The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 30 March 1922, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXXVll.—(Continued.) Once only did the flood of waters from the father’s heart quite overflow the sterile egoism of the London clubman. It was while he leaned on Joshua Neville’s arm over poor Harry s coffin as it disappeared into the yawning sepulchre in the grey shadow of the moist winter dawn. There was nobody else present except the Rector, young Neville, and two workmen. With an instinct for which Lord Drumshaughlin thanked him by a pressure of the arm, Mr. Neville had taken it upon himself not to invite All. Hans Harman to be of the party. He had more hesitation in deciding against an extraordinary suggestion of his son that Harry should be buried by the side of Quish, the bailiff, whose story had somehow affected father and son in a most unaccountable manner for two prosaic people from the Black Country. chap, he never owed much to the Drumshaughlins. I almost think Harry would feel more at home with Quish than in that stuckup stone vault,” said the most romantic of Guardsmen.— “No, no,” said his father, shaking his head, after a judicial summing-up. “His father could never bo got to consent. Besides, if others were unkind, remember Mabel!”— here the young Guardsman dropped the subject and flushed scarlet. He had not remembered Mabel quite so engrossingly of late. There was one lonely wreath among the expensive ones which the Misses Neville heaped on* poor Hany s coffin a simply-twined circlet of rustic green with lilies of the valley glistening like angels’ tears through it. Vhero this wreath came from nobody could tell. The Rector, who got it from his wife, and who expressed his wonder where that mother of a family got the lilies of the valley, was told to mind his own business, and could see that there were one or two angels’ tears in Mrs. Motherwell’s honest eyes as well as in the white chalices of the flowers. I have my own suspicions what took Katie Rohan flitting over to the Rectory like a frightened bird the night before the funeral, with the air of one engaged in the most awful enterprise of her life. She somehow trusted the Rector’s wife only little less than Mother Rosalie. I rather suspect also that, for all the timidity of her fluttering heart, she was too honest to soothe herself with the belief that it was on Mabel’s part alone she twined the little wreath, but that with all the sweet purity of her soul she offered it as a gratification to the dead boy’s shade. May we not go further and assume that when the trembling confession of her daring deed came under Mother Rosalie’s eyes, in the next communication from the Mill, a tear from Mother Rosalie’s own old heart fell with the wreath upon poor Harry’s coffin Nay, may we not take one last flight of clairvoyance and make sure that if Harry Westropp’s simple spirit hovered at all near his mortal tenement that ghostly winter dawn, the sprays of lily of the valley dropped from the hand he loved made him happier than ever he had been in his lifetime— perhaps, than many a dreary-hearted statesman whose shade beholds the loads of floral lumber with which a nation piles his coffin in Westminster Abbey? At all events, the Lord Harry’s coffin, with its little green and silver crown, vanished from this chilly world to one where kindlier breezes blow, and Lord Drumshaughlin had the first good heart-breaking cry that had , ever attacked him since, a little curly-headed blueeyed boy, he had seen his own mother’s coffin disappear into that same vault, upon one of those pure pearly summer mornings that, for Ralph Westropp, never came again. Mabel’s naturally healthy constitution saved her. She emerged at last from the weird fever-world, little more than a beautiful spectre herself, with deep mysterious shadows in her eyes such as the awe-stricken Italians used to remark of “1” uom ch” e stato all” inferno.” To everybody’s relief and wonder it was found that she was aware of all that had happened. Possibly words dropped by her nurses when they thought her delirious had given her the clue; possibly some more subtle knowledge had come to her in the darksome deathlands she had been traversing of

late; but she spoke of Harry as a mother does of a child who has been long in heaven, and when Miss Neville judged it safe to give her the lock of fair heair she had cut off over the dead boy’s brow, Mabel kissed it still with the calm sacred sorrow with which the mother inspects a tiny faded shoe. Lord Drumshaughhn, who had watched by her bedside like a great dog, fell upon his knees in a paroxysm of thankfulness, and fondled the worn outstretched hand as though it had just lifted him out of the very blackness of the pit. A less pleasant surprise was a desire expressed by Mabel to see Katie Rohan—a desire confided in a trembling whispper to Miss Neville when nobody else was by. It was a sore trial for a true-hearted sister, but Miss Neville had heard broken words during her patient’s delirium, which seemed to give the key to her present request, and, however her own heart ached, she answered with a kiss of affectionate sympathy on the almost transparent white forehead, which faintly flushed with joy under her lips. So Katie came, looking almost as white as the worn figure on the bed, and Miss Neville slipped out of the room as from a sacred place—and so, gentle reader, let you and I. But, oh dear, how are we ever to make the roses bloom again on those young, pallied cheeks ?

Having tasted the comfort of seeing his domestic concerns set in order in the ironmaster’s sure-footed, noiseless way, Lord Drumshaughhn was more pleased than he cared to own even to himself to find Neville’s all-seeing eye directed towards his financial entanglements.

“It’s all a hopeless mess, my dear fellow—you’ll make nothing of it,” he said, with the slovenly man’s sigh of despair at the sight of figures. “No man living knows his way through the accounts except Hans Harman. The figures and the lawyer’s jargon would set you mad.”

“These things are not always so unintelligible as it is the business of the lawyers to make us believe,” said Joshua Neville, with a smile. “I like figures, and I don’t dislike a knotty point. If you have no objection, I should like to try what I can make of it all.”

“Neville, you are a stunning good fellow,” Lord Drumshaughlin answered, shaking his hand in a manner oat of which he had been shamed for years by the callous formalism of London club life, where men shake hands like people in a plague.

All things look well in ruins. The broken old lord gave one strongly the impression of a crumbling feudal stronghold by the side of Joshua Neville’s flourishing, well-ordered, factory-like mind. There was a picturesque charm about him in his dilapidated fortunes which had never struck the ironmaster when ho used to meet him fluttering about Pall Mall in stays and orchid blossoms, in his false spring of second youth. Misfortune had given him a certain pathetic air of dignity, even as his thin , grey side-locks and the furrows yawning in his cheeks looked so much more really .handsome than when they used to be coated over with, dyes and cosmetics. There was a mixture in the man of noble tranquility in facing ruin and infantile incapacity to avert it which gave Neville something of the same feeling in helping him as a man has in rescuing a brave child who is hanging over a precipice. Besides which, the ironmaster’s interest in Mabel Westropp had deepened into a father’s idolatry, and in working for her he worked with the sombre enthusiasm of a Quaker saint. Accordingly, he set to work at Lord Drumshaughlin’s affairs as he would set to work to decipher a complicated granitic specimen. His first difficulty was with the floating liabilities, as to which -Lord DrumshaUghlin could give him but scrappy information, being sensible only that they were for ever and ever crossing him, and blinding him, and stinging him in such numbers that he had given up estimating them, as men who hear lions roar cease to occupy their thoughts with Neville, believing more in arithmetic than in metaphors, was not impressed at all with this despairful way of looking at things. What he wanted was not opinions, but bills and particulars - and quite soon he had amassed an alarming pile of documentary evidence, from the wine merchant’s civil reminder on his suburban-villa note-paper to the immense blue majesty of debtors summonses bills from London livery stables- bills from Horaces tailors; judgments marked for mysterious millinery debts for sporting losses; bank acceptances and renewals tangled twenty times over; pressing notes in angular hand from maiden ladies whose jointures were over-

•clue jostling a pork-buthcher’s bill, scrawled in a hand that suggested he bad employed one of his own swine as amanuensis, and the incumbent’s timid suggestion of his lordship’s unpaid-for (and unused) church sittings—all the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked and dissipated life. A pretty jungle lor a man to find his way through, oh P said Lord Drumshaughhn, who, like most men sunk deep in misfortune, sometimes revelled in the immeasurable depth and extent of it, and had a certain pride in impressing ■Neville with the magnificence of his ruin.

“Tbo only thing that is important about all these is the tot, said the ironmaster, studying some columns of figures befoio him. “And the tot,’’ ho added tranquilly, is not formidable in the matter of an estate like this y Now for something more important.”

Having brushed aside the, so to say, accidental incumbrances of the estate, he attacked the real ones. All the liabilities ho had been dealing with hitherto had been only so much desert sand which had got so piled and jammed around the Sphinx as almost to bury it. He now' proceeded to estimate the true proportions of the naked enigma itself. A celebrated Dublin lawyer arrived at this unseasonable period of the year on a visit to Clanlaurance Castle, and spent some laborious hours with Mr. Neville over the copies of mortagago deeds submitted to the Landed Estates Court amongst the proofs of title. As the result, both gentlemen shook their heads at one another across the table*, and Mr. Blaquiere, the eminent lawyer, said, with two several pinches of snuff and a prolonged consultation in the depths of his tawny .silk handkerchief :

Upon my conscience, there seems to be something very queer.”

So I thought, or I should not have put upon you this dismal journey,” said the ironmaster, quietly. “Why, the whole arrears of interest overdue do not appear to exceed 15,0001. ”

“13,7151. and some shillings, I make it.

“And for this bagatelle an estate of 7,0001. a year, mortgaged altogether to not more than sixteen years’ purchase of the rental, is to be put up for sale during the panic of a rebellion, and sold for a fourth of its value! Why, it’s not merely robbery— elementary robbery! — unless, indeed, there’s something deeper than plunder at the bottom of it. Has Lord Drumshaughlin an enemy?” “None that I ever head of, except himself.”

“Then who is it that has an interest in ruining the estate? Dargan you could understand, but his proceeding appears to be all square and above-board. But who the deuce is Hugg, who has joined in the petition for sale ” The two men looked at one another cautiously, as if they both had thoughts they did not care to put into words. “And what was the meaning of. a consent to have tho order made absolute? Did Lord Drumshaughlin really know he was committing suicide when he signed it?”

“I am afraid ho has been committing suicide pretty nearly all his life. So many attempts have failed, he does not seem to attach very much importance to a new' one. It appears it was a suggestion of Harman’s, the thing being inevitable, to get it over without any wrangle in court about his private affairs, which would get into the papers.” “A suggestion of Harman’s!” repeated Mr. Blaquiere, interrupting the operation of carrying, his bandanna to his nose in state and staring across the table at Joshua Neville, who stared back as intently. There was a curious silence for many seconds, when the lawyer proceeded : “The idea of invoking the authority of the Court of Chancery— only court that could have questioned or interdicted the sale — was also, I presume, a suggestion of Harman’s?” k

. » Neville assumed that his look was a sufficient answer.

“I believe,” he said, “the idea was that the proceeding in Chancery would act as a check upon any precipitancy in the Landed Estates Court, and would possibly dispose the incumbrancers to come to terms'.”

“Quito so, and with that excellent object Mr. Harman is appointed receiver himself, as the landlord’s friend and representative; and, by way of restraining the impetuosity of the Landed Estates Court, the receiver comes into court and assents to the sale in the interest of the landlord, and the Landed Estates Court, completely reassured as to the hona fides of the whole transaction by the intervention from Chancery, has no alternative but to pass the title, make the order for the survey, and instruct the Receiver to pre-

pare his rental; and, with an expedition perfectly unexampled in my experience, the Ordnance Survey people are already on the ground, and the estate is rushing headlong to a sale in the most panic-stricken year since the Famine. Now, it seems to me,” said Mr. Blaquiere, after blowing his nose con spirito, by way of note of admiration, “Hugg is the missing link in as rascally . Forgive me, Mr. Neville, for being betrayed into an adjective at least at this stage.”

“I shall have a word with Harman,” said the ironmaster, thoughtfully, and put on his hat. The agent was busy with maps, rentals, and tracings in the Estate Office when Mr. Neville sauntered in and mentioned that he had undertaken to look into Lord Drumshaughlin’s affairs, as a friend, and that it would facilitate him very handsomely if he had access to the estate books.

“Hum, more of this insufferable English meddling,” soliloquised the agent, who had rather a disdainful opinion of his visitor. “Thinks he’s divinely commissioned to go nosing every house drain in the universe except his own. Dare say his investigations will be as deep as that gold mine he discovered for us in his interview in the Banner. What amazes me is how a nation of dull prigs like this fellow ever rose above the sceptre of a vestry meeting.” Then aloud: “Might I ask with what practical object?” “To find out who Hugg is,” said the ironmaster, quietly.

(To be continued.)