Musgrave knocked the ash off his cigar and gazed reflectively out of the open window.
“Think I have,” he said. “I was walking down Eighth Avenue with him—day he was in town, last month. ‘Hello!’ he says, pulling up suddenly. ‘Here’s somebody I know from my district!’ And, in that happy, casual, easy way he’s got, he introduced me to a female acquaintance of his, who’d just come out of Black’s jewelry store. She was a great big tall dark girl—finest figure of a woman I think I’ve ever seen. Regular whopper—not fat with it, either. Made you think of Boadicea, or Brittania, somehow, to look at her. She didn’t strike me as being a beauty, exactly, but she’d got a nice kind face. Lots of fun in her, too, and a lady, unmistakably. I rather liked her. We stood there chatting a few minutes, and I remember she told me she was in town for a day or two, shopping. Never a peep from that old fox, Ben, though. You’d never have dreamt there was anything doing from the way he acted then. Everything was as casual as you please. Begad! I’ll soak it to him for putting it over on me like this! That’s if it is right,” he added, with a dubious smile. “Somehow, I can’t credit it, though. Why, he’s the very last man I’d have expected to go dangling after a woman!”
“Bet he don’t do much dangling,” remarked the Provost sagely. “Not if I know him. He ain’t that kind. More’n likely it’s the other way round. I’ve known quite a few women get struck on him. Queer beggar! he’s never aloof, rude, or cold, but somehow—he just doesn’t seem to notice ’em at all. P’r’aps that’s what gets ’em. Besides, he’s a proper man to look at, and when he’s penned in a corner with a woman with no chance of escape, he talks in that kind, simple way of his—you know his way, Charley.”
Musgrave nodded.
There was a long silence, the two men puffing thoughtfully at their cigars and gazing with owlish abstraction at each other.
“Didn’t you tell me once that he was engaged to some girl in Jo’burg? When he was with the Chartered Company?” pursued Hopgood.
“Yes,” answered Musgrave moodily, “he was.” He paused, and an unfathomable, far-away look crept into his eyes as he gazed absently across at a window in the opposite block that the last rays of the dying sun transformed into a flaming shield of fire. “Beautiful Irish girl named Eileen Regan. She’d a face like a Madonna, I remember. She was a Roman Catholic, and a very devout one at that. They might have been happy together.... I don’t know. It’s hard to predict how these mixed religions’ll turn out. Poor things never got the chance to see, anyway. For she died—died of enteric, just before the war started.”
Hopgood eyed the other tentatively for a second or two. “This one’s Irish, too, I understand?” he remarked. “Irish-American, anyway.... He seems mighty partial to the Irish. Her name’s O’Malley. They’ll be able to keep a pig and ‘live pretty,’ what?”
And, overcome by the thought, he made a comical grimace of despair and sank back into the depths of his luxurious chair, while the roar of the busy street below floated up to their ears.
Musgrave cleared his throat. “Mother was an Irishwoman,” he said presently. “Probably that accounts for it. She was a Miss Fitzgerald, of Dublin—sister of that brave, splendid chap, Captain Fitzgerald, who was killed along with poor Fred Burnaby and many others of Stewart’s column, when the square was broken in the fight near the wells at Abou Klea, in the Soudan War of ’eighty-four and five.”