The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 20 October 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O'Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXX.—(Continued.) It was a night of miserable discomfort; and as Lord Drumshaughlin drove past the stone catamountains over the lodge-gate, his own hair bristled up catamountain-like '-'. with the prospect of the cheerless reception that awaited •■ him and the fine store of grievances he would thereby .-. accumulate. He had omitted to advise his daughter of ' his coming, lest he should baulk the ends of justice by put- • ting the American Captain on his guard; and now he hugged himself upon the rich materials that a man in a towering rage would find ready to be sworn at in a cold and sleepy Castle at the end of a dismal" journey' in 'the* 1 ' grey winter dawn. It was downright provoking to him to find a light beckoning to him cheerily from the hall; as who should say, "Don't expect to catch us napping, you dear old Lord Catamountain; we shan't let you have so much as a growl or a profane adjective in comfort after your journey; you will find everything as snug as if you had sent on a regiment of flunkeys—your breakfast-kettle simmering on the knob, a fire roaring in your bedroom, your slippers lying in wait on the hearthrug to welcome your gouty old toes in their soft embraces." Nay, the driver had barely tugged at the bell, when Lord Drumshaughlin found Mabel's clinging arms round his neck and her bright hair wooing him in a shower of gold. Which made him a sulkier Roman Father than ever. "Why, Mabel, how is this? You have not been in bed, child " he cried, when he had leisure to examine her pale face in the cheerful light of the breakfast-room. "It was high time to put an end to this kind of thing," ho growled, with knit brows, as though Mabel were a young spendthrift whose nights were habitually passed in the dissipations of the gaming-table and he had just arrived as a grey-haired angel-guardian in the nick of time to avert her ruin. She saw that he was too well contented with his own virtue to be reminded that he had forgotten to take her into his confidence as to his movements, arid had obliged her to remain up all night in miserable uncertainty as to the hour or method of his coming. He took the offensive from the beginning. Poor Mabel's anticipation of an easy victory over Mr. Hans Harman was utterly dispelled in presence of her father's angry and louring face. She trembled like a peculiarly depraved schoolboy under i the master's uplifted rod. All her poor little plots for his comfort were sternly stamped under foot. He insisted that the bedroom fire smoked abominably. He threatened to stamp the breakfast things under foot in a realistic sense. "Nonsense, —you ought to know it's not slops of that kind, but a glass of grog a man wants after such a journey." He expressed a preference for whisky, in the hope ; that none might be at the moment procurable; and when the whisky appeared, he muttered: "Hum,-I daresay that: boy \ has been drinking perhaps that American fellow, Mabel," he cried, turning on her his fiercest scrutiny/, ; ' "I understand that the police have failed to apprehend that man. I trust I may take it for granted that my house is no longer a sanctuary for rebels and assassins—■'*' I hope I may conclude that the man is not concealed anywhere on my premises— any of those old turrets, for instance, or in the stables?" "Papa!" she cried, with a proud flash of indignation, "I have pledged my word!" Then she broke down and cried like the most commonplace young lady going. "Come, come, Mabel, I beg there shall be no scenes —I am not equal to it," he exclaimed, playing the martyr for one pathetic moment in order to heighten the effect of his iron determination. "You see what your folly has brought us to—my house watched by the police like, a coiner's, my family made the subject of gossip, my bailiff murdered, and, perhaps, for all I know, the murderer entertained in my own house by my own daughter." "Father!" she cried, her eyes positively blazing trough . her tears, "you are the only person living, who dare say. that -

\ to me. Captain MacCarthy is as incapable of that horrid deed as —as you are!" "Yes, yes, I am not going to enter into arguments with school-girls. It 'is not with you lam angry, Mabel," he said, magnanimously. "You meant it all for the best, and that kind of thing, and what was a child like you to know of the world? It was my fault, my crime, not to have guided you—not to have enforced my authority and restrained you. I confess my weakness, and I shall not he guilty of it again. I have come to take up possession of my own houseto rule in my own family—and to' do what I like with my own property; and I tell you once for all that it will be my first duty to deliver you from the associations into which your ignorance of the world has betrayed you, and my second duty to purge my estate of this bloodguiltiness, if I have -to clear it of its savages as bare as the day it was created. Now, child, remember I require some sleep—let Harman be informed that he will find me breakfasting at two." And he swept oft* in a blaze of stern resolution and self-sacrifice. Harman found him expanding in all the vainglory of an indolent man who has suddenly asserted his mastery over his own affairs. He had taken the r.eins of a. restive team at a dangerous pass, and he felt all the old teamster's exhilaration in testing the strength of his wrist, and observing how his wild team responded to the crack of his whip. "Things have got into a confoundedly ugly mess all round, Harman," he said, with the air of a Sultan who had taken a sudden fit of industry with his Grand Vizier. "It will require prompt and decisive measures to pull them out again, and I've come over in the mood to do something decisive, I can tell you."

"I should say your lordship, at all times, is nothing if not decisive," said the agent, bowing like a handsome cat licking her velvet paws. "That's-what I'm notnever was till now. You think it's an attack of the gout, Harman, and that it's necessary to say something pleasant. No, sir; it's necessary to say things unpleasant— unpleasantand they shall be said. First, as to this murder of unfortunate Quish Quish was that boy's evil genius, but he was a faithful animal in his way, and I am not going to have a servant of mine butchered at my door by a pack of ungrateful barbarians. They shall have to find the murderer—they shall have to give up the murderer and bring him to the gallows, or they shall sweat for it—every rafter in their murderous roofs shall shake for it, Harman. Do you understand? If the curs will bite the hand that fondled —that gavo them their own way all these years—then," with an oath, "we'll try a cut of the horsewhip on their cowardly carcasses —we'll tickle them — see if the hounds can't be made to squeal, Harman, you and I." "I wouldn't be for doing anything precipitate, my lord," said the velvety agent, rubbing his whiskers reflectively. "Yes, but, by God, that's the very thing I would do and will do," roared Lord Drumshaughlin. "They humbug you, Harman—this splash of bloodshed has unnerved you—has intimidated you, plainly." "At least, I may plead that my nerves have been broken down in your lordship's service—in doing your lordship's work," said the agent, with downcast eyes. "You were always a good fellow, Harman— reliable as the multiplication table, by God," said his lordship, encouragingly, "but it always did strike me you trusted to much to the silent operation of a writ served with a good-humored joke or two — dealing with an imaginative people like the Irish, the grand thing is to do somthing sudden and striking. Let me see. Did I' understand you to mention that this fellow who is arrested is under notice of eviction? Very good, the eviction must bo carried out at —to-morrow morning.- Now, I want to know is there anybody except this American fellow—anybody connected with the estatewhom, you suspect to be the ringleader, the man in the background, in devilry of this kind?" ■!, "Well, ".said the agent, hesitatingly, "young Rohan, the miller's son, is, I should say, the most pestilent young cub in the parish, and there is a writ for possession out against the father, but—— " »'•'.;;•'"Let it d>e executed without a day's delay. Do you • .hear ? ; To-morrow, if you have already given notice at the workhouse." ; • ; : •,

"I was about to mention : to your lordship " "Damn it, Harman, nolle. of your lawyer's quibbles and wrigglings. J insist! I'll superintend the evictions myself, if your stomach is at all qualmish. Now that I think of it, my presence would probably have an excellent moral effect. I'll shoulder a crowbar myself, if you please, but I'm resolved these fellows shall learn that they are dealing with a man who'll stand no nonsense until we've washed the stain of blood off this estate—until we've watered it with the fellows' tears of penance, by Jove!" cried Lord Drumshaughlin, enamored of his own Cromwellian thoroughness. * Mr. Hans Harman listened in an attitude in which he might either have seemed tranquilly self-satisfied or overawed by his principal's imposing cannon smoke and bounce. "There is a difficulty, my lord, although it is one that can 'be got over," he said, quietly, "and that is that the writs for possession in both these cases are in the hands of our friend Dargan, as security for advances of rent mado by him." Lord Drumshaughlin bounded at the name, as if it had been the point of a javelin piercing his flesh. "Then," he cried, furiously, "they will have to be got out of his hands, and not only these writs but this estate will have to be got out of his hands—and, to be plain with you, Harman, it was mainly to shake that fellow's clammy thievish hands off my estate that I have come over—much more than to teach the police how to clear the country of these Irish-American vermin." It was Hans Harman's turn to be startled. His fine eyes shot out from their ambush as if to discover. how much Lord Drumshaughlin had discovered. "Yes," pursued his lordship, fortified by the agent's attitude of attention. "It was the bitterest dose that poverty ever shoved down a man's throat to have to recommend the fellow for the Commission—you ought never to have let things go so far as that, Harman. & But imagine the creature's effrontery, his cold-blooded, patronising, inconceivable insolence—would [you believe it?— Pshaw! no matter!" he said, on second thoughts, as if the blood in his corded veins would have burst, if he were to dwell on the details of Humphrey Dargan's letter of gratitude and its accompanying cheque. "It's enough for you to know that life is not worth living while I feel that fellow's creepy hand upon my throat, and at any cost I'm determined that we shall shake him off, pay him, discharge him, kick him out, damn him— and I, Harman," he added, with a sudden show of coaxing tenderness to the agent, as if conscious that, however proudly he could afford to stand alone in other respects, Hans Harman was an indispensable vadc mecum in the details of finance. "The fact of it is, Harman, your friend Hugg will have to come to the rescue. His rate of interest is stiffer, but at least he does not cross and recross my life every day in the intolerable way in which old Dargan does. Hugg doesn't pester me for the commission of the peace—Hugg does not take me by the arm and invito himself to my dinnertable, and sit on my stomach like a nightmare. You've saved me from that, Harman. Be my fairy godfather once more, there's a good chap-consolidate the mortgages at eight per cent, if necessary— in Hugg—call in the twelve tribes of Judea if you will-but for Heaven's sake place me in a position in which I can present my compliments to Humphrey Dargan in just three unmanacled sentences."

“Tins, my lord, is a grave matter,” said the agent shaking his head portentously, “and I am grieved that you have formed so rooted an ill-opinion of Humphrey Dargan. His incumbrance tots up to fifty-five thousand, with three gales of interest—the terms, too, very advantageous, and I need hardly tell you that the present moment, with the bailiff’s corpse still unburied on our hands, would he an unfortunate one to go into the market for so enormous an operation,” (( Dord Drumshaughlin made a gesture of impatience. “I beg you will step down out of the pulpit, Harman,” he said, “and tell me how we are to kick the gombeenman off my premises.” . “For one moment, bear with me,” continued Harman with quiet decision. “I grant your lordship Dargan is a preposterous animal when he struts in peacock’s feathers —though I’m bound to say , it’s that ridiculous wife bf his

who keeps nagging him' into most of his follies; but, admitting that he would • melt down a pretty , heap $f his sovereigns for a gilt title, ,or an arrflchair in the Club, or -a. nod from, yonr lordship, is that so Unpardonable an ambition in the eyes of . a man—if your lordship seeks my advice, you must r let me give : it ■ plainly of a man who has more cheap titles and nods to dispose of than sovereigns? Nods are an easier source of revenue than rents. You will say it is irksome to give Humphrey Dargan two fingers in public. No doubt but it is less irksome than having your bailiffs shot through the lungs. Both are incidents of Irish landed property. Where’s the objection to levying a small rent off a gombeen-man’s vanity, if you see none to levying it off Meehul’s reclaimed rocks at Cnoeaunacurraghcooish ? Both are your rights, your royalties,- your, flotsam and jetsah, like the seaweed that drifts in on your foreshore. Perhaps you scruple giving a few snuffy old Grand Llamas like Admiral Ffrench a gentleman from a pawn-office as a. colleague oil the judicial bench? Pshaw! Admiral Ffrench can afford to be worshipped in his old family coach and fling bribes to his’tenantsthere’s not an acre .of Castle Ffrench under mortgage—simply because his grandfather had the sense to dispose of his borough on first-rate terms to Castlereagh; while your lordship is struggling in the fetters of three generations of incumbrancers in consequence of your grandfather’s absurd objections to the Act of Union. Your lordship would be . only avenging the honor of your family by. reminding men who have the blood-money of an Irish Parliament in th,eir pockets that they’d have to accept a gentry of gombeen-men with their bargain,”

“I presume it is to your acquaintance with Dargan we are indebted for this vulgarity,” said Lord Drumshaughlin, with a slight shudder of disgust.

“An acquaintance formed in negotiating matters of more interest to your lordship than to me,” retorted the agent, bowing coolly.

“Eh? What? Why this is insolence!” roared' his lordship. “Stop!— you hear me, damn you?— Stop\” “That is precisely what I can not do, my lord,. until I have given you the advice and tne warning you have yourself invited,” said the agent, whose cheeks were a little paler than usual, but who spoke with the air of authoritative respect of a nurse dealing with a fractious high-born baby. “If Dargan’s birth and manners have become insupportable to you, the first honorable shape criticism ought to take, obviously, would be to pay him his debt. That I take to be the upshot of your lordship’s proposal just now, and of your lordship’s natural impatience at this moment with my slow-witted method of coming to business. Well, -the time has come, to tell your lordship candidly—from my knowledge ,of the estate and of your lordship’s affairs (and I am not sure that I know all) —to shake off Dargan at the present stage of affairs would involve an operation which is impracticableimpossible.” . ‘ "

(To be continued.) - . ' —<&o The heart is the jewel which God covets for His crown and if the heart, which we do not see, is better than the actions we see, God be. praised, for then the world• is a trifle less dismal than" it seems,— Faber.