The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 18 November 1920, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER X.—(Continued). Pondering which problem, he lit a cigar, waved off an. officious cabby, and walked home in the moonlight. Three or four nights afterwards, walking home t again in the company of the moon and his cigar, Plynlymmon had a new and more incredible element of complication to give him pause: ° The Mild Irish Girl flying from London! —not a dozen piettier girls in the lotand in the very fruittime of the season—six good weeks left—the weeks of moonlit gardens, whispering walks—the St. Bartholomew of bachelors. Bah! don t tell me! No woman ever fled ftom it 'without a bruise somewhere. But where? or how? or what the deuce do all these people mean with their masques and mystery plays? First the mother then a Man in the Iron Mask Harry—and now this unaccountable daughter— the family is as full of mysteries as Prospero’s Isle! Upon my conscience, I was never in my life so provokingly out of the know.” Young Neville heard the news at the Chrysanthemum, where ho was perspiring over the composition of a letter of three lines to his stud-groom. “Fact. The Wild Irish Girl’s bolted,” said Mortlake, whoso function in life it was to circulate as a sort of stoppress edition of all such items of intelligence. “You don’t; say!—by Jove!” exclaimed Lord Amaranth, who represented the buying public of the early and exclusive newsmen. “Not gone,” said another. “Mortla-ke’s wrong, as usual. Only going—under a vow to bury herself in some Irish bog or other, to teach a hobbledehoy brother of hers pothooks—such a shame! —the law ought to forbid it; — as bad as burying herself alive in a convent, every bit.” “A convent it is to —one under the rule of the Abbey of Theleme,” grinned Mortlake, with an evil sneer. “Bet my hat nobody tells who the fellow- is, except myself? And I can only guess.” “Mortlake, you will die of cancer of the tongue.” “Don’t you think you had better look to your own symptoms of softening of the brain, old fellow?” * “Why did fellows turn the head of that girl?” asked Lord Amaranth, pettishly pulling flakes off his cigar, as one who had, somehow, been treated badly in the matter. “Do you know, I always thought the mother was immensely the finer woman of the two? 1 could never understand those wild Irish ways of the girl—a man could never bo sure what they meant.” “You can be sure what they mean now,” said Mortlake, emboldened by Lord Amaranth’s pique. “It is always the way with these wild people. The love of the beautiful savage is all very well for a time —it begins like a page of ‘Hiawatha,’ and ends by an elopement with the junior footman.” “Neville has overheard you. He’ll smash your face,” said somebody. He had, indeed, overheard a few- vital words of the conversation; but he was not thinking of Mortlake. Instead of smashing Mortlake’s face, he got up, looking straight before him, and walked out of the room, leaving the dabbled page behind him on which he had scrawled: “Ohuddly, the* Vet, thinks that instead of the steel balls ”

He went out into St. James’s Street as dizzy as a man who had just suffered sunstroke, and with no more notion of where he was going than one in delirium has of his destination when he is being whirled through endless galleries of grinning human heads. His legs walked away with him to Rashleigh Street by an independent mechanism of their own. Ten thousand lovers have done the like before him, and never once asked themselves what brought them there, or found it dull out on the comfortless flags, with nothing but sooty brick walls to stare at, except two lighted windows which, for all he knew, illuminated Mrs. MacAnaspie at her evening meal of tea and shrimps. But love, if a hard taskmaster, can pay. his slaves with all sorts of pretty, cheating fairy gold. Neville, who was not in ordinary a man of imagination, could see through the thick walls and the dingily-illumined curtains, as plainly as if he saw with mortal eyes, a rosy vision of beauty, with unconquered dark-blue eyes, and imperial diadem of hair, fleeing, fleeing far from him into space, and leaving only a faint trail of perfumed light in the

“world behind her. Still he did so burn> to see her just ; once ;more with corporeal e£es —if even Harry, swag-' gering home from the Golden ‘Shades music-hall, ould only turn up, what a. joy it would be! Nay, he once conceived a- wild thought of knocking at . the door, and then running to hide, in the belief that merely seeing the door open could not be without .-its consolations. Nobody and nothing appeared, however, until a policeman as dreamy as himself knocked up against him with the sensation of having knocked up against a lamp-post. Luckier than most lovers in such cases, his devotions were not, as it happened, directed to the wrong address. Inside the pall-like curtains of the lighted windows, the rosy vision was in very truth glowing by Lord Drumshaughlin’s side, or, to be accurate, was seated on a footstool at his knee, while lleggy Neville and’ the policeman were begging one another’s pardon. The roses had, indeed, faded since, we last saw Miss AYestropp in that faint pink ball-dress which covered her like a beautiful blush. There were dark suggestions under her eyes, and white Suggestions about her cheeks, of anxious unrestful nights her hair tumbled in shining cascades around her shoulders, and her little hand was laid pleadingly upon her father’s. She -was justifying, ,as she had been justifying, oh! so many weary times during the last three days, to him and to herself, the determination which had caused Mr. Mortlake’s cancerous tongue to wag. She pleaded under the disadvantage that the very looks and caresses, which, upon any other point,- would have had an easy victory, did but aggravate intolerably ' the anguish, the incredibility of her present caprice. Briefly, she had come to the determination that, as Harry could remain no longer in London, and had lost all hope of employment through the medium of Mr. Jelliland, she would herself go back with him to Drumshaughlin, and try what she could do to save him. The monks all tell us that the postulant s first day of loneliness in his narrow cell is one of miserable doubts whether he altogether knew his own mind when he fled the gladsome world. Such had been Mabel Westropp’s lonely conflict during these last bitter nights and days in the torture-chamber in which her own resolution had immured her. Did she really what she was doing in turning her back on London? There were a dozen young girls of her season who outshone her in classic perfection of form and distinction of manner; but there was not one on whom Society was readier to lavish the adoration reserved for the chosen ones to whom, like the Mexicans of old, it offers a year or two of divine honors before immolating .them. She was too young to understand that it was the faint sensuous fumes of worship which made the air of ball-rooms so subtly sweet; she enjoyed it all as naturally as a sensitive flower opens its petals to the sunshine. But she did enjoy it with the simple ardor of a girl for whom the bright paradise of youth was opening in all its freshness and springtime revelry, and who had boundless store of health and joyousness and honesty of heart to find in waltzes, operas, and pretty frocks the materials of immeasurable, interest, cdorv and delight. She had sipped these pleasures with a freeborn heartiness which had sometimes caused the double-barrelled eye-glasses of the Lady Dankroses to tremble with horror; in mere wilfulness and caprice, it seemed; and now, to indulge what seemed no better than caprice, of a newer and more outrageous fashion, she, who •had denied herself nothing, was about to deny herself everything. Was the step she was about to take likely to be of . service to anybody ? What real hope could there W for a young gentleman who made a confidant of Mils _, the bailiff? Would he not rather drag her down with him into the abysmal meanness and stagnation of We m an Irish country town?—into the mosquito-spites of Miss Harman’s archery club, or into Miss Deborah' Harman s plans for arguing hungry little Papists out of then-, do - Satie errors with a soup-ladle?. Was even her motive an unmixedly good one? Was she ” snirit kept asking her tortured soul—was she not adhcr iSg to her resolution mainly because in a Quixotic momeii she had formed it, and because she found more in being wilful than an being right. Had not the veil storm which her determination brought about her, a considerable influence in making that determination unshakable? was ever so much truth in these self-reproaches; for, like most young ladies who had enjoyed a fathei s idolatry without a mother’s counsel she was not always unite sure where duty ended and caprice began. But clear amidst all -these swamps and shifting mists * ofdon there stood out ineffaceably that lonely fig* i elected brother, with the vacant eyes and dishevelled hair, moping away his friendless youth in that gloomy sepulchi of a Castle; —picking up the poorest crumbs of human friendship -in the stables .and the public-house, while she

was basking in the glow of London drawing-rooms, t sipping the honey of men’s ' Vows;'' Whenever his image came back upon her mind ;—t-Harry, with whom she had first dared the ghost of mad Dick Warbro in the Castle cellars, with whom she had first climbed the breezy heights of Hungry for the white heather, and heard the waterfall dash down to its grave in the Wolves’ Glenshe had no more doubt what was her, duty than if she saw a child on the edge of the waterfall in Coomnaguira, walking blindfolded. Mabel, though she. was two years younger than Harry, and though he had borne her in his strong arms for a considerable portion: of that first ascent of Hungry Mountain, regarded him irresistibly in the light of a child and who could doubt that he stood on the brink of the terrible white abyss—if, haply, he ; was not already over it? But there was more than that. Plynlymmon was not wholly astray in his cynical surmise of “a bruise somewhere.” Harry’s appearance in London, and the awful gulf it had revealed in the household, had set Mabel’s thoughts travelling in regions of vague, feverish terror, in which she cried and strained for a mother’s strengthening arm with the longing of a sick child. Some gossamer, chilly shadow began to float between her and all this ballroom radiance; some impalpable* oppressive, sense of discomfort which manifested itself in a certain awe of those cold, stately, perfect dames, beside whom she began to feel something of the shrinking of an overrated country coquette. Boor Peggy Neville’s luckless declaration of love somehow augmented her unintelligible and unconquerable self-distrustaugmented, above all, her wild lonely aching for a mother’s sheltering arm and divining soui. Her feeling upon this score was not so much thought, as shadowy, formless impression; but it was an impression strong enough to bring back the breath of the pure free bills of Beam, smelling sweeter than all the delicate pastilles and essences of Mayfair. Also, her want of a motherly confidante had given to her sympathies a freer range than is usual with young beauties whose first Court costume was hardly yet tost. Her highest dream of happiness was making others happy; and inathe limitless sunheat of her own bright nature she could not see why all the world might not be steeped in the same joyous, tender hopeful sun-bath, and sing from soul to soul, and from creature to Creator, like the morning stars. -Perhaps, it was visiting that one lowly spot in her own heart that gave her so keen a perception of how much loveableness and how little love the great, dark, suffering, indelibly angelic human heart was composed. With a vague, girlish zeal, she stormed against the heartless, self-glorifying league of two against the world, which cheats the world of woman’s unsunned treasures of human sympathy in the name of Love; she felt a certain guilty tremor run through all her ball-room joys whenever she thought “what was this among so many”—what a speck of costly, selfish brightness was this amidst the glooms and despairs of London; and I am afraid Lady Dankrose would give up all Tingering hope of regeneration for a young lady who would dream now and again of some new miracle of the loaves and fishes which would make the ball-room walls expand, until all the sons and daughters of men were gathered into its golden glow, where there should be ices, and waltzes, and love-whispers, and divine music for all, and pinched cheeks and lacerated hearts no more under the sun. Such was the tangle of half-formed thoughts out of which poor Mabel’s throbbing little heart had to evolve some plan for beginning her regeneration of the world by leaving father and mother to their o\} - n devices in the very crisis of a triumphant London season. The old man at first stormed and raged like a maniac when his daughter broke the news to him. “You shan’t! by God, you shan’t! he roared in his rage. “You are mad. I forbid it. Not another word. The. excitement plunged him into a genuine nervous fever, which left nothing behind the next day except depression. “You want to kill me,” he cried complainingly. “I’m an old man, Mabel. Don’t go and take the light of my life away with you.” There was a tear in his eye. The blow had actually struck water from a heart which self-in-dulgence had all but turned to stone.

“But, papa, why should you not come with us?” “I!—leave London!” He started back under a new terrorhis every tendril and tentacle had got gripped into the easy, lazy, luxuriant life of an elderly London clubbeau, like some ancient mossy parasite clinging around a deciduous tree, and sucking its juices; and here was a hatchet lifted to strike away his tenacious hold of the associations which furnished him with the sap of life, and fling him, a hacked and withered old creeper, on the ground to go in search of something new to cling to. He could scarcely believe his ears. “DrumsliaughUn can be made a jolly place enough

for the autumn, I am sure. • We should get yon up your - billiard-room in the Warbro Toweryou should have your sessions and your grand jurywhy not a harvest-home? The grouse-mountains are the best in ' the county, and then there would be the fox-hunting. ' It is fso long since you had a real gallop, papa. . One goes in the Park as the circus horses do.” t “I do not want a gallop, child,” cried Lord Drumshaughlin snappishly. He was . alarmed beyond measure to find himself suddenly put upon the defensive ‘ by this savage proposal to tear him from his rooted London ties and cast him shuddering into an Irish bog. To be deprived of Mabel was a terrific blow, but to be cast out of London was quit© a -new fiendish jest of fate which almost took his breath away. “There ahem! various reasons—decisive" reasons —why I cannot. live in Ireland.” “Mr. Harman’s ghost stories. - Papa, you are not afraid of ghosts—not afraid of anything,” she said proudly. ' Lord Drumshaughlin frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous, child- Hans Harman is one of the most cool-headed men in the country and he has warned me repeatedly that my life would not be worth twenty-four hours’ purchase in Drumshaughlin without police protection.” . ‘‘Then I really think they ought to shoot himself, for, if anyone deserves it, I am sure it is not my dear old pappy.” Lord Drumshaughlin felt perplexed and angry. He was really an unpopular landlord, as men who stand between hungry people and a full meal will be; and, besides the chance that his presence in Ireland might charge a blunderbuss against his life, there was the still more formidable certainty that it would stir a battalion of sleeping Irish creditors into activity. He was no more afraid of a bullet now than he was when he saw the flash of Antonaccio’s pistol that night in the hotel in the Rue de la Paix. What he shrank from was not the danger, but the discomfort of being paragraphed in the newspapers, of having armed policemen about him instead of his softfooted valet, of being obliged to keep an eye to his revolver instead of sunning himself in peace at his club windows. (To be continued.)