O'Bannon

“ She did not feel unfriendly to O'Bannon. On the contrary she admired him. She could, as she said, see his side of it. She prided herself on seeing both sides of every question. She greeted him cordially as soon as she was sure it was he. He turned and walked with her. They had the reservoir to themselves.
Miss Bennett thought it more tactful not to refer to Lydia. She began talking about the beauty of the city. Country people always spoke as if all natural beauty were excluded from towns, but for her part——
O'Bannon suddenly interrupted her. ”

“ Albee looked right at him. "Taking the consequences of doing so isn't always so enjoyable. Good night."
When the sound of the governor's motor had died away O'Bannon went back to his desk. His mother had long ago gone upstairs, and the house was quiet. Disgust and anger were like a poison in his veins. So that vile, sleek old man was to have her? Love was out of the question? She did not even have the excuse of needing money! What a loathsome bargain! What a loathsome woman! To think he had allowed himself to be stirred by her beauty? ”

“ The footman had run down the drive to see why her chauffeur, after a wait of more than an hour, wasn't bringing her car round. O'Bannon, who was driving himself in an open car, came out, turning up the collar of his overcoat, and found himself alone with her in the pale light of the waning moon, which gave, as the waning moon always does, the effect of being a strange, unfamiliar celestial visitor. ”

“ The matron came in, running at the sound of her fall. O'Bannon picked her up limp as a rag doll in his arms and carried her back to her cell. Under most circumstances he would have noticed that the cell was bright and large, but now he only compared it, with a pang at his heart, to that large, luxurious, deserted bedroom of Lydia's in which he had once interviewed Evans. ”

“ She gave O'Bannon a pretty little sketch of a smile. She thought his position a great one, and his age extreme—anyone over thirty was ancient in her eyes. She was profoundly grateful to him, for he had given her fiancé a position on the police force and made their marriage a possibility at least.
"How are things, Alma?" he said.
"Simply wonderful, thanks to you, Mr. O'Bannon," she answered.
He went upstairs thinking kindly of all gentle blond women. In the office he found his assistant, Foster, the son of the local high-school teacher, a keen-minded ambitious boy of twenty-two. ”

“ It's not so much financially—seventy-five hundred—but the opportunity, the reputation a fellow might make. It needs a big man, and yet a young one. I'm for putting in a young man."
That was all. The governor began after that to speak of his coming campaign for the Senate, but O'Bannon knew now exactly why he had come. ”

“ Piers gave a slight snort. Everyone, he said, believed in that.
"I don't find they do—it isn't my experience," answered O'Bannon. "Some fellows broke up a socialist meeting the other evening in New York, and no one was punished, although not only were people injured, but even property was damaged." Eleanor was the only person who caught the "even." "You know very well that if the socialists broke in on a meeting of well-to-do citizens they would be sent up the river." ”

“ Wiley protested that there was nothing in evidence to show that the telephone call had been made at thirteen minutes before three, and O'Bannon replied that with the consent of the court he would put the records of the telephone company in evidence to prove the exact hour. This point settled, a pause followed. Lydia half rose, supposing the ordeal over, but O'Bannon stopped her.
"One moment," he said. "You say you have not been arrested for exceeding the speed law for several years. Have you ever been stopped by a policeman?" ”

“ She half shoved him out of the box. "And be as quick as you can," she called after him.
He really was quick. In a few seconds she saw the curtain of the opposite box pushed aside and Bobby enter. He spoke a moment to Eleanor, and then when no one else was watching she saw him speak to O'Bannon and give him her note. The two men rose and went together into the back of the box out of her sight. What was happening? Was O'Bannon now on his way to her? There was a long delay. Miss Bennett's voice called, "Is somebody knocking?" The noise was Lydia's restless feet tapping on the floor. ”

“ The sheriff did, and jumping in he murmured as they drove down the road: "She is all that. She's easy to look at all right. She's handsome, and yet not—not what I should call womanly. Look out at the turn. There's a hole as you get into the main road."
"Yes, I know about it," said O'Bannon.
CHAPTER V
When Lydia came back from the Emmonses late Monday afternoon she brought Bobby Dorset with her. Miss Bennett, who was arranging Morson's vases of flowers according to her more fastidious ideas, heard them come in, as noisy and high-spirited, she thought, as a couple of puppies. ”

“ When, a few minutes later, the district attorney came down he found Miss Bennett alone. He looked about quickly.
"Where's Miss Thorne?" he said.
Miss Bennett had not wanted Lydia to go—she had urged her not to. What difference did the Emmonses make in comparison with the jewels? But now she sprang to her defense.
"She was forced to go. She had a train to catch—a long-standing engagement. She was so sorry. She left all sorts of messages." This was not, strictly speaking, true.
O'Bannon smiled slightly.
"She does not seem to take much interest in the recovery of her jewels," he said. ”

“ Bannon leaned on the rail and glanced at the paper on which she had been setting down totals.
"I guess you'd better go home, Miss Vogel. It's after nine o'clock."
"I can finish in an hour."
"You'd better go. There'll be chances enough for night work without your making them."
She smiled, cleared up the desk, and reached for her jacket, which hung from the nail behind her. Then she paused.
"I thought I would wait for my brother, Mr. Bannon."
"That's all right. I guess we can spare him. I'll speak to him. Do you live far?"
"No; Max and I are boarding at the same place." ”

“ Rumors of the way things were going at Calumet under the hands of his younger co-laborer had reached Bannon, and he was not greatly surprised when MacBride told him to go to Chicago Sunday night and supersede Peterson.
At ten o'clock Monday morning, Bannon, looking out through the dusty window of the trolley car, caught sight of the elevator, the naked cribbing of its huge bins looming high above the huddled shanties and lumber piles about it. A few minutes later he was walking along a rickety plank sidewalk which seemed to lead in a general direction toward the elevator. ”

“ I said you was the boss here now, and I was only the foreman of the night shift."
Until that last sentence Bannon had been only half listening. He made no sign, indeed, of having heard anything, but stood hacking at the pine railing with his pocket-knife. He was silent so long that at last Peterson arose to go. Bannon shut his knife and wheeled around to face him.
"Hold on, Pete," he said. "We'd better talk this business out right here."
"Talk out what?"
"Oh, I guess you know. Why don't we pull together better? What is it you're sore about?" ”

“ At least, the girl in green is our Banshee. I saw her before the death of a cousin of mine, and she appeared to my mother the night before my father died. I don’t know what the other apparition could have been, unless it was what my father used to term the ‘hateful Banshee,’ which he said was only supposed to appear before some very dreadful catastrophe, worse even than death, if anything could be worse.”
“You haven’t the monopoly of Banshees,” Ralph laughed. “We have one too, and I am positive the woman I saw—the beautiful woman I mean—was the O’Donnell Banshee. ”

“ Once again, then, the Banshee confines itself solely to families of bona-fide ancient Irish descent. As to its origin, in spite of arbitrary assertions made by certain people, none of whom, by the way, are of Irish extraction—that no one knows. As a matter of fact the Banshee has a number of origins, for there is not one Banshee only—as so many people seem to think—but many; each clan possessing a Banshee of its own. ”

“ In fiction no writer has, I think, dealt more freely with the subject of the Banshee than Thomas Crofton Croker, the translator of the abovementioned elegy. In his “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,” he gives the most inimitable accounts of it; and for the benefit of those of my readers who are unacquainted with his works, as well as for the purpose of presenting the Banshee as seen by such an unrivalled portrayer of Irish ghost and [Pg 182] fairy lore, I will give a brief résumé of two of his stories. ”

“ In “Personal Sketches of his Own Times,” by Sir Jonah Barrington, we find (pp. 152-154, Vol. II.) the account of a ghostly experience of the author and his wife, which experience the writer of the paragraph, referring to this work in the notes to T. C. Croker’s Banshee Stories, evidently considered was closely associated with the Banshee.
At the time of the incident, Lord Rossmore was Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland. He was a Scot by birth, but had come over to Ireland when very young, and had obtained the post of page to the Lord-Lieutenant. Fortune had favoured him at every turn. ”

“ According to Mr McAnnaly, the malevolent Banshee is invariably “a horrible hag with ugly, distorted features; maledictions are written in every line of her wrinkled face, and her outstretched arms call down curses on the doomed member of the hated race.” ”

“ With this speech Bannon ranged alongside Lanyard and looked him over, keenly malicious enjoyment gleaming in his evil old eyes.
"You are an honest-looking chap," he observed with a mocking smile but in a tone of the most inoffensive admiration—"honest and—ah—what shall I say?—what's the word we're all using now-a-days?—efficient! Honest and efficient-looking, capable of better things, or I'm no judge! Forgive an old man's candour, my friend—and take good care of our British cousin here. He doesn't know his way around Paris very well. ”

“ That the famous Irish Banshee, like the Drummer and Pipers of Scotland, the Death Candles of Wales, and the various English Family Ghosts, is the work of a species of Elemental, to which I have given the name, "Clanogrian," I have no doubt. The Celtic word Banshee, meaning the woman of the barrow, may in all probability account for the popular idea that whenever a member of one of the old Irish clans dies, their doom is foretold (to any or every member of the family but themselves) by a series of wails, in a woman's voice, [p.24] the phantasm of the woman herself being sometimes seen. ”

“ He had always understood that the one who neither sees nor hears the Banshee during its manifestations is the one that is doomed to die. And yet Dick was assuredly as safe in that inn as he was here—here, surrounded on all sides by his enemies. ”

“ Come to examine it, that excuse had been far too clumsy to hoodwink any but a man bewitched by beauty in distress.
Who was she, anyway? And what her interest in him? What had she been after in his room?—this American girl making a first visit to Paris in company with her venerable ruin of a parent? Who, for that matter, was Bannon? If her story of sleep-walking were untrue, then Bannon must have been at the bottom of her essay in espionage—Bannon, the intimate of De Morbihan, and an American even as the murderer of poor Roddy was an American! ”

“ Lady Wilde goes on to tell us no harm ever comes of the Banshee’s visit, unless she is seen in the act of crying, when her wails may be taken as a certain sign that some member of the family will shortly die. Mr McAnnaly corroborates this by stating that on one occasion one of the O’Neills of Shane Castle heard the Banshee crying, just as he was about to set out on a journey, and perished soon [Pg 61] afterwards, which is somewhat unusual, because in the majority of cases I have come across the Banshee does not manifest itself at all to the person whose death it predicts. ”

“ Presently, the singing having ceased, the old woman got up and dried her tears. Her anxiety, however, was not allayed; all through the night she could still be heard, every now and again, crying quietly and whispering to herself “’Twas the Banshee! Banshee!”; and in the morning Norah, suddenly growing alarmingly ill, passed away before medical assistance could be summoned.
A case of Banshee haunting that is somewhat unusually pathetic was once related to me in [Pg 29] connection with a Dublin branch of the once powerful clan of McGrath. ”

“ But, anyhow, if they were Banshees that you saw last night, they’re a bit out in their calculations. They should have come before that skirmish, not after it; unless it’s the [Pg 107] death of some relative of one of us they’re prophesying. I hope it’s not my sister.”
“I don’t imagine it has anything to do with you,” Ralph replied. “They were both looking at me.”
He was about to say something further, when O’Flanagan, seeing the young girl come into the room to clear away the breakfast things, at once began talking to her ”

“ Miss O’Rorke began, “a most unpleasant attachment; in other words, a most unpleasant Banshee. Being Irish, you will not laugh, of course, as many English people do, at what I say. You know as well as I do, perhaps, that many of the really ancient Irish families possess Banshees.”
Miss S—— nodded. “We have one ourselves,” she remarked, “but pray go on. I am intensely interested.”
“Well, unlike most of the Banshees,” Miss Georgina continued, “ours is appallingly ugly and [Pg 49] malevolent; so frightful, indeed, that to see it, even, is sometimes fatal. ”