Priscilla's Spies
on Sir Lucius and the police sergeant. Sir Lucius looking around caught
sight of him.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do if you like,” said Sir Lucius. “I’ll send
Peter Walsh with you. He’s an unmitigated blackguard, but he knows
the bay like the palm of his hand and he can sail the boat. Come here,
Peter.”
Peter Walsh stepped forward, touching his hat and smiling respectfully.
“Peter,” said Sir Lucius, “Lord Torrington wants to take a sail round
the islands in the bay. I can’t go with him myself, so you must. Have
you taken any drink this morning?”
“I have not,” said Peter. “Is it likely I would with Sweeny’s shop shut
on account of the accident that’s after happening to him?”
“Don’t you give him a drop, Torrington, while you’re on the sea with
him. You can fill him up with whisky when you get home if you like.”
“I wouldn’t be for going very far today,” said Peter Walsh. “It looks to
me as if it might come on to blow from the southeast.”
“You’ll go out to Inishbawn first of all,” said Sir Lucius. “After that
you can work home in and out, visiting every island that’s big enough to
have people on it. The weather won’t hurt you.”
“Sure if his lordship’s contented,” said Peter, “it isn’t for me to be
making objections.”
“Very well,” said Sir Lucius. “Get the sails on the boat. You can tie
down a reef if you like.”
“There’s no need,” said Peter. “She’ll go better under the whole sail.”
“Now, sergeant,” said Sir Lucius, “I’ll just see them start, and then
I’ll go back and listen to whatever story Sweeny wants to tell.”
Peter Walsh huddled himself into an ancient oilskin coat, ferried out to
the Tortoise and hoisted the sails. He laid her long side the slip with
a neatness and precision which proved his ability to sail a small boat.
Lord Torrington stepped carefully on board and settled himself crouched
into a position undignified for a member of the Cabinet, on the side of
the centreboard case recommended by Peter Walsh.
“Got your sandwiches all right?” said Sir Lucius, “and the flask? Good.
Then off you go. Now, Peter, Inishbawn first and after that wherever
you’re told to go. If you get wet, Torrington, don’t blame me. Now,
sergeant, I’m ready.”
The Tortoise, a stiff breeze filling her sails, darted out to
mid-channel. Peter Walsh paid out his main sheet and set her running
dead before the wind.
“It’ll come round to the southeast,” he said, “before we’re half an hour
out.”
Sir Lucius waved his hand. Then he turned and followed the sergeant into
Sweeny’s house.
CHAPTER XXI
The Blue Wanderer, with her little lug, sailed slowly even when there
was a fresh wind right behind her. It was half-past ten when Priscilla
and Frank ran her aground on Inishbawn. Joseph Antony Kinsella had seen
them coming and was standing on the shore ready to greet them.
“You’re too venturesome, Miss, to be coming out all this way in that
little boat,” he said.
“We came safe enough,” said Priscilla, “didn’t ship a drop the whole way
out.”
“You came safe,” said Kinsella, “but will you tell me how you’re going
to get home again? The wind’s freshening and what’s more it’s drawing
round to the southeast.”
“Let it. If we can’t get home, we can’t, that’s all. I suppose Mrs.
Kinsella will bake us a loaf of bread for breakfast tomorrow. Cousin
Frank, you’ll have to make Barnabas take you into his tent. He can’t
very well refuse on account of being a clergyman and so more or less
pledged to deeds of charity. I’ll curl up in a corner of Lady Isabel’s
pavilion. By the way, Joseph Antony, how are the young people getting
on?”
“I had my own trouble with them after you left,” said Kinsella.
“I’m sorry to hear that and I wouldn’t have thought it. Barnabas seemed
to me a nice peaceable kind of curate. Why didn’t you hit him on the
head with an oar? That would have quieted him.”
“I might, of course; and I would; but it was the lady that was giving me
the trouble more than him. Nothing would do her right or wrong but she’d
have her tent set up on the south end of the island; and that’s what
wouldn’t suit me at all.”
Priscilla glanced at the smaller of the two hills which make up the
island of Inishbawn. It stood remote from the Kinsellas’ homestead and
the patches of cultivated land, separated from them by a rough causeway
of grey boulders. From a hollow in it a thin column of smoke arose, and
was blown in torn wreaths along the slope.
“It would not suit you a bit,” said Priscilla.
“What made her want to go there?” said Frank.
The bare southern hill of Inishbawn seemed to him a singularly
unattractive camping ground. It was a windswept, desolate spot.
“She took a notion into her head,” said Kinsella, “that his Reverence
might catch the fever if he stopped on this end of the island.”
“Good gracious!” said Frank, “how can any one catch fever here?”
“On account of Mrs. Kinsella and the children having come out all over
large yellow spots,” said Priscilla. “I hope that will be a lesson to
you, Joseph Antony.”
“What I said was for the best,” said Kinsella.
“How was I to know she’d be here at the latter end?”
“You couldn’t know, of course. Nobody ever can; which is one of the
reasons why it’s just as well to tell the truth at the start whenever
possible. If you make things up you generally forget afterwards what
they are, and then there’s trouble. Besides the things you make up very
often turn against you in ways you’d never expect. It was just the same
with a mouse-trap that Sylvia Courtney once bought, when she thought
there was a mouse in our room, though there wasn’t really and it
wouldn’t have done her any harm if there had been. No matter how careful
she was about tying the string down it used to bound up again and nip
her fingers. But Sylvia Courtney never was any good at things like
mouse-traps. What she likes is English Literature.”
“How did you stop her going to the far end of the island?” said Frank,
“if she thought there was an infectious fever for Mr. Pennefather to
catch----”
“I dare say you mentioned the wild heifer,” said Priscilla.
“I did not then. What I said was rats.”
“Rather mean of you that,” said Priscilla. “The rats were Peter Walsh’s
originally. You shouldn’t have taken them. That’s what’s called--What is
it called, Cousin Frank? Something to do with plagues, I know. Is there
such a word as plague-ism? Anyhow it’s what poets do when they lift
other poets’ rhymes and it’s considered mean.”
“It was me told Peter Walsh about the rats,” said Kinsella, repelling
an unjust accusation. “The way they came swimming in on the tide would
surprise you, and the gulls picking the eyes out of the biggest of them
as they came swimming along. But that wouldn’t stop them.”
“I’ll just run up and have a word with Barnabas,” said Priscilla. “It’ll
be as well for him to know that father and Lord Torrington are out after
him today in the Tortoise.”
“Do you tell me that?” said Kinsella.
“It’ll be all right,” said Priscilla. “They’ll never get here. But of
course Barnabas may want to make his will in case of accidents. Just you
help the young gentleman ashore, Kinsella. He can’t get along very well
by himself on account of the way Lord Torrington treated him. Then you’d
better haul the boat up a bit. It’s rather beginning to blow and I see
the wind really has got round to the southeast. I hardly thought it
would, but it has. Winds so seldom do what everybody says they’re going
to. I’m sure you’ve noticed that.”
She walked up the rough stony beach. A fierce gust, spray-laden and
eloquent with promise of rain, swept past her.
“If I’d known,” said Kinsella sulkily, “that half the country would be
out after them ones, I’d have drownded them in the sea and their tents
along with them before I let them set foot on Inishbawn.”
“Lord Torrington won’t do you any harm,” said Frank. “He’s only trying
to get back his daughter.”
“I don’t know,” said Kinsella, still in a very bad temper, “what
anybody’d want with the likes of that girl. You’d think a man would be
glad to get rid of her and thankful to anybody that was fool enough
to take her off his hands. She’s no sense. Miss Priscilla has little
enough, but she’s young and it’ll maybe come to her later. But that
other one--The Lord saves us.”
He helped Frank on shore as he talked. Then he called Jimmy from the
cottage. Between them they hauled the Blue Wanderer above high-tide
mark.
“There she’ll stay,” said Kinsella vindictively, “for the next
twenty-four hours anyway. Do you feel that now?”
Frank felt a sudden gust of wind and a heavy splash of rain. The sky
looked singularly dark and heavy over the southeastern shore of the bay.
Ragged scuds of clouds, low flying, were tearing across overhead.
The sea was almost black and very angry; short waves were getting up,
curling rapidly over and breaking in yellow foam. With the aid of Jimmy
Kinsella’s arm Frank climbed the beach, passed the Kinsella’s cottage
and made his way to the place where the two tents were pitched.
Priscilla was sitting on a camp stool at the entrance of Lady Isabel’s
tent. The Reverend Barnabas Pennefather, looking cold and miserable, was
crouching at her feet in a waterproof coat. Lady Isabel was going round
the tents with a hammer in her hand driving the pegs deeper into the
ground.
“I’m just explaining to Barnabas,” said Priscilla, “that he’s pretty
safe here so far as Lord Torrington is concerned. He doesn’t seem as
pleased as I should have expected.”
“It’s blowing very hard,” said Mr. Pennefather, “and it’s beginning to
rain. I’m sure our tents will come down and we shall get very wet Won’t
you sit down, Mr.--Mr----?”
“Mannix,” said Priscilla. “I thought you were introduced yesterday.
Hullo! What’s that?”
She was gazing across the sea when she spoke. She rose from her camp
stool and pointed eastwards with her finger. A small triangular patch of
white was visible far off between Inishrua and Knockilaun. Frank and Mr.
Pennefather stared at it eagerly.
“It looks to me,” said Priscilla, “very like the Tortoise. There isn’t
another boat in the bay with a sail that peaks up like that. If I’m
right, Barnabas--But I can’t believe that Peter Walsh and Patsy the
smith and all the rest of them would have been such fools as to let them
start.”
A rain squall blotted the sail from view.
“Perhaps they couldn’t help it,” said Frank. “Perhaps Uncle Lucius----”
“Lady Isabel,” shouted Priscilla, “come here at once. She won’t come,”
she said to Frank, “if she can possibly help it, because she’s furiously
angry with me for asking her why on earth she married Barnabas. Rather a
natural question, I thought. Barnabas, go and get her.”
Mr. Pennefather, who seemed cowed into a state of profound
submissiveness, huddled his waterproof round him and went to Lady
Isabel. She was hammering an extra peg through the loop of one of the
guy lines of the further tent.
“Why do you suppose she did it?” said Priscilla. “I couldn’t find that
out. It’s very hard to imagine why anybody marries anybody else. I often
sit and wonder for hours. But it’s totally impossible in this case----”
“Perhaps he preaches very well,” said Frank. “That might have attracted
her.”
“Couldn’t possibly,” said Priscilla. “No girl--at the same time, of
course, she has, which shows there must have been some reason. I say,
Cousin Frank, she must be absolutely mad with me. She’s dragged Barnabas
into the other tent. Rather a poor lookout for me, considering that
I shall have to sleep with her. There’s the Tortoise again. It is the
Tortoise. There’s no mistake about it this time.”
The rain squall had blown over. The Tortoise, now plainly visible, was
tearing across the foam-flecked stretch of water between Inishrua and