"Right--you are right, O'Brien. This is not a good time or place for our little private theatricals. I'll join you with pleasure at seven. Here I have been holding you, which is an assault, and detaining you against your will, which is false imprisonment--both punishable by law. I ought to be too old a stager to be guilty of either offence. But I cry mercy, and will do my best to wash away my offences in your claret this evening. Till then, adieu."
So they parted.
O'Brien resolved to stroll about until it was time for dinner. He knew every street, almost every house in Kilbarry. He had lived in the neighbourhood the most part of his life. He had no relative alive, nor any place he could call home. When in this neighbourhood he usually stopped at "The Munster"; but of late years he had spent much of his time in London. He owned the land close to which his salmon weirs stood on the Bawn; but there was no house for him on them--only a few rude, primitive farmers' houses.
He was now thirty years of age, and had been a rover most of his life. He had always made it a point to spend a month or two of the summer at Kilcash, a sea-bathing and fishing village ten miles by road from Kilbarry. Here it was that he learned what he knew of the Davenports, for Mr. Davenport's place, Kilcash House, was only a mile inland from the village whose name it bore. He had been personally acquainted with the Davenports, and had often seen them, and knew all about them.
O'Hanlon's words, now that he was from under the influence of the manner which accompanied them, filled him with wonder more than anything else. He was only nineteen or twenty at the time that man Fahey was drowned--or, rather, committed suicide--and he could not recall all the particulars of the case. When it occurred, he had been living with his widowed mother at Kilbarry, and had not, like other young men of the city, gone out to the scene of the tragedy. He knew every nook of the coast for miles around Kilcash. It was a bold, bad, rock-bound coast save at the village, where there was a bay and a strand fatal to ships. He remembered that, from the first news of Fahey's death, there had not been the least hope of recovering the man's body. It was a tradition of the coast that the body of no one who had been drowned there was ever recovered. Who or what Fahey was he did not know, and so he resolved to banish the subject from his mind until O'Hanlon reopened it that evening.
The great feature of this day was O'Hanlon's assurance that his weirs would not be torn up. If that were true, and Alfred Paulton recovered, then he would have to think of building a house somewhere near the weirs for--Madge.
He got back to the hotel a little before seven, and wrote a letter to Mr. Paulton, announcing his safe arrival, asking for news of Alfred, and sending his kindest regards to the others in the order of their seniority. It was a little comfort to be able to send even kind regards to Madge through her father. But if he had the commissioners by the collective throat at that moment, he could have throttled them with great comfort to himself, and an assured consciousness that he was a benefactor to mankind.
Seven o'clock brought O'Hanlon and the dinner. The latter was served in a small, snug, private room overlooking the broad white river. When at length they were alone and had lighted their cigars, the guest reverted to the Davenport affair, and asked for the full and true history of the case as far as it was known to Jerry.
Then O'Hanlon's turn came:
"Since I saw you I have hunted up and glanced over the documents left in my hands by the dead man Fahey. They are, I find, unintelligible, as far as my lights now lead me, and I think we may dismiss them from our minds for the present. I shall, however, keep them safe. I will say nothing more of them than that in whatever portions of them Mr. Davenport is mentioned, they always speak of him in terms of gratitude and respect. It is plain that at one time the relations between these two men were very close, but of the nature of these relations there is no hint. At the time of the death of Fahey he had been hovering about Kilcash for months. No one exactly knew who or what he was. He had taken a mean lodging in the village, and given out that he was poor, and had been ordered to the seaside for his health, and recommended to get as much sea air and boating as possible. He often went out with the fishermen, and at last bought a small punt, a mere cockleshell, and kept it for his own exclusive use. In this he put off at all times of the day and night, and the fishermen predicted that he would be drowned some time or other; and so he was, but not in the way anticipated by the people of the village. They made sure his boat would be swamped one day, and that would be the end of him. An additional reason for their fears was that he never swam, and said he was too old to learn.