MR LYBURN
Larry Lyburn had a face which, in colour and expression, was exactly
like a wedge of double Gloucester cheese. He was the helper in the
stable, and lived over the horses. Dan, the coachman, had a cottage near
the gamekeeper’s.
Larry had champagne-bottle shoulders, rather bowed legs, and a back like
the hind view of a lobster. He was a decent-living man, a superb
horseman, an excellent groom, and a heaven-born vet. He was nothing
else. If his character had been cut out of cardboard the line of
demarcation between living efficiency and dead blankness could not have
been more sharply defined. Larry was not only entirely and utterly
destitute of all—even the most rudimentary—knowledge of Politics,
Astronomy, Art, Literature (including writing and spelling) and
Geography, but he was destitute also of the power of acquiring such
knowledge, or the wish to do so. He was a living example of what horses
can do for a man if he devotes himself to them properly, and to nothing
else.
Tell him to do a stable job, and everything would be done well and up to
time, but send him on the simplest business into the outside world
beyond the smell of ammonia, and everything would be muddled. He would
have made a splendid ambassador to the Huhyhnms, but for anything else
in the universe beyond his work he was worthless.
This was Larry, sober. “Once in a while,” Larry got drunk. That is a
plain statement of the fact. The whisky flew to his head, and one may
amuse oneself with imagining the consternation of the whisky fiend on
finding itself in such a skull. The man could not be made speechless,
because he was always speechless; nor talkative, because he had nothing
to talk about. He could not be made to blunder worse in the ordinary
affairs of life.
On these occasions Larry made mistakes in his work, but it is only fair
to him to say they were very rare occasions.
He was standing in the harness room cleaning a bit with sand by the
light of a lantern, when Patsy appeared to summon him to help in fixing
up the burglar trap.
“Larry,” said Patsy, sticking his head in through the half-open door.
“Oh, there you are. Mr Fanshawe wants you in the house.”
“I’m finishin’ clanin’ me harness,” replied Larry. (Mr Lyburn always
spoke of the harness as his personal property, also of the horses.)
“How much more of it have you to clane?”
“Nothin’.”
“Well, finish it up in a hurry,” said Patsy, “for he’s waitin’ till you
come.”
“Get off that chist!” cried Larry, polishing away at the bit, as Patsy
made to take his seat on a big corn-bin whose lid did duty for a table.
“Get off that chist, or I’ll land you a wan wid me fut.”
Patsy got off the chest.
Mr Lyburn was very touchy about a lot of things, and he expressed
himself directly; it was part of the cardboard nature of the individual:
he had no _nuances_ of expression.
He had cleaned the bit with sand, he was now polishing it with a
chamois-leather and loving tenderness. If Larry was a living example of
what horses can do for a man, the harness room was an object-lesson of
what a man can do for harness. It was good to look at the glossy,
nut-brown, pig-skin saddles on their rests, the suits of carriage
harness, each complete and in its proper place.
“Lave down that whip, or I’ll be takin’ the butt of it to you!” cried
Larry.
Patsy put the whip aside and waited, making no attempt at conversation,
which he knew would be useless.
When the bit was polished to satisfaction and placed aside, Larry looked
around to see that everything was in its place, blew out the stable
lantern, closed the door, and prepared to follow Patsy into the house.
It will be noticed that he did not enquire of Patsy what business Mr
Fanshawe wanted him upon.
Led by Patsy, he entered the house by the kitchen entrance.
Patsy’s room, as we have said, was on the ground-floor. The other
servants’ rooms were at the top of the house, but the page-boy at Glen
Druid always inhabited a room on the ground-floor, near the plate
pantry.
It was five minutes past ten; most of the servants had gone up to bed,
and nobody saw them as they went down the passage to the room, where,
lit by a candle burning on the chest of drawers, a coil of rope, a huge
pulley, some carpenter’s tools, and half a dozen long screws lay on the
bed. A step-ladder stood in the middle of the room under the beam in the
ceiling.
“You wait here,” said Patsy, “till I tell Mr Fanshawe. Don’t be movin’
from the room; and if any one comes, say you’ve come to help fix the
window sash.”
“Off with you!” replied Larry.
Lady Seagrave, Uncle Molyneux, Violet Lestrange and General Grampound
were playing bridge in the drawing-room when Patsy appeared with the
announcement, that Larry Lyburn wanted to see Mr Fanshawe on account of
one of the horses.
Dicky, who had excused himself from bridge, alleging a headache, left
the room with a glance at Violet—an ocular kiss unnoticed by the others
in the ferment of mind caused by the General, who was going the grand
slam.
“Larry’s waitin’, sir,” said Patsy.
“Come on,” replied Mr Fanshawe.
They reached the room unnoticed, and Larry greeted Mr Fanshawe with a
touch of an imaginary hat.
“That’s right,” said Dicky, looking at the things on the bed—“everything
is here. Does Larry know what we’re about?”
“No, sir,” said Patsy.
“Well, see here,” said Mr Fanshawe, turning to the stable-man, “a
burglar is going to break into the house to-night, and I’m going to
catch him.”
Mr Fanshawe made the statement, as we make many statements in this life,
little knowing how much it implied, for, as a matter of fact, the thing
he was about to catch or lose that night was not so much Paddy Murphy as
his future happiness.
How Mr Murphy could possibly be bound up with that blissful condition
you will not discover, however, till you have read the last pages of
this story.
“Yes, sor,” said Larry, as unmoved as though it were some minor stable
matter about which Mr Fanshawe had spoken.
“I want you to help.”
“Yes, sor.”
“You see that rope?”
“Yes, sor.”
“I’m going to screw that pulley on to the beam.”
“Yes, sor.”
“We’ll put the rope through the pulley and a running noose at the end of
the rope.”
“Yes, sor. Axing your pardon, sor, I don’t mind helpin’ in the fixin’
and the bindin’ of him, but I’d rather lave the stretchin’ of him to
you, sor.”
“The what?”
“The stretchin’, sor.”
“The hangin’ he means, sir,” said Patsy. “Sure, Larry, that’s not what
Misther Fanshawe’s afther.”
“Good God!” said Dicky, “you didn’t think I was going to _hang_ the
man!”
Larry scratched his head.
“I thought be the rope, sor——”
“Come on,” said Mr Fanshawe, “and I’ll show you what I mean.”
He got on the step-ladder and fixed the pulley tight on to the beam with
long screws. At one end of the rope, he made a huge running noose, large
enough for the body of a man to pass through, then he pulled up the
window sash and tacked the upper part of the noose to the lower part of
the sash lightly with tin tacks, so that a strong pull would fetch the
whole thing away. He passed the free end of the rope through the pulley.
A man entering the window would pass through the noose.
“See!” said Mr Fanshawe. “We will leave the window just like that; it’s
a warm night outside.”
“Yes, sor.”
“It’s now eleven,” said Mr Fanshawe, “and we have an hour to wait. Patsy
will stand by the window, I’ll sit on the bed with this end of the rope
in my hand, you sit beside me. When I give the word, and not before,
haul for all you’re worth; it will take the two of us to swing him up.
Patsy, take the step-ladder away. I shall go and have a whisky and soda,
and be back in twenty minutes. You stay here, Larry.”
“Yes, sor.”
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