At this moment the door opened, and Mr. French appeared, and, leaving the old lady to her pipe and the prospect of a glass of whisky, they went back to the inn for luncheon.
The hideous, old-fashioned Irish custom of dinner at four o'clock had been put aside on account of Miss Grimshaw. Seven o'clock was the dinner hour at Drumgool now, and after dinner that night, Effie having departed for bed in charge of Norah, Violet, with a ball of red wool and two long knitting-needles, took her seat at a corner of the fireplace in the sitting-room. The idea of a red knitted petticoat for old Mrs. Moriarty had occurred to her on the way home, and she was putting it now into practice.
French had been rather gloomy on the way home, and at dinner. It was evident that the incident at the meet had hit him hard. Money worries could not depress the light-hearted, easy-going gentleman, who had a soul above money and the small affairs of life. It was the feeling of enmity against himself that cast him out of spirits for the first time in years. For the first time in life he felt the presence, and the influence against him, of the thing we call Fate.
His whole soul, heart, and mind were centred on Garryowen. In Garryowen he felt he had the instrument which would bring him name and fame and fortune. It was no fanciful belief. He knew horses profoundly; here was the thing he had been waiting for all his life, and everything was conspiring to prevent him using it.
First, there was Lewis and his debt—that was bad enough. Second, was the fact that he would have to complete the training of the horse in a hostile country, and that country the Ireland of to-day, a place where law is not and where petty ruffianism has been cultivated as a fine art. With Giveen for a spy on his movements, with a hundred scoundrels ready to do him an injury, and with Lewis only waiting to put out his hand and seize the horse, he was, it must be admitted, in a pretty bad way to the attainment of his desires.
But he had a friend, and as long as a man has a friend, however humble, he is not altogether in the hands of Fate. The girl sitting by the fire, knitting a red petticoat for old Mrs. Moriarty, had been exercising her busy mind for the past few days on the seeming hopelessness of the problem presented to her in French and his affairs. She had inherited a good deal of her father's business sharpness. She was not the niece of Simon Gretry for nothing, and a way out of the difficulty had presented itself before her; at least, she fancied it was a way.
At nine o'clock, after a look round the stables, Mr. French came in, and, sitting down in the arm-chair opposite the girl, opened the Irish Times and began to read it, listlessly skimming the columns without finding anything of interest, moving restlessly in his chair, lighting his pipe and letting it go out again. Miss Grimshaw, without pausing in her rapid knitting or dropping a stitch, watched him.
Then she said, "Do you know I've been thinking?"
"What have you been thinking?"
"That I've found a way out of your difficulty about Garryowen."