SEEING NOT BELIEVING.
For a moment the young man looked at the other in amazement and doubt.
But it was impossible to resist for any great length of time the
conviction that O'Hanlon had spoken sincerely. O'Hanlon himself looked
troubled, scared, affrighted, as though scarcely able, and wholly
unwilling, to believe his own words. O'Brien was the first to recover
his composure.
"I will not," he said, "question what you say; I will go so far as to
assure you I am fully convinced you saw the ghost of that unhappy man.
You want me to tell you a story which, as I said, is a long one, and I
want you to tell me your story at length. Dine with me at 'The
Munster' this evening at seven, and we can chat the matter over."
The reference to the hotel and dinner drew the mind of the lawyer back
once more into its ordinary groove. With a shrug of his shoulders and
a forced laugh, he said:
"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.
"On the day of his death he was followed from a distance by two
policemen in plain clothes. They watched him leave the cottage in
which he lived at Kilcash, take to the downs, and make straight for
Kilcash House. They were not able to get near him until he had just
gained the house. He then became aware that he was followed, and ran
straight for the cliffs. The rest I have already told you. There never
was an inquest, for, as you may know, the bodies of people drowned
there are never found.
"A week ago I was in the neighbourhood of Kilcash House. I had left my
horse and car at Kilcash, and was walking over the downs to the
village, when on the cliffs, just over the Black Rock, I cast my eyes
down, and there, on that large shelf of rock, as plain as I see you
now, I saw him. The same coat, the same Scotch bonnet, the same
trousers--not a thing altered since the first day he stood in my
office, going on eleven years ago."
"What time of the day was it?"
"Broad day. About three o'clock in the afternoon."
"It must have been some one of about his stature dressed identically."
"Must it?" cried the lawyer, scornfully. "You have not heard all yet.
I made up my mind to be sure. I ran--I _ran_ to the top of the path,
and went down to the rocks below. There was nobody there. You know the
place. Tell me how a living man could get away alive, except up the
path that I went down? It was Michael Fahey's ghost, as sure as I am a
living man."
"I confess," said Jerry, in perplexity, "I cannot explain away what
you say, except upon the supposition that you were suffering from
delusion. How do you account for the appearance yourself?"
"This is my way of reasoning it out. I either saw the ghost of Michael
Fahey or I did not. If I did, I account for it by the fact that
Davenport and he were associated together in something while they were
alive, and now that both are dead, one of them has to come back and
see that something left undone--a wrong unrighted, a debt unpaid, an
explanation unmade--is put straight."
"But why should the one be Fahey? And why should it be at the Black
Rock? And why should he appear to you?"
"The first, because I had nothing to do with Mr. Davenport; the
second, because seeing Fahey's ghost there would recall to my mind
most vividly the circumstance of his death; and the third, because I
hold the documents to which I have referred."
"But don't you think the fact of Davenport's name having been brought
before the public so lately, and that you recollected the documents
you held belonging to Fahey, and that you looked over the cliff at the
very spot where he lost his life, may all have helped to impose upon
your imagination?"
"Sir, an attorney of my years does not know the meaning of the word
imagination. You may say I am mad if you like, but don't attribute
imagination to me, or I shall break down altogether. O'Brien, do you
mean to say seriously that you take me for a crazy young poet? Great
heavens, sir, it can't have come to that with me in my declining
years!"
"But, then, what did you see?"
"A ghost--Fahey's ghost."
"You don't mean to tell me seriously you believe in ghosts!"
"I mean to tell you most emphatically I do not."
"Then what is your contention?"
"That I, being one who does not believe in ghosts, saw the ghost of
Michael Fahey this day week at the Black Rock."
"I can make nothing of your position."
"I can make nothing of my position either. I am beginning to think I
shall lose my reason. You are the first person I spoke to on the
subject. Don't say anything about it to a soul. I have no wife to blab
to, and I look on you as a friend. I had hoped you would have brought
me news from London--some facts not published in the papers, and
bearing on this branch of the case. But you haven't. If you let this
get abroad, some of my _kind_ friends will get me locked up. I got old
Coolahan locked up because he kept on saying that farthings were as
valuable as sovereigns because they had the Queen's head on them."
O'Brien was sorely puzzled. It did not now look like a matter which
ought to be laughed at. Either O'Hanlon had seen the ghost of this
man, or he was losing his reason. There was one other possibility. He
said: "I am not going to make light of what you have told me, or
communicate it to a soul. There is one other question--a wild one, I
own. I wonder have you thought of it?"
"What is it? If you have thought of anything which has escaped me, you
are a very Daniel come to judgment."
"Could it be that man was not really drowned ten or eleven years ago?
Either the police may have been mistaken in their man, and the wrong
man may have leaped into the hole, or Fahey may have leaped in and by
some miracle escaped."
"Yes, I have thought of both possibilities. The only answer will
dispose of both. The clothes seen ten or eleven, years ago, and those
seen this day week, were identical."
"What! You identify them?"
"Yes, if"--with a shudder--"those of last week could be produced and
handled. O'Brien, I'm not afraid of ghosts, but I begin to be afraid
of myself, now that I have begun to see them."
"But after such a lapse of time, and at a long distance, as from the
top of the cliff to the plain of rock below. It must be a hundred
feet."
"It is a hundred and twenty feet from the brow of the cliff to where
the cliff meets the sloping rock, and the figure was about one hundred
and seventy or eighty feet from the base. I measured both roughly.
That gives between seventy and eighty yards from my eye. Now, ten
years ago, and this day week, the colour, cut, and material of the
coat and trousers were identical, and both times there was a circular
green patch on the right elbow of the coat, about the size of my palm;
and both times the right leg of the trousers had evidently been torn
up as high as the knee-joint behind, and rudely stitched by an
unskilful hand. I'm not," he said, looking timidly around, "afraid of
ghosts, but I am of men. Keep my secret, O'Brien, if you care for me."
"You may swear by me. By-the-way, I have more time than you. Let me
see those documents you have, and I'll try if I can puzzle anything
out of them."
"With the greatest pleasure and thankfulness."
And so the two parted.