Leary

“ The door was scarcely closed when the count drew his chair closer to mine, and, with a look of kindliness and good-nature I cannot convey, said, ‘I am going, Monsieur O’Leary, to take a liberty—a very great liberty indeed—with you, and perhaps you may not forgive it.’ He paused for a minute or two, as if waiting some intimation on my part. I merely muttered something intended to express my willingness to accept of what he hinted, and he resumed: ‘You are a very young man; I not a very old, but a very experienced one. ”

“ I made known to my sister all the particulars of Leary’s death. She agreed with me in the idea I had already entertained: that the intelligence could not with safety be communicated to our mother.
“I don’t believe,” said Martha, “that any woman in this world ever loved a man so much as mother does Mr Leary. I am sure, Rowland, it would kill her, to hear what you have just told me.”
“But we must bring her to know it in some way,” said I; “She must be told of his death: for I can see that she will not consent to leave Sydney, so long as she believes him to be alive. ”

“ Mr. Leary now keeps a hat store in the Astor House, whose boys are wealthy merchants in Exchange Place, whom I often remind of the days when I bore them in my arms, and spanked them when they squalled. From Leary’s I went to the Harpers in Cliff street, and was placed in the pressing and folding room, in the upper story. I boarded with Fletcher (the youngest of the Harpers) in Batavia street, between James and Roosevelt. The firm then consisted of John, James, and Wesley Harper. ”

“ O’Leary; and, as he is destined to occupy some place in the history of these Confessions, I may, perhaps, be permitted to do so at more length than his intrinsic merit at first sight might appear to warrant.
Mr. O’Leary was, and I am induced to believe is, a particularly short, fat, greasy-looking gentleman, with a head as free from phrenological development as a billiard-ball, and a countenance which, in feature and colour, nearly resembled the face of a cherub, carved in oak, as we see them in old pulpits.
Short as is his stature, his limbs compose the least part of it. ”

“ Affection for Mathew Leary absorbed her whole soul, which had received a mortal wound, on learning the fate that had unexpectedly, but justly, befallen the wretch.
“Rowland!” she screamed out, as I entered the house! “He is dead! He is murdered. He has been hung innocently, by a mob of wretches in California.”
I resolved to do what is sometimes called “taking the bull by the horns.”
“Yes, you are right, mother,” said I. “If you mean Mr Leary, he was hung innocently; for the men who did the deed were guilty of no wrong. Mathew Leary deserved the fate that has befallen him.” ”

“ Leary's confidence in the Governor as a judge of character reënforced Archie's own opinion of the leader's fitness to command. That he should have been received into the strange brotherhood of the road, which the Governor controlled with so little friction, never ceased to puzzle him. He was amused to find himself feeling very humble beside Leary, a poor, ignorant, unmoral creature, whose loyalty as manifested in his devotion to the Governor was probably the one admirable thing in his nature.
"Somebody may get hurt if we come to a scrimmage," he suggested. ”

“ The idea of remaining for seven years in a situation chosen for me by Mr Leary, was too absurd to be seriously entertained for a moment. I told Stormy so; and he finally consented that I should go with him.
“My reason for objecting at first,” said he, “was because I did not like to be troubled with you; but that’s not exactly the right sort o’ feeling for a Christian to steer by. One should expect to have some trouble with those as need a helping hand, and I don’t know why I should try to shirk from my share of it.” ”

“ I was standing a little in the rear of O’Leary, and thus was partially hidden from observation.
Stepping on one side, and extending his hand towards me, O’Leary said, “Allow me, Mr. Hooker, to introduce you to a gentleman from England, with whom I believe you are well acquainted.”
Making an effort to appear calm and unconscious of danger, the swindler deliberately disowned all knowledge of me.
Looking at me, and then turning to O’Leary, he replied, “I do not know the gentleman. He is a perfect stranger to me.” ”

“ Leary asked, as he proceeded to fill his pipe.
"The shadow hasn't fallen, but we watch the sky," returned the Governor.
The brushing of the hands together Archie interpreted as a code sign signifying murder and the subsequent interchange of words he took to be inquiry and answer as to the danger of apprehension. He felt that Leary's attitude toward him became friendlier from that moment. There was something ghastly in the thought that as the slayer of a human being he attained a certain dignity in the eyes of men like Leary. ”

“ Leary's outer garbing was in the main conventional there were strikingly incongruous features of it too.
From his neck to his knees he correctly presented the aspect of a gentleman returning late from social diversions, caparisoned in a handsome fur-faced, fur-lined top coat. But his knees were entirely bare; so, too, were his legs down to about midway of the calves, where there ensued, as it were, a pair of white [Pg 20] silk socks, encircled by pink garters with large and ornate pink ribbon bows upon them. ”

“ The figure was now quite silent, and its garments, which had before flown loosely in the wind, were closely wrapped around it. ‘Go on, Leary, to Spring House, in God’s name,’ said my mother; ‘whatever world it belongs to, we will provoke it no longer.’ ‘’Tis the Banshee, ma’am,’ said Leary ”

“ O’Leary, I became a kind of moral amphibia, with powers to sustain life in two distinct and opposite elements—now brushing my way among frieze-coated farmers, trainers, dealers, sharpers, and stablemen; now floating on the surface of a politer world, where the topics of conversation took a different range, and were couched in a very different vocabulary. ”

“ Now, I am free to confess that few men have less hope to win the world by deeds of horsemanship than Arthur O’Leary. I have ever looked upon it as a kind of presumption in me to get into the saddle. I have regarded my taking the reins as a species of duplicity on my part—a tacit assumption that I had any sort of control oyer the beast. ”

“ Adieu, then, to Spas and their visitors! The sick are seldom the pleasantest company; the healthy at such places are rarely the safest.
‘You are going, Mr. O’Leary?’ said a voice from a window opposite the hotel, as my luggage was lifted into a fiacre, I looked up. It was the youth who had lost so deeply at the Cursaal. ”

“ Presently, however, the screaming discrepancy between Cuff-Button Leary's rule and "Jeffersonian ideals" did occur to me. I conveyed my thoughts to Bender as well as I could
He flared up. "Nonsense," he said, "Mr. Leary is the best man in the city.
He is a friend of mine and I am proud of it. Ask him for any favor and he will do it for you if he has to get out of bed in the middle of the night.
He spends a fortune on the poor. He has the biggest heart of any man in all New York, I don't care who he is. He helps a lot of people out of trouble, but he can't help everybody, can he? ”

“ No regular guy with the name of Leary would let a cheap stiff of a stick-up rob him out of the coat offen his back without puttin' up a battle. No regular guy named Leary would be named Algernon. Say, I think you're a Far Downer. ”

“ At the entrance below, as O’Leary was passing curiously out, he caught him with a sudden restraining clutch and a low admonition. Then he lit a match and studied the row of mail-boxes in the vestibule.
“No, no; that’s all right,” he said at last. “Old cards, all of them. No changes here.” He blew out the match and looked back at the stairs lost in the dimness of the hall light. “Uncanny, isn’t it? Anything might happen there. All right, now. Out, and turn straight toward Amsterdam Avenue.”
“As you say,” said O’Leary, struck by the restrained excitement in the other’s voice and gesture. ”

“ In the end Leerie had her wish. The little room at the end of a ward, used heretofore for supplies, was turned into a private room, and Monsieur Satan was moved in, with Sheila O’Leary as guardian. It was very evident that the patient approved. Once the door was closed behind them, he beckoned the nurse to him with malignant joy.
“They are all Germans out there—I’ve just discovered it. Sooner or later they will all have to be destroyed. You are an American. ”

“ But the reader and I, better informed than any lamp post could be as to the prior sequence of events, would know at a glance it was no parsnip we beheld, but Mr. Algernon Leary, now suddenly enveloped, through no fault of his own, in one of the most overpowering predicaments conceivable to involve a rising lawyer and a member of at least two good clubs ”

“ O'Leary Charges the Mob
"You may easily suppose," began Mr. O'Leary, "that the unhappy termination of my first passion served as a shield to me for a long time against my unfortunate tendencies towards the fair; and such was really the case. I never spoke to a young lady for three years after, without a reeling in my head, so associated in my mind was love and sea-sickness. However, at last what will not time do. It was about four years from the date of this adventure, when I became so, from oblivion of my former failure, as again to tempt my fortune. ”

“ Sir—A lately-arrived traveller in these parts brings me intelligence, that a work is announced for publication by you, under the title of ‘The Loiterings of Arthur O’Leary,’ containing his opinions, notions, dreamings, and doings during several years of his life, and in various countries. Now this must mean me, and I should like to know what are a man’s own, if his adventures are not? His ongoings, his ‘begebenheiten,’ as the Germans call them, are they not as much his, as his—what shall I say; his flannel waistcoat or his tobacco-pipe? ”

“ The rascal is anxious to settle down in some strictly moral community and open a confectionery shop—one of these little concerns where the neighborhood children bring in their pennies for sodas and chewing-gum, with a line of late magazines on the side. A kind, genial man is Leary, and he swears he'll abandon the road for good. ”

“ O'Leary and some others of the rioters—among whom I rejoiced to find my cousin did not figure. If I were to judge from his disordered habiliments and scarred visage, Mr. O'Leary's resistance to the constituted authorities must have been a vigorous one, and the drollery of his appearance was certainly not decreased by his having lost the entire brim of his hat—the covering of his head bearing, under these distressing circumstances, a strong resemblance to a saucepan. ”

“ Leary declares he has been close-mouthed; the other men on guard know absolutely nothing, and Captain Wilton is the only officer to whom in my distress of mind I betrayed that there was a mystery, and he has pledged himself to me to say nothing. Sloat, too, has an inkling, and a big one, that Jerrold is the suspected party ”

“ As he so said, the head of a huge black-thorn stick was half protruded across the table, causing renewed mirth; for, among other regulations, every cane, however trifling, is always demanded at the door; and thus a new subject of astonishment arose as to how he had succeeded in carrying it with him into the salon.
“Here’s at you again,” said O’Leary, regardless of the laughter, and covering three or four numbers with his jetons. ”

“ I saw that he was dressed as if for the road, and looking paler and more agitated than usual.
‘O’Leary,’ said he, in a tremulous voice, ‘I am come to place in your hands the highest trust a man can repose in another. Am I certain of your friendship?’ I shook his hand in silence, and he went on. ‘I must leave Brussels to-night, secretly. A political affair, in which the peace of Europe is involved, has just come to my knowledge; the Government here will do their best to detain me; orders are already given to delay me at the frontier, perhaps send me back to the capital ”

“ Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave; ”

“ O’Leary,’ said Laura, in the easy tone of one who asked for information’s sake, ‘what are your plans here; for up to this moment I only perceive that we have been increasing the distance between us and Rochepied.’
‘Quite true,’ said I; ‘but you know we agreed it was impossible to hope to find our way back through the forest. Every allée here has not only its brother, but a large family, so absolutely alike no one could distinguish between them; we might wander for weeks without extricating ourselves.’
‘I know all that,’ said she somewhat pettishly ”

“ And besides there were some people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally, though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight down.
So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon [Pg 14] Leary, of the firm of Leary & Slack, counsellors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very last to depart. Never had Mr. Leary spent a more pleasant evening. ”

“ The highwayman's accent was both ominous and contemptuous. "Say, wotcher mean drillin' round dis town in some kinder funny riggin' wit'out no plunder on you? I gotta right to belt you one acrost the bean."
"I'd rather you didn't do that," protested Mr. Leary in all seriousness. "If—if you'd only give me your address I could send you some money in the morning to pay you for your trouble——"
"Cut out de kiddin'," broke in the disgusted marauder. His tone changed slightly for the better. "Say, near as I kin tell by feelin' it, dat ain't such a bum benny you're sportin'. ”