"Knock Ceoil! Begad, that's a great notion! Now I come to think of it, I did hear something of old Fogarty giving up, but somehow I never thought of young Danny Aherne in connection with it. I thought I was as well able as any man to put two and two together, but I declare I might never have thought of it if it hadn't been for you! They say, if you're too close to a thing, you can't see it!"
Thus did the collie yap, while the sheep (who was a member of the Dispensary Committee) gratified, and pleasantly conscious of originality, trotted up the path and into the fold that had been prepared for it.
Meanwhile, in what house-agents call the reception-rooms, the Sale of Work raged on, with auctions, with raffles, with card-fortunes, told in a cave of rugs by a devoted sorceress, in a temperature that would inure her to face with composure the witch's destiny at the stake; with "occasional music," that fell upon the turmoil of talk more softly than any petals from blown roses on the grass, and was just sufficiently perceptible to impart the requisite flavour of festivity. One item of the musical programme had indeed had power to still the storm, but since it was contributed by the Mangan Quartet, it must be admitted that, charming though it was, it owed something of its success to surprise. The countryside had rallied to Lady Isabel with a response that did credit to her as to them, yet, thronged though the rooms were the Mangan family shone with a unique lustre as alone representing the mighty Church of Rome.
"Wonderful of them to come!" said the Church of Ireland ladies approvingly; "the only R.C.'s here!"
Yet the Mangan family was not quite alone in this representative position; young Mr. Coppinger, their (as it were) inventor and patentee, shared it with them, and was, moreover, beginning, for the first time, and not without displeasure, to realise something of the social complications that are involved by the difference of creed. It was a matter of atmosphere; quite intangible, and quite perceptible. Larry was discovering that he was something of an anomaly. "Only an R.C. by accident," as he had heard someone say, in apparent extenuation (a benevolence that he found irritating). He was learning the meaning of the sudden silences, the too obvious changes of the course of conversation, that seemed to occur when he drew near. He had not, as yet, formulated these things to himself, but, on this turbulent afternoon, it was possibly some livelier apprehension of them that made him gravitate towards Barty Mangan, as towards a fellow pariah, and induced him to seek with him the far asylum of the schoolroom. There, save for the schoolroom cat, they were alone, and they sat for some minutes in grateful silence, looking out, across misty stretches of grass, to the river, and beyond it to the dense green of the trees of Coppinger's Court. The sky was very low and grey; by leaning out of the window a little, a far-off reach of river, at the western end of the valley, could be descried; above it there was a narrow slit in the clouds, and through it a faint and lovely primrose light fell, like a veil, that hid, while it told of the deathbed repentance of the dying day. Larry dragged his chair into the corner of the window, and watched the growing glory of the sunset with all his ardent soul in his eyes.
Whatever this boy did, he did vividly, and to Barty Mangan, seated on the shadow side, watching him, he was, as ever, a pageant, a being of incalculable impulse, of flashing intensity and splendour.
"Where on earth did you go, Barty? I looked about for you for ages before I found you; but there was such an awful crowd of women—I'm jolly glad to get out of it!" Larry leaned back in his chair and proceeded to light a cigarette, as an assertion of the rights of a man of nearly seventeen.
"My father was taking Tishy and me about, showing us the house," replied Barty, apologetically. (As a matter of fact, he said "me fawther," but if this, and similar details of pronunciation, are not known by nature, it is labour in vain to attempt to indicate them by means of the wholly inadequate English alphabet.) "Larry," he went on, with the candour that made a gentleman of him, "I never was in a house like this before. I declare to you it frightens me! I feel like a rat gone astray! I was in the dining-room by myself, looking at the pictures, and that old fella' of a butler came in and frightened the heels off me! He kept an eye on me that was like a flame from a blow-pipe! You'd say he thought I was going to steal the house!"
"I expect he did, too," said Larry, "especially if he thought that you were a pal of mine. He hates me like blazes. He's one of those damned Orangemen. I say, do you remember that thing in The Spirit of the Nation, 'Orange and Green will carry the Day'? I bet old Evans would rather lose, any day, than be 'linked in his might' with a Papist like you or me! It's a most extraordinary thing how religion plays the devil with Ireland!"
There are certain standard truisms that must be rediscovered by each successive generation (possibly because they have bored the preceding one to extinction), and Larry was of the age at which truisms reveal themselves as new ideas, and sing and shine with the radiancy of morning stars. He was also young enough, and just sufficiently interested in religion, to find it exciting to denounce it. The fervour of his indictment lifted him from his chair, and he stood, with the evening light on his hot face, enjoying his theme, and his audience.