The inner aspect of the affair began to reveal itself, accompanied by a singularly unbecoming side light on old Flynn. I perceived also the useful part that had been played by Philippa's pony, but it did not alter the fact that Master Eddy was showing his grat.i.tude like a hero.

The situation was, however, too delicate to admit of comment.

"Very well," I said, without any change of expression, "will you bring the dog down to me?"

"I tried to bring him down with me, but he wouldn't let me put a hand on him."

I hastily got into the few garments of which I had not divested myself before getting into the misnamed stretcher-bed, aware that the horrid task was before me of burglariously probing the depths of Eugene's bedroom, and acutely uncertain as to Playboy's reception of me.

"There's a light above in the room," said Master Eddy, with a dubious glance at the candle in my hand.

I put it down, and followed him into the dark hall.

I have seldom done a more preposterous thing than creep up old Flynn's stairs in the small hours of the morning, in illicit search for my own property; but, given the dual determination to recover Playboy, and to shield my confederate, I still fail to see that I could have acted otherwise.

We reached the first landing; it vibrated rea.s.suringly with the enormous snores of Mr. Flynn. Master Eddy's cold paw closed on my hand, and led me to another and steeper flight of stairs. At the top of these was a second landing, or rather pa.s.sage, at the end of which a crack of light showed under a door. A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face. I defy the most hardened conspirator to have refrained from some expression of opinion.

"Good Lord!" I gasped, starting back, and knocking my head hard against a rafter. "What's that?"

"It's Maggie Kane, sir!" hissed a female voice. "I'm after bringing up a bone for the dog to quieten him!"

That Maggie Kane should also be in the plot was a complication beyond my stunned intelligence; I grasped only the single fact that she was an ally, endued with supernatural and sympathetic forethought. She placed in my hand a tepid and bulky fragment, which, even in the dark, I recognised as the mighty drumstick of last night's goose; at the same moment Master Eddy opened the door, and revealed Playboy, tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.

He was standing up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf. He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower, and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost too well in fact. Following the alluring drumstick Playboy burst into the pa.s.sage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to enquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to cuckoo with jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was not Playboy b.u.mped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously m.u.f.fled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open. We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.

In the kitchen we drew breath for the first time, and Maggie Kane put the cuckoo clock into a flour bin; the house remained still as the grave. Master Eddy opened the back door; behind his head the Plough glittered wakefully in a clear and frosty sky. It was uncommonly cold.

Slipper had not gone to the wake, and was quite sober. I shall never forget it to him. I told him that Playboy had come back, and was to be taken home at once. He asked no inconvenient questions, but did not deny himself a most dissolute wink. We helped him to saddle the pony, while Playboy crunched his hard-earned drumstick in the straw. In less than ten minutes he rode quietly away in the starlight, with Playboy trotting at his stirrup, and Playboy's rope tied to his arm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HE DID NOT DENY HIMSELF A MOST DISSOLUTE WINK]

I did not meet Mr. Flynn at breakfast; he had started early for a distant fair. I have, however, met him frequently since then, and we are on the best of terms. We have not shirked allusions to the day's hunting at Knockeenbwee, but Playboy has not on these occasions been mentioned by either of us.

I understand that Slipper has put forth a version of the story, in which the whole matter is resolved into a trial of wits between himself and Eugene. With this I have not interfered.

VI

THE BOAT'S SHARE

I was sitting on the steps of Shreelane House, smoking a cigarette after breakfast. By the calendar, the month was November, by the map it was the South-west of Ireland, but by every token that hot sun and soft breeze could offer it was the Riviera in April.

Maria, my wife's water spaniel, elderly now, but unimpaired in figure, and in character merely fortified in guile by the castigations of seven winters, reclined on the warm limestone flags beside me. Minx, the nursery fox-terrier, sat, as was her practice, upon Maria's ribs, nodding in slumber. All was peace.

Peace, I say, but even as I expanded in it and the sunshine, there arose to me from the kitchen window in the area the voice of Mrs.

Cadogan, uplifted in pa.s.sionate questioning.

"Bridgie!" it wailed. "Where's me beautiful head and me lovely feet?"

The answer to this amazing inquiry travelled shrilly from the region of the scullery.

"Bilin' in the pot, ma'am."

I realised that it was merely soup in its elemental stage that was under discussion, but Peace spread her wings at the cry; it recalled the fact that Philippa was having a dinner party that same night. In a small establishment such as mine, a dinner party is an affair of many aspects, all of them serious. The aspect of the master of the house, however, is not serious, it is merely contemptible. Having got out the champagne, and reverentially decanted the port, there remains for him no further place in the proceedings, no moment in which his presence is desired. If, at such a time, I wished to have speech with my wife, she was not to be found; if I abandoned the search and stationed myself in the hall, she would pa.s.s me, on an average, twice in every three minutes, generally with flowers in her hands, always with an expression so rapt as to abash all questionings. I therefore sat upon the steps and read the paper, superfluous to all save the dogs, to whom I at least offered a harbourage in the general stress.

Suddenly, and without a word of warning, Minx and Maria were converted from a slumbrous mound into twin comets--comets that trailed a continuous shriek of rage as they flew down the avenue. The cause of the affront presently revealed itself, in the form of a tall woman, with a shawl over her head, and a basket on her arm. She advanced unfalteringly, Minx walking on her hind legs beside her, as if in a circus, attentively smelling the basket, while Maria bayed her at large in the background. She dropped me a curtsey fit for the Lord Lieutenant.

"Does your Honour want any fish this morning?" Her rippling grey hair gleamed like silver in the sunlight, her face was straight-browed and pale, her grey eyes met mine with respectful self-possession. She might have been Deborah the prophetess, or the Mother of the Gracchi; as a matter of fact I recognised her as a certain Mrs. Honora Brickley, mother of my present kitchen-maid, a lady whom, not six months before, I had fined in a matter of trespa.s.s and a.s.sault.

"They're lovely fish altogether!" she pursued, "they're leppin' fresh!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THEY'RE LOVELY FISH ALTOGETHER! THEY'RE LEPPIN'

FRESH!"]

Here was the chance to make myself useful. I called down the area and asked Mrs. Cadogan if she wanted fish. (It may or may not be necessary to mention that my cook's name is locally p.r.o.nounced "Caydogawn.")

"What fish is it, sir?" replied Mrs. Cadogan, presenting at the kitchen window a face like a harvest moon.

"'Tis pollock, ma'am!" shouted Mrs. Brickley from the foot of the steps.

"'Sha! thim's no good to us!" responded the harvest moon in bitter scorn. "Thim's not company fish!"

I was here aware of the presence of my wife in the doorway, with a menu-slate in one hand, and one of my best silk pocket handkerchiefs, that had obviously been used as a duster, in the other.

"Filleted with white sauce--" she murmured to herself, a world of thought in her blue eyes, "or perhaps quenelles----"

Mrs. Brickley instantly extracted a long and shapely pollock from her basket, and, with eulogies of its beauty, of Philippa's beauty, and of her own magnanimity in proffering her wares to us instead of to a craving market in Skebawn, laid it on the steps.

At this point a series of yells from the nursery, of the usual blood-curdling description, lifted Philippa from the scene of action as a wind whirls a feather.

"Buy them!" came back to me from the stairs.

I kept to myself my long-formed opinion that eating pollock was like eating boiled cotton wool with pins in it, and the bargain proceeded.

The affair was almost concluded, when Mrs. Brickley, in s.n.a.t.c.hing a fish from the bottom of her basket to complete an irresistible half-dozen, let it slip from her fingers. It fell at my feet, revealing a mangled and gory patch on its side.

"Why, then, that's the best fish I have!" declared Mrs. Brickley in response to my protest. "That's the very one her honour Mrs. Yeates would fancy! She'd always like to see the blood running fresh!"

This flight of sympathetic insight did not deter me from refusing the injured pollock, coupled with a regret that Mrs. Brickley's cat should have been interrupted in its meal.

Mrs. Brickley did not immediately reply. She peeped down the area, she glanced into the hall.

"Cat is it!" she said, sinking her voice to a mysterious whisper.

"Your Honour knows well, G.o.d bless you, that it was no cat done that!"

Obedient to the wholly fallacious axiom that those who ask no questions will be told no lies, I remained silent.

"Only for the luck of G.o.d being on me they'd have left meself no betther than they left the fish!" continued Mrs. Brickley. "Your Honour didn't hear what work was in it on Hare Island Strand last night? Thim Keohanes had the wooden leg pulled from undher me husband with the len'th o' fightin'! Oh! Thim's outlawed altogether, and the faymales is as manly as the men! Sure the polis theirselves does be in dhread of thim women! The day-and-night-screeching porpoises!"