The O’Mahony sat once more in the living-room of his castle—sat very much at his ease, with a cigar between his teeth, and his feet comfortably stretched out toward the blazing bank of turf on the stone hearth.
A great heap of papers lay upon the table at his elbow—the contents of O’Daly’s strong-box, the key to which he had brought with him from the vessel—but not a single band of red tape had been untied. The O’Mahony’s mood for investigation had exhausted itself in the work of getting the documents out. His hands were plunged deep into his trousers’ pockets now, and he gazed into the glowing peat.
His home-coming had been a thing to warm the most frigid heart. His own beat delightedly still at the thought of it. From time to time there reached his ears from the square without a vague braying noise, the sound of which curled his lips into the semblance of a grin. It seemed so droll to him that Muirisc should have a band—a fervent half-dozen of amateurs, with ancient and battered instruments which successive generations of regimental musicians bad pawned at Skibbereen or Bantry, and on which they played now, neither by note nor by ear, but solely by main strength.
The tumult of discord which they produced was dreadful, but The O’Mahony liked it. He had been pleasurably touched, too, by the wild enthusiasm of greeting with which Muirisc had met him when he disclosed himself on the main street, walking up to the police-station with Major Snaffle and Jerry. All the older inhabitants he knew, and shook hands with. The sight of younger people among them whom he did not know alone kept alive the recollection that he had been absent twelve long years. Old and young alike, and preceded by the hurriedly summoned band, they had followed him in triumphal procession when he came down the street again, with the liberated Jerry and Linsky at his heels. They were still outside, cheering and madly bawling their delight whenever the bandsmen stopped to take breath. Jerry, Linsky and the one-armed Malachy were out among them, broaching a cask of porter from the castle cellar; Mrs. Fergus and Mrs. Sullivan were in the kitchen cutting up bread and meat to go with the drink.
No wonder there were cheers! Small matter for marvel was it, either, that The O’Mahony smiled as he settled down still more lazily in his arm-chair and pushed his feet further toward the fire.
Presently he must go and fetch O’Daly and Kate from the vessel—or no, when Jerry came in he would send him on that errand. After his long journey The O’Mahony was tired and sleepy—all the more as he had sat up most of the night, out on deck, talking with O’Daly. What a journey it had been! Post-haste from far away, barbarous Armenia, where the faithful Malachy had found him in command of a Turkish battalion, resting after the task of suppressing a provincial rebellion. Home they had wended their tireless way by Constantinople and Malta and mistral-swept Marseilles, and thence by land across to Havre. Here, oddly enough, he had fallen in with the French merchant to whom he had sold the Hen Hawk twelve years before—the merchant’s son had served with him in the Army of the Loire three years later, and was his friend—and he had been able to gratify the sudden fantastic whim of returning as he had departed in the quaint, flush-decked, yawl-rigged old craft. It all seemed like a dream!
“If your honor plazes, there’s a young gintleman at the dure—a Misther O’Mahony, from America—w’u’d be afther having a word wid ye.”
It was the soft voice of good old Mrs. Sullivan that spoke.
The O’Mahony woke with a start from his complacent day-dream. He drew his feet in, sat upright, and bit hard on his cigar for a minute in scowling reflection.
“Show him in,” he said, at last, and then straightened himself truculently to receive this meddling new-comer. He fastened a stern and hostile gaze upon the door.
Bernard seemed to miss entirely the frosty element in his reception. He advanced with a light step, hat in hand, to the side of the hearth, and held one hand with familiar nonchalance over the blaze, while he nodded amiably at his frowning host.
“I skipped off rather suddenly this morning,” he said, with a pleasant half-smile, “because I didn’t seem altogether needful to the party for the minute, and I had something else to do. I’ve dropped in now to say that I’m as glad as anybody here to see you back again. I’ve only been about Muirisc a few weeks, but I already feel as if I’d been born and brought up here. And so I’ve come around to do my share of the welcoming.”
“You seem to have made yourself pretty much at home, sir,” commented The O’Mahony, icily.
“You mean putting O’Daly down in the family vault?” queried the young man. “Yes, perhaps it was making a little free, but, you see, time pressed. I couldn’t be in two places at once, now, could I? And while I went off to settle the convent business, there was no telling what O’Daly mightn’t be up to if we left him loose; so I thought it was best to take the liberty of shutting him up. You found him there, I judge, and took him out.”
The O’Mahony nodded curtly, and eyed his visitor with cool disfavor.
“As long as you’re here, sir, you might as well take a seat,” he said, after a minute’s pause. “That ’s it. Now, sir, first of all, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me who you are and what the devil you mean, sir, by coming here and meddling in this way with other people’s private affairs.”
“Curious, isn’t it,” remarked the young man from Houghton County, blandly, “how we Americans lug in the word ‘sir’ every other breath? They tell me no Englishman ever uses it at all.”
The O’Mahony stirred in his chair.
“I’m not as easy-going a man or as good-natured as I used to be, my young friend,” he said, with an affectation of calm, through which ran a threatening note.
“I shouldn’t have thought it,” protested Bernard. “You seemed the pink of politeness out there in the graveyard this morning. But I suppose years of campaigning—”
“See here!” the other interposed abruptly. “Don’t fool with me. It’s a risky game! Unless you want trouble, stop monkeying and answer my question straight: Who are you?”
The young man had ceased smiling. His face had all at once become very grave, and he was staring at The O’Mahony with wide-open, bewildered eyes.
“True enough!” he gasped, after his gaze had been so protracted that the other half rose from his seat in impatient anger. “Why—yes, sir! I’ll swear to it—well—this does beat all!”
“Your cheek beats all!” broke in The O’Mahony, springing to his feet in a gust of choleric heat.
Bernard stretched forth a restraining hand.
“Wait a minute,” he said, in evidently sincere anxiety not to be misunderstood, and picking his words slowly as he went along, “hold on—I’m not fooling! Please sit down again. I’ve got something important, and mighty queer, too, to say to you.”
The O’Mahony, with a grunt of reluctant acquiescing, sat down once more. The two men looked at each other with troubled glances, the one vaguely suspicious, the other still round-eyed with surprise.
“You ask who I am,” Bernard began. “I’ll tell you. I was a little shaver—oh, six or seven years old—just at the beginning of the War. My father enlisted when they began raising troops. The recruiting tent in our town was in the old hay-market by the canal bridge. It seems to me, now, that they must have kept my father there for weeks alter he ’d put his uniform on. I used to go there every day, I know, with my mother to see him. But there was another soldier there—this is the queer thing about a boy’s memory—I remember him ever so much better than I do my own father. It’s—let’s see—eighteen years now, but I’d know him to this day, wherever I met him. He carried a gun, and he walked all day long up and down in front of the tent, like a polar bear in his cage. We boys thought he was the most important man in the whole army. Some of them knew him—he belonged to our section originally, it seems—and they said he’d been in lots of wars before. I can see him now, as plainly as—as I see you. His name was Tisdale—Zeb, I think it was—no, Zeke Tisdale.”
Perhaps The O’Mahony changed color. He sat with his back to the window, and the ruddy glow from the peat blaze made it impossible to tell. But he did not take his sharp gray eye off Bernard’s face, and it never so much as winked.
“Very interesting,” he said, “but it doesn’t go very far toward explaining wh............