“Unless you are having a joke at my expense,” he said, “and you look too genuinely scared for that, you have actually seen her—a very beautiful girl, dressed after some old-time Irish custom, in a loose flowing green mantle—only of course you couldn’t see the colour—with head and feet bare. But it’s odd about that wail. The good Banshee in a family is always supposed to make it, but why didn’t I hear her? Why should it only be you? You’re Scotch, not Irish.”
“For which I’m truly thankful,” Menzies said with warmth. “I’ve lived without ever seeing or hearing a ghost or anything approaching one for thirty-eight years, and now I’ve seen and heard two, within the short space of three weeks, and all because of you, because you’re Irish. No thanks. None of your Banshees for me. I’d rather, ten thousand times rather, be just an ordinary laddie from the Highlands, and dispense with your highly aristocratic and fastidious family ghost.”
“Come, now,” O’Hara said good-humouredly, “we won’t quarrel about so unsubstantial a thing as the Banshee. Let’s hurry up and have a bottle of cognac to make us think of something rather more cheerful.”
Menzies often thought of those words, for it is not infrequently the most trifling words and actions that haunt our memory to the greatest extent in after days. The rest of the evening passed quite uneventfully, and, after they had “toasted” each other, the two friends separated for the night.
Two days later O’Hara’s body lay in the Morque, whither it had been taken from the Seine. Though there were some doubts expressed as to the exact manner in which he had met his death, it was officially recorded “death from misadventure,” and it was not till several years later Menzies learned the truth.
He was then in Mexico, in a little town not twenty miles from San Blas, on the Western Coast, doing some newspaper work for a South American paper. A storekeeper and his wife were murdered; done to death in a singularly cruel manner, even for those parts, and one of the assassins was caught red-handed. The other, a woman, succeeded in escaping. As there had been so many murders lately in that neighbourhood, the townspeople declared they would make a very severe example of the culprit, and hang him, right away, on the scene of his diabolical outrage. Menzies, who had never witnessed anything of the kind before, and was, of course, anxious for copy, took good care to be present. He stood quite close to the handcuffed man, and caught every word of the confession he made to the local padre. He gave his name as André Fécamps, his age as twenty-five, and his nationality as French. He asserted that he was first induced to take to crime through falling in love with a notorious French criminal of the name of Marie Diblanc, who accepted him as her lover, conditionally on his joining the band of Apaches of which she was the recognised leader.
He did so, and forthwith plunged into every kind of wickedness imaginable. Among other crimes in which he was implicated he mentioned that of the murder of an Irishman of the name of O’Hara, who was supposed to have met with an accidental death from drowning in the Seine. What really happened, so the young desperado said, was this. M. O’Hara was madly in love with Marie Diblanc, who was posing to him as Gabrielle Delacourt, an innocent young girl from the country, when she was already very much married, and was being searched for high and low, at that very time, by certainly more than one desperate husband. Well, one day she persuaded M. O’Hara to take her to a dance given by some very wealthy friends of his.
He did so, and she contrived, unknown to him of course, to smuggle me in, and between us we walked off with something like ten thousand pounds of jewellery.
M. O’Hara came to suspect her—how I don’t know, unless he overheard some stray conversation between her and some other member of our gang at one of the restaurants they used to dine at. Anyhow, she got to know of it, and at once resolved to have him put out of the way. It was arranged that she should bring him to a house in Montmartre, where several of us were in hiding, and that we should both kill and bury him there.
Well, he came, and, on perceiving that he had fallen into a trap, besought her, if his life must be forfeited—and, anyhow, now he knew she was a thief he wouldn’t have it otherwise—to take it herself. This she eventually agreed to do, and, lying in her arms, he allowed her to press a poison-bag over his mouth, and so put him to death. His body was taken to the Seine that night in a fiacre and dropped in. Fécamps added that it was the only occasion upon which he had seen Marie Diblanc really moved, and he believed she was a trifle fond of the Irishman, that is to say, if she could be genuinely fond of anyone.