If Margaret Callaghan, when she meditated matrimony, indulged in any roseate dreams, they were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home, and face to face with the fact that she had a white elephant on her hands. It is not likely that Mr. O’Rourke assumed precisely the shape of a white elephant to her mental vision; but he was as useless and cumbersome and unmanageable as one.
Margaret and Larry’s wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs. Finnigan’s establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up housekeeping in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept the floor of her apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on the dresser as bright as your lady-love’s eyes, and the cooking-stove as neat as the machinery on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the stove with lamp-black she was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt the palate of her marine monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament, she went about her work singing softly to herself at times, and would have been very happy that first week if Mr. O’Rourke had known a sober moment. But Mr. O’Rourke showed an exasperating disposition to keep up festivities. At the end of ten days, however, he toned down, and at Margaret’s suggestion that he had better be looking about for some employment he rigged up a fishing-pole, and set out with an injured air for the wharf at the foot of the street, where he fished for the rest of the day. To sit for hours blinking in the sun, waiting for a cunner to come along and take his hook, was as exhaustive a kind of labor as he cared to engage in. Though Mr. O’Rourke had recently returned from a long cruise, he had not a cent to show. During his first three days ashore he had dissipated his three years’ pay. The housekeeping expenses began eating a hole in Margaret’s little fund, the existence of which was no sooner known to Mr. O’Rourke than he stood up his fishing-rod in one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught nothing but cobwebs.
“Divil a sthroke o’ work I ‘ll do,” said Mr. O’Rourke, “whin we can live at aise on our earnin’s. Who ‘d be afther frettin’ hisself, wid money in the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?”
And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the wharves, and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his hands in his pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat on the door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne’er-do-weels of Rivermouth.
It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight to array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row, like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand’s wharf, with their twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O’Rourke in contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as it were.
The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice—quite in the rough, to be sure—and he played, on the violin like an angel. He did not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way, just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the more pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of personal property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or three o’clock in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to the distraction of all the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and innumerable dogs in the distance.
Unfortunately, Mr. O’Rourke’s freaks were not always of so innocent a complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and other spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his nocturnal feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement not wholly disconnected with an interior view of the police-station (bridewell is the local term); so it happened that Mr. O’Rourke woke up one fine morning and found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that the bull’s-eye in the glass door of The Wee Drop winked at him in an insult-in’ manner as he was passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent ten dollars and costs, which made sad havoc with the poor wife’s bank account. So Margaret’s married life wore on, and all went merry as a funeral knell.
After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parcæ, had closed the door upon the O’Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst into tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler sex are apt to be—to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the first vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing, which was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in the preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back again. Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when he was well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the fish-market—for Mr. O’Rourke had long since given over the onerous labor of catching dinners—he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she liked the change in her life, and if Mr. O’Rourke was good to her.
“Troth, thin, sur,” said Margaret, with a short, dry laugh, “he ‘s the divil’s own!”
Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gayety of champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr. Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
“I ‘m afraid, Margaret,” he remarked sorrowfully, “that you are not making both ends meet.”
“Begorra, I ‘d be glad if I could make one ind meet!” returned Margaret.
With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, Mr. Bilkins gradually drew from her the true state of affairs. Mr. O’Rourke was a very bad case indeed; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly drunk; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would not last until winter. Mr. O’Rourke was perpetually coming home with a sprained ankle, or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove. “In short,” as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to Mrs. Bilkins, “he had broken all those things which he should n’t have broken, and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long ago—his neck, namely.”
The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins most was this: in spite of all, Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart. Further than keeping the poor creature up waiting for him until ever so much o’clock at night, it did not appear that he treated her with personal cruelty. If he had beaten her, perhaps she would have worshipped him. It needed only that.
Revolving Margaret’s troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr. Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan was laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that convinced him she had made up her mind to adopt it.
“Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof!” cried Mrs. Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs. O’Rourke took up their abode in the Bilkins mansion—Margaret as cook, and Larry as gardener.
“I ‘m convanient if the owld gintleman is,” had been Mr. O’Rourke’s remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr. O’Rourke had the faintest idea of gardening. He did n’t know a tulip from a tomato. He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to undertake anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability.
Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret’s husband for any great botanical knowledge; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr. O’Rourke pointed to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out of flower, and remarked, “Thim ‘s a nate lot o’ pur-taties ye ‘ve got there, sur.” Mr. Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr. O’Rourke’s skill in gardening; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any case to make Margaret’s lot easier.
Reestablished in her old home, Margaret broke into song again, and Mr. O’Rourke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject were heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily, Mr. Bilkins was not without a sense of humor, else he would have found Mr. O’Rourke insupportable. Just when the old gentleman’s patience was about exhausted, the gardener would commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but loved him for the moment.
“Larry,” said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of September, “just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands.”
Mr. O’Rourke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with the monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820!
Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober.
“Eight hundred and twenty what?” cried Mr. Bilkins, feeling very warm, as he naturally would in so high a temperature.
“Eight hundthred an’ twinty degrays, I suppose, sur.”
“Larry, you ‘re an idiot.”
This was obviously not to Mr. O’Rourke’s taste; for he went out and brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of numerals running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed, “Add ‘em up yerself, thin!”
Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr. Bilkins had not spent the greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O’Rourke into the mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr. O’Rourke’s method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received a lot of a very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that morning, turned over to Mr. O’Rourke the duty of planting them. Though he had never seen a bulb in his life, Larry unblushingly asserted that he had set out thousands for Sir Lucius O’Grady of O’Grady Castle, “an illegant place intirely, wid tin miles o’ garden-walks,” added Mr. O’Rourke, crushing Mr. Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble flower-beds.