“You are among strangers, Constable,” he said; “and the unfortunate feeling of disloyalty which pervades this county might reduce you to rougher fare than would be agreeable at the festive Christmas time. Accept this goose as a token of my good-will. Fatten it, and invite your comrades to partake of the hospitable cheer it may afford.”
Now, whether the early associations of that goose with the stingy and miserly household of the agent had accustomed it to a peculiar dietary, or that its depraved appetite was inherent, I cannot say, but the gastronomical horrors recorded of it during Gallagher’s custodianship are preserved among the most glowing traditions of the force. He tried to fatten it, as per invoice, so to speak. He expended all the fervor of a constable’s first love on it. He wrote to the editors of half-a-dozen agricultural papers for information as to the best kind of food to make his goose a sufficiently adipose victim for the sacrificial altar. But the perversity of that web-footed cackler was almost miraculous. The compiler of farm-yard items in the Dublin Farmer’s Gazette recommended boiled Indian meal. The intelligent constable boiled the grain with his own loyal hands, and laid down a saucerful before his white-winged Christmas donation. It spurned the Indian meal, and devoured the saucer. The constable had to retire and read the Riot Act to himself before he could recover from this outrage to his judgment.
The assistant editor who lets himself loose on poultry in the Barndoor Chronicle gave an elaborate recipe, which he warranted to convert Gallagher’s shadowy anatomy of legs and feathers into a pudgy monster of edible delicacy inside a week or so. The belted constabulary knight spent half a day mixing the recipe and stirring it in a canteen kettle. He laid it tenderly before the agent’s goose. The bird sailed into the kettle, and actually gorged the spout before peace was restored in Warsaw. But why continue? Every man in the barracks tried medicinal and culinary experiments upon Gallagher’s goose, but it refused to be fattened. It spent its leisure time in masticating broken bottles, half-bricks, nails, old shoes, copies of the official Gazette, tunic buttons, bayonet sheaths—anything, everything, except flesh-forming food. It exhibited a remarkable appetite for official documents. Private circulars from Col. Hillier, secret instructions from George Bolton, search-warrants, copies of information, it swallowed with an avidity that rendered its general abstinence all the more conspicuous.
I have devoted so much introduction to Gallagher’s goose because a knowledge of the physical and psychological eccentricities of that wonderful fowl, and a due appreciation of its literary tastes, will be necessary to the proper understanding of the memorable events that transpired during the Christmas week of 1880 at Ballyblank.
II.
A PLOT, AND ITS EXECUTION.
The hates, the fears, and the respects of Agent Macgrabb and Constable Gallagher extended to precisely the same two individuals in Ballyblank. They both hated the medical student, Harry McCarthy, before alluded to, and they both feared and consequently respected Pat McCarthy, tenant farmer, and father of that unutterable scapegrace. Both, too, hated Harry for the same reason. He was irreclaimably, obtusely, blindly, madly irreverent of the mighty forces that prevail in Ireland. He never doffed his hat to the agent, majestic representative of property and propriety; he smiled at the constable, personification of British justice and empire, and had actually laughed at the constabulary joint-stock enterprise in goose fattening. Then, he was popular, and your little village tyrant hates no one more bitterly than the man who is loved by the oppressed. Finally, his popularity was due in a great measure to his powers of mimicry, and the fact that Macgrabb and Gallagher were ever the twin objects of his talent in that direction. At weddings and patterns, wakes and fairs, he had made people roar again and again with his reproductions of the peeler’s parade stride and the magistrate’s judicial frown. It would be hard to say which had the greatest abhorrence to free-and-easy Harry. The agent would have gloried in burying him under a pyramid of ejectment writs; the constable would have sacrificed a stripe for the privilege of emptying a company’s charge of buckshot into his obnoxious figure. The disappointment at finding no opportunity to either annoy or hurt him turned Macgrabb blue and Gallagher yellow whenever they encountered Harry’s joyous countenance.
As mentioned, the worthy couple both respected and feared Harry’s father. The policeman respected him because he was the one man in the parish (outside his reckless son) who did not give a traneen for either the agent Macgrabb or the agent’s master, Lord Clonboy. He feared the sturdy farmer, too, from some indefinable sensation that he could not account for. The reasons of the agent’s fear and respect were of a two-fold character. In the first place, Pat McCarthy held a lease; and in the second, he had a daughter. When at the close of a gale Macgrabb could put a ten per cent. screw on the tenants for Lord Clonboy’s Parisian dissipation, and a five per cent. twist for his own less expensive frolics in Dublin, McCarthy could not only pay him a rent, guarded by his lease, one-half what all the surrounding tenants had to contribute, but he could and did express his opinion of the rack-renting proclivities of the rural Nero in language whose emphasis was more marked than its elegance. It had been the life-long dream of the agent to break that lease, and twice had he approached within measurable distance of doing so. Once, when the expenses of Harry’s collegiate education had left the old man short of money, and he had begged for a few weeks’ grace. Again, just a year before, when the universal failure of the crops should in all human probability have left McCarthy nearly bankrupt. But, somehow, the farmer weathered his difficulties, and escaped the penal clause of the lease, which rendered the whole document void if one gale fell in arrears.
I have mentioned a second reason why Macgrabb respected McCarthy. This reason, Miss Ellen McCarthy, was a fair and remarkably excusable one. Why a shrivelled atomy like the agent should feel drawn to a buxom, frolicsome, blue-eyed Irish girl, whose generous sympathies were the opposite of his sordid nature, whose merry laugh was the antithesis of his diabolical grin, who cordially loathed and despised every bone in his body and every constituent element of his soul, I know not; but the fact remained that Macgrabb doated upon McCarthy’s daughter with a devotion so utterly antagonistic to his ordinary selfishness that he couldn’t quite understand it himself.
It led him to a proposal of marriage, whose consequences were singularly disagreeable both to his magisterial dignity and his physical susceptibilities. Miss McCarthy laughed at and ran away from him, and Harry McCarthy, to whom she related the joke, came into the parlor, and with a vehemence that reflected credit upon his sincerity, and a knowledge of sore spots that spoke well for his diligence at surgical studies, kicked the J. P. out of the door, down the steps, across a grass plot, and out into the high road.
It was the day after this occurrence that Macgrabb presented the goose of destiny to Gallagher. A week subsequently the magistrate and the peeler were closeted in the former’s private office.