“Why does he do that?” Malooney whispered. Malooney has a singularly hearty whisper.
Dick and I got the women and children out of the room as quickly as we could, but of course Veronica managed to tumble over something on the way—Veronica would find something to tumble over in the desert of Sahara; and a few days later I overheard expressions, scorching their way through the nursery door, that made my hair rise up. I entered, and found Veronica standing on the table. Jumbo was sitting upon the music-stool. The poor dog himself was looking scared, though he must have heard a bit of language in his time, one way and another.
“Veronica,” I said, “are you not ashamed of yourself? You wicked child, how dare you—”
“It’s all right,” said Veronica. “I don’t really mean any harm. He’s a sailor, and I have to talk to him like that, else he don’t know he’s being talked to.”
I pay hard-working, conscientious ladies to teach this child things right and proper for her to know. They tell her clever things that Julius Cæsar said; observations made by Marcus Aurelius that, pondered over, might help her to become a beautiful character. She complains that it produces a strange buzzy feeling in her head; and her mother argues that perhaps her brain is of the creative order, not intended to remember much—thinks that perhaps she is going to be something. A good round-dozen oaths the Captain must have let fly before Dick and I succeeded in rolling her out of the room. She had only heard them once, yet, so far as I could judge, she had got them letter perfect.
The Captain, now no longer under the necessity of employing all his energies to suppress his natural instincts, gradually recovered form, and eventually the game stood at one hundred and forty-nine all, Malooney to play. The Captain had left the balls in a position that would have disheartened any other opponent than Malooney. To any other opponent than Malooney the Captain would have offered irritating sympathy. “Afraid the balls are not rolling well for you to-night,” the Captain would have said; or, “Sorry, sir, I don’t seem to have left you very much.” To-night the Captain wasn’t feeling playful.
“Well, if he scores off that!” said Dick.
“Short of locking up the balls and turning out the lights, I don’t myself see how one is going to stop him,” sighed the Captain.
The Captain’s ball was in hand. Malooney went for the red and hit—perhaps it would be more correct to say, frightened—it into a pocket. Malooney’s ball, with the table to itself, then gave a solo performance, and ended up by breaking a window. It was what the lawyers call a nice point. What was the effect upon the score?
Malooney argued that, seeing he had pocketed the red before his own ball left the table, his three should be counted first, and that therefore he had won. Dick maintained that a ball that had ended up in a flower-bed couldn’t be deemed to have scored anything. The Captain declined to assist. He said that, although he had been playing billiards for upwards of forty years, the incident was new to him. My own feeling was that of thankfulness that we had got through the game without anybody being really injured. We agreed that the person to decide the point would be the editor of The Field.