“I don’t see that we are bound to consider the feelings of the Deputy-Lieutenant,” said Dr. O’Grady. “After all, if a man deliberately leads his relatives to suppose that he is rich enough to afford a statue in a cathedral and then turns out to be too poor to pay for it, he doesn’t deserve much consideration.”
“I wouldn’t cross the road,” said Doyle, “to do a good turn to a man that let my nephew in the way that fellow did. For let me tell you, gentlemen, that statue would have been a serious loss to him if——”
“I’m not thinking of him or Doyle’s nephew either,” said the Major. “I don’t know who that Deputy-Lieutenant was, and I don’t care if his statue was stuck up in every market town in Ireland.”
“If you’re not thinking of the General,” said the doctor, “and if you’re not thinking of the Deputy-Lieutenant, what on earth are you grumbling about?”
“I’m grumbling, as you call it,” said the Major, “about the utterly intolerable absurdity of the whole thing. Can’t you see it? You can of course, but you won’t. Look here, Father McCormack, you’re a man of some sense and decency of feeling. Can we possibly ask the Lord-Lieutenant to come here and unveil a statue of General John Regan—whoever he was—when all we’ve got is a statue of some other man? Quite possibly the Lord-Lieutenant may have known that Deputy-Lieutenant personally, and if he recognises the statue where shall we be?”
“There’s something in what the Major says,” said Father McCormack. “I’ll not deny there’s something in what he says.”
“There isn’t,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Excuse my contradicting you flatly, Father McCormack, but there really isn’t. We all know Doyle, and we respect him; but I put it to you now, Father McCormack, I put it to any member of the committee: Is Doyle likely to have a nephew who’d be able to make a statue that anybody would recognise?”
“There’s something in that,” said Father McCormack. “I’m not well up in statues, but I’ve seen a few in my time, and all I can say is that unless Doyle’s nephew is a great deal better at the job than most of the fellows that makes them, nobody would know, unless they were told, who their statue’s meant to be like.”
“My nephew’s a good sculptor,” said Doyle. “If he wasn’t I wouldn’t have brought his name forward to-day; but what the doctor says is true enough. I’ve seen heads he’s done, for mural tablets and the like, and so far as anybody recognising them for portraits of the deceased goes, you might have changed the tablets and, barring the inscriptions, nobody would have known to the differ. Not but what they were well done, every one of them.”
“There now, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady. “That pretty well disposes of your last objection.”