The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 19 January 1922, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXXlll.— (Continued.) As the evening wore on, Mat Murrin took furtive op- ; portunities of embracing his various darlings on one lying pretext -or another, and had serious thoughts of writing out his last testament and leaving it behind ..him, until he remarked that that was the only thing he had to leave behind except various bills of sale and paper obligations to the bank. And at last the moment came, in the back shop, for bidding farewell in state to Mrs. Murrin. “You have always been a good wife t*o me,, Aloysia. God bless you!” he said, in his finest manner, kissing her. “Is this true, what I hear, Mat Murrin, that it’s out in the, Rising you’re going?” asked Mrs. Murrin, with astonishing composure under the circumstances. “Well, you know, Aloysia, we’re allin fact, I may say, bound,to lend a hand, don’t you observe? ‘England expects every man,” etcetera —or, rather, not England—may the devil knock the nose off her ! I beg your pardon for indulging in what may seem profane language, Aloysia, on the present occasion; but — ahem ! —in point of fact, good-bye, old woman !” he said, bolting for the door, “Mat,” she said, tenderly, “I’d like to say a word to you, before you go away from me like that, and we can’t speak to our liking here for fear the police would be in on us.”. >"• “Certainly, Aloysia; why not upstairs, darling ” said Mat, who was no more deceived by sweet tranquillity of the wife of his bosom than Head-Constable Mul-D. by the meek looks of the able-bodied penitents trooping into Father Phil’s confessional. “A blowing-up, of course, but we may as well have it over at once,” he said to himself gaily, mounting the stairs three at a bound. “Here, Aloysia?” he proposed, pushing in the door of the drawingroom on # tho first floor. “Higher,” she said; “the people could hoar us from the street.” “By George, it’s going to be a blizzard!” he cried, as he mounted another flight—of stairs more nervously. “‘This will do, at ail events?” he said, throwing open the door of his bedroom, and walking in. “That will do,” said sturdy Aloysia, flinging him forward with a. force that sent him spinning to the further end of the room, slamming the door after her, and turning the key in the lock outside. “Hallo! What is this? Aloysia, here, Aloysia, I say,” cried Mat, when his first stupefaction was over. “‘What does this outrage mean?” “It means that you’ll stay where you are till ’tis safe to let you out,” was the tranquil response, “I’ll break the door. I’ll break the furniture. I’ll set fire to the houseas I’m a living man I will,” he said, delivering desperate kicks on the panel of the door. “If you make any more, noise I’ll call in the police you make any more-noise I’ll call in the police to you,” cried his wife, sternly. “I will, as I’m a living woman, and that’s as good an oath as your own.” A cold perspiration broke out all over the editor; but, after a few desperate runs at the door, without succeeding in bringing it down at the critical moment, he laid down his arms at discretion. He applied his mouth cooingly to the empty key-hole. “Well, but,' 1 Aloysia, dear., this is really ridiculous—it is in the highest degree absurd. Just only listen a moment to reason. My precious ” “Reason!” retorted the indignant voice outside. “You propose to go out to fight the British Empire—you that couldn’t walk to Mass with your corns —you that have a houseful of hungry children that God sent you to provide forand you have the impudence to talk of reason, you miserable object!” Mat threw up his hands in despair, and for a short while silently waited developments, like a deep old fox

sitting on his tail. ■ As soon as he judged that Mrs. Murrin must have departed he crept to the window. It was a back window, fully forty feet above the level of the ground. Desperate thoughts of tying the bedclothes in a rope occurred to him, but, when he looked into the blank abyss underneath, he dismissed these boy burglar’s resources as inventions of the penny novelists. The only gleam of comfort he ecould see in the darkness came through a skylight in the printing-office, whose glass roof lay slightly to his' right in the yard underneath the window. There was light in the printing-office, and the idea of arousing the Staff to the rescue of their Chief began to take possession of him. The situation was an ignominious one; but a charge of cowardice was more ignominious still. The world knew what an unreasonable woman Mrs. Murrin was, and was not quite so well provided with evidence what a hero her husband was. He dropped a halfpenny quietly in the direction of the skylight. It was never heard of more. It probably found its grave in a cesspool close by. This time he determined to try a heavier and more reliable coin. He aimed a penny viciously at the skylight. It had scarcely left his hand when he heard the crash of glass in the roof of the printing-office* and heard at the same moment Noble Nolan’s pious exclamation of astonishment: “Oh, glory be to God!” He immediately thrust his body half out of the window, and began to shout in a heavy stage whisper, making a trumpet .of his hands: “Noble-NolanNoble Nolan, I say! Noble Nolan!” again. “My God, sir, is it yourself?” at last came the weak voice from below, “Where, in the name of God, are you, and what is the matter ?” “Here, at the second-floor bedroom window, locked in by that ridiculous woman. Come up, and terminate the tension of this intolerable situation,” he said, unconsciously lapsing into one of his-own leading articles. “Come up, and unlock the door, like a Christian man.” “Hould on for a minute, sir,” said the voice, and for a short while there was a suspenseful silence;' after which the voice was heard, more cautiously“ Are you there, sir?” “I am; but why the devil are you there and not here?” “Oh, begor, sir, I daren’t. The missis is on the landing with the fire-shovel.” “Noble Nolan,” roared Mat, like a general in the field, “order up the Staff, and let them carry that landing by assault, if necessary; do you hearby assault ? They have my authority. I now issue it as an order to the Staff.” “Begor, sir,” was the apologetic reply, “every man and boy an the Staff is on his way to Coomhola this hour back. The whole country is- out!” “Well,” said Mat, after a few moments of wild recurrence to the rope-of-blankets idea, “I’m pleased to know that the Banner is adequately represented, at all events. Noble Nolan, you can be of some slight assistance to me, without encountering Mrs. Murrin or the fire-iron. I have discovered a ball of twine here on the table—a ball of twine. Do you follow me?” “Indeed I do, sir,” said the gentle foreman, who had followed his master for many a year through graver intricacies than the ball of twine was likely to produce. “Well,” proceeded Mat, “the arrangements up here, if this outrage is to continue, are of a highly inadequate character— short, I’m develish thirsty, and I want a drink. Do you follow me?” “I think I do, sir,” came the answer, more diffidently than ever. Noble Nolan, you were always a decent fellow, though never a good judge of a glass of whisky yourself. Well, now, I want you to go' across the street, to Mr. Tummulty’s public-house, with my compliments, for a bottle of his John Jameson of ’3B, and when I let fall the slight mode of communication the gods have devised for us in growing the hemp that made this ball of twine, you will, with your accustomed fidelity to the best--interests of the Banner, affix the bottle securely to the end thereof, and I will myself perform the remainder of the enterprise. Do you'ob&erve ??’ “There is only one thing more, Noble Nolan,” he said, ten minutes afterwards, after triumphantly hauling in the refreshment. ,1 wish you to convey to the boys my deep indignation that various causes over which I have no control

that, iti fact, the conduct of; a misguided womanprecludes me from having the pleasure of their society in Coomhola; and you will, please, convey, to the general in command my special wish that, on their . capturing the town, their first operation shall be directed to the deliverance of Mat Murrin from this preposterous captivity.” “Now,” he soliloquised, as he pulled out a pocket corkscrew and proceeded to open the bottle, “perhaps, after all, trials like Aloysia are sometimes designed by a merciful Providence for a man’s good. Next to bearing a hand in whatever is going in Coomhola, this isn’t altogether so bad of a cold night for a gentleman on the freezing side of forty.” CHAPTER XXXIV.—THE AMERICAN SHIP. Mr. Fronde, who loves Irish scenery with the same intensity with which he misreads Irish character, has lavished some of his finest art in pen-and-ink pictures of the beautiful promontory which divides Bantry Bay from Kenmare Bay. The backbone of twisted mountains lies along the whole length of the peninsula for thirty miles, like the skeleton of a fallen Titan, from which Dursey Island has got separated like a gigantic toe-joint. To the three chief peaks the poetic Irish gave the names of the Hill of Anger, the Hill of Battle, and the Hill of Weeping. Once a soldier of a surveying party benighted on the bleak top of the Hill of Auger (Cnocdhiad) jokingly remarked that it would bo better christened the Hill of Hunger; and a prosy posterity has ever since seen on the brow of Cnocdhiad, not the storm-clouds of its Irish title, but'the breakfastless private of Engineers, and has agreed to call it Hungry Hill. What a miniature portrait of the two nations! and how like the fate of that other romantic tapering peak over Glengariff, to which the dreamy Celt assigned the name of the Witches’ Hill (Cnocnacailiagh) and some tourist in the wholesale grocery line that of the Sugarloaf! Hastening from the Waterfall through the Wolves’ Glen, Ken Rohan found his mountain pony at the appointed trysting-place near the bridge of Trafrask, and, leaving Bantry Bay behind him, faced for the steep mountain road which climbs straight over the shoulders of the Old Cow Mountain into Glanloch. The stillness of the atmosphere gave place to a subtle, chilly tremor, and as the pony dived deeper into the gloom of the mountains strange lurid tints began to shoot through the dense grey clouds. The short twilight had already set in, and if Ken had not traversed every mile of the mountains by night as well as I>\ day on many a daybreak appointment with the grouse and cock, he might have been daunted by the darkening and apparently inextricable maze of heights and glens that was closing around him. The sun, which was going down behind the crooked back of Slieve Miskish, was stMl shimmering bravely through a tawny gold shower, and lit the strangest shades of pence and lurid red among the stormclouds in the opposite side of the sky, like the reflection of some dull conflagration among the woody recesses of Glanmore. The beautiful glen could still be seen stretched away to the north-east in soft realms of limpid lake and evergreen woods and tenderly circling mountains, like a beautiful maiden in a camp of rough warrior men. On . the horseman’s left hand the small sister glen of Glanbeg— a still more charming, shrinking little rustic beauty—was sinking quite away into the gloom of the angry overhanging mountains between it and the dying sun. The suspenseful stillness of the air began to be broken by a low crooning sound, such as might be emitted by great lonesome mountains in pain. Ken knew the sound as familiarly as if it were part of a local code of signals. The road sank deeper into the long, wild ravine of Clugher, bordered on one side by the giant black escarpments of Hungry on its northern face, and on the other by great naked stone-coffin like piles of rocks, littering the whole bleak line of descent towards Cooiloch Bay, like some uncovered cemetery of dead sons of Anak. ’ The sun’s brief struggle behind Slieve Miskish was already over. A bright gold , scroll of cloud g&amed out for a moment, epitaphlike, over its grave and then, like most florid .epitaphs, v as rubbed out by the heavy, blood-shot thunderclouds that now in all directions began to pour in, rending one another for the dead sun’s inheritance. Suddenly a short

deafening thunder-smash resounded at Ken Rohan’s ear, horrible enough, it seemed, to have cracked the gloomy jagged mass of mountain over his head. The crooning winds appeared to pause for a frightened moment or two to listen. Then the clouds burst, and the winds shrieked, and thunder crashed from height to height, and the road was swallowed up in a miserable black abyss, through which the lightning sported like an imp of darkness, and the whirling rain cut isth icy whips, and a hundred waterfalls, suddenly swollen, dashed towards the roadway through the darkness, with a remorseless hungry roar that was appaling. The ill-defined road-track was not visible for three yards in front; every moment it seemed as if some ferocious torrent were coming to tear it away. An unaccustomed steed Dr horseman might well have quailed in the midst of so hopeless-looking and terrible an outlook. But the pony picked his business-like way through the inspissated gloom and storm, as though the winds and thunderclouds were old travelling companions with whom he had a working understanding not to interfere with one another’s trade upon the road; and Ken found in this grand orchestral war of the mountains an almost exhilarating dramatic overture to the great scenes that were beginning to rush red on his sight. The rain grew colder and more bitter until it changed to volleys of fierce hailstones, and then again into driving cataracts of icy liquid snow, when, yet again, the gale would sweep all before it, and so rage and bluster that the snow itself could scarcely find where to fall. And, now to the awful diapason of the winds began to be added the deep answering roar of the ocean, wher a speck of light from the lighthouse at Inishfarnard, now and again flickering out of the gloom, announced the neighborhood of Cooiloch Bay. The gnome-like threatening masses of mountain impending over the pass of Clugher began to recede; the noise of breakers and their terrible white light mingled more and more with the shrieks and frozen breath of the storm on the defenceless stretches of the road as it wound down to the shore.

(To be continued.)

The principles of social life, laid down by Pope Leo XIII., are still available. They are the only basis upon which peace and order can hope to rear the structure of prosperity and happiness. But the world wants not such principles, for the world is selfish.