A Rivermouth Romance

III

But Mr. O’Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite confident that a bird of Mr. O’Rourke’s plumage would be brought to perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered about town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took a careful survey of the wharves along the river on his way home. He even shook the apple-tree near the stable with a vague hope of bringing down Mr. O’Rourke, but brought down nothing except a few winter apples, which, being both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad representatives of the object of his search.

That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion with a straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O’Rourke’s, which had been found on Neal’s Wharf. This would have told against another man; but O’Rourke was always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret’s distress is not to be pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had drowned himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen overboard while intoxicated.

The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is regulated by laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that a certain percentage of the earth’s population is bound to drown itself annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then, that Rivermouth’s proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and pleasure parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly business. But Mr. O’Rourke failed to appear among the flotsam and jetsam which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the River-mouth wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of those immense schools of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment with the fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod or a mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She averted her head in making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a man fall into the sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of hashed fish?

But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, ‘t were to consider too curiously to consider so.

Mr. Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret’s explanation of O’Rourke’s disappearance. He was undoubtedly drowned; had most likely drowned himself. The hat picked up on the wharf was strong circumstantial evidence in that direction. But one feature of the case staggered Mr. Bilkins. O’Rourke’s violin had also disappeared. Now, it required no great effort to imagine a man throwing himself overboard under the influence of mania à potu; but it was difficult to conceive of a man committing violinicide! If the fellow went to drown himself, why did he take his fiddle with him? He might as well have taken an umbrella or a German student-lamp. This question troubled Mr. Bilkins a good deal first and last. But one thing was indisputable: the man was gone—and had evidently gone by water.

It was now that Margaret invested her husband with charms of mind and person not calculated to make him recognizable by any one who had ever had the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She eliminated all his bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a Mr. O’Rourke as he ought to have been—a species of seraphic being mixed up in some way with a violin; and to this ideal she erected a costly headstone in the suburban cemetery. “It would be a proud day for Larry,” observed Margaret contemplatively, “if he could rest his oi on the illegant monumint I ‘ve put up to him.” If Mr. O’Rourke could have read the inscription on it, he would never have suspected his own complicity in the matter.

But there the marble stood, sacred to his memory; and soon the snow came down from the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible snow of weeks and months drifted down on Margaret’s heart, and filled up its fissures, and smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and there was peace upon it.

Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. Yet life had a relish to it again; she was free, though she did not look at it in that light; she was happier in a quiet fashion than she had ever been, though she would not have acknowledged it to herself. She wondered that she had the heart to laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps she was conscious of something comically incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who spent all winter in cutting ice, and all summer in dealing it out to his customers. She had not the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet she laughed still more merrily at him when he pressed her hand over the steaming loaf of brown-bread, delivered every Saturday morning at the scullery door. Both these gentlemen had known Margaret many years, yet neither of them had valued her very highly until another man came along and married her. A widow, it would appear, is esteemed in some sort as a warranted article, being stamped with the maker’s name.

There was even a third lover in prospect; for according to the gossip of the town, Mr. Donnehugh was frequently to be seen of a Sunday afternoon standing in the cemetery and regarding Mr. O’Rourke’s headstone with unrestrained satisfaction.

A year had passed away, and certain bits of color blossoming among Margaret’s weeds indicated that the winter of her mourning was oyer. The ice-man and the baker were hating each other cordially, and Mrs. Bilkins was daily expecting it would be discovered before night that Margaret had married one or both of them. But to do Margaret justice, she was faithful in thought and deed to the memory of O’Rourke—not the O’Rourke who disappeared so strangely, but the O’Rourke who never existed.

“D’ ye think, mum,” she said one day to Mrs. Bilkins, as that lady was adroitly sounding her on the ice question—“d’ ye think I ‘d condescind to take up wid the likes o’ him, or the baker either, afther sich a man as Larry?”

The rectified and clarified O’Rourke was a permanent wonder to Mr. Bilkins, who bore up under the bereavement with noticeable resignation.

“Peggy is right,” said the old gentleman, who was superintending the burning out of the kitchen flue. “She won’t find another man like Larry O’Rourke in a hurry.”

“Thrue for ye, Mr. Bilkins,” answered Margaret. “Maybe there’s as good fish in the say as iver was caught, but I don’t be-lave it, all the same.”

As good fish in the sea! The words recalled to Margaret the nature of her loss, and she went on with her work in silence.

“What—what is it, Ezra?” cried Mrs. Bilkins, changing color, and rising hastily from the breakfast table. Her first thought was of apoplexy.

There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed back from his forehead, and his eyes fixed vacantly on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held out at arm’s length before him.

“Good heavens, Ezra! what is the matter?”

Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically, as if he were a great wax-doll, and somebody had pulled his wire.

“Can’t you speak, Ezra?”

His lips opened, and moved inarticulately; then he pointed a rigid finger, in the manner of a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper, which he held up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his shoulder. When she had read it she sunk back into her chair without a word, and the two sat contemplating each other as if they had never met before in this world, and were not overpleased at meeting.

The paragraph which produced this singular effect on the aged couple occurred at the end of a column of telegraph despatches giving the details of an unimportant engagement that had just taken place between one of the blockading squadron and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement itself does not concern us, but this item from the list of casualties on the Union side has a direct bearing on our narrative:—

“Larry O’Rourke, seaman, splinter wound in the leg. Not serious.”

That splinter flew far. It glanced from Mr. O’Rourke’s leg, went plumb through the Bilkins mansion, and knocked over a small marble slab in the Old South Burying Ground.

If a ghost had dropped in familiarly to breakfast, the constraint and consternation of the Bilkins family could not have been greater. How was the astounding intelligence to be broken to Margaret? Her explosive Irish nature made the task one of extreme delicacy. Mrs. Bilkins flatly declared herself incapable of undertaking it. Mr. Bilkins, with many misgivings as to his fitness, assumed the duty; for it would never do to have the news sprung suddenly upon Margaret by people outside.

As Mrs. O’Rourke was clearing away the breakfast things, Mr. Bilkins, who had lingered near the window with the newspaper in his hand, coughed once or twice in an unnatural way to show that he was not embarrassed, and began to think that may be it would be best to tell Margaret after dinner. Mrs. Bilkins fathomed his thought with that intuition which renders women terrible, and sent across the room an eye-telegram to this effect, “Now is your time.”

“There ‘s been another battle down South, Margaret,” said the old gentleman presently, folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket. “A sea-fight this time.”

“Sure, an’ they ‘re allus fightin’ down there.”

“But not always with so little damage. There was only one man wounded on our side.”

“Pore man! It’s sorry we oughter be for his wife an’ childer, if he’s got any.”

“Not badly wounded, you will understand, Margaret—not at all seriously wounded; only a splinter in the leg.”

“Faith, thin, a splinter in the leg is no pleasant thing in itself.”

“A mere scratch,” said Mr. Bilkins lightly, as if he were constantly in the habit of going about with a splinter in his own leg, and found it rather agreeable. “The odd part of the matter is the man’s first name. His first name was Larry.”

Margaret nodded, as one should say, There’s a many Larrys in the world.

“But the oddest part of it,” continued Mr. Bilkins, in a carelessly sepulchral voice, “is the man’s last name.”

Something in the tone of his voice made Margaret look at him, and something in the expression of his face caused the blood to fly from Margaret’s cheek.

“The man’s last name!” she repeated, wonderingly.

“Yes, his last name—O’Rourke.”

“D’ye mane it?” shrieked Margaret—“d’ ye mane it? Glory to God! O worra! worra!”

“Well, Ezra,” said Mrs. Bilking, in one of those spasms of base ingratitude to which even the most perfect women are liable, “you ‘ve made nice work of it. You might as well have knocked her down with an axe!”

“But, my dear”—

“Oh, bother!—my smelling-bottle, quick!—second bureau drawer—left-hand side.”

Joy never kills; it is a celestial kind of hydrogen of which it seems impossible to get too much at one inhalation. In an hour Margaret was able to converse with comparative calmness on the resuscitation of Larry O’Rourke, whom the firing of a cannon had brought to the surface as if he had been in reality a drowned body.

Now that the whole town was aware of Mr. O’Rourke’s fate, his friend Mr. Donne-hugh came forward with a statement that would have been of some interest at an earlier period, but was of no service as matters stood, except so far as it assisted in removing from Mr. Bilkins’s mind a passing doubt as to whether the Larry O’Rourke of the telegraphic reports was Margaret’s scape-grace of a husband. Mr. Donnehugh had known all along that O’Rourke had absconded to Boston by a night train and enlisted in the navy. It was the possession of this knowledge that had made it impossible for Mr. Donnehugh to look at Mr. O’Rourke’s gravestone without grinning.

At Margaret’s request, and in Margaret’s name, Mr. Bilkins wrote three or four letters to O’Rourke, and finally succeeded in extorting an epistle from that gentleman, in which he told Margaret to cheer up, that his fortune was as good as made, and that the day would come when she should ride through the town in her own coach, and no thanks to old flint-head, who pretended to be so fond of her. Mr. Bilkins tried to conjecture who was meant by old flint-head, but was obliged to give it up. Mr. O’Rourke furthermore informed Margaret that he had three hundred dollars prize-money coming to him, and broadly intimated that when he got home he intended to have one of the most extensive blow-outs ever witnessed in Rivermouth.

“Och!” laughed Margaret, “that’s jist Larry over agin. The pore lad was allus full of his nonsense an’ spirits.”

“That he was,” said Mr. Bilkins, dryly.

Content with the fact that her husband was in the land of the living, Margaret gave herself no trouble over the separation. O’Rourke had shipped for three years; one third of his term of service was past, and two years more, God willing, would see him home again. This was Margaret’s view of it. Mr. Bilkins’s view of it was not so cheerful The prospect of Mr. O’Rourke’s ultimate return was anything but enchanting. Mr. Bilkins was by no means disposed to kill the fatted calf. He would much rather have killed the Prodigal Son. However, there was always this chance: he might never come back.

The tides rose and fell at the Rivermouth wharves; the summer moonlight and the winter snow, in turn, bleached its quiet streets; and the two years had nearly gone by. In the mean time nothing had been heard of O’Rourke. If he ever received the five or six letters sent to him, he did not fatigue himself by answering them.

“Larry’s all right,” said hopeful Margaret. “If any harum had come to the gossoon, we’d have knowed it. It’s the bad news that travels fast.”

Mr. Bilkins was not so positive about that. It had taken a whole year to find out that O’Rourke had not drowned himself.

The period of Mr. O’Rourke’s enlistment had come to an end. Two months slipped by, and he had neglected to brighten River-mouth with his presence. There were many things that might have detained him, difficulties in getting his prize-papers or in drawing his pay; but there was no reason why he might not have written. The days were beginning to grow long to Margaret, and vague forebodings of misfortune possessed her.

Perhaps we had better look up Mr. O’Rourke.

He had seen some rough times, during those three years, and some harder work than catching cunners at the foot of Anchor Street, or setting out crocuses in Mr. Bil-kins’s back garden. He had seen battles and shipwreck, and death in many guises; but they had taught him nothing, as the sequel will show. With his active career in the navy we shall not trouble ourselves; we take him up at a date a little prior to the close of his term of service.