The Search Party. George A. Birmingham
you might ask of him, he’d do.”
Patsy was susceptible to flattery of this kind.
“He always thought a deal of me and my father before me,” he said. “You could tell the opinion he had of me by the letter he wrote. And why wouldn’t he when either my father or myself put the shoes on every horse that’s come and gone from the Castle this fifty years.”
“I could tell what he thought of you,” said Jimmy. “Sure anybody could.”
“You could tell it, if so be you read the letter.”
“The doctor’s young lady,” said Jimmy, “is going up to see the earl to-morrow. The Lord save her! but she’s half distracted with grief this minute.”
“And what good will going to the Castle do her? Sure he doesn’t know where the doctor is no more than another.”
“He might tell her the truth,” said Jimmy.
“Be damn! but he might, not knowing.”
“And if he did, the girl’s heart would be broke.”
“It would surely.”
“We’ve kept it from her,” said Jimmy, “and may the Lord forgive us for the lies we’re after telling, fresh ones every hour of the day. And if so be that now, at the latter end, she hears how the doctor has gone and left her it’ll go through her terrible, worse than the influenza.”
“And what would you consider would be best to be done?” asked Patsy.
“I was thinking that maybe, if you was to see him to-morrow, early, before ever she gets at him with her questions, and if you were to give him the word, that it might be, coming from a man like yourself that he has a respect for, that he’d hold off from telling her.”
“He might.”
“And will you do it, Patsy Devlin? Will you do it for the sake of the fine young girl that’s upstairs, this minute, heart scalded with the sorrow that’s on her?”
“It’s little you deserve the like from me,” said Patsy, “you nor the rest of the Guardians. But I’ll do it for the sake of the girl.”
“I knew you would,” said Jimmy. “It’s a good heart you have in you, Patsy Devlin, and a feeling for them that’s in distress. But the porter’s finished. Will I draw you another jug of the same, or will you try the whisky for a change?”
Patsy indicated the whisky bottle with his thumb. He remained lost in deep thought while the cork was drawn and a considerable quantity of the spirit poured into the tumbler before him. Indeed, so complete was his abstraction that the glass might have been absolutely filled with undiluted whisky if Jimmy had not, of his own accord, stayed the flow of it.
“I’m collecting the town and the neighbourhood,” said Patsy, “for the sports, and there’s no reason that I can see why I shouldn’t call on his lordship to-morrow and ask for a subscription.”
“You might.”
“And in the course of conversation I could draw down about the doctor and the young lady and give him the word.”
“Take care now would she be beforehand with you, if so be you were a bit late in going.”
“Let you see to that,” said Patsy.
“I might try,” said Jimmy; “but she’s that headstrong and determined it’s hard to stop her once she takes the notion into her head.”
“Be damn!” said Patsy, “but however you manage you’ll have to stop her. The old earl doesn’t have his breakfast took till near ten o’clock, and if I was to try to see him before half-past ten, he’d eat the face off me.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell Bridgy to have the breakfast late on her. She does be wanting it at half-past eight.”
“Let her want. If she gets it by half-past nine itself oughtn’t she to be content? There’s many a house where she wouldn’t get it then.”
“Content or not,” said Jimmy heroically, “it’s at half-past nine she’ll have it to-morrow anyway.”
“And after that,” said Patsy, “it could be that the horse might be lame the way she’d have to walk.”
“It could.”
“And if you sent her round by the big gate,” said Patsy, “it would put a couple of miles on her beyond what she’d have to walk if she was to go up through the deer park.”
“It would,” said Jimmy; “but the talk she’ll give after will be terrible to listen to.”
“Don’t tell me. A young lady like her wouldn’t know how to curse.”
“It’s not cursing,” said Jimmy, “but it’s a way she has of speaking that would make you feel as if the rats beyond in the haggard was Christians compared to you.”
“Let her talk.”
“And she looks at you straight in the face,” said Jimmy, “the same as if she was trying to see what would be in the inside of your head, and feeling middling sure all the time that there wasn’t much in it, beyond the sweepings of the street.”
“It’s for her own good you’re doing it,” said Patsy.
There was some consolation in the thought. But Patsy, even while making the suggestion, felt that a good conscience is not always a sufficient support in well-doing.
“You might,” he added, “be out about the place and let herself talk to her till the worst of it was over.”
This plan, which perhaps would not have suited Mrs. O’Loughlin, commended itself to Jimmy; but it did not make him altogether comfortable about the future.
“I might,” he said, “and I will, but she’ll get me for sure at the latter end.”
If he had done as his conscience suggested, Patsy Devlin would have gone home at once after settling Miss Blow’s business for her. But the whisky bottle was still more than half full, and it seemed to him a pity to break up a pleasant party at an early hour. He started a fresh subject of conversation, one that he hoped would be interesting to his host.
“Tell me this now,” he said. “Do you think that fellow down at Rosivera, the same that brought the pianos along with him, would give a subscription to the sports?”
“I don’t know,” said Jimmy. “He’s queer. I never set eyes upon him myself since I finished carting the packing-cases down to Rosivera.”
“They tell me that he does be calling at your shop for his bread and the like, and leaving a power of money with you.”
“I wouldn’t say he left so much at all,” said Jimmy cautiously. “And anyway it’s a servant that did be coming every day till to-day, and then it was some sort of a foreigner with a written order, him not being able to speak English.”
“Would you see your way to asking him for a subscription?”
“How would I do it, when he can’t know a word I say to him, nor him to me? Why won’t you talk sense?”
“And where’s the man himself, and the fellow that did speak English?”
“How would I know? If it’s a subscription you want from him, you’d better go over to Rosivera and ask for it.”
“They say,” said Patsy thoughtfully, “that he has plenty to give. A man like that with a motor car running on the road every day, and two foreign gentlemen, let alone an Englishman, to wait on him, must have a power of money. I wouldn’t wonder now, if I took him the right way, but he’d give five pounds. I might drop him a hint that five pounds is the least that any of the gentry would give to the sports.”
“Let