LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 161, 10 December 1874, Page 3

LITERATURE.

A RIVEEMOUTH ROMANCE. {Continued.) Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when he was well, like Margaret ? So, meeting her one morning at the iish market—for Mr O'Rouke had long since given over the onerous labour of catching dinners —he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she liked the change in her life, and if Mr O'Rouke was good to her. ' Troth, thin, sur,' said Margaret, with a short dry laugh, ' he's the divil's own !' Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gaiety of champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer. With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, he gradually drew from her the true state of affairs. Mr O'Rouke was a very bad case indeed ; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly drunk ; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would not last until winter. Mr O'Rouke was perpetually coming home with a sprained ankle or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove. ' In short,' as Mr Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to Mrs Bilkins, ' he had broken all those things which he shouldn't have broken, and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long ago —his neck, namely.' The revelation which startled Mr Bilkins most was this: in spite of all, Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart. Further than keej)ing the poor creature up waiting r for him until ever so much o'clock at night, it did not appear that he treated her with personal cruelty. If he bad beaten her, she would have worshipped him ; as it was, she merely loved the ground he trod upon. Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan was laid before Mrs Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that convinced him she had made up her mind to adopt it. ' Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof ! ' cried Mrs Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr and Mrs O'Rouke took up their abode in the Bilkins mansion—Margaret as cook, and Larry as gardener. ' I'm convanient if the owld gintleman is,' had been k Mr O'Ronke's remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr O'Rouke had the faintest idea of gardening. He didn't know a tulip from a tomato. He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to undertake anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability. Mr Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband for any great botanical knowledge ; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr O'Rouke pointed to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out in flower, and remarked, ' Thim's a nate lot o' purtaties ye\ e got there, sur.' Mr Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr O'Rouke's skill in gardening ; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any case to make Margaret's lot easier. Re-established in her old home, Margeret broke into song again, and Mr O'Rouke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not agricultiirally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject were heavy trials to Mr Bilkins. Happily Mr Bilkins was not without a sense of humor, else he would have found Mr O'Rouke insupportable. Just when the old gentleman's patience was about exhausted, the gardener would commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but loved him for the moment. ' Larry,' said Mr Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of September, 'just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands.' Mr O'Rouke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with the monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820. Mr Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober. ' Eight hundred and twenty what ?' cried Mr Bilkins, feeling very warm, as he naturally would in so high a temperature. ' Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose, sur.' ' Larry, you're an idiot.' This was obviously not to Mr O'Rouke's taste ; for he went and brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of numerals running parallel with the glass tube explained, ' Add 'em up yerself, thin !' Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr Bilkins had not spent the greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr O'Rouke into the mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr O'Rouke's method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr Bilkins had received a lot of a very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that morning, turned over to Mr O'Rouke the duty of planting them. Though he had never seen a bulb in his life Larry unblushingly asserted that he had set out thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady, of O'Grady Castle, ' a illegant place intirely wid tin miles o' garden walks,' added Mr O'Rouke, crushing Mr Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble flower beds. The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done his work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles and squares on the top of the soil. ' Didn't I tell you to set out these bulbs?' cried Mr Bilkins wrathfully. ' An' didn't I set 'em out ?' expostulated Mr O'Rouke. ' An' ain't they a settin' there beautiful ?' 4 But you should have put them into the ground stupid ! ' Is it bury 'em, ye mane ? Be jabers ! how could they iver git out agin ? Give the little jokers a fair show, Mister Bilkins !' For two weeks Mr O'Rouke conducted himself with comparative propriety ; that is to say, he rendered himself useless about the place, appeared regularly at his meals and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarous strains of music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of the north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would desire ; but on the whole there was not much to complain of. The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand at the serving out the rations, Mr O'Rouke did not even make a pretence of working ' in the garden. He would disappear immediately

after breakfast and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner. Nobody knew what he did with himself in the interval until one day he was observed to fall out of an apple tree near the stable. His retreat discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part of the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop. Of course, Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman, she made excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad anyway, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours and hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a light in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the gravel walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about the house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which women hide their care. One morning found Margaret sitting palo and anxious by the kitchen stove. O'Rouke had not come home at all. Noon came and night, but not Larry. Whenever Mrs Bill kins approached her that day, Margaret was humming ' Kate Kearney' quite merrily. But when her was work was done, she stole out at the back gate and went in search of him. She scoured the neighborhood like a madwoman. O'Rouke had not been at the Finnigan's. He had not been at the Wee Drop since Monday, and this was Wednesday night. Her heart sunk within her when she failed to find him in the police station. Some dreadful thing had happened to him. She came to the house with one hand pressed wearily against her cheek. The dawn struggled through the kitchen windows, and fell upon Margaret crouched by the stove. She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr Bilkins came down she confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been home for two nights. ' Mayhap he's drownded hisself,' suggested Margaret, wringing her hands. 'Not he,' said Mr Bilkins, 'he doesn't like the taste of water well enough.' ' Troth, thin, he doesn't,' reflected Margaret; and the reflection comforted her. 'At any rate, I'll go and look him up after breakfast,' said Mr Bilkins. And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr Bilkins sallied forth with the depressing expectation of finding Mr O'Rouke without much difficulty. ' Come to think of it,' said the old gentleman to himself, drawing on his white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor street, 'I don't want to find him!'

Chapter 111. But Mr O'Rouke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr Bilkins directed his steps in the first instance to the police station, quite confident that a bird of Mr O'Rouke's plumage would be brought to perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered about town, and through these Mr Bilkins went conscientiously. He then explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took a careful survey of the wharves along the river on his way home. He even shook the apple tree near the stable with a vague hope of bringing down Mr O'Rouke, but brought down nothing except a few winter apples, which, being both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad representatives of the object of his search. That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilkins' mansion with a straw hat, at once identified as Mr O'Rouke's, which had been found on Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but Mr O'Rouke was always leaving his hat on the wharf. Margaret's distress is not to be pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had drowned himself, not intentionally, maybe; possibly he had fallen overboard while intoxicated. The late Mr Buckle] has informed us that death by drowning is regulated by laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that a certain percentage of the earth's population is bound to drown itself annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed then that Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the ensuing two months. There had been gales off the cost and pleasure parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly business. But Mr O'Rouke failed to appear among the fiotsam and jetsam which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the Rivermouth wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of those immense shoals of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment with the fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod or a mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She averted her head in [making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a man fall into the st,a, be eaten, say by,' a halibut, and reappear on the scenes of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the non-committal form of hashed fish ? ' Imperial Cresar, dead, and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.' But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, 'tAverc to consider too curiously to consider so. Mr Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret's explanation of O'Rouke's disappearance. He was undoubtedly drowned, had most likely drowned himself. The hat' picked up on the wharf was strong circumstantial evidence in that direction. But one feature of the case staggered Mr Bilkins. O'Rouke's violin had also disappeared. Now, it required no great effort to imagine a man throwing himself overboard under the influence of mania a potu; but it was difficult to conceive of a man committing violinicidc! If the fellow went to drown himself, why did he take his fiddle witli him? He might as well have taken an umbrella or a German student lamp. The question troubled Mr Bilkins a good deal first and last. But one thing was indisputable: the man was gone, — and had evidently gone by water. It was now that Margaret invested her husband with charms of mind and person not calculated to make him recognisable by any one who had ever had the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She eliminated all his bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a Mr O'Rouke as he ought to have been—a species of seraphic being mixed up in some way with a violin ; and to this ideal she erected a headstone in the suburban cemetery. To be oontinued.