I cannot help lingering over him, for he belongs to a race of men who are growing fewer in an age when coldness and correctness of character veil, without in the least diminishing, the essential brutality and savagery of man.
Miss Grimshaw, left to herself, made a tour of the rooms, set Effie some sums to keep her quiet, and then retired into the sitting-room and shut the door.
It was now that the really desperate condition of things that underlay the comedy of Garryowen appeared before her unveiled.
The ruin that those six words have so often postulated, rank, raw, cold, and brutal, rose before her. Horses, cards, dice, wine, tobacco--one's dislike of the Pipers who cry these down is accentuated by the truth that underlies their piping.
They are the prophets of the awful telegram which heralds the misery, the pinching, and the poverty that will grip you and your wife and your children till you are in your coffins. They are the prophets of the white dawn that shines into your rooms at Oxford when the men are gone, shines on the card-strewn floor where, like a fallen house of cards, lies the once fair future of a man. They are the physicians who prognose inefficiency, failure, old-age at forty--mental death.
Effie would have two hundred a year. Nothing could touch that. But what of the jovial French? She knew enough of his financial affairs to know that he would be absolutely and utterly ruined.
Tears welled to her eyes for a moment; then she brushed them away, and her colour heightened. Enthusiasm suddenly filled her; the desperate nature of the adventure appealed to her adventurous soul. Never did a doubter do any great work or carry any high adventure to a successful close. Garryowen would win! She felt that to doubt it would be the act of a traitor, and to believe it would help the event.
Shortly after three the dog-cart hired at the inn for the purpose of bailing out Mr. Piper arrived with Mr. Dashwood and his charge.
Mr. Piper looked literally as though he had been bailed out. The unfortunate man, besides receiving a severe rebuke from the magistrates, had been fined two pounds, which Mr. Dashwood had paid.
In Mr. Piper's morning reflections, conducted in the police cell at Crowsnest, he had recognised his false position, and the uselessness of kicking against the pricks.