“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.