They said little to each other as the motor splashed along the flooded road.  Each was absorbed in the effort to envisage the profound changes that had befallen himself in a single night.  More than once Barty turned to Larry as if he were about to speak, and then turned away; they came to the Mount Music entrance, and as the car turned in through the gateway, Barty suddenly put his bony and pallid hand on Larry’s knee.

“There’s a thing no one here knows but myself, and I didn’t hear it till two days ago, but I can’t bear the weight of it any longer.  I can’t give you all the details, but you may rely on what I say being correct.”  He looked away from Larry out of the window.  The car was running swiftly up the smooth levels of the long avenue; he knew he had no time for circumlocution.  “My father told me,” he began, “that in some way, between himself and the Major a lot of money had passed.  The Major was greatly pressed for money—­he wasn’t getting his rents, and there were many liabilities—­my father got hold of them all.  I think he lent him a lot of money too—­” He paused an instant, then he rushed on with his story.  “Anyway, whatever was between them, the Major gave my father the title-deeds of this house and the demesne in security for what he had borrowed.  My father has them now, I mean,” he corrected himself, “they’re in my office.  He said they were for me—­he as good as gave them to me.”  Barty slowly turned a dusky red.  He thought of what his father had said of Mount Music, of Christian; the arrogance, the hateful facetiousness; he had felt as if brutal hands had been laid on a saint; even now, he shuddered in spirit as remembrance came to him.

“Good God!  Was that why they went away?” Larry said, with a horror that scarcely permitted of speech.  “Do you mean the place isn’t theirs any more?” He thought:  “I wish he’d take his hand off my knee!  Thank God, I’m out of it!”

“It” meant marriage with the daughter and the sister of men who could do such things.

Perhaps some telepathic vibration from that wave of repulsion reached Barty.

“You needn’t think I had anything to do with it,” he muttered, withdrawing his hand, “or ever will!” he added, as if to himself.

Larry remained silent; the car ground into the heavy river-gravel on the sweep in front of the house, and ceased at the door that he had not seen since that day of wrath when he had cast his cousins behind him for ever.

CHAPTER XLII

Dr. Mangan’s body was still lying on the door on which it had been carried up from the river-bank.  Kitchen chairs now supported it where it lay, with its burden, between the high windows, in the desolate, sheeted dining-room, surrounded by portraits of Talbots, and Lowrys, and their collaterals, who would surely have considered the presence of Francis Aloysius Mangan, dead or alive, as something of an intrusion, not to say a liberty.