At this the two men leapt with surprising speed into their ambulance and drove away. Mr Thewless was left standing by the roadside, speechless with bewilderment and rage. All around him stretched an empty moor, now growing bleak and inhospitable in the late afternoon sunlight. Miles away, a single white spot on the horizon suggested some humble species of human dwelling. Further sign of life or habitation there was none. He examined the dusty surface of the road. No tracks were visible except those of the ambulance which was now growing small in the distance. It was only too evident that the back of beyond had veritably received him.
Doggedly he began to trudge towards the distant white speck.
‘No eggs! No eggs!! Good heavens, man, what do you mean by no eggs?’ And, as one thunderstruck, Mr Cyril Bolderwood of Killyboffin Hall stared at Denis, the general factotum whom, in expansive moments, he was pleased to describe as his steward. Then less vehemently he added: ‘You did say
no
eggs?’
‘It’s a shameful fact, sir, that I’m just after discovering.’ Denis paused to remove a straw from his hair and drop it in his master’s waste-paper basket. ‘But Mr Ivor had the last of our own for his breakfast surely, and now there’s never an egg to be bought in all Killyboffin on account of the fish having come.’
‘God bless my soul!’ Mr Bolderwood raised both hands in air with an expressiveness possibly indicating his long sojourn in Latin-American countries. ‘Do you realize, Denis, that here is Mr Ivor’s cousin coming from London, where not the King himself has an egg to his breakfast except once in a way – and coming, mark you, with a tutor, Denis, a great doctor from the universities, no doubt – and you stand there and tell me the eggs are all gone from Killyboffin because the fish have come? Is it the tinned salmon in old Mrs Fallon’s little window that have risen up in the night and sucked them dry, Denis? Now tell me that.’ And Mr Bolderwood, who prided himself on a manner of speech both feudal and familiar, sat down with regained composure and began to stuff an ancient pipe.
‘Indeed and your honour knows it is no such thing, but rather the live fish coming up the loughs in their millions like the stars of heaven and all the world’s ships labouring after them from Hull and Narvik and Nineveh. And it’s myself have seen boatloads of them coming ashore all morning, and taking Tannian’s car and Donohoe’s, yes and Michael Orr’s old Ford too, and scouring the land to eat it up like the locusts, and ourselves in want of a simple dish to set before a fine lad from London itself, broad and fair and blue-eyed as he is, that none of us has ever had the joy of setting eyes on, and him Mr Ivor’s own cousin.’ Denis paused on this. He found a rhetoric based upon uncertain memories of his grandmother distinctly exhausting to keep up. But since his cosmopolitan employer liked to play at being surrounded by old Ireland, and was prepared to pay for the illusion, Denis did his best to get the atmosphere right. ‘Isn’t it a hard case, your honour, myself and yourself to be treated–’
‘So that’s it!’ Cyril Bolderwood had risen again and walked to the window of the long shabby room he called his study. ‘Steam trawlers, eh? And rascals off them wandering the countryside buying by day what they haven’t already stolen by night? Why don’t the police see to them? Why doesn’t the
garda
act?’
‘Indeed, sir, he well might.’ Denis shook his head. ‘And yet it would maybe be beyond reason to expect a poor lad like Shaun Cushin, with a great examination in the Irish before him that would tax the bottomless learning of the Taoiseach himself, to concern himself with chasing after a rabble of foreigners and gaoling them for stealing a goose or a hen or a handful of eggs. Unless’ – Denis added as an afterthought – ‘they should be your honour’s own, indeed.’
Mr Bolderwood was now staring thoughtfully at a curl of smoke which rose presumably from one of the offending trawlers in the little harbour beyond the village. ‘If we can’t have eggs–’ he began, and abruptly broke off. ‘What the devil is all that noise about?’
Killyboffin Hall was a large, bare, rambling building, Georgian in a bleak way and falling down at the corners. The lightest breeze, on gaining entry through its many cracks, crevices, and broken panes, became mysteriously transformed into a gale that sobbed and moaned through its lofty rooms, stirring the dust from shadowy cornices and immemorial hangings, and making the worn carpets rise and fall in the long corridors. It was the sort of house in which, in the small hours, boards start from worm-eaten joists, and ancient wicker furniture creaks in shrouded rooms, and invisible fingers are at play upon doors and windows. That the Bolderwoods were positively obliged to live amid such a
décor
nobody very seriously believed, for clearly it was old Mr Bolderwood’s whim thus to assimilate himself with impoverished landowners upon whom such conditions were obligatory, and the fancy was licensed by sundry tortuous but indubitable blood-ties with the nobility and gentry of the region. Life at Killyboffin, then, had superficially every appearance of all the discomforts associated with genteel penury, and had Sir Bernard Paxton gained any inkling of this eccentric humour on the part of his kinsman he would certainly not – prizing life’s material surfaces as he was inclined to do – have sanctioned the expedition upon which his only son had recently embarked.
One consequence of the somewhat bare condition of the mansion was the tendency of noise in any volume to gain resonance as it travelled from room to room, and to propagate itself through a complex system of echoes. It was a phenomenon of this sort that was disturbing Mr Bolderwood now. ‘Denis,’ he repeated, ‘what the devil is that?’
Denis considered. ‘It might be the half-Ayrshire, your honour, got unbeknownst among the turnips, and Gracie and Billy and the lad Pat and the dogs–’
‘Stuff and nonsense, man! It’s coming up the kitchen stairs – and whoever heard of a half-Ayrshire doing that? But here’s Mr Ivor. Ivor, in heaven’s name–’
Ivor Bolderwood, a mild young man behind large round glasses, had entered his father’s study by a door at its far end; and at the same moment a confused rout of persons had burst in opposite. One of these latter, a stout woman in an apron, appeared to possess some power of articulate speech, and her voice presently rose clear of the babel around her. ‘The terrible disaster that it is!’ she cried. ‘And the poor lad nigh at the end of his long journey and all – alas! that Killyboffin should see such a day.’
To these words a general consenting murmur arose from Mr Bolderwood’s other retainers. And Denis, although without any notion of what all this betokened, judged that some more specifically Celtic reaction would be appropriate. ‘Ochone,’ he cried with great satisfaction, and began swaying his body in a rhythmical manner from the hips. ‘Ochone, ochone!’
‘Hold your tongue, man!’ Ivor Bolderwood spoke with a decision unexpected in one whose eyes gleamed so vaguely from behind their expanses of glass. ‘Now, Gracie, why–’ But here the young man stopped, his glance having fallen for the first time upon another of the intruders. ‘Billy, weren’t you told to be off to the station long ago?’
‘And indeed I was, Mr Ivor.’ The man addressed took a step forward, acknowledging the presence of his employer as he did so by pulling at a forelock. ‘And I’m after driving back this moment with the terrible news of the great disaster to the train. And sorry I am that it’s without the poor young gentleman that I’ve returned here.’
‘A disaster to the train!’ The elder Mr Bolderwood paled. ‘You don’t mean the train on which my nephew and his tutor were–’
‘Indeed he does, sir.’ The woman called Gracie spoke again. ‘A great and terrible accident in the tunnel it has been, and the mangled bodies and severed limbs strewn far under the wide heaven, and the cries of those in their agony like to be heard from here to Sligo.’
‘But this is too ghastly to believe.’ Mr Bolderwood looked in consternation at his son, whose perturbation was equal to his own. ‘And is the poor boy–’
‘The poor boy, indeed!’ Denis was no longer to be restrained. ‘The fine lad that was to be coming amongst us, triumphant and brave, to be no more than one of a dark line of corpses crying shame upon the railways of Ireland!’
‘And the learned man that was with him to be less even than that, by far and far.’ Gracie had risen and raised imprecating hands against the heavens. ‘For no morsel of him have they pieced to morsel in all that dolorous field.’
‘Not with all the labour of all the doctors that be there now with all their fair and shining instruments,’ said Denis with conviction. ‘But thanks be to God we can do better for the boy. For with a stitch here, and maybe some hay or tow thrust in there, he can be laid neat and decent in his coffin and it shipped at no great expense to his sorrowing dad in London. And no trouble on the way except it may be a bit rummaged, reverently undertaken, in the Customs sheds of Dublin.’
At this Mr Bolderwood produced a large coloured handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘Am I to understand,’ he cried, ‘that my nephew is
dead
?’
Billy, who was chiefly addressed, made a motion with his head which contrived to be at once vigorous and completely ambiguous. ‘As soon,’ he began, ‘as ever the train got into the station–’
‘Got into the station?’ It was Ivor Bolderwood who exclaimed this time. ‘And how the deuce could the train get into the station when it had had a terrible accident in the tunnel?’
‘Indeed and why should it not?’ Billy was innocently surprised. ‘The great disaster was safely over, praise God, and what should the train do but arrive where it was intended?’
‘It’s enough to drive a man out of his senses!’ Mr Bolderwood’s voice rose in despair. ‘Haven’t you been telling us, you abominable rascal, of mangled bodies and severed limbs and dark lines of corpses and – and doctors and surgeons by the bevy. And now you–’
‘But indeed, your honour, there was an ambulance.’ Billy produced this with a good deal of triumph. ‘There’s five or six of them that was on the train to swear to it – although others will yet be denying of it, to be sure, since it was gone it seems almost as soon as come.’
‘There was an accident – but not so bad that the train couldn’t continue on its way.’ Mr Bolderwood had advanced and was grasping Billy sternly by the lapel of his coat. ‘And there was an ambulance – but it saw no reason to stay long. Now, what of all the rest of this outrageous nonsense? Was
anyone
killed? Was
anyone
injured?’
‘Or’ – and Ivor Bolderwood intervened sharply – ‘is anyone missing?’
Billy threw up admiring hands – thereby dexterously freeing himself from his employer’s grasp. ‘There, now!’ he said. ‘It’s a great intelligence that your honour’s son has, and a great pride that he must be to his father. For there were three strangers at the back of the train, it seems, and they the most sorely wounded of all. Screaming in their agony, they were, and the blood all about them as deep as fish-pools, while the others, as it appeared in the end, were no more than shaken and bruised. And when all that great fear and panic was over it was seen that these three had vanished entirely, and with them the learned man that was your honour’s nephew’s tutor. And this same that I’m after telling you is but another proof that there was an ambulance there surely, for how else could the wounded men have vanished? And the tutor, Christ help him, must have been taken as at death’s door too.’
‘Then it comes to this.’ Ivor Bolderwood turned to address his father, who, wrathful and bewildered, still confronted Billy. ‘The accident resulted in three strangers and Mr Thewless being injured and taken away in an ambulance. That is bad enough, although not nearly so bad as all this excited chatter suggested. But where is the boy?’
‘Exactly so.’ The elder Mr Bolderwood was now trembling with mingled anxiety and irritation. ‘Where is Mr Humphrey, you blackguard? Why haven’t you brought him home? Do you realize how – how
important
this is?’
‘And that we are responsible,’ Ivor added, ‘to his father?’
‘There, now!’ said Denis indignantly. ‘And can’t you answer his honour with some mite or drop of reason, Billy Bone, instead of blathering, God help you, over every irrelevant thing?’
‘And causing the limbs to drop and the blood to flow,’ cried Gracie, ‘from untold Irish souls, when there was no mischief but to three poor creatures from the North, and maybe to the young lad’s tutor, which is a person of great learning, God be praised, but of small consideration either among Christian folk or gentry?’
Under this general reprobation, Billy Bone shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. ‘Should I not be sparing his honour’s feelings,’ he demanded of the company at large, ‘and waiting some more seemly time for telling him that his nephew has gone off with a woman in Tannian’s car?’
‘Gone off with a woman? Stuff and nonsense!’ The elder Mr Bolderwood threw up his arms in despair. ‘Why should Mr Humphrey do a fantastic thing like that?’
‘And why should he do anything else?’ Billy was bewildered. ‘With the tutor that was set at guard over him laid low in an ambulance, and a fine woman in her perfumes and her pearls and her rich and rustling garments waiting for him in Tannian’s great car, and himself a young heretic without fear of priest or purgatory or the blessed St Patrick–’
‘Lunacy – utter lunacy!’ Mr Bolderwood’s manner wavered between incredulity and apprehensiveness. ‘Do you ask me to believe that a – a woman of this character should be waiting in the wilds of Killyboffin on the chance that a railway accident might incapacitate my nephew’s tutor?’
Ivor Bolderwood had strolled to the window and was staring out at the wisp of smoke rising from the hidden trawler. Now he turned back and looked at his father soberly. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘the unlikely touch is Tannian’s car. One would expect the equipage of such an adventuress to match the perfumes and the pearls and the alluring limbs.’
Mr Bolderwood looked at his son in some surprise. ‘But surely you can’t think–’
‘Well, the boy
has
vanished. And something odd
does
seem to have happened on the train. I begin to wonder if we quite reckoned with what we might be taking on.’ He glanced round the circle of his father’s retainers.
‘Paxton père
,’ he said,
‘n’est-il pas très riche et très célèbre? Peut-être on trame l’enlèvement de l’enfant.’