The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 17 November 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O'Bbien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXXl.—(Continued.) Monsignor McGrudder sprang to his feet. He was not superstitious. Still less was he a. coward. He did not believe there was question of anything supernatural, and he was not afraid of anything human. The next minute he was in the open air, unfastening the wicket into the graveyard, his gold-knobbed oak cudgel grasped in his left hand. The graveyard looked deadly dark. For the first few moments he could distinguish nothing but the spectral cypress sentinels over the tombs, and hear nothing but the dismal w—u—ll—h of the wind through the trees. His feet stumbled over a mound. He remembered it was the grave where the murdered bailiff, Quish, had been interred less than two weeks before. As to which, I must break through all the rules of art. to narrate hie et nunc a circumstance that marked the burial. It was a lonesome affair poor Quish's last earthly expedition—the most lonesome of all terrestrial sights—an Irish funeral avoided by the people. It Mas not that anybody specially disliked Quish, or that everybody was not horrified by his fate; but the mere whisper of his having suffered as an informer made the coffin exhale a certain nameless contagion that made people shrink from it as from the first unburied body in a medieval plague. Those who kept away from the funeral could not have explained in the least why they did so. Law is so often villainy' in Ireland that the presumption is always in favor of a breach of it. When Monsignor McGrudder said the last prayer over the coffin in a strain that made it sound like a stern exorcism of the murderers, the only mourners left were Harry Westropp and Ken Rohan (who took Harry's arm and who noticed Dawley's scowling eves fixed on him as he walked behind the coffin) and Mr. Hans Harman who seemed to take a more important part than the corpse in the ceremonial. Mr. Harman was giving the gravedigger some instruction in the use of his mattock, when Harry, who had barely tolerated the agent's proceedings until now, flew at him like a tiger with fiery eyeballs, and snatched the mattock out of his hand. "Be off out of this!'.' he shouted, furiously. '''You've done enough already to put Quish in his grave. 'Twas you and vour infernal attempts to bribe him to spy upon me that brought him where he is. There was better stuff in Quish than in a regiment of fellows like you'. It's you, and not he, that 'twould be worth somebody's while chastising. Be off! I'll stand no more of your hypocritical grief, damn you! Leave the rest of this to me. Quish would sooner have one shovelful of earth thrown on his coffin by me than if you were to raise a tombstone of gold over him. Be off, I tell you-this instant-or ." His terrible look and uplifted mattock told Hans Harman for the first time in his life what terror is. He grew as ashen pale as a corpse and staggered out of the graveyard and Harrv not onlv dropped shovelfuls of earth upon his dead friend's coffin, but wetted them with tears such as a National Funeral Procession does'not always draw in Westminster Abbey. Poor Quish's happy super-earthly face would have been worth beholding at that moment. It was not of Quish's ghost, however, that Monsignor McGrudder was thinking as he fumbled over the new-made grave. The confused muffled noises had reached his ear again. They proceeded as before from the direction of the Tower, which was at present screened from his view by some thick pyramids of yew.tree. He groped towards the path which he knew led directly to the door of the belfry. Just as he had found the path, a peremptory voice beside him called out: "Who goes there?" and at the same moment he saw the figure of a man emerge from between two yew-trees and stand full in front of him. "Who are you, yourself, fellow and what are you doing here at this time of night?" answered Monsignor, sturdily grasping his stick. " .

"Who are you?—Answer, or I'll fire!" cried the man, and Monsignor McGrudder heard an ominous click and vaguely distinguished a gleaming barrel almost at his spectacles. He was now genuinely startled. Tho towering impassive figure, the quick deep words, the click of the hammer, and the glimmer of nickel were unmistakable. "For Heaven's sake, stop —I'm Monsignor McGrudder!" he cried, with a sickening feeling of feebleness. "Thank God you said it, your Beverence. Another moment, and you were a dead man!" The revolver-barrel disappeared from before Monsignor McGrudder's spectacles. At the same moment he caught an indistinct glimpse of his interlocutor's face. "Con Lehane!" exclaimed Monsignor McGrudder. "You ruffian, is it you that dare stop your priest and threaten to murder him?" The Monsignor's dread was now changed into a sacred fury, and he whirled his great stick fiercely over the head of the man in front of him. "Take care of your stick, your Beverence," whispered the huge fellow, quietly. "This is no child's play. But it down!" "You miserable man, do you dare to talk to me in language like that?" "Put it down, I say! There, don't raise your voice again, your Beverence. Now, you will have to go back into your house and give me your word you will never breathe a syllable of this, or" —said Con Lehane, in whose hand the revolver still gleamed, •"I will be obliged to keep your Beverence in custody and ask you to step over to the Tower." It was not in the least physical terror that was agitating Monsignor McGrudder. It was the self-same agony of shame and indignation that had convulsed him the day little Danny flung the lie in his teeth on the altar. It was not himself, but the whole power of his o'der, the whole awful authority and dignity of the Church, that seemed to be thus baited and outraged. A great surge of passion rose to his brain. "I will not give my wordl'll alarm the town —I will denounce you the world over. Ruffian! —murderer! —fire if you dare! !" "One word more, and, as God is my judge, I will fire !" This time Monsignor McGrudder felt the cold metal of the muzzle touching his forehead. In one lightning-flash of thought, he compared his own strong frame with the towering but not so burly figure before him, and thought that at the most he would be dying in a sacred cause: then that horror of death, which often haunts those who oftenest weigh the eternal issues that depend on it, came over him, with the thought of the immeasurable calamities for religion that might follow such a tragic scandal —all in one flash of consciousness. The next moment he said meekly, almost entreatingly: "Con Lehane, you were once a good Catholic boy. Go, in God's name, and do no worse than you have done." "I am on duty, your Reverence. There may be life depending on more valuable life than mine. Give me your promise, quick." "And if I don't, you will detain' me by force —me, your own priest—and you will kill me, if I resist " "I will!" said Con Lehane, in a deep, solemn voice. In the darkness the huge globules of icy perspiration tumbling down his forehead were not visible. The grim revolverbarrel was. "Come, your Beverence — no more time. Do you promise, or do you not?" "I promise," said Monsignor McGrudder, turning back towards the Presbytery, like an unsubdued prisoner, staggering from the hands of the torturer. "May God forgive you!" "Amen, your Reverence! —and forgive you!—lreland has enemies enough without you," said Con Lehane, put- . ting the revolver in his breast-pocket, and turning towards the Tower. I hate mystifying my readers. A man who invites people to dinner might as well begin by ushering them 8 into the coal-cellar. Be it known at once, therefore, that the glint of light across the graveyard came from a chink in the doorway of the lower chamber of the Tower where the American Captain and a party of his friends were assembled in the glow of a fire that had nothing of church-

yard gloom around it' There were pistols upon the table, amidst the remains of a supper, with some bottles and tumblers. Upon the day when Con Lehane "didn't like the way them Bobbies were hovering" around the Banner Office while' the Captain was enveloped in Olympian clouds of cigar-smoke in the back-shop, a hurried council of war was held, and was barely in session when Mat Murriri was beckoned out into the back-kitchen where some mysterious magnetic familiar spirit from the Telegraph Office whispered that the order for the Captain's immediate arrest had just come off the wires. "Well," said Mat, returning to the Council of War, ''what do you say to bolting tho front door and summoning the Staff? 'Tis a pity the poor divels hadn't a taste of the auctioneer's John Jameson first to put a soul in them after their day at the case. But Noble Nolan can slip out and get in a jar or two that'll stand a siege. There's an old shot gun over that press there, if you'll find anything in the powder-horn—l never bad occasion to use it myself since the night Hans Harman's blackguard election mob tried their tricks on tho Banner office. . And don't you think Mrs. Murrin might as well get down a few pots of boiling water? 'Twould be very effective from the top window — darling, Aloysia !" But Con Lehane was prepared with a more promising project. His mother, as chapel-woman, had the keys of the Chapel and the Bound Tower under her dominion. What more unsuspicious refuge could be found than under the very wing of Monsignor McGrudder and in the midst of a graveyard? The Bound Tower, too, in obedience to the obliquity of Monsignor McGrudder's architectural genius, seemed to be built with a special view of stifling the voice of the bell before it could reach the ears of the public, for it was completely screened from the view of the street by the Chapel, and could only be subjected to a close inspection by the few who cared to take their walks abroad among dead people whose bones were apt sometimes to come above the ground in a manner not altogether supernatural nor yet at all cheerful. "I guess*that's just where I'm goin' to wade in. Con Lehane, you're a lad of some savvypowerfully so, sir!" said Captain Mike. "As I have got to dust out of the Castle at all, there ain't nobody's hospitality more to my taste than the gon'leman's with the Italian nickname. Sir. it'll bust the crust of that worthy old sacred volcano if ever the public should ascertain that while he was cursin' me a hundred-and-for'ty-pounds-of-steam-power in the Chapel, he was all the time entertainin' me in rayshershay style in tho Bound Tower." "Don't you think 'twill be a little- —ahem! depressing to tho spirits?" asked Mat Murrin, with a slight shudder ■ —"or rather not depressing, so far as spirits of a certain order are concerned, but perhaps rather calculated to raise them?"" "No, sir. No better company than dead men —I've know'd 'cm now this long while —spent an odd night or so with 'em, thousands of 'em away down the Wilderness way, and with Meade that night at Gettysburg, an' never know'd a. man of 'em to rise up an' do anything onneighborly, though they'd got no coffins to shake themselves out of. God rest 'cm, good old boys! The Tower's the ticket, Con Lehane"—■ And hence it came to pass that, to the rest of the maddening problems to .which the Irish Bound Towers gave rise in Monsignor McGrudders mind, was added now the mystery that his own Bound Tower was giving forth unaccountable lights and sounds at an advanced hour of the night, and sentinelled by parishioners with cocked revolvers. With proper adherence to the architectural type, the entrance door was at some height from the ground, and was approached by a short ladder, which was removable at will, and which was the abiding terror of the old chapel-woman's life. The lower chamber was separated from the bell-chamber by a loft pierced in the centre by a square opening through which a ladder went up and the bell-chain came down. It was upon this loft that Captain Mike's mattress was laid. The room below was heated from a fire-place which Mrs. Lehane had established in connection with the flue of the adjoining vestry, in order to comfort herself during those icy winter days, when she had sometimes to toll the bell all day for some departed . member of the public. There was thus an unsuspicious

exit provided for the smoke of the fire at which Mrs. Lehane cooked the Captain's meals, and it was easy to 'stuff the unglazed apertures by which daylight entered the lower portion of the Tower, so that no artificial light from within should show itself, unless through some such accidental slit or chink as emitted the ray of light which startled Monsignor McGrudder. Here' Captain Mike smoked and snoozed away the days of his captivity,- and entertained himself in the open air among the tombstones after dark and here he toasted his own bacon rasher with an old campaigner's relish, whenever the old chapel-woman judged it unsafe to approach the Tower, and smacked his lips over even prettier dainties, which Katie Rohan would smuggle in under that pirate little mantelette of hers when she came to morning Mass, or her daily visit to the Blessed Sacrament, and which, there is some reason to suspect, in part found their way from a pair of lily hands in the kitchen of Drumshaughlin Castle. (To be continued.)