The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 13 October 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O'Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXlX.—(Continued.) Quish raised himself on his elbow and gazed intently into, or rather around, the priest's face. "Whisper, Father Phil," he said, in a voice that seemed to be evolved from the clashing of rusty iron files. "Do you think there is a chance for an object like me up thereyou know where " the eyes rolling violently towards the thatch. "A chance! my poor boy—yes! I ""wish I. had as good a chance as you have this moment, with God's holy help!"_ said the old priest, laying a soothing hand upon the burning forehead and leaving a tear glittering there, too, like a jewel. "Qnish," he added solemnly, "you forgive them that did this night's work?" "Oyeh, I do an' welcome, Father," was the reply, with the oddest contorted expression, like a hobgoblin jest, struggling on his features. "I daar say some o' the boys heerd that Hans Harman gev me a half-ssufferin or so once an' away to play the informer for him, an' they didn't ondherstand, the craythurs— didn't ondherstand !"—he repeated with something like a ghoulish laugh. "Then it wasn't true? —they wronged you along with murdering you?" cried the priest. *"True! Sell Masther Harry to Hans Harman for half a sufferin! True!" cried the dwarf, starting up and flinging out his hairy paws in a way that made Father Phil himself recoil in terror; but when the paroxysm was • at its worst it broke in hideous laughter like the rattling of rusty iron chains in his chest. "Why," he jerked out in spasms of frightful merriment, "Masther Harry know'd every, word — med it all up together—we turned every pinny of Hans' dirty money into honest pewthers at Moll Carty's. True!" and he was going off into another volcanic eruption of delirious laughter; when, changing his thoughts to some more torturing one, he gripped Father Phil by the coat-sleeve with his burning paw, and whispered feverishly: "Father, will you do one thing for a dying man?" "I will," said the old priest solemnly. "See him — him —don't tell him to come—no, no, don't so much as hint such a thing him know ould Quish is goin' —that's all," he gasped; and then, falling back with a yell of pain: "Quick, Father Phil— I'm a'most bet; but I won't give in —till I know there's no use in waitin.' " An hour wore away, and another. The old woman, swinging her body to and fro in that rhythmic movement which is to Irish grief what dancing is to French gaiety, accompanied herself with a low crooning orchestra which, mingling with the moaning treble of the winds, had the effect of a lullaby for the dying. The patient doggedly refused to open his lips to give expression to his internal, torments. He was waiting like one of those patient-eyed animals that you see tethered uncomfortably in a cart on the way to the shambles. The sense of waiting seemed to have killed the sense,of pain. He lay so still that the calliagh once or twice ceased her chant to make sure that the eyes turned so intently towards the doorway were not glazed in death. "It's he! I hear the step down the borheen. It's he f" he suddenly shouted, flinging out his arms, and seeming to make the crazy cabin tremble with the wild, shrill halloo he had learned among the- beaters on the mountains. After which, he fell back motionless, and his eyes closed. Quish's keen ear was not at fault; but it took a long while yet before Harry Westropp, toiling up the jagged watercourse by the help of an occasional flash of moonlight, had his hand on the latch of the bailiff's cabin. "A weenuch, a weemmh, it's too late!" wailed the old woman, dragging him to the bedside, and holding the sooty lamp over the ghastly figure extended there. / "Mother, howld yer whist!" cried the dwarf opening his eyes with as terrifying an effect as if he, had opened them .his coffin. "Masther Harry," he whispered, "who are t;him with you?"

-' Harry looked at him bewildered. He supposed his / mind must be wandering. ~ ;>'■'. "With me? I came alone." ■'■ „ The other shook his head. "I hear 'em this moment on the stepping-stones across the sthrame. Don't tell me! A hare couldn't run in that mountain unknownst to me." The deadly doubt which convulsed his face, when he besought Father Phil to communicate with his young master, seemed to have taken possession of him again 1 . "Whisper, : Masther Harry," he gurgled out,- drawing Harry's head down to him in an eager, feverish way. "The ould 'oman is deaf an' won't hear. It wasn't that you had any doubt of Quish? It wasn't to relieve your mind the boys put -> me out of the way?" Harry started back as if a bullet had gone to his heart. "God of Heaven!" he cried, "my poor Quish, do you think I'm x a murderer? do you think I'm the vilest brute that ever bit the hand of his best friend?" "Because," continued the other, confidentially, "it, isn't that 'twould matter a traneen ; my child, I'd boil N - every drop of my" blood for you—l'd grind every bone in my ould carcase, if 'twas plasin' to you to accept of it. But if I could make sure it Wasn't you had any fear Quish would harm you dead or alive—if 'twas only a mistake of the boys " (' Harry could not answer a word. There seemed to be a boulder fixed in his throat. But his tears fell on the dying man's face, and Quish's burning flesh seemed to drink them up like an elixir, and to understand them better than if they were most musical eloquence."Thank God!" he muttered, huskily. "An," Masther Harry," with a glance in the direction of his mother, "you won't see the ould woman short of the sup of tay?" Harry pressed his hand, and Quish reclined back with the comforted air of a man whose will had just been read ' over and signed. For a few moments nothing was heard but Quish's pained breathing, the old mother's woeful lullaby, and the uneasy voices of the night. A face pressed close outside.the window (for Quish's instinct had not deceived him), was pressed closer, as'' if trying to hear the very silence. Once more the monstrous bullet-head / shot upwards, shaking with a preternatural chuckle. "Well, J begor, 'twas a fine sell on ould Harman, any way!" he coughed .out, his distorted mouth, mangled cheek, ajid bulging eyes tossing as in a whirpool of ghastly glee. "Sell Masther Harry for Hans Harman's goold ! Heugh ! heugh ! heugh!" He clutched Harry Westropp's hand and licked it with parched kisses, like a powerful dog, only so hungrily .it seemed as if he were about to bite the limb into his jaws. At the same moment the door was thrown open, and two policemen burst into the cabin in a gush of icy wind. -> ' "What's this? What the devil do you mean?" cried Harry passionately. They were daunted by his words and by the glare, and started back; but one of them immediately recovered himself. "Very sorry, sir," he said hurriedly, "but some a murder— been committed. We must hear the statement of the dying man." Quish had fallen back, still clutching Harry Westropp's left hand, and gluing it to his hungry lips. Harry suddenly felt the grasp relax and grow cold—a cold that bit into his marrow. He bent down. Quish's cold fingers still t held the hand in a last effort to keep it pressed to the cold lips. The lips had pressed their last. A mysterious grey beauty glimmered over the face. "He is dead!", said Harry Westropp, falling on his knees on the cabin floor.. ; "How cursed awkwardly these things happen exclaimed Mr. Hans Harman when, some hours after his return from the abortive expedition to Drumshaughlin Castle, a police orderly disturbed him in his bedroom (where he was not in bed) with the intelligence that the bailiff had been fired at and mortally wounded on the • public road outside his own house in the Bauherlin Mount- ,; ains. "If this had only come last, night, or if Lord Drum- !| shaughlin had not left Euston to-night, a telegram to say V the estate bailiff had been shot dead would have ended J: this trip which Deborah has brought" upon us with her infernal virtuous starching and strait-lacing. Now I'm

afraid it's too late. He's on the road, and his blood -will be up. He is quite capable of saying I got it up to frighten him. Well, well, who the ; devil cafes what he says, if it comes to that?" muttered the agent, kicking the - fire viciously for not having more heat in it. "Quish is one precious rascal gone, and Dawley is another still more precious rascal, who has obligingly knotted a rope around his neck and presented the other" end to me. For 3 of course, it was Dawley—that is/to say, it was so promptly and pluckily done, that, of course', it was somebody else he got to do it for him. Well, well, we mustn't neglect the agrarian bearing of this business on the value of landed property hereabouts for the satisfaction of hanging Dawley—he'll wait, and can bo turned to good account in the meantime. What a cub that young Rohan is! How I should have liked to lay the cat-o'-nine-tails across his insolent hide, while that madcap girl was girding at me!,/ By George, there goes three o'clock! Heigho! it makes a man feel queer to think of his bailiff lying dead with a bullet in his lungs, and no blood " He deliberated for a moment. "I think upon the whole Quish will be worth a wire to the Kingstown boat. Who knows?" At daybreak that morning Meehul the tenant under sentence of eviction at Cnocaunacurraghcooish, and Owen his son, were arrested on a charge of wilful murder. CHAPTER XXX.— DRUMSHATJGHLIN'S BLOOD UP. As Lord Drumshaughlin stepped off the gangway of the mail-boat at Kingstown. Pier, a telegraph messenger put a yellow despatch into his hands. He read,: "Quish, estate bailiff, fired at and murdered last night. Tenant, under notice of eviction, arrested.—Harman." The agent was -right in anticipating that the news would not deter Lord Drumshaughlin from pursuing his journey. He was right, perhaps, too, in assuming that if the news had come sooner the journey would never have been begun. One of Lord Drumshaughlin's most industrious tasks in life was finding honorable causes of quarrel with his good resolutions. Coming across in the mail-boat, a hundred devils of indolence, selfishness, irresolution, and gout were prompting him to return to London. He examined the chalky deposits around his swollen knuckles with a certain affectionate interest as old friends, who might at any moment supply him with an adequate excuse for giving up his Drumshaughlin expedition: and I am not sure that he would not have had a bottle of port-wine opened with his supper, with a view to nursing his gout, only that he dreaded ship's port even more than the loss of his club cookery and tricorne notes. The murder of his bailiff was the one spur that could have roused him from his ignoble sluggardice. The pretended fear of • a blunderbuss 'and the real irksomeness s of going about with his hand on his revolver had often enough served him as excellent apologies for shirking duty in Ireland; but now that he was on the road, and that this news savored of an attempt to intimidate him, the note of danger was to him what the cry of horn and hounds is to an old foxhunter. If every . ditch between Kingstown and Drumshaughlin was. lined with blunderbusses, he would run the gauntlet all the more gaily. If every knuckle and toe-joint were to swell in rebellion, he would only push on the more doggedly to ' revenge this barbarous slaughter of his servant—this intolerable insult to his own courage and his pride. Lord Drumshaughlin's virtue usually took the form of rage. He became possessed with a fearful fury towards his tenante. . "The curs!—the slaves!—the savages!—l let them alone % all these years, and here is my reward! I'll show them ! . I'll pinch their cowardly bones for them ! By God, I'll fire* them out ilke a rabbit-warren!" he cried to him- . self, while hotel, touts'were in vain inquiring from him the destination of his luggage. He tramped over railway- > porters and cabmen, as if they Were so many tedious impediments to'his vengeance; .soothing them, nevertheless, with liberal plasters of half-crowns. He tore through Dublin as if his cab were a car of juggernaut crunching over a prostrate city of assassins. He threatened to withdraw his name from the directorate of the West Cork Railway Company because their time-table imposed upon him a delay of three hours in Cork. To a fat city knight, - an apothecary, who > sidled up to him in the coffee-room

of the County Club, with his condolences and the latest particulars of the murder from the evening editions, and who, with the most obsequious intentions possible, ventured to hint that such a thing could not possibly have happened if ; his ■ lordship had gladdened the eyes of his respectful adorers with an occasional glimpse of his person in the county, his lordship replied, brutally: "No doubt, sir— I have been so long away that I have really forgotten that I had the honor of your acquaintance." And then remarked To a bald-headed old deputy lieutenant who was dining off a mutton-chop at the same table, "How can you blame men for keeping away from Ireland when they can't even enter the County Club without rubbing skirts with a fellow of that kind?" When he was disgorged on the Garrindinny railway station towards three o'clock in the morning, and Head Constable Muldudden met him with a polite suggestion of a police escort, he replied, summarily, "Nonsense! Certainly not To the amicable overtures of the driver, who told, him the road was bad and the storm rising, and that Mick Birne's best bedroom was at his lordship's service for the night, he responded by jumping into the chaise and observing, "Drive on, damn you!" paying half a severeign for his oath as an extra at the end of his journey. « - (To be continued.)