Part 3

Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated--for at all times and seasons of the year a nipping wind howled through the stony tunnel that ended in the arch of the Barrack-gateway--and pacing his official strip of pavement, that began at the yellow-painted sentry-box with the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big spiked gate. And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings sprawling on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers, and the sergeant sitting on his cot stiffly stocked and fully accoutered--that had the charm of a well-known, never too familiar sight. To other senses besides the eyes and ears appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched blue gingham umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank mounted on two barrels, against the great bare wall on the left of the Barrack-entrance, exercising a privilege permitted to no other, because Mary's stone ginger-pop bottles might be relied upon as containing nothing else....

It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place, bordered by a line of shops and houses, broken by the bridge, under which flowed a famous salmon-river, was seething with people out to buy and sell and enjoy themselves. On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a modern building of no great design, animated bundles of rags containing female penitents performing the devotions of the Stations round it. While upreared upon the summit of an isolated rock beyond the rushing river, perched the ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient castle from which the town derived its name; once held against the Commonwealth by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet bedded in the massive masonry.

The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about blared on the ear from a field where some caravans of strolling show-people had encamped themselves. Rows of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down, waited their squireen owners in the bleakest angle of the market-place; and in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them, covered with gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had jolted and joggled from their distant homes, and--the last bargain made--would jolt and joggle back again.

Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese, butter, and other dairy-produce. Crates were crammed with quacking ducks and loudly cackling fowls. Strings of shaggy-footed horses and knots of isolated cows were ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be purchaser; hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive mood, alive and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig. In reeking basements below the shops--cellars where potatoes, cabbages, and onions were peddled to the poorest, and turf and firewood were sold in ha'p'orths--piles of pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted herring in popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to be frizzled over turf-embers for supper.

A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a clarionet on a square of smooth flagstones in the middle of the market-place. And--for this was the West of Ireland in the early fifties--the bright red or dark blue cloaks and white frilled caps of the matrons, the short stuff petticoats, chintz jacket-bodices and bright handkerchief-shawls of the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches, blue yarn stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed chimney-pots--gave charm and variety to the shifting scene.

Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse, strapping, red-faced women who daily patroled the square in the neighborhood of the Barracks; whisky-hardened viragoes whose uncovered heads of greasy hair, thrust into sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and uniform attire of clean starched cotton print, worn over a multiplicity of whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,--as did their coarse speech and loud laughter,--members of the ancient sisterhood of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient profession in the world.

Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers of the greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of captive red-coats. One of them was fairly sober, and sulky at being thus paraded under the eyes of his countrymen. The other, a raw young recruit, half-fuddled with libations of porter and whisky, staggeringly promenaded the pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in the pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic comment from the crowd into shaking off the women who supported,--while they feigned to lean on him,--and challenging the critic of morals, in broad Yorkshire, to a bout at fisticuffs.

"Leggo o' me, tha----!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians. "Cannowt a chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an' armin' him? As for tha!"--he addressed the critic--"Ah'll teach tha to meddle wi' thy betters. If tha'rt a mon--coom on!"

"Fight, is ut? Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a fist wud level ye," commented the censor, turning on his heel contemptuously. Upon which, the belligerent, taking the act as a confession of recreancy, wrenched himself from the women, and, staggering forward, came into violent contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed to tempt customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk, or rolled gaily down the gutter; pursued with yells of joy by certain ragged urchins who usually were to be found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.

Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the upset and the subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions on the soldier's drunken clumsiness and the predatory activity of the raiders, shook her fists at their flying heels.

"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha! Wull sixpence neet maak guid thy loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman, thrusting a hand into his trousers-pocket in search of the coin. Then his flaming face darkened heavily, and he said, withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah havena a brass farden t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence. Mak't oop to her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"

And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her arm in the soldier's and affectionately ogling him:

"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and a kiss av the handsome boy you are will pay me!"

Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive sense of things that are incomprehensible, saw with a strange shock and thrill that never quite passed away.

The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump clean fingers with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings on them was dashed to the flags by a fierce blow of the old, bony, wrinkled hand....

"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said sternly to the staring woman, "and thrapse upon your way!"

And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the faces in the crowded market-place seemed to be looking that way, the woman had picked up the coin; and as her comrades hurried on, had slunk after them, leaving the tipsy soldier standing there.

"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him, "that ye are hastin' quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid Thim Wans?"

And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that might have meant anything, and hung his head sulkily, and gone staggering upon his way, but in an opposite direction to that taken by the women. And Mary Daa looked after him long and sorrowfully.

"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the apple-woman, for Mary and he had struck up a friendship over divers ha'p'orths of nuts and pink peppermint-candy sticks, "what are they, and why are they wicked?"

Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel of her huge and venerable bonnet, and became aware of a small boy with a scarlet topknot and a pair of honest gray eyes.

"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were shining drops of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the cracked glasses of her huge iron-framed spectacles were foggy. She took them off, and wiped them on her old green plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been referring to Thim Wans.

"What arr they? Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous planets; thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate up the bodies an' souls av men! Look me in the face wid your child's eyes, ye that will be a man wan day, an' get by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you! An' when the pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av you--kape them worruds in mind!"

Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny, purchased a cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock, and went home crunching. He had learned a good deal that day. The mystery of Death and the power of Money had been revealed to him. Also, he had gained some slight preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against the human soul in its march through this strange world of ours, and of the strange and foul and ugly things that lie hidden beneath the shining surface of Life.

IV

Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty or rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of railed-in grass plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns make a show of putting forth green leaves in Spring, and plane-trees shed their bark, as boa-constrictors doff their skins, at the approach of Winter--Furnival's Inn, even in the year of stress of 1870, impressed itself upon the casual visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a dusty one in dry. But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said that nothing young or gay or natural could ever flourish there.

At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily fraught with Fate for the protagonist of this unpretending life-drama, recent puddles testified to overnight's rain, and gray clouds rushing north-westward across a monochromatic parallelogram of sky, framed in by the bilious-hued, grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings, predicted more presently.

Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have seen a shaggy young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under the round-topped carriage archway, eschewing the smaller side-entrance intended for pedestrians. Whereat the upper half of a porter, crowned with a tarred chimney-pot hat, and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt buttons, appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the fresh-faced, shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his back, as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived between the gouty Corinthian columns of the fourth portico on the left-hand side, and rang the first-floor bell.

"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized, noting the masterful tug given by the early visitor to the dingy brass bell-handle--third of a row of six sticking out like organ-stops on the right of the heavy, low-browed outer door. "And again! ... Don't be shy!" said the porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the bell-wire, and then you won't have done no good to yourself!--supposing you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and Son--though you're over-young to be the first and over-cheerful to be the second, it strikes me! Good-day, Mr. Chown!" And the porter touched his hat to a lean, mild-looking, elderly man in black, who turned in at that moment beneath the smaller archway. "You're not the first this morning, early as you are. There's a young chap who don't seem in the mind to take no answer--has been ringing ten minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."

"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so early!" said the person addressed.

A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between Mr. Chown and the porter, but there were no further words. Mr. Chown passed on, and joined the younger man on the doorstep under the fourth portico on the left side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's prophecy about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal appearance, and drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of his vest:

"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with Mr. Mustey Junior,"--he tapped the key upon the tarnished brass door-handle as though to knock some grains of dust out of the words, and went on, punctuating his utterances with more tapping--"I happen to know"--_tap-tap-tap_--"that he won't be here to-day." He added, as he took a brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy, square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight (with a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of the shoulders, and the depth of the chest), buttoned up in the rough frieze garment that had seen hard wear. "But possibly it is the head of the Firm" (_tap-tap_) "you want, and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid you'll have to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late at work yesterday. I should mention that I am employed in the capacity of head-clerk by" (_tap_) "a firm of solicitors who have offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath Mustey and Son" (_tap_), "and----"

Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the lowest of a series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking the right-hand row of bells, and setting forth the titles of "Wotherspoon and Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners of Oaths." He continued: "And though I was detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I noticed particularly--when I shut the front-door behind me, that the gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was burning still."

"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the strange young man, whose head was plentifully covered with a crop of decidedly red and obstinately curly hair, crowned with the battered gray felt wideawake previously mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured, fresh-colored, rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of very clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked with yellow. He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he carried two dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor, and Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with an irrepressible start of consternation, saw that the darkness of the room behind them was thrown into relief by a greenish patch of radiance that indicated the position of a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle of the elder Mustey's private room.

"God bless my soul, so it is!"

The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it on the door-knob. Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a perturbed and dubious air:

"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you--being a stranger, as I take it?--and new to the sights of London--were to indulge in a little walk along Holborn--say as far as Bloomsbury Street--and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,--or the--the Mummies in the Egyptian Department,--and then come back again,--you might stand a better chance of getting the bell answered." The speaker added, meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it: "Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."

"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell _is_ answered. But I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.

"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk.

The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.

"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.

"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your cradle! But time flies and business presses, and----"

"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak and hung with mildewed flock-paper. "_Donnerwetter!_ how you smell here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air. "But I suppose you're used to it!"

"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown, who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door. "But I suppose--as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still away on their vacations--the place might seem--to a stranger from the country--a trifle close."

"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was highly uncomplimentary. "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty, cellary. With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that I----" He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's gunpowder! The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt gunpowder.... Here! Hallo! What the devil are you trying to do? What do you mean?"

For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion to the sallow change of countenance previously observed in him, had caught him by the arm, as his eager foot had touched a dilapidated mat that lay as a snare for the unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase, and with unexpected strength and quickness had swung him to the hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the threshold.

"I mean----" Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently quite unused to wrestling: and as he strove with the shaggy young man upon the threshold of the dingy hall, it was evident that he would very soon give in. "I mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be sensible?"

"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding something. Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not at all malevolently, "or I shall have to hurt you! I'm going upstairs, and you can't stop me! What harm do you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man who's lying fast asleep across his table? I shan't go in without knocking, if that's what you're thinking of! And what harm do you suppose he's going to do to me?"

A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out a wary hand behind his own respectable back, and grabbed at the dim brass knob and slammed the heavy door upon himself and his antagonist. There were circles round his eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.

"You young--_puff_--idiot!" he gasped, "I'm not--_whoof!_--considering you--for--a--_whuff!_--moment. It's him,"--he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped his face--"him that I've known since I was first articled, and had many a kindly word from, and many a liberal present. And now that this has happened--I may say I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed here--knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a time I've been on the point of going up and knocking and offering a word of sympathy. But--it wasn't to be done! ... You could never take a liberty with him, alive--and no one shall if I can stop 'em--now that he isn't!"

"Now that he--why, man!--you don't mean to say----"

They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the shaggy, obstinate young man had now flushed to ripe tomato-color as he stammered:

"You don't mean he's dead? It isn't possible!"

"I say nothing and I mean nothing. There's no third party present," asserted Mr. Chown, with professional caution, "to testify to what I said or didn't say. But his son has to be looked for, and brought here if they can find him--and if Mr. William can't be found--and without prejudice I think that's more than likely!--some one he knew and trusted must be the first to go into that room. His housekeeper I've heard is a good creature. He's often dropped a word in praise of her to me, I know.... We'll telegraph--I know his address! Number Three----"

The young man interrupted: "Addington Square, Camberwell."

"Send her a wire! I'll pay!" Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger. "There's a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"

"Where is Snow Hill? I'm a stranger in London. As it happens, I came from Schwärz-Brettingen--it's a University town in North Germany--to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son." The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows.... adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's fortune--his son, who you say's missing, is the other--that is, he has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine.... For I didn't come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my twenty-third birthday. And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"

"I see! He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord! Good Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!--what a world it is!"

"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man, and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him as unpleasantly powerful. "Look here!--where is your key?"

"Just inside in the hall there.... I'd dropped it, don't you remember--I was looking for it when you--when you--said you smelt gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed on me."

"You did on me!--and I thought you'd gone crazy. Look here----" the other began.

"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown, adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add--I was effective! And if you've got it into your head that there's life in the poor old man yet--put it out again! For he shot himself last night just on the stroke of nine--and I could take my oath of it! I heard what must have been the--the noise--as I passed out at the gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.' And I thought it might have been thunder--for the weather observations in the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and South-Eastern England--and the winds have been blowing from south and south-east. And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the atmosphere--and she has been bad three days past."

"But let's do something--not stand here with our hands in our pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness. "I'm a surgeon--not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid in such a case as you've hinted at."

"My key's inside the house--as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown, "and unless we were to break down the door--which would bring the police upon us before they're wanted--or one of us could climb like a cat--so as to look in at that window and make certain----"