Scremerston was very unlike his father: he was a small, rather fair man, with a slight moustache, a close-clipped beard, and little grey eyes with pink lids. His health was not good: he had been invalided home from the Imperial Yeomanry, after a slight wound and a dangerous attack of enteric fever, and he had secured a pair for the rest of the Session. He was not very clever, but he certainly laughed sufficiently
at what Miss Willoughby said, who also managed to entertain the Earl with great dexterity and aplomb. Meanwhile Logan and the Jesuit amused the excellent Lady Mary as best they might, which was not saying much. Lady Mary, though extremely amiable, was far from brilliant, and never having met a Jesuit before, she regarded Father Riccoboni with a certain hereditary horror, as an animal of a rare species, and, of habits perhaps startling and certainly perfidious. However, the lady was philanthropic in a rural way, and Father Riccoboni enlightened her as to the reasons why his enterprising countrymen leave their smiling land, and open small ice-shops in little English towns, or, less ambitious, invest their slender capital in a monkey and a barrel-organ.
‘I don’t so very much mind barrel-organs myself,’ said Logan; ‘I don’t know anything prettier than to see the little girls dancing to the music in a London side street.’
‘But do not the musicians all belong to that dreadful Camorra?’ asked the lady.
‘Not if they come from the North, madam,’ said the Jesuit. ‘And do not all your Irish reapers belong to that dreadful Land League, or whatever it is called?’
‘They are all Pap---’ said Lady Mary, who then stopped, blushed, and said, with some presence of mind, ‘paupers, I fear, but they are quite safe and well-behaved on this side of the Irish Channel.’
‘And so are our poor people,’ said the Jesuit. ‘If they occasionally use the knife a little—naturam expellas furca, Mr. Logan, but the knife is a different
thing—it is only in a homely war among themselves that they handle it in the East-end of London.’
‘Cœlum non animum,’ said Logan, determined not to be outdone in classical felicities; and, indeed, he thought his own quotation the more appropriate.
At this moment a great silvery-grey Persian cat, which had sat hitherto in a stereotyped Egyptian attitude on the arm of the Earl’s chair, leaped down and sprang affectionately on the shoulder of the Jesuit. He shuddered strongly and obviously repressed an exclamation with difficulty, as he gently removed the cat.