Love hates practical people, so does the spirit of Ireland. The spirit of Ireland had given Mr Boxall a bang on the head with a soot bag, and Love had locked him up in his room; and, being a practical man without a grain of humour in his mass, he could not see the joke, or take the hint.
Take the hint—ah! what a lot of philosophy lies in those three words! Watch a French punter at Monte Carlo: fortune declares against him, and he takes the hint and stops; your stolid Englishman does not even see the hint: he takes it as a personal insult, goes on, and gets broken.
Mr Boxall did not even see the hint, and, here, let me point out to the unintelligent reader that, perhaps symbolism rather than low comedy is served by the presence—and sometimes absence—of Mr Boxall’s glass eye in this book.
Whilst he was finishing his letters, he could hear an indistinct murmuring of voices from the stable-yard below. It was Moriarty discoursing on cluricaunes. He heard the yell emitted by Micky Mooney on being kicked off the bucket by Larry Lyburn, and the subsequent bellowings and blubberings of that seer. He would have put his head out of the window to enquire the meaning of it, but for ocular reasons.
“D—d savages!” said Mr Boxall. He had placed a muffler round his neck for the sake of appearances, should any other member of the household call upon him to enquire after his health. No one came, however. Uncle Molyneux had too much dread of influenza, and, as for Dicky Fanshawe, he was busy in other directions.
At five o’clock a servant brought up tea, which was placed, by direction of the power inside, on the mat before the bedroom door. When the servant had withdrawn, the invalid, opening the door cautiously, fetched in the tray.
Mr Boxall did not keep a man. Though he had several thousand a year and a tin mine, he was a careful person, who turned a penny twice over before he parted with it, and then, as often as not, put it back in his pocket; yet, though miserly in small things, he gave considerably to well-organised charities, and he had been known to commit quite unexpected and kindly acts.
He was in fact, an excellent citizen, but he was a man utterly without a sense of humour, the poetry of life was for him not; and, though he had been known to utter noises indicative of mirth at parliamentary dinners, Laughter, that happy sprite, never sat upon his lips.
One might imagine stiff and starched individuals of this description incapable of romantic attachment; unfortunately they are not. They enter the lists of love, and they go to the encounter heavily armed.
A man who is able to hurl a tin mine at your head is not to be despised. Adonis himself would stand a poor chance nowadays against a man armed with great blocks of London North Western and other railway shares.