Priscilla's Spies. George A. Birmingham
of them. Mannix’s anger rose to boiling point at this addition of calculated insult to deliberate injury. He struggled to his feet, intending then and there to speak some plain truths to his assailant. He was immediately aware of a pain in his ankle. A pain so sharp as to make walking quite impossible. The sailor who carried his bag sympathised with him and helped him into the train. He felt the injured ankle carefully and came to the conclusion that it was sprained.
Between Kingstown and Dublin Mannix arranged plans for handing over his assailant to the police. That seemed to him the most dignified form of revenge open to him. He was fully determined to take it. Unfortunately his train carried him, slowly indeed, but inexorably, to the station from which another train, the one in which he was to travel westwards to Rosnacree, took its departure. The elderly gentleman and the lady with the insolent manner, whose destination was Dublin itself, had left Kingstown in a different train. Mannix saw no more of them and so was unable to get them handcuffed.
Two porters helped him along the platform at Broadstone Station and settled him in a corner of the breakfast carriage of the westward going mail. A very sympathetic attendant offered to find out whether there was a doctor in the train. It turned out that there was not. The sympathetic attendant, with the help of a young ticket-collector in a neat uniform offered to do the best he could for his ankle. The cook joined them, leaving a quantity of bacon hissing in his pan. He was a man of some surgical knowledge.
“It’s hot water,” he said, “that’s best for the like of that.”
“It could be,” said the ticket-collector, “that it’s broke on him.”
“Cold water,” said Mannix firmly.
“With a sup of whiskey in it,” said the attendant
“If it’s broke,” said the ticket-collector, “and you go putting whiskey and water on it it’s likely that the young gentleman will be lame for life.”
“Maybe now,” said the cook derisively, “you’d be in favour of soda water with the squeeze of a lemon in it.”
“I would not,” said the ticket-collector, “but a drop of sweet oil the way the joint would be kept supple.”
“Get a jug of cold water,” said Mannix, “and something that will do for a bandage.”
The attendant, with a glance at the cook, compromised the matter. He brought a basin full of lukewarm water and a table napkin. The cook wrapped the soaked napkin round the ankle. The ticket-collector tied it in its place with a piece of string. The attendant coaxed the sock over the bulky bandage. The new brown boot could by no means be persuaded to go on. It was packed by the attendant in the kit bag.
“It’s my opinion,” said the ticket-collector, “that you’d get damages out of the steamboat company if you was to process them.”
Mannix did not want to attack the steamboat company. He felt vindictive, but his anger was all di-rected against the man who had injured him.
“There was a fellow I knew one time,” said the ticket-collector, “that got £200 out of this company, and he wasn’t as bad as you nor near it.”
“I remember that well,” said the attendant “It was his elbow he dislocated, and him getting out at the wrong side of the carriage.”
“He’d have got more,” said the ticket-collector. “He’d have got £500 instead of £200 if so be he’d have gone into the court, but that’s what he couldn’t do, by reason of the fact that he happened to be travelling without a ticket when the accident came on him.”
He gazed thoughtfully out of the window as he spoke.
“It might have been that,” said the attendant, “which was the cause of his getting out at the wrong side of the carriage.”
“He tried it,” said the ticket-collector, still looking straight in front of him, “because he hadn’t a ticket.”
No one spoke for a minute. The story of the fraudulent traveller who secured £200 in damages was an affecting one. At length the cook broke the silence.
“The young gentleman here,” he said, “has his ticket right enough surely.”
“He may have,” said the ticket-collector.
“I have,” said Mannix, fumbling in his pocket “Here it is.”
“I’m obliged to you,” said the ticket-collector. “It was it I wanted to see.”
“Then why didn’t you ask me for it?” said Mannix.
“He wouldn’t do the like,” said the attendant, “and you with maybe a broken leg.”
“I would not,” said the ticket-collector. “It would be a queer thing for me to be bothering you about a ticket, and me just after tying a bit of cord round as nasty a leg as ever I seen.”
“But when you wanted to see the ticket—” said Mannix.
“I drew down the subject of tickets,” said the collector, “the way you’d offer me a look at yours, if so be you had one, but as for asking you for it and you in pain, it’s what I wouldn’t do.”
There are travellers, cantankerous people, who complain that Irish railway officials are not civil. Perhaps English porters and guards may excel them in the plausible lip service which anticipates a tip. But in the Irishman there is a natural delicacy of feeling which expresses itself in lofty kinds of courtesy. An Englishman, compelled by a sense of duty to see the ticket of a passenger, would have asked for it with callous bluntness. The Irishman, knowing that his victim was in pain, approached the subject of tickets obliquely, hinting by means of an anecdote of great interest, that people have from time to time been known to defraud railway companies.
CHAPTER III
Rosnacree House, the home of Sir Lucius Lentaigne and his ancestors since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought the family to Ireland in search of religious freedom, stands high on a wooded slope above the southern shore of a great bay. From the dining-room windows, so carefully have vistas been cut through the trees, there is a broad prospect of sea and shore. For eight miles the bay stretches north to the range of hills which bound it. For five or six miles westward its waters are dotted over with islands. There are, the people say, three hundred and sixty-five of them, so that a fisher-man with a taste for exploration, could such a one be found, might land on a different island every day for a whole year. Long promontories, some of them to be reckoned with the three hundred and sixty-five islands when the tide is high, run far out from the mainland. Narrow channels, winding bewilderingly, eat their way for miles among the sea-saturate fields of the eastward lying plain. The people, dwelling with pardonable pride upon the peculiarities of their coast line, say that any one who walked from the north to the south side of the bay, keeping resolutely along the high-tide mark, would travel altogether 200 miles. He would reach after his way-faring a spot which, measured on the map, would be just eight miles distant from the point of his departure. Sir Lucius, who loved his home, while he sometimes affects to despise it, says that he believes this estimate of the extent of the sea’s meanderings to be approximately correct, but adds that he has never yet met any one with courage enough to attempt the walk. You do, in fact, come suddenly on salt-water channels in the midst of fields at long distances from the sea, and find cockles on stretches of mud where you might expect frog spawn or black slugs. Therefore, it is quite likely that the high-tide line would really, if it were stretched out straight, reach right across Ireland and far out into St. George’s Channel.
In Rosnacree House, along with Sir Lucius, lives Juliet Lentaigne, his maiden sister, elderly, intellectual, dominating, the competent mistress of a sufficient staff of servants. She lived there in her girlhood. She returned to live there after