A Rivermouth Romance | Page 8

that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place,
appeared regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious
strains of music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper
window of the north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious
family would desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain
of.
The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on
hand at the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a
pretence of working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously
immediately after breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness
at dinner. Nobody knew what he did with himself in the interval, until
one day he was observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His
retreat discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant
part of the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the
ways of temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.
Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman,
she coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad,
any way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray.
Hours and hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit
without a light in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step
along the gravel walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and
went about the house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face
behind which women hide their care.
One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen
stove. O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but
not Larry. Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret

was humming "Kate Kearney" quite merrily. But when her work was
done, she stole out at the back gate and went in search of him. She
scoured the neighborhood like a madwoman. O'Rourke had not been at
the 'Finnigans'. He had not been at The Wee Drop since Monday, and
this was Wednesday night. Her heart sunk within her when she failed to
find him in the police-station. Some dreadful thing had happened to
him. She came back to the house with one hand pressed wearily against
her cheek. The dawn struggled through the kitchen windows, and fell
upon Margaret crouched by the stove.
She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr. Bilkins came down she
confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been
home for two nights.
"Mayhap he 's drownded hisself," suggested Margaret, wringing her
hands.
"Not he," said Mr. Bilkins; "he does n't like the taste of water well
enough."
"Troth, thin, he does n't," reflected Margaret, and the reflection
comforted her.
"At any rate, I 'll go and look him up after breakfast," said Mr. Bilkins.
And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth with the
depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rourke without much
difficulty. "Come to think of it," said the old gentleman to himself,
drawing on his white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor Street "I
don't want to find him."

III.
But Mr. O'Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr.
Bilkins directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite
confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought to
perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was
discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in

Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered
about town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He
then explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man,
and took a careful survey of the wharves along the river on his way
home. He even shook the apple-tree near the stable with a vague hope
of bringing down Mr. O'Rourke, but brought down nothing except a
few winter apples, which, being both unripe and unsound, were not
perhaps bad representatives of the object of his search.
That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion
with a straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O'Rourke's, which had been
found on Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but
O'Rourke was always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress is
not to be pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry
had drowned himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen
overboard while intoxicated.
The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is
regulated by laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar
system; that a certain percentage of the earth's population is