Dr. Mangan’s body was still
lying on the door on which it had been carried up
from the river-bank. Kitchen chairs now supported
it where it lay, with its burden, between the high
windows, in the desolate, sheeted dining-room, surrounded
by portraits of Talbots, and Lowrys, and their collaterals,
who would surely have considered the presence of Francis
Aloysius Mangan, dead or alive, as something of an
intrusion, not to say a liberty.
Old Evans opened the hall door, and
silently led the two young men through the hall, and
opening the dining-room door, left them there.
They stood looking down on the Big Doctor in silence.
The strong, coarse face had taken on that aloof dignity,
even splendour of expression, that death can confer.
The servants had covered all else with a sheet; the
soaked fur collar of the coat was turned up, and made
a pillow for the big, iron-grey head.
With a shaking hand Barty turned back
the sheet. His father’s thick, powerful
hands were crossed on his broad breast. The son
stooped and kissed them, humbly; then he replaced
the sheet, and kissed the heavy brow, from which all
the marks of the turmoil of life had been smoothed.
“I believe he is near us,”
he whispered; he took a prayer-book from his pocket
and knelt, his head resting on the covered form.
Larry knelt also. If only Barty
had not told him that abhorrent thing. He tried
to forget it, to pray for the soul of the man who had,
as he believed, always been kind to him, and a good
friend. Larry was undevout, careless, thinking
little of spiritual things, so little, that he had
scarcely troubled himself either to question or to
accept what he had been taught, but he was quick to
respond to emotion of any kind; now he listened, with
an unaccustomed reverence, to Barty’s voice,
brokenly whispering the prayers of his Church.
Their unfamiliar beauty stirred his imagination, their
appeal for mercy wakened his heart, and made him ask
himself what was he that he should refuse mercy!
He felt the anger, that had only been roused in him
within the last few minutes, dying, merged in pity
and in awe.
“By the multitude of Thy mercies,
ever compassionate to human frailty, deliver him,
O Lord!” Barty’s husky, shaking voice murmured.
“Give him, O Lord, eternal rest, and let perpetual
light shine upon him
The door was opened and Evans said:
“The police are here, and are asking for Mr.
Mangan.”
Barty rose from his knees; without
a word, he placed the prayer book in Larry’s
hands, and left the room.
Larry had risen also, but instead
of following Barty he knelt again by the Big Doctor’s
still figure, and began to speak to him in the low
voice that is the mark of recognition of the great
mystery of death, and tells of that singular, sudden
reverence that is bestowed on the body when the spirit
has left it; a reverence that seems to imply a belief
in the nearness of the freed spirit, which is unsupported
by the immeasurable remoteness of the expression of
the mask that it once wore.
“Doctor,” said Larry,
“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll
chance it. I want to tell you that it’s
not my fault about Tishy, and the wedding not coming
off. She bolted with Ned Cloherty last night ”
he checked himself, and felt he ought to apologise
for talking slang, and then thought that if it were
the Doctor, himself, he wouldn’t mind.
“Tishy liked Cloherty best,” he hurried
on, “and she was probably quite right, but I
want you to know that I would have played up all right.”
Then he said, hesitating, that Barty had told him a
thing that he didn’t quite understand the rights
of. “You must forgive me if I felt angry.
I daresay there’s a lot to be said on your side
if I only knew it. But I don’t and you
can’t tell me now ” He stood
up, and touching the cold brow, smoothed back the damp
hair. “You were always awfully good to
me,” he said, and, stooping, kissed the forehead,
as Barty had done, and found that his eyes were full
of tears.
As he stood erect again, he saw he
was not alone in the room. A girl was standing
just behind him with a basket of Christmas roses in
her hand, a girl who had come quietly in while he
was speaking, and had waited, watching, with eyes
that saw more than Larry’s kneeling figure beside
the dead man, listening, with senses that were perceptive
of a fellow-listener, in whom were newly-learnt impulses
of self-reproach and penitence.
“Christian!” said Larry,
trembling, as he had trembled when he spoke to her
by the Druid Stone on Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe.