‘I tell you no, Thir,’ rejoined Puddock.
‘And do you mean to tell me you did not hear that vulgar dog Nutter’s unmanly jokes?’
‘Jokes!’ repeated Puddock, in large perplexity, ‘why I’ve been here in this town for more than five years, and I never heard in all that time that Nutter once made a joke — and upon my life, I don’t think he could make a joke, Sir, if he tried — I don’t, indeed, Lieutenant O’Flaherty, upon my honour!’
And rat it, Sir, how can I help it?’ cried O’Flaherty, relapsing into pathos.
‘Help what?’ demanded Puddock.
O’Flaherty took him by the hand, and gazing on his face with a maudlin, lacklustre tenderness, said:—
‘Absalom was caught by the hair of his head — he was, Puddock — long hair or short hair, or (a hiccough) no hair at all, isn’t it nature’s doing, I ask you my darlin’ Puddock, isn’t it?’ He was shedding tears again very fast. ‘There was Cicero and Julius Cæsar, wor both as bald as that,’ and he thrust a shining sugar basin, bottom upward, into Puddock’s face. ‘I’m not bald; I tell you I’m not — no, my darlin’ Puddock, I’m not — poor Hyacinth O’Flaherty is not bald,’ shaking Puddock by both hands.
‘That’s very plain, Sir, but I don’t see your drift,’ he replied.
‘I want to tell you, Puddock, dear, if you’ll only have a minute’s patience. The door can’t fasten, divil bother it; come into the next room;’ and toppling a little in his walk, he led him solemnly into his bed-room — the door of which he locked — somewhat to Puddock’s disquietude, who began to think him insane. Here having informed Puddock that Nutter was driving at the one point the whole evening, as any one that knew the secret would have seen; and having solemnly imposed the seal of secrecy upon his second, and essayed a wild and broken discourse upon the difference between total baldness and partial loss of hair, he disclosed to him the grand mystery of his existence, by lifting from the summit of his head a circular piece of wig, which in those days they called I believe, a ‘topping,’ leaving a bare shining disc exposed, about the size of a large pat of butter.
‘Upon my life, Thir, it’th a very fine piethe of work,’ says Puddock, who viewed the wiglet with the eye of a stage-property man, and held it by a top lock near the candle. ‘The very finetht piethe of work of the kind I ever thaw. ‘Tith thertainly French. Oh, yeth — we can’t do such thingth here. By Jove, Thir, what a wig that man would make for Cato!’
‘An’ he must be a mane crature — I say, a mane crature,’ pursued O’Flaherty, ‘for there was not a soul in the town but Jerome, the — the treacherous ape, that knew it. It’s he that dhresses my head every morning behind the bed-curtain there, with the door locked. And Nutter could never have found it out — who was to tell him, unless that ojus French damon, that’s never done talkin’ about it;’ and O’Flaherty strode heavily up and down the room with his hands in his breeches’ pockets, muttering savage invectives, pitching his head from side to side, and whisking round at the turns in a way to show how strongly he was wrought upon.
‘Come in, Sorr!’ thundered O’Flaherty, unlocking the door, in reply to a knock, and expecting to see his ‘ojus French damon.’ But it was a tall fattish stranger, rather flashily dressed, but a little soiled, with a black wig, and a rollicking red face, showing a good deal of chin and jaw.
O’Flaherty made his grandest bow, quite forgetting the exposure at the top of his head; and Puddock stood rather shocked, with the candle in one hand and O’Flaherty’s scalp in the other.
‘You come, Sir, I presume, from Mr. Nutter,’ said O’Flaherty, with lofty courtesy. This, Sir, is my friend, Lieutenant Puddock of the Royal Irish Artillery, who does me the honour to support me with his advice and —’
As he moved his hand towards Puddock, he saw his scalp dangling between that gentleman’s finger and thumb, and became suddenly mute. He clapped his hand upon his bare skull, and made an agitated pluck at that article, but missed, and disappeared, with an imprecation in Irish, behind the bed curtains.
‘If you will be so obliging, Sir, as to precede me into that room,’ lisped Puddock, with grave dignity, and waving O’Flaherty’s scalp slightly towards the door — for Puddock never stooped to hide anything, and being a gentleman, pure and simple, was not ashamed or afraid to avow his deeds, words, and situations; ‘I shall do myself the honour to follow.’
‘Gi’ me that,’ was heard in a vehement whisper from behind the curtains. Puddock understood it, and restored the treasure.
The secret conference in the drawing-room was not tedious, nor indeed very secret, for anyone acquainted with the diplomatic slang in which such affairs were conducted might have learned in the lobby, or indeed in the hall, so mighty was the voice of the stranger, that there was no chance of any settlement without a meeting which was fixed to take place at twelve o’clock next day on the Fifteen Acres.
Chapter 11.
Some Talk About the Haunted House — Being, as I Suppose, Only Old Woman’s Tales
Old Sally always attended her young mistress while she prepared for bed — not that Lilias required help, for she had the spirit of neatness and a joyous, gentle alacrity, and only troubled the good old creature enough to prevent her thinking herself grown old and useless.
Sally, in her quiet way, was garrulous, and she had all sorts of old-world tales of wonder and adventure, to which Lilias often went pleasantly to sleep; for there was no danger while old Sally sat knitting there by the fire, and the sound of the rector’s mounting upon his chairs, as was his wont, and taking down and putting up his books in the study beneath, though muffled and faint, gave evidence that that good and loving influence was awake and busy.
Old Sally was telling her young mistress, who sometimes listened with a smile, and sometimes lost a good five minutes together of her gentle prattle, how the young gentleman, Mr. Mervyn, had taken that awful old haunted habitation, the Tiled House ‘beyant at Ballyfermot,’ and was going to stay there, and wondered no one had told him of the mysterious dangers of that desolate mansion.
It stood by a lonely bend of the narrow road. Lilias had often looked upon the short, straight, grass-grown avenue with an awful curiosity at the old house which she had learned in childhood to fear as the abode of shadowy tenants and unearthly dangers.
‘There are people, Sally, nowadays, who call themselves free-thinkers, and don’t believe in anything — even in ghosts,’ said Lilias.
‘A then the place he’s stopping in now, Miss Lily, ‘ill soon cure him of free-thinking, if the half they say about it’s true,’ answered Sally.
‘But I don’t say, mind, he’s a free-thinker, for I don’t know anything of Mr. Mervyn; but if he be not, he must be very brave, or very good, indeed. I know, Sally, I should be horribly afraid, indeed, to sleep in it myself,’ answered Lilias, with a cosy little shudder, as the aërial image of the old house for a moment stood before her, with its peculiar malign, sacred, and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt under the melancholy old elms among the tall hemlock and nettles.
‘And now, Sally, I’m safe in bed. Stir the fire, my old darling.’ For although it was the first week in May, the night was frosty. ‘And tell me all about the Tiled House again, and frighten me out of my wits.’
So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off over the well-known ground in a gentle little amble — sometimes subsiding into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up altogether — that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a mysterious nod