Serpent Versus Donovan
ON the third Friday of September the town council of Ballyfintry appointed a committee with extraordinary powers to deal with the delicate question of Sarah Donovan’s attitude to the new wide road that was coming into the town to bring civilization and a glorious dust-covered, petrol-stinking, man-mind-thyself prosperity to it and to the whole district. The road was then only two miles away and the surveyors would soon have to decide whether to bring it marching straight through the town or make a detour to avoid it. That had been written down in red ink on the agenda, and Terence O’Shea, conscious of the deep solemnity of the occasion, had reared himself on his hind legs, given an introductory cough, and made a motion to appoint a committee to investigate Sarah Donovan’s mind, and apply what measures they might consider necessary to work the miracle of a change in it, and so allow the new era of milk and honey to come into the place unhindered.
The first they elected to the committee was that little slimy bum of a lawyer, Aloysius Slaney, and soon he was flanked to east and west by the corporate wisdom, cunning, and snake’s-belly sagacity of Cornelius Rodgers, the proprietor of the Plough Hotel, and Terence Josceyline, the butcher.
As soon as the meeting was over, this unholy trinity of roguery got into a huddle and went to a private room in the Plough, where they sat knocking the guts out of a five-gill bottle of Scotch whiskey and bending their imaginations over the smoke of three cigars.
Slaney put the point to them with commendable brevity. In a nutshell, it was this. Here was that ould stick Donovan, twelve solid years left alone, with her man marching out of it and away to the far corners of the earth, where, for all was known, he might be settled down now with a handful of naked black women filing his teeth for him, and herself living a life on a thin string of empty days that made dust and ashes look like strawberry trifle by comparison, and lighting useless lamps in windows fore and aft every night the way they would cast a beam of light for his wayward feet coming back to her.
Aloysius Slaney took a hefty pull at his cigar and blew a reflective ring of smoke round a ray of sunshine. “That,” he said, in his best dehydrated legal voice, “in so far as it goes, is her own affair and her own funeral, but now we come to our affair and what looks like being the funeral of our unborn prosperity if we’re not careful.
“This Sarah Donovan owns a garden, and that garden, as you gentlemen well know, juts out from her doorstep beyond all Christian proportion to the size of the residence, and at a place that’s strategically placed to command the entry of the new wide road that’s coming down the valley. But for the same sentimental old foolishness that causes this female martyr to light lamps in her windows and live the frozen life of a celibate nun, she refuses point-blank to allow any alteration to her garden till her man comes back, and when, if ever, that will be, God only knows.”
They pondered that over in the depths of a fog of smoke and the biting smell of w’hiskey. Josceyline said: “Can’t we force the issue?”
“No use,” said Slaney. “She has all the trumps. She holds that bit of land on a lease that makes it impossible for us to touch it.”
“That’s what they call democracy,” grunted Rodgers. “Democracy means allowin’ the random whims of one old woman wipin’ her feet on the door mat of madness to hold the whole process of civilization locked up in the hollow of a withered hand. It means the forward march of human progress is to be held at bay by a yellow old face lookin’ into the past after the shadow of a man she’ll surely never see again.” Having got that off his chest, Rodgers turned his face into the whiskey glass again.
“Send a deputation,” said Josceyline, “and offer the ould witch money. Money always takes the trick.”
“Not with this one,” said Slaney. “We’ve tried it. It was just like shouting into an empty house.”
“Did you offer her enough?” said Rodgers.
“Enough and more than enough.” Slaney was flat, emphatic, and perfectly final about that.
“This is fanaticism,” he said, “and putting money up against it is like popping peas at the Pyramids.”
“There’s only one thing for it,” Josceyline said, “and that’s to get her convinced he’s dead. If she was convinced he was dead she’d soon soften up.”
“That’s easy said, but how are we goin’ to do it?” said Rodgers. “Are we goin’ to produce a homebaked corpse of Michael Donovan an’ serve it up on a plate or what? For if you ask me, that ould wan will fall for nothing less.”
“Ye’d think,” said Josceyline, “ye’d think, in these days of enlightened opinion, that twelve years of unmitigated absence would be a tolerable equivalent for death in even the most stupid of female minds.”
“Tach!” said Rodgers. “I’m sick of female minds. They are instruments that don’t answer to the logical stimulus of natural common sense. Ye’d need the wisdom of the serpent —”
Aloysius Slaney came to sudden life on that. He jumped to his feet and smashed one claw hand down on the table. “Serpent!” he cried. “Serpent! That’s what we want.”
2
IN the silence that followed, Josceyline started slowly and methodically to rub his long nose while he stared darkly and doubtfully into Slaney’s face. After a while Slaney answered the unspoken question that hung thick in the air of the room. He said: “No, I’m not mad.”
Rodgers squinted at him over his cigar. “If ye’re not itself,” he said, “ye’re givin’ what I would call a damned good impersonation of it. What the devil do ye mean by sayin’ we want a serpent?”
Slaney smiled his most slimy smile and weaved a vague pattern in the air with his cigar. “Let me ask you one first,” he said. “What, now, is the clearest thing you remember about this Michael Donovan?”
Rodgers wrinkled his nose in thought. “Well, it’s all damned stupid,” he said, “but if ye want to know, my clearest memory of Donovan was him standin’ out there in my own bar, mad drunk and roarin’ out ‘The Wearin’ o’ the Green’ in a voice like ten locomotives runnin’ over Fingal’s Stones without anny rails.”
“And you?” Slaney turned his weasel face on Josceyline.
Josceyline looked down the length of his nose at the lawyer and said: “So far as my memory can descend the ladder of human frailty to mind such a man at all, my clearest recollection — indeed my only recollection of him — was one day he came into my shop and bought a pound of tripe and then went up the middle of the High Street eatin’ it raw out of the paper. I thought at the time it was the most glarin’ exhibition of sodden, unmannered ignorance I’d ever seen in a civilized Christian town, and the place at the time full of foreign visitors from England.”
Slaney listened till they were both finished with their reminiscences. Then he gave a bit of a disparaging grunt. “Well,” he said, “there’s not much in either of your contributions to help on the matter in hand. Now I’ll tell ye what I mind about Michael Donovan. I mind a queer sort of a pin he always wore in his tie. It was made of rolled gold in the shape of a serpent rearing up to strike, with two green stones for eyes. A cruel-looking ornament, but fascinating — damned fascinating. It fascinated me, and I’ve never seen another like it.”
Rodgers said: “Now ye come to mention it I do mind him wearin’ a thing like that. He used to call it his lucky pin.”
“Of course,” said Josceyline, “his lucky pin. He never moved without it stuck into his cravat like a charm. The man was up to the neck in ignorant superstition.”
Slaney broke in again, his thin reedy voice filling his words with all the double meanings his ferreting mind could dig up. “Exactly,” he said. “Donovan never moved without that pin. I want you to remember that because it’s important — it’s the most important thing that’s been said. And beside it I want you to lay the fact that I can mind every detail of that pin, which wouldn’t be a wonder, for every time I met the man I found myself lookin’ into a snake’s head with two green eyes rearin’ out at me.”
Rodgers thought: “That’s because ye’ve lost the way of lookin’ people in the face,” but he didn’t say it. What he did say was: “All this might be very interesting to you, but I don’t see that it’s getting us anywhere, Aloysius.”
“Ye’re damned right,” muttered Josceyline, “it isn’t. Drawin’ pretty pictures of serpents out of a heap of old memories won’t ever help us to move the mountain of prejudice and stupid sentiment that ould Sarah Donovan has for a mind.”
“Maybe not,” said Slaney, “but I’ve an idea that it might.”
“Spill it, then,” said Rodgers impatiently, “for God knows there’s a remarkable dearth of ideas on the subject round here.”
“I was just thinkin’,” said Aloysius Slaney softly. “I was just thinkin’ that if that pin was to appear in the town here without Donovan’s ugly puss stickin’ above it, the thought might enter that old fool’s head that he was indeed dead, defunct, and finally departed this mortal coil.”
Rodgers sat glowering into space, and the birth of a sneer began to visit his ugly mouth. “A tolerable sort of inspiration for the likes of you, Aloysius, he said. “Man, I can just see that pin, which I suppose ye ll conjure up, like Ali Baba, out of the moon, comin’ sailin’ in to Ballyfintry under its own steam to settle down under the startled eyes of ould Sarah.”
“Which statement only goes to prove that ye’re even a bigger fool than ye look, Cornelius, said Slaney sweetly. “The aforesaid pin won’t come sailin’ in anywhere under any sort of steam. Doesn’t it strike your mislaid intelligence as possible that I could have a perfect duplicate of that pin made by a jeweler I know, and that I could find a stranger to bring it to Sarah Donovan, surrounded and garnished by a suitable story of the lonely death of her useless husband?”
That bit of Slaney’s wisdom was followed by a respectful silence while the other two measured the plan in their minds, and took thorough stock of all its implications. At last Josceyline said: “It’s a long shot, Aloysius. I don’t think she would fall for it.”
“Then ye’ve a lamentable lack of the knowledge of human nature,” said Slaney. “Remember the age of the ould stick and the tormentin’ way she’s lived for the last twelve years.”
“Even at that—” said Josceyline. Rodgers said nothing, only blew out a great cloud of blue smoke and stared into it with the wrapped-up look of a fortuneteller.
But Slaney was warming up to his idea now, and didn’t care what they said or did. “ You leave this to me, and the man I’ll get to tell the story,” he said. “When she’s finally convinced that Donovan’s dead, and sees there’s no longer any use hold in’ the fort for him, she’ll be damned glad to take the money we’ve offered and let the new road cut a way through that jungle wilderness she calls a garden.”
Rodgers spoke at last. “You’re a cunning devil, Aloysius Slaney,” was all he said, but he said it in a tone that was well laced with a mixture of envy and admiration, not to mention the three new glasses of Scotch whiskey he poured out to wet the launching of the idea.
The next day Aloysius Slaney had business in Ballyfergus, about ten miles away, first with a jeweler, and then with an ocher-faced man in a muffler who smelt of dulce and stale beer. That very night the ocher-faced man, who called himself Patrick Tierney, spent a quiet hour or so in the dark prowling round the garden of Sarah Donovan, watching the ceremony of her lighting the lamps and all the other paraphernalia that marked the end of a lonely day. Then, when he was sure she had gone to bed, this Patrick Tierney quietly opened a window and climbed in. Being a careful man he took off his boots before putting his feet on the floor inside the house; then he set about the task of gathering what information he could about Michael Donovan. He didn’t get much, but had a good squint at a photograph on the wall in which Donovan stood in all his glory, well plastered up for the occasion and wearing the serpent pin in front of him.
The man stood looking at this for a long while, as if soaking every feature of it into his mind, then he turned and went quietly out by the way he had come in. The only thing he had neglected to take care of was the churned-up mess he had made walking up and down in the garden to keep warm while he waited. But as the garden was well covered in by overgrown bushes and weeds, no one would ever notice that.
Two days later the ocher-faced man again visited Ballyfintry, but this time in daylight. He walked down the street looking this way and that, as a stranger would, and stopping now and again on his way to ask someone for directions to the house of the Widow Donovan. He put a sort of soft, meaning emphasis on the word “Widow,” and more than one that he asked noticed that he was wearing in his cravat a gold pin shaped like a rearing serpent — an ornament that seemed vaguely familiar to them.
3
SARAH DONOVAN looked more every day like a lantern stuck on the end of a thin stick, her face being so hollow and the cheekbones rearing up like two platforms under the deep sockets of her eyes with the dark fever burning away far back in them.
She was thin to gauntness and was never still in her dark shadowy house, drifting like a starved ghost from room to room, always sorting this and arranging that, cleaning what was already clean, burnishing and polishing brass and copper that already shone with a hard malevolence in the dimness of her four rooms.
The overgrown garden and the everlasting curtains over the windows made a formidable barrier for any sunlight that tried to get in. That had been the way of it for so many years now that the place had taken on the look of a mausoleum in which an automatic corpse perambulated around inside. Three times a week she would leave the place for the space of an hour, once to make confession and receive Communion at the Church of Our Lady, the second time to draw her pension at the Post Office, and the third time to buy in what little she needed to keep her spare frame in motion. On all these occasions she would sail through the place like a forlorn derelict ship, bare-masted, her thin face pointed forward the way she was going, and never as much as a look to right or left, let alone the human weakness of a word in the passing.
When she came back again, she would take off her coat and pick up the endless thread of useless duty where she had left off, filling in the slow time till dusk, when she would light a lamp in the front window and one in the back. Only then she would stand still for a little minute, with her eyes closed and her lips moving without any sound coming, before lying down to sleep like the last installment of death till the first gray of the morning. On Tuesday forenoons she would wash clothes and hang them on a big wooden clotheshorse round the fire to dry, and always among them would be some of Michael Donovan’s underclothes, maybe a shirt or a pair of drawers, or socks — always some little thing that pinned her mind and activity to the memory of her man.
In that way she was more faithful to the absence of him than many a woman was to the living presence of a man, which was remarkable, considering that Michael Donovan had been a cruel-natured individual who gave her many a bruise when they were in it together. But that is the nature of some women; the more cruel a man is, the better they seem to serve him.
4
IT WAS on one of these Tuesdays that the stranger knocked at the door and she standing in the middle of wringing out a pair of her husband’s woolen drawers. When the knock came she stopped in the middle of it, her hands still tightly wrapped round the wool like two great bundles of knotted veins. The sound of the knock seemed a long time in penetrating to her mind, and it was repeated in a louder tone before she stepped, like a yellow wraith, out of the cloud of steam and went to the door. When she opened the door she found a strange man standing there, his face well beaten up with all kinds of weather, and dressed like one who knew more about ships than houses.
But face and body and everything else were lost on Sarah Donovan, whose eyes were fixed in a nailed-down hypnotism on one thing only — a tiepin in the shape of a rearing serpent with two green stones for eyes that looked at her from below the man’s unshaven chin.
Patrick Tierney opened his mouth to say what his business was, but before he could get a blessed word out, the long yellow forefinger of the woman was fastened on the tiepin. “Where did ye get that?” she asked, her voice making a low vibration in the still morning air.
The man saw then that the pin was a ticket of admission to this place just as the lawyer had said, so he asked in a quiet, civil way if he could come in and remove the conversation from the handy ears of the town that might be passing and not above loitering a bit to pick up all that was going.
She brought him in then, and he sat down heavily on a horsehair chair beside the highly polished table in the sitting room, where he was facing again the flat-faced likeness of Michael Donovan. As for the old woman, she just stood watching the serpent’s head, like a still statue in gray and yellow stone, with never a move out of her.
Patrick Tierney took the pin out then and rolled it over and over between his fingers. “It belonged to a dead man,” he said, “a man ye know well, Mrs. Donovan.”
The change in her was sudden, like the shudder of an electric shock convulsing the movement into the muscles of her face and hands. She screamed out in a thin shrill cry: “That’s a lie! Before God, that’s a lie! Michael Donovan’s living and coming back again.”
“I’m sorry, Missus,” said Tierney. “It’s a hard thing breakin’ it to ye, but I know what ye know, and that is if Michael Donovan ever comes back it’ll be carried in the arms of angels he’ll be, for I got this off his dead body.”
The face of the woman went into a stillness then and did not change any more. It was set the way it would be in death, frozen still in its mold, and her body was quiet so that she did not even seem to breathe. Her eyes were fixed on him with such a look as made Tierney forget forever the rest of the highly colored story Aloysius Slaney had built up for him. All he could do now was look into the horrible dark places of Sarah Donovan’s eyes and babble the words: “He’s dead, dead. I got this off his body.” Then he waited for her to speak, while the silence stretched itself out like a long rope on which was hung the far-away life of the town in little muffled memories of sound. At last, when she did speak, it was only to ask him what his name was and where he lived.
He told her his name was Patrick Tierney and for the passing time he was staying with a Mrs. Stone in the High Street of Ballyfergus, his ship being in Belfast having her bottom scraped. And all the time he cursed himself inside for being such a pulp-brained bum as to allow the eyes of one mad old woman to rob his wits of the ready benefit of using an alias and a false address.
Sarah Donovan pondered over the knowledge of who he was and where he lived, behind the mask of her face; then she said again: “He’s not dead. He’s coming back.” Only this time she said it without any meaning, like a child repeating a parrot lesson in school.
Tierney was still struggling under the paralyzing power of her burning eyes, struggling to remember the next installment of the story Slaney had given him, but in the end nothing would come of it except the words: “Dead. Dead. Dead. You know he’s dead, Sarah Donovan.”
Then at last he saw a dim waver working over her face, and she turned away from him and went to the window. She pulled the curtains to the side and stood looking out for what seemed to him like ten long eternities. When she turned back, the fierce light had died out of the caves of her eyes, and she sat down. Slowly, heavily, her head sank down. Her voice was as lifeless as old ashes when she said: “I know he’s dead. Yes, I know he’s dead.”
The man went away then on soft feet, his mind in a daze and not knowing properly where he was going, driven by the terrible urge to get out of it, out of the shadows of the house and away from this gaunt shadow of a woman. He set his ocher face with desperate urgency on a course for the public bar of the Plough Hotel.
When he was well gone Sarah Donovan stirred herself and went out to the garden — a thing she had not done for many years. For a while she walked about among the dank vegetation, muttering incessantly to herself, with her scorched eyes looking down. Then she went back into the house, and drew the curtains again, tight over the windows. That night she lit no lamps, and next morning she did not appear in the town to draw her pension.
5
IT WAS four days before Sarah Donovan’s absence from confession, added to the accumulated regiment of milk bottles on her step, spurred on the curiosity of the town to have the door knocked in by a policeman.
Then they found her lying her length on the couch, stone dead, and the place stinking like the inside of a gasometer. The only difference in her from the time she was living was that she did not breathe now, and her eyes were frozen in a still mirror of fear.
It was Slaney himself who discovered the sheet of note paper on the table, and he would have crumpled it up quietly and destroyed it, only he was not sure, with all the eyes in the room, if someone else had not seen it as well. On the paper it said that Sarah Donovan left her house and garden to Patrick Tierney, c/o Mrs. Stone, High Street, Pallyfergus, on the sole condition that he would allow no interference with the existing property, but would inherit and live in it just as it was.
That was a shot in the eye for Aloysius Slaney, and he had to call another meeting of the extraordinary committee to deal with the new problems confronting them.
They gathered again in the private room in the Plough Hotel, and Slaney read out Sarah Donovan’s last will and testament to them. When he had finished, the three of them sat gathering their thoughts together, trying to see a way out of it.
Josceyline said: “Well, that’s the brilliant outside edge of everything. It’s the most remarkable and unique instance of a kick on the behind from the far side of the grave that I’ve ever heard of.”
Cornelius Rodgers waved that bit of wisdom aside impatiently. “What are we goin’ to do about it?” he said. “That’s what we want to know, and the more precious time we spend philosophizin’ and recriminatin’ and moanin’, the less time we’ll have to deal adequately with this man Tierney.”
Aloysius Slaney looked his narrowest look at the other two, and then ho opened his mind to them slowly, like a man opening up a bag of ferrets.
And out the ferrets came in the shape of a doublecrossing idea as flagrant in its simple criminal roguery as had ever fallen on the hard, experienced ears of Rodgers and Josceyline.
“Why not just forget about this fool Tierney? Why not put the whole business on ice till he is well out of the place, and then destroy the will and let the property revert to the town.”
At first the other two attempted a sort of circumspect shock for the sake of appearances, but at last they got round to admitting it might be an act of civil benefaction to avoid the risk of this drunken wanderer gaining property in a decent town.
They were in the process of anointing that bit of roguery with three glasses of whiskey when there was the devil of a rumpus from outside, followed in due time by the lumbering drunken body of Patrick Tierney.
He orientated his way round the room and came at last to anchor before the weasel face of Aloysius Slaney. Arrived there, he leered into the face of the lawyer, struck an attitude, and said, “I’ve had a letter from the dead departed.”
Slaney looked at him and saw the serpent tiepin with the green eyes still decorating the scarf under the stubble of his chin. There was something the lawyer did not like about that. He gritted his teeth and said: “You’d better take that pin out now.”
With a slow and insolent deliberation Tierney removed the serpent pin, and rolled it over and over between his thick tobacco-stained fingers. He said: “Sure. Sure. I forgot there wouldn’t be room in the place for another serpent with all that’s in it already.”
“What do ye want?” said Rodgers, eying him up and down beneath his heavy lids.
“It’s not what I want, it’s what I’ve got;” said Tierney. “I told ye I’d had a letter from the dead departed. It’s a notification from the late suicidelamented Sarah Donovan invitin’ me to inherit the house and garden which she has just left with such undiscriminatin’ haste.”
“Let me see that letter.” Slaney ground the demand out between his tight teeth. But Tierney gave him a sidelong look and said: “I can’t do that, for in my natural stupidity I handed it over to a Protestant lawyer in Ballyfergus. But I have a copy here ye can look at for your amusement, Mr. Slaney.”
Aloysius Slaney took the paper from Tierney’s brown paw and in a dull voice read out a duplicate of the will he had lying in his pocket.
It took the three of them a good five minutes to digest the meaning of that one, and then the words began to fly.
“The will would be contested. The woman had been insane. Balance of mind disturbed. No court of law could uphold such a document.” To all of which Patrick Tierney replied that the Protestant lawyer thought another way entirely. Out of the storm of words rose his grim ocher face and heavy rampart body, obdurate, obstinate, and undeniably the inheritor of that house and garden — on one condition.
6
WHEN half an hour of it had passed and no impression was made on Tierney except that he began to steer a slow way to the door with the copy of the will in his pocket, Aloysius Slaney swallowed hard and started to eat the dust.
“Of course,” he said, “a man like you wouldn’t dream of wanting a house like that, especially on those conditions.”
“And why wouldn’t I?” said Tierney.
“For the simple reason that ye’re a natural wanderer on the face of the earth,” said Slaney, “a man of the sea and never at rest away from it. What now would the likes of you want with a dark old house and such a wilderness of a garden?”
“There’ll come a day when the spirit will move me to settle down,” said Tierney, “and what better place could I find to settle in than this — among all my friends,” he added, with the ghost of a sneering smile.
Josceyline weighed in then, digging up his best mollifying voice. “Man, man,” he said, “surely ye don’t contemplate spending the declinin’ years of an active life pinin’ away in a corner of a damp and dark old house?”
“It wasn’t a bad house by what I saw of it,” said Tierney. “Not a bad house at all.”
Rodgers said: “And what about yourself stuck in it, haunted all your remainin’ life by the ghost of an ould woman you druv to death by a fantastic story about her man being dead.”
Slaney said: “Indeed, maybe that’s what she left it to ye for. Maybe she wanted ye in a place handy for her hauntin’ ye.”
Tierney looked at him, a long-drawn-out look. “If there’s hauntin’ in it,” he said, “I know who’ll be gettin’ haunted, an’ that’s the wan that instigated the story an’ planted the seed in me mind to rise up an’ drive the livin’ burnin’ hope out of the face of an oul’ woman till in desperation she turns the gas on an’ forgets to put a light to it.”
Slaney lapped that up, and then, after a minute of silence, he said quietly: “How much, Tierney?”
The ocher face lifted up a heavy look of surprise. “I don’t know what ye mean,” he said.
Slaney chucked impatiently with his tongue against his false teeth. “You know you’ve no shadow of intention of occupying that house,” he said. “I’m asking you how much do you want to renounce the inheritance.”
Tierney took a look at them all in turn while his brain slowly turned over and pondered the facts of the case — the wide road coming into it, the house standing in the way, these three old crows appointed by the town council to straighten the thing out. He did a quiet sum in his own mind and said six hundred pounds.
Slaney laughed, but it was a very thin laugh. It was even thinner when Josceyline echoed it, Rodgers made no sound, but just lit himself a cigar, which he got well going before he spoke. Then he said: “Surely to God it won’t take you all that money to drink yourself to death and you half way there.”
For answer, Tierney rotated slowly towards the door. “I’d better go and see about movin’ into me new house,” he said.
But Aloysius Slaney stopped him. Aloysius Slaney wanted to talk it over as friends. Maybe Rodgers would bring another bottle of whiskey. Rodgers brought the whiskey, and for a while they let the whiskey do the talking; it took the whole of a fivegill bottle and the three councilors only nibbling a drop here and there, but it did more than all the big brains in Ballyfintry could have done in ten years. Tierney finished up with ten one-pound notes in his pocket, and in Slaney’s pocket, lying snugly beside the will, was a signed abdication from the rights of the house, written in a round uncertain handwriting — but written, and signed. That was the thing. Next day Patrick Tierney weighed anchor with a thick head and a tongue like a door mat, and he was never seen in the place again.
At the end of the week there was a special meeting of the town council at which there was present a man from the road engineers, a man with a tall bald dome of a head like an eggshell, and thin specs on his nose.
Aloysius Slaney made his report, regretting the unfortunate demise of the late Sarah Donovan by a gas accident, and saying that in the absence of any kith or kin the house and property had ipso facto reverted to the community.
The mayor, on behalf of the council, thanked Slaney and the extraordinary committee for their noble and disinterested work, and assured the man with the eggshell head that there would now be no hindrance to the new wide road cutting a way through the garden of the old dark house at the end of the town.
On hearing that, the man with the eggshell head heaved a sigh of relief because he liked his roads to be straight for the motorcars. He took off his specs to say a few words that fell from his lips like dry biscuits; then he put them on again and went away in a hurry to give the sign that all was clear. So next day, two men with spyglasses on three sticks stood at the end of the town and looked at a distant object along an invisible line that ran straight through the garden of the late Sarah Donovan.
Three weeks later the road came, carried along by three hundred navvies and road makers, who laid it down behind them like a broad gray ribbon. The only snag was that when they came to the garden of the late Sarah Donovan, the proceedings had to be held up for two days while the police held a post-mortem over tho body of a man which they found buried there not far in front of the window.
It was lying with its face down, and not very deep, as if the work had been done in a hurry, and maybe by a weak person with no other help.
When they examined tho body in the county hospital, they discovered a great gaping hole in the back of the skull — a hole that made the examining doctor say something about a blunt instrument, maybe like a hammer a woman would use ordinarily for breaking coal.
The corpse was in a sad state of decomposition and the doctor said it must have been there for about ten or twelve years, there being nothing much more than a skeleton left, but the cravat it wore round its neck had been made of tougher stuff, it being still there and looking very queer beneath the grinning bones of the face.
It was Aloysius Slaney who identified it as the remains of Michael Donovan when he saw stuck in the cravat, under the rotten face, a tiepin in the shape of a rearing serpent with two green stones for eyes.