Mount Music Part 41

He watched the car turn into the wide sweep in front of the house, and wheel round it, and draw up at the foot of the hall-door steps. It looked like the car he had hired, he knew the shover's face, but there was someone in it. He saw, with pleasure, that it was Barty who was in the car. Good old Barty, come over early to buck him up a bit. Larry sprang to the door, and as he opened it, Barty was coming up the steps. He stood still on the top step. He was very pale, Barty always had a pasty face, Larry thought, but this whiteness was different, and there was a look in his eyes that made Larry, over-strung, tuned to vibrate to ill tidings, catch his arm, and say:

"What is it? Tell me quick!"

Barty did not answer at once. He seemed as if he could not speak. He came into the hall and shut the door behind him and leaned against it, one hand still on the handle, his breath coming short and fast.

"My father was drowned last night!" he said at last, in a low, hurried voice. "He drove into the river. The flood was up on the road. Wait, Larry! That isn't all--" he went on quickly, holding up his other hand to keep Larry from speaking. "That's bad enough, G.o.d knows! But this other thing is Disgrace!"

Larry waited.

"It isn't easy to tell you," said Barty, moistening his dry lips.

"There's just one good thing about it, my father didn't know--"

"What _is_ it? Look sharp!"

Larry was shaking with the strain of waiting for this withheld horror.

"Tishy was caught out by the flood last night; she didn't come home--"

"What! She also--?" stammered Larry.

"I wish to G.o.d she were!" said Barty, fiercely. "No. But while my father was going to his death, maybe when he was drowning itself, she bolted with Ned Cloherty! They went to Dublin on the mail--a porter at the station saw them--there's no doubt about it!"

Larry sat down by a table, and put his head on his arms and tried to think. His brain was whirling. He had covered his eyes, because he knew if he saw Barty's tragic face again he would laugh, and if he began to laugh, he said to himself, G.o.d only knew when he would stop.

It was a fatal trick of his nerves, he could never make Barty understand. He would be shocked and scandalised for ever.

The Doctor drowned! He must fix his mind on that. He mustn't think of Tishy; if he did, he knew that this horrible, inhuman surge of joy that was pulsing in him would betray itself in his face, would overwhelm him, like the flood in the river, would sweep away all decency, sympathy, would leave him bare of all that he ought to feel and express. (But to think that he hadn't to get married to-day! Oh, blessed, beautiful Cloherty!) He was going to be very angry with Cloherty, as soon as he had pulled himself together. Cloherty had behaved like a blackguard; he had blackened Larry's face; he had shamed him; had stolen his girl--(but, for all that, oh, Blessed and Beautiful--!)

Larry and Barty sat for awhile and talked, saying, as people will, at such moments, dull things over and over again, uninspired, conventional, stupid things. Both were equally afraid to say the things that were in their minds about Tishy and Cloherty; Barty, because he was so angry with her that he feared he might hurt Larry; Larry, because he told himself he would have to sit down to the thing squarely, and think it out, before he knew what to say about it. He tried to concentrate on the death of Barty's father, but here, strangely enough, Barty seemed equally unable to respond without restraint.

"I've got to go on to Mount Music. They say the flood's down, and you can get there now," he said, presently, in the voice from which all the colour and life had died, "I've arranged for a hea.r.s.e. I had a wire, early, telling me what--what had happened. I was wondering, Larry, would you come with me? I've no right, now, to ask you, but--" His tired voice died on the sentence, his mournful eyes sought Larry's and said what his lips failed to say.

"My dear old chap," said Larry, ardently, grateful for the chance of showing Barty that he bore no ill will to him, "Of course I will!

Anything I could do to help you, I'd be only too glad--you mustn't think anything will make a difference--"

They said little to each other as the motor splashed along the flooded road. Each was absorbed in the effort to envisage the profound changes that had befallen himself in a single night. More than once Barty turned to Larry as if he were about to speak, and then turned away; they came to the Mount Music entrance, and as the car turned in through the gateway, Barty suddenly put his bony and pallid hand on Larry's knee.

"There's a thing no one here knows but myself, and I didn't hear it till two days ago, but I can't bear the weight of it any longer. I can't give you all the details, but you may rely on what I say being correct." He looked away from Larry out of the window. The car was running swiftly up the smooth levels of the long avenue; he knew he had no time for circ.u.mlocution. "My father told me," he began, "that in some way, between himself and the Major a lot of money had pa.s.sed.

The Major was greatly pressed for money--he wasn't getting his rents, and there were many liabilities--my father got hold of them all. I think he lent him a lot of money too--" He paused an instant, then he rushed on with his story. "Anyway, whatever was between them, the Major gave my father the t.i.tle-deeds of this house and the demesne in security for what he had borrowed. My father has them now, I mean," he corrected himself, "they're in my office. He said they were for me--he as good as gave them to me." Barty slowly turned a dusky red. He thought of what his father had said of Mount Music, of Christian; the arrogance, the hateful facetiousness; he had felt as if brutal hands had been laid on a saint; even now, he shuddered in spirit as remembrance came to him.

"Good G.o.d! Was that why they went away?" Larry said, with a horror that scarcely permitted of speech. "Do you mean the place isn't theirs any more?" He thought: "I wish he'd take his hand off my knee! Thank G.o.d, I'm out of it!"

"It" meant marriage with the daughter and the sister of men who could do such things.

Perhaps some telepathic vibration from that wave of repulsion reached Barty.

"You needn't think I had anything to do with it," he muttered, withdrawing his hand, "or ever will!" he added, as if to himself.

Larry remained silent; the car ground into the heavy river-gravel on the sweep in front of the house, and ceased at the door that he had not seen since that day of wrath when he had cast his cousins behind him for ever.

CHAPTER XLII

Dr. Mangan's body was still lying on the door on which it had been carried up from the river-bank. Kitchen chairs now supported it where it lay, with its burden, between the high windows, in the desolate, sheeted dining-room, surrounded by portraits of Talbots, and Lowrys, and their collaterals, who would surely have considered the presence of Francis Aloysius Mangan, dead or alive, as something of an intrusion, not to say a liberty.

Old Evans opened the hall door, and silently led the two young men through the hall, and opening the dining-room door, left them there.

They stood looking down on the Big Doctor in silence. The strong, coa.r.s.e face had taken on that aloof dignity, even splendour of expression, that death can confer. The servants had covered all else with a sheet; the soaked fur collar of the coat was turned up, and made a pillow for the big, iron-grey head.

With a shaking hand Barty turned back the sheet. His father's thick, powerful hands were crossed on his broad breast. The son stooped and kissed them, humbly; then he replaced the sheet, and kissed the heavy brow, from which all the marks of the turmoil of life had been smoothed.

"I believe he is near us," he whispered; he took a prayer-book from his pocket and knelt, his head resting on the covered form.

Larry knelt also. If only Barty had not told him that abhorrent thing.

He tried to forget it, to pray for the soul of the man who had, as he believed, always been kind to him, and a good friend. Larry was undevout, careless, thinking little of spiritual things, so little, that he had scarcely troubled himself either to question or to accept what he had been taught, but he was quick to respond to emotion of any kind; now he listened, with an unaccustomed reverence, to Barty's voice, brokenly whispering the prayers of his Church. Their unfamiliar beauty stirred his imagination, their appeal for mercy wakened his heart, and made him ask himself what was he that he should refuse mercy! He felt the anger, that had only been roused in him within the last few minutes, dying, merged in pity and in awe.

"By the mult.i.tude of Thy mercies, ever compa.s.sionate to human frailty, deliver him, O Lord!" Barty's husky, shaking voice murmured. "Give him, O Lord, eternal rest, and let perpetual light shine upon him--"

The door was opened and Evans said:

"The police are here, and are asking for Mr. Mangan."

Barty rose from his knees; without a word, he placed the prayer book in Larry's hands, and left the room.

Larry had risen also, but instead of following Barty he knelt again by the Big Doctor's still figure, and began to speak to him in the low voice that is the mark of recognition of the great mystery of death, and tells of that singular, sudden reverence that is bestowed on the body when the spirit has left it; a reverence that seems to imply a belief in the nearness of the freed spirit, which is unsupported by the immeasurable remoteness of the expression of the mask that it once wore.

"Doctor," said Larry, "I don't know if you can hear me, but I'll chance it. I want to tell you that it's not my fault about Tishy, and the wedding not coming off. She bolted with Ned Cloherty last night--"

he checked himself, and felt he ought to apologise for talking slang, and then thought that if it were the Doctor, himself, he wouldn't mind. "Tishy liked Cloherty best," he hurried on, "and she was probably quite right, but I want you to know that I would have played up all right." Then he said, hesitating, that Barty had told him a thing that he didn't quite understand the rights of. "You must forgive me if I felt angry. I daresay there's a lot to be said on your side if I only knew it. But I don't and you can't tell me now--" He stood up, and touching the cold brow, smoothed back the damp hair. "You were always awfully good to me," he said, and, stooping, kissed the forehead, as Barty had done, and found that his eyes were full of tears.

As he stood erect again, he saw he was not alone in the room. A girl was standing just behind him with a basket of Christmas roses in her hand, a girl who had come quietly in while he was speaking, and had waited, watching, with eyes that saw more than Larry's kneeling figure beside the dead man, listening, with senses that were perceptive of a fellow-listener, in whom were newly-learnt impulses of self-reproach and penitence.

"Christian!" said Larry, trembling, as he had trembled when he spoke to her by the Druid Stone on Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe.

By the same Authors

Some Experiences of An Irish R.M.

Further Experiences of An Irish R.M.

In Mr. Knox's Country

All On The Irish Sh.o.r.e