Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories/The Despatch Rider
XII.—THE DESPATCH RIDER
THE motor-car stood palpitating outside the doors of the Town Hall at Ballygore. Its powerful headlights glared at the crowd which blocked the road in front of it. Beyond the limit of their range, on each side of the car and behind it, the crowd was denser still. Lawrence O'Kevin, bareheaded, descended the steps of the hall accompanied by three gentlemen also bareheaded. The crowd cheered. O'Kevin waved his hand, put on his hat, took it off again and waved it. Then he stepped into the car. The crowd cheered more enthusiastically. The driver, sitting at the steering wheel of the car, blew several warning blasts on his horn. The crowd, refusing to be warned, continued to cheer. O'Kevin stood up.
"God save Ireland," he said.
"And damn the Orangemen," said some one.
The crowd cheered both sentiments with vigour. The driver, who no doubt wanted to get home to bed, threw a note of impatient anger into the hooting of his horn. He started the car and O'Kevin sat down abruptly. That part of the crowd which was in front of the car scattered right and left. The cheering was continued by those whose limbs were safe. O'Kevin leaned forward and waved his hat.
In a few minutes the car was clear of the crowd and clear of the streets of the town. It sped at a high pace along the empty country roads. O'Kevin leaned back and closed his eyes.
"I wish," he murmured, "that it were not absolutely necessary to damn the Orangemen."
Lawrence O'Kevin was a Member of Parliament, and one of the leading figures in the Irish Nationalist Party. All successful politicians are politicians by nature. They are born with a taste for making speeches and it is in them to enjoy intrigue. But most of them belong to one party or the other by mere accident. They would be just as happy, just as effective, if the dice of circumstance had fallen the other way up and they had found themselves members of the opposite party. Lawrence O'Kevin was an exception to this rule. He was a Nationalist, just as he was a politician, by nature. It was impossible to imagine him a Unionist.
Yet even Lawrence O'Kevin was thankful when his speech was over. Ballygore is one of those danger spots on the borders of Protestant Ulster where the numbers of the two parties are very nearly equal. The Nationalists had for nearly a year watched their opponents drilling and arming. They were quite of opinion that it was time for them to do the same. When O'Kevin, the trusted lieutenant of their trusted leader, advised them to do the very thing they wanted to do their enthusiasm was unbounded. Never in the whole course of his life had O'Kevin held a more successful meeting. Yet, when it was all over and the car in which he sat was racing through the cool night air, he leaned back and thanked Heaven.
The fact is that it is not only the round men in the square holes who are discontented with their lot. The fortunate few who, being round, get into round holes are ultimately worried by the want of angles in their lives. A surgeon may have, ought to have, a natural love for cutting out appendices; but if he is kept at it by fate, obliged to cut them out at the rate of a hundred a year for a quarter of a century, he begins to wish that he were something else, a market gardener or an ambassador, anything except a surgeon. O'Kevin had made, on an average, two hundred speeches a year for thirty years, all of them on Home Rule, and he had reached the point of regarding each one as a milestone passed on a somewhat weary road. He might he was fifty-five years of age have to make as many as three thousand more. But he was a philosopher. He knew that each time he spoke reduced the number of speeches before him by one, and that in the end he would certainly reach his last speech.
O'Kevin had a long drive before him and plenty of time for meditation. He allowed his mind to range over the chances which life offers to a man of moderate means and some intelligence, if he does not happen to be born an orator and forced by fate to spend his time talking. He dwelt for some time on the joys of money-making. Then he thought of the people who go adventuring, who discover bits of Central Africa or rivers in Brazil. Finally, for he was a man of kindly heart, he came to the conclusion that the life of a philanthropist must be the happiest of all. He did not, indeed, wish to sit on any of the committees which devise means of annoying harmless people in order to improve their habits or their health. His dream was of doing kindly acts unexpectedly, to men, women, and especially children, who might be in need of a benefactor. He sighed. The dream was a dream and no more. A man needs ample leisure to be a philanthropist of that sort. Perhaps only the country parsons and the smaller landed gentry have leisure enough. And indeed that kind of well-doing is out of fashion everywhere.
O'Kevin was roused from his dream by a series of short, furious hoots from the motor-horn. The car swerved sharply and went sideways into a ditch. O'Kevin was jerked from his seat and found himself sitting, unhurt, but a good deal crumpled up, on the floor of the tonneau. He heard the driver swearing fluently. A " motor-bike"—he picked out the fact from a bewildering shower of profanity was lying, without a sign of a light on it, in the middle of the road.
The next thing O'Kevin heard was the voice of a girl.
"It's all my fault," she said; "I know it's all my fault, and now somebody is killed."
Then she sobbed. O'Kevin could hear the sobs distinctly. So, apparently, could the driver, for he stopped swearing. O'Kevin climbed out of the car. He found a girl sitting beside the ruin of a motor-bicycle weeping bitterly. For a moment he was doubtful whether it was a girl. She was dressed in a boy's Norfolk jacket and a pair of tweed knickerbockers much too big for her. The driver, who had turned the light of one of the lamps on her figure, was deceived. He began to swear again. But O'Kevin caught sight of a long mane of yellow hair, and felt sure that his first guess was the right one. He told the driver to stop swearing at once. He went over to the girl and picked her up.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
She stopped sobbing and looked up at him.
"No," she said, "not a bit; but the machine is in flitters. You know what I mean by flitters, don't you? Little bits. And I don't know what to do."
"Let me take you home," said O'Kevin. "My car's all right. Where do you live?"
"I can't go home," said the girl. "Tom would kill me if I did. Besides—well, I can't, yet."
O'Kevin thought over the position for a minute or two.
"Is it Tom's bicycle?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, "and Tom's my brother."
O'Kevin felt that he understood the matter thoroughly. The opportunity he had dreamed of, the opportunity for doing an unexpected, irregular act of kindness, had come to him without his spending any time in seeking it. He was fifty-five years of age. The girl beside him was plainly little more than a child. He patted her head.
"Don't be afraid, my dear," he said. "Tom shall have a new bicycle. I'll give him one. But I hope that you'll be more careful in future." He was beginning to realise the full pleasure of benevolent fatherliness. "You mustn't take Tom's bicycle again without asking leave."
"Good gracious!" said the girl. "He sent me on the bicycle himself, and he won't mind it's being smashed, at least not much. That's not the reason I won't go home."
O'Kevin felt puzzled. He had evidently failed to grasp the situation. But the glow of kindly intention by no means died in him.
"Would you mind telling me," he said, "what I can do for you?"
The girl looked at him carefully. She scanned him from head to foot. Then she glanced at the car which the driver had succeeded in backing out of the ditch.
"You look like a gentleman," she said. "Are you?"
O'Kevin was a Member of Parliament. That gave him a plain right to call himself a gentleman. But he was a modest man.
"I hope so," he said.
"Then I expect," said the girl, "that it will be all right to tell you. It's despatches."
"Despatches!" said O'Kevin.
For a moment he did not realise exactly what she meant. He had spent the evening enrolling an army, but he had not yet reached the stage of putting it on a war footing. Then he recollected that the other army, the opposition one, was very completely organised, and was, according to the reports in the daily papers, particularly rich in despatch riders. The assumption that if he were a gentleman he must be in full sympathy with the Ulster Volunteers nettled him a little.
"Surely," he said, "they don't send little girls like you to carry despatches."
"Oh, no," she said. "I'm only in the Ambulance Corps, learning to nurse the wounded, you know. Tom is a despatch-rider. But poor Tom sprained his ankle yesterday, and so when the despatches came he sent me with them."
"But your mother—" said O'Kevin, "and your father, what do they think?"
"They don't exactly know. But mother won't really mind, and father—well, father is the Colonel, you know. I'm carrying the despatches to him. He'll be furious, of course, but he'll get over it. He'd be much more furious if the despatches didn't arrive."
"Where is your father?" said O'Kevin.
"Head Quarters, Ballygore."
"Very well. Get into my car. It must be over twenty miles, but"
"Will you really? How perfectly sweet of you; but of course you may be a Volunteer yourself and then you'd want to. Are you?"
"Yes," said O'Kevin, quite truthfully.
"I thought you must be," said the girl, "when I saw you were a gentleman. And would you mind taking this." She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket—evidently Tom's jacket—and drew out a revolver. "I'm so awfully afraid of its going off. It's in case of meeting any Nationalists, you know; and of course if I did meet one I'd shoot."
Remembering that despatches are often of vital importance, O'Kevin told his driver to go back to Ballygore as quickly as possible. The twenty miles were covered in an hour. Most of the inhabitants of the town had gone to bed. In one window alone there was a light burning.
"Here we are," said the girl.
"I'll wait for you," said O'Kevin, "and drive you home."
The girl ran into the office. In ten minutes she was out again followed by a middle-aged man. He approached O'Kevin.
"I won't trouble you to drive my little girl home," he said. "But I want to thank you for your kindness to her. She oughtn't to have been running about the country on a motor-bicycle at night by herself. But under the circumstances—well she has delivered her despatches, thanks to your kindness. May I hope that you will lunch with us to-morrow? My name is Daintree, Cecil Daintree."
"Mine is O'Kevin."
"O'Kevin! But—but—but— Surely not the Mr. O'Kevin."
"Well, yes, I suppose I may call myself the Mr. O'Kevin. I was in Ballygore earlier in the evening. I daresay you heard about it. I was forming a corps of Nationalist Volunteers."
"But my daughter—my daughter told me—"
"That I was a gentleman? I'm sorry for the mistake."
"Most extraordinary thing I ever heard in my life, but of course—Sir," he held out his hand as he spoke, "I'm delighted to hear that you're training up your fellows to fight like men. If only those politicians would stop talking and let us settle the matter, like gentlemen, sir, like gentlemen."
"I'm afraid," said O'Kevin, "that I am also one of the politicians."
Mr. Daintree jerked his head back and swallowed with an evident effort. Then he seized O'Kevin's hand.
"Never mind, sir, never mind. Any man may find himself in a doubtful position, any man. But you're doing your best to get out of it, and no man can do more than that. Mr. O'Kevin, those despatches didn't matter a pin's head. There wasn't anything in them. But I'll not forget what you've done for my little girl to-night, and if ever, in the future, you know, any of your despatch riders happen to break down, I'll"
"Help them out?"
"I'll give orders to our fellows," said Daintree, "to take the despatches straight to you."