The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 11 August 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXVl.—(Continued.)

Of course, you might throw Mcehal’s land in with your mountain,” said the agent, when they were ensconced in the shadows of the back parlor, and the blind pulled down, ‘’but the place wouldn’t fatten snipe, and he has a dangerous son. If you’d just seize the heifer of a morning, he’d probably raise a liver in one way or another and buy her out, and you'd make a better thing of it. 1 suppose that was your son in the passage?” he said, referring to Master Lionel, who had made a descent from Trinity College for the wedding, and was at present engaged in overcrowding Drumshaughlin with the most chic Dublin fashions in Tyrolese hats, prodigious stand-up collars, and magenta neckties (it was in the brief reign, of that lackadaisical shade). “By the way,” he continued, as a happy thought struck him, “you’ll be wanting to settle him down to something. The Attorney-General, Glascock, has given me the nomination to a handsome little thing in the Pipe Roll Office — nothing to do, ninety pounds a year to begin, and quite the right kind of thing, you know, though it’s called a clerkship. What if I present you with the nomination for your lad as a sort of birthday present to you on this your magisterial natal-day—eh, Dargan?”

“A clerkship at ninety pounds a year,” repeated the magisterial baby, stroking his puddled grey beard reflectively. “Thank you, sir—you’re very obliging, I’m sure — most cemiable of you, Mr. Harman; but his mother has, ahem ! other views for Lionel. Lord Dunbrody’s son and he are College chums —a bit of a scapegrace, no doubt —it runs in them genteel families — he talks of getting Loinel into theahem !Diplomatic Service through the influence of his respected father.”

“The devil he does!” cried Hans Harman, walking towards the window to discharge an oath into the street in safety. (The respectable father happened to be in the respectable Bankruptcy Court.) “Very well, Dargan, to business. First, you’ve got the decree for possession of the Mill. Very well, if he doesn’t stump up on the 24th, I don’t care how soon you execute it. My bailiff will have to take the possession formally; but it will have to be known that it is you arc working understand?”

“I understand, sir,” said old Humphrey, licking one hand unctuously with the other. (The gloves were now gone, and he felt at home with his hands once more.) “Though, indeed, I’m really sorry for Myles Rohan —an old neebour, sir, though a little im-pnfe-yus.”

Now, to talk of more important matters. The time of redemption for the mortgage for 45,000 L is more than a year expiredthree half-years’ interest overdue? Very well, the Court cannot possibly resist an application for sale. A judge will be sitting on Tuesday. You must have notice of application lodged at once. A conditional order will go as a matter of course. The second mortgagee, you know, Hugg, I can make all right, and then if you get the carriage of sale, and if I can get appointed Receiver- to watch you—as, of course, I must, on the part of the owner —well, well, ray good friend, you and I will manage to console ourselves on the ruin of Carthage, eh?”

“No fear of that ironmaster up at Lord Clanlaurance’s place bidding, sir?” asked Dargan, his velvety eyes blinking like those of an ancient cat in their ambush of eyebrow. “He’s rich, and I hear he likes the place.”

“Pooh ! he’s an Englishman and an ass. Wait till we Lave a parcel of arrests or a bit of a rising somewhere in his neighborhood. My dear Dargan, there could not possibly be a more opportune moment for a sale—country in a disturbed state, smouldering volcano, pending insurrection, threat-talking of the Protestant inhabitants (I forgot you’re not a Protestant, Humphrey—but these Fenian fellows are no bigots—they’ll make a bonfire of your Bishops, as well as ours, quite impartially—Monsignor McGrudder will tell you that)— short, if we get queasy old Grimshaw, the

Land Judge, on a good morning for the liver, you and I, sir, will be a pair of kings making a partition of a kingdom.

“We’ll have to dip very deep to get at so much money, Mr. Harman, sir,”.squeaked the money-lender, shaking his head. “I can tell you that the loan for that Hugg mortgage pushed me tightpainfully tight, I do assure you, sir.”

“If it did, you held it pretty insisted on having the deed lodged with you as security, as if you were dealing with a sharper, confound you! You’ve got it in that safe behind you, this moment, I’d wager my neck, if you haven’t set it to breed more gold elsewhere.”

Old Dargan made a nervous backward movement towards the safe, as if at some vague thought of its being threatened. “Besides that 12,000?. I’ve advanced in your own name,” he proceeded, ignoring Mr. Harman’s levity, “a trifle, sir, but you can’t conceive, Mr. Harman, how it strained my little manes.”

“Oh, come, that I could have had in the open market at your —six per cent.”

“No doubt, sir — for the matter of that, so could his lordship himself, perhaps—he, he!” said old Humphrey, with a grin which seemed to be devoted chiefly to apologising for itself; “and I’m sure his lordship ought to be a greeteful man if he is only charged six per cent, for it—truly greeteful, sir.”

“You won’t make as big a fortune as a wit as you have done on stamped paper,, Humphrey—take my -advice,” said the agent, showing two ranks of teeth as sharp-looking as fixed bayonets, as well as equally shining. “It just comes to this —those three mortgages in your safeare as good security as bank-notes, and 120,000?. or 140,000?. would cover the whole purchase. Why, you’d have fellows tumbling over one another to advance it. I’m not sure that Hugg himself couldn’t manage to raise it, if he was driven to it” —and the fixed bayonets again glittered significantly in the sun.

The money-lender started, and placed one palm of his long skinny hands against the other —a favorite deprecatory gesture of his. “Of course, sir, we could make a push—a push, Mr. Harman, don’t you observe?—but, indeed, and in double deed, I’ve dipped more deeply than I’d like Mrs. D. to know at the present, sir; and, after all, Irish land may not be always, you know —in the disturbed state of the country, now, for example ”

“A disturbed pot of stirabout! Tush, Humphrey, my good friend; we’ll be indebted to the disturbers in the purchase-money for five years off—maybe ten, if the fellows give us a respectable rising, but they won’t. Then, don’t you see, it is I who will have to return the rent-roll —you don’t understand and it is not necessary that you should,” he went on, rapidly. “I tell you we’ve got but to stretch out our hands to make the greatest coup of the century, and with as little risk of any sort or kind as you would run in sweeping that spider off your window-pane— between ourselves, Humphrey, if I were you, I should have removed from the Bank window as a personal insult. If you move next Tuesday, there need be no opposition to the order being made absolute, and if there is proper diligence used about the proof of title, we may have the Ordnance Survey fellows on the lands before Christmas.”

“I will post over to ’Torney Wrixon directly I’m done dinner, sir,” said the money-lender; and then, with his hands working in a new fit of emotion, he mumbled : “There’s one trifling matter, sir, if I’m not too persumshus, sir ”

“Well?” said the agent, turning sharply. “It’s Mrs. D., sirvvimmen are such fidgets—so onraysonable, Ido assure you, sir— about the Club, sir— wants to know ah hum how the little affair is going on in short?” - ’

Oh, the ballot! In short, it’s going on like a house afire— hell’s blazes!” laughed the agent, boisterously. “'We’ll pull you through, Humphrey, my old friend—always, with that cheque for the Hunt, mind! I don’t see why you shouldn’t turn out in scarlet yourself, and 'take the value of your money. I don’t see why Mrs. D. shouldn’t turn out herself, for that matter— Flibbert’s wife, and the young gentleman who won’t take that thing in the Pipe Roll Office—l don’t see why the Dargan family should not have lands, castle, title, mingle in the gilded saloons of the

aristocracy, out-dazzle the biggest nobs in the countryif the head of the house will only keep that venerable noddle of his well screwed on to his shoulders and —have just the least bit in life of patience.”

It was after delivering himself of this outburst (in which Humphrey Dargan in vain puzzled himself to separate the irony from the high spirits) that Mr. Hans Harman stumbled upon Jack Harold on his way from the conference at the Banner office, and ejaculated: “Good heavens! what a relief to meet somebody whose brain is not a petty cashbox!” as he walked up to the young man, and, a thought suddenly striking him, said, “Come and oblige a lonesome man by having a hit of dinner with him. I have something to say to younot a warrant for your body,” he added, smilingly for, - apart from the circumstances that Dawley happened to be at this moment a scowling witness of the cordialities of the agent and the young rebel, Hans Harman felt a powerful personal attraction towards this bright French streak of color in the drab life of Drumshaughlin.

Jack Harold changed color; perhaps the bodements of the weird sisters were audible for a faint moment or two again; but the two besetting weaknesses of his character werefirst, the impulse to flee from trouble as the swallows flee from winter, and, secondly, a craving for the society of a station above his own. Humphrey Dargan and he sought the society of their social superior for curiously opposite reasons young man because ho felt he was fitted for it, the money-lender because he felt that he was not. Miss Deborah looked sourly enough upon her brother’s guest, chiefly because she remembered the scene when Mabel sang “Ihe Wearing of the Green,” and, amopg other reasons, because tho “bit of dinner” consisted of a small dish of beefsteak, weakly reinforced by a much cut-up cold leg of mutton; but the agent’s jollity, and a bottle of dry Pommery, of which, to Miss Deborah’s consternation, he him-, self wrung the gold head off—both coinciding with the reaction from Jack’s recent penitential moodsoon made the cold mutton, and the cold room, and Miss Deborah’s cold smile, warm into a banquet for the gods in the young Sybarites eyes. Hans Harman himself, though he was in all but form a teetotaller (Miss Deborah was one- with the fierceness of a Captain Hew-Agag-ti-pieces-before-the-Lord of the old Puritan days), genially fiddled with the champagne bottle in the neighborhood of his own glass every time that he refilled his guest’s; and Jack, who was on the full tide, of wit and spirits, did not at all notice, when the last gush of creamy gold sparkled into his glass, that it was he himself who had finished it unaided !

I rank Harman (who had no prejudices against champagne) had vanished before there was any question of uncorking the bottle of Pommcry. She was not in a particularly good humor. The announcement of little Flibbert s marriage# had filled her with tho desire of birching her audacious little el eve within an inch of his life. “The puppy! the wretched, sordid little beggar !—to use the footing she had given him in society for the purpose of driving a bargain for that creepy old fellow’s money and his pink doll of a daughter, and to do all this without even asking 1 her leave!” Further, she did not like Jack Harold. He uas too clever to be a Flibbert, and too mincing to be a man; and perhaps the circumstance that Miss Deborah was of a different opinion had also something to say to it. Frank, at all events, fled on the pretext of scouring the country on her canvass for old Dargan’s name for the Club (personally, she would have preferred ducking old Dargan’s beard in the water-butt; but Frank was too loyal a partyman, so to say, not to see that this was the battle of the Harman interest; and so, she grudged not flying over hill and dale to do her duty by the flag). .“It will be a tough matter;” she remarked, as she drew on her gauntlets on the steps at Stone Hall before departing. “Hans, I hope you won’t be doing those things any more. But I dare say we’ll pull it off all right, if Admiral Ffrench will only keep those transcendental airs of his at Castle Ffrench—as if it were so much worse to introduce an Irish gombeen-man into society than a Greek dancing-girl V ! ‘You do it, Frank— the pompous old humbug! ) Do you know, what he said to me to-day?—that we might i: as well make Quish a magistrate next! By Jove ! it would serve him right to have Quish put up for the Club— and carry him!” - - T;, a. ;,.. . 1

... “He wouldn’t be a much uglier dose,” laughed Frank, as she gathered up the reins and gave the air a flick with her driving-whip.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” mused Hans Harman, as he sat sipping his coffee after dinner, while Jack smoked a thick cigar and dived into a bottle of claret. Mr. Harman had no views himself, but had a humane toleration of them in others. “By George! if I meet a third beardless brat who flings an appointment at the Four Courts in my face, this is no longer a country worth living in . I like you,”- he said, abruptly, ‘and I do not like to see you running to rust in this hole —perhaps running your neck into a halter. Read that.” He shoved across a scrawl under an official stamp from Glascock: “I understand your fellow has not come to the scratch at the Pipe Roll Office. The appointment will have to be filled at once unless you bring up your man.” —“It’s one of the prettiest posts that ever a young gentleman drew caricatures in,” the agent proceeded. “I mean to bring up my man, and my man yourself, if your highness should be pleased not to snub me for my impertinence.”

The Pommery and St. Estephe lifted from Jack’s brain, like a gas held in suspension by some strong agency. Wonder, shame, delight, remorse, coursed after one another, like wild animals, in his thoughts. Recollections of the day’s scene amidst the heather, of his presentiment, of his mission to Dublin — curiously enough, even of Father Phil’s not very dreadful-looking countenancetormented him; but they angered more than softened him. He felt a grievance against them for haunting him with looks so green and pale —these he could dismiss as envious creatures flocking to imprison his good fortune. What alarmed him more was—what could be the object of this man’s bounty What could be the consideration to be exacted in return P Hot and uncomfortable apprehensions besieged him upon this point.

(To be continued.)