"Go to the courts, I presume," said the lawyer.
"Oh dear, no! I'll go to no courts, Mr. Curphy. I'll go to the people who have set the courts in motion—which means that I'll go to you and you and you and you. Heaven knows how many of us may be living when that day comes; but as surely as I am, if I find that the promise I made to Mary O'Neill has been a vain one, and that her child is under this woman's control and the subject of a lawsuit about this man's money, and she in her grave, as surely as the Lord God is above us there isn't one soul of you here present who will be alive the following morning."
That seemed to be enough for all of them. Even old Daniel O'Neill (the only man in the house who had an ounce of fight in him) dropped his head back in his chair, with his mouth wide open and his broken teeth showing behind his discoloured lips.
I thought Father Dan would have been waiting for me under the trammon on "the street," but he had gone back to the Presbytery and sent Tommy the Mate to lead me through the mist and the by-lanes to the main road.
The old salt seemed to have a "skute" into the bad business which had brought out the Bishop and the lawyer at that late hour, and on parting from me at the gate of Sunny Lodge he said:
"Lord-a-massy me, what for hasn't ould Tom Dug a fortune coming to him?"
And when I asked him what he would do with a fortune if he had one he answered:
"Do? Have a tunderin' [thundering] good law-shoot and sattle some o' them big fellas."
Going to bed in the "Plough" that night, I had an ugly vision of the scene being enacted in the cottage on the curragh (a scene not without precedent in the history of the world, though the priesthood as a whole is so pure and noble)—the midnight marriage of a man dying in unnatural hatred of his own daughter (and she the sweetest woman in the world) while the priest and the prostitute divided the spoils.
[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]