The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 6 October 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHPIM wr wppp BOYS

CHAPTER XXlX.—(Continued.)

Five minutes afterwards the old pony and its old rider were plunging away into the night. As Owen slunk away under the cloak made for him Ivy the hurrying clouds, another figure, which had been lurking about the chapel, moved up to him. "Gimme de tool, now, quickand get home," whispered the new comer. "My God! what is dat patch? It's blood." - .

The moon had suddenly shot out upon the two men like a flash of limelight. It revealed a great dark smear upon the white flannel vest which the young man wore over his chest under the outer jacket. "I suppose it is!" he said in a voice out of a sepulchre. "I did not notice. It must have been the —while I was carryin' it."

"Man, how you are trembling! Are you a coward?" said the other, plucking him roughly by the arm.

"A coward!" was the deep reply. "I brought the body to his mother's doore —I sent the priest to him myself—how .many men would daar do that? Would you do it?" he said, turning on him- like a young wild beast, as another flying ray of moonlight fell on the little hellfire-tipped nose of Dawley. There was something in the sight that enraged him. He seized Dawley by the throat with both his hands, and shook him as easily as if he were a small dog in the claws of a young tiger. "Look he cried, in a terrible whisper, "I hope there is no mistake about this night's work, or "

"Mistake!" replied the other, wriggling himself free, and gasping for breath. "Yerra, in de honor o' God, man, do you want de people to tink you escaped from a madhouse? or are you goin' to bring de Bobbies down atop of us admirin' dat shirt o' yours? Gimme de ting you know, I tell you, an' peg away home, an' burn dem bloody rags of yours to blazes." The other pulled a pistol, whose barrel still smelt of gunpowder from his bosom, and Dawley pounced on it and covered it up. "You're a brave lad, Owen," he said, "an' you've ridded Ireland of a scorpion to-night."

"God sind Father Phil'll be in time whatever!" were the young peasant's last husky words, as he stood for a moment gazing down the road by which the priest's pony had disappeared then plunged into a narrow laneway, and made for the mountains.

Quish, in addition to his nest over the stables at the Castle, possessed a more regular home of his own among the Bauherlin Mountains, where they join hands with the wild range over Gougaun Barra. The cabin was pitched under shelter of a black escarpment of rock, down which in wintry weather a savage young yellow cataract smashed its way, and reeled headlong in foaming torrents under, and now and again over, the ruins of the bridge which, spanned the public road lower down. Quish's "stripe" of land consisted of some black potato beds descending steeply from tho cabin door, and at present littered with rotten stalks; and outside these some diminutive ragged fields which had once been reclaimed and fenced in with enormous stone fences by some former tenant, but were now re-in-vaded by gorse and flowering heather, as though it was these Vandal tribes that had broken down the massy stone Avails and were reconquering their old territory, blasting and burning up everything on their barbaric, line of march. Quish was no farmer. His duties as estate bailiff supplied him with the means of living, and his avocations on the moors and rivers were the only delights, except red-headed whisky, which it ever entered into his overgrown bulbous head to conceive. He cultivated as many black beds of potato-mould as he himself in an industrious mood could plant, and as his old mother at her leisure could dig out and his only other agricultural appurtenances were a stunted mountain milch-cow, as ill-favored as himself, and some goats which gave the old lady's legs and voice a wholesome degree of exercise in hunting and cursing them all over the mountain. In the one-windowed hut which'

dominated this bleak mass of mountain, and .which to Father Phil as he caught sight • of it on the public road

below presented the appearance of a burning eye set in the forehead of a monster, Quish preserved what more pretentious people would call his home; and it was here that at this moment, while the priest's pony was picking its way through the black morasses and rocky water-courses towards the light, the bailiff lay moaning in dull inarticulate agony, like a dumb animal. Bright as the light looked, as seen against the black mountain heights, it was only a miserable smoking paraffin lamp, the upper portion of whose chimney was a mass of stinking soot. The bloodshotlooking, rays that issued from the unblackened glass bulb did not do much more than the uncanny flicker of a wet turf fire to throw light into the hideous corners of the cabin, where all sorts of weird things—peeering fowls' eyes among the rafters, filthy-looking stone bed-recesses, horse-collars that had a strangling look, the ugly little cow's fixed staring eyeballs—loomed and winked in horrid mystery out of the all-pervading wreaths of turf-smoke. The elfin light, foraging under the deep canopy of a bedstead, apparently built upon a stone shelf, from.time to time picked out another luminous pair of eyes:—if one may describe as a pair two so irreconcilably opposed orbs as those of the dwarf, which in his present agony squinted and leered more horribly than ever in a demoniac grin. Sometimes his eyes would close, and the purple weal across his cheek would disappear in a corpse-like pallor; then, with a groan as of a volcano in labor, the dead mass would stir again, the long hairy paws would be flung out in fever, the purple £ash would fill again as if a great dab of blood had been dropped upon the face, and those hideous unearthly eyes would go tumbling and flashing in all directions, like ogres searching for their victims. If there was a finishing touch wanting to the horror of the scene, it was supplied by the awful creature wringing her hands by the bedside. Quish's mother was the type of an' old woman who would have been burned as a witch three or four centuries ago— crooked, filthy-looking, with protruding yellow tusks, hawk's eyes buried under cavernous grizzly eyebrows, naked bony arms that seemed to reach to her feet, the whole floating against an eerie mist of wild grey hairs that suggested thoughts of their being blown about by the midnight air at some. Witches' Sabbath. Who Quish was, none but the old creature could tell; and an ancient sepulchre would have been more communicative. It never occurred to Quish himself that his parentage could be a matter of any greater interest than the parentage of his moorhens, seals, or salmon; it did not strike him even that he required any more than these any second descriptive name. Whether Quish was intended to be a Christian name or surname was to him as meaningless a point of controversy as that of the Procession of the Holy Ghost; he had probably sprung up as one of the fungi that sprout from the refuse of great houses; and the old woman had been so long without anything either to hope or dread from human interest, except the companionship of her misshapen child, that she had possibly lost faith in the real facts of tho story herself, so buried had they become amidst the rotting memories of her sepulchral life.

So deadened had she grown to human experiences, that when, an hour ago, the. door of the cabin was roughly kicked in, and she. found her son's body laid across the threshold, it took her a considerable time to realise that there was anything more than a fit of drunkenness in question. This was the less surprising that there was no trace of . external bleeding. Owen might have spared himself his anxiety about the dark blotches on his flannel vest. They were only the soft mud with which the body got enamelled when it fell upon the roadway. Drunkenness, however, seemed no more terrible to the old woman in her son than his ill-mated eyes or disfigured cheek. She gathered up the body with that superhuman strength which mothers have upon emergency, and trundled it into the bedstead, and listened patiently for the snore that would tell her her boy was enjoying himself after his own peculiar way (God bless him!). Instead of the comfortable snore she heard sounds in the throat that appalled her; and when, holding the smutty lamp over the bed, she saw that the red blotches on the cheek and lips had grown a ghastly grey, and that the forehead was glistening with beads of cold sweat, and when, bending down, she found that the deep grommelings that came through the teeth, were groans of agony, the lamp almost fell out of her hands in terror.

"Mo stoir, mo stoir! what have they done to my boy, my darling boy?" she cried, her brain suddenly taking lire with intelligence. She knew enough of the risks and penalties of his calling to be prepared for anything. Instinctively she tore open his clothes and searched for blood. The clothes were not bloody. She snatched at the shirt. Her hawk's eye pounced upon a small round hole burnt through it, the edges slightly singed. She ; knew now what she would find inside. Over the left lung there was a small blue discoloration that would scarcely have suggested a wound, at all only for a tiny smear of blood that had escaped from the blue lips of the bullet-hole. With a wail of lamentation that seemed to pierce the mountain she threw herself on the body. "Murder!" she screamed, with the wild instinct of one who knew she was miles away from the habitations of men, but was determined that her cry should be heard as plainly as she knew thunderclaps in the Bauherlin Mountains were heard in valleys far away. All at once she found her arm clutched, and a hoarse voice liker thunder than her own mumbled :

"Howlcl yer whisht, woman; will you howld yer whisht?"

It was Quish who had recovered consciousness, and whose voice was now sinking back into a tortured bellowing rumble after his spring at the arm of the frantic woman. "Drink!" was all he could articulate, his parched tongue lolling out horribly, "drink!" She put a black bottle to his lips. He sucked the neck of the bottle into his throat, as if he were going to bite it off; then sank back again without further sound or movement. The old woman set up her howl anew. "Whisht, I tell you again! —whisht!" roared the dwarf, his eyes flaring wildly as if in a desperate attempt to unite in withering her.

"Whisht? an' my boy murthered before my face! — whisht! an' his corpse left on the thrashil' of his owld mother's doore!" wailed the old creature, her skinny arms and grey hairs waving as in some eerie midnight storm.

This time the wounded man darted up, and pulled her down to him in the grasp of a demon. "If you shout again I'll—l'll kill you!" he whispered, in a voice that made her blood freeze with terror. "What business is it o' yours?" Then he relaxed his grip of the poor old trembling hag, and in a lower creaking whisper, and with the most diabolical gambolling expression of deep cunning in his eyes, he muttered: "Whisper, mother! I suppose 'twas the boys clone it," and lay back, as if the observation were some plaster to the red-hot wound that was boring his heart.

The old woman was silent. She bent her old stupid head with both hands, as though the intelligence so long slumbering within would only act upon the direst compulsion. She looked earnestly into his rolling eyes to read the secret that seemed to be starting out of them. At last she understood. "I won't cry 'murder!' any more!" she whispered. The trembling eyes closed with satisfaction. "Drink!" was all that the blackening lips uttered forth.

"Oh, but to die without the priest, the docthor! Wirra, wirra, an' am I to lave him here alone?" cried the old woman, and wandering from side to side of the cabin like a she-wolf in a cage, the while the wounded man groaned like one whose pain was past expressing, and the lonesome winds sang their horrible cooinc around the cabin, and the ugly brindled cow from her own corner contributed an occasional forlorn bellow to the unearthly noises of the night. At last the mother could stand the helpless agony no longer. "I won't say 'murder!' acushla," she whispered softly over the bed, "but if I was to be kilt an' Was to burn for ever for it, I'll shout, an' if there's a God in heaven he'll hear me!" And flinging open the door of the cabin, she faced the black night, and raised a yell of "Help, help with such superhuman force that from that height it seemed to shoot through the troubled darkness like the cry of a damned soul, and to echo from mountain to mountain. .-'.-.

"All right, Judy—all right!— am coming! It is I Father Phil!" answered the priest out of the gloom.

"Thank God, .an' the Holy Virgin! My cry is heard! My boy is saved!" exclaimed the old creature, sinking on her knees at the doorstep, and bending wildly down till she seemed to kiss the muddy ground the heaven-sent visitor trod upon. : - ;. ' ; .

Father Phil. was sufficiently familiar with, bodily as well as spiritual ailments to see at a glance that the ab-

scnco of a doctor was a matter of the very smallest consequence to Quish. v Nothing but his herculean bodily strength was keeping him alive. As to Father Phil's own mysterious surgery of the soul, who can tell how fared it? All I know is that, ten minutes afterwards, when the old priest in his violet stole and silvery nimbus, pronounced the august words of the Absolution and bade the Christian soul go forth to meet its Creator under the pitiful wings of escorting angels, the lonesome mountain cabin looked as holy a place as more pretentious temples. What a Leveller the Church is! What a Revolutionist whose barricades are death-beds! What a Socialist whose one ceremony of initiation is to die! • How strange it seems, and goodthe thought that to the angels hovering in the turfsmoke the soul encased in Qnish's gnomelike body, and peeping out from behind Quish's twisted eyes may have looked more beautiful than many a soul that escapes from flesh of rose-tinted satin on a death-bed of rustling laces and in clouds of perfume! The old mother herself, kneeling by the bedside with the lighted taper in her hand, while the dying man was being marked with the sacred chrism, looked no longer like the weird sister caught riding on a broomstick, but rather like some gaunt female eremite of the desert kneeling for her eternal reward. The very night-winds appeared to have changed their dismal chant into a pathetio requiem.

(To be continued.)