The Red Hand of Ulster Part 4

Power and I want you to come and play tennis with us."

I rose and stuffed my paper into my pocket. I felt quite glad that they had found me, although I do not care for playing tennis, and, as a rule, enjoy writing articles.

"You will get on much better without me," I said.

"Oh no," said Marion; "Mr. Power is sure to beat me in a single; but I think I'd have a pretty good chance if you are on his side."

I was to act as a handicap. My efforts to help Power were reckoned to be worth one, perhaps two strokes in every game for Marion. This was not complimentary to me; but I dare say my tennis deserves no more respectful treatment. I agreed to be a handicap, and I was a good one.

Marion won the first set. I got exceedingly hot, but, up to the middle of the second set, I enjoyed myself. Then G.o.dfrey appeared. He watched my efforts with an air of cold superiority and contemptuous surprise.

My heart failed me and I was obliged to ask to be allowed to stop.

Bob Power invited us to lunch on the _Finola_. Marion accepted the invitation joyfully. G.o.dfrey also accepted, although I do not think Power meant to ask him. But G.o.dfrey is not the kind of man to miss the chance of getting into touch, however remotely, with any one as rich as Conroy. Power eyed him with an expression of frank dislike.

G.o.dfrey, it seemed to me, did not much like Power. He was probably annoyed at the way in which Power made himself agreeable to Marion.

G.o.dfrey regarded Marion as, in a sense, his property, although there was nothing in the way of an engagement between them.

McNeice, whom I had hoped to meet, was not on the yacht. The steward explained to us that he was spending the day with Crossan. I could see that the thought of any one spending the day with Crossan outraged G.o.dfrey's sense of decency. By way, I suppose, of annoying Power, he asked what had been happening on the _Finola_ at twelve o'clock the night before.

"I was awakened up," he said, "by the noise of carts going along the street and I looked out. I could see lights on the yacht and on the pier. What on earth were you doing at that time of night?"

"Coaling," said Power, shortly.

It was plain to me that he disliked being asked questions. It must have been plain to G.o.dfrey, too, for he immediately asked another.

"How did you get coal in a place like this?"

"Dear me," said Marion, "how very unromantic! I thought you were smuggling!"

G.o.dfrey's face a.s.sumed an expression of quite unusual intelligence. He suspected Power of evil practices of some sort. Marion's suggestion of smuggling delighted him.

"But where did you get the coal?" he persisted.

"My dear G.o.dfrey," I said, "for all you or I know there may be hundreds of tons of it piled up in the co-operative store. Crossan has a wonderful business instinct. He may have speculated on a visit from some large steamer and be making a large profit. I am the princ.i.p.al shareholder, and nothing pleases me better than to see the store succeeding."

I knew, as a matter of fact, that Crossan had no coal. I also knew that the _Finola_ was not coaling. The carts were loaded when they were going up the hill. They would have been empty if they had been going to get coal for the _Finola_. I made my remark in the hope of discouraging G.o.dfrey from asking more questions.

"I wish you would smuggle something," said Marion. "I should love to have some French lace laid at my door in a bale in the middle of the night."

Marion reads novels, and the smugglers in these import French lace. In real life the only people who try to cheat the nation out of its duty on lace are tourist ladies, and they would not share their spoils with Marion.

"But why did you coal in the middle of the night?" said G.o.dfrey.

One of G.o.dfrey's most striking characteristics is his persistent curiosity. There is hardly anything in the world which G.o.dfrey will not find out if he is given time. A secret has the same attraction for him that cheese has for a mouse. Some day, I hope, he will find a trap baited with a seductive mystery.

"We always coal at night," said Power.

"Of course," said Marion, "the dirt shows so much less at night than it would in daylight."

"But," said G.o.dfrey, "I don't understand why you--"

I rose and said that we must go ash.o.r.e. I invited Power to dinner, and urged him to bring McNeice with him if possible. I made it quite plain that I was not inviting G.o.dfrey. Power accepted the invitation, and sent us off in a boat. I said good-bye firmly to G.o.dfrey at the end of the pier. I was annoyed with him for cross-questioning our host at his own table. Marion and I walked home. G.o.dfrey walked up the hill towards the co-operative store. I am sure he did not want to see Crossan. I cannot suppose that he would venture to catechise McNeice.

I expect he meant to prowl round the premises in hopes of discovering casks of smuggled brandy or cases full of tobacco.

McNeice came to dinner, and I am bound to say that I found myself very nearly in agreement with G.o.dfrey's opinion of him. He was a singularly ill-mannered man. Power devoted himself to Marion, and I felt at once that their conversation was not of a kind that was likely to be interesting either to McNeice or me. They were talking about ski-ing and skating in Switzerland. McNeice made no effort to talk at all. He sucked his soup into his mouth with a loud hissing noise, and glared at me when I invited him to admire our scenery. His fish he ate more quietly, and I took the opportunity of reminding him of our correspondence about St. Patrick. The subject roused him.

"There are," he said, "seventeen different theories about the place of that man's birth."

I knew nine myself, my own, of which I was a little proud, being the ninth. I did not expect McNeice to deliver a harangue on the whole seventeen, but that is what he did. Having bolted his fish, he began in a loud, harsh voice to pour contempt on all attempts at investigating the early history of our national saint. He delayed our progress through dinner a good deal, because he would neither refuse nor help himself to the _entree_ which my butler held at his elbow. It was not until he had finished with the whole seventeen theories about the saint that he turned his attention to dinner again. I ventured to suggest that he had not even mentioned my own theory.

"Oh," he said, "you have a theory too, have you?"

My theory, at the time of its first appearance, occupied ten whole pages of the _Nineteenth Century_, and when republished, with notes, in pamphlet form, was reviewed by two German papers. I felt hurt by his ignorance of it, and reminded him again that we had corresponded about the subject while I was writing the article.

"If you've time to waste on that sort of thing," he said, "why not devote it to living bishops instead of one who has been dead over a thousand years?"

The idea of investigating the origins of our existing bishops was new to me but not in the least attractive.

"Wouldn't it be rather waste of labour," I said, "to build up an hypothesis about the birthplace of a living bishop when--"

"It's certainly waste of labour to build up an hypothesis about a dead one."

"I meant to say," I added, "that if one did want to know such a thing--"

"n.o.body does," said McNeice.

"It would," I went on, "be much simpler to write and ask him."

I gathered from the way in which he spoke that McNeice did not like bishops; but I was not prepared for the violence of the speech which he made to me after dinner. Marion and Power were at the piano, which stands in a far-off corner of my rather oversized drawing-room.

McNeice settled himself in front of the fire, his long legs straddled far apart, the bow of his white tie twisted under his ear. He is a man of singularly ferocious appearance. He has very bushy eyebrows which meet across the bridge of his nose, s.h.i.+ning green eyes, a large jaw heavily underhung, and bright red hair.

He addressed me for more than half an hour on the subject of bishops in general. I should be very sorry to write down the things he said.

Some of them were quite untrue. Others were utterly unjust. It is quite wrong, for instance, to impute it as a crime to a whole cla.s.s of men that their heads are bald. n.o.body can help being bald if his hair will not grow any more than he can help being fat if his stomach will swell. Fatness was another of the accusations which McNeice hurled against the bishops. I suppose this violent hatred of an inoffensive cla.s.s of men was partly the result of McNeice's tremendous Protestantism. The poet Milton, I think, felt in the same way about the prelates of his day. Partly it may have been the expression of his naturally democratic temperament. Bishops like to be called "my lord"

by servants and clergymen. McNeice, I imagine, has a quite evangelical dislike of such t.i.tles. I dare say that it was the fact of my being a lord which made him so rude to me.

On the afternoon of my garden-party I happened to be standing close beside Lady Moyne when she was saying good-bye to the Dean. Her final remark was addressed quite as much to him as to me.

"What we have got to do," she said, "is to make use of this virile democracy of ours; to mould it into an instrument for the preservation of social order. The introduction of the Home Rule Bill gives us just about the chance we want."

I found myself wondering, while the diatribe against the bishops was in full swing, whether Lady Moyne would succeed in moulding McNeice into a weapon for her hand. It seemed to me more probable at the moment that McNeice would in the end tumble her beautiful head from the block of a guillotine into the basket of sawdust which waited underneath.

Marion and Bob Power were singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan's operas while McNeice preached to me. They at least were having an enjoyable evening. I dare say McNeice enjoyed himself too. If so, my dinner-party was not given in vain. One cannot reasonably expect more than three out of every four people to be happy at the same time. It was my misfortune that I happened to be the fourth.

CHAPTER VI

The _Finola_ steamed out of our bay next morning. Marion saw her go, and became quite lyrical at breakfast about the beauty of her "lines,"

a word which, as applied to the appearance of a yacht, she can only have learned from Bob Power. I was not able to share her rapture because the _Finola_ went out at 6 a. m., an hour at which I make it a settled rule to be in bed. Marion is generally in bed at 6 a. m. too.