“Well and if you are, isn’t it the same with all of us?”
“What I say is this,” said Gallagher, “as long as the people of Ireland is denied the inalienable right of managing their own affairs I’d be opposed to welcoming into our midst the emissaries of Dublin Castle, and I’d like to know, so I would, what the people of this locality will be saying to the man that’s false to his principles and goes back on the dearest aspirations of our hearts?”
He glared quite fiercely while he spoke, but Doyle remained serenely unimpressed.
“Talk sense now, Thady,” he said. “Nobody’ll say a word without it’d be yourself and you making a speech at the time. It’s for the good of the town that we’re getting him down here.”
“What good?” said Gallagher, “tell me that now. What good will come of the like?”
Doyle was unwilling to confide the whole pier scheme to Gallagher. He contented himself with a vague reply.
“There’s many a thing,” he said, “that would be for the good of the town that might be got if it was represented properly to the Lord-Lieutenant.”
“If I thought that,” said Gallagher, “I might——”
He was in a difficult position. He did not want to quarrel with Doyle, who provided him with a good deal of bottled porter, but he did not want to identify himself with a public welcome to the Lord-Lieutenant, because he had hopes of becoming a Member of Parliament. The idea of conferring a benefit on the town attracted him as offering a way out of his difficulty.
“I might———” he repeated slowly. “I wouldn’t say but it’s possible that I might.”