CHAPTER X

The "touch of pneumonia," prophesied by Dr. Mangan, had proved to be a sufficiently emphatic one. Larry's recovery was slow, and during his languid convalescence, he found himself becoming sincerely attached to the Big Doctor and Mrs. Mangan, and their high place in his affections was shared by the nurse provided by Miss Coppinger. The bond of a common faith was one that, at this stage of his development, had but little appeal to Larry, but he was, at all events, spared any possibility of suffering from the feelings of sub-friction, if not of antagonism, that inevitably stirred in his aunt's breast, if she found herself brought into relation closer than that of employer and employed with those of the older creed.

His sense of beauty, now beginning to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty's bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women. Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted his mind from the wall-paper (which suggested the contents of Dr. Mangan's surgery, rhubarb, and mustard-leaves predominating), and from Barty's taste in art, which in its sacred and profane aspects was alike deplorable.

Nurse Brennan, slight and fair, with the clearest of blue eyes, and a Dresden china complexion--Larry was already artist enough to study and adore the shadow of her white coif, with its subtle, reflected lights, on her pink, rose-leaf cheek--and Mrs. Mangan, just a little over-blown, but heavily, darkly handsome, with deep-lidded shadowy eyes, and--as Master Coppinger pleased himself by discovering--a slight suggestion of a luxurious Chesterfield sofa, upholstered in rich cream velvet. When he was getting better, and the rigours of the sick room were relaxing, these two provided him with interest and entertainment of which they were delightfully unaware.

"Well, and what will I give him for his dinner to-day, Norrse?"--(impossible to persuade the English alphabet to disclose Mrs. Mangan's p.r.o.nunciation of this word)--his hostess would say, drifting largely into Larry's room, and seating herself on the side of his bed.

"Don't be making an invalid of him at all, Mrs. Mangan!" Nurse Brennan would rejoin briskly; "I'm just telling him I'd be sorry to get a thump from that old wrist of his, he and the Doctor think so much about! And he hasn't as much as a point of temperature those three days!"

"Oh, I say, Nurse!" Larry would protest, "then why won't you let me get up?"

"Be quite now"--(in Ireland the "e" in "quiet" is not infrequently thus transposed)--"and don't be bothering me, like a good child!"

Nurse would reply, with a sidelong flash of her charming eyes, a recognition of Larry's age and s.e.x that atoned for the opprobrious epithet.

"Would he like a bit of fish now? I'm going down the town, and I might meet one of the women in from Broadhaven." Thus Mrs. Mangan, coaxingly.

"Oh, Mrs. Mangan, please don't bother!" says Larry.

"Ah, no bother at all! Sure I was going down anyway to the chapel to get a sup of holy water. I declare the house is bone dry! Not a drop in it!"

After dreary winter mornings spent in reading, by the light of a misplaced window, or age-long afternoons, drowsed through in that torpor, mental as well as physical, that overwhelms the victim of a prolonged sojourn in bed, Larry used to find himself looking forward to the conversations between Nurse Brennan and Mrs. Mangan that arose at tea-time, and followed, stimulated by the early darkness of January, in the firelight; the southern voices rising and falling like the flickering flames, becoming soon self-engrossed, and forgetful of the silent listener in the bed. Sometimes sleep would lap him in slow, stealthy peace, and the voices would die away, or come intermittently, as the sound of a band marching through a town fades and recurs at the end of a street. But without being aware of it, he was absorbing knowledge, learning a new point of view, breathing a new atmosphere that was to influence him more deeply than he could have any conception was possible.

One evening the talk fell on the congenial topic of illness, doctors and patients, nurses and nuns, all spinning in the many-coloured whirlpool of talk, now one and now another cresting the changing wave.

The fact that Larry was of their own religion, counterbalanced his belonging to an alien cla.s.s, and if their consciences sometimes hinted at a lack of discretion, they quieted them with the a.s.surance that "the poor child was asleep!"

"Ah, the nuns are wonderful!" said Mrs. Mangan, languishingly. "Look how lovely they have the Workhouse Infirmary! I was taking some flowers to Reverend Mother, and she was telling me what a beautiful death old Catherine Macsweeny made. Reverend Mother rained tears when she told me."

Nurse Brennan sniffed.

"Reverend Mother's a sweet woman, and the nuns are very attentive when a person'd be dying, but indeed Mrs. Mangan, if you ask _me_, I'd say 'twas the only time they were much use to their patients! Up at that infirmary what have patients at night to look after them only an old inmate, and she 'wanting' maybe!"

Larry began to giggle, and was moved to try his wit.

"Nurse! What's the difference between a stale mate and an old inmate?

And what does it want?"

"It wants the very same as yourself--brains!" returned Nurse, swiftly.

"Now may be!" She wagged her head at him triumphantly, turning aside to hide the smile of victory, and Larry thought how lovely was her profile, as the firelight etched it in incandescent lines on the smoky background.

"Well, indeed, the Poor have a deal to put up with!" said Mrs. Mangan, lazily, leaning back in her basket-chair, with her big grey cat purring like an aeroplane engine on her knee. "The Doctor says no one but himself knows the way he's dragged all over the country, patching up after some of them young fellows that get dispensaries before they're fit to doctor the cat!"

The reformer, that underlay the artist in Larry, awoke.

"But, Mrs. Mangan," he said, hotly, sitting up in bed, and glaring into the gloom at Mrs. Mangan's half-seen face, "why do they give dispensaries to chaps that can't doctor a cat?"

"Because their fathers can spend four or five hundred pounds to buy votes!" returned Mrs. Mangan, laughing at him. "Is that news to you?

Lie down child, and don't be looking at me like that! _I_ haven't a vote to sell!"

Larry subsided with vague splutterings. Nurse came to his bedside and smoothed the clothes.

"Listen to me now," she said impressively, "and _I'll_ tell you something to make you angry, if you like!"

She leaned against the foot of the bed, with her hands in the pockets of her ap.r.o.n, looking down at him. "I was in charge of th' infirmary at Mellifont one time, and late one evening a young farm-boy was brought in to me with a dislocated foot and a 'Pott's Fracture'--"

"In the name o' G.o.d, what's that?" enquired Mrs. Mangan.

"Fracture of the fibula, but the case I'm speaking of had the two bones broken at the ankle," explained Nurse Brennan, in her most professional manner; "sure I thought anyone'd know that! And I can tell you," she leaned towards Larry, striking the palm of her left hand with her little clenched right fist, as if to hammer the words into him, "I can a.s.sure _you_, that as bad as you thought you were, you don't know what pain _is_ beside what that boy suffered! Well, I sent for the doctor--a young brat of a fella that hadn't but just left college. 'He'll want an anaesthetic,' says he, 'I'll send down for Doctor ----' (I'll not tell you his name--Smith, I'll call him!) 'Do you give him some brandy, nurse,' says he, 'Dr.

Smith'll be here soon.' Sure enough he was, and glad I was to see him, for the patient was suffering greatly, and the leg swelling every minyute. It was a long ward he was in, and no one at all in it but himself. At the far end there was a table and a lamp, and down at the table me gentlemen sat, and commenced to talk."

Nurse Brennan paused, and Mrs. Mangan gave the fire a well-directed poke, that set the flames branching upwards. The tale was resumed, in those cool and equable tones that express a more perfected indignation than any heat or haste could convey.

"Well, that was nine o'clock, and they talked there for two hours, and I giving the patient brandy, and expecting every minyute he'd collapse. And what do you suppose they were talking about? Fighting they were! Disputing which of them would perform the operation, and which would administer the chloroform!"

Mrs. Mangan laughed lightly, and said: "I wouldn't at all doubt it!"

"Impossible!" exclaimed Larry.

"Not a bit impossible!" said Nurse Brennan, "and how d'ye think they settled it in the end? They arranged one of them would begin th'

operation and go on for five minutes, and then he should stop and give the anaesthetic, and the other would go on with the leg! Oh, it's the case, I a.s.sure you! It was twelve o'clock at night before they were done!"

She paused, laughing a little at the hot questions with which Larry a.s.sailed her, but he could see the unshed tears gleaming in her eyes.

"I was summoned to a private case next day; I don't know what happened to the unfortunate poor creature of a patient."

"A stiff leg he has, I'll be bound!" said Mrs. Mangan.

Larry lay silent. He saw it all. The long, dark ward, the white angel figure (he thought, romantically) bending over the tortured creature on the bed, and, far away, the pool of yellow light and in it those two--he sought in vain for adjectives to express what he thought of Dr. I'll-not-tell-you-his-name, and his young colleague.

CHAPTER XI

In the years that followed, "Larry's cads" came to be, for the young Talbot-Lowrys, a convenient designation for the friends into whose bosom Providence had seen fit to fling their cousin. But Larry never either approved or accepted it. He was entirely pleased with his new friends, and especially with that son of the house whose position he had usurped, Mr. Bartholomew Mangan.

Barty was a lengthy, languid, gentle youth, of nearly nineteen, darkly, pallidly handsome, sweet natured, and slovenly, like his mother, and, unlike her, poetical, idealistic, unpractical, shy, and self-conscious. He was, at this period, working in the office of one of the two solicitors, who, with the aid of a branch of a bank, a Petty Sessions Court, and the imposing, plate-gla.s.s bow-windows of Hallinan's hotel, enabled Cluhir to convince itself of its status as a town. Further proof of the civic importance of Cluhir was found in the existence of a debating club of very advanced political views among its young men, of which Barty Mangan was secretary. Its membership, if small, was select, since its Republican principles did not compel it to admit to its privileges shop-a.s.sistants, or artisans, while they automatically excluded members of the cla.s.s that were usually referred to in the club discussions as "Carrion Crows," or if the orator's mood was mild, "the garrison." In Ireland the att.i.tude of mind that is termed, alternately, Disloyalty or Patriotism, is largely a matter of cla.s.s, and Barty Mangan's introduction of Master St. Lawrence Coppinger, as an honorary member of the club, partook of the nature of a shock to those of the faithful who were present at his first appearance in the club room, a severely plain apartment, that offered no impediment in the matter of luxury to high thinking. But the faithful of the "Sons of Emmet" Club had nothing to fear from this half-fledged young Carrion Crow. The English school to which Larry had been sent had dulled the fire lit by the poems of The Spirit of the Nation, but it had not extinguished it. It had flickered for a time, during which Hunting had superseded Patriotism, and Mr. Jorrocks had reigned alone; but the oratory of the Sons of Emmet, to which Larry was now privileged to listen, had had the effect of restoring to life and vigour the long-neglected, half-forgotten tenets of the Companionage of Finn. Larry's store of enthusiasm was quite equal to supplying motive power for running two engines; hunting still held its own, and after a club debate in which he had taken an energetic part, even the most exclusive of the Sons of Emmet admitted that Barty's importation was worthy of the privilege that had been extended to him.

A spell of cold weather had compelled a postponement of Larry's return to his own home. When snow and frost visit a country unused to their attentions, they are treated with a respect that they do not receive elsewhere. The Doctor's orders were strict, and Larry spent the last days of his stay at No. 6, The Mall, seated in semi-invalid state by the dining-room fire, occupied, mainly, in the consumption of literature provided by his new friend, Mr. Barty Mangan, that consisted of poems, books, and pamphlets of precisely that shade of politics of which his family most thoroughly disapproved, and absorbing what would be, in their opinion, the most entirely poisonous points of view.

The Big Doctor, smoking a comfortable evening pipe over the fire, would join in the discussions between his son and his visitor, offering just as much opposition to Larry's revolutionary flights as was stimulating, and flattering his sense of youth and daring.

"We mustn't send him back to his auntie too much of a rebel altogether!" The Doctor would say, grinning at the enthusiast with his pipe wedged under a tooth; "isn't it good enough for you to be a poor decent old Nationalist like myself? I'm sure there's no one would disapprove of _me_, is there, Annie?"

"Don't be too sure of that at all!" Mrs. Mangan would reply coquettishly, trying to look as if she did not agree with him; "wait till his auntie hears the notions Larry's taking up with, and she'll think we're all the worst in the world! And the Major! The Major'll go cracked-mad!"