“She’ll attend him right enough,” said Doyle. “Since ever she got the notion that he was going to make a lady of her, attending on him is the one thing that she will do.”
“Then you needn’t bother your head about anything else.”
CHAPTER VIII
There are men in the world, a great many of them—who are capable of managing details with thoroughness and efficiency. These men make admirable lieutenants and fill subordinate positions so well that towards the end of their lives they are allowed to attend full dress evening parties with medals and stars hung round their necks or pinned on their coats. There are also a good many men who are capable of conceiving great ideas and forming vast plans, but who have an unconquerable aversion to anything in the way of a detail. These men generally end their days in obscure asylums, possibly in workhouses, and their ideas, after living for a while as subject matter for jests, perish unrealised. There is also a third kind of man, fortunately a very rare kind. He is capable of conceiving great ideas, and has besides an insatiable delight in working out details. He may end his days as a victorious general, or even as an emperor. If he prefers a less ostentatious kind of reward, he will die a millionaire.
Dr. Lucius O’Grady belonged to this third class. In the face of Doyle’s objection to his expenditure on posters, he was capable of conceiving on the spur of the moment and without previous meditation, the audacious and magnificent plan of bringing the Lord-Lieutenant to Ballymoy and wrestling from a reluctant treasury a sufficient sum of money to build a third pier on the beach below the town. There may have been other men in Ireland capable of making such a plan. There was certainly no one else who would have set himself, as Dr. O’Grady did, with tireless enthusiasm, to work out the details necessary to the plan’s success.
As soon as Doyle left him he mounted his bicycle and rode out to the Greggs’ home. Mr. Gregg, being the District Inspector of Police, was usually a very busy man. But the Government, though a hard task-master in the case of minor officials, does not insist on anyone inspecting or being inspected on Sunday afternoons. Mr. Gregg had taken advantage of the Government’s respect for revealed religion, and had gone out with a fishing rod to catch trout. Mrs. Gregg was at home. Being a bride of not more than three months’ standing she had nothing particular to do, and was yawning rather wearily over the fashion-plates of a ladies’ paper. She seemed unaffectedly glad to see Dr. O’Grady, and at once offered to give him tea. The doctor refused the tea, and plunged into his business.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you’ll have no objection to presenting a bouquet to Lady Chesterton when she comes to Ballymoy?”
“Is she coming?” said Mrs. Gregg. “How splendid!”
Before marrying Mr. Gregg she had lived in a Dublin suburb. Accustomed to the rich and varied life of a metropolis she found Ballymoy a little dull. She recognised Major Kent as “a dear old boy,” but he was quite unexciting. Mrs. Ford, the wife of a rather morose stipendiary magistrate, had severely snubbed Mrs. Gregg. There was no one else, and the gay frocks of Mrs. Gregg’s bridal outfit were wasting their first freshness with hardly an opportunity of being worn.