveloped in a long black robe
of design similar to that worn by Noah and his family in the toy arks.
The priests of Rome in this country being in the habit of adopting a
dress corresponding with the character of that worn by the people
among whom they live, this outlandish disguise served to indicate that
the wearer was in Anglican Orders. He was, in fact, the Rev. Aloysius
Grimes, curate of St. Jermyn’s parish.
The Rev. Aloysius was one of that class which has flowed into the
ranks of the clergy of late years in increasing numbers, to fill the
gap created by the falling off in the supply of graduates from the
Universities, a falling off due as much to the decline in the value of
the Church’s preferments, perhaps, as to the decline of belief in her
doctrines. The son of a small tradesman in the suburbs, he had passed
from a higher-grade Board School into a theological college. He had
entered the college an ordinary sharp London lad of the lower orders,
and left it the social equal of dukes.
Such a youth, strongly conscious of the importance of the step he had
gained, was not likely to listen with reluctant ears to any doctrine
which exaggerated the dignity of his profession. The Rev. Aloysius came
out into the world firmly impressed that he was a priest, commissioned
by the Maker of the Universe to teach and to rule mankind, endowed
with power to bestow the absolution and remission of sins, and
supernaturally enabled to work the awful miracle of Transubstantiation.
Between the Duchess of Trent and Mr. Grimes there was an instinctive
antagonism, which each strove to veil beneath the outward forms of
courtesy, the Duchess because she respected the curate’s cloth,
the curate because he respected her Grace’s rank. To the Duchess
the doctrines held and taught by the Rev. Aloysius were simply and
literally blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. She supposed that
they had been abandoned as such at the Reformation, and she understood
them so to be condemned by the Articles of the English Church. Yet she
perceived that they were now freely tolerated within its pale by those
to whom the government of the Church was committed, and she shrank
with real pain from setting up her own judgment against that of the
Episcopal Bench.
What added to her distress was the fact that she was unable to credit
the head of that Bench with any belief in what she had always regarded
as the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. That doctrine in her mind was
the Atonement. The great truth which Catholicism images in the crucifix
seemed to her the central one of Christianity, and those who doubted it
became in her view mere Deists, with a reverence for Jesus of Nazareth.
Such a Deist she believed Dr. Dresden, the then Primate, to be, and,
believing it, she regarded even the Rev. Aloysius as more worthy of his
place in the Church than the Archbishop.
Mr. Grimes glided in front, fawning over the hand of the Duchess,
before Hero could come up.
“I am so delighted to meet you here, Duchess. It is so good of you to
do so much for our poor people. They are always singing your praises.”
The Duchess made the briefest response to these compliments as she
turned to greet Hero.
“My dear, how well you are looking! One would think that St. Jermyn’s
was a health-resort, to see you. Now I wonder whether you will take
compassion on a poor old woman, and let me carry you home to lunch with
me presently?”
Hero blushed as she listened to these old-fashioned compliments.
“You are exceedingly kind, Duchess. I shall be delighted. I came here
in the brougham to-day, so that I shall be able to send a message to
my father to let him know where I am. But what is all this about?” She
turned to the excited women who were now repeating the tale of Mike
Finigan’s outrages in the ears of Mr. Grimes.
The Rev. Aloysius was listening with a troubled brow. In his secret
heart he had a great respect for Finigan, partly because he knew
that the Irishman had no respect at all for him, and regarded him as
an impostor, dressed in plumes borrowed from his own clergy, partly
because of the superior example which the Finigans showed to his own
flock in the matter of reverence for the priesthood. The hooligan and
his family in their wildest moments treated their own priest as being
invested with dreadful sanctity and tremendous powers. They firmly
believed that Father Molyneux could strike any one of them dead without
moving an eyelash; if one of them had been betrayed into lifting a hand
against the Father’s person, they would have expected to see it wither
to a stump. Yet Father Molyneux was a very insignificant-looking little
man, with a jolly smile, and a brogue like the scent of an onion, who
went about dressed in a shabby overcoat and a disreputable hat of the
ordinary chimney-pot shape. He said “Sorr” to Mr. Grimes when that
gentleman condescended to greet him in the street, and never showed by
a word or look that he did not regard him as a superior by whose notice
he was honoured. It was true that the little priest had a reputation
for humour among his own friends; a sound as of laughter was sometimes
heard issuing from the presbytery as the Rev. Aloysius passed by; a
book entitled “The Secret History of the Romish Conspiracy” had been
found by the priest’s housekeeper in the cupboard where his reverence
kept his whisky and his slippers; but those things were mercifully
hidden from the curate of St. Jermyn’s.
Mr. Grimes turned towards Hero, as she came forward, shaking his head.
“I’m afraid it’s a sad business, Miss Vanbrugh. Finigan has broken
out again. I can’t understand how it is that a man so well conducted
in some respects, with such genuine faith in his religion, schismatic
though it may appear to us, should be guilty of outrages like this.”
Hero flushed up. She did not share the elder woman’s deep-rooted
prejudice against the Catholicizing movement, which attracted her
strongly on its æsthetic side, but her English common sense remained
to her.
“The man is a drunken brute, who ought to have been sent to penal
servitude for fourteen years, instead of being let off with a paltry
fourteen days!” she exclaimed. “What are prisons for, I should like to
know, except to protect peaceful folk from ruffians like that?”
The Rev. Aloysius shook his head doubtfully. He was inclined to read
the text, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” in a very broad sense, and
to consider that Mike Finigan’s admirable loyalty to his creed ought to
atone for any trifling disregard of his neighbours’ peace and comfort.
But the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage, whose rude minds failed to
appreciate the beauty of Mr. Finigan’s theological attitude, in the
face of their broken flower-pots and slaughtered pets, were quick to
perceive that Hero was the champion of whom they stood in need. They
deserted the curate to besiege her with their complaints; the owner of
the birdcage renewed her direful malediction, and another woman, who
could boast no injury on her own account, drew the sympathetic young
lady to the scene of the trampled wallflowers.
The sight aroused Miss Vanbrugh’s wrath in real earnest.
“I have a great mind to send for the police myself,” she declared. “I
only wish I had seen him do it, so that I could give evidence.”
The women shrank back at these words. Their anger against Finigan,
already partly relieved by the mere exertion of denouncing him, was
cooled at once by Miss Vanbrugh’s threat.
“That ’ud only mike it wuss, miss,” the lame man responded dolefully.
“’E’d come out again at the end of a week like a mad Calico, an’ not
leave a roof over our ’eads.”
Before Hero had time to resolve this extraordinary expression into an
allusion to the late Khalifa of the Soudan there was a stir among the
little group behind, caused by the sudden appearance of Mike Finigan
himself at the door of his abode.
Now that the women perceived that their clamour had achieved its
purpose of rousing the evildoer, they suddenly became silent. Finigan
lounged forward, with a masterful air, his hands in his pockets, and
surveyed his neighbours disdainfully.
It said, in the history-books out of which the small Britons of Beers
Cooperage were taught in the Board School, that Ireland had been
conquered by England in the year of grace 1172. The history-books said
nothing about the conquest of Beers Cooperage by Mike Finigan.
Seen close at hand, the Irishman did not look a remarkably vicious or
ill-disposed creature. His face was of the dark, heavy, animal type
to be met with in some of the western counties of England itself.
He represented that mixed remnant of old, forgotten races which is
found washed up in out-of-the-way corners of the land, the relics of
prehistoric wanderings and subjugations, the rubble of European man.
Because his ancestors during a thousand years or so had spoken a
Gaelic dialect, learned language-mongers called Mike Finigan a Celt.
His name might have told them that he was a mongrel Finn, between whom
and the fair-haired, blue-eyed Gauls who took Rome there was no more
kinship than between the Chinaman and the Greek. The traditions of his
own land, had the language-mongers cared to study them, would have
disclosed to them the existence of half a dozen strange older races,
some of whom in all likelihood were still speaking Neolithic dialects
of their own when the armies of Cæsar landed in Britain.
This primitive savage had been brought from his native bogs, and set
down among a peaceable town-dwelling population, chiefly of Dutch
descent, by the economic machinery of the Raj. The Raj had taught him
to speak its language, and bestowed upon him a voice in the choice of
its administrators.
Now the Raj was trying to digest Mike Finigan.
In his own country, dwelling on some bare hillside beaten by the rains
of the Atlantic, the Irishman might have seemed a picturesque figure.
Living the life that was natural to him, digging his native peat, and
finding an outlet for his brutal instincts in the folk-fights that
formed the immemorial pastime of the country-side, he would have been a
harmless subject.
In the streets of London he was a dangerous criminal. The civilized
life brought out all that was worst in this wild nature. It galled him
with its manifold restraints. It stunned him with its monotony of work.
It teased him with its decorum. It stifled him with its lack of air and
space. Finally, it drove him to the public-house.
If dirt be matter in the wrong place, so is crime conduct in an unfit
historical or geographical environment. If the hooligan had lived a
few thousand years earlier he would have been a hero. He would have
refreshed himself with his native mead before going into battle, and
his strength becoming as the strength of ten, he would have been deemed
of supernatural birth. His exploits would have become the theme of
bards, divine honours would have been rendered to his memory, and,
his figure shining through the mist of saga like a demigod’s, learned
students would have been engaged to-day in identifying him with the
solar orb.
As it was, Mike Finigan’s history was already written to its end. After
a long or short series of savage atrocities, after wounding and maiming
a certain number of peaceable citizens, and being punished by sentences
ranging from a small fine to six months’ hard labour, according to the
magistrate before whom he happened to be brought, one of Mike Finigan’s
kicks some day, probably by pure accident, would cause a death; when
society, seizing the excuse for which it had been waiting all along,
would hang Mike Finigan. A pity that you could not have passed the
sentence before the murder, and commuted it to transportation, back
to the little shieling in the potato-patch from which you dragged his
father, Your Majesty the public!
The effect of alcohol is different on different constitutions, a truism
which fanatics forget. On Finigan its effect was to make him a raging
wild beast. His unfortunate neighbours would have been the first to
bear witness that when the drink was not in him the Irishman was
harmless enough. His speech was always coarse, and he was a stranger
to soap and water, but those were venial faults in the light of his
drunken frolics. At such moments the appearance of the Khalifa himself
in their archway would have struck less consternation into the dwellers
in the Cooperage than Mike Finigan’s.
After one of these outbursts the Irishman was usually sullen and silent
for a day or two, during which period his neighbours found it wisest to
leave him alone. He was in that condition, surly, but not dangerous, as
he strode forth to silence his assailants.
At the sight of the Duchess he paused, uncertain. Though he had uttered
a coarse threat against any Protestant who should invade his own home,
he had acquired a tacit respect for the quiet lady who visited his
neighbours, and perhaps there were times when he would not have been
sorry if the Duchess had disregarded his words, and included his wife
and family in her friendly ministrations. A secret shame at having
disgraced himself in her eyes caused him to assume a defiant and
insolent air as he demanded of the women:
“And what have yez got to say agin me, now I’m here?”
The women shrank back terrorized.
The Duchess thought it useless for her to speak. But Mr. Grimes,
anxious to show her Grace how well he could administer a priestly
reproof, rashly undertook to answer the bully.
“I wonder you are not ashamed to ask the question, Finigan. You have
been behaving in a shocking, scandalous manner. Do you consider what
disgrace you bring, not merely on yourself as a man, but on the Church
to which you belong?”
The Irishman turned red.
“Here, Mister, yez lave me Church alone, an’ I’ll lave yours,” he
muttered.
The Rev. Aloysius smiled at the success with which he had touched the
man’s weak spot.
“I am not blaming your Church,” he said impressively. “The teaching you
have received is good enough for you to know when you have done wrong.
I am pointing out to you that your neighbours here, who do not know
and understand the Church of Rome as I know and understand it, are not
likely to have their opinion of it raised by such conduct as yours last
night.”
The curate was warming to his work, and would have gone on to inflict
further stabs on the sensitive place, when suddenly the Irishman
clenched his fists, and stepped towards him.
“Say another word about me Church, good or bad, and, be the Howly
Moses, I’ll knock yer teeth down yer Protestant throat!”
The Rev. Aloysius fairly recoiled, stunned, to do him justice, as much
by the insult conveyed in the description of himself as a Protestant as
by the threat of personal violence. It was too bitter; the serpent of
schism had raised its baleful crest, and stung him in the very midst of
his flock.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one suspected the true cause of his
agitation. Before he could frame a suitable retort an unexpected ally
came to his rescue.
Hero Vanbrugh had listened impatiently to the curate’s attempted
admonition of the hooligan. Her indignation at the brutalities whose
effects she had just seen was still hot within her, and the Irishman’s
hectoring demeanour made it boil over.
She walked up quickly, and confronted him with blazing eyes.
“You coward! How dare you stand there and bluster! How dare you come
out and show yourself, in the face of all the mean, silly, brutal,
wicked things you did last night! Where is the bird you and your
friends killed? There is its cage! Look at it, and stay here and brazen
it out if you dare! Look at that poor man’s flowers all trodden down
and broken! I wonder you can bring yourself to pass them! To rob a
poor lame man! a cripple! I suppose you will beat him next, or murder
him if you are not afraid of the police. I tell you, you are a coward,
nothing but a big hulking coward, who goes about bullying women and
children--and cripples! Go! Don’t stay out here! Go and hide yourself,
lest a man should come along and see you!”
Then a great thing happened. For Mike Finigan, the tyrant of Beers
Cooperage and the terror of the police, raised his finger to his
forelock, and with a muttered--“Beg pardon, miss,” turned round, and
shrank back into his house like a thoroughly ashamed man.
The Duchess turned to Hero with a look of grateful admiration.
“You did that splendidly, my dear. Thank you.”
The women, relieved of the presence of their enemy, would have burst
out in a triumphant chorus, but Hero restrained them with a gesture,
and the next minute they were surprised to see her turn white and
totter against the side of the Duchess, who hastened to draw her away.