The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 9 March 1922, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXXVl.—(Continued.) " It was characteristic of the young philosopher of La Mere Medecine that, though the letter was as a thick black curtain falling upon all the stage-glory of the career he had been promising himself, he nevertheless put the crisp bank-note in his pocket along with the AttorneyGeneral s, and, by the time he felt the fresh air blowing on his temples again, was half inclined to think the banknote the most important part of the communication. Ten pounds plus youth was a great deal of present money; and as for the remote future beyond the ground covered by that dazzling quantity of silver and gold, does the butterfly perched on a luscious summer flower ruffle his pretty wings about equinoctial gales to come ? Dublin was large, and must have more brilliant corners than its workhouses for men of parts; and in the meanwhile his ten pounds spread out into an obsequious army of shillings and half-crowns in silver uniforms, obligingly offering to show him the town. Those dusky Irish-American soldiers he had met in the dingy hotel were capital company to begin with; and the faithless rogue had already remarked that the little girl behind the bar had an uncommonly wicked pair of merry brown eyes and seemed not altogether indisposed to use them. In the airy content of thoughts like these he floated across the frowsy courtyard of the Castle, whose walls of dingy blood-colored bricK, coated with the grimy sweat of ages, habitually suggested the exhalations of an evil conscience in respect of deeds done within. Passing under an arch into the Lower Castle Yard, the prancing of cavalry horses and the hoarse sound of an agitated crowd in motion roused him to the fact that something unusual was astir. The Lower Castle Yard was filled with troops and policemen. A troop of hussars with drawn sabres were keeping back a swaying crowd by backing their horses gently amongst them. Presently a great roar of voices was heard outside and two great prison vans surrounded by mounted constables dashed into the courtyard. A broken multitude surged in after them cheering wildly. The hussars, who had faced around, received a. hoarse order, and set their horses and sabres in motion, upon which the rush forward became a rush backward, and the cheers changed into the groans and curses of men slashed at with naked swords, trampled under the hoofs of horses or trampling over one another’s bodies.

“What is it?” asked Jack of a man standing near him.

“Thim’s the Fenian prisoners that was took last night,” was the reply.

Harold looked at him inquiringly.

“What, you didn’t look at the papers to-day?” said Madden the detective, scanning his face slyly. “They were all grabbed at the Bull in the middle of the night—lß American officers and the whole Directory in session—so they says. ’Twas the mischief of a haul, wasn’t it?”

The Bull was the dingy hotel in the decaying street. It did not tax Madden’s keenness much to note what a deadly white crept over the gay French face.

“And—what is going on now?”

“Luk it here —they’re bringing ’em up at the Po-lis Office for examination,” said the detective.

A sudden sense of desolation struck upon Jack Harold’s heart. Ho felt himself a stranger in the great city. The arrests had deprived him of all his friends at a swoop. They had, at the same time, brought home to him a sharp sense of personal danger. The gloomy stone-paved streets were now to him simply so many corridors of a prison, of which the policemen at the street-corners were the warders. He crept home to his lodgings in a dirty brick street on the northern side of the river, oppressed with a nervous discomfort near the shoulder, as if a heavy hand were going to be laid there. But what to do next? He paced up and down the narrow room till it became a stifling dungeon, till the bed with its yellow counterpane grew in the foggy twilight into the likeness of a coffin, till a man work-

iug in his shirt-sleeves in another grimy brick dungeon over the way seemed to be cutting his throat, and the bell of the coal-cart rumbling in the street below sounded horrible as a passing knell. There are natures, like the sun’s, that from their own stores of central heat give out more than they receive. There are others, like the moon’s, which depend upon light from outside for their brilliancy. Harold was one of the weaker luminaries. He had little of those reserves of inborn faith and principle which make your sun-gods glow' whether the winds blow high or low. Ho would warm at any bright bodybe it wit, wine, music, woman, a good dinner, or even a new thing in neckties; but some external brightness had to shine on him or lie was in dead darkness. A terrible craving for this missing sunshine began to attack his soul. It developed in a way that he had never experienced before, in a way that perturbed him, even while its novelty fascinated him. It was the first time his thoughts had ever dwelt on drink for drink’s sake. It was the first time also that he formed a deliberate preference for whisky. Its brutal strength used to repel him. Now lie felt as if no less potent spirit could drive out the cold and gloom that were settling down within him. Nevertheless, it was with a horrid feeling of self-contempt he gave his old charwoman the commission, and with it the Attorney-General’s bank-note. Mrs. Mullowney was accustomed to take her posset in a small way herself at the latter end of a sea-coal fire-; but, having boys of her own stretching on in their teens, the honest old lady was naturally disgusted at the youthful depravity that could require a whisky-bottle all to its own cheek in its own clandestine chamber; and to the indignation thus aroused were added unpleasant suspicious both as to the genuineness of the Bank of England note and as to the source it came from. “What is the. world coming to at all, at all,” she mumbled to herself, “when a shaver like that goes on a ba-a-tter of drink just as grand as if he was the fa-a-ther of a fam’ly? I humbly hopes there’s uawthin’ quare about that note, young man?” she asked him plump. Which was a great relief to Jack Harold; for, although he could be a sufficiently cheeky youth upon occasion, he was quailing under Mrs. Mullowney’s faded old eyes—partly through a sense of ignominious guilt, partly from a growing suspicion that the old lady might bo in the employment of an all-seeing detective department, and might he, for all he knew, comparing his features with a description in the hue-and-cry. When lie found that it, was only the genuineness of the Attorney-General’s money that was in question, Mrs. Mullowney was easily satisfied; and lie dissipated any remaining scruples of hers by giving her a brand-new half-crown out of the glittering heap of wealth she brought back to him with the spirits. As he was stuffing the change into his pocket, a letter which fell out on tho floor caught his eye. He immediately snatched at it as at a new idea. It was a letter from Miss Deborah,. full of the most flamboyant language of tho affections. I ruth to tell, after satisfying himself of this fact from a few opening sentences, Master Jack had put it aside for more leisurely reading, while the prospective joys of the clerkship of' the Ripe Roll Office were still titillating him; but now that those joys had fizzed out in smoke and darkness, he plunged at the letter as affording highly opportune reading. It, as it were, supplied him with company over his bottle; it took away the uncanny lonesomeness of his carouse. And so fie took Miss Harman’s honey vows and the whisky in alternate sips. It would he cruel to expose poor Miss Deborah’s love-letter to the gaze of a mocking world. It was, perhaps, a more genuine love-letter than most socalled love-letters that come from young ladies in the heyday of their bloom and blushing power—a letter flavoring all over with the exuberance of a heart that thought its soil had for ever ceased to put forth love’s rose-red fancies. So genuine were its raptures that it (taken, of course, in combination with the other stimulant) put Jack Harold completely in love, if not with Miss Deborah, at least with the picture of himself as she painted it; and the distinction between the two things was one which’ a harum-scarum youngster, in a horrible mess and with the fumes of strong waters in his brain, was not likely to split straws about. He remembered that, in one of his chats with Hans Harman, the agent had mentioned that jointures of £SOO a year apiece were settled upon i is sisters. With five hundred a year, in his own biight-

colored Paris, how the Boulevards would blossom!how distant would seem the mists and horrors of this unhappy island! Hannan’s partiality for him seemed to promise but slight opposition in that quarter but, with the agent’s consent or without, Miss Deborah’s perfervid correspondence left him in no manner of doubt as to the consent most immediately important. And, finally, what else remained, except a lifelong term of penal servitude, which would bo a daily and hourly act of suicide?

"1 will do it!” he exclaimed, with unnaturally glowing eyes. ‘‘After all, the woman to marry is not the woman you love, but the woman who loves you. That makes you the dictator of the situation. Deborah is un pen evaporeo of course ; but a nurse for a lifetime vaut mieux than a plaything for six months. It is finished. I will write this night even. It is my betrothal night. Permit that I honor it with a pouch d’alleluia. Yip, yip, sip, tra. la Ila Id la!” And he brightened up his somewnat ghastly-merry chorus with a deep draught from his tumbler. When a couple of hours later Mrs. Mullowney stole up tire stairs oppressed with doubts whether the youth lul inebriate might not have fallen into the fire or set the bedclothes in a blaze, she was greatly relieved to espy him, pen in hand, scudding over sheets of note-paper with the elation of an author in a good humor with his own work of imagination.

It was on a bitter evening, a few days after the abortive Rising, that Harold walked in by the back door of Father Phil’s small mansion upon his mother, and told his love. The poor lady’s first conviction was that she was conversing with her darling’s ghost. When she had satislied herself by solid embraces that she was not so, the

large spectacles on the little nose suddenly lit up with indignation that it was not his ghost. “And you dare to come to tell me this!” said the flashing spectacles. “I would rather you came to mo laid out in your coffin! A woman old enough to be your mothera persecutor of your holy religion—a. wrinkled witch that has not a drop of sweet blood in her veins—vinegar, every drop of it. Ob, oh, why weren’t yon brought in a. corpse to me, instead of bringing me this sorrowful tale at the end of my days?”

“Maybe F soon will, mother. You have only to go on bawling like that for a short time, and Head-Constable Mulduddcn will step in and gratify your pious desire for my corpse,” said her hopeful son. He knew his power He had been informed by letter that the police had been searching Father Phil’s house with a warrant for his arrest. The memory of the dark-coated policeman’s visit hung over the mother’s mind like the sight of a flock el vultures flapping their black wings for her son’s flesh, ho who would not have feared to face the world in arms on any other argument yielded with more than the submissiveness of a baby upon this. The moment it was shown to he an issue between Miss Deborah and the gallows,

she accepted and even thirsted for the respite. The one fate did not seem to her much brighter than the other; hut condemned men have been known to go mad with joy even for the boon of lifelong penal servitude. “Besides, mother,” said Jack, improving his advantage, “she really loves me to distraction.”

“To he sure she does —as if anyone could help loving my unhappy child!” cried the idolatrous mother; and a hitter exclamation, “The designing hussy!” followed, which she kept for’ private consumption. “Well, well, Jack, it will break my old heart, but that’s so pulled and dragged by the world already it is not much that is left to be broken--—I suppose wo will only have to make the best of this shameless woman’s plot against my boy.”

“Come, mother, that is scarcely fair — ray future ,” said Jack, rallying a smile by way of covering his sense of his own meanness; “but,” he added, more nervously, “what about Father Phil?”

-Mrs. Harold tossed up her sharp nose contemptuously. “Yon had better toll him, of course,” she said, “but— Father Phil does not count,”

(To be continued.)