About three-fifteen, there was a stealthy creaking of parquetry, a shift of shadows, and after a time, cap in hand, there stood Casey at the library door.
“Hist!” he called softly.
The lord, who had dozed somewhat, blinked his eyes wide. “Oh, dear me,” he said, “is it time for us to go?”
“That’s tomorrow night,” said Casey. “And anyways, it’s not you that’s going, it’s them is coming back.”
“Them? Your friends?”
“No, yours.” And Casey beckoned.
The old man let himself be led through the hall to look out the front door into a deep well of night.
There, like Napoleon’s numbed dog army of foot-weary, undecided, and demoralized men, stood the shadowy but familiar mob, their hands full of pictures, pictures leaned against their legs, pictures on their backs, pictures stood upright and held by trembling, panic-whitened hands in the drifted snow.
A terrible silence lay over and among the men. They seemed stranded, as if one enemy had gone off to fight far better wars while yet another enemy, as yet unnamed, nipped silent and trackless at their behinds.
They kept glancing over their shoulders at the hills and the town as if at any moment Chaos herself might unleash her dogs from there. They alone, in the infiltering night, heard the far-off baying of dismays and despairs that cast a spell.
“Is that you, Riordan?” called Casey nervously.
“Ah, who the hell would it be!” cried a voice out beyond.
“What do they want?” asked the old party.
“It’s not so much what we want as what you now want from us,” called a voice.
“You see,” said another, advancing until all could see it was Hannahan in the light, “considered in all its aspects, Your Honor, we’ve decided, you’re such a fine gent, we—”
“We will not burn your house!” cried Blinky Watts.
“Shut up and let the man talk!” said several voices.
Hannahan nodded. “That’s it. We will not burn your house.”
“But see here,” said the lord, “I’m quite prepared. Everything can easily be moved out.”
“You’re taking the whole thing too lightly, begging your pardon, Your Honor,” said Kelly. “Easy for you is not easy for us.”
“I see,” said the old man, not seeing at all.
“It seems,” said Tuohy, “we have all of us, in just the last few hours, developed problems. Some to do with the home and some to do with transport and cartage, if you get my drift. Who’ll explain first? Kelly? No? Casey? Riordan?”
Nobody spoke.
At last, with a sigh, Flannery edged forward. “It’s this way …” he said.
“Yes?” said the old man gently.
“Well,” said Flannery, “me and Tuohy here got half through the woods, like damn fools, and was across two thirds of the bog with the large picture of the Twilight of the Gods, when we began to sink.”
“Your strength failed?” inquired the lord kindly.
“Sink, Your Honor, just plain sink, into the ground,” Tuohy put in.
“Dear me,” said the lord.
“You can say that again, Your Lordship,” said Tuohy. “Why, together, me and Flannery and the demon gods must have weighed close onto six hundred pounds, and that bog out there is infirm if it’s anything, and the more we walk the deeper we sink, and a cry strangled in me throat, for I’m thinking of those scenes in the old story where the Hound of the Baskervilles or some such fiend chases the heroine out in the moor, and down she goes in a watery pit, wishing she had kept at that diet, but it’s too late, and bubbles rise, to pop on the surface. All of this athrottling in me mind, Your Honor.”
“And so?” the lord put in, seeing he was expected to ask.
“And so,” said Flannery, “we just walked off and left the damn gods there in their twilight.”
“In the middle of the bog?” asked the elderly man, just a trifle upset.
“Ah, we covered them up; I mean, we put our mufflers over the scene. The gods will not die twice. Your Honor. Say, did you hear that, boys? The gods—”
“Ah, shut up,” cried Kelly. “Ya dimwits. Why didn’t you bring the damn portrait in off the bog?”
“We thought we would come get two more boys to help—”
“Two more!” cried Nolan. “That’s four men, plus a parcel of gods. You’d all sink twice as fast, and the bubbles rising, ya nitwit!”
“Ah!” said Tuohy. “I never thought of that.”
“It has been thought of now,” said the old man. “And perhaps several of you will form a rescue team—”
“It’s done, Your Honor,” said Casey. “Bob, you and Tim dash off and save the pagan deities.”
“You won’t tell Father Leary?”
“Father Leary, my behind. Get!” And Tim and Bob panted off.
His Lordship turned now to Nolan and Kelly.
“I see that you, too, have brought your rather large picture back.”
“At least we made it within a hundred yards of the door, sir,” said Kelly. “I suppose you’re wondering why we have returned it, Your Honor?”
“With the gathering in of coincidence upon coincidence,” said the old man, going back in to get his overcoat and putting on his tweed cap so he could stand out in the cold and finish what looked to be a long converse, “yes, I was given to speculate.”
“It’s me back,” said Kelly. “It gave out not five hundred yards down the main road. The back has been springing out and in for five years now, and me suffering the agonies of Christ. I sneeze and fall to my knees, Your Honor.”
“I have suffered the selfsame delinquency,” said the old man. “It is as if someone had driven a spike into one’s spine.” The old man touched his back, carefully, remembering, which brought a gasp from all, nodding.
“The agonies of Christ, as I said,” said Kelly.
“Most understandable, then, that you could not finish your journey with that heavy frame,” said die old man, “and most commendable that you were able to struggle back this far with the dreadful weight.”
Kelly stood taller immediately, as he heard his plight described. He beamed. “It was nothing. And I’d do it again, save for the string of bones above me ass. Begging pardon, Your Honor.”
But already His Lordship had passed his kind if tremulous gray-blue, unfocused gaze toward Blinky Watts, who had, under either arm, like a dartful prancer, the two Renoir peach ladies.
“Ah, God, there was no trouble with sinking into bogs or knocking my spine out of shape,” said Watts, treading the earth to demonstrate his passage home.
“I made it back to the house in ten minutes flat, dashed into the wee cot, and began hanging the pictures on the wall, when my wife came up behind me. Have ya ever had your wife come up behind ya, Your Honor, and just stand there mum’s the word?”
“I seem to recall a similar circumstance,” said the old man, trying to remember if he did, then nodding as indeed several memories flashed over his fitful baby mind.
“Well, Your Lordship, there is no silence like a woman’s silence, do you agree? And no standing there like a woman’s standing there like a monument out of Stonehenge. The mean temperature dropped in the room so quick I suffered from the polar concussions, as we call it in our house.
I did not dare turn to confront the Beast, or the daughter of the Beast, as I call her in deference to her mom. But finally I heard her suck in a great breath and let it out very cool and calm like a Prussian general. ‘That woman is naked as a jaybird’ and ‘That other woman is raw as the inside of a clam at low tide.’
“ ‘But,’ said I, ‘these are studies of natural physique by a famous French artist.’
“ ‘Jesus come after me French,’ she cried. ‘Skirts half up to your bum French. Dress half down to your navel French. And the gulping and smothering they do with their mouths in their dirty novels French. And now you come home and nail ‘French’ on the walls. Why don’t you, while you’re at it, put the crucifix down and nail one fat naked lady there?’
“Well, Your Honor, I just shut up my eyes and wished my ears would fall off. ‘Is this what you want our boys to look at last thing at night as they go to sleep?’ she says. Next thing I know, I’m on the path, and here I am and here’s the raw-oyster nudes, Your Honor, beg your pardon, thanks, and much obliged.”
“They do seem to be unclothed,” said the old man, looking at the two pictures, one in either hand, as if he wished to find all that this man’s wife said was in them. “I had always thought of summer, looking at them.”
“From your seventieth birthday on, Your Lordship, perhaps. But before that?”
“Uh, yes, yes,” said the old man, watching a speck of half-remembered lechery drift across one eye.
When his eye stopped drifting, it found Bannock and Toolery on the edge of the far rim of the uneasy sheepfold crowd. Behind each, dwarfing them, stood a giant painting.
Bannock had got his picture home, only to find he could not get the damn thing through the door, nor any window.
Toolery had actually got his picture in the door, when his wife said what a laughingstock they’d be, the only family in the village with a Rubens worth half a million pounds and not even a cow to milk!
So that was the sum, total, and substance of this long night. Each man had a similar chill, dread, and awful tale to tell, and all were told at last, and
