The colour rose again in Barty's face. His dark, shortsighted eyes, that were set on Larry, had a sudden glow in them. He nodded.

"He's likely dead by now! Oh Larry!" he cried, panting in his eagerness. "May be the chance has come at last! I believe you might be the man Ireland wants! I believe you might take Parnell's place! Me fawther says you're certain to be nominated, and there's no opposition, of course. Anyhow, if there were, itself, you'd go in flying, just the same! You're the man we're all waiting for! Larry, old c.o.c.k! The day will come when I'll be bragging that I was the one first gave you the notion to go into politics!"

Larry was gazing at his man of business, whose aspect, it may be conceded, was at this moment singularly at variance with the usual conception of such a functionary. The man of business gazed back at him, the glow intensifying behind his eye-gla.s.ses and gathering energy from the answering gleam in Larry's eyes.

"The b.l.o.o.d.y Wars!" uttered Larry, slowly and quite irrelevantly, and with great emphasis. "By all the crosses in a yard of check! Let me hold on to something and think! This is a game and a half! I must think furiously!"

"Do not!" exclaimed Barty; "don't think at all! Don't be wasting time like that! No man ever had a greater chance than this! Lep at it, Larry, old lad! Give me the word I want, and I'll wire the Doctor to-night--a message he'll understand, and no one else. Oh Larry!" he implored, "don't cry off now! You've pots of money; you can do any d.a.m.n thing you like! If you refuse this chance now you'll only regret it the once, and that'll be all your life!"

Then did that mysterious and mighty agency, the warp that a mind has received in childhood, come to reinforce the enthusiasms and ambitions of youth, and urge Larry to a.s.sent. That other and n.o.bler Spirit of the Nation woke, and the pa.s.sionate, irreconcilable voice, that had first spoken to him when he was a little boy, woke and uttered itself again, shouting to him its wild summons at a moment when the tide of life was running fiercest in him, when every emotion was at highest pressure and calling for great adventure.

"All right, Barty, my son, I'm for it!" said Larry, with the a.s.sumption of outward calm, when heart and pulses are pounding, that has been claimed as one of the a.s.sets of a public school education, and is, even without that advantage, the birthright of such as young Mr. Coppinger.

CHAPTER x.x.x

Larry bicycled up to the white chapel on the hill, to Second Ma.s.s, on the following morning. He rode fast through the converging groups of people, on foot, on outside cars, in carts, on horseback. It was four years since he had last attended a service there, and to many of the a.s.sembled congregation he had become a stranger. None the less there was no hesitation in any man's mind in identifying him; these were people who knew a gentleman when they saw one, and the young owner of Coppinger's Court was the only gentleman ever to be seen at the white chapel on the hill.

Therefore it was that Larry's right hand was seldom on his handle-bar, as he skimmed through the people, decent and dark-dressed in their Sunday best, who saluted with a long-established friendship and respect this solitary representative of their traditional enemies, the landlords.

There cannot be in the world a people more unfailingly church-going than those sons and daughters of Rome who are bred in Southern Ireland. Larry looked down, from his pew in the gallery, at the close ranks of kneeling figures, and thought with compunction how long it was since he had been in a church, and thanked G.o.d that he had come home to his own people, and that their religion was his. He followed the words of the service with a new realisation of their ancient beauty. He trembled with an unfamiliar emotion, as, in the charged silence of the crowded chapel, the bell tinkled and the censer clashed, sounds that have in them at such moments a heart-shaking power, magnetic, mystical. He heard nothing of the sermon; in his eager mind two thoughts raced side by side, now one, now the other, leading. These two marvels that had befallen. That Christian should love him; this had the mastery, irradiating all; but with the vivid sense of fellowship and communion that the service brought the other thought, the old dream that was coming true of standing for these people, of making their interests his, their welfare his care, moved him profoundly.

Outside in the chapel yard, after the service, the congregation was in no hurry to disperse. Larry looked about him, and found many friendly eyes set on him. Larry, too, had a friendly heart, and he bethought him that, as a future M.P., he should lose no opportunity of intercourse with his const.i.tuents. He recognised the solid presence of John Herlihy, an elderly farmer who had been one of the largest of his own late tenants, and he went across the yard to where he stood and shook hands with him.

"Fine day, John! Good and hot for the harvest! Got your threshing done yet?"

"'Tis very warm, sir," answered John Herlihy, correcting, as is invariable, Larry's employment of the vulgar adjective "hot"; "very warm entirely, and sure I have my corn threshed this ten days, the same as yourself!"

"Nothing like taking time by the fetlock, is there, John!" chaffed Larry (who, until that moment, had been unaware that he possessed any corn); "it's a good harvest all round, isn't it?"

"Well, pretty fair, thank G.o.d!"

"And the country's quiet?"

"Never better, sir, never better!" responded John Herlihy, weightily; but something in his cool eyes, grey and wise as a parrot's, impelled Larry, in his new-born sense of responsibility, to further questioning.

Mr. John Herlihy was a man of the order to whom the label "respectable" inevitably attaches itself (that adjective which acts as a touch-stone in the definition of cla.s.s, and is a compliment up to a certain point, an offence higher up the scale); one of those sound and sensible and thrifty farmers who are the strength of Ireland, and are as the stones of a break-water, over which the storm-froth of the waters of politics sweeps unheeded.

"Well," Larry went on, "it wasn't a very nice way that those Carmodys up at Derrylugga treated Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry the other day!

Killing her mare under her, the cowardly blackguards!"

The grey parrot eyes scanned Larry, summing him up, determining how far he might be trusted, deciding that an oblique approach might be most advisable.

"Major Lowry's a fine gentleman," said John Herlihy, largely; "a fine, easy, _grauver_ man! I declare I was sorry to me heart when he gave up the hounds! If it was to be only a scold or a curse from him, ye'd rather it, and to have he be goin' through the country!"

"Then what have people against him? Good G.o.d!" cried Larry, hotly.

"It's too easy he is! _I_ wouldn't have let those devils off as easy as he did!"

"I heard the Priest and a few more, was above at Mount Music ere yesterday," said John Herlihy, in a slightly lowered voice, "about the sale of the property they were, I b'lieve. You done well, Master Larry, you got quit o' the whole kit of us!"

Having thus shelved the controversial subject, Mr. Herlihy, laughing heartily at his own jest, moved towards his horse and car, that were hitched to the chapel gate, and let down the upturned side of the car.

"Come! Get up, woman! Get up!" he called to his wife, a prosperous lady, in a ma.s.sive, blue, hooded cloak, who had been standing by the gate, patiently waiting his pleasure; "don't be delaying me this way!"

He winked at Larry, scrambling on to the car.

"What _tashpy_ he has!" remarked Mrs. Herlihy, benignantly, as Larry shook hands with her.

"Ah, you spoil him, Mrs. Herlihy! You should dock his oats!" said Larry, laughing into her jolly, round, red face, that was glistening with heat under the heavy cloth hood. "It's a grand hot day, isn't it?"

"'Tis very warm, sir, indeed," corrected Mrs. Herlihy, as she mounted the car with an agility as competent, and as unexpected, as that of a trespa.s.sing cow confronted with a stone-faced bank.

Larry went home, and continued a letter to Christian that he had begun over night. He told her of Barty's visit, and of all that it was likely to involve. He said that he was very lonely, and he believed she had been gone a year. Even Aunt Freddy had bolted off to Dublin, on urgent private affairs, which meant the dentist, as usual. He would go over to see Cousin d.i.c.k, only that he was absolutely bound to go into Cluhir. At this point he entered anew upon the subject of his political future, and what it meant to him. Of the fun he would have canva.s.sing the electors. Christian would have to come round with him, and in very obdurate cases there was always the cla.s.sical method of the d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire to be resorted to! Already, he said, he was frightfully interested in the whole show, and he meant--several pages were devoted by Larry to his intentions.

Christian, far away in the County Limerick, received the letter with her early cup of tea, and, as she read it, felt her soul disquieted within her. The conjunction of the stars of Love and Politics presaged, she felt, disaster--as if the question of religion had not been complicating enough! Even had her gift of envisaging a situation by the light of reason failed her, that spiritual aneroid, which, sensitive to soul-pressure, warned her intuitively of coming joy or sorrow, ill luck or good fortune, had fallen from set fair to stormy.

She had gone to sleep with sunshine in her heart; she awoke in clouds, dark and threatening. She read Larry's letter, and knew that the foreboding would come true.

It is probable that no human being was ever less the prey of intuitions or presentiments than was young Mr. Coppinger, as he bicycled lightly into Cluhir along the solitary steam-rolled road of the district, a typical effort of Irish civilisation, initiated by Dr.

Mangan, that had proposed to link Cluhir with the outer world, but had died, like a worn-out tramp, at the end of a few faltering miles, on the steps of the work-house hospital at Riverstown. The road ran along the bank of the great river, with nothing save a low fence and a footpath between it and the water. The river was still and gleaming.

Ma.s.ses of dove-coloured cloud, with touches of silver-saffron, where their lining showed through, draped the wide sky, in over-lapping folds. The planes of distance up the broad valley were graduated in tone by a succession of screens of luminous vapour that parcelled out the landscape, taking away all colour save that bestowed by the transparent golden grey of the mist. The roofs of Cluhir made a dark profile in the middle distance, the lower part of the houses hidden in the steaming mist, and the beautiful outline of the twin crests of Carrigaholt was like a golden shadow in the sky above them. The spire and the tower of the two churches of Cluhir, rose on either side of the pale radiance of the river, with the slender arch of the bridge joining them, as if to show in allegory their inherent oneness, their joint access to the water of life. Religion counted for but little with Larry in those days, yet as the wonder of beauty sank into his soul, that was ever thirsty for beauty, the thought of what it would mean for Ireland if the symbol of the linking bridge had its counterpart in reality sprang into his eager mind. Then he thought of himself and Christian, and knew that religion could never come between him and her, and, as the close-followed thought of what these last days had brought, rose in his mind, the wonder of it overwhelmed him.

He told himself that the only possible explanation of her caring for such as he, was that Narcissus-like, she had seen her own image reflected in his heart, and had fallen in love with it. The fancy attracted him; he rode on, his mind set on a sonnet that should fitly enshrine the thought, and politics and religion, symbols and ideals, faded, as the stars go out when the sun comes.

For the last couple of miles before Cluhir was reached the road and the river ran their parallel course in a line that was nearly direct, and, from a long way off, Larry was aware of the figure of a man and woman and a dog, preceding him towards the town. He noted presently that the dog had pa.s.sed from view, and then he saw the man and the woman hurry across the road and pa.s.s through the gateway of a field.

He was soon level with the gate. There was a little knot of people just within the field, and in the moment of perceiving that the woman was Tishy Mangan, he also saw that a fierce fight was in progress between two dogs.

"Oh, stop them, stop them!" Tishy was screaming. "That's my father's dog, and he'll be killed!"

She belaboured the dogs, futilely, with her parasol.

The man who was with her, a tall and elaborately well-dressed young gentleman with a red moustache, confined himself, very wisely, to loud exhortations to the remainder of the group, who were lads from the town, to call off their dog; and the remainder of the group, with equal wisdom and greater candour, were unanimously a.s.serting that they would be "in dhread" to touch the combatants. The dogs were well matched--strong, yellow-red Irish terriers; each had the other by the side of the throat, and each, with the deep, snuffling gurgles of strenuous combat, was trying to better his hold on his enemy.

Larry, swift in action as in thought, was off his bicycle and into the ring without a second of hesitation.

"Catch your dog by the tail," he shouted to the boys, while he performed the like office for the Doctor's dog. "Now then! Into the river with them!"

The two dogs, fast in each other's jaws, were lifted, and were borne across the road to the edge of the footpath, below which the river ran, deep and strong.

"Now then!"

The two rough, yellow bodies were swung between Larry and his coadjutor.

"Now! Let 'em go!"

The dogs flew like chain-shot through the air, and, with a tremendous splash disappeared from view in the river. They rose to the surface still keeping their hold of one another, and sank again. A second time they rose without having loosened their grip, but at their third appearance they were apart.