Miss Grimshaw had several very good reasons to make her desire seclusion for herself and the family which she had taken under her wing. I say "taken under her wing" advisedly, for since the day of her arrival at Drumgool she had been steadily extending the protection of her practical nature and common sense to her protégés.
In a hundred ways too small for mention in a romance of this description she had interfered in domestic matters. Mrs. Driscoll, for instance, no longer boiled clothes in the soup kettle, prodding them at intervals with the pastry roller, and Norah no longer swept the carpets under the sofas, lit the fires with letters left on the mantel-piece, or emptied pails out of the windows; and these sanitary reforms had been compassed with no loss of goodwill on the part of the reformed towards the reformer.
She had emancipated Effie from her bondage to an imaginary disease, and she had pointed out to French the way he should go, and the methods he should use in carrying out his assault on what, to a lower order of mind than Miss Grimshaw's, would have seemed the impossible.
Common sense of the highest order sometimes allies itself to what common sense of a lower order would deem lunacy. When this alliance takes place, sometimes great and world-shaking events occur.
French had conceived the splendid idea of winning a great English race with an unknown horse in the face of debts, enemies and training disabilities. Miss Grimshaw had, with misgivings enough, brought him the aid of her practical nature. The first move in the game had been made; the knight's gambit had been played; Garryowen had been hopped over three squares and landed in Sussex; nothing threatened him for the moment, and Miss Grimshaw's mind, turned from the big pieces, was now occupied with pawns.
Norah was a pawn. She had a grand-aunt living in Cloyne, and should she forsake The Martens and return, driven by home-sickness, to the roof of her grand-aunt, the game might very easily be lost. Mr. Giveen, who had inklings of French's debt, would discover, by hook or by crook, the Sussex address, and when Lewis' man arrived to find Drumgool empty, the information he would receive from Giveen would be fatal as a loaded gun in the hands of an unerring marksman. Mrs. Driscoll was another pawn in a dangerous position; but the small pieces most engaging the attention of our chess-player at the moment were literally small pieces—half-crowns and shillings.
She had carefully worked out the money problem with Mr. French, and, allowing for everything, and fifty pounds over, to take them back to Ireland, in case of disaster, there was barely three pounds a week left to bring them up to the second week of April.
"Oh, bother the money!" French would say. "It's not the money I'm thinking of."
"Yes, but it's what I'm thinking of. We must be economical. We should have travelled here third-class, not first. You sent that order to Mr. Dashwood's wine merchant for all that champagne and stuff."