THE SEARCH PARTY
BY
G. A. BIRMINGHAM
AUTHOR OF “SPANISH GOLD,” “LALAGE’S LOVERS,”
“THE SIMPKINS PLOT,” ETC.
[Illustration]
HODDER & STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE SEARCH PARTY
THE SEARCH PARTY
CHAPTER I
Dr. O’Grady, Dr. Lucius O’Grady, was the medical officer of the Poor
Law Union of Clonmore, which is in Western Connacht. The office is
not like that of resident magistrate or bank manager. It does not
necessarily confer on its holder the right of entry to the highest
society. Therefore, Dr. O’Grady was not invited to dinner, luncheon,
or even afternoon tea by Lord Manton at that season of the year when
Clonmore Castle was full of visitors. Lady Flavia Canning, Lord
Manton’s daughter, who was married to a London barrister of some
distinction, and moved in smart society, did not appreciate Dr.
O’Grady. Nor did those nephews and nieces of the deceased Lady Manton
who found it convenient to spend a part of each summer at Clonmore
Castle. They were not the sort of people who would associate with a
dispensary doctor, unless, indeed, he had possessed a motor car. And
Dr. O’Grady, for reasons which became obvious later on, did not keep a
motor car.
On the other hand, he was a frequent guest at the Castle during those
early summer months when Lord Manton was alone. In April and May, for
instance, and in June, Dr. O’Grady dined once, twice, or even three
times a week at Clonmore Castle. The old earl liked him because he
found him amusing; and Dr. O’Grady had a feeling for his host as
nearly approaching respect as it was in his nature to entertain for
any man. This respect was not of the kind which every elderly earl
would have appreciated. The doctor was constitutionally incapable of
understanding the innate majesty of a peerage, and had not the smallest
veneration for grey hairs in man or woman. Nor was he inclined to bow
before any moral superiority in Lord Manton. In fact, Lord Manton,
though grown too old for the lavish wildness of his earlier years,
made no pretence at morality or dignity of any kind. What Dr. O’Grady
respected and liked in him was a certain cynical frankness, a hinted
contempt for all ordinary standards of respectability. This suited
well enough the doctor’s own volatile indifference to anything which
threatened to bore him.
When Lord Manton returned to Clonmore in May, 1905, after his usual
visit to his daughter in Grosvenor Street, he at once asked Dr.
O’Grady to dinner. There was on this occasion a special reason for the
invitation, though doubtless it would have been given and accepted
without any reason. Lord Manton wanted to know all that could be known
about a new tenant who had taken Rosivera for six months. Rosivera,
long used as a dower house by Lord Manton’s ancestors, was not an easy
place to let. It stood eight miles from the village of Clonmore, on
the shore of a small land-locked bay. It was a singularly unattractive
building, rectangular, grey, four storeys high, and lit by small
ineffective windows. There was no shooting connected with it nor any
fishing of the kind appreciated by a sportsman. There were, it was
believed, small flat fish to be caught in the bay, but no one thought
it worth while to pursue these creatures earnestly. Occasionally an
adventurous Englishman, cherishing some romantic idea of the west of
Ireland, rented the house for August and September. Occasionally a
wealthy Dublin doctor brought his family there for six weeks. None of
these tenants ever came a second time. The place was too solitary for
the social, too ugly for the amateurs of the picturesque, utterly dull
for the sportsman, and had not even the saving grace of an appeal to
the romantic. The mother and grandmother of Lord Manton had died there,
but in the odour of moderate sanctity. Their ghosts wandered down no
corridors. Indeed, no ghosts could have haunted, no tradition attached
itself to a house with the shape and appearance of Rosivera.
There was, therefore, something interesting and curious in the fact
that a tenant had taken the place for six months and had settled down
there early in March, a time of year at which even a hermit, vowed to a
life entirely devoid of incident, might have hesitated to fix his cell
at Rosivera.
“The first thing that struck me as queer about the man,” said Lord
Manton, after dinner, “was his name. Did you ever hear of anybody
called Red? Scarlett, of course, is comparatively common.”
“So is Black,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and Brown, and Grey, and White. I’ve
heard of Pink, and I once met a man called Blue, but he spelt it ‘ew.’”
“Guy Theodore Red is this man’s name. Guy and Theodore are all right,
of course, but Red----!”
“Is he safe for the rent, do you think?”
“He has paid the whole six months in advance,” said Lord Manton, “and
he never asked a question about the drains. He’s the only tenant I ever
heard of who didn’t make himself ridiculous about drains.”
“He hasn’t got typhoid yet,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If he’s the kind of man
who pays six months’ rent in advance and asks no questions, I hope he
soon will.”
“Unfortunately for you he seems to have neither wife nor children.”
“No, nor as much as a maid-servant,” said Dr. O’Grady. “And from the
look of him, I’d say he was a tough old cock himself, the sort of man a
microbe would hesitate about attacking.”
“You’ve seen him, then?”
“I happened to be standing at Jimmy O’Loughlin’s door the day he drove
through in his motor car.”
“You would be, of course.”
“But I’ve never seen him since. Nobody has. He has a servant, an
Englishman, I’m told, who comes into the village every second day in
the motor, and buys what’s wanted for the house at Jimmy O’Loughlin’s.”
“Jimmy makes a good thing out of that, I expect,” said Lord Manton.
“Believe you me, he does. Jimmy’s the boy who knows how to charge, and
these people don’t seem to care what they pay.”
“I hear he has two friends with him.”
“He has, foreigners, both of them. Jimmy O’Loughlin says they can’t
either of them speak English. It was Jimmy who carted their things down
to Rosivera from the station, so of course he’d know.”
“Byrne told me that,” said Lord Manton, chuckling as he spoke. “There
seems to have been some queer things to be carted.”
The conversation turned on Mr. Red’s belongings, the personal luggage
which the English servant had brought in the train, the packing-cases
which had followed the next day and on many subsequent days. Byrne,
it appeared, had also met Mr. Red and his party on their arrival; but,
then, Byrne had a legitimate excuse wherewith to cover his curiosity.
He was Lord Manton’s steward, and it was his business to put the new
tenant in possession of Rosivera. He had given a full report of Mr.
Red, the foreign friends and the English servant, to Lord Manton. He
had described the packing-cases which, day after day, were carted from
the railway station by Jimmy O’Loughlin. They were, according to Byrne,
of unusual size and great weight. There were altogether twenty-five
of them. It was Byrne’s opinion that they contained pianos. The
station-master, who had to drag them out of the train, agreed with him.
Jimmy O’Loughlin and his man, who had ample opportunities of examining
them on the way to Rosivera, thought they were full of machinery,
possibly steam engines, or as they expressed it, “the makings of some
of them motor cars.”
“No man,” said Lord Manton, commenting on this information, “even if
his name happens to be Red, can possibly want twenty-five grand pianos
in Rosivera.”
“Unless he came down here with the intention of composing an opera,”
said Dr. O’Grady.
“Even then--three, four, anything up to six I could understand, but
twenty-five! No opera could require that. As for those cases containing
steam engines or bits of motor cars, what on earth could a manufacturer
of such things be doing at Rosivera?”
“My own belief,” said Dr. O’Grady, “is that the man is an artist--a
sculptor, engaged in the production of a statue of unusual size.”
“With blocks of marble in the packing-cases?”
“Yes, and the two foreigners for models. They look like models. One
of them had a long black beard, and the other was a big man, well
over six foot, blond, seemed to be a Norwegian; not that I ever saw a
Norwegian to my knowledge, but this fellow looked like the kind of man
a Norwegian ought to be.”
“It will be a pretty big statue,” said Lord Manton, “if it absorbs
twenty-five blocks of marble, each the size of a grand piano.”
“He looked like an artist,” said Dr. O’Grady; “he had a pointed beard,
and a wild expression in his eye.”
“A genius escaped from somewhere, perhaps.”
“He very well might be. Indeed, I’d say from the glimpse I had of him
that he’s worse than a genius. He had the eye of a mad gander. But,
of course, I only saw him the once, sitting in his motor, the day
he arrived. He hasn’t stirred out of Rosivera since, and, as I said
before, I haven’t been sent for to attend him for anything.”
“The queerest thing about him was the message he sent me,” said Lord
Manton. “By way of doing the civil thing, I told Byrne to say that I
should make a point of calling on him as soon as I got home.”
“And he sent you word that he’d be thankful if you’d stay away and not
bother him. I heard all about that. Byrne was furious. That is just one
of the things which makes me feel sure he’s a genius. Nobody except a
genius or a socialist would have sent a message of that kind to you;
and he clearly isn’t a socialist. If he was, he couldn’t afford to pay
six months’ rent in advance for Rosivera.”
Dr. O’Grady spoke confidently. He was not personally acquainted with
any of the numerous men of genius in Ireland, but he had read about
them in newspapers and was aware that they differed in many respects
from other men. No ordinary man, that is to say, no one who is
perfectly sane, would refuse to receive a visit from an earl. Mr. Red
had refused, and so, since he was not a socialist, he must be a genius.
The reasoning was perfectly convincing.
“I expect,” said Lord Manton, “that his statue, in spite of its
immense size, will be a melancholy object to look at. Rosivera is the
most depressing place I know. It was built to serve as a dower house
by my grandfather, and he evidently chose the site and the style of
architecture with a view to making his widow feel really sorry he was
dead. If I had a wife whom I disliked intensely I should try to die
at once so that she should have as long a time as possible to live at
Rosivera.”
“I wouldn’t care to spend a winter alone there,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and
I’m a man of fairly cheerful disposition.”
“I suppose there’s a lot of talk about Red in the village?”
“There was at first; but the people are getting a bit sick of him now.
It’s a long time since he’s done anything the least exciting. About a
fortnight after he came he sent a telegram which had the whole place
fizzing for awhile.”
Telegrams in the west of Ireland, are, of course, public property. So
are postcards and the contents of the parcels carried by his Majesty’s
mails. Lord Manton, whose taste for the details of local gossip was
strongly developed, asked what Mr. Red’s telegram was about.
“That’s what nobody could tell,” said Dr. O’Grady. “It began with
four letters, A.M.B.A., and then came a lot of figures. Father Moroney
worked at it for the best part of two hours, with the help of a Latin
dictionary, but he could make no more out of it than I could myself.”
“Cipher,” said Lord Manton; “probably quite a simple cipher if you’d
known how to go about reading it.”
“At the end of the week, another packing-case arrived, carriage paid
from London. It was as big as any of the first lot. Byrne and I went
up to the station to see it before Jimmy O’Loughlin carted it down to
Rosivera. He seemed to think that it was another piano. Since then
nothing of any sort has happened, and the people have pretty well given
over talking about the man.”
Lord Manton yawned. Like the other inhabitants of Clonmore he was
beginning to get tired of Mr. Red and his affairs. A stranger is only
interesting when there are things about him which can be found out. If
his affairs are public property he becomes commonplace and dull. If, on
the other hand, it is manifestly impossible to discover anything about
him, if he sends his telegrams in cipher, employs a remarkably taciturn
servant to do his marketing, and never appears in public himself, he
becomes in time quite as tiresome as the man who has no secrets at all.
“Any other news about the place?” asked Lord Manton. “You needn’t
mention Jimmy O’Loughlin’s wife’s baby. Byrne told me about it.”
“It’s the tenth,” said Dr. O’Grady, “the tenth boy.”
“So I believe.”
“Well, there’s nothing else, except the election of the inspector of
sheep dipping. I needn’t tell you that there’s been plenty of talk
about that.”
“So I gathered,” said Lord Manton, “from the number of candidates for
the post who wrote to me asking me to back them up. I think there were
eleven of them.”
“I hear that you supported Patsy Devlin, the smith. He’s a drunken
blackguard.”
“That’s why I wrote him the letter of recommendation. There’s a lot of
stupid talk nowadays about the landlords having lost all their power
in the country. It’s not a bit true. They have plenty of power, more
than they ever had, if they only knew how to use it. All I have to do
if I want a particular man not to be appointed to anything is to write
a strong letter in his favour to the Board of Guardians or the County
Council, or whatever body is doing the particular job that happens to
be on hand at the time. The League comes down on my man at once and he
hasn’t the ghost of a chance. That’s the beauty of being thoroughly
unpopular. Three years ago you were made dispensary doctor here chiefly
because I used all my influence on behalf of the other two candidates.
They were both men with bad records. It was just the same in this
sheep-dipping business. I didn’t care who was appointed so long as it
wasn’t Patsy Devlin. I managed the labourers’ cottages on the same
principle. There were two different pieces of land where I particularly
objected to their building cottages. I offered them those two without
waiting to be asked. Of course, they wouldn’t have them, insisted in
fact on getting another bit of land altogether, thinking they were
annoying me. I was delighted. That’s the way to manage things nowadays.”
“Do you suppose,” said Dr. O’Grady, “that if I wrote to Mr. Red saying
I sincerely hoped he wouldn’t get typhoid for a fortnight, because I
wanted to go away for a holiday--do you suppose he’d get it to spite
me?”
“That’s the worst of men in your profession. You’re always wanting
everybody to be ill. It’s most unchristian.”
“I want Red to get typhoid,” said Dr. O’Grady, “because he’s the only
man in the neighbourhood except yourself who would pay me for curing
him.”