"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 G.o.d!" 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 G.o.d! Oh G.o.d! Why couldn't he think of me as well as of that d.a.m.ned 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 ign.o.ble 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 ash.o.r.e, half lying in thin flood through which tufts of gra.s.s were showing, with arms stretched out, grasping at the sh.o.r.e, 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 acc.u.mulated 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 Ma.s.s 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 a.s.s, 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-a.s.serted 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, _d.a.m.n_ 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 m.u.f.fled, 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 n.i.g.g.e.r-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?"