The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 10 November 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O'Bbien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXX.—(Continued.) Shortly after Lord Drumshaughlin's arrival in the reading-room there seemed to run around the buzzing groups some strange electric current, the first effect of which was a Avhispering hush, and the next effect a polyphloisboisterous hum of voices, laughter and excitement. The knowledge that Lord Drumshaughlin had brought not a white but a black bean in his pocket circulated rapidly, and added to the interest of the struggle in the ballot between the old school and the new a fresh excitement as to the result of the inexplicable duel between Lord Drumshaughlin and his agent. Harman's face darkened, but his eye glanced over his own musters with assurance.

“This is deuced bad conduct on Lord Drumshaughlin’s part,” said Mr. Flibbert, tugging nervously at his moustache, as if it were the American Captain he were dragging out of his lurking-place. “I really must get Mr. Dargan to take notice of it.”

“Pooh!” was the agent’s whispered reply. “The notice to take of it is to win without him and in spite of him.” Then undauntedly to his wavering legionaries: “Of course everybody understands Drumshaughlin’s position is a peculiar one. He is bound to make some show as the haughty Gustos Rotulorum and all that, you see, but they will be no friends who will do him the ill turn of voting with him.”

The voting went on slowly. Men seemed to have been stricken with a sudden incapacity to make up their minds. Harman flitted more actively than ever through the rooms, without, however, approaching Lord Drumshaughlin’s group. Admiral Ffrench, who had come to lead a forlorn hope, was beginning to feel (not now for the first time in his life) that forlorn hopes sometimes in a twinkle turn to glittering victories. The excitement was running higher. So was the betting.

"I'll give you five to one still on the Gombeen-man," said one of the young gentlemen in white coats, scarlet gills, and horsey continuations, to Peggy Neville. "No," said the Guardsman. "Can't, as a stranger, interfere; very sorry, for I should dearly like to lay something against that little policeman." "I had hardly hoped ever to see a spark of public spirit in the county again," said a delicately-featured old Deputy-Lieutenant, who had hobbled in on a crutch and on the arm of Admiral Ffrench. "It was really time for Lord Drumshaughlin to put himself at the head of the county," said another. "The presumption of the fellow!" remarked the landlords' attorney of the district, a loud-lunged, truculent plebeian, who had only edged his way into the Club himself some six months before. "And Harman swears he'll carry him still." "No, he won't!" cried one of the younger men, bursting into the group. "Harman has thrown up the sponge. The nomination is withdrawn." The news was true. Upon a rapid review of his mutinous forces, Hans Harman had come to the determination to withdraw the name and stop the balloting. "You have won, my lord," he said, laughingly, but with something like a faint red glare louring out of his smiling dark eyes. "I hope it may turn out that you have been as wise as you have been brave." , "Trust me, Harman, as you have failed as a diplomatist, you will never be a success as a bully," replied Lord Drumshaughlin, as he drew his furred overcoat about his ears and passed out on the arm of Admiral Ffrench. Two mornings afterwards Lord Drumshaughlin was served from the Landed Estates Court, in Dublin, with notice of a conditional order of sale, requiring him within twenty-eight days to show cause why the court should not proceed to a sale of the estate on foot of a certain mortgage transaction duly set forth in the matter of Ralph Adalbert Warbro Westropp, Baron Drumshaughlin, Owner; Humphrey -Dargan, Petitioner. •" >

CHAPTER XXXI. —IN THE CHURCHYARD.

Monsignor McGrudder was staggered.’ He could swear he had heard singular noises in the churchyard putside his window. He was sitting later than usual, examining the plates attached to Miss Stokes’ edition of the Notes on Irish Architecture, in his old-fashioned chintz-covered armchair, in the room which was at once his study and bedroom at the back of the new' cut-stone Presbytery, looking out on the graveyard. The antiquated armchair, with arms like lofty fortifications and cushions like fragments of a feather-bed, was the only article of furniture at all old-fashioned in the room. The Monsignor had found himself unable to sacrifice this relic of old simplicity, this ancient seat of homely comfort, to the more ambitious requirements of his new Italian dignities. His old friend in chintz survived amidst the brass-mounted bedstead, mirrored wardrobe, and polished birch appointments of the bedroom in the new Presbytery, even as the worn, plain, old silver chalice, which was handed down-from the Penal Days, was still to be seen among the gold and jewelled cups of the Emancipation times in.the sacrarium. The rest of the room was equipped in a style of costliness, which wanted nothing but a woman’s taste to make it elegant. A b ( lack and yellow' Japanese folding-screen gracefully marked the transition from the region ,of the bed to the region of the books. The bookcases were of shiny oak; the volumes themselves splendid in gold-printed half-calf; the two regular library-chairs covered with stamped white leather; the fire was in the custody of Brass dogs, in a dainty prison of glossy white and black tiles, and any indiscreet glow that escaped from it fell into the respectable arms of a fluffy white hearthrug which suggested something of the animal life of the North Pole as well as just a suspicion of the want of animal heat appertaining to those latitudes as well. Please don’t do the Monsignor the injustice! of supposing that he lolled in all this luxury like an Epicurean philosopher, He found the old armchair the most luxurious article in the room—that and a few old books hidden in the basement of the bookshelves, because of their shabby exteriors. He would have given up the Presbytery for a cabin of thatch in the mountains, cheerfully, if the necessities of the Church had demanded it. But the Church did not demand it. The Church, on the contrary,, demanded once more a position of splendor and power in the land, and demanded that he, as one of her empurpled captains, should prove himself equal to her more exalted fortunes by holding his head as high as his predecessors of the Penal Days had held theirs low " He accordingly built the cut-stone Presbytery, as he placed the purple edging round his buttons, because the rubric so ordained - and he bought the birchwood wardrobe, as he contemplated himself in its glass; panel, in his tasselled biretta and soutane, simply as portion of the statelier finely that beseemed the Church’s new career. The Monsignor applied himself again determinedly to the engravings. He examined with the genuine archaeological eye, which is (necessarily) rather that of the stonemason than the enthusiast, the zigzag lacework tracery of a recessed 1 TH in King Crmacs Cathedral on the Rock of Cashel; i U before he had half-mastered the details of the pattern the sound from the graveyard .again struck bTdWm of IT" " back int ° the capacious featlmt bed bosom of the arm-chair to consider what it was like At one moment he thought it resembled a. muffled cry and lau’o-hterHe mXi* 0 *° U " d more like "« lcl diabolical 1, u liter Be lifted the green jalousie of the window overlooking the graveyard and looked, out. The night was pitch-dark. A nipping wind was blowing the few'last !eaves of the elm-tree outside against the window panes abfy than'the fXf th<> Monsig " ”■»« nncomfo/ ably than the ghostly tapping of-the leaves) was beatiim a sort of chattering tatoo between the ill-jointed sections of the window-frame. As his eyes came to forage more expertly ... the darkness, the skeleton arms of the ®oS elm-tree, and hero and there an indistinct gray blotch „f tombstone with stiff plumes, of cypress standhigVr them ike mourners began to come out in gloomy silhouette and then a bright eye of light whhich caused hi.? to start c. He had noticed that mysterious eye in the dark! ness more than once before during the fast few nHit Ho pressed his face close to the glass again in order t„ fix its exact position. It looked a mere spot of l,vff ,*! the surrounding gl„ om intensified its thin ray until it ex-

tended like a mystic white shining sword across the graves. He was now certain it proceeded from the Tower which rose in the graveyard at the rear of the Chapel, separated only by a stretch of grassy mounds and mouldering tombstones from the back windows of the Presbytery. Monsignor McGrudder was an ardent partisan by pen and deed in the never-ending wars as to the origin of the Irish Round Towers—those Irish Sphinxes at whoso base a thousand devastating invaders have swept by, with fire and sword, and left -them still lifting their graceful stone fingers silently to the sky, putting to the puzzled generations the conundrum who built them, how or when or why?—a type of the still greater mystery how the Irish race itself has survived all the salt tides that have ebbed and flowed over it, miserable age after age, and has kept its well-spring pure in the deep living heart of it? The Monsignor was of the school that insists the Round Towers were Christian belfries built with an eye to serving as the strong box for the valuables of the adjoining churches in case of a raid by the freebooting Danes. In testimony of the faith that was in him, and in proof of the eligibility of such structures as bell-towers, he himself built a Round Tower at the" rear of the chapel, in the upper chamber of which, pierced by four large opes towards the main points of the compass, he hung the bell. Opinions differed about Monsignor McGrudder's Tower almost as much as 'about the ancient conundrums after which it was modelleddiffered as to whether the architecture of the Round Tower was ever caricatured more abominably than by this lanky stone beehive; differed especially as to whether the structure was not more effectual in smothering the clangor of the bell than in publishing it. The Monsignor, however, it, is scarcely necessary to add, was as much pleased with his tower and his bell as with his theory. It was at once his strength and his weakness that whatever he, in his biretta and purple—edged buttons, believed to be right was in his eyes a. dogma, wanting only the vote of an (Ecumenical Council to bo dr. fide. ° "A light in the Tower at such an hour!—oh, it must be Mrs. Lehane, the chapel-woman! Somebody's dead, perhaps, and she's arranging to have the funeral bell tolled to-morrow." And he returned to the wavy stone tracery of King Cormac's recessed doorway. But he could see nothing in the engraving but his own' Tower, with the phosphorescent blade of light, like Death's sickle, glittering over the shuddering graves. He looked - around the room, and found it chilly. In his zeal for the Church's speedy rehabilitation in the matter of presbyteries, the Monsignor, being his own architect, had unfortunately hung the door of his room on the wrong side, and had, moreover, left the door-handle open to the seductions of any wanton winter wind that chose to demoralise it; in addition to which tho fire-grate had to a large extent 'lost in warmth what it had gained in elegance; so that at this moment* almost as icy a blast was moaning about the room as in the graveyard. He stamped his foot two or three times with annoyance at finding that he felt nervous and uneasy. His wrought-iron frame had never been quite the game since the day his authority had been flouted to his face on his own- altar. Though he followed up his anathemas against the secret society with unflinching vigor in sermon and confessional, he had an uneasy consciousness that the young men were not afraid of him—that his diatribes only made the reckless more reckless, and that the remainder quietly listened to him within the church doors, and went their own ways the moment they crossed the threshold. To a priest conscientiously alive to his responsibility for the eternal salvation of all these young souls, the failure of his authority was as saddening as it was astounding to the high-stomached churchman. He could not in his heart, nor even in his face or frame, conceal the effects of the blow wliich he—the haughty purpleman, who had rolled in Cardinals' carriages to the* houses of Roman Princesses—had sustained from little Danny, the miller's lame man. Even at this moment he felt that it was little Danny, and not the churchyard sounds arid chills, that was unnerving him. While he lay back in his arm-chair irresolute, a v continued low, wailing croon was heard from the darkness/ This time the sound was unmistakable. It was still going on, in a muffled cadence,, and the cry, dirge, diabolical chorus, or whatever it wight be, proceeded beyond doubt from the graveyard. (To be continued.)