Chapter II: A Plot, and Its Execution

The hates, the fears, and the respects of Agent Macgrabb and Constable Gallagher extended to precisely the same two individuals in Ballyblank. They both hated the medical student, Harry McCarthy, before alluded to, and they both feared and consequently respected Pat McCarthy, tenant farmer, and father of that unutterable scapegrace. Both, too, hated Harry for the same reason. He was irreclaimably, obtusely, blindly, madly irreverent of the mighty forces that prevail in Ireland. He never doffed his hat to the agent, majestic representative of property and propriety; he smiled at the constable, personification of British justice and empire, and had actually laughed at the constabulary joint-stock enterprise in goose fattening. Then, he was popular, and your little village tyrant hates no one more bitterly than the man who is loved by the oppressed. Finally, his popularity was due in a great measure to his powers of mimicry, and the fact that Macgrabb and Gallagher were ever the twin objects of his talent in that direction. At weddings and patterns, wakes and fairs, he had made people roar again and again with his reproductions of the peeler’s parade stride and the magistrate’s judicial frown. It would be hard to say which had the greatest abhorrence to free-and-easy Harry. The agent would have gloried in burying him under a pyramid of ejectment writs; the constable would have sacrificed a stripe for the privilege of emptying a company’s charge of buckshot into his obnoxious figure. The disappointment at finding no opportunity to either annoy or hurt him turned Macgrabb blue and Gallagher yellow whenever they encountered Harry’s joyous countenance.

As mentioned, the worthy couple both respected and feared Harry’s father. The policeman respected him because he was the one man in the parish (outside his reckless son) who did not give a traneen for either the agent Macgrabb or the agent’s master, Lord Clonboy. He feared the sturdy farmer, too, from some indefinable sensation that he could not account for. The reasons of the agent’s fear and respect were of a two-fold character. In the first place, Pat McCarthy held a lease; and in the second, he had a daughter. When at the close of a gale Macgrabb could put a ten per cent. screw on the tenants for Lord Clonboy’s Parisian dissipation, and a five per cent. twist for his own less expensive frolics in Dublin, McCarthy could not only pay him a rent, guarded by his lease, one-half what all the surrounding tenants had to contribute, but he could and did express his opinion of the rack-renting proclivities of the rural Nero in language whose emphasis was more marked than its elegance. It had been the life-long dream of the agent to break that lease, and twice had he approached within measurable distance of doing so. Once, when the expenses of Harry’s collegiate education had left the old man short of money, and he had begged for a few weeks’ grace. Again, just a year before, when the universal failure of the crops should in all human probability have left McCarthy nearly bankrupt. But, somehow, the farmer weathered his difficulties, and escaped the penal clause of the lease, which rendered the whole document void if one gale fell in arrears.

I have mentioned a second reason why Macgrabb respected McCarthy. This reason, Miss Ellen McCarthy, was a fair and remarkably excusable one. Why a shrivelled atomy like the agent should feel drawn to a buxom, frolicsome, blue-eyed Irish girl, whose generous sympathies were the opposite of his sordid nature, whose merry laugh was the antithesis of his diabolical grin, who cordially loathed and despised every bone in his body and every constituent element of his soul, I know not; but the fact remained that Macgrabb doated upon McCarthy’s daughter with a devotion so utterly antagonistic to his ordinary selfishness that he couldn’t quite understand it himself.

It led him to a proposal of marriage, whose consequences were singularly disagreeable both to his magisterial dignity and his physical susceptibilities. Miss McCarthy laughed at and ran away from him, and Harry McCarthy, to whom she related the joke, came into the parlor, and with a vehemence that reflected credit upon his sincerity, and a knowledge of sore spots that spoke well for his diligence at surgical studies, kicked the J. P. out of the door, down the steps, across a grass plot, and out into the high road.

It was the day after this occurrence that Macgrabb presented the goose of destiny to Gallagher. A week subsequently the magistrate and the peeler were closeted in the former’s private office.

“Here is the search-warrant, Tom,” observed Macgrabb, laying his hand familiarly on the constable’s arm. “I trust to you to see that no paper escapes you. If I get that last rent receipt into my hands I’ll squelch McCarthy as if a mountain had fallen on him.”

“It’s a risk,” said the policeman, hesitatingly.

“What risk? Information has been sworn that McCarthy’s son has been engaged in treasonable conspiracy, and that arms and illegal documents are in the father’s house. On that information I issue a warrant, and you execute it. It’s your duty to seize all documents--you’re not supposed to have time to read every letter you come across. If you don’t nab that rent receipt--you’ll know it--it’s on blue, thick paper--what harm’s done? Thank God! there’s law in the country, and police authorities can search these blackguards’ dens for fun, if for nothing else, as often as they like. If you do nip the receipt, there’s £50 down for you, and the chance, Tom--think of that, my boy--the chance of having the pleasure of assisting in turning the whole McCarthy brood out, and paying them off for many an old score. Why, at the school party last night Harry gave what he called a character sketch. What do you think it was? A representation of an Irish constable, and voice, legs, gesture, were all in imitation of you. The parish priest laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks, and all the boys and girls yelled with delight. Have you any spirit, man alive, to put up with such insults?”

“Give me the warrant,” growled Gallagher. “I suppose the National papers and the priest, too, for that matter, would call it stealing to take a rent receipt when we’re only looking for Fenian proclamations or copies of the _Irish World_, but I’ll chance to get even with that jackeen, even if I lose my stripes.”

On the night of Dec. 6, just as the McCarthys were retiring to rest, a loud knocking outside disarranged their programme of repose. Before the summons could be responded to, the door was rudely burst open, and Constable Gallagher, followed by half a dozen armed men, rushed in.

“Blow the brains out of any one that budges a foot or stirs a hand!” he yelled. “Mr. McCarthy, in the name of the Queen and by varchue of my oath--I mane this sarch-warrant--I demand any arms, ammunition, traysonable papers, or documents of any kind delivered up to me.”

McCarthy was surprised, his wife somewhat frightened, but Harry, true to his character, tossed a bundle of medical works on the table and cried, “Arrah! Sergeant dear, just give us your candid opinion of some of these anatomical sketches. What a beautiful skeleton you would make, yourself! Really, I would feel a pleasure in dissecting you. You have such a lot of bones about you that seem out of place.”

The constable paid no heed to this badinage, but with a sign to his followers proceeded to ransack the house. Every paper, envelope, or scrap of writing was seized, despite the indignant protests of McCarthy, and the merciless jeering of the young student.

On leaving, Gallagher grunted, “We will examine these in the barracks. If there’s nothing traysonable in them, you’ll get them back. If there is, why, law’s law, and you had better look out.”

That night, in the privacy of his own particular room, the constable sat down to a perusal of the McCarthy documents. But the excitement of the search, and sundry non-official stimulants to duty that he had indulged in, had made him heavy and sleepy. Leaving the papers spread on the table, he stretched his angular limbs on a bench, and was soon snoring in cadenzas which sounded like intermittent file-firing. He was awakened by a noise at the window. It was daylight. The window was open, and perched upon the sill with a long slip of blue paper in its beak, was the constable’s attenuated goose. A glance at the table showed that the omnivorous cackler had been tasting the flavor of the various papers strewn thereon. Gallagher rushed forward to seize the predatory monster, but with a peculiar chuckle of derision it flew from the window and disappeared from view.