Читать книгу Tempest-Driven: A Romance (Vol. 2 of 3) - Dowling Richard - Страница 2

For a moment the young man looked at the other in amazement and doubt. But it was impossible to resist for any great length of time the conviction that O'Hanlon had spoken sincerely. O'Hanlon himself looked troubled, scared, affrighted, as though scarcely able, and wholly unwilling, to believe his own words. O'Brien was the first to recover his composure.

"I will not," he said, "question what you say; I will go so far as to assure you I am fully convinced you saw the ghost of that unhappy man. You want me to tell you a story which, as I said, is a long one, and I want you to tell me your story at length. Dine with me at 'The Munster' this evening at seven, and we can chat the matter over."

The reference to the hotel and dinner drew the mind of the lawyer back once more into its ordinary groove. With a shrug of his shoulders and a forced laugh, he said:

"Right-you are right, O'Brien. This is not a good time or place for our little private theatricals. I'll join you with pleasure at seven. Here I have been holding you, which is an assault, and detaining you against your will, which is false imprisonment-both punishable by law. I ought to be too old a stager to be guilty of either offence. But I cry mercy, and will do my best to wash away my offences in your claret this evening. Till then, adieu."

So they parted.

O'Brien resolved to stroll about until it was time for dinner. He knew every street, almost every house in Kilbarry. He had lived in the neighbourhood the most part of his life. He had no relative alive, nor any place he could call home. When in this neighbourhood he usually stopped at "The Munster"; but of late years he had spent much of his time in London. He owned the land close to which his salmon weirs stood on the Bawn; but there was no house for him on them-only a few rude, primitive farmers' houses.

He was now thirty years of age, and had been a rover most of his life. He had always made it a point to spend a month or two of the summer at Kilcash, a sea-bathing and fishing village ten miles by road from Kilbarry. Here it was that he learned what he knew of the Davenports, for Mr. Davenport's place, Kilcash House, was only a mile inland from the village whose name it bore. He had been personally acquainted with the Davenports, and had often seen them, and knew all about them.

O'Hanlon's words, now that he was from under the influence of the manner which accompanied them, filled him with wonder more than anything else. He was only nineteen or twenty at the time that man Fahey was drowned-or, rather, committed suicide-and he could not recall all the particulars of the case. When it occurred, he had been living with his widowed mother at Kilbarry, and had not, like other young men of the city, gone out to the scene of the tragedy. He knew every nook of the coast for miles around Kilcash. It was a bold, bad, rock-bound coast save at the village, where there was a bay and a strand fatal to ships. He remembered that, from the first news of Fahey's death, there had not been the least hope of recovering the man's body. It was a tradition of the coast that the body of no one who had been drowned there was ever recovered. Who or what Fahey was he did not know, and so he resolved to banish the subject from his mind until O'Hanlon reopened it that evening.

The great feature of this day was O'Hanlon's assurance that his weirs would not be torn up. If that were true, and Alfred Paulton recovered, then he would have to think of building a house somewhere near the weirs for-Madge.

He got back to the hotel a little before seven, and wrote a letter to Mr. Paulton, announcing his safe arrival, asking for news of Alfred, and sending his kindest regards to the others in the order of their seniority. It was a little comfort to be able to send even kind regards to Madge through her father. But if he had the commissioners by the collective throat at that moment, he could have throttled them with great comfort to himself, and an assured consciousness that he was a benefactor to mankind.

Seven o'clock brought O'Hanlon and the dinner. The latter was served in a small, snug, private room overlooking the broad white river. When at length they were alone and had lighted their cigars, the guest reverted to the Davenport affair, and asked for the full and true history of the case as far as it was known to Jerry.

Then O'Hanlon's turn came:

"Since I saw you I have hunted up and glanced over the documents left in my hands by the dead man Fahey. They are, I find, unintelligible, as far as my lights now lead me, and I think we may dismiss them from our minds for the present. I shall, however, keep them safe. I will say nothing more of them than that in whatever portions of them Mr. Davenport is mentioned, they always speak of him in terms of gratitude and respect. It is plain that at one time the relations between these two men were very close, but of the nature of these relations there is no hint. At the time of the death of Fahey he had been hovering about Kilcash for months. No one exactly knew who or what he was. He had taken a mean lodging in the village, and given out that he was poor, and had been ordered to the seaside for his health, and recommended to get as much sea air and boating as possible. He often went out with the fishermen, and at last bought a small punt, a mere cockleshell, and kept it for his own exclusive use. In this he put off at all times of the day and night, and the fishermen predicted that he would be drowned some time or other; and so he was, but not in the way anticipated by the people of the village. They made sure his boat would be swamped one day, and that would be the end of him. An additional reason for their fears was that he never swam, and said he was too old to learn.

"On the day of his death he was followed from a distance by two policemen in plain clothes. They watched him leave the cottage in which he lived at Kilcash, take to the downs, and make straight for Kilcash House. They were not able to get near him until he had just gained the house. He then became aware that he was followed, and ran straight for the cliffs. The rest I have already told you. There never was an inquest, for, as you may know, the bodies of people drowned there are never found.

"A week ago I was in the neighbourhood of Kilcash House. I had left my horse and car at Kilcash, and was walking over the downs to the village, when on the cliffs, just over the Black Rock, I cast my eyes down, and there, on that large shelf of rock, as plain as I see you now, I saw him. The same coat, the same Scotch bonnet, the same trousers-not a thing altered since the first day he stood in my office, going on eleven years ago."

"What time of the day was it?"

"Broad day. About three o'clock in the afternoon."

"It must have been some one of about his stature dressed identically."

"Must it?" cried the lawyer, scornfully. "You have not heard all yet. I made up my mind to be sure. I ran-I ran to the top of the path, and went down to the rocks below. There was nobody there. You know the place. Tell me how a living man could get away alive, except up the path that I went down? It was Michael Fahey's ghost, as sure as I am a living man."

"I confess," said Jerry, in perplexity, "I cannot explain away what you say, except upon the supposition that you were suffering from delusion. How do you account for the appearance yourself?"

"This is my way of reasoning it out. I either saw the ghost of Michael Fahey or I did not. If I did, I account for it by the fact that Davenport and he were associated together in something while they were alive, and now that both are dead, one of them has to come back and see that something left undone-a wrong unrighted, a debt unpaid, an explanation unmade-is put straight."

"But why should the one be Fahey? And why should it be at the Black Rock? And why should he appear to you?"

"The first, because I had nothing to do with Mr. Davenport; the second, because seeing Fahey's ghost there would recall to my mind most vividly the circumstance of his death; and the third, because I hold the documents to which I have referred."

"But don't you think the fact of Davenport's name having been brought before the public so lately, and that you recollected the documents you held belonging to Fahey, and that you looked over the cliff at the very spot where he lost his life, may all have helped to impose upon your imagination?"

"Sir, an attorney of my years does not know the meaning of the word imagination. You may say I am mad if you like, but don't attribute imagination to me, or I shall break down altogether. O'Brien, do you mean to say seriously that you take me for a crazy young poet? Great heavens, sir, it can't have come to that with me in my declining years!"

"But, then, what did you see?"

"A ghost-Fahey's ghost."

"You don't mean to tell me seriously you believe in ghosts!"

"I mean to tell you most emphatically I do not."

"Then what is your contention?"

"That I, being one who does not believe in ghosts, saw the ghost of Michael Fahey this day week at the Black Rock."

"I can make nothing of your position."

"I can make nothing of my position either. I am beginning to think I shall lose my reason. You are the first person I spoke to on the subject. Don't say anything about it to a soul. I have no wife to blab to, and I look on you as a friend. I had hoped you would have brought me news from London-some facts not published in the papers, and bearing on this branch of the case. But you haven't. If you let this get abroad, some of my kind friends will get me locked up. I got old Coolahan locked up because he kept on saying that farthings were as valuable as sovereigns because they had the Queen's head on them."

O'Brien was sorely puzzled. It did not now look like a matter which ought to be laughed at. Either O'Hanlon had seen the ghost of this man, or he was losing his reason. There was one other possibility. He said: "I am not going to make light of what you have told me, or communicate it to a soul. There is one other question-a wild one, I own. I wonder have you thought of it?"

"What is it? If you have thought of anything which has escaped me, you are a very Daniel come to judgment."

"Could it be that man was not really drowned ten or eleven years ago? Either the police may have been mistaken in their man, and the wrong man may have leaped into the hole, or Fahey may have leaped in and by some miracle escaped."

"Yes, I have thought of both possibilities. The only answer will dispose of both. The clothes seen ten or eleven, years ago, and those seen this day week, were identical."

"What! You identify them?"

"Yes, if" – with a shudder-"those of last week could be produced and handled. O'Brien, I'm not afraid of ghosts, but I begin to be afraid of myself, now that I have begun to see them."

"But after such a lapse of time, and at a long distance, as from the top of the cliff to the plain of rock below. It must be a hundred feet."

"It is a hundred and twenty feet from the brow of the cliff to where the cliff meets the sloping rock, and the figure was about one hundred and seventy or eighty feet from the base. I measured both roughly. That gives between seventy and eighty yards from my eye. Now, ten years ago, and this day week, the colour, cut, and material of the coat and trousers were identical, and both times there was a circular green patch on the right elbow of the coat, about the size of my palm; and both times the right leg of the trousers had evidently been torn up as high as the knee-joint behind, and rudely stitched by an unskilful hand. I'm not," he said, looking timidly around, "afraid of ghosts, but I am of men. Keep my secret, O'Brien, if you care for me."

"You may swear by me. By-the-way, I have more time than you. Let me see those documents you have, and I'll try if I can puzzle anything out of them."

"With the greatest pleasure and thankfulness."

And so the two parted.