“I’m not quite sure,” said Mr. Billing, “that my arrangements will allow me——”
“Oh, they will if you squeeze them a bit. Arrangements are extraordinary pliable things if you handle them firmly, and we’d like to have you. A speech from you about the General would be most interesting. It would stimulate the whole population. Wouldn’t it, Major?”
“Good-bye then, for the present,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Come along, Major. By the way, Doyle, if Thady takes a drop too much to drink, and he may, don’t let him start boring Mr. Billing about Home Rule.”
He took Major Kent by the arm and walked off. Until they passed the end of the street and were well out on the lonely road which led to the Major’s house, neither of them spoke. Then the Major broke the silence.
“I hope, O’Grady, that you’re satisfied with that performance.”
“I’m surprised to hear that,” said the Major. “You’ve told the most outrageous lies I ever heard. You’ve—-”
“I gave the only possible explanation of a rather difficult situation.”
“You’ve made a laughing stock of a respectable girl.”
“I’ve given Mary Ellen a great uncle that she ought to be proud to own. That’s not what’s bothering me.”
“That American,” said the doctor. “I don’t at all like the way he’s going on. He’s not by any means a fool——”
“He must be or he wouldn’t have swallowed all those lies you told him in the way he did. How could Mary Ellen possibly be———?”
“That’s just it,” said Dr. O’Grady. “He swallowed what I said far too easily. The situation, owing to Thady Gallagher’s want of presence of mind, was complex, desperately complex. I got out of it as well as any man could, but I don’t deny that the explanation I gave—particularly that part about Mary Ellen being engaged to young Kerrigan, was a bit strained. I expected the American would have shied. But he didn’t. He swallowed it whole without so much as a choke. Now I don’t think that was quite natural. The fact is, Major, I’m uneasy about Billing. It struck me that there was something rather odd in the way he repeated my words about the General being a genuine democrat. He gave me the impression that he was—well, trying to make fools of us.”
“You were certainly trying to make a fool of him.”
“I don’t quite understand his game,” said Dr. O’Grady, “if he has a game. I may be wronging him. He may be simply an idiot, a well-meaning idiot with a craze for statues.”