Some Experiences of an Irish R.M Part 7

If I had kept my head I should have sat still and encouraged a further confidence, but unfortunately I acted on the impulse of the natural man, and was at the window in a jump, knocking down my chair, and making noise enough to scare a far less shy bird than an Irish informer. Of course there was no one there. I listened, with every nerve as taut as a violin string. It was quite dark; there was just breeze enough to make a rustling in the evergreens, so that a man might brush through them without being heard; and while I debated on a plan of action there came from beyond the shrubbery the jar and tw.a.n.g of a loose strand of wire in the paling by the wood. My informant, whoever he might be, had vanished into the darkness from which he had come as irrecoverably as had the falling star that had written its brief message across the sky, and gone out again into infinity.

I got up very early next morning and drove to Skebawn to see Murray, and offer him my mysterious information for what it was worth.

Personally I did not think it worth much, and was disposed to regard it as a red herring drawn across the trail. Murray, however, was not in a mood to despise anything that had a suggestion to make, having been out till nine o'clock the night before without being able to find any clue to the hiding-place of James Foley.

"The river's a good mile from the place where the fight was," he said, straddling his compa.s.ses over the Ordnance Survey map, "and there's no sort of a road they could have taken him along, but a tip like this is always worth trying. I remember in the Land League time how a man came one Sat.u.r.day night to my window and told me there were holes drilled in the chapel door to shoot a boycotted man through while he was at ma.s.s.

The holes were there right enough, and you may be quite sure that chap found excellent reasons for having family prayers at home next day!"

I had sessions to attend on the extreme outskirts of my district, and could not wait, as Murray suggested, to see the thing out. I did not get home till the following day, and when I arrived I found a letter from Murray awaiting me.

"Your pal was right. We found Foley's body in the river, knocking about against the posts of the weir. The head was wrapped in his own green jersey, and had been smashed in by a stone. We suspect a fellow named Bat Callaghan, who has bolted, but there were a lot of them in it. Possibly it was Callaghan himself who gave you the tip; you never can tell how superst.i.tion is going to take them next. The inquest will be held to-morrow."

The coroner's jury took a cautious view of the cause of the catastrophe, and brought in a verdict of "death by misadventure," and I presently found it to be my duty to call a magisterial inquiry to further investigate the matter. A few days before this was to take place, I was engaged in the delicate task of displaying to my landlord, Mr. Flurry Knox, the defects of the pantry sink, when Mrs. Cadogan advanced upon us with the information that the Widow Callaghan from Cluin would be thankful to speak to me, and had brought me a present of "a fine young goose."

"Is she come over here looking for Bat?" said Flurry, withdrawing his arm and the longest kitchen-ladle from the pipe that he had been probing; "she knows you're handy at hiding your friends, Mary; maybe it's he that's stopping the drain!"

Mrs. Cadogan turned her large red face upon her late employer.

"G.o.d knows I wish yerself was stuck in it, Master Flurry, the way ye'd hear Pether cursin' the full o' the house when he's striving to wash the things in that unnatural little trough."

"Are you sure it's Peter does all the cursing?" retorted Flurry. "I hear Father Scanlan has it in for you this long time for not going to confession."

"And how can I walk two miles to the chapel with G.o.d's burden on me feet?" demanded Mrs. Cadogan in purple indignation; "the Blessed Virgin and Docthor Hickey knows well the hards.h.i.+p I gets from them. If it wasn't for a pair of the Major's boots he gave me, I'd be hard set to thravel the house itself!"

The contest might have been continued indefinitely, had I not struck up the swords with a request that Mrs. Callaghan might be sent round to the hall door. There we found a tall, grey-haired countrywoman waiting for us at the foot of the steps, in the hooded blue cloak that is peculiar to the south of Ireland; from the fact that she clutched a pocket-handkerchief in her right hand I augured a stormy interview, but nothing could have been more self-restrained and even imposing than the reverence with which she greeted Flurry and me.

"Good-morning to your honours," she began, with a dignified and extremely imminent snuffle. "I ask your pardon for troubling you, Major Yeates, but I haven't a one in the counthry to give me an adwice, and I have no confidence only in your honour's experiments."

"Experience, she means," prompted Flurry. "Didn't you get advice enough out of Mr. Murray yesterday?" he went on aloud. "I heard he was at Cluin to see you."

"And if he was itself, it's little adwantage any one'd get out of that little whipper-shnapper of a shnap-dhragon!" responded Mrs. Callaghan tartly; "he was with me for a half-hour giving me every big rock of English till I had a reel in me head. I declare to ye, Mr. Flurry, after he had gone out o' the house, ye wouldn't throw three farthings for me!"

The pocket-handkerchief was here utilised, after which, with a heavy groan, Mrs. Callaghan again took up her parable.

"I towld him first and last I'd lose me life if I had to go into the coort, and if I did itself sure th' attorneys could rip no more out o'

me than what he did himself."

"Did you tell him where was Bat?" inquired Flurry casually.

At this Mrs. Callaghan immediately dissolved into tears.

"Is it Bat?" she howled. "If the twelve Apostles came down from heaven asking me where was Bat, I could give them no satisfaction. The divil a know I know what's happened him. He came home with me sober and good-natured from the rogatta, and the next morning he axed a fresh egg for his breakfast, and G.o.d forgive me, I wouldn't break the score I was taking to the hotel, and with that he slapped the cup o' tay into the fire and went out the door, and I never got a word of him since, good nor bad. G.o.d knows 'tis I got throuble with that poor boy, and he the only one I have to look to in the world!"

I cut the matter short by asking her what she wanted me to do for her, and sifted out from amongst much extraneous detail the fact that she relied upon my renowned wisdom and clemency to preserve her from being called as a witness at the coming inquiry. The gift of the goose served its intended purpose of embarra.s.sing my position, but in spite of it I broke to the Widow Callaghan my inability to help her. She did not, of course, believe me, but she was too well-bred to say so. In Ireland one becomes accustomed to this att.i.tude.

As it turned out, however, Bat Callaghan's mother had nothing to fear from the inquiry. She was by turns deaf, imbecile, garrulously candid, and furiously abusive of Murray's princ.i.p.al witness, a frightened lad of seventeen, who had sworn to having seen Bat Callaghan and Jimmy Foley "shaping at one another to fight," at an hour when, according to Mrs. Callaghan, Bat was "lying sthretched on the beddeen with a sick shtomach" in consequence of the malignant character of the porter supplied by the last witness's father. It all ended, as such cases so often do in Ireland, in complete moral certainty in the minds of all concerned as to the guilt of the accused, and entire impotence on the part of the law to prove it. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Bartholomew Callaghan; and the clans of Callaghan and Foley fought rather more bloodily than usual, as occasion served; and at intervals during the next few months Murray used to ask me if my friend the murderer had dropped in lately, to which I was wont to reply with condolences on the failure of the R.I.C. to find the Widow Callaghan's only son for her; and that was about all that came of it.

Events with which the present story has no concern took me to England towards the end of the following March. It so happened that my old regiment, the ----th Fusiliers, was quartered at Whincastle, within a couple of hours by rail of Philippa's home, where I was staying, and, since my wedding was now within measurable distance, my former brothers-in-arms invited me over to dine and sleep, and to receive a valedictory silver claret jug that they were magnanimous enough to bestow upon a backslider. I enjoyed the dinner as much as any man can enjoy his dinner when he knows he has to make a speech at the end of it; through much and varied conversation I strove, like a nervous mother who cannot trust her offspring out of her sight, to keep before my mind's eye the opening sentences that I had composed in the train; I felt that if I could only "get away" satisfactorily I might trust the Ayala ('89) to do the rest, and of that fount of inspiration there was no lack. As it turned out, I got away all right, though the sight of the double line of expectant faces and red mess jackets nearly scattered those precious opening sentences, and I am afraid that so far as the various subsequent points went that I had intended to make, I stayed away; however, neither Demosthenes, nor a Nationalist member at a Cork election, could have been listened to with more gratifying attention, and I sat down, hot and happy, to be confronted with my own flushed visage, hideously reflected in the glittering paunch of the claret jug.

Once safely over the presentation, the evening mellowed into frivolity, and it was pretty late before I found myself settled down to whist, at sixpenny points, in the ancient familiar way, while most of the others fell to playing pool in the billiard-room next door. I have played whist from my youth up; with the preternatural seriousness of a subaltern, with the self-a.s.surance of a senior captain, with the privileged irascibility of a major; and my eighteen months of abstinence at Shreelane had only whetted my appet.i.te for what I consider the best of games. After the long lonely evenings there, with rats for company, and, for relaxation, a "deck" of that specially demoniacal American variety of patience known as "Fooly Ann," it was wondrous agreeable to sit again among my fellows, and "lay the longs"

on a severely scientific rubber of whist, as though Mrs. Cadogan and the Skebawn Bench of Magistrates had never existed.

We were in the first game of the second rubber, and I was holding a very nice playing hand; I had early in the game moved forth my trumps to battle, and I was now in the ineffable position of scoring with the small cards of my long suit. The cards fell and fell in silence, and Ballantyne, my partner, raked in the tricks like a machine. The concentrated quiet of the game was suddenly arrested by a sharp, unmistakable sound from the barrack yard outside, the snap of a Lee-Metford rifle.

"What was that?" exclaimed Moffat, the senior major.

Before he had finished speaking there was a second shot.

"By Jove, those were rifle-shots! Perhaps I'd better go and see what's up," said Ballantyne, who was captain of the week, throwing down his cards and making a bolt for the door.

He had hardly got out of the room when the first long high note of the "a.s.sembly" sang out, sudden and clear. We all sprang to our feet, and as the bugle-call went shrilly on, the other men came pouring in from the billiard-room, and stampeded to their quarters to get their swords.

At the same moment the mess sergeant appeared at the outer door with a face as white as his s.h.i.+rt-front.

"The sentry on the magazine guard has been shot, sir!" he said excitedly to Moffat. "They say he's dead!"

We were all out in the barrack square in an instant; it was clear moonlight, and the square was already alive with hurrying figures cramming on clothes and caps as they ran to fall in. I was a free agent these times, and I followed the mess sergeant across the square towards the distant corner where the magazine stands. As we doubled round the end of the men's quarters, we nearly ran into a small party of men who were advancing slowly and heavily in our direction.

"'Ere he is, sir!" said the mess sergeant, stopping himself abruptly.

They were carrying the sentry to the hospital. His busby had fallen off; the moon shone mildly on his pale, convulsed face, and foam and strange inhuman sounds came from his lips. His head was rolling from side to side on the arm of one of the men who was carrying him; as it turned towards me I was struck by something disturbingly familiar in the face, and I wondered if he had been in my old company.

"What's his name, sergeant?" I said to the mess sergeant.

"Private Harris, sir," replied the sergeant; "he's only lately come up from the depot, and this was his first time on sentry by himself."

I went back to the mess, and in process of time the others straggled in, thirsting for whiskies-and-sodas, and full of such information as there was to give. Private Harris was not wounded; both the shots had been fired by him, as was testified by the state of his rifle and the fact that two of the cartridges were missing from the packet in his pouch.

"I hear he was a queer, sulky sort of chap always," said Tomkinson, the subaltern of the day, "but if he was having a try at suicide he made a bally bad fist of it."

"He made as good a fist of it as you did of putting on your sword, Tommy," remarked Ballantyne, indicating a dangling white strap of webbing, that hung down like a tail below Mr. Tomkinson's mess jacket.

"Nerves, obviously, in both cases!"

The exquisite satisfaction afforded by this discovery to Mr.

Tomkinson's brother officers found its natural outlet in a bear fight that threatened to become more or less general, and in the course of which I slid away unostentatiously to bed in Ballantyne's quarters, and took the precaution of barricading my door.

Next morning, when I got down to breakfast, I found Ballantyne and two or three others in the mess room, and my first inquiry was for Private Harris.

"Oh, the poor chap's dead," said Ballantyne; "it's a very queer business altogether. I think he must have been wrong in the top storey. The doctor was with him when he came to out of the fit, or whatever it was, and O'Reilly--that's the doctor y' know, Irish of course, and, by the way, poor Harris was an Irishman too--says that he could only jibber at first, but then he got better, and he got out of him that when he had been on sentry-go for about half-an-hour, he happened to look up at the angle of the barrack wall near where it joins the magazine tower, and saw a face looking at him over it. He challenged and got no answer, but the face just stuck there staring at him; he challenged again, and then, as O'Reilly said, he 'just oop with his royfle and blazed at it.'" Ballantyne was not above the common English delusion that he could imitate an Irish brogue.

"Well, what happened then?"

"Well, according to the poor devil's own story, the face just kept on looking at him and he had another shot at it, and 'My G.o.d Almighty,' he said to O'Reilly, 'it was there always!' While he was saying that to O'Reilly he began to chuck another fit, and apparently went on chucking them till he died a couple of hours ago."

"One result of it is," said another man, "that they couldn't get a man to go on sentry there alone last night. I expect we shall have to double the sentries there every night as long as we're here."

"Silly a.s.ses!" remarked Tomkinson, but he said it without conviction.

After breakfast we went out to look at the wall by the magazine. It was about eleven feet high, with a coped top, and they told me there was a deep and wide dry ditch on the outside. A ladder was brought, and we examined the angle of the wall at which Harris said the face had appeared. He had made a beautiful shot, one of his bullets having flicked a piece off the ridge of the coping exactly at the corner.