"Murphy!"
"Yes, sir."
"Have you anything in Court to-day?"
"Yes, sir, an ex parte application, Donald and Cluggs."
"Let O'Neill attend to it. I shall want you to draft a deed for some
ladies who will call here at noon. You can come down at ten minutes
after twelve."
"Yes, sir," said Murphy.
He grabbed his share of the letters and got to the door bathed in
perspiration and forebodings. He closed the door softly behind him,
and stood for a few seconds staring at the handle. "Blow you!" said he
viciously to nothing in particular, and he went slowly upstairs.
"He can't know," said he on the first landing. On the second floor he
thought, "She couldn't have told for she didn't know herself." He
reached his desk. "I wish I had a half of whisky," said the young man
to himself.
Before, however, twelve o'clock arrived he had journeyed on the hopeful
pinions of youth from the dogmatic "could not be" to the equally
immovable "is not," and his mind resumed its interrupted equilibrium.
At twelve o'clock Mrs. and Miss MacMahon arrived, and were at once
shown into the private office. At ten minutes past, Mr. Murphy's
respectful tap was heard. "Don't, Eddie," said Mrs. MacMahon in a
queer, flurried voice. "Come in," said her husband. Nora was
examining some judicial cartoons pinned over the mantelpiece. Mr.
Murphy opened the door a few inches, slid through the aperture, and was
at once caught and held by his employer's eye, which, like a hand,
guided him to the table with his notebook. Under the almost physical
pressure of that authoritative glare he did not dare to look who was in
the room, but the rim of his eye saw the movement of a skirt like the
far-away, shadowy canter of a ghost's robe. He fixed his attention on
his note-book.
Mr. MacMahon began to dictate a Deed of Conveyance from a precedent
deed in his hand. After dictating for some few minutes--
"Murphy," said he, and at the word the young lady studying the cartoons
stiffened, "I've rather lost the thread of that clause; please read
what you have down."
Murphy began to read, and, at the first word, the girl made a tiny,
shrill, mouse's noise, and then stood stock-still, tightened up and
frightened, with her two wild eyes trying to peep around her ears.
Mr. Murphy heard the noise and faltered--he knew instinctively.
Something told him with the bellowing assurance of a cannon who was
there. He must look. He forced his slack face past the granite image
that was his employer, saw a serge-clad figure that he knew, one ear
and the curve of a cheek. Then a cascade broke inside his head. It
buzzed and chattered and crashed, with now and again the blank
brutality of thunder bashing through the noise. The serge-clad figure
swelled suddenly to a tremendous magnitude, and then it receded just as
swiftly, and the vast earth spun minutely on a pin's point ten million
miles away, and she was behind it, her eyes piercing with scorn. . . .
Through the furious winds that whirled about his brain he heard a
whisper, thin and cold, and insistent as a razor's edge, "Go on,
Murphy; go on, Murphy." He strove to fix his attention on his
shorthand notes--To fight it down, to stand the shock like a man, and
then crawl into a hole somewhere and die; but his mind would not grip,
nor his eyes focus. The only words which his empty brain could pump up
were these, irrelevant and idiotic, "'A frog he would a-wooing go,
heigho,' said Rowley"; and they must not be said. "It is a bit
difficult, perhaps," said the whispering voice that crept through the
tumult of winds and waters in his head. "Never mind, take down the
rest of it," and the far-away whisper began to say things all about
nothing, making queer little noises and pauses, running for a moment
into a ripple of sound, and eddying and dying away and coming back
again--buz-z-z! His notebook lying on the table was as small as a
postage stamp, while the pencil in his hand was as big as an elephant's
leg. How can a man write on a microscopic blur with the stump of a fir
tree? He poked and prodded, and Mr. MacMahon watched for a few moments
his clerk poking his note-book with the wrong end of a pencil. He
silently pulled his daughter forward and made her look. After a
little--
"That will do, Murphy," said he, and Mr. Murphy, before he got out,
made two severe attempts to walk through a wall.
For half an hour he sat at his desk in a trance, with his eyes fixed
upon an ink-bottle. At last, nodding his head slowly--
"I'll bet you a shilling," said he to the ink-bottle, "that I get the
sack to-night."
And the ink-bottle lost the wager.