“And she is always ready to be a martyr, and to make martyrs of other people. Would it be rude to ask you, Princess, to suggest to her that she has cultivated heroism long enough, and that the softer virtues of daily life might have a turn with advantage?”
“Our life in Scythia may not have been the best school for her,” said the Princess, thoughtfully. “We Evangelicals have always been set apart—laughed at even when we were not persecuted, and such an experience fortifies one strongly against thinking too much of the opinion of others. It also develops, as you imply, one set of qualities rather at the expense of another set. And then she has that Irish faculty of concentration—blind devotion to an idea I have heard it called; but it need not necessarily be blind.”
“Irish?” Cyril raised his eyebrows. “I should have said that I never met any one more unlike the typical Irish girl than Miss O’Malachy. Her brother, too, was extremely un-Hibernian.”
“Ah, that is because you are thinking of the ordinary Irish type—Colonel O’Malachy’s, for instance. Gay, what you call a ‘good fellow,’ always ready for a frolic, possessing a keen sense of the ridiculous. But there is also another kind of Irishmen altogether. They have no sense of humour, or they would not preach under the protection of the police to howling mobs, or sacrifice their lives and their honour to some wrong-headed or hopeless cause. Nadia and her brother belong to this type, so do many conspirators, and not a few martyrs.”
“This is rather a poor look-out for Caerleon,” said Cyril.
“I don’t think so. Nadia has learnt a lesson from the past month; she is humbled, and she will have less confidence in her own judgment from henceforth. She has seen to-day something of your brother’s true character, and the better she knows him, the more she will trust him. Then, they will not have the trial and temptation of idleness, for both of them are born workers. I look to see them do great things for God and His poor on your brother’s estates in the provinces. They will strengthen each other’s hands in the good work, and the opposition which they will encounter from the world will bind them more closely together at home.”
“I suppose they will go in for closing all the public-houses on the estate, and that sort of thing,” groaned Cyril. “By the bye, there was part of Stefanovics’s letter that I didn’t read. I didn’t want to cast a damp over their first evening. King Otto Georg has repealed Caerleon’s liquor law.”
“Oh, no!” cried the Princess.
“He has, indeed. It seems that when the people found out that Caerleon wasn’t killed, they wanted to have him back again, and there were riots in several places. The King and Drakovics were concerting measures for the maintenance of peace, when Drakovics was seized with a bright idea. ‘Repeal the liquor law,’ he said. ‘That will please the people, and release a sum of money, which you can apply to the relief of taxation.’ They were in a pretty tight place, so the King jumped at the idea, and the law was repealed just a week ago. Stefanovics says that the Carlinists were all going about in austere dignity, like so many Girondins, each man wearing his temperance medal with Caerleon’s head on it at his button-hole, and lamenting the virtues of the late reign, but the mass of the people accepted the bribe like a shot. There were no more Carlinist riots, and now any one can get drunk that likes.”
“It is a sad step backwards,” murmured the Princess.