“I swear before Almighty God that I warned him to keep away from the house.”
There was a dead silence for three seconds. Then a perceptible shudder ran through the room. Everybody remembered with horror that there was a suspicion abroad, a suspicion that an informer had betrayed Francis Joseph McPhillip. Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by an Irish mind. For an awful moment each one present suspected himself or herself. Then each looked at his or her neighbour. Gradually rage took the place of fear. But it had no direction. Even the most daring gasped when their minds suggested, that possibly the great fierce giant might have had … Impossible!
“There’s no man suspects ye, Gypo. Ye needn’t be afraid of that,” cried Tommy Connor, the huge red-faced docker with immense jaws like a bullock, who had been whispering to Bartly Mulholland.
He had spoken spontaneously with a queer note of anger in his voice.
“Nobody suspects ye. Good God, man! …”
There was a chorus of agreement. Everybody was eager to assent to the statement that Connor had made. Somebody put his hand on Gypo’s shoulder and began to say: “Sure it’s well known that …”
But Gypo elbowed the man away fiercely and set out hurriedly across the floor towards Mrs. McPhillip. He elbowed the people out of his way without looking at them. He stood in front of Mrs. McPhillip. He stared at her impassively for a few moments. Then he put his hand slowly to his head and took off his hat. He felt moved by an incontrollable impulse. All his actions had completed themselves before his mind was aware of them. His mind was struggling along aimlessly in pursuit of his actions, impotently deprecating them and whispering warnings. But it was powerless.
This impulse that had possession of him now was of the same origin as the one that controlled him when he was looking into the shop window thinking of his youth.
He was beyond himself. His lips quivered. His throat got stuffed. He swallowed his breath with an articulate sound, resembling a cry of pain. He held out his left hand towards Mrs. McPhillip. He opened the hand slowly. The four white silver coins lay there.
“Take it,” he muttered. “Ye were good to me an’ I’m sorry for yer trouble.”
He felt a mad desire to pull out the roll of notes and give them to her also, but the very thought of such a mad action made him shiver. Instead he dropped the four coins into Mrs. McPhillip’s lap.
Mrs. McPhillip glanced at the money and then burst into loud sobs. The sound maddened Gypo. He turned about and rushed towards the door. He stubbed his foot against the doorjamb and hurtled into the hall. He rushed along the passage, cursing and striking furiously at everybody that came in his way. He stood outside the street door and breathed deeply.
Two men rushed out after him. They were Bartly Mulholland and Tommy Connor, the docker.
V
“Gypo!”
Gypo had taken three steps down the street when his name came to him through the darkness, uttered in that long-drawn-out whisper which is the customary intonation among revolutionaries. He contracted his back suddenly like an ass that has been struck with violence. Then he halted. He did not turn about or reply. He waited. He listened with a beating heart to the slow footsteps that came up to him from behind. One, two, three, four … they stopped. Gypo looked to his left. Bartly Mulholland was standing there.
The two of them stood in front of a window through which lamplight was streaming, across Gypo’s chest on to Mulholland’s face. Mulholland’s yellow face looked almost black in the lamplight. It was furrowed vertically from the temples to the jaws, with deep black furrows. The mouth was large and open, fixed in a perpetual grin that had absolutely no merriment in it, that fixed grin of sardonic contempt that is nearly always seen on the faces of men who make a business of concealing their thoughts. The nose was long and narrow. The ears were large. The forehead was furrowed horizontally. The skin on the forehead was very white in contrast to the dark skin on the cheeks. The furrows on the forehead were very shallow and narrow, like thin lines drawn with a sharp pencil. In fact, the whole appearance of the face was that of an artificial face, such as that produced in the dressing-room of an actor by means of paints, etc. This suggestion was strengthened by the appearance of the hair that straggled in loose wisps from beneath the shovel-shaped peak of the grey tweed cap. The hair appeared to be a dirty brown wig, much the worse for wear. But neither the hair nor any portion of the face was artificial. Everything had come from the hand of Nature, which seemed, by some peculiar whimsey, to have cast this individual for the role of a conspirator. The face was the face of a clown to hide the conspirator’s eyes, except from a very close scrutiny. The eyes were the colour of sea water that is dirty with grey sand. These eyes are sometimes described as watery blue, but it is a totally wrong description. There was an indescribable coldness and depth in them which it is beyond the power of any colour to describe. They stared without a movement of the pupils or of the lashes at Gypo’s face, expressing no emotion whatever. They were not doors of the soul like
