The hunt swept on after the manner of hunts, full of sympathy, having,
as to one man, contributed a silver cigarette case, with which
another, a resourceful medical student, had improvised a splint, but
feeling, not without relief, that they could do nothing more; feeling
also, with depression, that the Lord only knew where the devils had
run to by this time, but that that couldn't be helped; with which
philosophic reflection and many valedictory shouts of commiseration,
the last of them had vanished over the hill.
The unfortunate Charles restored to guardianship, now found himself
with Miss Judith, lost; Miss Christian soaked to the skin, eight miles
or more from her home; Master Larry ditto, in much pain, no nearer to
his, and unable to mount his horse, which latter would have to be led
over a succession of fences to the nearest road; (and no matter with
what distinction an elderly coachman can drive a pair of horses on a
road, it is very far from being the same thing to get a pair of horses
across a country). It was, therefore, a very gloomy party that set
face for the nearest highway. The intricacies of procedure at each
jump need not here be dealt with, but it may be said that a more
thankful man than Charles, when he again felt the good macadam under
his feet, is not often met with. He would at that moment have said
that he could not have felt an intenser gratitude than suffused him as
he saw his convoy safe off the hills; but there he would have
over-stated the case, since, scarcely five minutes after the road had
been reached, an even more supreme thankfulness was his. Coming
rapidly towards him, he beheld Dr. Mangan's outside car, and upon it
was the large person of Dr. Mangan himself.
"Well," said Charles that evening, to Mr. Evans, "if it was the Angel
Gabriel I seen flying down to me, I wouldn't be as glad as what I was
when I seen the Big Doctor on the side-car!"
And Mr. Evans had caustically rejoined: "It'll be the funny day when
you'll see wings on _him_!" meaning Dr. Mangan, of whom he had a
low opinion.
Wings or no wings, no angel of mercy and succour was ever more welcome
or more needed than was the Big Doctor at this moment. Larry, very
white, shivering with pain and cold, was lifted on to the car;
Christian was told to gallop away home as fast as she could, and
Charles was directed to let Miss Coppinger know that her nephew would
be put up for the night at the Doctor's own house at Cluhir.
"You can say to her that I met the Hunt, and one of them told me what
happened," said the Big Doctor, "and I knew then what to do."
It might, indeed, habitually be said of Dr. Mangan that he knew very
well what to do. There were, indeed, but two occasions on record when
it might have seemed that he had not so known. The first of these was
when he had abandoned an improving practice in Dublin to work as his
father's partner in his native Cluhir, the second, when, preliminary
to that return, he had married a lady, alleged, by inventive and
disagreeable people, to have been his cook. The disagreeable people
had also said disagreeable things as to the nature of the stress that
had prompted the marriage. But it was now twenty years since the
Mangans had been established at Number Six, The Mall, Cluhir; the
Doctor had come in for his father's money as well as his practice, and
was respected as "a warm man"; the disagreeable ones had grown old,
and people who are both old and disagreeable cannot expect to command
a large audience. Mrs. Mangan, on the contrary, was neither the one
nor the other, being, at this time, but little over forty, and as
kindly, lazy, and handsome a creature as ever lived down spiteful
gossip by good-nature. When "The Dawkthor" (as she called him, with a
drowsy drag on the first syllable) had galloped in at one o'clock to
command Barty's room to be got ready at once, Mrs. Mangan was still in
what she called "dishable," and was straying between her bedroom and
the kitchen, pleasurably involved in the cares of both.
"They say young Coppinger fell in the river, and he's broken his
wrist," said the Doctor rapidly, stamping into his wife's room,
bringing the wind of the hills with him. "I'll bring him here as soon
as I can get hold of him."
"The creature!" replied Mrs. Mangan, sympathetically.
"Well, don't be waiting to pity him now!" said her husband, stuffing
bandages into his pocket, "but hurry and put hot jars into the
bed--and clean sheets. Don't forget now, Annie!"
He lumbered in his long boots and spurs, down to the surgery, still
issuing directions.
"Tishy'll be back directly--she'll give you a hand--and Annie! tell
Hannah to have some hot soup ready. Now, hurry, for God's sake!"
The front door into the Mall, Cluhir's most fashionable quarter,
banged.
"Well, well!" said Mrs. Mangan, still sympathetic, while she removed
the curling-pins from her bison fringe; "wasn't it the will of God
that I had a headache this morning and couldn't go to Mass! I'll have
something to say to Father Greer now if he draws it up to me that I
was backward in my duty!"
Much fortified by this reflection, Mrs. Mangan hurriedly proceeded
with her toilette, squalling meanwhile to her bench-woman in the
kitchen a summary of the Doctor's orders. She had no more than
achieved what she called her "Sunday dress," a complimentary effort to
be equally divided between Saint Stephen and young Mr. Coppinger, when
the back-door into the yard from the house slammed, and her daughter's
voice announced her return.
"Come up, Tishy, till I talk to you!" shouted Mrs. Mangan, slinging a
long gold watch-chain over her head and festooning it upon her ample
bosom: "Did you meet Pappy?" she continued, as her daughter's steps
drew near.
"I did to be sure," returned Miss Letitia, coming into her mother's
room and flinging herself into an armchair, "when I was crossing the
bridge it was. He roared to me to hurry you and Hannah. Holy Mary
Joseph! How stiff I am! That old horn on the saddle has the right leg
cut off me!"
"Well, never mind your legs now," replied Mrs. Mangan, peremptorily,
"what I want to know is what sort is this young man that Pappy's
bringing in on top of us? In God's name, why couldn't he be let go
home to his own?"
"'Young man' is it!" retorted Tishy; "he's nothing but a boy at
school, and a cross boy too! Such beating of his pony as he had when
he wouldn't jump for him! Didn't I try and make poor Zoé go before
him, and th' eye he cast at her! I thought he'd beat me, too!"
"Oh, and is a boy all he is then?" said Mrs. Mangan, with relief in
her voice: "you'd think by the work your father had 'twas the Lord
Leftenant was in it! Run away now, Tishy, like a good girl, and get
those clothes off you, and help Hannah with Barty's room. Boy or man
or whatever he is, he must have a bed under him!"
It was a very deplorable boy who presently arrived at No. 6, The Mall,
Cluhir, and was practically lifted off the car by the Big Doctor.
Francis Aloysius Mangan had many aspects of character of an
undesirable kind, but they were linked with one virtue, the Irish
gift, of a good-natured heart. With his enormous thick hands, that
made Larry think of a tiger's paws, he undressed the boy as cleverly
and gently as he had set the broken bones of his wrist. Mrs. Mangan
and Hannah had not failed; the soup and the jars were, as the latter
authority had pronounced, "as hot as love," similarly passioned was
the ardour of the whisky-punch, with which the proceedings had opened.
Combined with a subsequent sleeping-draught, it conferred the boon of
sleep, and for some hours, at all events, Larry forgot his
recently-acquired knowledge of what pain was. But not for many hours.
In the long darkness of the winter morning he lay with a fast mounting
temperature, while he made the discovery, common to all in his case,
that upon the particular bone that has been broken, the entire
existence pivots. And, in addition to the broken bone, by the time
that Miss Frederica had driven in from Coppinger's Court, there was
but little doubt that what Dr. Mangan called, lightly, "a touch of
pneumonia," would keep young Mr. Coppinger in Barty's room for a time
unspecified.
Miss Frederica drove home again in a seriously perturbed frame of
mind, and with indignation against the decrees of Providence hot
within her.
"I wired for a nurse for him!" she said to Lady Isabel, "I could not
plant myself upon them! It's all _most_ uncomfortable and
unavoidable. Of course they've been extremely kind--"
At the back of Miss Coppinger's mind was the wish, that she trampled
on whenever it stirred, that the Mangans had been less unexceptionally
kind and Good Samaritan-like. "Such an obligation!" she groaned;
"they've turned their own son out of the house to make room for Larry!
But oh, my dear Isabel, if you could imagine what the house is like!
The untidiness! The dirt! Of course they're unspeakably kind, and Dr.
Mangan is certainly very clever, and has managed Larry wonderfully,"
went on Frederica, repenting her of her evil speaking, "and I must say
I can't help liking Mrs. Mangan, but the girl--!" Miss Coppinger
shut her mouth so tightly that her lips became thin, white lines.
"Keep the door of your lips" was a text which she had in her youth
illuminated for herself. She often found that nothing save a sudden
and violent slam would keep that door shut, and, to do her justice,
the slams, when the conversation turned on the Mangan household, were
both frequent and violent.
This was later, when Larry was getting better, and when his aunt had
begun to find the daily drive to Cluhir something of a strain. It was
not until he was practically convalescent that he was permitted to
receive other visitors. Even the daughter of the house, and that
unknown son, into whose bedroom he had been thrust, were, for him,
beneath the surface, and their presence only inferential. Barty was
domiciled at a friend's, and Miss Tishy held aloof, the hushed voices,
and general restraint imposed by illness, being not at all to her
taste. Lady Isabel came once, with his aunt, and Christian crept shyly
in behind them. Christian was wont to be silent in the presence of her
elders. That great and admirable maxim, once widely instilled into the
young, whose purport is that children should seldom be seen and never
heard, had early been accepted by Christian, without resentment, even,
as she grew older, with gratitude. Having diffidently taken Larry's
listless and pallid paw, she had slipped into the background, and
waited silently, while her eager brain absorbed and stored every
detail for future meditation. Long after Larry had lightly forgotten
all save the large facts of his illness and incarceration, Christian
could describe the Pope, whose highly-coloured presentment beatified
(rather than beautified) the wall over Larry's bed, and could imitate,
with the accuracy of a phonograph, the voice of Mrs. Mangan, as she
issued her opinions on the state of the weather to her distinguished
visitors.