Chapter LXXIX…

Chapter LXXIX

SHOWING HOW LITTLE LILY'S LIFE BEGAN TO CHANGE INTO A RETROSPECT; AND HOW ON A SUDDEN SHE BEGAN TO FEEL BETTER.

As time wore on, little Lilias was not better. When she had read her Bible, and closed it, she would sit long silent, with a sad look, thinking; and often she would ask old Sally questions about her mother, and listen to her, looking all the time with a strange and earnest gaze through the glass door upon the evergreens and the early snowdrops. And old Sally was troubled somehow, and saddened at her dwelling so much upon this theme.

And one evening, as they sat together in the drawing-room--she and the good old rector--she asked him, too, gently, about her; for he never shrank from talking of the beloved dead, but used to speak of her often, with a simple tenderness, as if she were still living.

In this he was right. Why should we be afraid to speak of those of whom we think so continually? She is not dead, but sleepeth! I have met a few, and they very good men, who spoke of their beloved dead with this cheery affection, and mingled their pleasant and loving remembrances of them in their common talk; and often I wished that, when I am laid up in the bosom of our common mother earth, those who loved me would keep my memory thus socially alive, and allow my name, when I shall answer to it no more, to mingle still in their affectionate and merry intercourse.

'Some conflicts my darling had the day before her departure,' he said; 'but such as through God's goodness lasted not long, and ended in the comfort that continued to her end, which was so quiet and so peaceable, we who were nearest about her, knew not the moment of her departure. And little Lily was then but an infant--a tiny little thing. Ah! if my darling had been spared to see her grown-up, such a beauty, and so like her!'

And so he rambled on; and when he looked at her, little Lily was weeping; and as he looked she said, trying to smile--

'Indeed, I don't know why I'm crying, darling. There's nothing the matter with your little Lily--only I can't help crying: and I'm your foolish little Lily, you know.'

And this often happened, that he found she was weeping when he looked on her suddenly, and she used to try to smile, and both, then, to cry together, and neither say what they feared, only each unspeakably more tender and loving. Ah, yes! in their love was mingling now something of the yearning of a farewell, which neither would acknowledge.

'Now, while they lay here,' says sweet John Bunyan, in his 'Pilgrim's Progress,' 'and waited for the good hour, there was a noise in the town that there was a post come from the celestial city, with matter of great importance to one Christiana. So enquiry was made for her, and the house was found out where she was; so the post presented her with a letter, the contents whereof were, "Hail, thou good one! I bring thee tidings that the Master calleth for thee, and expecteth that thou shouldst stand in his presence, in clothes of immortality, within these ten days."'

'When he had read this letter to her, he gave her therewith a sure token that he was a true messenger, and was come to bid her make haste to be gone. The token was an arrow with a point sharpened with love, let easily into her heart, which by degrees wrought so effectually with her, that at the time appointed she must be gone.

'When Christiana saw that her time was come, and that she was the first of this company that was to go over, she called for Mr. Greatheart, her guide, and told him how matters were.'

And so little Lily talked with Mr. Greatheart in her own way; and hearing of her mother, gave ear to the story as to a sweet and solemn parable, that lighted her dark steps. And the old man went on:--

'It is St. John who says, "And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. So when they had rowed about five-and-twenty, or thirty furlongs, they see the Lord walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they were afraid. But he saith unto them, It is I, be not afraid." So is it with the frail bark of mortality and the trembling spirit it carries. When "it is now dark," and the sea arises, and the "great wind" blows, the vessel is tost, and the poor heart fails within it; and when they see the dim form which they take to be the angel of death walking the roaming waters, they cry out in terror, but the voice of the sweet Redeemer, the Lord of Life is heard, "It is I; be not afraid," and so the faithful ones "willingly receive him into the ship," and immediately it is at the land whither they go: yes, at the land whither they go. But, oh! the lonely ones, left behind on the other shore.'

One morning, old Sally, who, in her quiet way, used to tell all the little village news she heard, thinking to make her young mistress smile, or at least listen, said--

'And that wild young gentleman, Captain Devereux, is growing godly, they say; Mrs. Irons tells me how he calls for his Bible o' nights, and how he does not play cards, nor eat suppers at the Phoenix, nor keep bad company, nor go into Dublin, but goes to church; and she says she does not know what to make of him.'

Little Lily did not speak or raise her head; she went on stirring the little locket, that lay on the table, with the tip of her finger, looking on it silently. She did not seem to mind old Sally's talk, almost to hear it, but when it ended, she waited, still silent, as a child, when the music is over, listens for more.

When she came down she placed her chair near the window, that she might see the snowdrops and the crocuses.

'The spring, at last, Sally, my darling, and I feel so much better;' and Lily smiled on the flowers through the windows, and I fancy the flowers opened in that beautiful light.

And she said, every now and then, that she felt 'so much better--so much stronger,' and made old Sally sit by her, and talk to her, and smiled so happily, and there again were all her droll engaging little ways. And when the good rector came in, that evening, she welcomed him in the old pleasant way: though she could not run out, as in other times, when she heard his foot on the steps, to meet him at the door, and there was such a beautiful colour in her clear, thin cheeks, and she sang his favourite little song for him, just one verse, with the clear, rich voice he loved so well, and then tired. The voice remained in his ears long after, and often came again, and that little song, in lonely reveries, while he sat listening, in long silence, and twilight, a swan's song.

'You see, your little Lily is growing quite well again. I feel so much better.'

There was such a childish sunshine in her smile, his trembling heart believed it.

'Oh! little Lily, my darling!' he stopped--he was crying, and yet delighted. Smiling all the time, and crying, and through it a little laugh, as if he had waked from a dream of having lost her, and found her there--his treasure--safe. 'If anything happened to little Lily, I think the poor old man'--and the sentence was not finished; and, after a little pause, he said, quite cheerily--'But I knew the spring would bring her back. I knew it, and here she is; the light of the house; little Lily, my treasure.'

And so he blessed and kissed her, and blessed her again, with all his fervent soul, laying his old hand lightly on her fair young head; and when she went up for the night, with gentle old Sally, and he heard her room door shut, he closed his own, and kneeling down, with clasped hands and streaming eyes, in a rapture of gratitude, he poured forth his thanksgivings before the Throne of all Mercies.

These outpourings of gratitude, all premature, for blessings not real but imagined, are not vain. They are not thrown away upon that glorious and marvellous God who draws near to all who will draw near to Him, reciprocates every emotion of our love with a tenderness literally parental, and is delighted with his creatures' appreciation of his affection and his trustworthiness; who knows whereof we are made, and remembers that we are but dust, and is our faithful Creator. Therefore, friend, though thou fearest a shadow, thy prayer is not wasted; though thou rejoicest in an illusion, thy thanksgiving is not in vain. They are the expressions of thy faith recorded in Heaven, and counted--oh! marvellous love and compassion!--to thee for righteousness.

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Chapter LXXX

IN WHICH TWO ACQUAINTANCES BECOME, ON A SUDDEN, MARVELLOUSLY FRIENDLY IN THE CHURCH-YARD; AND MR. DANGERFIELD SMOKES A PIPE IN THE BRASS CASTLE, AND RESOLVES THAT THE DUMB SHALL SPEAK.

On Sunday, Mervyn, after the good doctor's sermon and benediction, wishing to make enquiry of the rector touching the movements of his clerk, whose place was provisionally supplied by a corpulent and unctuous mercenary from Dublin, whose fat presence and panting delivery were in signal contrast with the lank figure and deep cavernous tones of the absent official, loitered in the church-yard to allow time for the congregation to disperse, and the parson to disrobe and emerge.

He was reading an epitaph on an expansive black flag-stone, in the far corner of the church-yard--it is still there--upon several ancestral members of the family of Lowe, who slept beneath 'in hope,' as the stone-cutter informed the upper world; and musing, as sad men will, upon the dates and vanities of the record, when a thin white hand was lightly laid upon his sleeve from behind; and looking round, in expectation of seeing the rector's grave, simple, kindly countenance, he beheld, instead, with a sort of odd thrill, the white glittering face of Mr. Paul Dangerfield.

'Hamlet in the church-yard!' said the white gentleman, with an ambiguous playfulness, very like a sneer. 'I'm too old to play Horatio; but standing at his elbow, if the Prince permits, I have a friendly word or two to say, in my own dry way.'

There was in Mervyn's nature something that revolted instinctively from the singular person who stood at his shoulder. Their organisations and appetites were different, I suppose, and repellent. Cold and glittering was the 'gelidus anguis in herbâ'--the churchyard grass--who had lifted his baleful crest close to his ear.

There was a slight flush on 'Hamlet's' forehead, and a glimmer of something dangerous in his eye, as he glanced on his stark acquaintance. But the feeling was transitory and unreasonable, and he greeted him with a cold and sad civility.

'I was thinking, Mr. Mervyn,' said Mr. Dangerfield, politely, 'of walking up to the Tiled House, after church, to pay my respects, and ask the favour of five minutes' discourse with you; and seeing you here, I ventured to present myself.'

'If I can do anything to serve Mr. Dangerfield,' began Mervyn.

Dangerfield smiled and bowed. He was very courteous; but in his smile there was a character of superiority which Mervyn felt almost like an insult.

'You mistake me, Sir. I'm all gratitude; but I don't mean to trouble you further than to ask your attention for two or three minutes. I've a thing to tell you, Sir. I'm really anxious to serve you. I wish I could. And 'tis only that I've recollected since I saw you, a circumstance of which possibly you may make some use.'

'I'm deeply obliged, Sir--deeply,' said Mervyn, eagerly.

'I'm only, Sir, too happy. It relates to Charles Archer. I've recollected, since I saw you, a document concerning his death. It had a legal bearing of some sort, and was signed by at least three gentlemen. One was Sir Philip Drayton, of Drayton Hall, who was with him at Florence in his last illness. I may have signed it myself, but I don't recollect. It was by his express desire, to quiet, as I remember, some proceedings which might have made a noise, and compromised his family.'

'Can you bring to mind the nature of the document?'

'Why, thus much. I'm quite sure it began with a certificate of his death; and then, I think, was added a statement, at his last request, which surprised, or perhaps, shocked us. I only say I think--for though I remember that such a statement was solemnly made, I can't bring to mind whether it was set out in the writing of which I speak. Only I am confident it referred to some crime--a confession of something; but for the life o' me I can't recollect what. If you could let me know the subject of your suspicion it might help me. I should never have remembered this occurrence, for instance, had it not been for our meeting t'other day. I can't exactly--in fact, at all--bring to mind what the crime was: forgery, or perjury--eh?'

'Why, Sir, 'twas this,' said Mervyn, and stopped short, not knowing how far even this innocent confidence might compromise Irons. Dangerfield, his head slightly inclined, was disconcertingly silent and attentive.

'I--I suspect,' resumed Mervyn, 'I suspect, Sir, 'twas perjury,' said Mervyn.

'Oh! perjury? I see--in the matter of his testimony in that distressing prosecution. My Lord Dunoran--hey?'

Mervyn bowed, and Dangerfield remained silent and thoughtful for a minute or two, and then said:--

'I see, Sir--I think I see; but, who then was the guilty man, who killed Mr. ---- pooh, What's-his-name--the deceased man,--you know?'

'Why, upon that point, Sir, I should have some hesitation in speaking. I can only now say thus much, that I'm satisfied, he, Charles Archer, in swearing as he did, committed wilful perjury.'

'You are?--oho!--oh! This is satisfactory. You don't, of course, mean mere conjecture--eh?'

'I know not, Sir, how you would call it, but 'tis certainly a feeling fixed in my mind.'

'Well, Sir, I trust it may prove well founded. I wish I had myself a copy of that paper; but, though I have it not, I think I can put you in a way to get it. It was addressed, I perfectly recollect, to the Messrs. Elrington, gentlemen attorneys, in Chancery-lane, London. I remember it, because my Lord Castlemallard employed them eight or nine years afterwards in some law business, which recalled the whole matter to my mind before it had quite faded. No doubt they have it there. 'Twas about a week after his death. The date of that you can have from newspapers. You'll not mention my name when writing, because they mayn't like the trouble of searching, and my Lord Castlemallard would not approve my meddling in other persons' affairs--even in yours.'

'I sha'n't forget. But what if they refuse to seek the paper out?'

'Make it worth their while in money, Sir; and, though they may grumble over it, I warrant they'll find it.'

'Sir,' said Mervyn, suddenly, 'I cannot thank you half enough. This statement, should it appear attached, as you suppose, to the certificate, may possibly place me on the track of that lost witness, who yet may restore my ruined name and fortunes. I thank you, Sir. From my heart I do thank you.'

And he grasped Dangerfield's white thin hand in his, with a fervour how unlike his cold greeting of only a few minutes before, and shook it with an eager cordiality.

Thus across the grave of these old Lowes did the two shake hands, as they had never done before; and Dangerfield, white and glittering, and like a frolicsome man, entering into a joke, wrung his with an exaggerated demonstration, and then flung it downward with a sudden jerk, as if throwing down a glove. The gesture, the smile, and the suspicion of a scowl, had a strange mixture of cordiality, banter and defiance, and he was laughing a quiet 'ha, ha, ha;' and, wagging his head, he said--

'Well, I thought 'twould please you to hear this; and anything more I can do or think of is equally at your service.'

So, side by side they returned, picking their steps among the graves and head-stones, to the old church porch.

For a day or two after the storm, the temper of our cynical friend of the silver spectacles had suffered. Perhaps he did not like the news which had reached him since, and would have preferred that Charles Nutter had made good his escape from the gripe of justice.

The management of Lord Castlemallard's Irish estates had devolved provisionally upon Mr. Dangerfield during the absence of Nutter and the coma of his rival; and the erect white gentleman, before his desk in his elbow-chair, when, after his breakfast, about to open the letters and the books relating to this part of his charge, used sometimes to grin over his work, and jabber to himself his hard scoffs and gibes over the sins and follies of man, and the chops and changes of this mortal life.

But from and after the night of the snow-storm he had contracted a disgust for this part of his labours, and he used to curse Nutter with remarkable intensity, and with an iteration which, to a listener who thought that even the best thing may be said too often, would have been tiresome.

Perhaps a little occurrence, which Mr. Dangerfield himself utterly despised, may have had something to do with his bitter temper, and gave an unsatisfactory turn to his thoughts. It took place on the eventful night of the tempest.

If some people saw visions that night, others dreamed dreams. In a midnight storm like this, time was when the solemn peal and defiant clang of the holy bells would have rung out confusion through the winged hosts of 'the prince of the powers of the air,' from the heights of the abbey tower. Everybody has a right to his own opinion on the matter. Perhaps the prince and his army are no more upon the air on such a night than on any other; or that being so, they no more hastened their departure by reason of the bells than the eclipse does by reason of the beating of the Emperor of China's gongs. But this I aver, whatever the cause, upon such nights of storm, the sensoria of some men are crossed by such wild variety and succession of images, as amounts very nearly to the Walpurgis of a fever. It is not the mere noise--other noises won't do it. The air, to be sure, is thin, and blood-vessels expand, and perhaps the brain is pressed upon unduly. Well, I don't know. Material laws may possibly account for it. I can only speak with certainty of the phenomenon. I've experienced it; and some among those of my friends who have reached that serene period of life in which we con over our ailments, register our sensations, and place ourselves upon regimens, tell me the same story of themselves. And this, too, I know, that upon the night in question, Mr. Paul Dangerfield, who was not troubled either with vapours or superstitions, as he lay in his green-curtained bed in the Brass Castle, had as many dreams flitting over his brain and voices humming and buzzing in his ears, as if he had been a poet or a pythoness.

He had not become, like poor Sturk before his catastrophe, a dreamer of dreams habitually. I suppose he did dream. The beasts do. But his visions never troubled him; and I don't think there was one morning in a year on which he could have remembered his last night's dream at the breakfast-table.

On this particular night, however, he did dream. Vidit somnium. He thought that Sturk was dead, and laid out in a sort of state in an open coffin, with a great bouquet on his breast, something in the continental fashion, as he remembered it in the case of a great, stern, burly ecclesiastic in Florence. The coffin stood on tressels in the aisle of Chapelizod church; and, of all persons in the world, he and Charles Nutter stood side by side as chief mourners, each with a great waxen taper burning in one hand, and a white pocket-handkerchief in the other.

Now in dreams it sometimes happens that men undergo sensations of awe, and even horror, such as waking they never know, and which the scenery and situation of the dream itself appear wholly inadequate to produce. Mr. Paul Dangerfield, had he been called on to do it, would have kept solitary watch in a dead man's chamber, and smoked his pipe as serenely as he would in the club-room of the Phoenix. But here it was different. The company were all hooded and silent, sitting in rows: and there was a dismal sound of distant waters, and an indefinable darkness and horror in the air; and, on a sudden, up sat the corpse of Sturk, and thundered, with a shriek, a dreadful denunciation, and Dangerfield started up in his bed aghast, and cried--'Charles Archer!'

The storm was bellowing and shrieking outside, and for some time that grim, white gentleman, bolt upright in his shirt, did not know distinctly in what part of the world, or, indeed, in what world he was.

'So,' said Mr. Dangerfield, soliloquising, 'Charles Nutter's alive, and in prison, and what comes next? 'Tis enough to make one believe in a devil almost! Why wasn't he drowned, d--n him? How did he get himself taken, d--n him again? From the time I came into this unlucky village I've smelt danger. That accursed beast, a corpse, and a ghost, and a prisoner at last--well, he has been my evil genius. If he were drowned or hanged; born to be hanged, I hope: all I want is quiet--just quiet; but I've a feeling the play's not played out yet. He'll give the hangman the slip, will he: not if I can help it, though; but caution, Sir, caution; life's at stake--my life's on the cast. The clerk's a wise dog to get out of the way. Death's walking. What a cursed fool I was when I came here and saw those beasts, and knew them, not to turn back again, and leave them to possess their paradise! I think I've lost my caution and common sense under some cursed infatuation. That handsome, insolent wench, Miss Gertrude, 'twould be something to have her, and to humble her, too; but--but 'tis not worth a week in such a neighbourhood.'

Now this soliloquy, which broke into an actual mutter every here and there, occurred at about eleven o'clock A.M., in the little low parlour of the Brass Castle, that looked out on the wintry river.

Mr. Dangerfield knew the virtues of tobacco, so he charged his pipe, and sat grim, white, and erect by the fire. It is not everyone that is 'happy thinking,' and the knight of the silver spectacles followed out his solitary discourse, with his pipe between his lips, and saw all sorts of things through the white narcotic smoke.

'It would not do to go off and leave affairs thus; a message might follow me, eh? No; I'll stay and see it out, quite out. Sturk--Barnabas Sturk. If he came to his speech for five minutes--hum--we'll see. I'll speak with Mrs. Sturk about it--we must help him to his speech--a prating fellow; 'tis hard he should hold his tongue; yes, we'll help him to his speech; 'tis in the interest of justice--eternal justice--ha, ha, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Let Dr. Sturk be sworn--ha, ha--magna est veritas--there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed; ha, ha. Let Dr. Sturk be called.'

So the white, thin phantom of the spectacles and tobacco pipe, sitting upright by the fire, amused himself with a solitary banter. Then he knocked the white ashes out upon the hob, stood up with his back to the fire, in grim rumination, for about a minute, at the end of which he unlocked his desk, and took forth a letter, with a large red seal. If was more than two months old by this time, and was, in fact, that letter from the London doctor which he had expected with some impatience.

It was not very long, and standing he read it through, and his white face contracted, and darkened, and grew strangely intense and stern as he did so.

''Tis devilish strong--ha, ha, ha--conclusive, indeed.' He was amused again. 'I've kept it long enough--igni reservata.'

And holding it in the tongs, he lighted a corner, and as the last black fragment of it, covered with creeping sparks, flew up the chimney, he heard the voice of a gentleman hallooing in the court-yard.

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Chapter LXXXI

IN WHICH MR. DANGERFIELD RECEIVES A VISITOR, AND MAKES A CALL.

Dangerfield walked out and blandly greeted the visitor, who turned out to be Mr. Justice Lowe.

'I give you good-morning, Sir; pray, alight and step in. Hallo, Doolan, take Mr. Justice Lowe's horse.'

So Mr. Lowe thanked him, in his cold way, and bowing, strode into the Brass Castle; and after the customary civilities, sat himself down, and says he--

'I've been at the Crown Office, Sir, about this murder, we may call it, upon Sturk, and I told them you could throw a light, as I thought, on the matter.'

'As how, Sir?'

'Why, regarding the kind of feeling that subsisted between the prisoner, Nutter, and Doctor Sturk.'

''Tis unpleasant, Sir, but I can't object.'

'There was an angry feeling about the agency, I believe? Lord Castlemallard's agency, eh?' continued Lowe.

'Well, I suppose it was that; there certainly was an unpleasant feeling--very unpleasant.'

'You've heard him express it?'

'Yes; I think most gentlemen who know him have. Why, he made no disguise of it; he was no great talker, but we've heard him on that subject.'

'But you specially know how it stood between them in respect of the agency?'

'Yes.'

'Very good, Sir,' said Lowe.

'And I've a notion that something decisive should be done toward effecting a full discovery, and I'll consider of a method,' replied Dangerfield.

'How do you mean?' said Lowe, looking up with a glance like a hawk.

'How! why I'll talk it over with Mrs. Sturk this evening.'

'Why, what has she got to tell?'

'Nothing, as I suppose; I'll see her to-day; there's nothing to tell; but something, I think, to be done; it hasn't been set about rightly; 'tis a botched business hitherto--that's in my judgment.'

'Yet 'tis rather a strong case,' answered Mr. Lowe, superciliously.

'Rather a strong case, so it is, but I'll clench it, Sir; it ought to be certain.'

'Well, Sir?' said Lowe, who expected to hear more.

'Yes,' said Dangerfield, briskly, ''twill depend on her; I'll suggest, she'll decide.'

'And why she, Sir?' said Lowe sharply.

'Because 'tis her business and her right, and no one else can,' answered Dangerfield just as tartly, with his hands in his breeches' pockets, and his head the least thing o' one side, and then with a bow, 'won't you drink a glass of wine, Sir?' which was as much as to say, you'll get no more from me.

'I thank you, Sir, no; 'tis a little too early for me.' And so with the usual ceremonies, Mr. Lowe departed, the governor of the Brass Castle walking beside his horse, as far as the iron gate, to do him honour; and as he rode away towards Lucan, Mr. Dangerfield followed him with a snowy smirk.

Then briskly, after his wont, the knight of the shining spectacles made his natty toilet; and in a few minutes his cocked hat was seen gliding along the hedge toward Chapelizod.

He glanced up at Sturk's window--it was a habit now--so soon as he came in sight, but all looked as usual. So he mounted the steps, and asked to see Mrs. Sturk.

'My dear Madam,' said he, after due courtesies interchanged, 'I've but a few minutes; my horse waits yonder at the Phoenix, and I'm away to town. How does your patient to-day?'

'Oh, mighty well--wonderful--that is considering how cold the weather is. The doctor says he's lower, indeed, but I don't mind that, for he must be lower while the cold continues; I always say that; and I judge very much by the eye; don't you, Mr. Dangerfield? by his looks, you know; they can't deceive me, and I assure you--'

'Your house is quiet; are the children out, Ma'am?'

'Oh, yes, with Mag in the park.'

'Perhaps, Ma'am, you'd let me see him?'

'See him?'

'Yes, look on him, Ma'am, only for a moment you know.'

She looked very much surprised, and perhaps a little curious and frightened.

'I hope you haven't heard he's worse, Mr. Dangerfield. Oh, Sir, sure you haven't?'

'No, Madam, on my honour, except from yourself, I've heard nothing of him to-day; but I'd like to see him, and speak a word to you, with your permission.'

So Mrs. Sturk led the way up stairs, whispering as she ascended; for she had always the fancy in her head that her Barney was in a sweet light sleep, from which he was on no account to be awakened, forgetting, or not clearly knowing, that all the ordnance in the barrack-yard over the way had not voice enough to call him up from that dread slumber.

'You may go down, my dear,' said Mr. Dangerfield to the little girl, who rose silently from the chair as they entered; 'with your permission, Mistress Sturk--I say, child, you may run down,' and he smiled a playful, sinister smile, with a little wave of his finger toward the door. So she courtesied and vanished obediently.

Then he drew the curtain, and looked on Doctor Sturk. There lay the hero of the tragedy, his smashed head strapped together with sticking-plaster, and a great white fold of fine linen, like a fantastic turban, surmounting his grim yellow features.

Then he slipped his fingers under the coverlet, and took his hand; a strange greeting that! But it was his pulse he wanted, and when he had felt it for a while--

'Psha!' said he in a whisper--for the semblance of sleep affected everyone alike--'his pulse is just gone. Now, Madam, listen to me. There's not a soul in Chapelizod but yourself who does not know his wounds are mortal--he's dying, Ma'am.'

'Oh--oh--o--o--oh, Mr. Dangerfield, you don't--you don't think so,' wildly cried the poor little lady, growing quite white with terror and agony.

'Now, pray, my dear Mistress Sturk, compose yourself, and hear me out: 'Tis my belief he has a chance; but none, absolutely no chance, Madam, unless my advice be taken. There's not an evening, Ma'am, I meet Doctor Toole at the club, but I hear the same report--a little lower--always the same--lower--sinking--and no hope.'

Here Mrs. Sturk broke out again.

'Now, Madam,' I protest you'll make me regret my visit, unless you please to command yourself. While the doctors who are about him have got him in hands, there's neither hope for his life, nor for his recovering, for one moment, the use of his speech. Pray, Madam, hear me. They state as much themselves. Now, Madam, I say, we must have a chance for his life, and if that fails, a chance for his speech. The latter, Madam, is of more consequence than, perhaps, you are aware.'

Poor little Mrs. Sturk was looking very pale, and breathing very hard, with her hand pressed to her heart.

'I've done what I could, you know, to see my way through his affairs, and I've succeeded in keeping his creditors quiet.'

At this point poor Mrs. Sturk broke out--

'Oh! may the Father of the fatherless, if such they are to be bless and reward--oh--oh--ho--ho, Mr. Dangerfield--oh--oh-oh--Sir.'

'Now, pray, Madam, oblige me and be tranquil. I say, Madam, his affairs, I suspect, are by no means in so bad a case as we at first supposed, and he has got, or I'm mistaken, large sums out, but where, neither I nor you can tell. Give him five minutes' speech, and it may be worth a thousand pounds to you--well, not to you, if you will, but to his children. And again, Madam, 'tis of the utmost importance that he should be able to state who was the villain who struck him--Charles--a--Charles--Mr. Nutter--you know, Madam.'

'Oh! that dreadful--dreadful man--may Heaven forgive him. Oh, my Barney! look at him there--he'd forgive him if he could speak. You would, my blessed Barney--you would.'

'To be sure he would. But see, Ma'am, the importance of having his evidence to settle the fact. Well, I know that he would not like to hang anybody. But suppose, Ma'am, Charles Nutter is innocent, don't you think he'd like to acquit him? ay, you do. Well, Ma'am, 'tis due to the public, you see, and to his children that he should have a chance of recovering his speech, and to common humanity that he should have a chance for his life--eh? and neither will the doctors who have him in hands allow him. Now, Madam, there's a simple operation, called trepanning, you have heard of it, which would afford him such a chance, but fearing its failure they won't try it, although they allege that without it he must die, d'ye see?--ay, die he must, without a cast for his life if you won't try it.'

And so, by harping on the alternatives, and demonstrating the prudence, humanity, and duty of action, and the inevitably fatal consequences of the other course, he wrought upon her at last to write a note to Surgeon Dillon to come out on the evening following, and to perform the operation. The dreadful word 'to-day,' the poor little woman could not abide. She pleaded for a respite, and so, half-distracted, fixed to-morrow.

'I hope, my dear Madam, you've some little confidence in me. I think I have shown an interest, and I've striven to be of use.'

'Oh, Sir, Mr. Dangerfield, you've been too good, our guardian angel; but for you, Sir, we should not have had a roof over our heads, or a bed to lie on; oh! may--'

'Well, Ma'am, you please to speak too highly of my small services; but I would plead them, humble as they are, as a claim on your confidence, and having decided upon this wise and necessary course, pray do not say a word about it to anybody but myself. I will go to town, and arrange for the doctor's visit, and you'll soon, I hope, have real grounds for gratitude, not to me, Ma'am, but to Heaven.'

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Chapter LXXXII

IN WHICH MR. PAUL DANGERFIELD PAYS HIS RESPECTS AND COMPLIMENTS AT BELMONT; WHERE OTHER VISITORS ALSO PRESENT THEMSELVES.

Before going to town, Mr. Dangerfield, riding over the bridge and up the Palmerstown-road, dismounted at Belmont door-steps, and asked for the general. He was out. Then for Miss Rebecca Chattesworth. Yes, she was in the withdrawing-room. And so, light, white, and wiry, he ascended the stairs swiftly.

'Mr. Dangerfield,' cried Dominick, throwing open the door; and that elderly and ill-starred wooer glided in thereat.

'Madam, your most humble servant.'

'Oh! Mr. Dangerfield? You're very welcome, Sir,' said Aunt Becky, with a grand courtesy, and extending her thin jewelled hand, which he took gallantly, with another bow, and a smile, and a flash from his spectacles.

Aunt Becky laid down her volume of Richardson. She was quite alone, except for her little monkey--Goblin--with a silver hoop about his waist, and a chain thereto attached; two King Charles's dogs, whose barking subsided after a while; and one gray parrot on a perch in the bow-window, who happily was not in a very chatty mood just then. So the human animals were able to edge in a sentence easily enough. And Mr. Dangerfield said--

'I'm happy in having found you, Madam; for whatever be my disappointments else, to Miss Rebecca Chattesworth at least I owe a debt of gratitude, which, despairing to repay it, I can only acknowledge; and leaving unacknowledged, I should have departed from Ireland most unhappily.'

'What a fop! what a fop,' said the parrot.

'You rate my poor wishes too highly, Mr. Dangerfield. I over-estimated, myself, my influence with the young lady; but why speak of your departure, Sir, so soon? A little time may yet work a change.'

'You lie, you dog! you lie, you lie, you lie,' said the parrot.

'Madam,' said he with a shake of his head, ''tis hoping against hope. Time will add to my wrinkles without softening her aversion. I utterly despair. While there remained one spark of hope I should never have dreamed of leaving Chapelizod.'

Here there was a considerable pause, during which the parrot occasionally repeated, 'You lie, you lie--you dog--you lie.'

'Of course, Sir, if the chance be not worth waiting for, you do well to be gone wherever your business or your pleasures, Sir, invite you,' said Aunt Becky, a little loftily.

'What a fop!' said the parrot. 'You lie, you dog!'

'Neither business, Madam, nor pleasures invite me. My situation here has been most distressing. So long as hope cheered me, I little regarded what might be said or thought; but I tell you honestly that hope is extinguished; and it has grown to me intolerable longer to remain in sight of that treasure for which I cannot cease to wish, and which I never can possess. I've grown, Madam, to detest the place.'

Aunt Becky, with her head very high, adjusted in silence, the two China mandarins on the mantelpiece--first, one very carefully, then the other. And there was a pause, during which one of the lap-dogs screamed; and the monkey, who had boxed his ears, jumped, with a ringing of his chain, chattering, on the back of the arm-chair in which the grim suitor sat. Mr. Dangerfield would have given the brute a slap in the face, but that he knew how that would affect Miss Rebecca Chattesworth.

'So, Madam,' said he, standing up abruptly, 'I am here to thank you most gratefully for the countenance given to my poor suit, which, here and now, at last and for ever, I forego. I shall leave for England so soon as my business will allow; and as I made no secret of my suit, so I shall make none of the reasons of my departure. I'm an outspoken man, Madam; and as the world knew my hopes, I shall offer them no false excuses for my departure; but lift my hat, and bow to fortune--a defeated man.'

'Avez-vous diné mon petit coquin?' said the parrot.

'Well, Sir, I will not altogether deny you have reason for what you design; and it may be, 'tis as well to bring the matter to a close, though your resolution has taken me by surprise. She hath shown herself so perverse in this respect, that I allow I see no present likelihood of a change; and indeed I do not quite understand my niece; and, very like, she does not comprehend herself.'

Mr. Dangerfield almost smiled one of his grim disconcerting smiles, and a cynical light played over his face; and the black monkey behind him grinned and hugged himself like his familiar. The disappointed gentleman thought he understood Miss Gertrude pretty well.

'I thought,' said Aunt Becky; 'I suspected--did you--a certain young gentleman in this neighbourhood--'

'As having found his way to the young lady's good graces?' asked Dangerfield.

'Yes; and I conjecture you know whom I mean,' said Aunt Rebecca.

'Who--pray, Madam?' he demanded.

'Why, Lieutenant Puddock,' said Aunt Becky, again adjusting the china on the chimneypiece.

'Eh?--truly?--that did not strike me,' replied Dangerfield.

He had a disconcerting way of saying the most ordinary things, and there was a sort of latent meaning, like a half-heard echo, underrunning the surface of his talk, which sometimes made people undefinably uncomfortable; and Aunt Becky looked a little stately and flushed; but in a minute more the conversation proceeded.

'I have many regrets, Miss Chattesworth, in leaving this place. The loss of your society--don't mistake me, I never flatter--is a chief one. Some of your views and plans interested me much. I shall see my Lord Castlemallard sooner than I should had my wishes prospered; and I will do all in my power to engage him to give the site for the building, and stones from the quarry free; and I hope, though no longer a resident here, you will permit me to contribute fifty pounds towards the undertaking.'

'Sir, I wish there were more gentlemen of your public spirit and Christian benevolence,' cried Aunt Becky, very cordially; 'and I have heard of all your goodness to that unhappy family of Doctor Sturk's--poor wretched man!'

'A bagatelle, Madam,' said Dangerfield, shaking his head and waving his hand slightly; 'but I hope to do them, or at least the public, a service of some importance, by bringing conviction home to the assassin who struck him down, and that in terms so clear and authentic, as will leave no room for doubt in the minds of any; and to this end I'm resolved to stick at no trifling sacrifice, and, rather than fail, I'll drain my purse.'

'Mon petit coquin!' prattled the parrot in the bow-window.

'And, Madam,' said he, after he had risen to take his leave, 'as I before said, I'm a plain man. I mean, so soon as I can wind my business up, to leave this place and country--I would to-night, if I could; but less, I fear, than some days--perhaps a week will not suffice. When I'm gone, Madam, I beg you'll exercise no reserve respecting the cause of my somewhat abrupt departure; I could easily make a pretext of something else; but the truth, Madam, is easiest as well as best to be told; I protracted my stay so long as hope continued. Now my suit is ended. I can no longer endure the place. The remembrance of your kindness only, sweetens the bitterness of my regret, and that I shall bear with me so long, Madam, as life remains.'

And saying this, as Mr. Richardson writes, 'he bowed upon her passive hand,' and Miss Rebecca made him a grand and gracious courtesy.

As he retreated, whom should Dominick announce but Captain Cluffe and Lieutenant Puddock. And there was an odd smile on Mr. Dangerfield's visage, as he slightly acknowledged them in passing, which Aunt Rebecca somehow did not like.

So Aunt Becky's levee went on; and as Homer, in our school-boy ear, sang the mournful truth, that 'as are the generations of the forest leaves so are the succession of men,' the Dangerfield efflorescence had no sooner disappeared, and that dry leaf whisked away down the stairs, than Cluffe and Puddock budded forth and bloomed in his place, in the sunshine of Aunt Rebecca's splendid presence.

Cluffe, in virtue of his rank and pretensions, marched in the van, and, as Aunt Becky received him, little Puddock's round eyes swept the room in search, perhaps, of some absent object.

'The general's not here,' said Aunt Becky loftily and severely, interpreting Puddock's wandering glance in that way. 'Your visit, perhaps, is for him--you'll find him in his study, with the orderly.'

'My visit, Madam,' said Puddock, with a slight blush, 'was intended for you, Madam--not for the general, whom I had the honour of seeing this morning on parade.'

'Oh! for me? I thank you,' said Aunt Rebecca, with a rather dry acknowledgment. And so she turned and chatted with Cluffe, who, not being at liberty to talk upon his usual theme--his poor, unhappy friend, Puddock, and his disgraces--was eloquent upon the monkey, and sweet upon the lap-dogs, and laughed till he grew purple at the humours of the parrot, and swore, as gentlemen then swore, 'twas a conjuror, a wonder, and as good as a play. While this entertaining conversation was going on, there came a horrid screech and a long succession of yelps from the court-yard.

'Good gracious mercy,' cried Aunt Rebecca, sailing rapidly to the window, ''tis Flora's voice. Sweet creature, have they killed you--my angel; what is it?--where are you, sweetheart?--where can she be? Oh, dear--oh, dear!'--and she looked this way and that in her distraction.

But the squeak subsided, and Flora was not to be seen; and Aunt Becky's presence of mind returned, and she said--

'Captain Cluffe, 'tis a great liberty; but you're humane--and, besides, I know that you would readily do me a kindness.' That emphasis was shot at poor Puddock. 'And may I pray you to try on the steps if you can see the dear animal, anywhere--you know Flora?'

'Know her?--oh dear, yes,' cried Cluffe with alacrity, who, however, did not, but relied on her answering to her name, which he bawled lustily from the door-steps and about the court-yard, with many terms of endearment, intended for Aunt Becky's ear, in the drawing-room.

Little Puddock, who was hurt at that lady's continued severity, was desirous of speaking; for he liked Aunt Becky, and his heart swelled within him at her injustice; but though he hemmed once or twice, somehow the exordium was not ready, and his feelings could not find a tongue.

Aunt Becky looked steadfastly from the window for a while, and then sailed majestically toward the door, which the little ensign, with an humble and somewhat frightened countenance, hastened to open.

'Pray, Sir, don't let me trouble you,' said Aunt Becky, in her high, cold way.

'Madam, 'tis no trouble--it would be a happiness to me, Madam, to serve you in any way you would permit; but 'tis a trouble to me, Madam, indeed, that you leave the room, and a greater trouble,' said little Puddock, waxing fluent as he proceeded, 'that I have incurred your displeasure--indeed, Madam, I know not how--your goodness to me, Madam, in my sickness, I never can forget.'

'You can forget, Sir--you have forgot. Though, indeed, Sir, there was little to remember, I--I'm glad you thought me kind, Sir. I--I wish you well, Sir,' said Aunt Becky. She was looking down and a little pale, and in her accents something hurried and almost sad. 'And as for my displeasure, Sir, who said I was displeased? And if I were, what could my displeasure be to you? No, Sir,' she went on almost fiercely, and with a little stamp on the floor, 'you don't care; and why should you?--you've proved it--you don't, Lieutenant Puddock, and you never did.'

And, without waiting for an answer, Aunt Becky flashed out of the room, and up stairs to her chamber, the door of which she slammed fiercely; and Gertrude, who was writing a letter in her own chamber, heard her turn the key hastily in the lock.

When Cluffe, who for some time continued to exercise his lungs in persuasive invitations to Flora, at last gave over the pursuit, and returned to the drawing-room, to suggest that the goddess in question had probably retreated to the kitchen, he was a good deal chagrined to find the drawing-room 'untreasured of its mistress.'

Puddock looked a good deal put out, and his explanation was none of the clearest; and he could not at all say that the lady was coming back.

'I think, Lieutenant Puddock,' said Cluffe, who was much displeased, and had come to regard Aunt Rebecca very much as under his especial protection, 'it might have been better we hadn't called here. I--you see--you're not--you see it yourself--you've offended Miss Rebecca Chattesworth somehow, and I'm afraid you've not mended matters while I was down stairs bawling after that cursed--that--the--little dog, you know. And--and for my part, I'm devilish sorry I came, Sir.'

This was said after a wait of nearly ten minutes, which appeared at least twice as long.

'I'm sorry, Sir, I embarrassed you with the disadvantage of my company,' answered little Puddock, with dignity.

'Why, 'tisn't that, you know,' rejoined Cluffe, in a patronising 'my good-fellow' sort of way; 'you know I always liked your company devilish well. But where's the good of putting one's self in the way of being thought de trop--don't you see--by other people--and annoyed in this way--and--you--you don't know the world, Puddock--you'd much better leave yourself in any hands, d'ye see; and so, I suppose, we may as well be off now--'tis no use waiting longer.'

And discontentedly and lingeringly the gallant captain, followed by Puddock, withdrew himself--pausing to caress the wolf-dog at the corner of the court-yard, and loitering as long as it was decent in the avenue.

All this time Miss Gertrude Chattesworth, like her more mature relative, was in the quiet precincts of her chamber. She, too, had locked her door, and, with throbbing temples and pale face, was writing a letter, from which I take the liberty of printing a few scarcely coherent passages.

* * * * *

'I saw you on Sunday--for near two hours--may Heaven forgive me, thinking of little else than you. And, oh! what would I not have given to speak, were it but ten words to you? When is my miserable probation to end? Why is this perverse mystery persisted in? I sometimes lose all hope in my destiny, and well-nigh all trust in you. I feel that I am a deceiver, and cannot bear it. I assure you, on my sacred honour, I believe there is nothing gained by all this--oh! forgive the word--deception. How or when is it to terminate?--what do you purpose?--why does the clerk's absence from the town cause you so much uneasiness--is there any danger you have not disclosed? A friend told me that you were making preparations to leave Chapelizod and return to England. I think I was on the point of fainting when I heard it. I almost regret I did not, as the secret would thus have been discovered, and my emancipation accomplished. How have you acquired this strange influence over me, to make me so deceive those in whom I should most naturally confide? I am persuaded they believe I really recoil from you. And what is this new business of Doctor Sturk? I am distracted with uncertainties and fears. I hear so little, and imperfectly from you, I cannot tell from your dark hints whether some new danger lurks in those unlooked-for quarters. I know not what magic binds me so to you, to endure the misery of this strange deceitful mystery--but you are all mystery; and yet be not--you cannot be--my evil genius. You will not condemn me longer to a wretchedness that must destroy me. I conjure you, declare yourself. What have we to fear? I will brave all--anything rather than darkness, suspense, and the consciousness of a continual dissimulation. Declare yourself, I implore of you, and be my angel of light and deliverance.'

There is a vast deal more, but this sample is quite enough; and when the letter was finished, she signed it-- 'Your most unhappy and too-faithful, 'GERTRUDE'.

And having sealed it, she leaned her anxious head upon her hand, and sighed heavily.

She knew very well by what means to send it; and the letter awaited at his house him for whom it was intended on his return that evening.

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Chapter LXXXIII

IN WHICH THE KNIGHT OF THE SILVER SPECTACLES MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF THE SAGE 'BLACK DILLON,' AND CONFERS WITH HIM IN HIS RETREAT.

AT that time there had appeared in Dublin an erratic genius in the medical craft, a young surgeon, 'Black Dillon,' they called him, the glory and disgrace of his calling; such as are from time to time raised up to abase the pride of intellect, and terrify the dabblers in vice. A prodigious mind, illuminating darkness, and shivering obstacles at a blow, with an electric force--possessing the power of a demigod, and the lusts of a swine. Without order, without industry; defying all usages and morality; lost for weeks together in the catacombs of vice; and emerging to re-assert in an hour the supremacy of his intellect; without principles or shame; laden with debt; and shattered and poisoned with his vices; a branded and admired man.

In the presence of this outcast genius and prodigy of vice, stood Mr. Dangerfield. There were two other gentlemen in the same small room, one of whom was doggedly smoking, with his hat on, over the fire; the other snoring in a crazy arm-chair, on the back of which hung his wig. The window was small and dirty; the air muddy with tobacco-smoke, and inflamed with whiskey. Singing and the clang of glasses was resounding from the next room, together with peals of coarse laughter, and from that on the other side, the high tones and hard swearing, and the emphatic slapping of a heavy hand upon the table, indicating a rising quarrel, were heard. From one door through another, across the narrow floor on which Mr. Dangerfield stood, every now and then lounged some neglected, dirty, dissipated looking inmate of these unwholesome precincts. In fact, Surgeon Dillon's present residence was in that diversorium pecatorum, the Four Courts Marshalsea in Molesworth-court. As these gentlemen shuffled or swaggered through, they generally nodded, winked, grunted, or otherwise saluted the medical gentleman, and stared at his visitor. For as the writer of the Harleian tract--I forget its name--pleasantly observes:--'In gaol they are no proud men, but will be quickly acquainted without ceremony.'

Mr. Dangerfield stood erect; all his appointments were natty, and his dress, though quiet, rich in material, and there was that air of reserve, and decision, and command about him, which suggests money, an article held much in esteem in that retreat. He had a way of seeing every thing in a moment without either staring or stealing glances, and nobody suspected him of making a scrutiny. In the young surgeon he saw an object in strong contrast with himself. He was lean and ungainly, shy and savage, dressed in a long greasy silk morning gown, blotched with wine and punch over the breast. He wore his own black hair gathered into a knot behind, and in a neglected dusty state, as if it had not been disturbed since he rolled out of his bed. This being placed his large, red, unclean hands, with fingers spread, like a gentleman playing the harpsichord, upon the table, as he stood at the side opposite to Mr. Dangerfield, and he looked with a haggard, surly stare on his visitor, through his great dark, deep-set prominent eyes, streaming fire, the one feature that transfixed the attention of all who saw him. He had a great brutal mouth, and his nose was pimply and inflamed, for Bacchus has his fires as well as Cupid, only he applies them differently. How polished showed Mr. Dangerfield's chin opposed to the three days' beard of Black Dillon! how delicate his features compared with the lurid proboscis, and huge, sensual, sarcastic mouth of the gentleman in the dirty morning-gown and shapeless slippers, who confronted him with his glare, an image of degradation and power!

'Tuppince, Docthor Dillon,' said a short, fat, dirty nymph, without stays or hoop, setting down a 'naggin o' whiskey' between the medical man and his visitor.

The doctor, to do him justice, for a second or two looked confoundedly put out, and his eyes blazed fiercer as his face flushed.

'Three halfpence outside, and twopence here, Sir,' said he with an awkward grin, throwing the money on the table; 'that's the way our shepherd deglubat oves, Sir; she's brought it too soon, but no matter.'

It was not one o'clock, in fact.

'They will make mistakes, Sir; but you will not suffer their blunders long, I warrant,' said Dangerfield, lightly. 'Pray, Sir, can we have a room for a moment to ourselves?'

'We can, Sir, 'tis a liberal house; we can have any thing; liberty itself, Sir--for an adequate sum,' replied Mr. Dillon.

Whatever the sum was, the room was had, and the surgeon, who had palpably left his 'naggin' uneasily in company with the gentleman in the hat, and him without a wig, eyed Dangerfield curiously, thinking that possibly his grand-aunt Molly had left him the fifty guineas she was rumoured to have sewed up in her stays.

'There's a great deal of diversion, Sir, in five hundred guineas, said Mr. Dangerfield, and the spectacles dashed pleasantly upon the doctor.

'Ye may say that,' answered the grinning surgeon, with a quiet oath of expectation.

''Tis a handsome fee, Sir, and you may have it.'

'Five hundred guineas!'

'Ah, you've heard, Sir, perhaps, of the attempted murder in the park, on Doctor Sturk, of the Artillery; for which Mr. Nutter now lies in prison?' said Mr. Dangerfield.

'That I have, Sir.'

'Well, you shall have the money, Sir, if you perform a simple operation.'

''Tis not to hang him you want me?' said the doctor, with a gloomy sneer.

'Hang him!--ha, ha--no, Sir, Doctor Sturk still lives, but insensible. He must be brought to consciousness, and speech. Now, the trepan is the only way to effect it; and I'll be frank with you: Doctor Pell has been with him half a dozen times, and he says the operation would be instantaneously fatal. I don't believe him. So also says Sir Hugh Skelton, to whom I wrote in London--I don't believe him, either. At all events, the man is dying, and can't last very many days longer, so there's nothing risked. His wife wishes the operation; here's her note; and I'll give you five hundred guineas and--what are you here for?'

'Only eighteen, unless some more has come in this morning,' answered the doctor.

'And your liberty, Sir, that on the spot, if you undertake the operation, and the fee so soon as you have done it.'

The doctor's face blazed with a grin of exultation; he squared his shoulders and shook himself a little; and after a little silence, he demanded--

'Can you describe the case, Sir, as you stated it to Sir Hugh Skelton?'

'Surely, Sir, but I rely for it and the terms, upon the description of a village doctor, named Toole; an ignoramus, I fear.'

And with this preface he concisely repeated the technical description which he had compiled from various club conversations of Dr. Toole's, to which no person imagined he had been listening so closely.

'If that's the case, Sir, 'twill kill him.'

'Kill or cure, Sir, 'tis the only chance,' rejoined Dangerfield.

'What sort is the wife, Sir?' asked Black Dillon, with a very odd look, while his eye still rested on the short note that poor Mrs. Sturk had penned.

'A nervous little woman of some two or three and forty,' answered the spectacles.

The queer look subsided. He put the note in his pocket, and looked puzzled, and then he asked--'

'Is he any way related to you, Sir?'

'None in life, Sir. But that does not affect, I take it, the medical question.'

'No, it does not affect the medical question--nothing can,' observed the surgeon, in a sulky, sardonic way.

'Of course not,' answered the oracle of the silver spectacles, and both remained silent for a while.

'You want to have him speak? Well, suppose there's a hundred chances to one the trepan kills him on the spot--what then?' demanded the surgeon, uncomfortably.

Dangerfield pondered, also uncomfortably for a minute, but answered nothing; on the contrary, he demanded--

'And what then, Sir?'

'But here, in this case,' said Black Dillon, 'there's no chance at all, do you see, there's no chance, good, bad, or indifferent; none at all.'

'But I believe there is,' replied Dangerfield, decisively.

'You believe, but I know.'

'See, Sir,' said Dangerfield, darkening, and speaking with a strange snarl; 'I know what I'm about. I've a desire, Sir, that he should speak, if 'twere only two minutes of conscious articulate life, and then death--'tis not a pin's point to me how soon. Left to himself he must die; therefore, to shrink from the operation on which depends the discovery both of his actual murderer and of his money, Sir, otherwise lost to his family, is--is a damned affectation! I think it--so do you, Sir; and I offer five hundred guineas as your fee, and Mrs. Sturk's letter to bear you harmless.'

Then there was a pause. Dangerfield knew the man's character as well as his skill. There were things said about him darker than we have hinted at.

The surgeon looked very queer and gloomy down upon the table, and scratched his head, and he mumbled gruffly--

'You see--you know--'tis a large fee, to be sure; but then--'

'Come, Sir,' said Dangerfield, looking as though he'd pull him by the ear; 'it is a large fee, and you'll get no more--you should not stick at trifles, when there's--a--a--justice and humanity--and, to be brief, Sir--yes or no?'

'Yes,' answered the doctor; 'but how's the fee secured?'

'Hey! I'd forgot. Right, Sir--you shall be satisfied.'

And he took a pen, and wrote on the back of a letter--

* * * * *

'SIR--Considering the hopeless condition in which Dr. Sturk now lies, and the vast importance of restoring him, Dr. Sturk, of the R.I.A., to the power of speech, even for a few minutes, I beg to second Mrs. Sturk's request to you; and when you shall have performed the critical operation she desires, I hereby promise, whether it succeed or fail, to give you a fee of five hundred guineas. PAUL DANGERFIELD. 'The Brass Castle, Chapelizod.'

And he dated it, and handed it to the surgeon, who read it through, and then looked with a gruff hesitation at the writer.

'Oh, you've only to enquire--anyone who knows Chapelizod will tell you who I am; and you'll want something--eh?--to take you out of this--how much?'

'Only seven guineas. There's a little score here, and some fees. Eighteen will cover everything, unless something has come in this morning.'

So they went to 'the Hatch,' and made enquiries, and all being well, Mr. Dangerfield dealt liberally with the surgeon, who promised to be in attendance at Dr. Sturk's house in Chapelizod, at seven o'clock next evening.

'And pray, Dr. Dillon, come in a coach,' said Dangerfield, 'and in costume--you understand. They've been accustomed, you know, to see Pell and other doctors who make a parade.'

And with these injunctions they parted; and the surgeon, whose luggage was trifling, jumped into a coach with it, and jingled home to his den and his liberty.

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LXXXIV. IN WHICH CHRISTIANA GOES OVER; AND DAN LOFTUS COMES HOME

This evening Lily Walsingham was early tired and very weak, Sally thought, and more glad than usual to lie down in her bed; and there her old and loving nurse fancied that she looked a little strange, and that her thoughts sometimes wandered.

She lay very quietly for a good while, and suddenly, with a beautiful look, and in a clear, glad voice, she said--

'Mother!'

And old Sally said--

'There's no one, dear Miss Lily, but me.'

But she was looking earnestly, and, with a wrapt smile, only said--

'Oh!'

She thought she saw her, I believe.

Are these always illusions? Or is it only that, as the twilight deepens, and the shapes of earth melt into night, the stars of heaven, changeless and serene, reveal themselves, and shine out to the darkened eyes of mortals?

As Aunt Becky sat that night in the drawing-room with her niece, a maid, with a whisper, placed a little note in Miss Gertrude's hand. There was a little pause.

'Oh! aunt--oh!' and she looked so terrified. 'Oh! aunt,' and she threw her arms round her aunt's neck, and began crying wildly. 'Poor Lily's gone--there's the note.'

Then arose the wild wailing of unavailing grief, and sobs, mixed with early recollections of childhood, and all poor Lily's sweet traits poured out.

Old Aunt Rebecca took the note. Her stoicism was the point on which she piqued herself most. She looked very pale, and she told her niece to be composed; for Aunt Becky had a theory that feelings ought to be commanded, and that it only needed effort and resolution. So she read the note, holding her head very high, but the muscles of her face were quivering.

'Oh! Gertrude, if ever there was an angel--and the poor desolate old man----'

The theory broke down, and old Aunt Rebecca cried and sat down, and cried heartily, and went and put her thin arms round her niece, and kissed her, and cried, and cried, and kissed her again.

'She was such--such a darling--oh! Gertrude dear, we must never quarrel any more.'

Death had come so near, and all things less than itself were rebuked in that sublime presence; and Lily Walsingham was gone; and she who was so lately their gay companion, all at once so awfully angelic in the unearthly light of death.

'Who'd ha' thought it was so near, Ma'am,' said the maid; 'the poor little thing! Though to be sure, Ma'am, a winding sheet came three times in the candle last night, and I turns it round and picks it off, that way, with my nail, unknownst to Mrs. Heany, for fear she'd be frettin' about the little boy that's lyin' at home in the small-pox; and indeed I thought 'twas for him it was; but man proposes, and God disposes--and death forgets none, the Lord be praised--and everyone has their hour, old and young, Ma'am; and as I was sayin', they had no notion or expectation up at the Elms, Ma'am, she was so bad, the heavens be her bed this night. 'Twas all in an instant like, Miss, she made as if she'd sit up, bein' leanin' on pillows--and so she put out them purty little hands of hers, with a smile, and that was all--the purty crature--everyone's sorry afther her. The man was cryin' in the hall that brought the note.'

The poor came to the door, and made their rude and kindly lamentations--they were all quite sincere--'His reverence was very good, but he couldn't have the thought, you know.' It was quite true--'everyone was sorry.' The brave Magnolia's eyes were red, when she looked out of the window next morning, and jolly little Doctor Toole said at the club--

'Ah, Sir, she was a bright little thing--a born lady--such a beauty--and the best little creature. The town might well be proud of her, in every way, Sir.' And he fell a blubbering; and old Major O'Neill, who was a quiet and silent officer, cried in a reserved way, looking into the fire, with his elbow on the mantelpiece. And Toole said, 'I don't know how I'll pass that house.'

And many felt the same. Little Lily was there no more--and the Elms were changed--the light and the grace were gone--and they were only dark old trees now.

And everyone felt a great desire to find some way--any way--to show their respect and affection for their good old rector. And I'm sure he understood it--for liking and reverence, one way or another, will tell their story. The hushed enquiries at the door, and little offers of useless services made by stealth through the servants, and such like foolish kindnesses at such a time--the evidence of a great but helpless sympathy--are sweet as angelic music.

And who should arrive at night, with all his trunks, or at least a considerable number of them, and his books and rattletraps, but honest, simple Dan Loftus. The news was true about his young charge. He had died of fever at Malaga, and Dick Devereux was at last a step, and a long one--nearer to the title. So Dan was back again in his old garret. Travel had not educated him in the world's ways. In them he was the same queer, helpless tyro. And his costume, though he had a few handsome articles--for, travelling with a sprig of nobility, he thought it but right and seemed to dress accordingly--was on that account, perhaps, only more grotesque than ever. But he had acquired mountains of that lore in which he and good Doctor Walsingham delighted. He had transcribed old epitaphs and translated interminable extracts from archives, and bought five Irish manuscripts, all highly illustrative of that history on which he and the doctor were so pleasantly engaged. It was too late that night to go up to the Elms; but he longed to unpack his trunkful of manuscripts, and to expound to his beloved doctor the treasures he had amassed.

And over his solitary tea-cup and his book the sorrowful news from the Elms reached him, and all his historical castles in the air were shivered. In the morning, before the town was stirring, he crossed the bridge, and knocked softly at the familiar hall-door. Honest old John Tracy opened it, and Dan shook hands with him, and both cried for a while quietly.

'How is the honoured master?' at last said Loftus.

'He's there in the study, Sir. Thank God, you're come, Sir. I'm sure he'd like to see you--I'll ask him.'

Dan went into the drawing-room. He looked out at the flowers, and then at the harpsichord, and on her little walnut table, where her work-basket lay, and her thimble, and the little coral necklace--a childish treasure that she used to wear when she was quite a little thing. It was like a dream; and everything seemed to say--'Poor little Lily!'

So old John came in, and 'Sir,' said he, 'the master will be glad to see you.' And Dan Loftus found himself in the study; and the good doctor and he wrung one another's hands for a long time.

'Oh, Dan--Dan--she's gone--little Lily.'

'You'll see her again, Sir--oh, you'll see her again.'

'Oh, Dan! Dan! Till the heavens be no more they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. Oh, Dan, a day's so long--how am I to get over the time?'

'The loving Lord, Sir, will find a way.'

'But, oh! was there no pitying angel to stay the blow--to plead for a few years more of life? I deserved it--oh, Dan, yes!--I know it--I deserved it. But, oh! could not the avenger have pierced me, without smiting my innocent darling?'

'Oh! she was taken in love, not in judgment, Sir--my pastor--but in love. It was the voice of the Redeemer that called her.'

And honest Dan repeated, through his sobs, a verse of that 'Song of Songs,' which little Lily had loved so well--

'My well-beloved spake, and said unto me: Arise, my love, my fair one, and come thy way.'

The old man bowed his sorrowful head listening.

'You never saw anything so beautiful,' said he after a while. 'I think, Dan, I could look at her for ever. I don't think it was partiality, but it seems to me there never was--I never saw a creature like her.'

'Oh, noble! noble!' sobbed poor Dan.

The doctor took him by the arm, and so into the solemn room.

'I think you'd like to see her, Dan?'

'I would--I would indeed, Sir.'

And there was little Lily, never so like the lily before. Poor old Sally had laid early spring flowers on the white coverlet. A snow-drop lay by her pale little finger and thumb, just like a flower that has fallen from a child's hand it its sleep. He looked, at her--the white angelic apparition--a smile, or a light upon the face.

'Oh, my darling, my young darling, gone--"He is not a man as I am, that I should answer him."'

But poor Dan, loudly crying, repeated the noble words of Paul, that have spoken down to us through the sorrows of nigh two thousand years--

'For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive, and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first.'

And so there was a little pause, and the old man said--

'It was very good of you to come to me, my good young friend, in my helplessness and shipwreck, for the Lord hath hid himself from me; but he speaks to his desolate creature, my good Dan, through your gracious lips. My faith!--I thought I had faith till it was brought to the test, and then it failed! But my good friend, Loftus, was sent to help me--to strengthen the feeble knees.'

And Dan answered, crying bitterly, and clasping the rector's hand in both of his--

'Oh, my master, all that ever I knew of good, I learned from you, my pastor, my benefactor.'

So, with a long, last look, Dan followed the old man to the study, and they talked long there together, and then went out into the lonely garden, and paced its walks side by side, up and down.

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Chapter LXXXV

IN WHICH CAPTAIN DEVEREUX HEARS THE NEWS; AND MR. DANGERFIELD MEETS AN OLD FRIEND AFTER DINNER.

'On the night when this great sorrow visited the Elms, Captain Richard Devereux, who had heard nothing of it, was strangely saddened and disturbed in mind. They say that a distant death is sometimes felt like the shadow and chill of a passing iceberg; and if this ominous feeling crosses a mind already saddened and embittered, it overcasts it with a feeling akin to despair.

Mrs. Irons knocked at his door, and with the eagerness of a messenger of news, opened it without awaiting his answer.

'Oh, captain, jewel, do you know what? There's poor Miss Lily Walsingham; and what do you think but she's dead--the poor little thing; gone to-night, Sir--not half an hour ago.'

He staggered a little, and put his hand toward his sword, like a man struck by a robber, and looked at her with a blank stare. She thought he was out of his mind, and was frightened.

''Tis only me, Sir, Mrs. Irons.'

'A--thank you;' and he walked towards the chimney, and then towards the door, like a man looking for something; and on a sudden clasping his forehead in his hands, he cried a wild and terrible appeal to the Maker and Judge of all things.

''Tis impossible--oh, no--oh, no--it's not true.'

He was in the open air, he could not tell how, and across the bridge, and before the Elms--a dream--the dark Elms--dark everything.

'Oh, no--it can't be--oh, no--oh, no;' and he went on saying as he stared on the old house, dark against the sky, 'Oh, no--oh, no.'

Two or three times he would have gone over to the hall-door to make enquiry, but he sickened at the thought. He clung to that hope, which was yet not a hope, and he turned and walked quickly down the river's side by the Inchicore-road. But the anguish of suspense soon drew him back again; and now his speech was changed, and he said--

'Yes, she's gone--she's gone--oh, she's gone--she's certainly gone.'

He found himself at the drawing-room window that looked into the little garden at the front of the house, and tapping at the window-pane. He remembered, all on a sudden--it was like waking--how strange was such a summons. A little after he saw a light crossing the hall, and he rang the door-bell. John Tracy opened the door. Yes, it was all true.

The captain was looking very pale, John thought, but otherwise much as usual. He stared at the old servant for some seconds after he told him all, but said nothing, not even good-night, and turned away. Old John was crying; but he called after the captain to take care of the step at the gate: and as he shut the hall-door his eye caught, by the light of his candle, a scribbling in red chalk, on the white door-post, and he stooped to read it, and muttered, 'Them mischievous young blackguards!' and began rubbing it with the cuff of his coat, his cheek still wet with tears. For even our grief is volatile; or, rather, it is two tunes that are in our ears together, the requiem of the organ, and, with it, the faint hurdy-gurdy jig of our vulgar daily life; and now and then this latter uppermost.

It was not till he had got nearly across the bridge that Captain Devereux, as it were, waked up. It was no good waking. He broke forth into sheer fury. It is not my business to note down the horrors of this impious frenzy. It was near five o'clock when he came back to his lodgings; and then, not to rest. To sit down, to rise again, to walk round the room and round, and stop on a sudden at the window, leaning his elbows on the sash, with hands clenched together, and teeth set; and so those demoniac hours of night and solitude wore slowly away, and the cold gray stole over the east, and Devereux drank a deep draught of his fiery Lethe, and cast himself down on his bed, and fell at once into a deep, exhausted lethargy.

When his servant came to his bed-side at seven o'clock, he was lying motionless, with flushed cheeks, and he could not rouse him. Perhaps it was well, and saved him from brain-fever or madness.

But after such paroxysms comes often a reaction, a still, stony, awful despondency. It is only the oscillation between active and passive despair. Poor Leonora, after she had worked out her fit, tearing 'her raven hair,' and reviling heaven, was visited in sadder and tenderer guise by the vision of the past; but with that phantom went down in fear and isolation to the grave.

This morning several of the neighbours went into Dublin, for the bills were to be presented against Charles Nutter for a murderous assault, with intent to kill, made upon the person of Barnabas Sturk, Esq., Doctor of Medicine, and Surgeon to the Royal Irish Artillery. As the day wore on, the honest gossips of Chapelizod looked out anxiously for news. And everybody who met any one else asked him--'Any news about Nutter, eh?'--and then they would stop to speculate--and then one would wonder that Dr. Walsingham's man, Clinton, had not yet returned--and the other would look at his watch, and say 'twas one o'clock--and then both agreed that Spaight, at all events, must soon come--for he has appointed two o'clock for looking at that brood mare of Fagan's.

At last, sure enough, Spaight appeared. Toole, who had been detained by business in another quarter, had ridden into the town from Leixlip, and was now dismounted and talking with Major O'Neill upon the absorbing topic. These cronies saw Spaight at the turnpike, and as he showed his ticket, he talked with the man. Of course, the news was come. The turnpike-man knew it by this time; and off scampered Toole, and the major followed close at his heels, at double-quick. He made a dismal shake or two of his head, and lifted his hand as they drew near. Toole's heart misgave him.

'Well, how is it?--what's the news?' he panted.

'A true bill,' answered Spaight, with a solemn stare; 'a true bill, Sir.'

Toole uttered an oath of consternation, and taking the words out of Spaight's mouth, told the news to the major.

'Do you tell me so?' exclaimed the major. 'Bedad, Sir, I'm uncommon sorry.'

'A bad business, Sir,' observed Spaight.

'No worse,' said Toole. 'If they convict him on this, you know--in case Sturk dies, and die he will--they'll indict and convict him on the more serious charge,' and he winked gloomily, 'the evidence is all one.'

'That poor little Sally Nutter!' ejaculated the major. 'She's to be pitied, the crature!'

''Tis mighty slender evidence to take a man's life on,' said Toole, with some disgust. 'Be the law, Sir, the whole thing gives me a complete turn. Are you to dine with Colonel Strafford to-day?'

'I am, Sir,' said the major; 'an' it goes again' the colonel's grain to have a party at all just now, with the respect he has for the family up there,' and he nodded his head, pensively, toward the Elms. 'But he asked Lowe ten days ago, and Mr. Dangerfield, and two or three more; and you know he could not put them off on that ground--there being no relationship, you see--and, 'pon my oath, Sir, I'd rather not go myself, just now.'

That evening, at five o'clock, Colonel Stafford's dinner party assembled at the King's House. The colonel was a serene man, and hospitality--even had he been in the dumps--demands her sacrifices. He, therefore, did the honours as beseemed a genial and courteous old officer of the Royal Irish Artillery, who, if his conversation was not very remarkable in quality, and certainly not exorbitant in quantity, made up by listening a great deal, and supplying no end of civility, and an affluence of very pretty claret. Mr. Justice Lowe was there, and Mr. Dangerfield, and old Colonel Bligh, of the Magazine, and honest Major O'Neill, notwithstanding his low spirits. Perhaps they required keeping up; and claret like Colonel Stafford's is consoling.

The talk turned, of course, a good deal on Charles Nutter; and Mr. Dangerfield, who was in great force, and, indeed, in particularly pleasant spirits, except when unfortunate Nutter was actually under discussion--when he grew grave and properly saddened--told, in his clear, biting way, a curious rosary of Newgate stories--of highwaymen's disguises--of clever constables--of circumstantial evidence, marvellously elicited, and exquisitely put together--of monsters, long concealed, drawn from the deep by the finest tackle, into upper light, and dropped deftly into the landing-net of Justice. These curious anecdotes of Bow-street dexterity and Bagshot dodges--thrust and parry--mine and counter-mine--ending, for the most part, in the triumph of Bow-street, Justice crowned, and a Tyburn speech--tickled Lowe mightily, who quite enjoyed himself, and laughed more than his friend Colonel Stafford ever remembered to have heard him before, over some of the ingenious stratagems described so neatly by Dangerfield, and the gay irony with which he pointed his catastrophes. And Lowe actually, having obtained Colonel Stafford's leave, proposed that gallant officer's health in a bumper, and took occasion to mention their obligations to him for having afforded them the opportunity of enjoying Mr. Dangerfield's sprightly and instructive sallies; and hoped, with all his heart, that the neighbourhood was long to enjoy the advantage and pleasure of his residence among them. And Mr. Dangerfield replied gaily, that all that was needed to make such sweet scenery and charming company as the place commanded absolutely irresistible, was the sense of safety conferred by the presence of such a magistrate as Mr. Lowe, and the convivial inspiration of such wine as their gallant host provided; and that, for his part, being somewhat of an old boy, and having had enough of rambling, nothing would better please him than to spend the residue of his days amidst the lively quietude of their virtuous and hilarious neighbourhood; and some more to the like purpose, which pleased the good company highly, who all agreed that the white gentleman--fluent, easy, and pointed in his delivery--was a mighty fine speaker, indeed. Though there was a lurking consciousness in each, which none cared to publish, that there was, at times, an indefinable flavour of burlesque and irony in Mr. Dangerfield's compliments, which excited momentary suspicions and qualms, which the speaker waived off, however, easily with his jewelled fingers, and smiled mockingly away.

Lowe was mightily taken with him. There was little warmth or veneration in that hard justice's nature. But Mr. Dangerfield had a way with him that few men with any sort of taste for the knowledge of evil could resist; and the cold-eyed justice of the peace hung on his words with an attentive rapture, and felt that he was drinking deep and pleasant draughts from the sparkling fountains of knowledge; and was really sorry, and shook him admiringly by the hand, when Dangerfield, who had special business at home, rose up in his brisk way, and flashed a farewell over the company from his spectacles.

'If Mr. Dangerfield really means to stay here, he must apply for the commission of the peace,' said Mr. Lowe, so soon as the door shut. 'We must put it upon him. I protest I never met a man so fitted by nature and acquirements to make a perfectly useful magistrate. He and I, Sir, between us, we'd give a good account of this part of the county; and there's plenty of work, Sir, if 'twere only between this and Dublin; and, by George, Sir, he's a wonderful diverting fellow, full of anecdote. Wonderful place London, to be sure.'

'And a good man, too, in a quiet way,' said Colonel Strafford, who could state a fact. ''Tisn't every rich man has the heart to part with his money as he does; he has done many charities here, and especially he has been most bountiful to poor Sturk's family.'

'I know that,' said Lowe.

'And he sent a fifty pound note by the major there to poor Sally Nutter o' Monday last; he'll tell you.'

And thus it is, as the foul fiend, when he vanishes, leaves a smell of brimstone after him, a good man leaves a fragrance; and the company in the parlour enjoyed the aroma of Mr. Dangerfield's virtues, as he buttoned his white surtout over his breast, and dropped his vails into the palms of the carbuncled butler and fuddled footman in the hall.

It was a clear, frosty, starlit night. White and stern was the face which he turned upward for a moment to the sky. He paused for a second in the ray of candle-light that gleamed through Puddock's window-shutter, and glanced on the pale dial of his large gold watch. It was only half-past eight o'clock. He walked on, glancing back over his shoulder, along the Dublin road.

'The drunken beast. My mind misgives me he'll disappoint,' muttered the silver spectacles, gliding briskly onward.

When he reached the main street he peered curiously before him under the village tree, in quest of carriage lights.

'A lawless brute like that may be before his time as well as after.' So he walked briskly forward, and up Sturk's door-steps, and knocked.

'The Dublin doctor hasn't come, eh?'--he asked.

'No, Sir, he isn't come yet--'twas nine o'clock, the mistress told me.'

'Very good. Tell Mrs. Sturk, pray, that I, Mr. Dangerfield, you know, will call, as I promised, at nine o'clock precisely.'

And he turned again and walked briskly over the bridge, and away along the Inchicore road overhanging the river. All was silent there. Not a step but his own was stirring, and the road in places so overhung with old trees that it was difficult to see a yard before one.

He slackened his pace, and listened, like a man who keeps an assignation, and listened again, and laughed under his breath; and sure enough, before long, the clink of a footstep was heard approaching swiftly from the Dublin direction.

Mr. Dangerfield drew aside under the deep shadow of a high hawthorn hedge, overhung by trees; and watching intently, he saw a tall, lank figure, with a peculiar gait and stoop of its own, glide stealthily by. He smiled after it in the dark.

The tall figure was that of our old friend, Zekiel Irons, the clerk. A sable form, as beseemed his ecclesiastical calling--and now a white figure was gliding without noise swiftly after him.

Suddenly, as he reached an open part of the road, a thin hand was laid on his shoulder, and, with a start, and a 'hollo,' he sprung round.

'Hey! why, you're as frightened as if you had seen Charles--Charles Nutter. Hey?--don't be uneasy. I heard from the parson yesterday morning you were to be with him to-night before nine o'clock, about that money you left in his hands, and I've chanced to meet you; and this I want you to understand, Charles Nutter is in gaol, and we must not let him get out--do you see? That business settled, we're at rest. So, Mr. Irons, you must not show the white feather. Be bold--speak out what you know--now's the time to strike. I'll put your evidence, as you reported it to me, into shape, and you come to me to-morrow morning at eight o'clock; and mind you, I'll reward you this time, and better than ever you've fared before. Go on. Or stay--I'll go before.'

And Mr. Dangerfield laughed one of his chilly laughs--and, with a nod to Irons, repeated--'eight o'clock'--and so walked on a little bit.

The clerk had not said a word. A perspiration broke forth on his forehead, and, wiping the drops away, he said--

'Lord have mercy upon us--Lord deliver us--Lord have mercy upon us,' like a man dying.

Mr. Dangerfield's bold proposition seemed quite to overpower and unman him.

The white figure turned short, facing the clerk, and said he--

'See you, Mr. Irons, I'm serious--there must be no shirking. If you undertake, you must go through; and, hark! in your ear--you shall have five hundred pounds. I put no constraint--say yes or no--if you don't like you needn't. Justice, I think, will be done even without your help. But till he's quiet--you understand--nothing sure. He has been dead and alive again--curse him; and till he's at rest, and on the surgeon's table--ha! ha!--we sha'n't feel quite comfortable.'

'Lord have mercy upon us!' muttered Irons, with a groan.

'Amen,' said Dangerfield, with a sneering imitation.

'There, 'tis enough--if you have nerve to speak truth and do justice, you may have the money. We're men of business--you and I. If not, I sha'n't trouble you any more. If you like it, come to me at eight o'clock in the morning; if not, why, stay away, and no harm's done.'

And with these words, Mr. Dangerfield turned on his heel once more, and started at a lively pace for Chapelizod.

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Chapter LXXXVI

IN WHICH MR. PAUL DANGERFIELD MOUNTS THE STAIRS OF THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCH-YARD, AND MAKES SOME ARRANGEMENTS.

The white figure glided duskily over the bridge. The river rushed beneath in Egyptian darkness. The air was still, and a thousand celestial eyes twinkled down brightly through the clear deep sky upon the actors in this true story. He kept the left side, so that the road lay between him and the Phoenix door, which gaped wide with a great hospitable grin, and crimsoned the night air with a glow of candle-light.

The white figure turned the corner, and glided onward in a straight, swift line--straight and swift as fate--to the door of Doctor Sturk.

He knocked softly at the hall-door, and swiftly stepped in and shut it.

'How's your master?'

'Jist the same way, plaze yer honour; jist sleepin'--still sleepin'--sleepin' always,' answered the maid.

'Has the Dublin doctor come?'

'No.'

'The mistress--where's she?'

'In the room, Sir, with the masther.'

'Present my service to her--Mr. Dangerfield's compliments, you know--and say I await her permission to come up stairs.'

Presently the maid returned, with poor Mrs. Sturk's invitation to Mr. Dangerfield to walk up.

Up he went, leaving his white surtout and cocked hat in the hall, and entered the chamber where pale little Mrs. Sturk, who had been crying a great deal, sat in a dingy old tabby saque, by the light of a solitary mould-candle at the bed-side of the noble Barney.

The mutton-fat wanted snuffing; but its light danced and splintered brilliantly over Mr. Dangerfield's resplendent shoe-buckles, and up and down his cut-steel buttons, and also glimmered in a more phosphoric way upon his silver spectacles, as he bowed at the door, arrayed in a puce cut velvet coat, lined with pink, long embroidered satin waistcoat, fine lace ruffles and cravat, his well-shaped leg gleaming glossily in silk, and altogether, in his glimmering jewellery, and purple and fine linen, resembling Dives making a complimentary visit to the garret of Lazarus.

Poor little Mrs. Sturk felt her obligations mysteriously enlarged by so much magnificence, and wondered at the goodness of this white-headed angel in point, diamonds, and cut velvet, who had dropped from the upper regions upon the sad and homely floor of her Barney's sick chamber.

'Dr. Dillon not yet arrived, Madam? Well, 'tis precisely his hour; we shall have him soon. How does the patient? Ha! just as usual. How?--why there's a change, isn't there?'

'As how, Sir?' enquired Mrs. Sturk, with a scared look.

'Why, don't you see? But you mustn't be frightened; there's one coming in whom I have every confidence.'

'I don't see, Sir. What is it, Mr. Dangerfield? Oh, pray, Sir?'

'Why--a--nothing very particular, only he looks more languid than when I saw him last, and discoloured somewhat, and his face more sunk, I think--eh?'

'Oh, no, Sir--'tis this bad light--nothing more, indeed, Sir. This evening, I assure you, Mr. Dangerfield, at three o'clock, when the sun was shining, we were all remarking how well he looked. I never saw--you'd have said so--such a wonderful improvement.'

And she snuffed the candle, and held it up over Barney's grim features.

'Well, Madam, I hope we soon may find it. 'Twill be a blessed sight--eh?--when he sits up in that bed, Madam, as I trust he may this very night, and speak--eh?'

'Oh! my precious Barney!' and the poor little woman began to cry, and fell into a rhapsody of hopes, thanksgiving, anecdote and prayer.

In the meanwhile Dangerfield was feeling his pulse, with his watch in the hollow of his hand.

'And aren't they better--his pulse, Sir--they were stronger this morning by a great deal than last night--it was just at ten o'clock--don't you perceive, Sir?'

'H'm--well, I hope, Ma'am, we'll soon find all better. Now, have you got all things ready--you have, of course, a sheet well aired?'

'A sheet--I did not know 'twas wanted.'

'Hey, this will never do, my dear Madam--he'll be here and nothing ready; and you'll do well to send over to the mess-room for a lump of ice. 'Tis five minutes past nine. If you'll see to these things, I'll sit here, Madam, and take the best care of the patient--and, d'ye see, Mistress Sturk, 'twill be necessary that you take care that Toole hears nothing of Dr. Dillon's coming.'

It struck me, when originally reading the correspondence which is digested in these pages, as hardly credible that Doctor Sturk should have continued to live for so long a space in a state of coma. Upon this point, therefore, I took occasion to ask the most eminent surgeon of my acquaintance, who at once quieted my doubts by detailing a very remarkable case cited by Sir A. Cooper in his lectures, Vol. I., p. 172. It is that of a seaman, who was pressed on board one of his Majesty's ships, early in the revolutionary war; and while on board this vessel, fell from the yard-arm, and was taken up insensible, in which state he continued living for thirteen months and some days!

So with a little more talk, Mrs. Sturk, calling one of her maids, and leaving the little girl in charge of the nursery, ran down with noiseless steps and care-worn face to the kitchen, and Mr. Dangerfield was left alone in the chamber with the spell-bound sleeper on the bed.

In about ten seconds he rose sharply from his chair and listened: then very noiselessly he stepped to the door and listened again, and gently shut it.

Then Mr. Dangerfield moved to the window. There was a round hole in the shutter, and through it he glanced into the street, and was satisfied.

By this time he had his white-pocket-handkerchief in his hands. He folded it deftly across and across into a small square, and then the spectacles flashed coldly on the image of Dr. Sturk, and then on the door; and there was a pause.

'What's that?' he muttered sharply, and listened for a second or two.

It was only one of the children crying in the nursery. The sound subsided.

So with another long silent step, he stood by the capriole-legged old mahogany table, with the scallop shell containing a piece of soap and a washball, and the basin with its jug of water standing therein. Again he listened while you might count two, and dipped the handkerchief, so folded, into the water, and quietly squeezed it; and stood white and glittering by Sturk's bed-side.

People moved very noiselessly about that house, and scarcely a minute had passed when the door opened softly, and the fair Magnolia Macnamara popped in her glowing face and brilliant glance, and whispered.

'Are you there, Mrs. Sturk, dear?'

At the far side of the bed, Dangerfield, with his flashing spectacles and snowy aspect, and a sort of pant, rose up straight, and looked into her eyes, like a white bird of prey disturbed over its carrion.

She uttered a little scream--quite pale on a sudden--for she did not recognise the sinister phantom who glimmered at her over the prostrate Sturk.

But Dangerfield laughed his quiet hollow 'ha! ha! ha!' and said promptly,

'A strange old nurse I make, Miss Macnamara. But what can I do? Mrs. Sturk has left me in charge, and faith I believe our patient's looking mighty badly.'

He had observed Miss Mag glancing from him to the dumb figure in the bed with a puzzled kind of horror.

The fact is, Sturk's face had a leaden tint; he looked, evidently enough, even in that dim candle-light, a great deal worse than the curious Miss Mag was accustomed to see him.

'He's very low, to-night, and seems oppressed, and his pulse is failing; in fact, my dear young lady, he's plainly worse to-night than I like to tell poor Mrs. Sturk, you understand.'

'And his face looks so shiny and damp-like,' said Miss Mag, with a horrible sort of scrutiny.

'Exactly so, Miss, 'tis weakness,' observed Dangerfield.

'And you were wiping it with your pocket-handkerchief when I looked in,' continued Miss Mag.

'Was I--ha, ha--'tis wonderful how quick we learn a new business. I vow I begin to think I should make a very respectable nursetender.'

'And what the dickens brings him up here?' asked Miss Mag of herself; so soon as the first shock was over, the oddity of the situation struck her as she looked with perplexed and unpleasant sort of enquiry at Mr. Dangerfield.

Just then up came the meek little Mrs. Sturk, and the gentleman greeted her with a 'Well, Madam, I have not left his bedside since you went down; and I think he looks a little better--just a little--eh?'

'I trust and pray, Sir, that when the doctor--' began Mrs. Sturk, and stopped short, for Mr. Dangerfield frowned quickly, and pointed towards Miss Mag, who was now, after her wont, looking round the room for matter of interest.

'And is Pell comin' out to-night?' asked Miss Mag quickly.

'No, truly. Madam,' answered the gentleman: 'Dr. Pell's not comin'--is he, Mrs. Sturk?'

'Dr. Pell!--oh, la--no, Sir. No, my dear.' And, after a pause, 'Oh, ho. I wish it was over,' she groaned, with her hand pressed to her side, looking with a kind of agony on Sturk.

'What over?' asked Miss Mag.

Just then a double-knock came to the hall-door, and Mr. Dangerfield signed sternly to Mrs. Sturk, who first stood up, with her eyes and mouth wide open, and then sat down, like a woman going to faint.

But the maid came up and told Miss Mag that her mother and Lieutenant O'Flaherty were waiting on the steps for her; and so, though loath to go unsatisfied, away she went, with a courtesy to Mr. Dangerfield and a kiss to Mrs. Sturk, who revived on hearing it was only her fat kindly neighbour from over the way, instead of Black Doctor Dillon, with his murderous case of instruments.

The gentleman in the silver spectacles accompanied her to the lobby, and offered his hand; but she dispensed with his attendance, and jumped down the stairs with one hand to the wall and the other on the banisters, nearly a flight at a time; and the cackle of voices rose from the hall door, which quickly shut, and the fair vision had vanished.

Dangerfield's silver spectacles gleamed phosphorically after her from under his lurid forehead. It was not a pleasant look, and his mouth was very grim. In another instant he was in the room again, and glanced at his watch.

''Tis half-past nine,' he said, in a quiet tone, but with a gleam of intense fury over his face, 'and that--that--doctor named nine.'

Dangerfield waited, and talked a little to Mrs. Sturk and the maid, who were now making preparations, in short sentences, by fits and starts of half-a-dozen words at a time. He had commenced his visit ceremoniously, but now he grew brusque, and took the command: and his tones were prompt and stern, and the women grew afraid of him.

Ten o'clock came. Dangerfield went down stairs, and looked from the drawing-room windows. He waxed more and more impatient. Down he went to the street. He did not care to walk towards the King's House, which lay on the road to Dublin; he did not choose to meet his boon companions again, but he stood for full ten minutes, with one of Dr. Sturk's military cloaks about him, under the village tree, directing the double-fire of his spectacles down the street, with an incensed steadiness, unrewarded, unrelieved. Not a glimmer of a link; not a distant rumble of a coach-wheel. It was a clear, frosty night, and one might hear a long way.

If any of the honest townsfolk had accidentally lighted upon that muffled, glaring image under the dark old elm, I think he would have mistaken it for a ghost, or something worse. The countenance at that moment was not prepossessing.

Mr. Dangerfield was not given to bluster, and never made a noise; but from his hollow jaws he sighed an icy curse towards Dublin, which had a keener edge than all the roaring blasphemies of Donnybrook together; and, with another shadow upon his white face, he re-entered the house.

'He'll not come to-night, Ma'am,' he said with a cold abruptness.

'Oh, thank Heaven!--that is--I'm so afraid--I mean about the operation.'

Dangerfield, with his hands in his pockets, said nothing. There was a sneer on his face, white and dark, somehow. That was all. Was he baffled, and was Dr. Sturk, after all, never to regain his speech?

At half-past ten o'clock, Mr. Dangerfield abandoned hope. Had it been Dr. Pell, indeed, it would have been otherwise. But Black Dillon had not a patient; his fame was in the hospitals. There was nothing to detain him but his vices, and five hundred pounds to draw him to Chapelizod. He had not come. He must be either brained in a row, or drunk under a table. So Mr. Dangerfield took leave of good Mrs. Sturk, having told her in case the doctor should come, to make him wait for his arrival before taking any measures, and directing that he should be sent for immediately.

So Mr. Dangerfield got into his white surtout silently in the hall, and shut the door quickly after him, and waited, a grim sentry, under the tree, with his face towards Dublin. Father Time had not blunted the white gentleman's perceptions, touched his ear with his numb fingers, or blown the smoke of his tobacco-pipe into his eyes. He was keen of eye, sharp of hearing; but neither sight nor sound rewarded him, and so he turned, after a few minutes, and glided away, like a white ghost, toward the Brass Castle.

In less than five minutes after, the thunder of a coach shook Dr. Sturk's windows, followed by a rousing peal on the hall-door, and Dr. Dillon, in dingy splendours, and a great draggled wig, with a gold-headed cane in his bony hand, stepped in; and, diffusing a reek of whiskey-punch, and with a case of instruments under his arm, pierced the maid, who opened the door, through, with his prominent black eyes, and frightened her with his fiery face, while he demanded to see Mrs. Sturk, and lounged, without ceremony, into the parlour; where he threw himself on the sofa, with one of his bony legs extended on it, and his great ugly hand under his wig scratching his head.

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Chapter LXXXVII

IN WHICH TWO COMRADES ARE TETE-A-TETE IN THEIR OLD QUARTERS, AND DOCTOR STURK'S CUE IS CUT OFF, AND A CONSULTATION COMMENCES.

The buzz of a village, like the hum of a city, represents a very wonderful variety of human accent and feeling. It is marvellous how few families thrown together will suffice to furnish forth this dubia coena of sweets and bitters.

The roar of many waters--the ululatus of many-voiced humanity--marvellously monotonous, considering the infinite variety of its ingredients, booms on through the dark. The story-teller alone can take up the score of the mighty medley, and read at a glance what every fife and fiddle-stick is doing. That pompous thrum-thrum is the talk of the great white Marseilles paunch, pietate gravis; the whine comes from Lazarus, at the area rails; and the bass is old Dives, roaring at his butler; the piccolo is contributed by the studious school-boy, whistling over his Latin Grammar; that wild, long note is poor Mrs. Fondle's farewell of her dead boy; the ugly barytone, rising from the tap-room, is what Wandering Willie calls a sculduddery song--shut your ears, and pass on; and that clear soprano, in nursery, rings out a shower of innocent idiotisms over the half-stripped baby, and suspends the bawl upon its lips.

So, on this night, as usual, there rose up toward the stars a throbbing murmur from our village--a wild chaos of sound, which we must strive to analyse, extracting from the hurly-burly each separate tune it may concern us to hear.

Captain Devereux was in his lodging. He was comparatively tranquil now; but a savage and impious despair possessed him. Serene outwardly--he would not let the vulgar see his scars and sores; and was one of those proud spirits who build to themselves desolate places.

Little Puddock was the man with whom he had least reserve. Puddock was so kindly, and so true and secret, and cherished beside, so great an admiration for him, that he greeted him rather kindly at a moment when another visitor would have fared scurvily enough. Puddock was painfully struck with his pallor, his wild and haggard eye, and something stern and brooding in his handsome face, which was altogether new and shocking to him.

'I've been thinking, Puddock,' he said; 'and thought with me has grown strangely like despair--and that's all. Why, man, think--what is there for me?--all my best stakes I've lost already; and I'm fast losing myself. How different, Sir, is my fate from others? Worse men than I--every way incomparably worse--and d---- them, they prosper, while I go down the tide. 'Tisn't just!' And he swore a great oath. ''Tis enough to make a man blaspheme. I've done with life--I hate it. I'll volunteer. 'Tis my first thought in the morning, and my last at night, how well I'd like a bullet through my brain or heart. D---- the world, d---- feeling, d---- memory. I'm not a man that can always be putting prudential restraints upon myself. I've none of those plodding ways. The cursed fools that spoiled me in my childhood, and forsake me now, have all to answer for--I charge them with my ruin.' And he launched a curse at them (meaning his aunt) which startled the plump soul of honest little Puddock.

'You must not talk that way, Devereux,' he said, still a good deal more dismayed by his looks than his words. 'Why are you so troubled with vapours and blue devils?'

'Nowhy!' said Devereux, with a grim smile.

'My dear Devereux, I say, you mustn't talk in that wild way. You--you talk like a ruined man!'

'And I so comfortable!'

'Why, to be sure, Dick, you have had some little rubs, and, maybe, your follies and your vexations; but, hang it, you are young; you can't get experience--at least, so I've found it--without paying for it. You mayn't like it just now; but it's well worth the cost. Your worries and miscarriages, dear Richard, will make you steady.'

'Steady!' echoed Devereux, like a man thinking of something far away.

'Ay, Dick--you've sown your wild oats.'

On a sudden, says the captain, 'My dear little Puddock,' and he took him by the hand, with a sort of sarcastic flicker of a smile, and looked in his face almost contemptuously; but his eyes and his voice softened before the unconscious bonhomie of the true little gentleman. 'Puddock, Puddock, did it never strike you, my boy, that Hamlet never strives to speak a word of comfort to the forlorn old Dane? He felt it would not do. Every man that's worth a button knows his own case best; and I know the secrets of my own prison-house. Sown my wild oats! To be sure I have, Puddock, my boy; and the new leaf I've turned over is just this; I've begun to reap them; and they'll grow, my boy, and grow as long as grass grows; and--Macbeth has his dagger, you know, and I've my sickle--the handle towards my hand, that you can't see; and in the sweat of my brow, I must cut down and garner my sheaves; and as I sowed, so must I reap, and grind, and bake, the black and bitter grist of my curse. Don't talk nonsense, little Puddock. Wasn't it Gay that wrote the "Beggar's Opera?" Ay! Why don't you play Macheath? Gay!--Ay--a pleasant fellow, and his poems too. He writes--don't you remember--he writes,

'So comes a reckoning when the banquet's o'er-- The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.'

'Puddock, throw up that window, the room's too hot--or stay never mind; read a book, Puddock, you like it, and I'll stroll a little along the path, and find you when I come back.'

'Why it's dark,' remonstrated his visitor.

'Dark? I dare say--yes, of course--very dark--but cool; the air is cool.'

He talked like a man who was thinking of something else; and Puddock thought how strangely handsome he looked, with that pale dash of horror, like King Saul when the evil spirit was upon him; and there was a terrible misgiving in his mind. The lines of the old ballad that Devereux used to sing with a sort of pathetic comicality were humming in his ear,--

'He walked by the river, the river so clear-- The river that runs through Kilkenny; His name was Captain Wade, And he died for that fair maid.'

and so following. What could he mean by walking, at that hour, alone, by the river's brink? Puddock, with a sinking and flutter at his heart, unperceived, followed him down stairs, and was beside him in the street.

'The path by the river?' said Puddock.

'The river--the path? Yes, Sir, the path by the river. I thought I left you up stairs,' said Devereux, with an odd sort of sulky shrinking.

'Why, Devereux, I may as well walk with you, if you don't object,' lisped Puddock.

'But I do object, Sir,' cried Devereux, suddenly, in a fierce high key, turning upon his little comrade. 'What d'ye mean, Sir? You think I mean to--to drown myself--ha, ha, ha! or what the devil's running in your head? I'm not a madman, Sir, nor you a mad-doctor. Go home, Sir--or go to--to where you will, Sir; only go your own way, and leave me mine.'

'Ah, Devereux, you're very quick with me,' said Puddock, placing his plump little hand on Devereux's arm, and looking very gently and gravely in his face.

Devereux laid his hand upon Puddock's collar with an agitated sort of sneer. But he recollected himself, and that diabolical gloom faded from his face, and he looked more like himself, and slid his cold hand silently into little Puddock's; and so they stood for a while, by the door-step, to the admiration of Mrs. Irons--whom Devereux's high tones had called to her window.

'Puddock, I don't think I'm well, and I don't know quite what I've been saying. I ask your pardon. You've always been very good to me, Puddock. I believe--I believe you're the only friend I have, and--Puddock, you won't leave me.'

So up stairs they went together; and Mrs. Irons, from what she had overheard, considered herself justified in saying, that 'Captain Devereux was for drowning himself in the Liffey, and would have done so only for Lieutenant Puddock.' And so the report was set a-going round the garrulous town of Chapelizod.

As Mr. Dangerfield glided rapidly along the silent road towards the Brass Castle, the little gate of his now leafless flower-garden being already in sight, he saw a dark figure awaiting him under the bushes which overhung it. It was Mr. Irons, who came forward, without speaking, and lifted his hat respectfully, perhaps abjectly, and paused for recognition.

'Hey! Irons?' said Mr. Dangerfield.

'At your service, Sir.'

'Well, and what says his worship?' asked the gentleman, playfully.

'I wanted to tell your honour that it won't make no odds, and I'll do it.'

'Of course. You're right. It does make no odds. He'll hang whatever you do; and I tell you 'tis well he should, and only right you should speak the truth, too--'twill make assurance doubly sure.'

'At eight o'clock in the morning, Sir, I'll attend you,' said Irons, with a sort of shiver.

'Good! and I'll jot down your evidence, and we'll drive over to Mr. Lowe's, to Lucan, and you shall swear before him. And, you understand--I don't forget what I promised--you'll be a happier man every way for having done your duty; and here's half-a-crown to spend in the Salmon House.'

Irons only moaned, and then said--

'That's all, Sir. But I couldn't feel easy till it was off my mind.'

'At eight o'clock I shall expect you. Good-night, Irons.'

And with his hands in his pockets he watched Irons off the ground. His visage darkened as for a while his steady gaze was turned toward Dublin. He was not quite so comfortable as he might have been.

Meanwhile Black Dillon, at Mrs. Sturk's request, had stalked up stairs to the patient's bed-side.

'Had not I best send at once for Mr. Dangerfield?' she enquired.

'No occasion, Ma'am,' replied the eminent but slightly fuddled 'Saw-bones,' spitting beside him on the floor 'until I see whether I'll operate to-night. What's in that jug, Ma'am? Chicken-broth? That'll do. Give him a spoonful. See--he swallows free enough;' and then Black Dillon plucked up his eyelids with a roughness that terrified the reverential and loving Mrs. Sturk, and examined the distorted pupils.

'You see the cast in that eye, Ma'am; there's the pressure on the brain.'

Dillon was lecturing her upon the case as he proceeded, from habit, just as he did the students in the hospital.

'No convulsions, Ma'am?'

'Oh, no, Sir, thank Heaven; nothing in the least--only quiet sleep, Sir; just like that.'

'Sleep, indeed--that's no sleep, Ma'am. Boo-hooh! I couldn't bawl that way in his face, Ma'am, without disturbing him, Ma'am, if it was. Now we'll get him up a bit--there, that's right--aisy. He was lying, Ma'am, I understand, on his back, when they found him in the park, Ma'am--so Mr. Dangerfield says--ay. Well, slip the cap off--backward--backward, you fool; that'll do. Who plastered his head, Ma'am?'

'Doctor Toole, Sir.'

'Toole--Toole--h'm--I see--hey--hi--tut! 'tis the devil's pair of fractures, Ma'am. See--nearer--d'ye see, there's two converging lines--d'ye see, Ma'am?' and he indicated their directions with the silver handle of an instrument he held in his hand, 'and serrated at the edges, I'll be bound.'

And he plucked off two or three strips of plaster with a quick whisk, which made poor little Mrs. Sturk wince and cry, 'Oh, dear, Sir!'

'Threpan, indeed!' murmured Black Dillon, with a coarse sneer, 'did they run the scalpel anywhere over the occiput, Ma'am?'

'I--I--truly, Sir--I'm not sure,' answered Mrs. Sturk, who did not perfectly understand a word he said.

The doctor's hair had not been cut behind. Poor Mrs. Sturk, expecting his recovery every day, would not have permitted the sacrilege, and his dishevelled cue lay upon his shoulders. With his straight surgical scissors Black Dillon snipped off this sacred appendage before the good lady knew what he was about, and cropped the back of his head down to the closest stubble.

'Will you send, if you please, Ma'am, for Doctor--Doctor--Thingumee?'

'Doctor Toole?' enquired Mrs. Sturk.

'Doctor Toole, Ma'am; yes,' answered the surgeon.

He himself went down to the coach at the hall-door, and in a few minutes returned with a case, and something in a cloth. From the cloth he took an apparatus, like the cushioned back of a chair, with straps and buckles attached to it, and a sort of socket, the back of which was open, being intended to receive the head in.

'Now, Ma'am, we'll prop him up comfortable with this, if you please.'

And having got it into place, and lowered by a screw, the cushions intended to receive his head, and got the lethargic trunk and skull of the Artillery doctor well-placed for his purpose, he took out a roll of sticking-plaster and a great piece of lint, and laid them on the table, and unlocked his box, which was a large one, and took out several instruments, silver-mounted, straight and crooked, with awful adaptations to unknown butcheries and tortures, and then out came another--the veritable trepan--resembling the homely bit-and-brace, but slender, sinister, and quaint, with a murderous sort of elegance.

'You may as well order in half-a-dozen clean towels, if you please, Ma'am.'

'Oh! Doctor, you're not going to have an operation to-night, gasped Mrs. Sturk, her face quite white and damp, and her clasped hands trembling.

'Twenty to one, Ma'am,' he replied with a slight hiccup, 'we'll have nothing of the kind; but have them here, Ma'am, and some warm water for fear of accidents--though maybe 'tis only for a dhrop of punch we'll be wanting it,' and his huge, thirsty mouth grinned facetiously; and just then Dr. Toole entered the room. He was confoundedly surprised when he found Black Dillon there. Though bent on meeting him with hauteur and proper reserve, on account of his damnable character, he was yet cowed by his superior knowledge, so that Tom Toole's address was strangely chequered with pomposity and alarm.

Dillon's credentials there was, indeed, no disputing, so they sent for Moore, the barber; and, while he was coming, they put the women out of the room, and sat in consultation.

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Chapter LXXXVIII

IN WHICH MR. MOORE THE BARBER ARRIVES, AND THE MEDICAL GENTLEMEN LOCK THE DOOR.

The ladies were not much the wiser, though, I confess, they were not far removed from the door. The great men inside talked indistinctly and technically, and once Doctor Dillon was so unfeeling as to crack a joke--they could not distinctly hear what--and hee-haw brutally over it. And poor little Mrs. Sturk was taken with a great palpitation, and looked as white as a ghost, and was, indeed, so obviously at the point of swooning that her women would have removed her to the nursery, and placed her on the bed, but that such a procedure would have obliged them to leave the door of their sick master's room, just then a point of too lively interest to be deserted. So they consoled their mistress, and supported her with such strong moral cordials as compassionate persons in their rank and circumstances are prompt to administer.

'Oh! Ma'am, jewel, don't be takin' it to heart that way--though, dear knows, 'tis no way surprisin' you would; for may I never sin if ever I seen such a murtherin' steel gimblet as the red-faced docthor--I mane the Dublin man--has out on the table beside the poor masther--'tid frighten the hangman to look at it--an' six towels, too! Why, Ma'am dear, if 'twas what they wor goin' to slaughter a bullock they wouldn't ax more nor that.'

'Oh! don't. Oh! Katty, Katty--don't, oh don't'

'An' why wouldn't I, my darlin' misthress, tell you what's doin', the way you would not be dhruv out o' your senses intirely if you had no notion, Ma'am dear, iv what they're goin' to do to him?'

At this moment the door opened, and Doctor Dillon's carbuncled visage and glowing eyes appeared.

'Is there a steady woman there--not a child, you know, Ma'am? A--you'll do (to Katty). Come in here, if you please, and we'll tell you what you're to do.'

So, being nothing loath, she made her courtesy and glided in.

'Oh! doctor,' gasped poor Mrs. Sturk, holding by the hem of his garment, 'do you think it will kill him?'

'No, Ma'am--not to-night, at any rate,' he answered, drawing back; but still she held him.

'Oh! doctor, you think it will kill him?'

'No, Ma'am--there's always some danger.'

'Danger of what, Sir?'

'Fungus, Ma'am--if he gets over the chance of inflammation. But, on the other hand, Ma'am, we may do him a power of good; and see, Ma'am, 'twill be best for you to go down or into the nursery, and we'll call you, Ma'am, if need be--that is, if he's better, Ma'am, as we hope.'

'Oh! Mr. Moore, it's you,' sobbed the poor woman, holding fast by the sleeve of the barber, who that moment, with many reverences and 'your servant, Ma'am,' had mounted to the lobby with the look of awestruck curiosity, in his long, honest face, which the solemn circumstance of his visit warranted.

'You're the man we sent for?' demanded Dillon, gruffly.

''Tis good Mr. Moore,' cried trembling little Mrs. Sturk, deprecating and wheedling him instinctively to make him of her side, and lead him to take part with her and resist all violence to her husband--flesh of her flesh, and bone of her bone.

'Why don't you spake, Sor-r-r? Are you the barber we sent for or no? What ails you, man?' demanded the savage Doctor Dillon, in a suppressed roar.

'At your sarvice, Ma'am--Sir,' replied Moore, with submissive alacrity.

'Come in here, then. Come in, will you?' cried the doctor, hauling him in with his great red hand.

'There now--there now--there--there,' he said gruffly, extending his palm to keep off poor Mrs. Sturk.

So he shut the door, and poor Mrs. Sturk heard him draw the bolt, and felt that her Barney had passed out of her hands, and that she could do nothing for him now but clasp her hands and gasp up her prayers for his deliverance; and so great indeed was her anguish and panic, that she had not room for the feminine reflection how great a brute Doctor Dillon was.

So she heard them walking this way and that, but could not distinguish what they said, only she heard them talking; and once or twice a word reached her, but not very intelligible, such as--

''Twas Surgeon Beauchamp's--see that'

'Mighty curious.'

Then a lot of mumbling, and

'Cruciform, of course.'

This was said by Doctor Dillon, near the door, where he had come to take an additional candle from the table that stood there; as he receded it lost itself in mumble again, and then she heard quite plainly--

'Keep your hand there.'

And a few seconds after,

'Hold it there and don't let it drip.'

And then a little more mumbled dialogue, and she thought she heard--

'Begin now.'

And there was a dead silence of many seconds; and Mrs. Sturk felt as if she must scream, and her heart beat at a gallop, and her dry, white lips silently called upon her Maker for help, and she felt quite wild, and very faint; and heard them speak brief, and low together, and then another long silence; and then a loud voice, in a sort of shriek, cry out that name--holy and awful--which we do not mix in tales like this. It was Sturk's voice; and he cried in the same horrid shriek, 'Murder--mercy--Mr. Archer!'

And poor Mrs. Sturk, with a loud hysterical cry, that quivered with her agony, answered from without, and wildly rattled at the door-handle, and pushed with all her feeble force to get in, in a kind of crescendo screaming--'Oh, Barney--Barney--Barney--sweetheart--what are they doing?'

'Oh! blessed hour!--Ma'am--'tis the master himself that is talking;' and with a very pale face the maid, who stood in the doorway beside her, uttered her amazed thanksgiving.

And the doctors' voices were now heard plainly enough soothing the patient, and he seemed to have grown more collected; and she heard him--she thought--repeat a snatch of a prayer, as a man might just rescued from a shipwreck; and he said in a tone more natural in one so sick and weak, 'I'm a dead man--he's done it--where is he?--he's murdered me.'

'Who?' demanded Toole's well-known voice.

'Archer--the villain--Charles Archer.'

'Give me the cup with the claret and water, and the spoon--there it is,' said Dillon's rough bass tones.

And she heard the maid's step crossing the floor, and then there was a groan from Sturk.

'Here, take another spoonful, and don't mind talking for a while. It's doing mighty well. There, don't let him slip over--that's enough.'

Just then Toole opened the door enough to put his head through, and gently restraining poor Mrs. Sturk with his hand, he said with a vigorous whisper--

''Twill all go well, Ma'am, we hope, if he's not agitated; you must not go in, Ma'am, nor talk to him--by-and-by you may see him, but he must be quiet now; his pulse is very regular at present--but you see, Ma'am, we can't be too cautious.'

While Toole was thus discoursing her at the door, she heard Dr. Dillon washing his hands, and Sturk's familiar voice, sounding so strange after the long silence, say very languidly and slowly--

'Take a pen, Sir--some one--take and write--write down what I say.'

'Now, Ma'am, you see he's bent on talking,' said Toole, whose quick ear caught the promise of a revelation. 'I must be at my post, Ma'am--the bed post--hey! We may joke now, Ma'am, that the patient's recovered his speech; and, you know, you mustn't come in--not till we tell you it's safe--there now--rely on me--I give you my word of honour he's doing as well as we could have hoped for.'

And Toole shook her trembling little hand very cordially, and there was a very good-natured twinkle in his eye.

And Toole closed the door again, and they heard Sturk murmur something more; and then the maid, who was within, was let out by Toole, and the door closed and bolted again, and a sort of cooing and murmuring recommenced.

After a while, Toole, absolutely pale, and looking very stern, opened the door, and, said he, in a quiet way--

'Ma'am, may I send Katty down to the King's House, with a note to Mr.--a note to the King's House, Ma'am--I thank you--and see, Katty, good girl, ask to see the gentleman himself, and take his answer from his own lips.'

And he tore off the back of a letter, and pencilled on it these words--

'MY DEAR SIR,--Dr. Sturk has been successfully operated upon by me and another gentleman; and being restored to speech and recollection, but very weak, desires earnestly to see you, and make an important disclosure to you as a justice of the peace. 'I am, Sir, your very obedient, humble servant, 'THOMAS TOOLE.

Upon this note he clapt a large seal with the Toole arms, and when it was complete, placed it in the hands of Katty, who, with her riding-hood on and her head within it teeming with all sorts of wild conjectures and horrible images, and her whole soul in a whirl of curiosity, hurried along the dark street, now and then glinted on by a gleam through a shutter, or enlivened by the jingle of a harpsichord, or a snatch of talk and laughter heard faintly through the windows, and along the Dublin-road to the gate of the King's House. The hall-door of this hospitable mansion stood open, and a flood of red candle-light fell upon one side of the gray horse, saddle, and holster pipes, which waited the descent of Mr. Lowe, who was shaking hands with the hospitable colonel at the threshold.

Katty was just in time, and the booted gentleman, in his surtout and cape, strode back again into the light of the hall-door, and breaking the seal, there read, with his clear cold eye, the lines which Toole had pencilled, and thrusting it into his coat pocket, and receiving again the fuddled butler's benedictions--he had given him half-a-crown--he mounted his gray steed, and at a brisk trot, followed by his servant, was, in little more than two minutes' time, at Dr. Sturk's door.

Moore, the barber, functus officio, was now sitting in the hall, with his razors in his pocket, expecting his fee, and smelling pleasantly of the glass of whiskey which he had just drunk to the health and long life of the master--God bless him--and all the family.

Doctor Toole met Mr. Lowe on the lobby; he was doing the honours of the ghastly eclaircissement, and bowed him up to the room, with many an intervening whisper, and a sort of apology for Dillon, whom he treated as quite unpresentable, and resolved to keep as much as practicable in the background.

But that gentleman, who exulted in a good stroke of surgery, and had no sort of professional delicacy, calling his absent fathers and brethren of the scalpel and forceps by confounded hard names when he detected a blunder or hit a blot of theirs, met Mr. Lowe on the upper lobby.

'Your servant, Sir,' said he, rubbing his great red hands with a moist grin; 'you see what I've done. Pell's no surgeon, no more than that--(Toole, he was going to say, but modified the comparison in time)--that candlestick! to think of him never looking at the occiput; and he found lying on his back--'twas well Mr. Dangerfield pitched on me--though I say it--why shouldn't I say it--a depression, the size of a shilling in the back of the head--a bit of depressed bone, you see, over the cerebellum--the trepan has relieved him.'

'And was it Mr. Dangerfield?' enquired Lowe, who was growing to admire that prompt, cynical hero more and more every hour.

'By gannies, it just was. He promised me five hundred guineas to make him speak. What all them solemn asses could not compass, that's sweeping in their thousands every quarter, thanks to a discerning public. Baugh! He had heard of a rake-helly dog, with some stuff in his brain-pan, and he came to me--and I done it--Black Dillon done it--ha, ha! that's for the pack of them. Baugh!'

Doctor Dillon knew that the profession slighted him; and every man's hand against him, his was against every man.

Sturk was propped up and knew Lowe, and was, in a ghastly sort of way, glad to see him. He looked strangely pale and haggard, and spoke faintly.

'Take pen and ink,' said he.

There were both and paper ready.

'He would not speak till you came,' whispered Toole, who looked hotter than usual, and felt rather small, and was glad to edge in a word.

'An' don't let him talk too long; five minutes or so, and no more,' said Doctor Dillon; 'and give him another spoonful now--and where's Mr. Dangerfield?'

'And do you really mean to say, Sir, he promised you a fee of five--eh?' said Toole, who could not restrain his somewhat angry curiosity.

'Five hundred guineas--ha, ha, ha! be gannies, Sir, there's a power of divarsion in that.'

''Tis a munificent fee, and prompted by a fine public spirit. We are all his debtors for it! and to you, Sir, too. He's an early man, Sir, I'm told. You'll not see him to-night. But, whatever he has promised is already performed; you may rely on his honour.'

'If you come out at nine in the morning, Dr. Dillon, you'll find him over his letters and desk, in his breakfast parlour,' said Toole, who, apprehending that this night's work might possibly prove a hit for the disreputable and savage luminary, was treating him, though a good deal stung and confounded by the prodigious amount of the fee, with more ceremony than he did at first. 'Short accounts, you know,' said Dillon, locking the lid of his case down upon his instruments. 'But maybe, as you say, 'tis best to see him in the morning--them rich fellows is often testy--ha! ha! An' a word with you, Dr. Toole,' and he beckoned his brother aside to the corner near the door--and whispered something in his ear, and laughed a little awkwardly, and Toole, very red and grave, lent him--with many misgivings, two guineas.

'An' see--don't let them give him too much of that--the chicken broth's too sthrong--put some wather to that, Miss, i' you plaze--and give him no more to-night--d'ye mind--than another half a wine-glass full of clar't unless the docthor here tells you.'

So Dr. Dillon took leave, and his fiery steeds, whirling him onward, devoured, with their resounding hoofs, the road to Dublin, where he had mentally devoted Toole's two guineas to the pagan divinities whose worship was nightly celebrated at the old St. Columbkill.

'We had best have it in the shape of a deposition, Sir, at once,' said Lowe, adjusting himself at the writing-table by the bed-side, and taking the pen in his fingers, he looked on the stern and sunken features of the resuscitated doctor, recalled, as it were, from 'the caverns of the dead and the gates of darkness,' to reveal an awful secret, and point his cold finger at the head of the undiscovered murderer.

'Tell it as shortly as you can, Sir, but without haste,' said Toole, with his finger on his pulse. Sturk looked dismal and frightened, like a man with the hangman at his elbow.

'It was that d--d villain--Charles Archer--write that down--'twas a foul blow--Sir, I'm murdered--I suppose.'

And then came a pause.

'Give me a spoonful of wine--I was coming out of town at dusk--this evening--'

'No, Sir; you're here some time, stunned and unconscious.'

'Eh! how long?'

'No matter, Sir, now. Just say the date of the night it happened.'

Sturk uttered a deep groan.

'Am I dying?' said he.

'No, Sir, please goodness--far from it,' said Toole.

'Fracture?' asked Sturk, faintly.

'Why--yes--something of the sort--indeed--altogether a fracture; but going on mighty well, Sir.'

'Stabbed anywhere--or gunshot wound?' demanded Sturk.

'Nothing of the kind, Sir, upon my honour.'

'You think--I have a chance?' and Sturk's cadaverous face was moist with the dews of an awful suspense.

'Chance,' said Toole, in an encouraging tone, 'well, I suppose you have, Sir--ha, ha! But, you know, you must not tire yourself, and we hope to have you on your legs again, Sir, in a reasonable time.'

'I'm very bad--the sight's affected,' groaned Sturk.

'See, Sir, you tire yourself to no purpose. You're in good hands, Sir--and all will go well--as we expect--Pell has been with you twice--'

'H'm! Pell--that's good.'

'And you're going on mighty well, Sir, especially to-night.'

'Doctor, upon your honour, have I a chance?'

'You have, Sir,--certainly--yes--upon my honour.'

'Thank God!' groaned Sturk, turning up the whites of his eyes, and lifting up two very shaky hands.

'But you must not spoil it--and fatigue will do that for you,' remarked Toole.

'But, Sir, Sir--I beg pardon, Doctor Toole--but this case is not quite a common one. What Doctor Sturk is about to say may acquire an additional legal value by his understanding precisely the degree of danger in which he lies. Now, Doctor Sturk, you must not be over much disturbed,' said Lowe.

'No, Sir--don't fear me--I'm not much disturbed,' said Sturk.

'Well, Doctor Toole,' continued Lowe, 'we must depart a little here from regular medical routine--tell Doctor Sturk plainly all you think.'

'Why--a'--and Doctor Toole cleared his voice, and hesitated.

'Tell him what you and Doctor Dillon think, Sir. Why, Doctor Dillon spoke very plainly to me.'

'I don't like his pulse, Sir. I think you had better not have agitated him,' muttered Toole with an impatient oath.

''Tis worse to keep his mind doubtful, and on the stretch,' said Lowe. 'Doctor Toole, Sir, has told you the bright side of the case. It is necessary, making the deposition you propose, that you should know t'other.'

'Yes, of course--quite right--go on,' said Sturk faintly.

'Why, you know,' said Toole, sniffing, and a little sulkily, 'you know, Doctor Sturk, we, doctors, like to put the best foot foremost; but you can't but be aware, that with the fractures--two fractures--along the summit of the skull, and the operation by the trepan, behind your head, just accomplished, there must be, of course, some danger.'

'I see. Sir,' said Sturk, very quietly, but looking awfully cadaverous; 'all I want to know is, how long you think I may live?'

'You may recover altogether, Sir--you may--but, of course--you may--there's a chance; and things might not go right,' said Toole, taking snuff.

'I see--Sir--'tis enough'--and there was a pause. 'I'd like to have the sacrament, and pray with the clergyman a little--Lord help me!--and my will--only a few words--I don't suppose there's much left me; but there's a power of appointment--a reversion of £600, stock--I'm tired.'

'Here, take this,' said Toole, and put half-a-dozen spoonsful of claret and water into his lips, and he seemed to revive a little. 'There's no immediate hurry--upon my honour, Doctor Sturk, there isn't,' said Toole. 'Just rest aisy a bit; you're disturbed a good deal, Sir; your pulse shows it; and you need not, I assure you, upon my conscience and honour--'tis quite on the cards you may recover.'

And as he spoke, Toole was dropping something from a phial into a wine-glass--sal volatile--ether--I can't say; but when Dr. Sturk swallowed it there was a 'potter-carrier's' aroma about the room.

Then there was a pause for a while, and Toole kept his fingers on his pulse; and Sturk looked, for some time, as if he were on the point of fainting, which, in his case, might have proved very like dying.

'Have you the claret bottle in the room?' demanded Toole, a little flurried; for Sturk's pulses were playing odd pranks, and bounding and sinking in a dance of death.

'The what, Sir?' asked the maid.

'The wine, woman--this instant,' said the doctor, with a little stamp.

So, the moment he had the bottle, he poured out half a large glass, and began spooning it into Sturk's white parted lips.

Lowe looked on very uneasily; for he expected, as Toole did also, prodigious revelations; though each had a suspicion that he divined their nature tolerably clearly.

'Give him some more,' said Toole, with his fingers on the sick man's wrist, and watching his countenance. 'D---- it, don't be afraid--more, some more--more!'

And so the Artillery doctor's spirit revived within him; though with flickerings and tremblings; and he heaved some great sighs, and moved his lips. Then he lay still for a while; and after that he spoke.

'The pen, Sir,--write,' he said. 'He met me in the Butcher's Wood; he said he was going to sleep in town,' and Sturk groaned dismally; 'and he began talking on business--and turned and walked a bit with me. I did not expect to see him there--he was frank--and spoke me fair. We were walking slowly. He looked up in the sky with his hands in his coat pockets and was a step, or so, in advance of me; and he turned short--I didn't know--I had no more fear than you--and struck me a blow with something he had in his hand. He rose to the blow on his toes--'twas so swift, I had no time--I could not see what he struck with, 'twas like a short bit of rope.'

'Charles Archer? Do you know him, Dr. Toole?' asked Lowe. Toole shook his head.

'Charles Archer!' he repeated, looking at Sturk; 'where does he live?' and he winked to Toole, who was about speaking, to hold his peace.

'Here--in this town--Chapelizod, up the river, a bit, with--with a--changed name,' answered Sturk. And at the name he mentioned, Lowe and Toole, in silence and steadfastly, exchanged a pale, grim glance that was awful to see.

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Chapter LXXXIX

IN WHICH A CERTAIN SONGSTER TREATS THE COMPANY TO A DOLOROUS BALLAD WHEREBY MR. IRONS IS SOMEWHAT MOVED.

It seemed that Mr. Dangerfield had taken Zekiel Irons's measure pretty exactly. The clerk had quite made up his mind to take the bold step urged upon him by that gentleman. He was a slow man. When one idea had fairly got into his head there was no room there for another. Cowardly and plotting; but when his cowardice was wrought upon to a certain pitch, he would wax daring and fierce from desperation.

He walked down to the village from the little gate of the Brass Castle, where he had talked with Mr. Dangerfield, appointing eight o'clock next morning for making the deposition; late now for all purposes; but to nail him to a line of vivá voce evidence when he should come to be examined on Charles Nutter's approaching trial. The whole way along he walked with the piece of silver, which Mr. Paul Dangerfield had given him, griped tight in his crooked fingers, in his breeches' pocket--no change in his grim and sinister face--no turn of the head--no side glance of the eye--all dark, rigid, and tense.

The mechanism of long habit brought him round the corner to the door of the Salmon House, the 'public' facing, but with the length of the street interposing, the Phoenix, whose lights were visible through and under the branches of the village tree. His mind wandered back to the Mills with a shock, and glided stealthily past the Brass Castle without dwelling there, and he looked down the street. Over the bridge at the Elms, lay death in its awful purity. At his left, in the Gray Stone House, was Doctor Sturk--the witness with sealed lips--the victim of Charles Archer's mysterious prowess; and behind lay the church-yard, and the quiet little church with that vault and nameless coffin. Altogether, the suggestions and associations about him were not cheerful or comfortable. He squeezed the silver--Dangerfield's little remembrance--with a furious strain, and ground his teeth.

'I'm like a man surrounded. I wish I was out of it all!' he muttered, with a care-worn glance.

So he entered the public-house.

There was not much business doing. Three friends, Smithfield dealers, or some such folk, talking loudly over their liquor of prices and prospects; and one fat fellow, by the fire, smoking a pipe, with a large glass of punch at his elbow.

'Ah, then, Mr. Irons, an' is it yourself that's in it? and where in the world wor ye all this time?' said the landlady.

'Business, Ma'am, business, Mrs. Molloy.'

'An' there's your chair waitin' for you beside the fire, Mr. Irons, this month an' more--a cowld evening--and we all wondherin' what in the wide world was gone widg ye--this I do'no how long.'

'Thank ye, Ma'am--a pipe and a glass o' punch.'

Irons was always a man of few words, and his laconics did not strike Mistress Molloy as anything very strange. So she wiped the little table at his side, and with one foot on the fender, and his elbow on his knee, he smoked leisurely into the fire-place.

To look at his face you would have supposed he was thinking; but it was only that sort of foggy vacuity which goes by the name of 'a brown study.' He never thought very clearly or connectedly; and his apathetic reveries, when his mood was gloomy, were furnished forth in a barren and monotonous way, with only two or three frightful figures, and a dismal scenery that seldom shifted.

The three gentlemen at the table called for more liquor, and the stout personage, sitting opposite to Irons, dropped into their talk, having smoked out his pipe, and their conversation became more general and hilarious; but Irons scarce heard it. Curiosity is an idle minx, and a soul laden like the clerk's has no entertainment for her. But when one of the three gentlemen who sat together--an honest but sad-looking person with a flaxen wig, and a fat, florid face--placing his hand in the breast of his red plush waistcoat, and throwing himself back in his chair, struck up a dismal tune, with a certain character of psalmody in it, the clerk's ear was charmed for a moment, and he glanced on the singer and sipped some punch; and the ballad, rude and almost rhymeless, which he chanted had an undefined and unpleasant fascination for Irons. It was thus:--

'A man there was near Ballymooney, Was guilty of a deed o' blood, For thravellin' alongside iv ould Tim Rooney. He kilt him in a lonesome wood.

'He took his purse, and his hat and cravat. And stole his buckles and his prayer-book, too; And neck-and-heels, like a cruel savage, His corpus through the wood he drew.

'He pult him over to a big bog-hole, And sunk him undher four-foot o' wather, And built him down wid many a thumpin' stone. And slipt the bank out on the corpus afther.'

Here the singer made a little pause, and took a great pull at the beer-can, and Irons looked over his shoulder at the minstrel; but his uneasy and malignant glance encountered only the bottom of the vessel; and so he listened for more, which soon came thus:--

'An' says he, "Tim Rooney, you're there, my boy, Kep' down in the bog-hole wid the force iv suction, An' tisn't myself you'll throuble or annoy, To the best o' my opinion, to the resurrection."

'With that, on he walks to the town o' Drumgoole, And sot by the fire in an inn was there; And sittin' beside him, says the ghost--"You fool! 'Tis myself's beside ye, Shamus, everywhere."'

At this point the clerk stood up, and looked once more at the songster, who was taking a short pull again, with a suspicious, and somewhat angry glance. But the unconscious musician resumed--

'"Up through the wather your secret rises; The stones won't keep it, and it lifts the mould, An' it tracks your footsteps, and yoar fun surprises An' it sits at the fire beside you black and cowld.

'"At prayers, at dances, or at wake or hurling; At fair, or funeral, or where you may; At your going out, and at your returning, 'Tis I'll be with you to your dying day."'

'Is there much more o' that?' demanded Irons, rather savagely.

The thirsty gentleman in the red plush waistcoat was once more, as he termed it, 'wetting his whistle;' but one of his comrades responded tartly enough--

'I'd like there was--an' if you mislike it, neighbour, there's the door.'

If he expected a quarrel, however, it did not come; and he saw by Irons's wandering eye, fierce as it looked, that his thoughts for the moment were elsewhere. And just then the songster, having wiped his mouth in his coat-sleeve, started afresh in these terms--

'"You'll walk the world with a dreadful knowledge, And a heavy heart and a frowning brow; And thinking deeper than a man in college, Your eye will deaden, and your back will bow.

'"And when the pariod iv your life is over, The frightful hour of judgment then will be; And, Shamus Hanlon, heavy on your shoulder, I'll lay my cowld hand, and you'll go wid me."'

This awful ditty died away in the prolonged drone which still finds favour in the ears of our Irish rustic musicians, and the company now began to talk of congenial themes, murders, ghosts, and retributions, and the horrid tune went dismally booming on in Mr. Irons's ear.

Trifling, and apparently wholly accidental, as was this occurrence, the musical and moral treat had a very permanent effect upon the fortunes of Irons, and those of other persons who figure in our story. Mr. Irons had another and another glass of punch. They made him only more malign and saturnine. He sat in his corner by the fire, silent and dismal; and no one cared what was passing in the brain behind that black and scowling mask. He paid sternly and furiously, like a villain who has lost at play; and without a 'good-night,' or any other leave taking, glided ominously from the room; and the gentlemen who carried on the discourse and convivialities of the Salmon House, followed him with a gibe or two, and felt the pleasanter for the removal of that ungracious presence.

A few minutes later, Mr. Lowe stood on the hall-door step, and calling to his man, gave him a little note and some silver, and a message--very impressively repeated--and the groom touched his hat, and buttoned up his coat about his neck, the wind being from the east, and he started, at something very near a gallop, for Dublin.

There was a man at the door of the Salmon House, who, with a taciturn and saturnine excitement, watched the unusual bustle going on at the door-steps of Doctor Sturk's dwelling. This individual had been drinking there for a while; and having paid his shot, stood with his back to the wall, and his hands in his pockets, profoundly agitated, and with a chaos of violent and unshaped thoughts rising and rolling in his darkened brain.

After Lowe went into the house again, seeing the maid still upon the steps, talking with Mr. Moore, the barber, who was making his lingering adieux there, this person drew near, and just as the tonsor made his final farewell, and strode down the street towards his own dwelling, he presented himself in time to arrest the retreat of the damsel.

'By your leave, Mistress Katty,' said he, laying his hand on the iron rail of the door-steps.

'Oh, good jewel! an' is that yourself, Mr. Irons? And where in the world wor you this month an' more?'

'Business--nothin'--in Mullingar--an' how's the docthor to-night?'

The clerk spoke a little thickly, as he commonly did on leaving the Salmon House.

'He's elegant, my dear--beyant the beyants--why, he's sittin' up, dhrinking chicken-broth, and talking law-business with Mr. Lowe.'

'He's talkin'!'

'Ay is he, and Mr. Lowe just this minute writ down all about the way he come by the breakin' of his skull in the park, and we'll have great doings on the head of it; for the master swore to it, and Doctor Toole----'

'An'who done it?' demanded Irons, ascending a step, and grasping the iron rail.

'I couldn't hear--nor no one, only themselves.'

'An' who's that rode down the Dublin road this minute?'

'That's Mr. Lowe's man; 'tis what he's sent him to Dublin wid a note.'

'I see,' said Irons, with a great oath, which seemed to the maid wholly uncalled for; and he came up another step, and held the iron rail and shook it, like a man grasping a battle-axe, and stared straight at her, with a look so strange, and a visage so black, that she was half-frightened.

'A what's the matther wid you, Misther Irons?' she demanded.

But he stared on in silence, scowling through her face at vacancy, and swaying slightly as he griped the metal banister.

'I will,' he muttered, with another most unclerklike oath, and he took Katty by the hand, and shook it slowly in his own cold, damp grasp as he asked, with the same intense and forbidding look,

'Is Mr. Lowe in the house still?'

'He is, himself and Doctor Toole, in the back parlour.'

'Whisper him, Katty, this minute, there's a man has a thing to tell him.'

'What about?' enquired Katty.

'About a great malefactor.'

Katty paused, with her mouth open, expecting more.

'Tell him now; at once, woman; you don't know what delay may cost.'

He spoke impetuously, and with a bitter sort of emphasis, like a man in a hurry to commit himself to a course, distrusting his own resolution.

She was frightened at his sudden fierceness, and drew back into the hall and he with her, and he shut the door with a clang behind him, and then looked before him, stunned and wild, like a man called up from his bed into danger.

'Thank God. I'm in for it,' muttered he, with a shudder and a sardonic grin, and he looked for a moment something like that fine image of the Wandering Jew, given us by Gustave Doreé, the talisman of his curse dissolved, and he smiling cynically in the terrible light of the judgment day.

The woman knocked at the parlour door, and Lowe opened it.

'Who's here?' he asked, looking at Irons, whose face he remembered, though he forgot to whom it belonged.

'I'm Zekiel Irons, the parish-clerk, please your worship, and all I want is ten minutes alone with your honour.'

'For what purpose?' demanded the magistrate, eyeing him sharply.

'To tell you all about a damned murder.'

'Hey--why--who did it?'

'Charles Archer,' he answered; and screwed up his mouth with a convulsive grimace, glaring bloodlessly at the justice.

'Ha! Charles Archer! I think we know something already about that.'

'I don't think you do, though; and by your leave, you'll promise, if I bring it home to him, you'll see me safe through it. 'Tis what I'm the only witness living that knows all about it.'

'Well, what is it about?'

'The murder of Mr. Beauclerc, that my Lord Dunoran was tried and found guilty for.'

'Why, all very good; but that did not happen in Ireland.'

'No. At Newmarket, the "Pied Horse."'

'Ay, in England. I know, and that's out of our jurisdiction.'

'I don't care. I'll go to London if you like--to Bow-street--anywhere--so as I make sure to hang him; for my life is worse than death while he's at this side of the grave--and I'd rather be in my coffin--I would--than live within five miles of him. Anyway, you'll hear what I have to say, and to swear, and send me safe across the water to Bow-street, or wherever else you think best; for, if he has his liberty, and gets sight o' me again, I'm a dead man.'

'Come in here, Mr. Irons, and take a chair,' said the justice.

Doctor Toole was in the room, in a balloon-backed chair, regaling himself with a long pipe, and Mr. Lowe shut the door.

'We have another deposition, doctor, to take; Mr. Irons, here, is prepared to swear informations of very singular importance.'

'Irons, hollo! from what planet did you drop to-night?'

'Mullingar, Sir.'

'Nothing about the burning of the old woman at Tyrrell's Pass, eh?'

'No--'tis an old story. I don't care what comes of it, I'm innocent, only you'll say I kept it too long to myself. But you can't touch my life. I'm more afeard of him than you, and with good cause; but I think he's in a corner now, and I'll speak out and take my chance, and you mustn't allow me to be murdered.'

By this time Lowe had procured writing materials, and all being ready, he and the curious and astonished doctor heard a story very like what we have already heard from the same lips.

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Chapter XC

MR. PAUL DANGERFIELD HAS SOMETHING ON HIS MIND, AND CAPTAIN DEVEREUX RECEIVES A MESSAGE.

Mr. Dangerfield having parted with Irons, entered the little garden or shrubbery, which skirted on either side the short gravel walk, which expanded to a miniature court-yard before the door of the Brass Castle. He flung the little iron gate to with a bitter clang; so violent that the latch sprang from its hold, and the screaking iron swung quivering open again behind him.

Like other men who have little religion, Mr. Paul Dangerfield had a sort of vague superstition. He was impressible by omens, though he scorned his own weakness, and sneered at, and quizzed it sometimes in the monologues of his ugly solitude. The swinging open of the outer gate of his castle sounded uncomfortably behind him, like an invitation to shapeless danger to step in after him. The further he left it behind him, the more in his spirit was the gaping void between his two little piers associated with the idea of exposure, defencelessness, and rashness. This feeling grew so strong, that he turned about before he reached his hall-door, and, with a sensation akin to fury, retraced the fifteen or twenty steps that intervened, and grasped the cold iron with the fiercest tension of his sinews, as if it had resented his first violence by a dogged defiance of his wishes, and spluttering a curse between his teeth, he dashed it to again--and again, as once more it sprang open from the shock.

'Who's master now?' snarled Mr. Paul Dangerfield, through his clenched teeth, and smiting the senseless iron with a vindictive swoop of his cane. I fancy his face at this moment had some of the peculiar lines and corrugations which we observe in that of Retzsch's Mephistopheles, when he gripes the arm of Faust to drag him from Margaret's cell. So he stood behind his iron grating, glaring and grinning defiance into the darkness, with his fingers clenched hard upon his cane.

Black Dillon's failure was a blow to the progress of his plans. It incensed him. 'That d----d outcast! That he should presume so to treat a man who could master him so easily at any game, and buy and sell him body and soul, and had actually bargained to give him five hundred guineas--the needy, swinish miscreant! and paid him earnest beside--the stupid cheat! Drink--dice--women! Why, five hundred guineas made him free of his filthy paradise for a twelvemonth, and the leprous oaf could not quit his impurities for an hour, and keep the appointment that was to have made him master of his heart's desires.'

At his hall-door he paused, listening intently, with his spectacles glimmering toward Chapelizod, for the sound of a distant step; but there was no messenger afoot. He heard only the chill sigh of the air through the leafless branches.

Mr. Dangerfield had not his key with him; and he beat an unnecessarily loud and long tattoo upon his door, and before it could possibly have been answered, he thundered a second through the passages.

Mrs. Jukes knew the meaning of that harsh and rabid summons. 'There was something on the master's mind.' His anxieties never depressed him as they did other men, but strung up his energies to a point of mental tension and exasperation which made him terrible to his domestics. It was not his acts--his conduct was always under control, but chiefly his looks, and accents, and an influence that seemed to take possession of him at such times that rendered him undefinably formidable to his servants.

'Ha!--mighty obleeging (he so pronounced the word)--let in at last--cold outside, Ma'am. You've let out the fire I suppose?'

His tones were like the bark of a wolf, and there was a devilish smirk in his white face, as he made her a mock salutation, and glided into his parlour. The fire was bright enough, however, as Mrs. Jukes was much relieved to see; and dropping a courtesy she enquired whether he would like a dish of tea, or anything?

'No, Ma'am!' he snarled.

'Would he like his dressing-gown and slippers?'

'No, Ma'am,' again. So she dropped another courtesy, and sneaked away to the kitchen, with short, noiseless steps, and heard Mr. Dangerfield shut the door sharply.

His servants were afraid of him. They could not quite comprehend him. They knew it was vain trying to deceive him, and had quite given up lying and prevaricating. Neither would he stand much talking. When they prattled he brought them to the point sternly; and whenever a real anxiety rested on his mind he became pretty nearly diabolical. On the whole, however, they had a strange sort of liking for him. They were proud of his wealth, and of his influence with great people. And though he would not allow them to rob, disobey, or deceive him, yet he used them handsomely, paid like a prince, was a considerate master, and made them comfortable.

Now Mr. Dangerfield poked up his fire and lighted his candles. Somehow, the room looked smaller he thought than it had ever seemed before. He was not nervous--nothing could bring him to that; but his little altercation with the iron gate, and some uncomfortable thoughts had excited him. It was an illusion merely--but the walls seemed to have closed in a foot or two, and the ceiling to have dropped down proportionably, and he felt himself confined and oppressed.

'My head's a little bit heated--ira furo brevis,' and he sneered a solitary laugh, more like himself, and went out into his tiny hall, and opened the door, and stood on the step for air, enjoying the cold wind that played about his temples. Presently he heard the hollow clink of two pair of feet walking toward the village. The pedestrians were talking eagerly; and he thought, as they passed the little iron gate of his domain, he heard his own name mentioned, and then that of Mervyn. I dare say it was mere fancy; but, somehow, he did not like it, and he walked swiftly down to the little gate by the road side--it was only some twenty yards--keeping upon the grass that bounded it, to muffle the sound of his steps. This white phantom noiselessly stood in the shadow of the road side. The interlocutors had got a good way on, and were talking loud and volubly. But he heard nothing that concerned him from either again, though he waited until their steps and voices were lost in the distance.

The cool air was pleasant about his bare temples, and Mr. Paul Dangerfield waited a while longer, and listened, for any sound of footsteps approaching from the village, but none such was audible; and beginning to feel a little chilly, he entered his domicile again, shut the hall-door, and once more found himself in the little parlour of the Brass Castle.

His housekeeper heard his harsh voice barking down the passage at her, and rising with a start from her seat, cried,

'At your service, Sir.'

'At a quarter to twelve o'clock fetch me a sandwich, and a glass of absynthe, and meanwhile, don't disturb me.'

And she heard him enter his little parlour, and shut the door.

'There's something to vex, but nothing to threaten--nothing. It's all that comical dream--curse it! What tricks the brain plays us! 'Tis fair it should though. We work it while we please, and it plays when it may. The slave has his saturnalia, and flouts his tyrant. Ha, ha! 'tis time these follies were ended. I've something to do to-night.'

So Mr. Dangerfield became himself again, and applied himself keenly to his business.

When I first thought of framing the materials which had accumulated in my hands into a narrative, dear little Lily Walsingham's death was a sore trouble to me. 'Little' Lily I call her, but though slight, she was not little--rather tall, indeed.

It was, however, the term I always heard connected with her pretty name in my boyhood, when the old people, who had remembered her very long ago, mentioned her, as they used, very kindly, a term of endearment that had belonged to her, and in virtue of the childlike charm that was about her, had grown up with her from childhood. I had plans for mending this part of the record, and marrying her to handsome Captain Devereux, and making him worthy of her; but somehow I could not. From very early times I had known the sad story. I had heard her beauty talked about in my childhood; the rich, clear tints, the delicate outlines, those tender and pleasant dimples, like the wimpling of a well; an image so pure, and merry, and melancholy withal, had grown before me, and in twilight shadows visited the now lonely haunts of her brief hours; even the old church, in my evening rambles along the uplands of the park, had in my eyes so saddened a grace in the knowledge that those slender bones lay beneath its shadows, and all about her was so linked in my mind with truth, and melancholy, and altogether so sacred, that I could not trifle with the story, and felt, even when I imagined it, a pang, and a reproach, as if I had mocked the sadness of little Lily's fate; so, after some ponderings and trouble of mind I gave it up, and quite renounced the thought.

And, after all, what difference should it make? Is not the generation among whom her girlish lot was cast long passed away? A few years more or less of life. What of them now? When honest Dan Loftus cited those lines from the 'Song of Songs,' did he not make her sweet epitaph? Had she married Captain Devereux, what would her lot have been? She was not one of those potent and stoical spirits, who can survive the wreck of their best affections, and retort injury with scorn. In forming that simple spirit, Nature had forgotten arrogance and wrath. She would never have fought against the cruelty of changed affections if that or the treasons of an unprincipled husband had come. His love would have been her light and life, and when that was turned away, like a northern flower that has lost its sun, she would have only hung her pretty head, and died, in her long winter. So viewing now the ways of wisdom from a distance, I think I can see they were the best, and how that fair, young mortal, who seemed a sacrifice, was really a conqueror.

Puddock and Devereux on this eventful night, as we remember, having shaken hands at the door-steps, turned and went up stairs together, very amicably again, to the captain's drawing-room.

So Devereux, when they returned to his lodgings, had lost much of his reserve, and once on the theme of his grief, stormed on in gusts, and lulls, and thunder, and wild upbraidings, and sudden calms; and the good-natured soul of little Puddock was touched, and though he did not speak, he often dried his eyes quietly, for grief is conversant not with self, but with the dead, and whatever is generous moves us.

'There's no one stirring now, Puddock--I'll put my cloak about me and walk over to the Elms, to ask how the rector is to-night,' said Devereux, muffling himself in his military mantle.

It was only the restlessness of grief. Like all other pain, grief is haunted with the illusion that change means relief; motion is the instinct of escape. Puddock walked beside him, and they went swiftly and silently together.

When they reached the other side of the bridge, and stood under the thorn-hedge fronting the leafless elms, Devereux was irresolute.

'Would you wish me to enquire?' asked Puddock. Devereux held him doubtfully by the arm for a moment or two, and then said gently--

'No, I thank you, Puddock--I'll go--yes--I'll go myself;' and so Captain Devereux went up to the door.

John Tracy, at the steps, told him that he thought his master wished to speak with him; but he was not quite sure. The tall muffled figure therefore waited at the door while John went in to tell his master, and soon returned to say that Doctor Walsingham would be much obliged to him to step into the study.

When the doctor saw Devereux, he stood up to meet him.

'I hope, Sir,' said Devereux, very humbly, 'you have forgiven me.'

The doctor took his hand and shook it very hard, and said, 'There's nothing--we're both in sorrow. Everyone--everyone is sorry, Sir, but you more.'

Devereux did not say anything, being moved, as I suppose. But he had drawn his cloak about his face, and was looking down.

'There was a little message--only a word or two,' said the doctor; 'but everything of hers is sacred.'

He turned over some papers in his desk, and chose one. It was in Lily's pretty handwriting.

'I am charged with this little message. Oh, my darling!' and the old man cried bitterly.

'Pray, read it--you will understand it--'tis easily read. What a pretty hand it was!'

So Devereux took the little paper, and read just the words which follow:--

'My beloved father will, I hope, if he thinks it right, tell Captain Richard Devereux that I was not so unkind and thankless as I may have seemed, but very grateful for his preference, of which I know, in many ways, how unworthy I was. But I do not think we could have been happy; and being all over, it is a great comfort to friends who are separated here, that there is a place where all may meet again, if God will; and as I did not see or speak with him since my dear father brought his message, I wished that so much should be said, and also to say a kind good-bye, and give him all good wishes.

'LILIAS.' 'Friday evening.'

Captain Richard Devereux read this simple little record through, and then he said:--

'Oh, Sir, may I have it--isn't it mine?'

We who have heard those wondrous aërial echoes of Killarney, when the breath has left the bugle and its cadences are silent, take up the broken links of the lost melody with an answer far away, sad and celestial, real, yet unreal, the fleeting yet lingering spirit of music, that is past and over, have something in memory by which we can illustrate the effect of these true voices of the thoughts and affections that have perished, returning for a few charmed moments regretfully and sweetly from the sea of eternal silence.

And so that sad and clear farewell, never repeated, was long after, in many a lonely night, answered by the voice of Devereux.

'Did she--did she know how I loved her? Oh, never, never! I'll never love any but you. Darling, darling--you can't die. Oh, no, no, no! Your place knows you still; your place is here--here--here.'

And he smote his breast over that heart which, such as it was, cherished a pure affection for her.

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Chapter XCI

CONCERNING CERTAIN DOCUMENTS WHICH REACHED MR. MERVYN, AND THE WITCHES' REVELS AT THE MILLS.

I would be ashamed to say how, soon after Dangerfield had spoken to Mr. Mervyn in the church-yard on the Sunday afternoon, when he surprised him among the tombstones, the large-eyed young gentleman, with the long black hair, was at his desk, and acting upon his suggestion. But the Hillsborough was to sail next day; and Mr. Mervyn's letter, containing certain queries, and an order for twenty guineas on a London house, glided in that packet with a favouring breeze from the Bay of Dublin, on its way to the London firm of Elrington Brothers.

On the morning of the day whose events I have been describing in the last half-dozen chapters, Mr. Mervyn received his answer, which was to the following effect:--

'SIR,--Having made search for the Paper which you enquire after, we have Found one answering your description in a General way; and pursuant to your request and Direction, beg leave to forward you a Copy thereof, together with a copy of a letter concerning it, received by the same post from Sir Philip Drayton, of Drayton Hall, Sometime our Client, and designed in Part to explain his share in the matter. Your order for twenty guineas, on Messrs. Trett and Penrose, hath come to hand, and been duly honoured, and we thankfully Accept the same, in payment for all trouble had in this matter. '&c, &c, &c.'

The formal document which it enclosed said:--

'This is to certify that Charles Archer, Esq., aged, as shortly before his death he reported himself, thirty-five years, formerly of London, departed this life, on the 4th August, 1748, in his lodgings, in the city of Florence, next door to the "Red Lion," and over against the great entrance of the Church of the Holy Cross, in the which, having conformed to the holy Roman faith, he is buried.--Signed this 12th day of August, 1748.

'PHILIP DRAYTON, Baronet. 'GAETANO MELONI, M.D. 'ROBERT SMITH, Musician.

'We three having seen the said Charles Archer during his sickness, and after his decease.'

Then followed the copy of the baronet's letter to his attorneys, which was neither very long nor very business-like.

'Why the plague don't you make the scoundrel, Jekyl, pay? His mother's dead only t'other day, and he must be full of money. I've scarce a marvedy in hand, now; so let him have a writ in his, drat him. About that certificate, I'm almost sorry I signed it. I've bin thinking 'tis like enough I may be troubled about it. So you may tell 'em I know no more only what is there avouched. No more I do. He played at a faro-table here, and made a very pretty figure. But I hear now from Lord Orland that there are many bad reports of him. He was the chief witness against that rogue, Lord Dunoran, who swallowed poison in Newgate, and, they say, leaned hard against him, although he won much money of him, and swore with a blood-thirsty intention. But that is neither here nor there; I mean ill reports of his rogueries at play, and other doings, which, had I sooner known, my name had not bin to the paper. So do not make a noise about it, and maybe none will ask for't. As for Jack Jekyl, why not take the shortest way with him. You're very pitiful fellows; but I wish o' my conscience you'd take some pity o' me, and not suffer me to be bubbled,' &c., &c.

There was only a sentence or two more, referring in the same strain to other matters of business, of which, in the way of litigation, he seemed to have no lack, and the letter ended.

'I'll go direct to London and see these people, and thence to Florence. Gaetano Meloni--he may be living--who knows? He will remember the priest who confessed him. A present to a religious house may procure--in a matter of justice, and where none can be prejudiced, for the case is very special--a dispensation, if he be the very Charles Archer--and he may--why not?--have disclosed all on his death-bed. First, I shall see Mr. Dangerfield--then those attorneys; and next make search in Florence; and, with the aid of whatever I can glean there, and from Irons, commence in England the intensest scrutiny to which a case was ever yet subjected.'

Had it not been so late when he found this letter on his return, he would have gone direct with it to the Brass Castle; but that being quite out of the question, he read it again and again. It is wonderful how often a man will spell over and over the same commonplace syllables, if they happen to touch a subject vitally concerning himself, and what theories and speculations he will build upon the accidental turn of a phrase, or the careless dash of a pen.

As we see those wild animals walk their cages in a menagerie, with the fierce instincts of suppressed action rolling in the vexed eye and vibrating in every sinew, even so we behold this hero of the flashing glance and sable locks treading, in high excitement, the floor of the cedar parlour. Every five minutes a new hope--a new conjecture, and another scrutiny of the baronet's letter, or of the certificate of Archer's death, and hour after hour speeding by in the wild chase of successive chimeras.

While Mr. Justice Lowe's servant was spurring into town at a pace which made the hollow road resound, and struck red flashes from the stones, up the river, at the Mills, Mistress Mary Matchwell was celebrating a sort of orgie. Dirty Davy and she were good friends again. Such friendships are subject to violent vicissitudes, and theirs had been interrupted by a difference of opinion, of which the lady had made a note with a brass candlestick over his eye. Dirty Davy's expressive feature still showed the green and yellow tints of convalescence. But there are few philosophers who forgive so frankly as a thorough scoundrel, when it is his interest to kiss and be friends. The candlestick was not more innocent of all unpleasant feeling upon the subject than at that moment was Dirty Davy.

Dirty Davy had brought with him his chief clerk, who was a facetious personage, and boozy, and on the confidential footing of a common rascality with his master, who, after the fashion of Harry V. in his nonage, condescended in his frolics and his cups to men of low estate; and Mary Matchwell, though fierce and deep enough, was not averse on occasion, to partake of a bowl of punch in sardonic riot, with such agreeable company.

Charles Nutter's unexpected coming to life no more affected Mary Matchwell's claim than his supposed death did her spirits. Widow or wife, she was resolved to make good her position, and the only thing she seriously dreaded was that an intelligent jury, an eminent judge, and an adroit hangman, might remove him prematurely from the sphere of his conjugal duties, and forfeit his worldly goods to the crown.

Next morning, however, a writ or a process of some sort, from which great things were expected, was to issue from the court in which her rights were being vindicated. Upon the granting of this, Mistress Matchwell and Dirty Davy--estranged for some time, as we have said,--embraced. She forgot the attorney's disrespectful language, and he the lady's brass candlestick, and, over the punch-bowl of oblivion and vain glory, they celebrated their common victory.

Under advice, M. M. had acquiesced, pending her vigorous legal proceedings, in poor little Sally Nutter's occupying her bed-room in the house for a little while longer. The beleagured lady was comforted in her strait by the worthy priest, by honest Dr. Toole, and not least, by that handsome and stalworth nymph, the daring Magnolia. That blooming Amazon was twice on the point of provoking the dismal sorceress, who kept her court in the parlour of the Mills, to single combat. But fortune willed it otherwise, and each time the duel had been interrupted in its formal inception, and had gone no further than that spirited prologue in which the female sex so faithfully preserve the tradition of those thundering dialogues which invariably precede the manual business of the Homeric fray.

This was the eve of a great triumph and a memorable gala. Next morning, Sally Nutter was to be scalped, roasted, and eaten up, and the night was spent in savage whoopings, songs and dances. They had got a reprobate blind fiddler into the parlour, where their punch-bowl steamed--a most agreeable and roistering sinner, who sang indescribable songs to the quaver of his violin, and entertained the company with Saturnalian vivacity, jokes, gibes, and wicked stories. Larry Cleary, thou man of sin and music! methinks I see thee now. Thy ugly, cunning, pitted face, twitching and grinning; thy small, sightless orbs rolling in thy devil's merriment, and thy shining forehead red with punch.

In the kitchen things were not more orderly; M. M.'s lean maid was making merry with the bailiff, and a fat and dreadful trollop with one eye--tipsy, noisy, and pugnacious.

Poor little Sally Nutter and her maids kept dismal vigil in her bed-room. But that her neighbours and her lawyer would in no sort permit it, the truth is, the frightened little soul would long ago have made herself wings, and flown anywhere for peace and safety.

It is remarkable how long one good topic, though all that may be said upon it has been said many scores of times, will serve the colloquial purposes of the good folk of the kitchen or the nursery. There was scarcely half-an-hour in the day during which the honest maids and their worthy little mistress did not discuss the dreadful Mary Matchwell. They were one and all, though in different degrees, indescribably afraid of her. Her necromantic pretensions gave an indistinctness and poignancy to their horror. She seemed to know, by a diabolical intuition, what everybody was about--she was so noiseless and stealthy, and always at your elbow when you least expected. Those large dismal eyes of hers, they said, glared green in the dark like a cat's; her voice was sometimes so coarse and deep, and her strength so unnatural, that they were often on the point of believing her to be a man in disguise. She was such a blasphemer, too; and could drink what would lay a trooper under the table, and yet show it in nothing but the superintensity of her Satanic propensities. She was so malignant, and seemed to bear to all God's creatures so general a malevolence, that her consistent and superlative wickedness cowed and paralysed them. The enigma grew more horrible every day and night, and they felt, or fancied, a sort of influence stealing over them which benumbed their faculty of resistance, and altogether unstrung their nerves.

The grand compotation going on in the parlour waxed louder and wilder as the night wore on. There were unseen guests there, elate and inspiring, who sat with the revellers--phantoms who attend such wassail, and keep the ladle of the punch-bowl clinking, the tongue of the songster glib and tuneful, and the general mirth alive and furious. A few honest folk, with the gift of a second sight in such matters, discover their uncanny presence--leprous impurity, insane blasphemy, and the stony grin of unearthly malice--and keep aloof.

To heighten their fun, this jovial company bellowed their abominable ballads in the hall, one of them about 'Sally M'Keogh,' whose sweetheart was hanged, and who cut her throat with his silver-mounted razor, and they hooted their gibes up the stairs. And at last Mary Matchwell, provoked by the passive quietude of her victim, summoned the three revellers from the kitchen, and invaded the upper regions at their head--to the unspeakable terror of poor Sally Nutter--and set her demon fiddler a scraping, and made them and Dirty Davy's clerk dance a frantic reel on the lobby outside her bed-room door, locked and bolted inside, you may be sure.

In the midst of this monstrous festivity and uproar, there came, all on a sudden, a reverberating double-knock at the hall-door, so loud and long that every hollow, nook, and passage of the old house rang again. Loud and untimely as was the summons, it had a character, not of riot, but of alarm and authority. The uproar was swallowed instantly in silence. For a second only the light of the solitary candle shone upon the pale, scowling features of Mary Matchwell, and she quenched its wick against the wall. So the Walpurgis ended in darkness, and the company instinctively held their breaths.

There was a subdued hum of voices outside, and a tramping on the crisp gravel, and the champing and snorting of horses, too, were audible.

'Does none o' yez see who's in it?' said the blind fiddler.

'Hold your tongue,' hissed Mary Matchwell with a curse, and visiting the cunning pate of the musician with a smart knock of the candlestick.

'I wisht I had your thumb undher my grinder,' said the fiddler, through his teeth, 'whoever you are.'

But the rest was lost in another and a louder summons at the hall-door, and a voice of authority cried sternly,

'Why don't you open the door?--hollo! there--I can't stay here all night.'

'Open to him, Madam, I recommend you,' said Dirty Davy, in a hard whisper; 'will I go?'

'Not a step; not a word;' and Mary Matchwell griped his wrist.

But a window in Mrs. Nutter's room was opened, and Moggy's voice cried out--

'Don't go, Sir; for the love o' goodness, don't go. Is it Father Roach that's in it?'

''Tis I, woman--Mr. Lowe--open the door, I've a word or two to say.'

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XCII. THE WHER-WOLF

About a quarter of an hour before this, Mr. Paul Dangerfield was packing two trunks in his little parlour, and burning letters industriously in the fire, when his keen ear caught a sound at which a prophetic instinct within him vibrated alarm. A minute or two before he had heard a stealthy footstep outside. Then he heard the cook walk along the passage, muttering to herself, to the hall-door, where there arose a whispering. He glanced round his shoulder at the window. It was barred. Then lifting the table and its load lightly from before him, he stood erect, fronting the door, and listening intently. Two steps on tip-toe brought him to it, and he placed his fingers on the key. But he recollected a better way. There was one of those bolts that rise and fall perpendicularly in a series of rings, and bar or open the door by a touch to a rope connected with it by a wire and a crank or two.

He let the bolt softly drop into its place; the rope was within easy reach, and with his spectacles gleaming white on the door, he kept humming a desultory tune, like a man over some listless occupation.

Mr. Paul Dangerfield was listening intently, and stepped as softly as a cat. Then, with a motion almost elegant, he dropt his right hand lightly into his coat-pocket, where it lay still in ambuscade.

There came a puffing night air along the passage, and rattled the door; then a quiet shutting of the hall-door, and a shuffling and breathing near the parlour.

Dangerfield, humming his idle tune with a white and sharpening face, and a gaze that never swerved, extended his delicately-shaped fingers to the rope, and held it in his left hand. At this moment the door-handle was suddenly turned outside, and the door sustained a violent jerk.

'Who's there?' demanded the harsh, prompt accents of Dangerfield, suspending his minstrelsy. 'I'm busy.'

'Open the door--we've a piece of intelligence to gi'e ye.'

'Certainly--but don't be tedious.' (He drew the string, and the bolt shot up). 'Come in, Sir.'

The door flew open; several strange faces presented themselves on the threshold, and at the same instant, a stern voice exclaimed--

'Charles Archer, I arrest you in the king's name.'

The last word was lost in the stunning report of a pistol, and the foremost man fell with a groan. A second pistol already gleamed in Dangerfield's hand, and missed. With a spring like a tiger he struck the hesitating constable in the throat, laying his scalp open against the door-frame, and stamping on his face as he fell; and clutching the third by the cravat, he struck at his breast with a knife, already in his hand. But a pistol-shot from Lowe struck his right arm, scorching the cloth; the dagger and the limb dropped, and he staggered back, but recovered his equilibrium, and confronted them with a white skull-like grin, and a low 'ha, ha, ha!'

It was all over, and the silver spectacles lay shattered on the floor, like a broken talisman, and a pair of gray, strangely-set, wild eyes glared upon them.

The suddenness of his assault, his disproportioned physical strength and terrific pluck, for a second or two, confounded his adversaries; but he was giddy--his right arm dead by his side. He sat down in a chair confronting them, his empty right hand depending near to the floor, and a thin stream of blood already trickling down his knuckles, his face smiling, and shining whitely with the damp of anguish, and the cold low 'ha, ha, ha!' mocking the reality of the scene.

'Heinous old villain!' said Lowe, advancing on him.

'Well, gentlemen, I've shown fight, eh?--and now I suppose you want my watch, and money, and keys--eh?'

'Read the warrant, Sir,' said Lowe, sternly.

'Warrant! hey--warrant?--why, this is something new--will you be so good as to give me a glass of water--thank you--hold the paper a moment longer--I can't get this arm up.' With his left hand he set down the tumbler-glass, and then held up the warrant.

'Thank ye. Well, this warrant's for Charles Archer.'

'Alias Paul Dangerfield--if you read, Sir.'

'Thank you--yes--I see--that's news to me. Oh! Mr. Lowe--I did not see you--I haven't hurt you, I hope? Why the plague do you come at these robbing hours? We'd have all fared better had you come by daylight.'

Lowe did not take the trouble to answer him.

'I believe you've killed that constable in the exercise of his duty, Sir; the man's dead,' said Lowe, sternly.

'Another gloss on my text; why invade me like housebreakers?' said Dangerfield with a grim scoff.

'No violence, Sirrah, on your peril--the prisoner's wounded,' said Lowe, catching the other fellow by the collar and thrusting him back: he had gathered himself up giddily, and swore he'd have the scoundrel's life.

'Well, gentlemen, you have made a false arrest, and shot me while defending my person--you--four to one!--and caused the death of your accomplice; what more do you want?'

'You must accompany us to the county gaol, Sir; where I'll hand in your committal.'

'Dr. Toole, I presume, may dress my arm?'

'Certainly, Sir.'

'Good! what more?'

'There's a coach at the door, you'll please to step in, Sir.'

'Good, Sir, again; and now permit me to make a remark. I submit, Sir, to all this violence, and will go with you, under protest, and with a distinct warning to you, Mr. Lowe, and to your respectable body-guard of prize-fighters and ruffians--how many?--two, four, five, six, upon my honour, counting the gentleman upon the floor, and yourself, Sir--seven, pitted against one old fellow, ha, ha, ha!--a distinct warning, Sir, that I hold you accountable for this outrage, and all its consequences.'

'See to that man; I'm afraid he has killed him,', said Lowe.

He was not dead, however, but, as it seemed, suffering intense pain, and unable to speak except in a whisper. They got him up with his back to the wall.

'You issue a warrant against another man whom I believe to be dead, and execute it upon me--rather an Irish proceeding, Sir; but, perhaps, if not considered impertinent, you will permit me to enquire what is the particular offence which that other person has committed, and for which you have been pleased to shoot me?'

'You may read it on the warrant, Sir; 'tis for a murderous assault on Doctor Sturk.'

'Hey? better and better! why, I'm ready to pay five hundred guineas to make him speak; and you'll soon find how expensive a blunder you've committed, Sir,' observed Dangerfield, with a glare of menace through his hollow smile.

'I'll stand that hazard, Sir,' rejoined Lowe, with a confident sneer.

The dreadful sounds of the brief scuffle had called up the scared and curious servants. The smell of the pistol-smoke, the sight of blood, the pale faces of the angry and agitated men, and the spectacle of their master, mangled, ghastly, and smiling, affrighted Mrs. Jukes; and the shock and horror expressed themselves in tears and distracted lamentations.

'I must have your keys, Sir, if you please,' said Mr. Lowe.

'A word first--here, Jukes,' he addressed his housekeeper; 'stop that, you fool!' (she was blubbering loudly) ''tis a mistake, I tell you; I shall be back in an hour. Meanwhile, here are my keys; let Mr. Lowe, there, have them whenever he likes--all my papers, Sir (turning to Lowe). I've nothing, thank Heaven! to conceal. Pour some port wine into that large glass.'

And he drank it off, and looked better; he appeared before on the point of fainting.

'I beg pardon, gentlemen--will you drink some wine?'

'I thank you, no, Sir. You'll be good enough to give me those keys' (to the housekeeper).

'Give them--certainly,' said Dangerfield.

'Which of them opens the chest of drawers in your master's bed-chamber facing the window?' He glanced at Dangerfield, and thought that he was smiling wider, and his jaws looked hollower, as he repeated--

'If she does not know it, I'll be happy to show it you.'

With a surly nod, Mr. Lowe requited the prisoner's urbanity, and followed Mrs. Jukes into her master's bed-chamber; there was an old-fashioned oak chest of drawers facing the window.

'Where's Captain Cluffe?' enquired Lowe.

'He stopped at his lodgings, on the way,' answered the man; 'and said he'd be after us in five minutes.'

'Well, be good enough, Madam, to show me the key of these drawers.'

So he opened the drawers in succession, beginning at the top, and searching each carefully, running his fingers along the inner edges, and holding the candle very close, and grunting his disappointment as he closed and locked each in its order.

In the mean time, Doctor Toole was ushered into the little parlour, where sat the disabled master of the Brass Castle. The fussy little mediciner showed in his pale, stern countenance, a sense of the shocking reverse and transformation which the great man of the village had sustained.

'A rather odd situation you find me in, Doctor Toole,' said white Mr. Dangerfield, in his usual harsh tones, but with a cold moisture shining on his face; 'under duresse, Sir, in my own parlour, charged with murdering a gentleman whom I have spent five hundred guineas to bring to speech and life, and myself half murdered by a justice of the peace and his discriminating followers, ha, ha, ha! I'm suffering a little pain, Sir; will you be so good as to lend me your assistance?'

Toole proceeded to his task much more silently than was his wont, and stealing, from time to time, a glance at his noticeable patient with the wild gray eyes, as people peep curiously at what is terrible and repulsive.

''Tis broken, of course,' said Dangerfield.

'Why, yes, Sir,' answered Toole; 'the upper arm--a bullet, Sir. H'm, ha--yes; it lies only under the skin, Sir.'

And with a touch of the sharp steel it dropped into the doctor's fingers, and lay on a bloody bit of lint on the table by the wine-glasses. Toole applied his sticking-plaster, and extemporised a set of splints, and had the terrified cook at his elbow tearing up one of her master's shirts into strips for bandages; and so went on neatly and rapidly with his shifty task.

In the mean time, Cluffe had arrived. He was a little bit huffed and grand at being nailed as an evidence, upon a few words carelessly, or, if you will, confidentially dropped at his own mess-table, where Lowe chanced to be a guest; and certainly with no suspicion that his little story could in any way be made to elucidate the mystery of Sturk's murder. He would not have minded, perhaps, so much, had it not been that it brought to light and memory again the confounded ducking sustained by him and Puddock, and which, as an officer and a very fine fellow, he could not but be conscious was altogether an undignified reminiscence.

'Yes, the drawers were there, he supposed; those were the very ones; he stooped but little; it must have been the top one, or the next to it. The thing was about as long as a drumstick, like a piece of whip handle, with a spring in it; it bent this way and that, as he dried it in the towel, and at the butt it was ribbed round and round with metal rings--devilish heavy.'

So they examined the drawers again, took everything out of them, and Captain Cluffe, not thinking it a soldier-like occupation, tacitly declined being present at it, and, turning on his heel, stalked out of the room.

'What's become of it, Ma'am?' said Lowe, suddenly and sternly, turning upon Mrs. Jukes, and fixing his eyes on hers. There was no guilty knowledge there.

'He never had any such thing that I know of,' she answered stoutly; 'and nothing could be hid from me in these drawers, Sir; for I had the key, except when it lay in the lock, and it must ha' been his horsewhip; it has some rings like of leather round it, and he used to lay it on these drawers.'

Cluffe was, perhaps, a little bit stupid, and Lowe knew it; but it was the weakness of that good magistrate to discover in a witness for the crown many mental and moral attributes which he would have failed to recognise in him had he appeared for the prisoner.

'And where's that whip, now?' demanded Lowe.

'By the hall-door, with his riding-coat, Sir,' answered the bewildered housekeeper.

'Go on, if you please, Ma'am, and let me see it.'

So to the hall they went, and there, lying across the pegs from which Mr. Dangerfield's surtout and riding-coat depended, there certainly was a whip with the butt fashioned very much in the shape described by Captain Cluffe; but alas, no weapon--a mere toy--leather and cat-gut.

Lowe took it in his hand, and weighing it with a look of disgust and disappointment, asked rather impatiently--

'Where's Captain Cluffe?'

The captain had gone away.

'Very well, I see,' said Lowe, replacing the whip; 'that will do. The hound!'

Mr. Lowe now re-entered the little parlour, where the incongruous crowd, lighted up with Mr. Dangerfield's wax lights, and several kitchen candles flaring in greasy brass sticks, were assisting at the treatment of the master of the castle and the wounded constables.

'Well, Sir,' said Mr. Dangerfield, standing erect, with his coat sleeve slit, and his arm braced up in splints, stiff and helpless in a sling, and a blot of blood in his shirt sleeve, contrasting with the white intense smirk of menace upon his face; 'if you have quite done with my linen and my housekeeper, Sir, I'm ready to accompany you under protest, as I've already said, wherever you design to convey my mangled person. I charge you, Sir, with the safety of my papers and my other property which you constrain me to abandon in this house; and I think you'll rue this night's work to the latest hour of your existence.'

'I've done, and will do my duty, Sir,' replied Lowe, with dry decision.

'You've committed a d----d outrage; duty? ha, ha, ha!'

'The coach is at the door, hey?' asked Lowe

'I say, Sir,' continued Dangerfield, with a wolfish glare, and speaking in something like a suppressed shriek, 'you shall hear my warning and my protest, although it should occupy the unreasonable period of two whole minutes of your precious time. You half murder, and then arrest me for the offence of another man, and under the name of a man who has been dead and buried full twenty years. I can prove it; the eminent London house of Elrington Brothers can prove it; the handwriting of the late Sir Philip Drayton, Baronet, of Drayton Hall, and of two other respectable witnesses to a formal document, can prove it; dead and rotten--dust, Sir. And in your stupid arrogance, you blundering Irishman, you dare to libel me--your superior in everything--with his villainous name, and the imputation of his crimes--to violate my house at the dead of night--to pistol me upon my own floor--and to carry me off by force, as you purpose, to a common gaol. Kill Dr. Sturk, indeed! Are you mad, Sir? I who offered a fee of five hundred guineas even to bring him to speech! I who took the best medical advice in London on his behalf; I who have been his friend only too much with my Lord Castlemallard, and who, to stay his creditors, and enable his family to procure for him the best medical attendance, and to afford him, in short, the best chance of recovery and life, have, where you neither lent or bestowed a shilling--poured out my money as profusely as you, Sir, have poured out my blood, every drop of which, Sir, shall cost you a slice of your estate. But even without Sturk's speaking one word, I've evidence which escaped you, conceited blockhead, and which, though the witness is as mad almost as yourself, will yet be enough to direct the hand of justice to the right man. There is a Charles, Sir, whom all suspect, who awaits trial, judgment, and death in this case, the wretched Charles Nutter of the Mills, Sir, whose motive is patent, and on whose proceedings a light will, I believe, be thrown by the evidence of Zekiel Irons, whatever that evidence may be worth.'

'I don't care to tell you, Sir, that 'tis partly on the evidence of that same Zekiel Irons that I've arrested you,' said Mr. Justice Lowe.

'Zekiel Irons, me! What Zekiel Irons charge me with the crime which he was here, not two hours since, fastening on oath upon Charles Nutter! Why, Sir, he asked me to bring him to your residence in the morning, that he might swear to the information which he repeated in my presence, and of which there's a note in that desk. 'Pon my life, Sir, 'tis an agreeable society, this; bedlam broke loose--the mad directing the mad, and both falling foul of the sane. One word from Doctor Sturk, Sir, will blast you, so soon as, please Heaven, he shall speak.'

'He has spoken, Sir,' replied Lowe, whose angry passions were roused by the insults of Dangerfield, and who had, for the moment, lost his customary caution.

'Ha!' cried Dangerfield, with a sort of gasp, and a violent smirk, the joyousness of which was, however, counteracted by a lurid scowl and a wonderful livid glare in his wild eyes; 'ha! he has? Bravo, Sir, bravissimo!' and he smirked wider and wider, and beat his uninjured hand upon the table, like a man applauding the denouement of a play. 'Well, Sir; and notwithstanding his declaration, you arrest me upon the monstrous assertion of a crazy clerk, you consummate blockhead!'

''Twon't do, Sir, you sha'n't sting me by insult into passion; nor frighten me by big words and big looks into hesitation. My duty's clear, and be the consequences what they may, I'll carry the matter through.'

'Frighten you! ha, ha, ha!' and Dangerfield glared at his bloody shirt-sleeve, and laughed a chilly sneer; 'no, Sir, but I'll punish you, with Doctor Sturk's declaration against the babble of poor Zekiel Irons. I'll quickly close your mouth.'

'Sir, I never made it a practice yet to hide evidence from a prisoner. Why should I desire to put you out of the world, if you're innocent? Doctor Sturk, Sir, has denounced you distinctly upon oath. Charles Archer, going by the name of Paul Dangerfield, and residing in this house, called the "Brass Castle," as the person who attempted to murder him in the Butcher's Wood.'

'What, Sir? Doctor Sturk denounce me! Fore heaven, Sir--it seems to me you've all lost your wits. Doctor Sturk!--? Doctor Sturk charge me with having assaulted him! why--curse it, Sir--it can't possibly be--you can't believe it; and, if he said it, the man's raving still.'

'He has said it, Sir.'

'Then, Sir, in the devil's name, didn't it strike you as going rather fast to shoot me on my own hearth-stone--me, knowing all you do about me--with no better warrant than the talk of a man with a shattered brain, awakening from a lethargy of months? Sir, though the laws afford no punishment exemplary enough for such atrocious precipitation, I promise you I'll exact the last penalty they provide; and now, Sir, take me where you will; I can't resist. Having shot me, do what you may to interrupt my business; to lose my papers and accounts; to prevent my recovery, and to blast my reputation--Sir, I shall have compensation for all.'

So saying, Dangerfield, with his left hand, clapt his cocked hat on, and with a ghastly smile nodded a farewell to Mrs. Jukes, who, sobbing plentifully, had placed his white surtout, cloakwise over his shoulders, buttoning it about his throat. The hall-door stood open; the candles flared in the night air, and with the jaunty, resolute step of a man marching to victory and revenge, he walked out, and lightly mounted to his place. She saw the constables get in, and one glimpse more of the white grim face she knew so well, the defiant smirk, the blood-stained shirt-sleeve, and the coach-door shut. At the crack of the whip and the driver's voice, the horses scrambled into motion, the wheels revolved, and the master of the Brass Castle and the equipage glided away like a magic lantern group, from before the eyes and the candle of the weeping Mrs. Jukes.

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Chapter XCIII

IN WHICH DOCTOR TOOLE AND DIRTY DAVY CONFER IN THE BLUE-ROOM.

The coach rumbled along toward Dublin at a leisurely jog. Notwithstanding the firm front Mr. Lowe had presented, Dangerfield's harangue had affected him unpleasantly. Cluffe's little bit of information respecting the instrument he had seen the prisoner lay up in his drawer on the night of the murder, and which corresponded in description with the wounds traced upon Sturk's skull, seemed to have failed. The handle of Dangerfield's harmless horsewhip, his mind misgave him, was all that would come of that piece of evidence; and it was impossible to say there might not be something in all that Dangerfield had uttered. Is it a magnetic force, or a high histrionic vein in some men, that makes them so persuasive and overpowering, and their passion so formidable? But, with Dangerfield's presence, the effect of his plausibilities and his defiance passed away. The pointed and consistent evidence of Sturk, perfectly clear as he was upon every topic he mentioned, and the corroborative testimony of Irons, equally distinct and damning--the whole case blurred and disjointed, and for a moment grown unpleasantly hazy and uncertain in the presence of that white sorcerer, readjusted itself now that he was gone, and came out in iron and compact relief--impregnable.

'Run boys, one of you, and open the gate of the Mills,' said Lowe, whose benevolence, such as it was, expanded in his intense feeling of relief. ''Twill be good news for poor Mistress Nutter. She'll see her husband in the morning.'

So he rode up to the Mills, and knocked his alarm, as we have seen and heard, and there told his tidings to poor Sally Nutter, vastly to the relief of Mistress Matchwell, the Blind Fiddler, and even of the sage, Dirt Davy; for there are persons upon the earth to whom a sudden summons of any sort always sounds like a call to judgment, and who, in any such ambiguous case, fill up the moments of suspense with wild conjecture, and a ghastly summing-up against themselves; can it be this--or that--or the other old, buried, distant villainy, that comes back to take me by the throat?

Having told his good news in a few dry words to Mrs. Sally, Mr. Lowe superadded a caution to the dark lady down stairs, in the face of which she, being quite reassured by this time, grinned and snapped her fingers, and in terms defied, and even cursed the tall magistrate without rising from the chair in which she had re-established herself in the parlour. He mounted his hunter again, and followed the coach at a pace which promised soon to bring him up with that lumbering conveyance; for Mr. Lowe was one of those public officers who love their work, and the tenant of the Brass Castle was no common prisoner, and well worth seeing, though at some inconvenience, safely into his new lodging.

Next morning, you may be sure, the news was all over the town of Chapelizod. All sorts of cross rumours and wild canards, of course, were on the wind, and every new fact or fib borne to the door-step with the fresh eggs, or the morning's milk and butter, was carried by the eager servant into the parlour, and swallowed down with their toast and tea by the staring company.

Upon one point all were agreed: Mr. Paul Dangerfield lay in the county gaol, on a charge of having assaulted Dr. Sturk with intent to kill him. The women blessed themselves, and turned pale. The men looked queer when they met one another. It was altogether so astounding--Mr. Dangerfield was so rich--so eminent--so moral--so charitable--so above temptation. It had come out that he had committed, some said three, others as many as fifteen secret murders. All the time that the neighbours had looked on his white head in church as the very standard of probity, and all the prudential virtues rewarded, they were admiring and honouring a masked assassin. They had been bringing into their homes and families an undivulged and terrible monster. The wher-wolf had walked the homely streets of their village. The ghoul, unrecognised, had prowled among the graves of their church-yard. One of their fairest princesses, the lady of Belmont, had been on the point of being sacrificed to a vampire. Horror, curiosity, and amazement, were everywhere.

Charles Nutter, it was rumoured, was to be discharged on bail early, and it was mooted in the club that a deputation of the neighbours should ride out to meet him at the boundaries of Chapelizod, welcome him there with an address, and accompany him to the Mills as a guard of honour; but cooler heads remembered the threatening and unsettled state of things at that domicile, and thought that Nutter would, all things considered, like a quiet return best; which view of the affair was, ultimately, acquiesced in.

For Mary Matchwell, at the Mills, the tidings which had thrown the town into commotion had but a solitary and a selfish interest. She was glad that Nutter was exculpated. She had no desire that the king should take his worldly goods to which she intended helping herself: otherwise he might hang or drown for ought she cared. Dirty Davy, too, who had quaked about his costs, was greatly relieved by the turn which things had taken; and the plain truth was that, notwithstanding his escape from the halter, things looked very black and awful for Charles Nutter and his poor little wife, Sally.

Doctor Toole, at half-past nine, was entertaining two or three of the neighbours, chiefly in oracular whispers, by the fire in the great parlour of the Phoenix, when he was interrupted by Larry, the waiter, with--

'Your horse is at the door, docther' (Toole was going into town, but was first to keep an appointment at Doctor Sturk's with Mr. Lowe), 'and,' continued Larry, 'there's a fat gentleman in the blue room wants to see you, if you plase.'

'Hey?--ho! let's see then,' said little Toole, bustling forth with an important air. 'The blue room, hey?'

When he opened the door of that small apartment there stood a stout, corpulent, rather seedy and dusty personage, at the window, looking out and whistling with his hat on. He turned lazily about as Toole entered, and displayed the fat and forbidding face of Dirty Davy.

'Oh! I thought it might be professionally, Sir,' said Toole, a little grandly; for he had seen the gentleman before, and had, by this time, found out all about him, and perceived he had no chance of a fee.

'It is professionally, Sir,' quoth Dirty Davy, 'if you'll be so obleeging as to give me five minutes.'

With that amiable egotism which pervades human nature, it will be observed, each gentleman interpreted 'professionally' as referring to his own particular calling.

So Toole declared himself ready and prepared to do his office, and Dirty Davy commenced.

'You know me, I believe, Sir?'

'Mr. David O'Reegan, as I believe,' answered Toole.

'The same, Sir,' replied Davy. 'I'm on my way, Sir, to the Mills, where my client, Mrs. Nutter (here Toole uttered a disdainful grunt), resides; and I called at your house, doctor, and they sent me here; and I am desirous to prove to you, Sir, as a friend of Miss Sarah Harty, styling herself Mrs. Nutter, that my client's rights are clear and irresistible, in order that you may use any interest you may have with that ill-advised faymale--and I'm told she respects your advice and opinion highly--to induce her to submit without further annoyance; and I tell you, in confidence, she has run herself already into a very sarious predicament.'

'Well, Sir, I'll be happy to hear you,' answered Toole.

''Tis no more, Sir, than I expected from your well-known candour,' replied Dirty Davy, with the unctuous politeness with which he treated such gentlemen as he expected to make use of. 'Now, Sir, I'll open our case without any reserve or exaggeration to you, Sir, and that, Doctor Toole, is what I wouldn't do to many beside yourself. The facts is in a nutshell. We claim our conjugal rights. Why, Sir? Because, Sir, we married the oppugnant, Charles Nutter, gentleman, of the Mills, and so forth, on the 7th of April, Anno Domini, 1750, in the Church of St. Clement Danes, in London, of which marriage this, Sir, is a verbatim copy of the certificate. Now, Sir, your client--I mane your friend--Misthress Mary Harty, who at present affects the state and usurps the rights of marriage against my client--the rightful Mrs. Nutter, performed and celebrated a certain pretended marriage with the same Charles Nutter, in Chapelizod Church, on the 4th of June, 1758, seven years and ten months, wanting three days, subsequent to the marriage of my client. Well, Sir, I see exactly, Sir, what you'd ask: "Is the certificate genuine?"'

Toole grunted an assent.

'Well, Sir, upon that point I have to show you this,' and he handed him a copy of Mr. Luke Gamble's notice served only two days before, to the effect that, having satisfied himself by enquiring on the spot of the authenticity of the certificate of the marriage of Charles Nutter of the Mills, and so forth, to Mary Duncan, his client did not mean to dispute it. 'And, Sir, further, as we were preparing evidence in support of my client's and her maid's affidavit, to prove her identity with the Mary Duncan in question, having served your client--I mane, Sir, asking your pardon again--your friend, with a notice that such corroboratory evidence being unnecessary, we would move the court, in case it were pressed for, to give us the costs of procuring it, Mr. Luke Gamble fortwith struck, on behalf of his client, and admitted the sufficiency of the evidence. Now, Sir, I mention these things, not as expecting you to believe them upon my statement, you see, but simply to enquire of Mr. Gamble whether they be true or no; and if true, Sir, upon his admission, then, Sir, I submit we're entitled to your good offices, and the judicious inthurfarence of the Rev. Mr. Roach, your respectable priest, Sir.'

'My friend, Sir, not my priest. I'm a Churchman, Sir, as everybody knows.'

'Of course, Sir--I ask your pardon again, Doctor Toole--Sir, your friend to induce your client---friend I mane again, Sir--Mistress Sarah Harty, formerly housekeeper of Mr. Charless (so he pronounced it) Nutther, gentleman, of the Mills, and so forth, to surrendher quiet and peaceable possession of the premises and chattels, and withdraw from her tortuous occupation dacently, and without provoking the consequences, which must otherwise follow in the sevarest o' forms;' or, as he pronounced it, 'fawrums.'

'The sevarest o' grandmothers. Humbug and flummery! Sir,' cried Toole, most unexpectedly incensed, and quite scarlet.

'D'ye mane I'm a liar, Sir? Is that what you mane?' demanded Dirty Davy, suddenly, like the doctor, getting rid of his ceremonious politeness.

'I mane what I mane, and that's what I mane,' thundered Toole, diplomatically.

'Then, tell your friend to prepare for consequences,' retorted Dirty Davy, with a grin.

'And make my compliments to your client, or conjuror, or wife, or whatever she is, and tell her that whenever she wants her dirty work done, there's plenty of other Dublin blackguards to be got to do it, without coming to Docther Thomas Toole, or the Rev. Father Roach.'

Which sarcasm he delivered with killing significance, but Dirty Davy had survived worse thrusts than that.

'She's a conjuror, is she? I thank you, Sir.'

'You're easily obliged, Sir,' says Toole.

'We all know what that manes. And these documents sworn to by my client and myself, is a pack o' lies! Betther and betther! I thank ye again, Sir.'

'You're welcome, my honey,' rejoined Toole, affectionately.

'An' you live round the corner. I know your hall-door, Sir--a light brown, wid a brass knocker.'

'Which is a fine likeness iv your own handsome face, Sir,' retorted Toole.

'An' them two documents, Sir, is a fabrication and a forgery, backed up wid false affidavits?' continued Mr. O'Reegan.

'Mind that, Larry,' says the doctor, with a sudden inspiration addressing the waiter, who had peeped in; 'he admits that them two documents you see there, is forgeries, backed up with false affidavits; you heard him say so, and I'll call you to prove it.'

'You lie!' said Dirty Davy, precipitately, for he was quite disconcerted at finding his own sophistical weapons so unexpectedly turned against him.

'You scum o' the airth!' cried Toole, hitting him, with his clenched fist, right upon the nose, so vigorous a thump, that his erudite head with a sonorous crash hopped off the wainscot behind it; 'you lying scullion!' roared the doctor, instantaneously repeating the blow, and down went Davy, and down went the table with dreadful din, and the incensed doctor bestrode his prostrate foe with clenched fists and flaming face, and his grand wig all awry, and he panting and scowling.

'Murdher, murdher, murdher!' screamed Dirty Davy, who was not much of a Spartan, and relished nothing of an assault and battery but the costs and damages.

'You--you--you'

'Murdher--help--help--murdher--murdher!'

'Say it again, you cowardly, sneaking, spying viper; say it again, can't you?'

It was a fine tableau, and a noble study of countenance and attitude.

'Sich a bloody nose I never seen before,' grinned Larry rubbing his hands over the exquisite remembrance. 'If you only seed him, flat on his back, the great ould shnake, wid his knees and his hands up bawling murdher; an' his big white face and his bloody nose in the middle, like nothin' in nature, bedad, but the ace iv hearts in a dirty pack.'

How they were separated, and who the particular persons that interposed, what restoratives were resorted to, how the feature looked half an hour afterwards, and what was the subsequent demeanour of Doctor Toole, upon the field of battle, I am not instructed; my letters stop short at the catastrophe, and run off to other matters.

Doctor Toole's agitations upon such encounters did not last long. They blew off in a few thundering claps of bravado and defiance in the second parlour of the Phoenix, where he washed his hands and readjusted his wig and ruffles, and strutted forth, squaring his elbows, and nodding and winking at the sympathising waiters in the inn hall; and with a half grin at Larry--

'Well, Larry, I think I showed him Chapelizod, hey?' said the doctor, buoyantly, to that functionary, and marched diagonally across the broad street toward Sturk's house, with a gait and a countenance that might have overawed an army.

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