I fixed my eyes immovably on my desk. I knew that the slightest symptom of intelligence on my part would instantly draw forth the episode of the fish-buying on the morning of the dinner party, with the rape of Philippa's sleeve, and the unjust aspersion on Miss Brickley following in due sequence, ending with the paralytic seizure and dignified departure of the latter to her parents' residence in Hare Island. The critical moment was averted by a question from Mr. Mooney.
"As for language," replied Mrs. Brickley, with clear eyes a little uplifted in the direction of the ceiling, "there was no name from heaven and hell but she had it on me, and wishin' the divil might burn the two heels off me, and the like o' me wasn't in sivin parishes! And that was the clane part of the discoorse, yer Worships!"
Mrs. Brickley here drew her cloak more closely about her, as though to enshroud herself in her own refinement, and presented to the Bench a silence as elaborate as a drop scene. It implied, amongst other things, a generous confidence in the imaginative powers of her audience.
Whether or no this was misplaced, Mrs. Brickley was not invited further to enlighten the Court. After her departure the case droned on in inexhaustible rancour, and trackless complications as to the shares of the fish. Its ethics and its arithmetic would have defied the allied intellects of Solomon and Bishop Colenso. It was somewhere in that dead hour of the afternoon, when it is too late for lunch and too early for tea, that the Bench, wan with hunger, wound up the affair by impartially binding both parties in sheaves "to the Peace."
As a sub-issue I arranged with Mr. Knox to shoot duck on the one-legged man's land on Hare Island as soon as should be convenient, and lightly dismissed from my mind my dealings, official and otherwise, with the House of Brickley.
But even as there are people who never give away old clothes, so are there people, of whom is Flurry Knox, who never dismiss anything from their minds.
VII
THE LAST DAY OF SHRAFT
It was not many days after the Keohane and Brickley trial that my wife's elderly step-brother, Maxwell Bruce, wrote to us to say that he was engaged in a tour through the Irish-speaking counties, and would look us up on his way from Kerry. The letter began "O Bean uasal," and broke into eruptions of Erse at various points, but the excerpts from Bradshaw were, fortunately, in the vernacular.
Philippa assured me she could read it all. During the previous winter she had had five lessons and a half in the Irish language from the National Schoolmaster, and believed herself to be one of the props of the Celtic movement. My own attitude with regard to the Celtic movement was sympathetic, but a brief inspection of the grammar convinced me that my sympathies would not survive the strain of tripthongs, eclipsed consonants, and synthetic verbs, and that I should do well to refrain from embittering my declining years by an impotent and humiliating pursuit of the most elusive of pronunciations. Philippa had attained to the height of being able to greet the schoolmaster in Irish, and, if the day happened to be fine, she was capable of stating the fact; other aspects of the weather, however remarkable, she epitomised in a brilliant smile, and the schoolmaster was generally considerate enough not to press the matter.
My step-brother-in-law neither hunted, shot, nor fished, yet as a guest he never gave me a moment's anxiety. He possessed the attribute, priceless in guests, a good portable hobby, involving no machinery, accessories, or paraphernalia of any kind. It did not even involve the personal attendance of his host. His mornings were spent in proffering Irish phrases to bewildered beggars at the hall door, or to the respectfully bored Peter Cadogan in the harness-room. He held conversaziones in the servants' hall after dinner, while I slept balmily in front of the drawing-room fire. When not thus engaged, he sat in his room making notes, and writing letters to the Archimandrites of his faith. Truly an ideal visitor, one to whom neglect was a kindness, and entertainments an abomination; certainly not a person to take to Hare Island to shoot ducks with Flurry Knox.