A note of the horn was wafted sweetly across the glen, and he came to the surface of his thoughts. By Jove! Where had Joker got him to? The lane they had wandered down ran parallel with Gloun Kieraun, and a gap in the fence on his left made him aware that he was now moving abreast with the hunt, but was divided from his fellows by the chasm of the glen.

A second touch of the horn came; Larry checked his horse; Bill Kirby had seen him and was shouting to him.

"Head him back if he breaks your side! I want him his way!"

All jolly fine for old Bill, but where did young Mr. Coppinger come in? He held up his hand to show he had heard, and stood still.

One hound spoke, sharply, in the depths of the woody glen. Another and another joined in. In a moment, the echoing glen was full of voices; it was impossible to tell what was happening. A couple and a half emerged on the farther side in the heather above the trees, working a line upwards, and speaking to it as they went. Larry saw the Master force his horse down near them, and heard him cheering them and doubling his horn. Another couple joined them, and Larry swore heartily. Here he was on the wrong side, and the fox away to the east! The cry redoubled; it sounded as if twice the pack were engaged, yet the two and a half couple were not being reinforced. By some chance Larry withdrew his eyes from them, and just then, about a hundred yards further on, on his side of the glen, something like a brown feather floated up into view.

"A second fox, by the living Jingo!" whispered Larry, thrilling to that sight that never fails to thrill.

He held up his hat. Bill saw the signal, and acknowledged it by redoubled efforts to get the hounds away with the fox that had broken to the east. The chorus of sound grew and grew, and as Joker and his rider, tense with an equal excitement, listened, it became plain that the cry was drawing nearer to them. Joker's sensitive ears were twitching, his heart thumped; the storm of sound was just below them now, and then, hound by hound, Larry counted them as they came, fourteen couples struggled up over the lip of the glen where that brown feather had so lightly lifted into view, and drove ahead, on the way it had gone, with a rush and a cry that Larry could no more have checked than he could have stemmed and driven back the wild stream in the glen below.

It may be said at once that he made no such futile effort. With a single glance at the frenzied party on the farther side, already galloping distractedly for a possible pass lower down the glen, Larry released his feelings in a maniac howl to the fleeting pack, and let Joker—who had already stood up on his hind legs twice, in legitimate protest—follow them.

The fox, having begun by running west, away from the glen, had then turned right-handed, and was heading north over the mountain whose lower slopes were cleft by Gloun Kieraun. The scent served well; the gurgling music with now and then a sharper note, like a fife among flutes and 'cellos, flowed on, and Larry and Joker, two happy creatures, the world forgetting (though by no means by their world forgot) galloped and rejoiced.

The little mountain sheep with their black, speckled faces sprang before them, quick as rabbits; green plover flopped up from the grassy places, wheeling and squealing; a woodcock whirred out of a furze bush so near Larry that he could have struck it down with his crop. Long-legged mountain hares fled right and left of the driving pack, unheeded. Great spaces of the mountain were bare of fences, but in those tracts where the grass had mastered the heather, it was "striped" with broad banks, sound, and springy, and bound, as with wire, by the heather roots. To feel Joker quicken his big stride and leap at the banks out of his gallop, to realise the perfect precision of his method, as he changed feet and flicked off into the next field, to race him at the walls of smooth round stones, weathered in the long centuries, and grey with lichen, and to know that if they were three times their height Joker would have sailed over them with the same ease—whatever might have been Larry's burden of care, it would have fallen from him, forgotten, in the pure glory of that ride.

The hounds ran hard for nearly a half hour before they checked, and Larry bethought him of those unfortunates between whom and himself that great gulf had been fixed. Apparently they had not found, any more than the rich man in the parable, a means of crossing it. He was high above the valley; the splendid landscape lay in broad undulating ribbons of brown and green and amethyst and blue, with the Broadwater dividing it—a silver belt, with a band of green on its either side; but within the great circle that was spread beneath his eyes were none of those toiling specks that tell of a Hunt in labour. The check was brief; the hurrying hounds, busy as ants, cast themselves right and left forward, combining in fussy groups, that would suddenly disintegrate as if by an access of centrifugal force; crowding each other jealously along the top of a bank, flopping into the patches of bog, snuffing greedily at the orange stems of the bracken. Soon, reiterated squeals from a leading lady told that the clue was found again, and they began to run, hard as before, but downwards this time, as though the fox despaired of finding refuge among the high places of heather and rock. Larry had lost his bearings; his eyes on the hounds, his thoughts on his horse, he had not even tried to place himself. But as the hounds ran on, south and west, he began to recognise familiar features. Away there to the south, surely were the trees of Coppinger's Court; could it be the Mount Music earths for which the fox was heading? The hounds were running now down hill, through crisp, upland meadows. Farmhouses began to reappear, thatched and whitewashed, tucked snugly in among low bunches of trees; fences were changing in character; the amber streams ran less fiercely, and found time to loiter in pools and quiet reaches. The hounds had begun to hunt more slowly, and Larry looked at his watch.

"Forty-five minutes since they left the glen! Bill's just about mad enough for the asylum by this time!" he thought "If we could only catch this lad!"

But this particular "lad" was not to gratify young Mr. Coppinger by dying, classically, in the open, "on the top of the ground." Five minutes after Larry had taken the time he took it again, this time at the mouth of one of many holes in a sandpit, wherein, as was announced by a country boy, "the lad" had saved himself, with "the dogs snapping at his tail."

"He earned it well," said Larry, ungrudgingly, even though the mask that was to have hung so carelessly from his saddle was panting deep and safe in the sandpit, listening warily for a possible eviction notice from the hunt-terrier (left, alas hunting rabbits in the heart of Gloun Kieraun) thanking its own wits for the recollection of the city of refuge.

"Ye're on the lands of Finnahy now," said the boy. "Folly on that way down, and ye'll meet the road. That's the near way."

"Come on, you, and show it to me," said Larry.

Amazing were the ramifications of the near way. The bed of a stream had a share, and a well-trodden path along the wide top of a bank; a brace of wheels had to be trundled out of one gap, a toothless harrow dragged from another. Then they were on heather again.

"Carry on now," said the guide, "and ye'll meet a pat—"

Larry needed no more leading; he was on the hill above Mount Music, Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe, and the "pat" that was to meet him was the narrow track that led by the Druid Stone and the Well of the Fairies.

The December afternoon was darkening to its close; the sun had made its farewell appearance, coming forth for a moment, a half-circle of clear flame, above the long grey cloud that barred the head of the valley. Larry rode past the great grey stone, and hardly turned his eyes toward it. The hounds, trooping meekly round his horse, went aside to the well, and drank long and thirstily. He did not wait for them. He put from his mind the memory of the last time he had seen from that hill-side the sun go down. Rather he set his thoughts, resolutely, on that other last time, in the library of Mount Music. And he called up Tishy's brilliant face, framed in the furs that he had given her, that it might help him to drive away other memories. He was very fond of Tishy, he told himself; anyway, he was booked to marry her next week.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

The small town of Cluhir, ever avid, as are all small towns, of sensation, was, did it only know it, about to enjoy a week that would long be remembered in its history. Miss Mangan's marriage, which alone would have made an epoch, was fixed for Thursday, December 12th; but this, it need scarcely be said, was a matter that, though soul-stirring, was devoid of the element of surprise. Not so, however, was the sudden evacuation of Mount Music. Father Hogan's indefinite information was as much as was generally known, but much that was not generally known was confided to the discreet ears of Father Greer, and he, almost alone of the inhabitants of Cluhir, was not surprised when the news went abroad that the Mount Music carriage had conveyed Major Dick and Lady Isabel to the station, and that so vast a mass of luggage had accompanied them as to betoken a prolonged absence.

That the news should, in the first instance, have been communicated to Father Greer by Dr. Mangan, was not remarkable, since Dr. Mangan's professional advice had usefully reinforced his unofficial advocacy of the move, and Father Greer was rarely ignorant for long of matters that were found interesting by the Big Doctor.

Not merely for the sake of Major Talbot-Lowry's health had this upheaval taken place; an even more imperious factor had been the state of the family finances. The cloud of debt that had so long brooded over Mount Music was lower and darker than ever it had been before. Dick had at length been coerced into opening negotiations for the sale of his property to his tenants, but although, in the fullness of time, these might be expected to bear fruit, they were of no more immediate assistance to this over-weighted survivor of a prehistoric species, than is the suggestion to a horse to live in order that he may get oats.

There was pressure in the air over Mount Music. Tradesmen, whose suffering had been as long as their bills, began to turn, in what had seemed like the sleep of exhaustion, and to talk about solicitors' letters. Even Dr. Mangan had surprised and pained his friend, the Major, by forgetting his wonted delicate reticence, and hinting, with what struck Dick as singularly doubtful taste, at a repayment of those loans that he had volunteered, offering as an excuse for doing so the expenses consequent on his daughter's marriage. In addition to these irritations, Major Talbot-Lowry had received what he justly considered to be very annoying letters from a firm of Dublin solicitors, in connection with various charges and mortgages on the Mount Music property, which so they, informed him, had been "acquired" by them for "a client," and were now to be called in. Alternatively, it was suggested, an arrangement might be proposed, whereby the house and demesne of Mount Music might be accepted in settlement of the sums in question. The firm had been in communication with another creditor, Dr. Mangan of Cluhir, and it was hoped that all Major Talbot-Lowry's liabilities might be arranged for by the method they suggested.

Dick Talbot-Lowry received this announcement with the mixture of indignation and contempt that might have been anticipated from an old-established Pterodactyl, who has been warned that his hereditary wallow in the Primeval Ooze is about to be wrested from him. Having expressed these sentiments in suitable language, he said, lightly, that Fairfax must raise as much on the property as would keep these Dublin sharks quiet, and in the meantime he would shut up the house at once and go to London. Temporary retrenchment was all that was required. He would let the place. Some rich Englishman would jump at the chance—

Major Dick had that optimism about his own affairs that is often combined with a tranquil pessimism about the affairs of others. He said that all he wanted was to get clear of the blood-sucking swarm of hangers-on that infested the place. He wondered at his own folly in having endured them for so long. And it would do Christian good to get away. She had been looking rather pulled down—she missed the hunting, of course. London would do her good—would be a change.

This, approximately, was what Dick said. What Lady Isabel said, being an attenuated echo of Dick's observations, is negligible. What Christian said was known only to Rinka, the eldest of the fox terriers, who had a habit of sitting in the chair at which Christian, knelt to say her prayers, and would then, with her bland and balmy smile, extort confidences denied to any other living creature.

On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst of all, the dismissals. The house (pending the materialisation of the Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old friendships. Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left, alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with the obliteration of her past life to be her task.

An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of her sight for a single instant.

The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one's own little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one insignificant segment of the world. On Monday morning, Christian saw her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes, to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost. And on Monday afternoon with the early darkness the storm began. There came first a little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out the land. There followed complete stillness; then a few scattered drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling roar, the wind came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of its surprise attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long passages snatching at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows and the shaking clatter of doors within the house, and the shrieking rage of the wind outside. She sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her room. She had none of the fears that might, for another, have filled the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing passages and knocks on the shaking doors. She had always lived on the borderland, and was naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so often given her help, were, when she most needed help, silent.

"I have nothing left now," she said to herself, "but memories, hungering memories—"

She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world has power to break a heart?

Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then, with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was hurled upon the world. All that night, and all the following day, the rain was like a wall about the house. It was flung in masses against the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck. To look forth was as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters, eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried roof was mastered, and in all its angles and valleys yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the top story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the tempi, from a ponderous adagio to a racing prestissimo. Buckets and jugs and baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the old Evans pair waddling to and fro, elated, almost gratified, by the magnitude of their task. And in the middle of the uproar, late in the afternoon, a new sound joined in the chorus of the storm, the coarse and ugly summons of a motor-horn. Old Evans spied at the car through the hall window, and contrived to signal a command to go round to the back of the house.

"If I let dhraw the bolts," he said to Barty Mangan at the kitchen entrance, "the door would fall flat on me!"

"I wouldn't be surprised at all," Barty replied. "Hardly I could force the car into the storm."

Christian was sitting on the floor by the fireplace in the hall, in the last of the daylight, examining and burning the contents of a drawer full of miscellaneous papers, as the visitor made his unexpected entrance from the back, and Barty, recognising his own improbability and unsuitability on such a day and at such a time, fell to confused apologies that were as incoherent, and seemed as unlikely ever to end, as the buzzing of an imprisoned bee on the window-pane. The fact at length, however, emerged, that there was a map of the Mount Music estate hanging in the library, and that the Major having promised to lend it to Dr. Mangan, had forgotten to do so.

"Some question of boundaries—a little grazing form m' fawther has—" Barty said, nervously.

The map was found, was rolled, and wrapped up, and yet Barty sat on. He talked incessantly, feverishly. He talked so fast, in his low voice, that, in the clamour of the storm, Christian could only distinguish an occasional word. She had a nightmare feeling as if a train were roaring through an endless tunnel, and that she and Barty were the sole passengers, and would never see daylight or know quiet again. His long, lean body was hooped into a very low and deep armchair, his thin hands clasped his knees; his immense dark eyes, fixed on Christian's face, gave her the impression that what he was saying was without relation to what he was thinking. In the direful gloom of the hall, with the rain and wind threshing on the half-shuttered windows, and the inconstant light of the burning logs the sole illuminant, his pale face, with the wing of black hair on his forehead, looked like the face of a strayed occupant of another sphere who had resumed such an aspect as he had worn in his coffin.

"Ireland's a queer old place just now, Miss Christian," Barty hurried on. "Everything's changing hands, and everyone's changing sides. You don't know what'll happen next!"

"I wish I were not changing sides too," said Christian, catching at a sentence, in a momentary lull of the roaring in the chimney. "Sides of the Channel, I mean—I prefer this side!"

"Do you? Do you?" said Barty, intensely. "I'm glad you do! I feel often as if no one cared for this miserable country except for what they could get out of it! At the election it would have sickened you, the bargaining, and the humbugging, and the lies. Larry was the only man that ran straight, and they jockeyed him—"

"I'm sure you ran straight," said Christian, with sympathy in her voice. Piercing her weariness and preoccupation was the feeling that he had something to say that lay under this babble of conversation. He was wrapping himself in a cloak of verbiage, but above the cloak his tormented eyes met hers, and the pain in them hurt her.

"Me? Oh, I only ran after Larry. I thought it was a shabby thing of the Unionists not to have supported him—" he stopped abruptly, remembering Major Talbot-Lowry's abstention, remembering also the feud, of which he knew only that he had never wholly divined its origin, between Coppinger's Court and Mount Music. He cursed himself for a fool. He had not meant to talk politics, but what he had come through the storm to say was so difficult. He looked at Christian with agony. Had she minded what he said about the Unionists? He began to talk again, very fast and incoherently.

"Miss Christian, I said awhile ago everything was changing in Ireland. There's big changes coming, even hereabouts, things I couldn't believe would ever happen. I've recently learned a—a fact—a statement that I'm not at liberty to repeat. I was—I may say that I was shocked—but Miss Christian—" the agony in his eyes was in his voice. "Oh! Miss Christian, for God's sake, believe that I knew nothing of it till this day!"

He stood up, steadying himself with a hand on one of the high marble pillars of the mantelpiece.

"Knew nothing of what?" said Christian, thinking she had mistaken what he had said.

"I can't tell you—you'll know soon enough—only I'm just asking you to believe that I had neither part nor lot in it!"

Christian had risen, and was standing up; he came a step nearer.

"I just want you to understand, Miss Christian, that in this world there is no one I regard like you—no one, nor ever was, nor ever will be—but don't mind that, I only want to say that if there is anything in this earthly world that it's in my power to do for you, or that I could help you in anny shape or form, you will be showing the kindness and mercy of God if you will let me do it for you."

He was trembling, and his voice shook, but his nervousness was gone. "The kindness and mercy of God!" he said again. "I would feel it to be that—oh, God! I would!" The tortured spirit in his eyes had given place to another spirit, whose emotion Christian could neither mistake nor respond to, yet its kinship with the immutable fidelity that was in her heart made an appeal that she could not refuse.

"Be sure I will ask you," she said, with the pity that her own heart-loneliness had taught her in her voice. "I can't understand what it is that you think may happen; it seems to me as if—" She broke off, held by the thought that disaster could hardly have another arrow in its quiver for her. "You may be sure if I think you can help me, I will ask you. I know I could rely on you," she said, pushing back her own trouble, meeting his wild eyes with hers, steadfast and compassionate.

"I'm more than thankful—grateful—you've only to speak—" he stumbled and stammered with words that were all inadequate to his feeling. "I won't detain you; I'm taking your time too long as it is—and I'll have a job to get home too, the river's rising every minute, and so is the storm—" He somehow talked himself out of the room.

Christian returned to her work of destruction. The situation in general had not been made easier for her by Barty's tragic offer of assistance in some mysterious and advancing stress, or by the certainty that she tried to shake, but could not, of what his eyes had said to her.

But Barty, as he drove home through the storm, felt himself to be a new man, consecrate and apart, ennobled by her promise to rely on him, glorified by her look; and thanked God that, when the trouble came, she would remember that he had had neither part nor lot in it.



CHAPTER XXXIX

The storm, and the preparations for the wedding, raged on with almost equal violence, within and without the walls of No. 6, The Mall. From the moment that daylight began on the fateful Wednesday, the day before the wedding, and until it ceased, Mrs. Mangan's face recurred at the window of the dining room, full of protest, primarily against the arbiter of the weather, who had sent so supreme a hindrance to all her preparations, secondarily, against the shops of Cluhir, whose dilatoriness in matters of the highest importance "had her," so she affirmed frequently, "that much distracted, that it would be a comfort and a consolation to her if she were stretched cold in her grave."

At intervals during the feverish day, beings would come rushing through the torrents, like trout in a swirling brook, and would fling themselves and their parcels in through the door that Mrs. Mangan was generally ready to open for them. Frantic messages from bridesmaids about their costumes, belated wedding presents, all the surf and foam that is flung up by the waves of a wedding, broke upon No. 6. The bride elect, pale and preoccupied, ("pale," that is to say, "for Tishy," as one of her compeers observed, "flushed for any one else!") wrote notes, and exhibited presents, and packed clothes, and rode the tempest with a fortitude that was worthy of the Big Doctor's daughter. But even Tishy began to fail as darkness drew in.

"I can't stand this house any more," she said to her mother, "rain or no rain, I'm going out! I didn't see Mrs. Whelply about Kathleen's" wreath that she wrote about—"

"You'll be drowned," said Mrs. Mangan, doomfully; "and sure if Larry comes over, what'll I say to him?"

"He'll not come!" said Tishy, scornfully. "What a fool he is, a day like this!"

"And they say the river's up in the houses down at the end of the town," went on Mrs. Mangan. "In the name of pity why wouldn't you be satisfied to stay at home for this once, and you leaving me for good to-morrow!"

"Well, I'll die if I stay in this messed-up hole any longer!" said Tishy. "I don't care how wet I get—"

Presently the front door slammed behind her; her mother said to herself that of all the headstrong pieces—! And, further, that she trusted in God Larry Coppinger would be able to make a hand of her; she then, with the resignation that experience teaches to defeated mothers, went to the kitchen, and prepared a tray with tea, and carried it herself up to the Doctor's surgery.

"Francis, may I come in? I have tea for you and meself."

"Come in to be sure," replied Francis, hospitably. "I'll be glad of a cup. Wait and I'll light the gas."

The Big Doctor was a faithful man, and loved his wife. He treated her as a slave, but it was thus that she not only expected, but preferred to be treated, and the position of a favourite slave may not be without its compensations. He established her in the Patients' chair, arranging it so that the crude flare of the incandescent gas should not be in her eyes, and then sat down in his own huge chair, in comfortable proximity to her and the tea-tray.

"Well, Annie, me girl," he said. "You're looking tired enough, but there isn't one will touch you in looks to-morrow for all that! Your own daughter included!"

"Go on out of that, Francis, with your nonsense!" replied Mrs. Mangan, with a coquettish slap on the Doctor's great round knee, "you ought to be learning sense for yourself by this time!"

"Maybe I'm not so wanting in sense as you might think, Annie!" he answered, his watchful, grey-blue eyes under the over-hanging, musical brows, softening as he looked at her. I think one way and another, I haven't made altogether such a bad fist of things!"

"Darling lovey!" cried Mrs. Mangan, adoringly. "How would you think I meant it!"

"Well, I didn't either!" said the Doctor, with a satisfied laugh, "but I'm inclined to think that I've done better than you're aware of, or that you might give me credit for either!"

"All I'm aware of," said Mrs. Mangan, sitting erect, with a look of defiance, "is that there's nothing in this world, no, nor in Ireland neither, that you couldn't do if you chose to put your mind to it! So now! You needn't be talking to me like that! Pretending I don't know you after all those years!"

"Well, listen to me now," said the Doctor, well pleased, 'Tell me what d'ye think of this marriage of Tishy's?"

"You know well what I think of it, Francis, and what everybody thinks of it, too! The smartest and the richest—"

"Well, that's all right," interrupted the Doctor, "but for a woman like yourself, that sets out to be fond of her children, its surprising that you didn't make a match yet for your son!" He looked at her with indulgent fondness, laughing at her, and she gazed back at him with her heart in her eyes, and thought him the king of men. "Well, what have you got to say to that, Mrs. Mangan? It's well for the poor boy that his father isn't so neglectful of him!"

"What do you mean, Francis? What are you talking of?"

"I'm talking of poor Barty, my dear!" said the Doctor, enjoying himself intensely, and watching his wife's handsome face with eyes that lost no shade of its quick-changing expression. "You've a high opingen of him, I know! Would you think Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry was good enough for him?"

Mrs. Mangan's mouth opened, in sheer stupefaction. She opened and shut it two or three times before speech came to her.

"Barty!" she panted; "Miss Christian Lowry! Sweet and Blessed Mother of God! Francis, you're raving! Is it my poor Barty! They'd never look at him!"

The Doctor watched her with triumph in his face. "Don't be too sure of that! I might have an argument up my sleeve—" he checked himself as a nervous knock was heard at the door. "Who's there? Come in! Come in, can't ye?"

A telegram, the orange envelope dark with wet, was handed to him. He read it.

"No answer," he said, getting up quickly. "Well, bad manners to the woman! Such a day to choose!"

"What is it, lovey? Don't tell me it's a sick call! You couldn't possibly go annywhere this evening!" cried Mrs. Mangan, italicising, in her indignation, every second word, "and for goodness' sake, go on and tell me what was the argument you said you had?"

"My dear, I couldn't go into it properly now. I'll tell you another time. I'm bound to go, and as quick as I can too! Run now, like a good girl, and tell Barty or Mike to get the car ready in a hurry. That wire was from Hannigan that lives below Riverstown. He says his wife'll die—she's very bad, I'm afraid—I'm booked for the job this long time—"

Mrs. Mangan, loudly expostulating, though wise in obedience from experience, flew from the room with her message, and speedily returned to find the Big Doctor still hurrying about the surgery, making his preparations, and talking as he went.

"I mightn't be back till morning, but I'll not miss the wedding, don't be afraid! I'll come as soon as I can, I promise you that!"

"Oh, Francis, love, I hate to see you go out this awful night," wailed Mrs. Mangan, following him into the little hall, and dragging his fur-lined coat off a peg, and holding it for him; "and this scorf, my darling, put it on you before you ketch your death. Will you take Mike with you?"

"I will not. He'll be wanting here. Don't delay me now. Good-bye, girlie!" He kissed her. Then he opened the door, and with a roar, the wind and the rain hurled in, with a force that staggered him, big as he was.

"Well, such a night!" lamented Mrs. Mangan, for the twentieth time, clinging to the door; "I wish to God the telegraph wires were down before they could send for you! Oh, will you take care of yourself now, Francis?"

"Of course I will! Go in out of the wet—" he pushed himself in under the low hood of the car, and glided into the darkness.

A doctor is a dedicated man. He accepts risks with a laugh, and toil with, perhaps, a grumble, but he does not flinch. Obscure and inglorious perils are his, and hardships that only himself can gauge. Be sure that they are not unrecorded. They shine, and their splendour is hidden, like those lanterns that were hidden under the coats of the lantern-bearers. But there is, very surely, some screen, sensitive to its rays, on which that light is thrown, that will some day show us what we have been too self-centred to realise, and will dazzle us with the devotion to which we are now too much habituated to admire.



CHAPTER XL

It was Barty who had brought out the car, and, on his father's departure, he released the grip of the railings that had enabled him to keep his footing, and was, literally, blown into the house.

"Shut the door, my Pigeon-pie!" said his mother, "the wind's too strong for me."

Barty was too well accustomed to this expression of his mother's affection to resent it, and having done her bidding, he followed her into the Doctor's room, which alone had a fire in it.

"Nothing would please Tishy only to go down to the Whelplys," complained Mrs. Mangan, poking the fire, and seating herself in front of it with a long, groaning sigh of exhaustion; "some nonsense about a wreath. A wreath indeed! Any one'd be lucky that kept their hair on their heads in this wind, let alone a wreath! You'll have to go fetch her, my poor boy! I'll not be easy till I see her and Pappy home again! I thought maybe Larry might have come over, but I declare now I'm glad he did not."

"Larry's not like himself lately," said Barty, sitting down in his father's chair, and taking from his pocket a paper packet and extracting a crushed cigarette from it. "I think the loss of th' election disappointed him greatly."

"'Twas well he had Tishy to console him," said Mrs. Mangan, "it was in the nick of time she cot him!"

"It was," replied Barty, tepidly. "I think also," he went on, "he's put out about his aunt not coming down for the wedding, and even young Mrs. Kirby away. It's funny to think Coppinger's Court and Mount Music are empty now, the two of them—or will be after to-morrow. Miss Christian went to-day."

("See now how he's talking of her!" thought his mother. "I wonder did Francis say anything to him?") Aloud she said: "It's a pity she's gone, but it mightn't be for long."

"I saw her yesterday. The Doctor sent me there for a map," said Barty, with elaborate unconcern.

("Look at that now!" again commented Mrs. Mangan to herself. "How well they never told me he'd gone to see her! Aren't men a fright the way they'll hide things!")

"She's a sweet girl, my Pidgie," she resumed, to her son, "And Pappy's always said the same thing."

Barty looked at her like a horse prepared to shy. Had his father said anything to her? The longing to speak of Christian had mastered him, but if his mother knew—

"I think I'd better go for Tishy now," he said abruptly, "It might be a job to get down the town later on."

He left the room, and Mrs. Mangan, in her husband's big chair, by his big fire, fell into tired yet peaceful ease of body and mind. How wonderful was Francis! Who but he would have dared to aspire for his children as he had? He had secured for Tishy the very pick of the country; and now, her own darling Barty! Was it possible? Yes! It was, if Francis said so! But what was "the argument he had up his sleeve?" Never mind! Francis would tell her when he came home. There was no hurry. But again, how wonderful was Francis!

She fell asleep. Barty woke her, coming into the room, dripping and shining in oilskins and sou'wester, like a lifeboat man.

"I couldn't get further than West Street, Mammie," he said, still breathless. "I had on my waders, but the water was up over them. They had boats going about, I believe, but I couldn't get hold of one. Tishy'll have to stay the night at the Whelplys'. I met a man that told me there was a big flood in the river, and haystacks, and cattle, and all sorts, coming down in it. It was up over the line, and the train hardly got out. It was near putting out the engine fires."

"Oh, my God!" said Mrs. Mangan, with her big eyes that were so like Barty's fixed on his, "the Riverstown road! Oh! Francis!—" she groped at the front of her blouse for her Rosary, her lips moving in hasty supplication, her eyes wild, roving from her son's face to the blackness of the window. Suddenly she thrust back the Rosary.

"Why do you tell me these things?" she cried, furiously, "you great omadhaun! Is it to frighten me into my grave you want? Is it nothing to you that your father's out alone? Oh God! Oh God! Why couldn't he think of me as well as of that damned woman away at Riverstown!" She began to cry, wildly, her forehead pressed against one of the streaming panes of the window. "Oh Francis, Francis!—"

There were many more than Mrs. Mangan and her son that sat up all through that night in the Valley of the Broadwater. Trembling people in little low-lying cottages, with thatched roofs held in place with ladders, and ropes, and stones, with doors and windows barricaded against the wind. But of what avail are barricades against the creeping white lip of water, crawling in under the doors over the earthen floors, soaking in, through mud-built walls, coming against them at first as a thief in the night, falling upon them later as a strong man armed?

From the lower side-streets of Cluhir the people fled before the flood to any shelter that the upper parts of the town could offer them. Ghastly stories were told of drowned cattle that were swept against the closed doors, and came pushing and banging at the windows, carried there by their conqueror as it were with mockery, to entreat for the succour that was too late.

When the pale dawn looked out through wind-torn clouds, it saw a half-mile breadth of racing water where had been pasture-fields; the yellow, foam-laced river was half way up the tall, slender arches of Cluhir Bridge, lapping ever higher, as if in envy, to hide the sole beauty of the ignoble town. Trees, and hayricks, broken boats, and humble pieces of cottage furniture, jostled each other between the piers, tossing and dancing in grotesque gaiety, like drunken holiday-makers on their way to the sea. The great river that is credited with exacting six lives each year, was claiming its toll. How many it took that December night does not now concern us, save, indeed, where one sad house was in question, where a wife and a son waited a long night through for the man who would not return to them.

* * * * *

Down below Cluhir, at Mount Music, old Evans crept out of the shuttered house, and fought his way in the wind, amid fallen trees, down to the big river, to see what still stood of the boathouse. The boathouse had weathered out the night. Its roof had held, its door stood firm. Old Evans surveyed it with pride.

"Aha! Protestant building!" he said, old inveterate that he was.

Then he saw on the submerged bank, amid a debris of broken rushes, and clots of foam, and branches, something that he knew instantly for what it was. The drowned body of a man.

Cautiously, and holding by shrubs and tree-stems, he reached the place, where, half ashore, half lying in thin flood through which tufts of grass were showing, with arms stretched out, grasping at the shore, the intruder lay. Old Evans knew well that fur-collared coat. Often enough he had held it for the Big Doctor. He had no need to turn the defeated face from its pillow in the broken reeds. He stared down at the man whom he had hated, with something of pity, more of cynicism.

"Well, ye wanted Mount Music!" he said, at last. "How d'ye like it now ye've got it?"

* * * * *

The things that a man has accomplished we sum him up by, and the things of which he was capable, and did not accomplish, are of no account, and the net that held him is of a mesh beyond the vision of most.

Who shall pity the Big Doctor, or blame him over-much? He died in the fullness of his powers, with his ambitions, as he believed, attained. He knew himself to be a good son of the Church, a faithful husband, a successfully-scheming father. What his priest thought of him is known only to his priest, but we may be sure he regretted him. A jury of his peers would have approved him in his every action. If the paths that he had followed were sometimes tortuous, along many of them he had been guided by the ankus of that mahout in whose directions his faith had taught him to confide. He had lived according to the light that he had received, and in his last act he took his life in his hand, and gave it for another.

For my part, I believe that the Big Doctor viewed with a justified composure

" ... that last Wild pageant of the accumulated past That clangs and flashes for a drowning man."



CHAPTER XLI

In that same wind-wild dawn, Larry awoke, and tried to believe that he was a bridegroom, and was going to espouse Tishy Mangan in the course of the next few hours.

"C'est toujours l'imprevu qui arrive!" he told himself. That ancient ditty, "The Yeoman's Wedding," that he had often heard Dr. Mangan sing, attacked him like an illness, and enforced its galloping metres on all he did.

"Through the valley we'll haste, For we've no time to waste! For it is my wedding morning, my wedding morning!"

The housemaid (that same Upper Housemaid who had spoken of the riff-raff of Cluhir) heard him, in the bathroom, loudly announcing his intentions.

"Ding dong! We'll gallop along!" Larry sang, and the Upper Housemaid said to her subordinate, "What a hurry he's in! Well! Bright's his fancy!"

The Upper Housemaid was rash in thus giving her opinion. Larry's fancy was far from bright, but he was of those unfortunates who, when obsessed by a tune, must yield to its importunity, even though it followed him to the steps of the scaffold.

It is not insinuated that Larry was now, metaphorically, or otherwise, in such a case. He was, as he told himself, quite prepared to go through with the job, but, he likewise told himself, it was a rotten sort of business dressing for your wedding with not a soul, bar the servants, to say good morning to, and even they looked as sour as lemons and hadn't a smile among the lot of them. Larry drank some coffee, and crumbled some toast, and brutally and wastefully broke into a poached egg, turning what had been a triumph of snow, into a yellow peril, and gave its attendant bacon to Aunt Freddy's old Pomeranian, and found that he had finished his breakfast, and that it was no more than ten o'clock. The rain was coming down in torrents; he could not go out, not even to the stables. What on earth was he to do from now till one o'clock? The blooming wedding was at two.

He thought of it as some one else's, and realised that he so thought of it, and then just tripped himself up in the middle of the further reflection that he wished it were.

"Probably getting married is always a bore," he said to himself, consolingly. "'E's all right when you know 'im, but you've got to know 'im fust'! Why do these rotten old songs stick in my head like this? Because I'm a fool, no doubt, and always was!"

He walked into the hall, and there surveyed his luggage, packed and ready, and appallingly new.

"It'll give the show away, even if they let us off confetti," he thought.

He wished he hadn't given in to this High Nuptial Mass business, and a big wedding, and all the rest of it, but the Doctor and Tishy were dead keen on it, and he had been sat on.

He and Tishy were going to London, and if this gale lasted, they would have a devil of a crossing. He wondered if Tishy were a good sailor. He wasn't, anyhow. He would warn her that he would be no more use to her than a sick headache, which she would probably have, to start with, and she wouldn't want another. The Mount Music people were across the Channel by this time, ahead of the gale too. Luck for them! Old Mrs. Twomey had told him they were gone, and she said they would never come back again. Silly old ass, what did she know about it?

He had wandered into his studio; now, without his own volition, almost as if he were hypnotised, he took the canvas on which he had painted Christian, from where it was leaning, face inwards, against the wall, and put it on an easel. He had not looked at it since the day of conflict, and he told himself that he was now regarding it with the frigid rye of the art critic.

Yes, it was good. Better than he thought. The technique was jolly good, slick, and unworried, and the likeness was all right too. He had somehow just got hold of that ethereal look she always had had. She was hearing those voices they used to chaff her about. How she had gone for John one day, when he began ragging her about that old hymn! She always had the pluck of the devil! He frowned. She hadn't had pluck enough to stand up to her father! He would look at her picture no longer. He wouldn't think of her. She had chucked him. But his eyes were held by the eyes that he had painted; with a rush, the thought of her possessed him. She was everywhere, penetrating his very being, "his heart in her hands"; he shook in the grip of remembrance, almost of realisation, of her presence. For a moment, Time stood still for him; he hung, like a ship that has been flung up into the wind, trembling. Then the sails filled, the present re-asserted itself. He was going to marry Tishy Mangan, and Christian had chucked him. He turned the canvas again.

Why had he thought of that beastly hymn? It had got hold of him now! The measured tramp of the tune fitted itself to the tick of the clattering little tin clock on the studio chimney-piece.

"How the troops of Mid-ian, Prowl, and prowl around! Christian! Up and at them—"

No, that was what the Duke of Wellington said to the Guards at—Oh, damn the clock, anyhow! He caught it up, and pitched it across the room on to a sofa, and hurled a bundle of draperies after it and on top of it. But the tune would not stop, and the muffled, unbaffled tick of the clock went on. He swung out of the studio, and went back to the hall.

The house had its back to the storm, and it was only when he looked down the Cluhir avenue, that he realised with what fury the rain was falling. The wind had moderated a little, but the barograph-needle was still almost off the paper it had gone so low. It was only eleven o'clock. Two hours before the motor was to come for him. He felt, as he told himself, using the adjective that has had to undertake the duties of so many others, rotten. Empty and rather sick, and, well, generally beastly—a sort of vague funk. Yes, by Jove! He was in a regular blue funk! That was what was wrong with him. (But he certainly felt sick too.)

What on earth was he afraid of? The service couldn't last for ever, and he had barred speeches at the Collation (as Mrs. Mangan insisted on calling it). His thoughts took a twist. Surely he wasn't afraid of the Mangans? He liked Mrs. Mangan; he was quite fond of her, quite a good sort of mother-in-law she'd make. And Barty, his best man, good old Barty! And the Doctor—Of course he wasn't afraid of the Doctor either. He had always liked him. There only remained Tishy. Hang it all! He wasn't afraid of the girl he was going to marry! She might have a bit of a temper—she certainly had been rather rattled these last few days, but you couldn't blame her for that. The very last time he had seen her—the evening before the big storm began, wasn't it?—he had overtaken her in the dark in the Mall, going home after shopping, and that long-legged cad of a fellow, Cloherty, carrying her parcels for her. By Jove! She had let drive at him after Cloherty had gone and they were in the house! By Jove, yes! He laughed a little at the remembrance. She had said it was a nice time of day for him to be coming over. She had jolly nearly cried, she was so mad with him. For the life of him he didn't know why. But, after all, that wasn't exactly temper.—Blowed if he knew what it was. He supposed it was temperament—quite a different thing! He laughed and had a look at a large and splendid photograph of Miss Mangan, that had been a sort of corollary of the Dublin trousseau. Tishy was all right. Tishy was a topper! He said it aloud, and, with that, another tune, the old nigger-tune, "Nelly was a Lady," fitted itself absurdly to the words.

"Tishy was a topper!" he sang. "Last night she—No, she didn't! By Jove, there's the motor! What's it coming at this hour for?"

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, God 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 God 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, God 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 hearse. 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 circumlocution. "My father told me," he began, "that in some way, between himself and the Major a lot of money had passed. 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 title-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 God! 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 God, 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, coarse 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 multitude of Thy mercies, ever compassionate 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.

THE END