We were now aware for the first time of the presence of Mr. Coolahan, a taciturn person, with a blue-black chin and a gloomy demeanour.

"Where had ye it last?" he demanded.

"I seen Katty Ann with it in the cow-house, sir," volunteered a small female Coolahan from beneath the flap of the counter.

Katty Ann, with a vindictive eye at the tell-tale, vanished.

"That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!" chanted Mrs.

Coolahan. "Such a mee-aw! Such a thing to happen to me--the pure, decent woman! G'wout!" This, the imperative of the verb to retire, was hurtled at the tell-tale, who, presuming on her services, had incautiously left the covert of the counter, and had laid a sticky hand on her mother's skirts.

"Only that some was praying for me," pursued Mrs. Coolahan, "it might as well be the Inspector that came in the office, asking for the pin, an'

if that was the way we might all go under the sod! Sich a mee-aw!"

"Musha! Musha!" breathed, prayerfully, one of the shawled women.

At this juncture I mounted on an up-ended barrel to investigate a promising lair above my head, and from this alt.i.tude was unexpectedly presented with a bird's-eye view of a hat with a silver band inside the railed and curtained "snug". I descended swiftly, not without an impression of black bottles on the snug table, and Katty Ann here slid in from the search in the cow-house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MUSHA! MUSHA!"]

"'Twasn't in it," she whined, "nor I didn't put it in it."

"For a pinny I'd give ye a slap in the jaw!" said Mr. Coolahan with sudden and startling ferocity.

"That the Lord Almighty might take me to Himself!" reiterated Mrs.

Coolahan, while the search spread upwards through the house.

"Look here!" said Robert abruptly, "this business is going on for a week. I'm going for the things myself."

Neither I nor my remonstrances overtook him till he was well out into the street. There, outside the Coolahan door, was the Dean's inside car, resting on its shafts; while the black horse, like his driver, restored himself elsewhere beneath the Coolahan roof. Robert paid no heed to its silent warning.

"I must go myself. If I had forty pencils I couldn't explain to Julia the flies that I want!"

There comes, with the most biddable of men, a moment when argument fails, the moment of dead pull, when the creature perceives his own strength, and the astute will give in, early and imperceptibly, in order that he may not learn it beyond forgetting.

The only thing left to be done now was to accompany Robert, to avert what might be irretrievable disaster. It was now half-past one, and the three mutton chops and the stewed gooseberries must have long since yielded their uttermost to our guests. The latter would therefore have returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen.

'There remained between us and the house an open s.p.a.ce of about fifteen yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which, however, the lace curtains met in rea.s.suring stillness. We rushed the interval, and entered the house softly. Here we were instantly met by Julia, with her mouth full, and a cup of tea in her hand. She drew us into the kitchen.

"Where are they, Julia?" I whispered. "Have they had lunch?"

"Is it lunch?" replied Julia, through bread and b.u.t.ter; "there isn't a bit in the house but they have it ate! And the eggs I had for the fast-day for myself, didn't That One"--I knew this to indicate Miss McEvoy--"ax an omelette from me when she seen she had no more to get!"

"Are they out of the dining-room?" broke in Robert.

"Faith, they are. 'Twas no good for them to stay in it! That One's lying up on the sofa in the dhrawing-room like any owld dog, and the Dane and Mrs. Doherty's dhrinking hot water--they have bad shtomachs, the craytures."

Robert opened the kitchen door and crept towards the dining-room, wherein, not long before the alarm, had been gathered all the essentials of the expedition. I followed him. I have never committed a burglary, but since the moment when I creaked past the drawing-room door, foretasting the instant when it would open, my sympathies are dedicated to burglars.

In two palpitating journeys we removed from the dining-room our belongings, and placed them in the kitchen; silence, fraught with dire possibilities, still brooded over the drawing-room. Could they all be asleep, or was Miss McEvoy watching us through the keyhole? There remained only my hat, which was upstairs, and at this, the last moment, Robert remembered his fly-book, left under the clock in the dining-room.

I again pa.s.sed the drawing-room in safety, and got upstairs, Robert effecting at the same moment his third entry into the dining-room. I was in the act of thrusting in the second hat pin when I heard the drawing-room door open. I admit that, obeying the primary instinct of self-preservation, my first impulse was to lock myself in; it pa.s.sed, aided by the recollection that there was no key. I made for the landing, and from thence viewed, in a species of trance, Miss McEvoy crossing the hall and entering the dining-room. A long and deathly pause followed.

She was a small woman; had Robert strangled her? After two or three horrible minutes a sound reached me, the well-known rattle of the side-board drawer. All then was well--Miss McEvoy was probably looking for the biscuits, and Robert must have escaped in time through the window. I took my courage in both hands and glided downstairs. As I placed my foot on the oilcloth of the hall, I was confronted by the nightmare spectacle of my brother creeping towards me on all-fours through the open door of the dining-room, and then, crowning this already over-loaded moment, there arose a series of yells from Miss McEvoy as blood-curdling as they were excusable, yet, as even in my maniac flight to the kitchen I recognised, something m.u.f.fled by Marie biscuit.

It seems to me that the next incident was the composite and shattering collision of Robert, Julia and myself in the scullery doorway, followed by the swift closing of the scullery-door upon us by Julia; then the voice of the Dean of Glengad, demanding from the house at large an explanation, in a voice of cathedral severity. Miss McEvoy's reply was to us about as coherent as the shrieks of a parrot, but we plainly heard Julia murmur in the kitchen:--

"May the devil choke ye!"

Then again the Dean, this time near the kitchen door. "Julia! Where is the man who was secreted under the dinner-table?"

I gripped Robert's arm. The issues of life and death were now in Julia's hands.

"Is it who was in the dining-room, your Reverence?" asked Julia, in tones of respectful honey; "sure that was the carpenter's boy, that came to quinch a rat-hole. Sure we're destroyed with rats."

"But," pursued the Dean, raising his voice to overcome Miss McEvoy's continuous screams of explanation to Mrs. Doherty, "I understand that he left the room on his hands and knees. He must have been drunk!"

"Ah, not at all, your Reverence," replied Julia, with almost compa.s.sionate superiority, "sure that poor boy is the gentlest crayture ever came into a house. I suppose 'tis what it was he was ashamed like when Miss McEvoy comminced to screech, and faith he never stopped nor stayed till he ran out of the house like a wild goose!"

We heard the Dean reascend the kitchen steps, and make a statement of which the words "drink" and "Dora" alone reached us. The drawing-room door closed, and in the release from tension I sank heavily down upon a heap of potatoes. The wolf of laughter that had been gnawing at my vitals broke loose.

"Why did you go out of the room on your hands and knees?" I moaned, rolling in anguish on the potatoes.

"I got under the table when I heard the brute coming," said Robert, with the crossness of reaction from terror, "then she settled down to eat biscuits, and I thought I could crawl out without her seeing me"

"_Ye can come out_!" said Julia's mouth, appearing at a crack of the scullery door, "I have as many lies told for ye--G.o.d forgive me!--as'd bog a noddy!"

This mysterious contingency might have impressed us more had the artist been able to conceal her legitimate pride in her handiwork. We emerged from the chill and varied smells of the scullery, retaining just sufficient social self-control to keep us from flinging ourselves with grateful tears upon Julia's neck. Shaken as we were, the expedition still lay open before us; the game was in our hands. We were winning by tricks, and Julia held all the honours.

PART II

Perhaps it was the clinging memory of the fried pork, perhaps it was because all my favourite brushes were standing in a mug of soft soap on my washing stand, or because Robert had in his flight forgotten to replenish his cigarette case, but there was no doubt but that the expedition languished.

There was no fault to be found with the setting. The pool in which the river coiled itself under the pine-trees was black and br.i.m.m.i.n.g, the fish were rising at the flies that wrought above it, like a spotted net veil in hysterics, the distant hills lay in sleepy undulations of every shade of blue, the gra.s.s was warm, and not unduly peopled with ants. But some impalpable blight was upon us. I ranged like a lost soul along the banks of the river--a lost soul that is condemned to bear a burden of some two stone of sketching materials, and a sketching umbrella with a defective joint--in search of a point of view that for ever eluded me.

Robert cast his choicest flies, with delicate quiverings, with coquettish withdrawals; had they been cannon-b.a.l.l.s they could hardly have had a more intimidating effect upon the trout. Where Robert fished a Sabbath stillness reigned, beyond that charmed area they rose like notes of exclamation in a French novel. I was on the whole inclined to trace these things back to the influence of the pork, working on systems weakened by shock; but Robert was not in the mood to trace them to anything. Unsuccessful fishermen are not fond of introspective suggestions. The member of the expedition who enjoyed himself beyond any question was Mrs. Coolahan's car-horse. Having been taken out of the shafts on the road above the river, he had with his harness on his back, like Horatius, unhesitatingly lumbered over a respectable bank and ditch in the wake of Croppy, who had preceded him with the reins. He was now grazing luxuriously along the river's edge, while his driver smoked, no less luxuriously, in the background.

"Will I carry the box for ye, Miss?" Croppy inquired compa.s.sionately, stuffing his lighted pipe into his pocket, as I drifted desolately past him. "Sure you're killed with the load you have! This is a rough owld place for a lady to be walkin'. Sit down, Miss. G.o.d knows you have a right to be tired."

It seemed that with Croppy also the day was dragging, doubtless he too had lunched on Mrs. Coolahan's pork. He planted my camp-stool and I sank upon it.

"Well, now, for all it's so throublesome," he resumed, "I'd say painting was a nice thrade. There was a gintleman here one time that was a painther--I used to be dhrivin' him. Faith! there wasn't a place in the counthry but he had it pathrolled. He seen me mother one day--cleaning fish, I b'lieve she was, below on the quay--an' nothing would howld him but he should dhraw out her picture!" Croppy laughed unfilially. "Well, me mother was mad. 'To the divil I pitch him!' says she; 'if I wants me photograph drew out I'm liable to pay for it,' says she, 'an' not to be stuck up before the ginthry to be ped for the like o' that!' 'Tis for; you bein' so handsome!' says I to her. She was black mad altogether then. 'If that's the way,' says she, 'it's a wondher he wouldn't ax yerself, ye rotten little rat,' says she, 'in place of thrying could he make a show of yer poor little ugly little c.o.c.k-nosed mother!' 'Faith!'

says I to her, 'I wouldn't care if the divil himself axed it, if he give me a half-crown and nothing to do but to be sittin' down!'"

The tale may or may not have been intended to have a personal application, but Croppy's fat scarlet face and yellow moustache, bristling beneath a nose which he must have inherited from his mother, did not lend themselves to a landscape background, and I fell to fugitive pencil sketches of the old white car-horse as he grazed round us. It was thus that I first came to notice a fact whose bearing upon our fortunes I was far from suspecting. The old horse's harness was of dingy brown leather, with dingier bra.s.s mountings; it had been frequently mended, in varying shades of brown, and, in remarkable contrast to the rest of the outfit, the breeching was of solid and well-polished black leather, with silver buckles. It was not so much the discrepancy of the breeching as its respectability that jarred upon me; finally I commented upon it to Croppy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CROPPY."]

His cap was tilted over the maternal nose, he glanced at me sideways from under its peak.