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–That’s right, Father, Mr Collopy said loudly. Encourage him. Give your blessing to the badness that’s in him. By damn but I’ll have a word with Brother Cruppy in Westland Row. I’ll tell him—

He broke off here and we all sat still. It came again, a faint cry from Mrs Crotty’s room.

–Is Father Fahrt there?

Mr Collopy got up and hurried in, closing the door tight.

–Ah, please God there is nothing wrong, Father Fahrt said softly.

We sat in silence, looking at each other. After some minutes Mr Collopy reappeared.

–She would like to see you, Father, he said in a strange low voice.

–Of course, the priest said rising.

He gently went into where I knew only a candle served. Mr Collopy slumped back into his chair, pre-occupied, quite unaware of ourselves at the table. Mechanically he sipped his drink, staring at the gleam of the fire through the bars of the range. The brother nudged me and rolled his eyes.

–Ah dear O, Mr Collopy murmured sadly.

He poured another drink into his glass, nor did he forget Father Fahrt.

–We know not the day … nor the hour. All things come to him who waits. It’s the very divil.

Again he slumped into silence, and for what seemed a long, long time there was no sound at all except that of the alarm clock above the range, which we began to hear for the first time. In the end Father Fahrt came quietly from the room and sat down.

–I am very pleased, Collopy, he said.

Mr Collopy looked at him anxiously.

–Was it, he asked, was it …?

–She is at peace. Her little harmless account is clear. Here we see God’s grace working. She is at peace. She was smiling when I left her. The poor thing is very ill.

–You … did the needful?

–Surely. A sweet, spiritual safeguard is not another name for death. Often it means a miraculous recovery. I know of many cases.

The brother spoke.

–Should I go for Dr Blennerhassett?

–No, no, Mr Collopy said. He is due to call tonight anyway.

–Let us not be presumptuous, Collopy, Father Fahrt said gently. We do not know God’s ways. She may be on her feet again in two weeks. We should pray.

But in four days Mrs Crotty was dead.

8

ABOUT the time of Mrs Crotty’s death, the brother’s ‘business’ had grown to a surprising size. He had got a box—fitly enough, a soap-box—from Davies the grocers, and went down to the hall every morning very early to collect the little avalanche of letters awaiting him there before they should come to the notice of Mr Collopy. Still using our home address, he had become, in addition to Professor Latimer Dodds, The Excelsior Turf Bureau operated, I suspect, on the old system of dividing clients into groups equal to the number of runners in a given race, and sending a different horse with any chance to each group. No matter which horse won, a group of clients would have backed it, and one of the brother’s rules of business was that a winning client should send him the odds to five shillings. He was by now smoking openly in the house and several times I saw him coming out of or going into a public house, usually with a rather down-at-heel character. He had money to spend.

He also operated the Zenith School of Journalism, which claimed to be able to explain how to make a fortune with the pen in twelve ‘clear, analytical, precise and unparagoned lessons’. As well he was trying to flood Britain with a treatise on cage-birds, published by the Simplex Nature Press, which also issued a Guide to Gardening, both works obviously composed of material looted from books in the National Library. He had put away his little press and now had printing done by an impoverished back-lane man with some small semblance of machinery. He once asked me to get stamps for him, giving me two pounds; this gives some idea of the volume of his correspondence.

He seemed in a bad temper the evening the remains of Mrs Crotty were brought to the church at Haddington Road; he did not come home afterwards but walked off without a word, possibly to visit a public house. Next morning dawned dark, forbidding and very wet, suitable