PART I

Produced by Al Haines

[Illustration: Cover]

[Frontispiece: "If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare

spurs to get to the cliff before them!" [Page 4.]]

In Mr. Knox's Country

By

E. [OE]. Somerville and Martin Ross

Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Further

Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "Some Irish Yesterdays,"

"All on the Irish Shore," "Dan Russel the Fox,"

"The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.

With 8 Illustrations by E. [OE]. Somerville

Longmans, Green and Co.

39 Paternoster Row, London

Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York

Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras

1915

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

I. THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT

II. THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX

III. THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH

IV. HARRINGTON'S

V. THE MAROAN PONY

VI. MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS

VII. WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY

VIII. THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS

IX. PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO

X. THE COMTE DE PRALINES

XI. THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"If ever you see hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get

to the cliff before them!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

Kitty the Shakes

"I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls"

"Lyney's a tough dog!"

"Walkin' Aisy"

James

Miss Cooney O'Rattigan

Miss Larkie McRory

IN MR. KNOX'S COUNTRY

I

THE AUSSOLAS MARTIN CAT

Flurry Knox and I had driven some fourteen miles to a tryst with one

David Courtney, of Fanaghy. But, at the appointed cross-roads, David

Courtney was not. It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when

everything was young and tense and thin and fit to run for its life,

like a Derby horse. Above us was such of the spacious bare country as

we had not already climbed, with nothing on it taller than a thorn-bush

from one end of it to the other. The hill-top blazed with yellow

furze, and great silver balls of cloud looked over its edge. Nearly as

white were the little white-washed houses that were tucked in and out

of the grey rocks on the hill-side.

"It's up there somewhere he lives," said Flurry, turning his cart

across the road; "which'll you do, hold the horse or go look for him?"

I said I would go to look for him. I mounted the hill by a wandering

bohireen resembling nothing so much as a series of bony elbows; a

white-washed cottage presently confronted me, clinging, like a

sea-anemone, to a rock. I knocked at the closed door, I tapped at a

window held up by a great, speckled foreign shell, but without success.

Climbing another elbow, I repeated the process at two successive

houses, but without avail. All was as deserted as Pompeii, and, as at

Pompeii, the live rock in the road was worn smooth by feet and scarred

with wheel tracks.

An open doorway faced me; I stooped beneath its lintel and asked of

seeming vacancy if there were "anyone inside." There was no reply. I

advanced into a clean kitchen, with a well-swept earthen floor, and was

suddenly aware of a human presence very close to me.

A youngish woman, with a heavy mop of dark hair, and brown eyes staring

at the opposite wall, was sitting at the end of a settle behind the

door. Every bit of her was trembling. She looked past me as if I did

not exist. Feeling uncertain as to whether she or I were mad, I put to

her my question as to where David Courtney lived, without much

expectation of receiving an answer.

Still shaking from head to foot, and without turning her eyes, she

replied:

"A small piece to the north. The house on the bare rock."

The situation showed no symptom of expansion; I faltered thanks to her

profile and returned to Flurry.

The house of David Courtney produced David Courtney's large and

handsome wife, who told us that Himself was gone to a funeral, and all

that was in the village was gone to it, but there was a couple of the

boys below in the bog.

"What have they done with those cubs?" asked Flurry.

Mrs. Courtney shot at him a dark-blue side-glance, indulgent and

amused, and, advancing to the edge of her rock terrace, made a trumpet

of her hands and projected a long call down the valley.

"Mikeen! Con! Come hither!"

From a brown patch in the green below came a far-away response, and we

presently saw two tall lads coming towards us, running up the hill as

smoothly and easily as a couple of hounds. Their legs were bare and

stained with bog-mould, they were young and light and radiant as the

May weather.

I did not withhold my opinion of them from their proprietor.

"Why, then, I have six more as good as them!" replied Mrs. Courtney,

her hands on her hips.

We took the horse from the shafts and pushed him, deeply suspicious,

into a darksome lair, in one corner of which glimmered a pale object,

either pig or calf. When this was done we followed Mikeen and Con up

through blossoming furze and blue-grey rock to the ridge of the hill,

and there came face to face with the vast blue dazzle of the Atlantic,

with a long line of cliffs standing it off, in snowy lather, as far as

eye could follow them into the easterly haze.

"That's the cliff over-right you now," said one of the boys, pointing

downwards, with a hand dark with bog-stuff, to a grey and green wedge

thrust out into the blue. "It's there where she have her den. She

have a pat' down for herself in it--it's hardly a bird could walk

it--the five pups was following her, and two o' them rolled down into

the strand, and our dogs held them. Ourselves was below in the cove

gathering seaweed."

"Make a note of it now, Major," said Flurry, "and if ever you see

hounds pointing this way, don't spare spurs to get to the cliff before

them!"

"Why don't you get them out and blow up the place?"

"Is it get them out of that hole!" said one of the boys. "If all the

foxes in Europe was inside in it you couldn't get them out!"

"We mightn't want them either," said Flurry, his eye ranging the face

of the cliff, and assimilating its uncompromising negations.

"Then there's plenty that would!" returned Mikeen, looking at us with

an eye as blue and bright as the sea. "There was a man east here that

cot a fox and her five young ones in the one night, and he got three

half-crowns for every lad o' them!"

"He'd be turned out of hell for doing that," said Flurry, very severely.

We went back to the cottage on the rock, and the matter entered upon

its more serious phase. I took no part in the negotiations, and

employed myself in converse with Mrs. Courtney, who--it may not be out

of place to recall--informed me, amongst other domestic details, that

the farm wouldn't carry all the children she had, and that nowadays,

when the ger'rls would be going to America, it's white nightdresses and

flannelette nightdresses she should give them; and further, that she

thought, if she lived to be as old as a goat, she'd never see them so

tasty.

On the way home I asked Flurry what he was going to do with the two

cubs, now immured in a market basket under the seat of the dog-cart.

Flurry was ambiguous and impenetrable; there were certain matters in

which Flurry trusted nobody, knowing the darkness of his own heart and

the inelasticity of other people's points of view.

"That woman, you know, that told you the way," he remarked, with

palpable irrelevance, "'Kitty the Shakes,' they call her--they say she

mightn't speak to anyone once in three months, and she shakes that way

then. It's a pity that was the house you went into first."

[Illustration: Kitty the Shakes.]

"Why so?" said I.

"That's the why!" said Flurry.

It was during the week following this expedition that Philippa and I

stayed for a few days at Aussolas, where Flurry and Mrs. Flurry were

now more or less permanently in residence. The position of guest in

old Mrs. Knox's house was one often fraught with more than the normal

anxieties proper to guests. Her mood was like the weather, a matter

incalculable and beyond control; it governed the day, and was the _leit

motif_ in the affairs of the household. I hope that it may be given to

me to live until my mood also is as a dark tower full of armed men.

On the evening of our arrival my wife, whose perception of danger is

comparable only to that of the wild elephant, warned me that Mrs. Knox

was rheumatic, and that I was on no account to condole with her. Later

on the position revealed itself. Mrs. Knox's Dublin doctor had ordered

her to Buxton with as little delay as possible; furthermore, she was to

proceed to Brighton for the summer, possibly for the winter also. She

had put Aussolas on a house agent's books, "out of spite," Flurry said

sourly; "I suppose she thinks I'd pop the silver, or sell the feather

beds."

It was a tribute to Mrs. Knox's character that her grandson treated her

as a combatant in his own class, and did not for an instant consider

himself bound to allow her weight for either age or sex.

At dinner that night Mrs. Knox was as favourable to me as usual; yet it

was pointed out to me by Mrs. Flurry that she was wearing two shawls

instead of one, always an indication to be noted as a portent of storm.

At bridge she played a very sharp-edged game, in grimness scarcely

mitigated by two well-brought-off revokes on the part of Philippa, who

was playing with Flurry; a gross and unprincipled piece of chivalry on

my wife's part that was justly resented by Mr. Knox.

Next morning the lady of the house was invisible, and Mullins, her

maid, was heard to lament to an unknown sympathiser on the back stairs

that the divil in the wild woods wouldn't content her.

In the grove at Aussolas, on a height behind the castle, romantically

named Mount Ida, there is a half-circle of laurels that screens, with

pleasing severity, an ancient bench and table of stone. The spot

commands a fair and far prospect of Aussolas Lake, and, nearer at hand,

it permitted a useful outlook upon the kitchen garden and its affairs.

When old Mrs. Knox first led me thither to admire the view, she

mentioned that it was a place to which she often repaired when the cook

was on her trail with enquiries as to what the servants were to have

for dinner.

Since our expedition to Fanaghy the glory of the weather had remained

unshaken, and each day there was a shade of added warmth in the

sunshine and a more caressing quality in the wind. Flurry and I went

to Petty Sessions in the morning, and returned to find that Mrs. Knox

was still in her room, and that our respective wives were awaiting us

with a tea-basket in the classic shades of Mount Ida. Mrs. Knox had

that mysterious quality of attraction given to some persons, and some

dogs, of forming a social vortex into which lesser beings inevitably

swim; yet I cannot deny that her absence induced a sneaking sensation

of holiday. Had she been there, for example, Mrs. Flurry would

scarcely have indicated, with a free gesture, the luxuriance of the

asparagus beds in the kitchen garden below, nor promised to have a

bundle of it cut for us before we went home; still less would she and

Philippa have smoked cigarettes, a practice considered by Mrs. Knox to

be, in women, several degrees worse than drinking.

To us there, through the green light of young beech leaves and the

upstriking azure glare of myriads of bluebells, came the solid presence

of John Kane. It would be hard to define John Kane's exact status at

Aussolas; Flurry had once said that, whether it was the house, or the

garden, or the stables, whatever it'd be that you wanted to do, John

Kane'd be in it before you to hinder you; but that had been in a moment

of excusable irritation, when John Kane had put a padlock on the oat

loft, and had given the key to Mrs. Knox.

John Kane now ascended to us, and came to a standstill, with his soft

black hat in his hands; it was dusty, so were his boots, and the

pockets of his coat bulked large. Among the green drifts and flakes of

the pale young beech leaves his bushy beard looked as red as a

squirrel's tail.

"I have the commands here, Master Flurry," he began, "and it's to

yourself I'd sooner give them. As for them ger'rls that's inside in

the kitchen, they have every pup in the place in a thrain at the back

door, and, if your tobacco went asthray, it's me that would be blemt."

"The commands"--_i.e._ some small parcels--were laid on the stone

table, minor pockets yielded an assortment of small moneys that were

each in turn counted and placed in heaps by their consort parcels.

"And as for the bottle, the misthress wrote down for me," said John

Kane, his eye rounding up his audience like a sheep-dog, "I got me

'nough with the same bottle. But sure them's the stupidest people in

Hennessy's! 'Twas to Hennessy himself I gave the misthress's paper,

and he was there looking at it for a while. 'What have she in it?'

says he to me. 'How would I know,' says I, 'me that have no learning?'

He got the spy-glass to it then, and 'twas shortly till all was in the

shop was gethered in it looking at it. 'Twould take an expairt to read

it!' says one fella----"

"True for him!" said Flurry.

"---- 'She have written it in Latin!' says Hennessy. 'Faith she's

able to write it that way, or anny other way for yee!' says I. 'Well,

I'll tell ye now what ye'll do,' says Hennessy. 'There's a boy in the

Medical Hall, and he's able to read all languages. Show it to him,'

says he. I showed it then to the boy in the Medical Hall. Sure, the

very minute he looked at it--'Elliman's Embrocation,' says he." John

Kane waved his hand slightly to one side; his gestures had throughout

been supple and restrained. "Sure them's the stupidest people in

Hennessy's!"

My sympathies were with the house of Hennessy; I, too, had encountered

Mrs. Knox's handwriting, and realised the high imaginative and

deductive qualities needed in its interpreter. No individual word was

decipherable, but, with a bold reader, groups could be made to conform

to a scheme based on probabilities.

"You can tell the mistress what they were saying at Hennessy's about

her," said Flurry.

"I will, your honour," replied John, accepting the turn in the

conversation as easily as a skilful motorist changes gear. "I suppose

you'll have a job for me at Tory Lodge when I get the sack from the

misthress?"

"No, but they tell me I'm to be put on the Old Age Pension Committee,"

returned Flurry, "and I might get a chance to do something for you if

you'd give over dyeing that beard you have."

"I'm sorry to say it's the Almighty is dyeing my beard for me, sir,"

replied John Kane, fingering a grey streak on his chin, "and I think

He's after giving yourself a touch, too!" He glanced at the side of

Flurry's head, and his eye travelled on to mine. There was an almost

flagrant absence of triumph in it.

He put aside a beechen bough with his hand; "I'll leave the things on

the hall table for you, sir," he said, choosing the perfect moment for

departure, and passed out of sight. The bough swung into place behind

him; it was like an exit in a pastoral play.

"She never told me about the embrocation," said Sally, leaning back

against the mossed stones of the bench and looking up into the web of

branches. "She never will admit that she's ill."

"Poor old Mrs. Knox!" said Philippa compassionately, "I thought she

looked so ill last night when she was playing bridge. Such a tiny

fragile thing, sitting wrapped up in that great old chair----"

Philippa is ineradicably romantic, yet my mind, too, dwelt upon the old

autocrat lying there, ill and undefeated, in the heart of her ancient

fortress.

"Fragile!" said Flurry, "you'd best not tell her that. With my

grandmother no one's ill till they're dead, and no one's dead till

they're buried!"

Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a note of

exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the

turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion, and from

further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally instant in

taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to yell.

Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud harangue,

advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden. As it

approached, the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clappings

of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which they were wont

to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the fruit. We sat in

tense silence. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and the voice

said in stentorian tones:

"----My father 'e kept a splendid table!"

"I hear wheels!" breathed Sally Knox.

A hawthorn tree and a laburnum tree leaned over the garden gate, and

from beneath their canopy of cream and pale gold there emerged the

bath-chair of Mrs. Knox, with Mrs. Knox herself seated in it. It was

propelled by Mullins--even at that distance the indignation of Mullins

was discernible--and it progressed up the central path. Beside it

walked the personage whose father had kept a splendid table.

Parenthetically it may be observed that he did credit to it.

"Glory be to Moses! Look at my grandmother!" said Flurry under his

breath. "How fragile she is! Who the dickens has she got hold of?"

"He thinks she's deaf, anyhow," said Sally.

"That's where he makes the mistake!" returned Flurry.

"I don't see your glawss, Mrs. Knox," shouted the stout gentleman.

"That's very possible," replied the incisive and slightly cracked voice

of Mrs. Knox, "because the little that is left of it is in the mortar

on the wall, to keep thieves out, which it fails to do."

The pair passed on, and paused, still in high converse, at the

asparagus beds; Mullins, behind the bath-chair, wiped her indignant

brow.

"You'll go home without the asparagus," whispered Flurry, "she has

every stick of it counted by now!"

They moved on, heading for the further gate of the garden.

"I'll bet a sovereign he's come after the house!" Flurry continued,

following the _cortege_ with a malevolent eye.

Later, when we returned to the house, we found a motor-bicycle, dusty

and dwarfish, leaning against the hall door steps. Within was the

sound of shouting. It was then half-past seven.

"Is it possible that she's keeping him for dinner?" said Sally.

"Take care he's not staying for the night!" said Flurry. "Look at the

knapsack he has on the table!"

"There's only one room he can possibly have," said Mrs. Flurry, with a

strange and fixed gaze at her lord, "and that's the James the Second

room. The others are cleared for the painters."

"Oh, that will be all right," replied her lord, easily.

When I came down to dinner I found the new arrival planted on his

short, thick legs in front of the fireplace, still shouting at Mrs.

Knox, who, notwithstanding the sinister presence of the two shawls of

ill-omen, was listening with a propitious countenance. She looked very

tired, and I committed the _gaucherie_ of saying I was sorry to hear

she had not been well.

"Oh, that was nothing!" said Mrs. Knox, with a wave of her tiny,

sunburnt, and bediamonded hand. "I've shaken that off, 'like dewdrops

from the lion's mane!' This is Mr. Tebbutts, from--er--England, Major

Yeates."

Mr. Tebbutts, after a bewildered stare, presumably in search of the

lion, proclaimed his gratification at meeting me, in a voice that might

have been heard in the stable yard.

At dinner the position developed apace. The visitor was, it appeared,

the representative of a patriarchal family, comprising samples of all

the relationships mentioned in the table of affinities, and

_fortissimo_, and at vast length, he laid down their personal histories

and their various requirements. It was pretty to see how old Mrs.

Knox, ill as she looked, and suffering as she undoubtedly was, mastered

the bowling.

Did the Tebbutts ladies exact bathing for their young? The lake

supplied it.

("It's all mud and swallow-holes!" said Flurry in an audible aside.)

Did the brothers demand trout fishing? the schoolboys rabbit shooting?

the young ladies lawn tennis and society?--all were theirs, especially

the latter. "My grandson and his wife will be within easy reach in

their own house, Tory Lodge!"

The remark about the swallow-holes had not been lost upon the Lady of

the Lake.

Mrs. Knox had her glass of port at dessert, an act equivalent to

snapping her rheumatic fingers in our faces, and withdrew, stiff but

erect, and still on the best of terms with her prospective tenant. As

I held the door open for her, she said to me:

"''Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell.'"

By an amazing stroke of luck I was enabled to continue:

"'And echo caught softly the sound as it fell!'" with a glance at Mr.

Tebbutts that showed I was aware the quotation was directed at his

missing aspirates.

As the door closed, the visitor turned to Flurry and said impressively:

"There's just one thing, Mr. Knox, I should like to mention, if you

will allow me. Are the drains quite in order?"

"God knows," said Flurry, pulling hard at a badly-lighted cigarette and

throwing himself into a chair by the turf fire.

"Mrs. Knox's health has held out against them for about sixty years," I

remarked.

"Well, as to that," replied Mr. Tebbutts, "I feel it is only right to

mention that the dear old lady was very giddy with me in the garden

this afternoon."

Flurry received this remarkable statement without emotion.

"Maybe she's taken a fancy to you!" he said brutally. "If it wasn't

that it was whipped cream."

Mr. Tebbutts' bulging eyes sought mine in complete mystification; I

turned to the fire, and to it revealed my emotions. Flurry was not at

all amused.

"Well--er--I understood her maid to say she 'ad bin ailing," said the

guest after a pause. "I'd have called it a kind of a megrim myself,

and, as I say, I certainly perceived a sort of charnel-'ouse smell in

the room I'm in. And look 'ere, Mr. Knox, 'ere's another thing. 'Ow

about rats? You know what ladies are; there's one of my

sisters-in-law, Mrs. William Tebbutts, who'd just scream the 'ouse down

if she 'eard the 'alf of what was goin' on behind the panelling in my

room this evening."

"Anyone that's afraid of rats had better keep out of Aussolas," said

Flurry, getting up with a yawn.

"Mr. Tebbutts is in the James the Second room, isn't he?" said I, idly.

"Isn't that the room with the powdering-closet off it?"

"It is," said Flurry. "Anything else you'd like to know?"

I recognised that someone had blundered, presumably myself, and made a

move for the drawing-room.

Mrs. Knox had retired when we got there; my wife and Mrs. Flurry

followed suit as soon as might be; and the guest said that, if the

gentlemen had no objection, he thought he'd turn in too.

Flurry and I shut the windows--fresh air is a foible of the female

sex--heaped turf on the fire, drew up chairs in front of it, and

composed ourselves for that sweetest sleep of all, the sleep that has

in it the bliss of abandonment, and is made almost passionate by the

deep underlying knowledge that it can be but temporary.

How long we had slumbered I cannot say; it seemed but a moment when a

door opened in our dreams, and the face of Mr. Tebbutts was developed

before me in the air like the face of the Cheshire cat, only without

the grin.

"Mr. Knox! Gentlemen!" he began, as if he were addressing a meeting.

The thunder had left his voice; he stopped to take breath. He was in

his shirt and trousers, and the laces of his boots trailed on the floor

behind him. "I've 'ad a bit of a start upstairs. I was just winding

up my watch at the dressing-table when I saw some kind of an animal

gloide past the fireplace and across the room----"

"What was it like?" interrupted Flurry, sitting up in his chair.

"Well, Mr. Knox, it's 'ard to say what it was like. It wasn't a cat,

nor yet it wasn't what you could call a squirrel----"

Flurry got on to his feet.

"By the living Jingo!" he said, turning to me an awestruck countenance;

"he's seen the Aussolas Martin Cat!"

I had never before heard of the Aussolas Martin Cat, and it is

indisputable that a slight chill crept down my backbone.

Mr. Tebbutts' eyes bulged more than ever, and his lower lip fell.

"What way did it go?" said Flurry; "did it look at you?"

"It seemed to disappear in that recess by the door," faltered the seer

of the vision; "it just vanished!"

"I don't know if it's for my grandmother or for me," said Flurry in a

low voice, "but it's a death in the house anyway."

The colour in Mr. Tebbutts' face deepened to a glossy sealing-wax red.

"If one of you gents would come upstairs with me," he said, "I think

I'll just get my traps together. I can be back at the 'otel in 'alf an

'our----"

Flurry and I accompanied Mr. Tebbutts to the James the Second room.

Over Mrs. Knox's door there were panes of glass, and light came forth

from them. (It is my belief that Mrs. Knox never goes to bed.) We

trod softly as we passed it, and went along the uncarpeted boards of

the Musicians' Gallery above the entrance hall.

There certainly was a peculiar odour in the James the Second room, and

the adjective "charnel-'ouse" had not been misapplied.

I thought about a dead rat, and decided that the apparition had been

one of the bandit tribe of tawny cats that inhabited the Aussolas

stables. And yet legends of creatures that haunted old houses and

followed old families came back to me; of one in particular, a tale of

medieval France, wherein "a yellow furry animal" ran down the throat of

a sleeping lady named Sagesse.

Mr. Tebbutts, by this time fully dressed, was swiftly bestowing a brush

and comb in his knapsack. Perhaps he, too, had read the legend about

Madame Sagesse. Flurry was silently, and with a perturbed countenance,

examining the room; rapping at the panelling and peering up the

cavernous chimney; I heard him sniff as he did so. Possibly he also

held the dead-rat theory. He opened the flap in the door of the

powdering-closet, and, striking a match, held it through the opening.

I looked over his shoulder, and had a glimpse of black feathers on the

floor, and a waft of a decidedly "charnel-'ouse" nature. "Damn!"

muttered Flurry to himself, and slammed down the flap.

"I think, sir," said Mr. Tebbutts, with his knapsack in his hand and

his cap on his head, "I must ask you to let Mrs. Knox know that this

'ouse won't suit Mrs. William Tebbutts. You might just say I was

called away rather sudden. Of course, you won't mention what I saw

just now--I wouldn't wish to upset the pore old lady----"

We followed him from the room, and treading softly as before, traversed

the gallery, and began to descend the slippery oak stairs. Flurry was

still looking furtively about him, and the thought crossed my mind that

in the most hard-headed Irishman there wanders a vein of superstition.

Before we had reached the first landing, the violent ringing of a

handbell broke forth in the room with the light over the door, followed

by a crash of fire-irons; then old Mrs. Knox's voice calling

imperatively for Mullins.

There was a sound of rushing, slippered feet, a bumping of furniture;

with a squall from Mullins the door flew open, and I was endowed with a

never-to-be-forgotten vision of Mrs. Knox, swathed in hundreds of

shawls, in the act of hurling the tongs at some unseen object.

Almost simultaneously there was a scurry of claws on the oak floor

above us, Mrs. Knox's door was slammed, and something whizzed past me.

I am thankful to think that I possess, as a companion vision to that of

Mrs. Knox, the face of Mr. Tebbutts with the candle light on it as he

looked up from the foot of the stairs and saw the Aussolas Martin Cat

in his track.

"Look out, Tebbutts!" yelled Flurry. "It's you he's after!"

Mr. Tebbutts here passed out of the incident into the night, and the

Aussolas Martin Cat was swallowed up by a large hole in the surbase in

the corner of the first landing.

"He'll come out in the wine-cellar," said Flurry, with the calm that

was his in moments of crisis, "the way the cat did."

I pulled myself together.

"What's happened to the other Fanaghy cub?" I enquired with, I hope,

equal calmness.

"He's gone to blazes," replied Flurry; "there isn't a wall in this

house that hasn't a way in it. I knew I'd never have luck with them

after you asking the way from Kitty the Shakes."

As is usual in my dealings with Flurry, the fault was mine.

While I reflected on this, the stillness of the night was studded in a

long and diminishing line by the running pant of the motor-bicycle.

II

THE FINGER OF MRS. KNOX

A being stood in a dark corner under the gallery of the hall at

Aussolas Castle; a being who had arrived noiselessly on bare feet, and

now revealed its presence by hard breathing.

"Come in, Mary," commanded old Mrs. Knox without turning her head;

"make up the fire."

"I will, ma'am," murmured the being, advancing with an apologetic eye

upon me, and an undulating gait suggestive of a succession of incipient

curtsies.

She was carrying an armful of logs, and, having stacked them on the

fire in a heap calculated to set alight any chimney less roomy than the

Severn Tunnel, she retired by way of the open hall door with the same

deferential stealth with which she had entered.

"The hen-woman," explained Mrs. Knox casually, "the only person in this

place who knows a dry log from a wet one."

Like all successful rulers, Mrs. Knox had the power of divining in her

underlings their special gifts, and of wresting them to the sphere in

which they shone, no matter what their normal functions might be. She

herself pervaded all spheres.

"There's no pie but my grandmother has a finger in it," was Flurry

Knox's epitome of these high qualities; a sour tribute from one

freebooter to another.

"If the Mistress want a thing she mus' have it!" was the comment of

John Kane, the gamekeeper, as he threw down the spade with which he was

digging out a ferret, and armed himself with a holly-bush wherewith to

sweep the drawing-room chimney.

As Mrs. Knox and I sat by the hen-woman's noble fire, and gossiped, the

cook panted in with the tea-tray; the butler, it appeared, had gone out

to shoot a rabbit for dinner. All these things pointed to the fact

that Mrs. Knox's granddaughter-in-law, Mrs. Flurry, was not, at the

moment, in residence at Aussolas. The Jungle was creeping in; Sally

Knox, by virtue, I suppose, of her English mother, spasmodically

endeavoured to keep it out, but with her departure the Wild triumphed.

It was an October afternoon, grey and still; the hall door stood open,

as indeed it always did at Aussolas, and on the topmost of the broad

limestone steps Mrs. Knox's white woolly dog sat, and magisterially

regarded lake and wood and lawn. The tawny bracken flowed like a sea

to the palings that bounded the lawn; along its verge squatted the

rabbits, motionless for the most part, sometimes languidly changing

their ground, with hops like the dying efforts of a mechanical toy.

The woolly dog had evidently learned in many fruitless charges the

futility of frontal attack; a close and menacing supervision from the

altitude of the steps was all that was consistent with dignity, but an

occasional strong shudder betrayed his emotion. The open door framed

also a pleasing view of my new car, standing in beautiful repose at the

foot of the steps, splashed with the mud of a twenty-mile run from an

outlying Petty Sessions Court; her presence added, for me, the touch of

romance.

It was twilight in the back of the hall by the fireplace; the flames of

the logs, branching like antlers, made a courteous and not too

searching inquisition into dark corners, and lighted with a very

suitable evasiveness Mrs. Knox's Witch of Endor profile. She wore her

usual velvet bonnet; the rest of her attire recalled to my memory the

summary of it by her kinswoman, Lady Knox, "A rag bag held together by

diamond brooches." Yet, according to her wont, her personality was the

only thing that counted; it reduced all externals to a proper

insignificance.

The object of my visit had ostensibly been to see her grandson, but

Flurry was away for the night.

"He's sleeping at Tory Lodge," said Mrs. Knox. "He's cubbing at

Drumvoortneen, and he has to start early. He tried to torment me into

allowing him to keep the hounds in the yard here this season, but I had

the pleasure of telling him that old as I might be, I still retained

possession of my hearing, my sense of smell, and, to a certain extent,

of my wits."

"I should have thought," I said discreetly, "that Tory Lodge was more

in the middle of his country."

"Undoubtedly," replied Flurry's grandmother; "but it is not in the

middle of my straw, my meal, my buttermilk, my firewood, and anything

else of mine that can be pilfered for the uses of a kennel!" She

concluded with a chuckle that might have been uttered by a scald-crow.

I was pondering a diplomatic reply, when the quiet evening was rent by

a shrill challenge from the woolly dog.

"Thy sentinel am I!" he vociferated, barking himself backwards into the

hall, in proper strategic retreat upon his base.

A slow foot ascended the steps, and the twilight in the hall deepened

as a man's figure appeared in the doorway; a middle-aged man, with his

hat in one hand, and in the other a thick stick, with which he was

making respectfully intimidating demonstrations to the woolly dog.

"Who are you?" called out Mrs. Knox from her big chair.

"I'm Casey, your ladyship," replied the visitor in a deplorable voice,

"from Killoge."

"Cornelius Casey?" queried Mrs. Knox.

"No, but his son, your honour ma'am, Stephen Casey, one of the tenants."

"Well, come in, Stephen," said Mrs. Knox affably, supplementing her

spectacles with a gold-rimmed single eye-glass, and looking at him with

interest. "I knew your father well in old times, when he used to stop

the earths in Killoge Wood for the Colonel. They tell me that's all

cut down now?"

"There's not the boiling of a kettle left in it afther Goggin, my

lady!" said Casey eagerly. Mrs. Knox cut him short.

"Many a good hunt the Colonel had out of Killoge, and I too, for the

matter of that!" she added, turning to me; "my cousin Bessie Hamilton

and I were the only huntresses in the country in those days, and people

thought us shocking tomboys, I believe. Now, what with driving motors

and riding astride, the gentlemen are all ladies, and the ladies are

gentlemen!" With another scald-crow chuckle she turned to Casey. "Did

your father ever tell you of the great hunt out of Killoge into the

Fanaghy cliffs?"

"He did, your ladyship, he did!" responded Casey, with a touch of life

in his lamentable voice. "Often he told me that it knocked fire from

his eyes to see yourself facing in at the Killoge river."

"I was riding Bijou, the grandmother of old Trinket, in that run," said

Mrs. Knox, leaning back in her chair, with a smile that had something

of the light of other days in it.

I remembered the story that Colonel Knox had run away with her after a

hunt, and wondered if that had been the occasion when she had knocked

fire from the eyes of Cornelius Casey.

Her thin old hand drooped in momentary languor over the arm of her

chair; and the woolly dog thrust his nose under it, with a beady eye

fixed upon the hot cakes.

"Here!" said Mrs. Knox, sitting up, and throwing a buttery bun on the

floor. "Be off with you! Well, Casey," she went on, "what is it you

want with me?"

"Great trouble I got, Mrs. Knox, your honour ma'am," replied Casey from

the door-mat, "great trouble entirely." He came a step or two nearer.

He had a long, clean-shaved face, with mournful eyes, like a sick

bloodhound, and the enviable, countryman's thatch of thick, strong

hair, with scarcely a touch of grey in it.

"That Goggin, that has the shop at Killoge Cross, has me processed.

I'm pairsecuted with him; and the few little bastes I has, and me

donkey and all--" his voice thinned to a whimper, "he's to drive them

to-morrow----"

"I suppose that's Goggin, the Gombeen?" said Mrs. Knox; "how were you

fool enough to get into dealings with him?"

The statement of Casey's wrongs occupied quite ten minutes, and was

generous in detail. His land was bad, ever and always. The grass that

was in it was as bare as that you could pick pins in it. He had no

pushing land at all for cattle. Didn't he buy a heifer at Scabawn fair

and the praisings she got was beyant all raves, and he had her one

month, and kinder company he never had, and she giving seven pints at

every meal, and wasn't that the divil's own produce? One month,

indeed, was all he had her till she got a dropsy, and the dropsy

supported her for a while, and when it left her she faded away. And

didn't his wife lose all her hens in one week? "They fell dead on her,

like hailstones!" He ceased, and a tear wandered down the channels in

his long cheek.

"How much do you owe Goggin?" asked Mrs. Knox sharply.

What Casey owed to Goggin had, as might have been expected, but a

remote relation to the sum that Goggin was now endeavouring to extract

from Casey. At the heart of the transaction was a shop account,

complicated by loans of single pounds (and in my mind's eye I could

see, and with my mind's nose I could smell, the dirty crumpled notes).

It was further entangled by per-contra accounts of cribs of turf,

scores of eggs, and a day's work now and again. I had, from the

judgment seat, listened to many such recitals, so, apparently, had Mrs.

Knox, judging by the ease with which she straightened Casey's devious

narrative at critical points, and shepherded him to his facts, like a

cunning old collie steering a sheep to its pen. The conclusion of the

matter was that Goggin was, on the morrow, to take possession of

Casey's remaining stock, consisting of three calves, a donkey, and a

couple of goats, in liquidation of a debt of L15, and that he, Stephen

Casey, knew that Mrs. Knox would never be satisfied to see one of her

own tenants wronged.

"I have no tenants," replied Mrs. Knox tartly; "the Government is your

landlord now, and I wish you joy of each other!"

"Then I wish to God it was yourself we had in it again!" lamented

Stephen Casey; "it was better for us when the gentry was managing their

own business. They'd give patience, and they'd have patience."

"Well, that will do now," said Mrs. Knox; "go round to the servants'

hall and have your tea. I'll see what I can do."

There was silence while Stephen Casey withdrew. As the sound of his

hobnailed tread died away the woolly dog advanced very stiffly to the

hall door, and, with his eyes fixed on the departing visitor, licked

his lips hungrily.

"When those rascals in Parliament took our land from us," said Mrs.

Knox, flinging a sod of turf on to the huge fire with practised aim,

"we thought we should have some peace, now we're both beggared and

bothered!" She turned upon me a countenance like that of an ancient

and spectacled falcon. "Major Yeates! You have often offered me a

drive in your motor-car. Will you take me to Killoge to-morrow

morning?"

It was a brisk and windy morning, with the sharpness of 9 A.M. in it,

when Mullins, Mrs. Knox's tirewoman, met me at the hall door of

Aussolas with her arms full of shawls, and a countenance dark with doom

and wrath. She informed me that it was a shame for me to be enticing

the Mistress out of her bed at this hour of the morning, and that she

would get her death out of it. I was repudiating this soft impeachment

(which had indeed some flavour of the Restoration drama about it), when

the companion of my flight appeared.

"How would anyone know the minute--" continued Mullins, addressing the

universe, "that this what's-this-I'll-call-it wouldn't turn into a

bog-hole?" She put this conundrum while fiercely swaddling her

mistress in cloak upon cloak. I attempted no reply, and Mrs. Knox,

winking both eyes at me over the rim of the topmost shawl, was hoisted

into the back of the car; as we glided away I had, at all events, the

consolation of knowing that, in the event of an accident, Mrs. Knox in

her cloaks would float from the car as softly and bulkily as a bumble

bee.

As we ran out of the gates on to the high road I remembered that my

passenger's age was variously reckoned at from ninety to a hundred, and

thought it well to ask her if fifteen miles an hour would be too fast

for pleasure.

"You can't go too fast to please me," replied Mrs. Knox, through the

meshes of a Shetland shawl. "When I was a girl I rode a fourteen-hand

pony to the fourteenth milestone on the Cork road in a minute under the

hour! I think you should be able to double that!"

I replied to this challenge with twenty miles an hour, which, with a

head wind and a bad road, I considered to be fast enough for any old

lady. As a matter of fact it was too fast for her costume. We had run

some eight or nine miles before, looking back, I noticed that a change

of some sort had occurred.

"Oh, the red one blew away long ago!" screamed Mrs. Knox against the

wind; "it doesn't matter, I shall get it back--I'll ask Father Scanlan

to speak about it at Mass next Sunday. There's a veil gone too--how

frantic Mullins will be!"

A skirl of laughter came from the recesses of the remaining shawls.

We were running now on a level road under the lee of a long line of

hills; a strip of plantation, gay with the yellows and greens of

autumn, clung to a steep slope ahead of us, and, at the top of it, some

ragged pines looked like blots against the sky. As we neared it, a

faint and long-drawn call came from the height; presently among the

tree-trunks we saw hounds, like creatures in a tapestry hunting scene,

working up and up through the brown undergrowth. I slackened speed.

"'Pon my honour, we've hit off the Hunt!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox.

As she spoke there was a responsive yelp from a tract of briars in the

lower part of the wood; two or three couples jostled downwards to their

comrade, and a full chorus, led by the soprano squeals of the Hunt

terrier, arose and streamed along the wood above the road. I came to a

full stop, and, just in front of us, a rabbit emerged very quietly from

the fence of the wood, crept along in the ditch, and disappeared in a

hole in the bank. The hounds still uttered the classic paeans of the

Chase; hoofs clattered in a steep lane on the hill-side, and Flurry

Knox charged on to the road a little ahead of us.

"Forrad, forrad, forrad!" he shouted as he came.

"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" cackled his grandmother at him in malevolent

imitation.

I let the car go, and as we flew past him he asked me, sideways out of

a very red face, what the devil I was doing there. It was evident that

Mrs. Knox's observation had been accepted in the spirit in which it was

offered.

"That will do my young gentleman no harm!" said Mrs. Knox complacently,

as we became a speck in the distance.

It was about ten o'clock when we ran down a valley between steep hills

to Killoge cross-roads. The hill-sides were set thick with tree

stumps, like the crowded headstones of a cemetery, with coarse grass

and briars filling the spaces between them. Here and there a slender,

orphaned ash sapling, spared because despised, stood among the havoc,

and showed with its handful of yellow leaves what the autumn colours

might once have been here. A starkly new, cemented public-house, with

"J. Goggin" on the name board, stood at the fork of the roads.

Doubtless into it had flowed the blood-money of the wood; it

represented the alternative offered to the community by Mr. Goggin. I

slowed up and looked about me.

"I suppose this is--or was--Killoge Wood?" I said to my passenger.

Mrs. Knox was staring through her spectacles at the devastated

hill-side.

"Ichabod, Ichabod!" she murmured, and leaned back in her place.

A man got up from a heap of stones by the roadside and came slowly

towards the car.

"Well, Stephen," began Mrs. Knox irritably, "what about the cattle? He

looks as if he were walking behind his own coffin!" she continued in a

loud aside to me.

Stephen Casey removed his hat, and with it indicated a group composed

of three calves--and nothing can look as dejected as an ill-fed,

under-bred calf--two goats, and a donkey, attended by a boy with a

stick, and a couple of cur dogs.

"Himself and the sheriff's man is after driving them, my lady," replied

their proprietor, and proceeded to envelop the name of Goggin in a

flowing mantle of curses.

"There, that will do for the present," said Mrs. Knox peremptorily, as

Casey, with tears streaming down his face, paused to catch his wind.

"Where's Goggin?"

"The two of them is inside in the shop," answered the miserable Casey,

still weeping copiously.

I drove over to the public-house, thinking that if Casey could not put

up a better fight than this it would be difficult to do much for him.

The door of the pub was already filled by the large and decent figure

of Mr. Goggin, who advanced to meet us, taking off his hat

reverentially; I remembered at once his pale and pimpled face, his pink

nose, his shabby grey and yellow beard. He had been before me in a

matter of selling drink on Sunday, and had sailed out of court in

stainless triumph, on sworn evidence that he was merely extending

hospitality to some friends that had come to make a match for a niece

of his own, and were tired after walking the land and putting a price

on the cattle.

"Well, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox, waving towards the hill-side a tiny

hand in a mouldy old black kid glove, "you've done a great work here!

You've destroyed in six months what it took the Colonel and the Lord

Almighty eighty years to make. That's something to be proud of!"

Goggin, again, and with even deeper reverence, removed his hat, and

murmured something about being a poor man.

"It was your own grandfather that planted those trees for the Colonel,"

continued Mrs. Knox, diving, as it were, into an ancient armoury and

snatching a rusty weapon from the wall.

"That's the case, ma'am," replied Mr. Goggin solemnly. "The Lord have

mercy on his soul!"

"You'll be wanting mercy on your own soul in the next world, if you

meet the Colonel there!" said Mrs. Knox unhesitatingly.

"I mightn't have the honour of meeting the Colonel there, ma'am!"

tittered Goggin sycophantically.

"You might not indeed," responded Mrs. Knox, "but you might find your

grandfather making up a good fire for you with the logs out of Killoge

Wood!"

"Ha, ha! That's good, faith!" said a fat voice from the

porter-flavoured depths of the pub. I recognised among other half-seen

faces the round cheeks and bristling moustache of little M'Sweeny, the

sheriff's officer, at Goggin's elbow.

"And what's this I hear about Stephen Casey?" went on Mrs. Knox, in

shrill and trenchant tones, delivering her real attack now that she had

breached the wall. "You lent him five pounds two years ago, and now

you're driving all his stock off! What do you call that, I'd thank you

to tell me?"

In the discussion that followed I could almost have been sorry for

Goggin, so entirely over-weighted was he by Mrs. Knox's traditional

prestige, by my official position, by knowledge of the unseen audience

in the pub, and by the inherent rottenness of his case. Nevertheless,

the defence put forward by him was a very creditable work of art. The

whole affair had its foundation in a foolish philanthropy, the outcome

of generous instincts exploited to their utmost, only, indeed, kept

within bounds by Mr. Goggin's own financial embarrassments. These he

primarily referred back to the excessive price extorted from him by

Mrs. Knox's agent for the purchase of his land under the Act; and

secondarily to the bad debts with which Stephen Casey and other

customers had loaded him in their dealings with his little shop. There

were moments when I almost had to accept Mr. Goggin's point of view, so

well-ordered and so mildly stated were his facts. But Mrs. Knox's

convictions were beyond and above any possibility of being shaken by

mere evidence; she has often said to me that if all justice magistrates

were deaf there would be more done. She herself was not in the least

deaf, but she knew Mr. Goggin, which did as well.

"Fifteen pounds worth of stock to pay a debt that was never more than

L7! What do you call that, Major Yeates?"

She darted the question at me.

I had, some little time before, felt my last moment of sympathy with

Goggin expire, and I replied with considerable heat that, if Mrs. Knox

would forgive my saying so, I called it damned usury.

From this point the Affaire Casey went out swiftly on an ebb tide. It

was insinuated by someone, M'Sweeny, I think, that an instalment of

five pounds might be accepted, and the eyes of Goggin turned,

tentatively, to Mrs. Knox. It has always been said of that venerable

warrior that if there were a job to be done for a friend she would work

her fingers to the bone, but she would never put them in her pocket. I

observed that the eye of Goggin, having failed in its quest of hers,

was concentrating itself upon me. The two walls of a corner seemed to

rise mysteriously on either side of me; I suddenly, and without

premeditation, found myself promising to be responsible for the five

pounds.

Before the glow of this impulse had time to be succeeded by its too

familiar reaction, the broken, yet persistent cry of hounds came to my

ear. It advanced swiftly, coming, seemingly, from higher levels, into

the desolated spaces that had once been Killoge Wood. From the inner

depths of Mrs. Knox's wrappings the face of the woolly dog amazingly

presented itself; from the companion depths of the public-house an

equally unexpected party of _convives_ burst forth and stood at gaze.

Mrs. Knox tried to stand up, was borne down by the sheer weight of rugs

and the woolly dog, glared at me for a tense moment, and hissed,

"They're coming this way! Try to get a view!"

Before the words had passed her lips someone in the group at the door

vociferated, "Look at him above! Look at him!"

I looked "above," but could see nothing. Not so the rest of the group.

"Now! look at him going west the rock! Now! He's passing the little

holly-tree--he's over the fence----"

I bore, as I have so often borne, the exasperation of, as it were,

hearing instead of seeing a cinematograph, but I saw no reason why I

should submit to the presence of Mr. M'Sweeny, who had sociably sprung

into the motor beside me in order to obtain a better view.

"Look at him over the wall!" howled the cinematograph. "Look at the

size he is! Isn't he the divil of a sheep!"

It was at this moment that I first caught sight of the fox, about fifty

yards on the farther side of Casey's assortment of live stock and their

guardian cur dogs, gliding over the wall like a cat, and slipping away

up the road. At this point Mr. M'Sweeny, finding the disadvantage of

his want of stature, bounded on to the seat beside me and uttered a

long yell.

"Hi! At him! Tiger, good dog! Hi! Rosy!"

I cannot now say whether I smote M'Sweeny in the legs before he jumped,

or if I merely accelerated the act; he appeared to be running before he

touched the ground, and he probably took it as a send-off, administered

in irrepressible fellow-feeling.

Tiger and Rosy were already laying themselves out down the road, and

their yelps streamed back from them like the sparks from an engine.

The party at the door was suddenly in full flight after them with a

swiftness and unanimity that again recalled the cinematograph. They

caught away with them Stephen Casey and his animals; and I had an

enlivening glimpse of the donkey at the top of the hunt, braying as it

went; of Goggin trying in vain to stem the companion flight of the

calves. The bend of the road hid them all from us; the thumping of

heavy feet, the sobbing bray of the donkey, passed rapidly into

remoteness, and Mrs. Knox and I were left with nothing remaining to us

of the situation save the well-defined footmarks of M'Sweeny on the

seat beside me (indelible, as I afterwards discovered).

"Get on, Major Yeates!" screamed Mrs. Knox, above the barking of the

woolly dog. "We must see it out!"

I started the car, and just before we in our turn rounded the corner I

looked back, and saw the leading hounds coming down the hill-side. I

slackened and saw them drop into the road and there remain, mystified,

no doubt, by the astonishing variety of scents, from goat to gombeen

man, that presented themselves. Of Flurry and his followers there was

no sign.

"Get on, get on," reiterated Mrs. Knox, divining, no doubt, my

feelings; "we shall do no more harm than the rest!"

I gave the car her head, knowing that whatever I did Flurry would have

my blood. In less than two minutes we were all but into Stephen

Casey's goats, who, being yoked together in body but not in spirit,

required the full width of the road for their argument. We passed

Stephen Casey and the gombeen man cornering the disputed calves in the

sympathetic accord that such an operation demands. As we neared

M'Sweeny, who brought up the rear, the body of the hunt, still headed

by the donkey, swept into a field on the left of the road. The fox, as

might have been expected, had passed from the ken of the cur dogs, and

these, intoxicated by the incitements of their owners, now flung

themselves, with the adaptability of their kind, into the pursuit of

the donkey.

I stopped and looked back. The leading hounds were galloping behind

the car; I recognised at their heads Rattler and Roman, the puppies I

had walked, and for a moment was touched by this mark of affection.

The gratification was brief. They passed me without a glance, and with

anticipatory cries of joy flung themselves into the field and joined in

the chase of the donkey.

"They'll kill him!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox, restraining with difficulty

the woolly dog; "what good is Flurry that he can't keep with his

hounds!"

Galloping hoofs on the road behind us clattered a reply, accompanied by

what I can only describe as imprecations on the horn, and Flurry

hurtled by and swung his horse into the field over a low bank with all

the dramatic fury of the hero rushing to the rescue of the leading

lady. It recalled the incidents that in the palmy days of the

Hippodrome gloriously ended in a plunge into deep water, amid a salvo

of firearms.

In Flurry's wake came the rest of the pack, and with them Dr. Jerome

Hickey. "A great morning's cubbing!" he called out, snatching off his

old velvet cap. "Thirty minutes with an old fox, and now a nice burst

with a jackass!"

For the next three or four minutes shrieks, like nothing so much as

forked lightning, lacerated the air, as the guilty hounds began to

receive that which was their due. It seemed possible that my turn

would come next; I looked about to see what the chances were of turning

the car and withdrawing as soon as might be, and decided to move on

down the road in search of facilities. We had proceeded perhaps a

hundred yards without improving the situation, when my eye was caught

by something moving swiftly through the furze-bushes that clothed a

little hill on the right of the road. It was brownish red, it slid

into the deep furze that crested the hill, and was gone.

Here was a heaven-sent peace-offering!

"Tally-ho!" I bellowed, rising in my place and waving my cap high in

air. "Tally-ho, over!"

The forked lightning ceased.

"What way is he?" came an answering bellow from Flurry.

"This way, over the hill!"

The hounds were already coming to the holloa. I achieved some very

creditable falsetto screeches; I leaped from the car, and cheered and

capped them over the fence; I shouted precise directions to the Master

and Whip, who were now, with the clamours proper to their calling,

steeplechasing into the road and out of it again, followed by two or

three of the Field, including the new District Inspector of the Royal

Irish Constabulary (recently come from Meath with a high reputation as

a goer). They scrambled and struggled up the hill-side, through rocks

and furze (in connection with which I heard the new D.I. making some

strenuous comments to his Meath hunter), the hounds streamed and

screamed over the ridge of the hill, the riders shoved their puffing

horses after them, topped it, and dropped behind it. The furzy skyline

and the pleasant blue and white sky above it remained serene and silent.

I returned to the car, and my passenger, who, as I now realised, had

remained very still during these excitements.

"That was a bit of luck!" I said happily, inflated by the sense of

personal merit that is the portion of one who has viewed a fox away.

As I spoke I became aware of something fixed in Mrs. Knox's expression,

something rigid, as though she were repressing emotion; a fear flashed

through my mind that she was overtired, and that the cry of the hounds

had brought back to her the days when she too had known what a first

burst away with a fox out of Killoge Wood had felt like.

"Major Yeates," she said sepulchrally, and yet with some inward thrill

in her voice, "I think the sooner we start for home the better."

I could not turn the car, but, rather than lose time, I ran it

backwards towards the cross-roads; it was a branch of the art in which

I had not become proficient, and as, with my head over my shoulder, I

dodged the ditches, I found myself continually encountering Mrs. Knox's

eye, and was startled by something in it that was both jubilant and

compassionate. I also surprised her in the act of wiping her eyes. I

wondered if she were becoming hysterical, and yearned for Mullins as

the policeman (no doubt) yearns for the mother of the lost child.

On the road near the public-house we came upon M'Sweeny, Goggin, and

Casey, obviously awaiting us. I stopped the car, not without

reluctance.

"That will be all right, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox airily; "we're in a

hurry to get home now."

The three protagonists looked at one another dubiously, and

simultaneously cleared their throats.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Knox, ma'am," began Mr. Goggin very

delicately. "Mr. M'Sweeny would be thankful to speak a word to you

before you go."

"Well, let him speak and be quick about it," returned Mrs. Knox, who

seemed to have recovered remarkably from her moment of emotion.

"You must excuse me, Major Yeates," said Mr. M'Sweeny, chivalrously

selecting me as the person to whom to present the business end of the

transaction, "but I'm afraid I must trouble you about that little

matter of the five pounds that we arranged a while ago--I couldn't go

back without it was settled----"

Mr. Goggin coughed, and looked at his boots; Stephen Casey sighed

heavily.

At the same moment I thought I heard the horn.

"I'm afraid I haven't got it with me," I said, pulling out a handful of

silver and a half-sovereign. "I suppose eighteen and sixpence wouldn't

be any use to you?"

Mr. M'Sweeny smiled deprecatingly, as at a passing jest, and again I

heard the horn, several harsh and prolonged notes.

Mrs. Knox leaned forward and poked me in the back with some violence.

"Goggin will lend it to you," she said, with the splendid simplicity of

a great mind.

It must be recorded of Goggin that he accepted this singular inversion

of the position like a gentleman. We moved on to his house and he went

in with an excellent show of alacrity to fetch the money wherewith I

was to stop his own mouth. It was while we were waiting that a small

wet collie, reddish-brown in colour, came flying across the road, and

darted in at the open door of the house. Its tongue was hanging out,

it was panting heavily.

"I seen her going over the hill, and the hounds after her; I thought

she wouldn't go three sthretches before they'd have her cot," said

M'Sweeny pleasantly. "But I declare she gave them a nice chase. When

she seen the Doctor beating the hounds, that's the time she ran."

I turned feebly in my place and looked at Mrs. Knox.

"It was a very natural mistake," she said, again wiping her eyes; "I

myself was taken in for a moment--but only for a moment!" she added,

with abominable glee.

I gave her but one glance, laden with reproach, and turned to M'Sweeny.

"You'll get the five pounds from Goggin," I said, starting the car.

As we ran out of Killoge, at something near thirty miles an hour, I

heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls.

[Illustration: "I heard scald-crow laughter behind me in the shawls."]

III

THE FRIEND OF HER YOUTH

It has come to this with me, I am not the country-house visitor that I

once was. It is a sign of age, I suppose, and of growing unamiability;

so, at any rate, my wife tells me. For my part, I think it indicates a

power of discriminating between the things that are good enough, and

the infinitely more numerous things that are the reverse.

"Do you mean to say this isn't good enough?" said Philippa, putting

down the novel that, at 11 A.M., she was shamelessly reading, and

indicating our surroundings with a swing of her open parasol.

It was a perfect morning in August. She and I were seated in

incredible leisure, in comfortable basket chairs, on a space of sward

that sank in pleasant curves to the verge of the summer sea. We looked

across three miles of burnished water to the Castle Manus hills, that

showed mistily through grey veils of heat; in the middle distance a

40-ton cutter yacht drowsed at anchor; at the end of the sward a

strand, theatrical in the perfection of its pale sand and dark rocks,

laid itself out to attract the bather.

"I think it is very good," I replied, "but it won't last. At any

minute old Derryclare will come and compel me to go out trawling, or

mending nets, or cutting up bait, or mucking out the dinghey----"

"You may be thankful if he lets you off with that!" said Philippa,

flitting from her first position and taking up one in advance of mine.

Following the direction of her eyes, I perceived, as it were at the

back of the stage, two mysterious, shrouded figures pursuing a swift

course towards the house through a shrubbery of immense hydrangea

bushes. Their heads resembled monster black door-handles, round their

shoulders hung flounces of black muslin; in gauntleted hands they bore

trays loaded with "sections" of honey; even at a distance of fifty

yards we could see their attendant _cortege_ of indignant bees.

"Taken thirty pounds this morning!" shouted the leading door-handle,

speeding towards the house. "Splendid heather honey!"

"You ought to show some interest," said my wife malignly. "Go in and

look at it. He's your host!"

"Not if he were all the hosts of Midian!" I said, but I felt shaken.

I rose from my chair.

"I'm going to the motor-house," I said firmly.

"Very well, I shall bathe," replied Philippa.

"I suppose you are aware that your old friend, Mr. Chichester, is at

present in possession of the bathing cove," I returned, "and it might

be as well to ascertain the opinion of your hostess on the subject of

mixed bathing."

"Did you observe that Lord Derryclare was wearing your new

motor-gloves?" said Philippa as I moved away.

I magnanimously left the last word with her.

The Derryclares were in the habit of hurling themselves, at intervals,

out of civilisation, and into the wilderness, with much the same zest

with which those who live in the wilderness hurl themselves into

civilisation. In the wilderness, twenty miles from a railway station,

they had built them a nest, and there led that variety of the simple

life that is founded on good servants, old clothes, and a total

indifference to weather. Wandering friends on motor tours swooped

occasionally out of space; married daughters, with intervals between

visits to be filled in, arrived without warning, towing reluctant

husbands (who had been there before). Lost men, implicated with Royal

Commissions and Congested Districts, were washed in at intervals; Lady

Derryclare said she never asked anyone; people came.

It is true that she had asked us, but the invitation had been given on

our wedding-day, and had been put away with our duplicate wedding

presents; we had now disinterred it, because I had bought a motor, and

was still in the stage of enthusiasm when the amateur driver will beat

up visits for his wife to pay. I do not know how Chichester got there;

he, like Lady Derryclare, dated from the benighted period before

Philippa knew me, and I may admit that, in common with most husbands, I

am not attracted by the male friends of my wife's youth. If Chichester

had been the type she fancied, was I merely a Super-Chichester?

Chichester was an elderly young man, worn smooth by much visiting in

country houses, and thoroughly competent in the avocations proper to

his career. He knew the best "stands" at half the shoots in Ireland,

and could tell to half a crown the value set upon each by the keeper;

if you gave him a map he could put a pudgy finger upon the good cooks

as promptly as an archbishop upon his cathedral towns; he played a

useful and remunerative game of bridge; to see his eye, critical, yet

alight with healthful voracity, travelling down the array of dishes on

the side-table at breakfast, and arranging unhesitatingly the order in

which they were to be attacked, was a lesson to the heedless who blunt

the fine edge of appetite with porridge.

He faced me at lunch, plump and pink and shining after his bathe; he

was clean-shaved (the only reliable remedy for a greying moustache, as

I did not fail to point out to Philippa); it increased his resemblance

to a well-fed and _passe_ schoolboy. Old Derryclare, whose foible it

was to believe that he never had any luncheon, was standing at the

sideboard, devouring informally a slice of bread and honey. One of his

eyes was bunged up by bee-stings, and the end of his large nose shone

red from the same cause.

"Bill," he said, addressing his eldest son, "don't you forget to take

those sections on board this afternoon."

"No fear!" responded Bill, helping himself to a beaker of barley-water

with hands that bore indelible traces of tar and motor grease.

Bill was a vigorous youth, of the type that I have heard my friend

Slipper describe as "a hardy young splinter"; he was supposed to be

preparing for a diplomatic career, and in the meantime was apparently

qualifying for the engine-room of a tramp steamer (of which, it may be

added, his father would have made a most admirable skipper).

"Great stuff, honey, with a rice-pudding," went on Bill. "Mrs. Yeates,

do you know I can make a topping rice-pudding?"

I noticed that Chichester, who was seated next to Philippa, suddenly

ceased to chew.

"I can do you a very high-class omelette, too," continued Bill, bashing

a brutal spoon into the fragile elegance of something that looked as if

it were made of snow and spun glass. "I'm not so certain about my

mutton-chops and beefsteak, but I've had the knives sharpened, anyhow!"

Chichester turned his head away, as from a jest too clownish to be

worthy of attention. His cheek was large, and had a tender, beefy

flush in it.

"In my house," he said to Philippa, "I never allow the knives to be

sharpened. If meat requires a sharp knife it is not fit to eat."

"No, of course not!" replied Philippa, with nauseating hypocrisy.

"The principle on which my wife buys meat," I said to the table at

large, "is to say to the butcher, 'I want the best meat in your shop;

but don't show it to me!'"

"Mrs. Yeates is quite right," said Chichester seriously; "you should be

able to trust your butcher."

The door flew open, and Lady Derryclare strode in, wrestling as she

came with the strings of a painting apron, whose office had been no

sinecure. She was tall and grey-haired, and was just sufficiently

engrossed in her own pursuits to be an attractive hostess.

"It was perfectly lovely out there on the _Sheila_," she said, handing

the apron to the butler, who removed it from the room with respectful

disapproval. "If only she hadn't swung with the tide! I found my

sketch had more and more in it every moment--turning into a panorama,

in fact! Yachts would be perfect if they had long solid legs and stood

on concrete."

I said that I thought a small island would do as well.

Lady Derryclare disputed this, and argued that an island would involve

a garden, whereas the charm of a yacht was that one hideous bunch of

flowers on the cabin table was all that was expected of it, and that

kind people ashore always gave it vegetables.

I said that these things did not concern me, as I usually neither

opened my eyes or touched food while yachting. I said this very

firmly, being not without fear that I might yet find myself hustled

into becoming one of the party that was to go aboard the _Sheila_ that

very night. They were to start on the top of the tide, that is to say,

at 4 A.M. the following morning, to sail round the coast to a bay some

thirty miles away, renowned for its pollack-fishing, and there to fish.

Pollack-fishing, as a sport, does not appeal to me; according to my

experience, it consists in hauling up coarse fish out of deep water by

means of a hook baited with red flannel. It might appear

poor-spirited, even effeminate, but nothing short of a press-gang

should get me on board the _Sheila_ that night.

"Every expedition requires its martyr," said Lady Derryclare, helping

herself to some of the best cold salmon it has been my lot to

encounter, "it makes it so much pleasanter for the others; some one

they can despise and say funny things about."

"The situation may produce its martyr," I said.

Lady Derryclare glanced quickly at me, and then at Chichester, who was

now expounding to Philippa the method, peculiar to himself, by which he

secured mountain mutton of the essential age.

At nine-thirty that night I sat with my hostess and my wife, engaged in

a domestic game of Poker-patience. Shaded lights and a softly burning

turf fire shed a mellow radiance; an exquisite completeness was added

by a silken rustle of misty rain against the south window.

"Do you think they'll start in this weather?" said Philippa

sympathetically.

"Seventy-five, and one full house, ten, that's eighty-five," said Lady

Derryclare abstractedly. "Start? you may be quite sure they'll start!

Then we three shall have an empty house. That ought to count at least

twenty!"

Lady Derryclare was far too good a hostess not to appreciate the charms

of solitude; that Philippa and I should be looked upon as solitude was

soothing to the heart of the guest, the heart that, however good the

hostess, inevitably conceals some measure of apprehension.

"Has Mr. Chichester been on board the _Sheila_?" I enquired, with

elaborate unconcern.

"_Never!_" said Lady Derryclare melodramatically.

"I believe he has done some yachting?" I continued.

"A five-hundred-ton steam yacht to the West Indies!" replied Lady

Derryclare. "Bathrooms and a _chef_----"

There was a thumping of heavy feet outside the door, and the yacht

party entered, headed by Lord Derryclare with a lighted lantern. They

were clad in oilskins and sou'-westers; Bill had a string of onions in

one hand and a sponge-bag in the other; Chichester carried a large

gold-mounted umbrella.

"You look as if you were acting a charade," said Lady Derryclare,

shuffling the cards for the next game, the game that would take place

when the pleasure-seekers had gone forth into the rain. "The word is

Fare-well, I understand?"

It occurred to me that to fare well was the last thing that Chichester

was likely to do; and, furthermore, that the same thing had occurred to

him.

"'Fare thee well, my own Mary Anne!'" sang Lord Derryclare, in a voice

like a bassoon, and much out of tune. "It's a dirty night, but the

glass is rising, and" (here he relapsed again into song) "'We are bound

for the sea, Mary Anne! We are bound for the sea!'"

"Then we're to meet you on Friday?" said Philippa, addressing herself

to Chichester in palpable and egregious consolation.

"Dear lady," replied Chichester tartly, "in the South of Ireland it is

quite absurd to make plans. One is the plaything of the climate!"

"All aboard," said Lord Derryclare, with a swing of his lantern.

As they left the room the eye of Bill met mine, not without

understanding.

"Now D's perfectly happy," remarked Lady Derryclare, sorting her suits;

"but I'm not quite so sure about the Super-Cargo."

The game progressed pleasantly, and we heard the rain enwrap the house

softly, as with a mantle.

The next three days were spent in inglorious peace, not to say sloth.

On one of them, which was wet, I cleared off outstanding letters and

browsed among new books and innumerable magazines: on the others, which

were fine, I ran the ladies in the car back into the hills, and

pottered after grouse with a venerable red setter, while Lady

Derryclare painted, and Philippa made tea. When not otherwise

employed, I thanked heaven that I was not on board the _Sheila_.

On Thursday night came a telegram from the yacht:

"Ronnie's flotilla in; luncheon party to-morrow; come early.--BILL."

At nine o'clock the next morning we were on the road; there was a light

northerly breeze, enough to dry the roads and to clear the sky of all

save a few silver feathers of cloud; the heather was in bloom on the

hills, the bogs were bronze and green, the mountains behind them were

as blue as grapes; best of all, the car was running like a saint,

floating up the minor hills, pounding unfalteringly up the big ones.

She and I were still in the honeymoon stage, and her most normal

virtues were to me miraculous; even my two ladies, though, like their

sex, grossly utilitarian, and incapable, as I did not fail to assure

them, of appreciating the poesy of mechanism, were complimentary.

In that part of Ireland in which my lot is cast signposts do not exist.

The residents, very reasonably, consider them to be superfluous, even

ridiculous, in view of the fact that every one knows the way, and as

for strangers, "haven't they tongues in their heads as well as

another?" It all tends to conversation and an increased knowledge of

human nature. Therefore it was that when we had descended from the

hills, and found ourselves near the head of Dunerris Bay, at a junction

of three roads, any one of which might have been ours, our only course

was to pause there and await enlightenment.

It came, plentifully, borne by an outside car, and bestowed by no less

than four beautifully dressed young ladies. I alighted and approached

the outside car, and was instructed by the driver as to the route, an

intricate one, to Eyries Harbour. The young ladies offered

supplementary suggestions; they were mysteriously acquainted with the

fact that the _Sheila_ was our destination, and were also authorities

on the movements of that section of the British Navy that was known to

the family of Sub-Lieutenant the Hon. Ronald Cunningham as "Ronnie's

Flotilla."

"We met the yacht gentlemen at tea on Mr. Cunningham's torpedo-boat

yesterday afternoon," volunteered the prettiest of the young ladies,

with a droop of her eyelashes.

The party then laughed, and looked at each other, as those do who have

together heard the chimes at midnight.

"Why, we're going to lunch with them to-day at the hotel at Ecclestown!

And with you, too!" broke in another, with a sudden squeal of laughter.

I said that the prospect left nothing to be desired.

"Mr. Chichester invited us yesterday!" put in a third from the other

side of the car.

"I don't think it's pollack he'll order for luncheon," said the fourth

of the party from under the driver's elbow, a flapper, with a slow,

hoarse voice, and a heavy cold in her head.

"Shut up, Katty, you brat!" said the eldest, with lightning utterance.

The quartette again dissolved into laughter. I said "Au revoir," and

withdrew to report progress to my deeply interested passengers.

As the outside car disappeared from view at a corner, the Flapper waved

a large pocket-handkerchief to me.

"You seem to have done wonderfully well in the time," said Lady

Derryclare kindly.

For half an hour or more we ran west along the southern shore of the

great bay; Ecclestown, where Chichester's luncheon-party was to take

place, was faintly visible on the further side. So sparkling was the

sea, so benign the breeze, that even I looked forward without anxiety,

almost with enjoyment, to the sail across the bay.

There is a bland and peaceful suggestion about the word village that is

wholly inapplicable to the village of Eyries, a collection of dismal,

slated cabins, grouped round a public-house, like a company of shabby

little hens round a shabby and bedraggled cock. The road that had

conveyed us to this place of entertainment committed suicide on a weedy

beach below, its last moments much embittered by chaotic heaps of

timber, stones, and gravel. A paternal Board was building a pier, and

"mountains of gold was flying into it, but the divil a much would ever

come out of it."

This I was told by the publican as I bestowed the car in an outhouse in

his yard, wherein, he assured me, "neither chick nor child would find

it."

The _Sheila_ was anchored near the mouth of the harbour; there was a

cheerful air of expectancy about her, and her big mainsail was hoisted;

her punt, propelled by Bill, was already tripping towards us over the

little waves; the air was salt, and clean, and appetising. Bill

appeared to be in robust health; he had taken on a good many extra

tones of sunburn, and it was difficult, on a cursory inspection, to

decide where his neck ended and his brown flannel shirt began.

"----Oh, a topping time!" he said, as we moved out over the green,

clear water, through which glimmered to us the broken pots and pans of

Eyries that lay below. "Any amount of fish going. We've had to give

away no end."

"I should like to hear what you've been giving Mr. Chichester to eat?"

said Lady Derryclare suavely.

"Well, there was the leg of mutton that we took with us; he ate that

pretty well; and a sort of a hash next day, fair to middling."

"And after that?" said his mother, with polite interest.

"Well, after that," said Bill, leaning his elbows on his sculls and

ticking off the items on his fingers, "we had boiled pollack, and fried

pollack, and pollack _rechauffe aux fines herbes_--onions, you know----"

Bill broke off artistically, and I recalled to myself a saying of an

American sage, "Those that go down to the sea in ships see the works of

the Lord, but those that go down to the sea in cutters see hell."

"He went ashore yesterday," said Bill, resuming his narrative and the

sculls, "and came aboard with a pig's face and a pot of jam that he got

at the pub, and I say!--that pig's face!--Phew! My aunt!"

"'Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,'" quoted Lady Derryclare.

Philippa shuddered aloud.

"But he's going to come level to-day," went on Bill; "he's standing us

all lunch at the Ecclestown Hotel, Ronnie's skipper and all. He spent

a good half-hour writing out a menu, and Ronnie took it over last

night. We had tea on board Ronnie's ship, you know."

We said we knew all about the tea-party and the guests.

"Oh, you do, do you?" said Bill; "then you know a good deal!

Chichester can tell you a bit more about the dark one if you like to

ask him!"

"He seems to have outgrown his fancy for fair people," I said.

Philippa put her nose in the air.

"He's gorgeously dressed for the occasion," continued Bill.

"More than you are!" said his mother.

"Oh, my one don't care. No more does Ronnie's. What they enjoyed was

the engine-room."

"It seems to me," said Lady Derryclare to Philippa, "that we are rather

superfluous to this entertainment."

Chichester stood at the gangway and helped the ladies on to the narrow,

hog-backed deck of the _Sheila_. He was indeed beautifully dressed,

but to the critical eye it seemed that the spotless grey flannel suit

hung a shade easier, and that the line of his cheek was less freshly

rounded. His nose had warmed to a healthful scarlet, but his eye was

cold, and distinctly bleak. He was silent, not, it was obvious to me,

because he had nothing to say, but because he might have more to say

than would be convenient. In all senses save the literal one he

suggested the simple phrase, "Fed up." I felt for him. As I saw the

grim deck-bosses on which we might have to sit, and the dark mouth of

the cabin in which we might have to eat, and tripped over a rope, and

grasped at the boom, which yielded instead of supporting me, I thought

with a lover's ardour of the superiority--whether as means of

progression or as toy--of the little car, tucked away in the Eyries

publican's back-yard, where neither chick nor child would find her.

"You ought to have come with us, Yeates," said Derryclare, emerging

from the companion-hatch with a fishing-line in his hand. "Great

sport! we got a hundred and fifty yesterday--beats trout-fishing!

Doesn't it, Chichester?"

Chichester smiled sarcastically and looked at his watch.

"Quite right," said his lordship, twisting his huge hairy paw, and

consulting the nickel time-keeper on his wrist. "Time to be

off--mustn't keep our young ladies waiting. We'll slip across in no

time with this nice breeze. Regular ladies' day. Now then, Bill! get

that fores'l on her--we'll up anchor and be off!"

There are few places in creation where the onlooker can find himself

more painfully and perpetually _de trop_ than on the deck of a small

yacht. I followed the ladies to the saloon. Chichester remained on

deck. As I carefully descended the companion-ladder I saw him looking

again at his watch, and from it across the bay to the hazy white

specks, some four miles away, in one of which assiduous waiters were

even now, it might be, setting forth the repast that was to indemnify

him for three days of pollack.

"P'ff; I wonder if they ever open the windows," said Lady Derryclare,

fitting herself skilfully into the revolving chair at the end of the

cabin table. "Do sit down--these starting operations are always

lengthy."

I took my seat, that is to say, I began to sit down in the air, well

outside the flap of the table, and gradually inserted myself underneath

it. The bunch of flowers, foretold by Lady Derryclare, confronted us,

packed suffocatingly into its vase, and even the least astute of the

party (I allude to myself) was able unhesitatingly to place it as an

attention from the fair ones of the outside car. Behind my shoulders,

a species of trough filled the interval between the back of the seat

and the sloping side of the yacht; in it lay old tweed caps, old

sixpenny magazines, field-glasses, cans of tobacco, and a well-worn box

of "Patience" cards. Above and behind it a rack made of netting was

darkly charged with signal-flags, fishing-rods, and minor offal.

"Think of them all, smoking here on a wet night," said Lady Derryclare

with abhorrence; "with the windows shut and no shade on the lamp! Let

nothing tempt any of you to open the pantry door; we might see the

pig's face. Unfortunate George Chichester!"

"I shouldn't pity him too much," said I. "I expect he wouldn't take

five pounds for his appetite this moment!"

The rhythmic creak of the windlass told that the anchor was coming up.

It continued for some moments, and then stopped abruptly.

"Now then, all together!" said Lord Derryclare's voice.

A pause, punctuated by heavy grunts of effort--then Bill's voice.

"What the blazes is holding it? Come on, Chichester, and put your back

into it!"

Chichester's back, ample as it would seem, had no appreciable effect on

the situation.

"You ought to go and help them, Sinclair," said my wife, with that

readiness to offer a vicarious sacrifice that is so characteristic of

wives.

I said I would wait till I was asked. I had not to wait long.

I took my turn at the warm handle-bar of the windlass, and grunted and

strove as strenuously as my predecessors. The sun poured down in

undesired geniality, the mainsail lurched and flapped; the boom tugged

at its tether; the water jabbered and gurgled past the bows.

"I think we're in the _consomme_!" remarked Bill, putting his hands in

his pockets.

"Here," said Lord Derryclare, with a very red face; "confound her!

we'll sail her off it!"

Chichester sat down in a deck-chair as remote as possible from his

kind, and once again consulted his watch. Bill took the tiller; ropes

were hauled, slacked, made fast; the boom awoke to devastating life;

the _Sheila_ swung, tilted over to the breeze, and made a rush for

freedom. The rush ended in a jerk, the anchor remained immovable, and

the process was repeated in the opposite direction, with a vigour that

restored Chichester abruptly to the bosom of society--in point of fact,

my bosom. He said nothing, or at least nothing to signify, as I

assisted him to rise, but I felt as if I were handling a live shell.

During the succeeding quarter of an hour the _Sheila_, so it seemed to

my untutored mind, continued to sail in tangents towards all the points

of the compass, and at the end of each tangent was brought up with an

uncompromising negative from the anchor. By that time my invariable

yacht-headache was established, and all the other men in the ship were

advancing, at a varying rate of progress, into a frame of mind that

precluded human intercourse, and was entirely removed from perceiving

any humour in the situation.

Through all these affairs the sound of conversation ascended steadily

through the main-hatch. Lady Derryclare and my wife were playing

Patience in the cabin, and were at the same time discussing intricate

matters in connection with District Nurses, with that strange power of

doing one thing and talking about another that I have often noticed in

women. It was at about this period that the small, rat-like head of

Bill's kitchen-maid, Jimmy, appeared at the fore-hatch (accompanied by

a reek of such potency that I immediately assigned it to the pig's

face), and made the suggestion about the Congested Diver. That the

Diver, however congested, was a public official, engaged at the moment

in laying the foundations of the Eyries Pier, did not, this being

Ireland, complicate the situation. The punt, with Bill, hot and

taciturn, in the stern, sprang forth on her errand, smashing and

bouncing through the sharpened edges of the little waves. As I faced

that dainty and appetising breeze, I felt the first pang of the same

hunger that was, I knew, already gnawing Chichester like a wolf.

"We must have fouled some old moorings," said Derryclare, coming up

from the cabin, with a large slice of bread and honey in his hand, and

an equanimity somewhat restored by a working solution of the problem.

"Damn nuisance, but it can't be helped. Better get something to eat,

Chichester; you won't get to Ecclestown before three o'clock at the

best."

"No, thank you," said Chichester, without raising his eyes from the

four-day-old paper that he was affecting to read.

I strolled discreetly away, and again looked down through the skylight

into the cabin. The ladies were no longer there, and, in defiance of

all nautical regulations, a spirit-lamp with a kettle upon it was

burning on the table, a sufficient indication to a person of my

experience that Philippa and Lady Derryclare had abandoned hope of the

Ecclestown lunch and were making tea. The prospect of something to

eat, of any description, was not unpleasing; in the meantime I took the

field-glasses, and went forward to follow, pessimistically, the

progress of the punt in its search for the Diver.

There was no one on the pier. Bill landed, went up the beach, and was

lost to sight in the yard of the public-house.

"It must be he's at his dinner," said Jimmy at my elbow, descrying

these movements with a vision that appeared to be equal to mine plus

the field-glasses. There was an interval, during which I transferred

my attention to Ecclestown; its white hotel basked in sunshine, settled

and balmy, as of the land of Beulah. Its comfortable aspect suggested

roast chicken, tingling glasses of beer, even of champagne. A

torpedo-boat, with a thread of smoke coming quietly from its foremost

funnel, lay in front of the hotel. It seemed as though it were

enjoying an after-luncheon cigarette.

"They're coming out now!" said Jimmy, with excitement; "it must be they

were within in the house looking at the motor."

I turned the field-glasses on Eyries; a fair proportion of its

population was emerging from the yard of the public-house, and the

length to which their scientific interest had carried them formed a

pleasing subject for meditation.

"There's the ha'past-one mail-car coming in," said Jimmy; "it's likely

he'll wait for the letters now."

The mirage of the Ecclestown lunch here melted away, as far as I was

concerned, and with a resignation perfected in many Petty Sessions

courts, I turned my appetite to humbler issues. To those who have

breakfasted at eight, and have motored over thirty miles of moorland,

tea and sardines at two o'clock are a mere affair of outposts, that

leave the heart of the position untouched. Yet a temporary glow of

achievement may be attained by their means, and the news brought back

by Bill, coupled with a fresh loaf, that the Diver was coming at once,

flattered the hope that the game was still alive. Bill had also

brought a telegram for Chichester.

"Who has the nerve to tell Mr. Chichester that there's something to eat

here?" said Lady Derryclare, minutely examining the butter.

"Philippa is obviously indicated," I said malignly. "She is the Friend

of his Youth!"

"You're all odious," said Philippa, sliding from beneath the flap of

the table with the light of the lion-tamer in her eye.

What transpired between her and the lion we shall never know. She

returned almost immediately, with a heightened colour, and the

irrelevant information that the Diver had come on board. The news had

the lifting power of a high explosive. We burst from the cabin and

went on deck as one man, with the exception of my wife, who, with a

forethought that did her credit, turned back to improvise a cosy for

the teapot.

The Diver was a large person, of few words, with a lowering brow and a

heavy moustache. He did not minimise the greatness of his

condescension in coming aboard the yacht; he listened gloomily to the

explanations of Lord Derryclare. At the conclusion of the narrative he

moved in silence to the bows and surveyed the situation. His boat,

containing the apparatus of his trade, was alongside; a stalwart

underling, clad in a brown jersey, sat in the bows; in the stern was

enthroned the helmet, goggling upon us like a decapitated motorist. It

imparted a thrill that I had not experienced since I read Jules Verne

at school.

"Here, Jeremiah," said the Diver.

The satellite came on deck with the single sinuous movement of a salmon.

The Diver motioned him to the windlass. "We'll take a turn at this

first," he said.

They took each a handle, they bent to their task, and the anchor rose

at their summons like a hot knife out of butter.

Every man present, with the exception of the Diver and the satellite,

made the simple declaration that he was damned, and it was in the

period of paralysis following on this that a fresh ingredient was added

to the situation.

A giant voice filled the air, and in a windy bellow came the words:

"Nice lot you are!"

We faced about and saw "Ronnie's torpedo-boat" executing a sweeping

curve in the mouth of Eyries Harbour.

"Couldn't wait any longer!" proceeded the voice of the Megaphone.

"We've got to pick up the others outside. Thanks awfully for luncheon!

Top-hole!"

T.B. No. 1000 completed the curve and headed for the open sea with a

white mane of water rising above her bows. There was something else

white fluttering at the stern. I put up the field-glasses, and with

their aid perceived upon the deck a party of four ladies, one of whom

was waving a large pocket handkerchief. The glasses were here taken

out of my hand by Chichester, but not before I had identified the

Flapper.

What Chichester said of Ronnie was heard only by me, and possibly by

Jimmy, who did not count. I think it may have saved his life, being

akin to opening a vein. That I was the sole recipient of these

confidences was perhaps due to the fact that the _Sheila_, so swiftly

and amazingly untethered, here began to fall away to leeward, with all

the wilful helplessness of her kind, and instant and general confusion

was the result. There were a few moments during which ropes, spars,

and human beings pursued me wherever I went. Then I heard Lord

Derryclare's voice--"Let go that anchor again!"

The sliding rattle of the chain followed, the anchor plunged; the

_status quo_ was re-established.

Chichester went ashore with the Diver to catch the outgoing mail-car.

The telegram that had arrived with Bill was brought into action

flagrantly, and was as flagrantly accepted. (It was found,

subsequently, on his cabin floor, and was to the effect that the

cartridges had been forwarded as directed.) The farewells were made,

the parting regrets very creditably accomplished, and we stood on the

deck and saw him go, with his suit-case, his rods, his gun-case, heaped

imposingly in the bow, his rug, and his coats, the greater and the

less, piled beside him in the stern.

The wind had freshened; the Diver and Jeremiah drove the boat into it

with a will, and the heavy oars struck spray off the crests of the

waves. We saw Chichester draw forth the greater coat, and stand up and

put it on. The boat lurched, and he sat down abruptly, only to start

to his feet again as if he had been stung by a wasp. He thrust his

hand into the pocket, and Philippa clutched my arm.

"Could it have been into the pocket of his coat that I put the

teapot----?" she breathed.

IV

HARRINGTON'S

Breakfast was over; Philippa was feeding the dogs. Philippa's cousin,

Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was looking out of the window with that

air of unemployment that touches the conscience of a host like a spur.

Andrew did not smoke, a serious matter in a male guest, which means

that there are, for him, no moments of lethargy, and that, when he

idles, his idleness stands stark in the foreground against a clear sky,

a reproach and a menace to his entertainers.

It was a cold day about the middle of September, and there was an

unrest among the trees that commemorated a night of storm; the gravel

was wet, the lawn-tennis ground was strewn with sycamore leaves.

"I suppose you'll say I'm drunk," said Andrew, "but the fact remains

that I see two Natives coming up the drive."

In the green tunnel that was the avenue at Shreelane were two dark

figures; both were dressed in frock-coats, of which the tails fluttered

meagrely in the wind; their faces were black; with the half-hearted

blackness of a leg in a black silk stocking; one of them wore a tall

hat.

"This is what comes of leaving Calcutta without paying your bills," I

suggested; "or perhaps it's a Missionary Deputation----"

The Natives advanced into the middle distance.

"It's the Sweep!" exclaimed Philippa. "It's my beloved Cantillon!"

She flung open the window.

"Oh, Cantillon!" she cried, invoking the gentleman in the top-hat as if

he were an idol, "I've been longing to see you!"

The leading Native halted beneath the window and curtseyed.

"I partly guessed it, my Lady!" he replied modestly, and curtseyed

again.

"Then why didn't you come before?" screamed Philippa, suppressing with

difficulty the indignation of the dogs.

"I had the toothache, my Lady, and a howlt in my poll," returned the

sweep, in dignified narrative. "I may say my hands was crackin' with

the stren'th of pain, and these four days back there was the rumour of

passpiration all over me, with respex to ye----"

"I'll see you in the kitchen," said Philippa, shutting the window

abruptly. "My poor friends," she continued, "this means a cold

luncheon for you, and a still colder reception for me from Mrs.

Cadogan, but if I let Cantillon escape me now, I may never see him

again--which is unthinkable!"

I presume that white is the complimentary colour of a sweep. In half

an hour after the arrival of Mr. Cantillon the sitting-rooms were

snowed over with sheets, covering alike floor and furniture, while he

and his disciple moved from room to room on tiptoe, with ostentatious

humility, leaving a round black spoor upon the snow. My writing-table

was inaccessible, so also was the piano, which could usually be trusted

to keep Andrew quiet for an hour of the morning. Perhaps it would be

more accurate to say it kept him occupied. Captain Larpent had not

been many years in the service of his country, yet it was already told

of him that "From Birr to Bareilly," undeterred by hardships, his

intrepid piano had accompanied him, and that house-rents fell to zero

within a half-mile radius of his vicinity. Daily the walls of

Shreelane shook to the thunder of his practising; nightly his duets

with my wife roared like a torrent over my sleeping head. Sometimes,

also, he sang, chiefly in German (a language I do not understand), and

with what seemed to me superfluous energy. But this, I am told, means

"temperament."

Haunting as a waltz refrain the flavour of soot stole through the menu

at dinner; it was whispered in the soup, it was muttered in the

savoury, and in the coffee it abandoned subterfuge and shouted down all

opposition. Next morning, at breakfast, Philippa asked if the car

wanted exercise, because it seemed to her a day marked out by

Providence for calling on the Chicken Farmers. We might start early,

take sandwiches, show Andrew something of the country--the programme

was impulsively sketched in, but none the less I divined that an

indignant household had demanded a day of atonement in which to

obliterate the memory of the sweep.

It was, as well as I remember, in the preceding spring that the Chicken

Farmers had come before the swallow dared, and had taken--in addition

to the winds of March--a small farm about midway in the wilderness

between us and the Derryclares. They were two young women who had

recently been commended to our special attention by Lady Derryclare;

they were, she said, Pioneers, and were going to make their fortunes,

and would incidentally set an example to the district. Philippa had

met them on the Derryclares' yacht.

"One of them is very pretty," she explained to Andrew, "and the other

is a doctor."

"I wonder which of them does most damage?" said Andrew. "I think I'll

stay at home."

None the less he came.

It was not until the car was at the door that I found we were to be

favoured with the society of my eldest son, Anthony, in consequence of

the facts that (1) the day before had been his ninth birthday, (2) that

he had not cried when he met the sweep in the passage, and (3) that for

lack of the kitchen fire he had had no birthday cake. Minx, also, was

one of us, but as she came as a stowaway, this did not transpire till

later, when explanations were superfluous.

It was at the moment of departure that I perceived a donkey-cart,

modestly screening itself behind the evergreens on the way to the yard,

and one of Flurry Knox's men approached me with Mr. Knox's compliments,

and would I lend him the loan of the long ladder? Some two years ago,

in a moment of weakness, I had provided myself with a ladder wherewith

to attain to the eaveshoots of Shreelane, since when I had found myself

in the undesired position of public benefactor. How life without a

long ladder had hitherto been possible for my neighbours I was at a

loss to imagine, and as I was also at a loss for any valid excuse for

refusing to lend it, the ladder enjoyed a butterfly existence of

country-house visiting. Its visits to Mr. Knox had been especially

lengthy and debilitating. It is, as Mrs. Cadogan is wont to say, the

last straw that puts the hump on the camel. The blood suddenly mounted

to my brain, and with it came inspiration.

"You can tell Mr. Knox that the eaveshoots of this house are leaking

like sieves, and I want the ladder myself."

In the glow of satisfaction kindled by the delivery of this message I

started the caravan. The western breeze fanned my brow agreeably, the

car purred her satisfaction with our new and only stretch of

steam-rolled road, and Anthony was still in the condition of Being Good

(a condition, nevertheless, by no means to be relied on, and quite

distinct from Goodness).

We ran west, we ran north; we skirted grey and sounding bays of the

Atlantic; we climbed high among heathery, stone-besprinkled moors; we

lunched by the roadside in the lee of a rick of turf, and Anthony, by

this time emerging from the condition of Being Good, broke the Thermos,

and flashed his birthday electric torch in Minx's face until she very

properly bit him, and Philippa slurred over the incident with impartial

chocolate, and said it was time to start.

The region in which the Chicken Farmers had established themselves

suggested the nurture of snipe and sea-gulls rather than chickens. It

was an indeterminate patchwork of stony knobs of hill and pockets of

bog, among which the road humped and sagged, accepting pessimistically

the facts of nature. Hardy, noisy hill-streams scurried beside it, or

over it, as seemed good to them; finally a sharp turn, a high horizon

of sea, and a steep down-hill grade, ending on the shore of a small,

round lake. There was a little pink box of a house on its farther

side, with a few bunches of trees round it, and among them a pigmy

village of prim wooden huts.

"That's the place," said Philippa, who had been there with Lady

Derryclare. "And those are the last cry in hen-houses. Now remember,

both of you, one of them is a doctor, Scotch, and a theosophist, or

something mysterious of that sort; and the pretty one was engaged to a

gunner and it was broken off--why, I don't know--drink, I fancy, or

mad--so you had better be careful----"

"I shall be guarded in my condolences," I said, turning in at the

little gate, with the sensation of being forcibly fed.

"As far as one can gather," said Andrew, "there remains no topic in

heaven or earth that----"

"Music and poultry," said Philippa in a breath, as I drew up at the

hall door.

Andrew rang the bell, and a flock of white ducks hurried up from among

the trees and gathered round him with loud cries of welcome. There was

no other reply to his summons, and at the second essay the bell-wire

came out by the roots with generous completeness.

"The ladies is gone to th' oxtion!" cried a voice from among the

hen-coops, and the ducks lifted up their voices in ardent reply.

"Where is the auction?" Philippa called, when a comparative silence had

fallen.

"In Harrington's, beyond at the Mines!" replied the oracle, on a

well-sustained high G.

"Put the cards on the hall table," said Philippa, "we might go back

that way."

Several things combine in the spell that an auction casts upon my wife,

as upon many others of her sex; the gamble, the competition, the lure

of the second-hand, the thrill of possible treasure-trove. We

proceeded along the coast road towards the mines, and I could hear

Philippa expounding to her first-born the nature and functions of

auctions, even as the maternal carnivore instructs her young in the art

of slaughter. The road with which we were now dealing ran, or, it

would be more accurate to say, walked, across the stony laps of the

hills. The cliffs were on our right; the sea was still flustered after

the storm, like a dog that has fought and is ready to fight again. We

toiled over the shoulder of a headland, and there caught sight of

"Harrington's."

On a green plateau, high above the sea, were a couple of iron sheds and

a small squat tower; landward of them was a square and hideous house,

of the type that springs up, as if inevitably, in the neighbourhood of

mines, which are, in themselves, among the most hideous works of man.

One of the sheds had but half a roof; a truck lay on its side in a pool

of water; defeat was written starkly over all.

"Copper, and precious little of it," I explained to Andrew; "and they

got some gold too--just enough to go to their heads, and ruin them."

"Did they put it in their mouths--where you have it, Father?" enquired

Anthony, who was hanging on my words and on the back of my seat.

"Suppose you shut yours," I replied, with the brutality that is the

only effective defence against the frontal attacks of the young.

We found the yard at Harrington's thronged with a shabby company of

carts, cars, and traps of many varieties; donkey-carts had made their

own of the road outside, even the small circle of gravel in front of

the hall door was bordered by bicycles; apparently an auction was a

fashionable function in the region of the Lug-na-Coppal copper-mines.

Dingy backs bulged from the open door of the hall, and over their heads

as we arrived floated the voice of the auctioneer, demanding in tragic

incredulity if people thought his conscience would permit him to let an

aneroid barometer go for half-a-crown. Without a word Philippa

inserted herself between the backs, followed by her son, and was lost

to view.

"Thank you, madam!" said the voice, with a new note of cheer in it.

"Five shillings I am bid! Any advance on five shillings?"

"That's a good weather-glass!" hissed a farmer's daughter with a plumed

hat, to a friend with a black shawl over her head. "An' I coming into

the house to-day I gave it a puck, and it knocked a lep out o' the

needle. It's in grand working order."

"I'm told it was the last thing in the house poor Mr. Harrington left a

hand on, the day he made away with himself, the Lord save us!" remarked

a large matron, casually, to Andrew and me.

"I thought the Coroner's Jury found that he fell down the shaft?" I

returned, accepting the conversational opening in the spirit in which

it was offered.

The matron winked at me with a mixture of compassion and confederacy.

"Ah, the poor fellow was insured, and the jury were decent men, they

wouldn't wish to have anything said that 'd put the wife out of the

money."

"The right men in the right place, evidently," said Andrew, who rather

fancies his dry humour. "But apart from the climate and the

architecture, was there any reason for suicide?"

"I'm told he was a little annoyed," said an enormous old farmer,

delicately.

"It was the weather preyed on him," said the matron. "There was a

vessel was coming round to him with coal and all sorts, weather-bound

she was, in Kinsale, and in the latther end she met a rock, and she

went down in a lump, and his own brother that was in her was drownded."

"There were grounds for annoyance, I admit," said Andrew.

The big farmer, who had, perhaps, been one of the jury, remarked

non-committally that he wouldn't say much for the weather we were

getting now, and there was one of them planets was after the moon

always.

We moved on to the yard, in which prospective buyers were prowling

among wheelbarrows, coils of rope, ladders, and the various rubbish

proper to such scenes, and Andrew discoursed of the accessories that

would be needed for the repair of my eaveshoots, with the

large-mindedness of the Government official who has his own spurs and

another man's horse. He was in the act of assuring me that I should

save half a man's wages by having a second long ladder, when some one

in the house began to play on a piano, with knowledge and vigour. The

effect on Captain Larpent was as when a hound, outside a covert, hears

the voice of a comrade within. The room from which the music came was

on the ground floor, the back door was open, and Andrew walked in.

"That is one of those young ladies who have come here to make their

fortunes with poultry," observed a melancholy-looking clergyman at my

elbow, "Miss Longmuir, I expect; she is the musician. Her friend, Dr.

Catherine Fraser, is here also. Wonderful young ladies--no wish for

society. I begged them to come and live near my church--I offered them

a spare corner of the churchyard for their hen-coops--all of no avail."

I said that they seemed hard to please.

"Very, very," assented the clergyman; "yet I assure you there is

nothing cynical about them. They are merely recloozes."

He sighed, on what seemed to be general grounds, and moved away.

I followed Andrew into the house and found myself in the kitchen. The

unspeakable dreariness of an auction was upon it. Pagodas of various

crockeries stood high on the tables, and on benches round the walls

sat, rook-like, an assembly of hooded countrywomen. A man with a dingy

pale face was standing in front of the cold fireplace, addressing the

company. On my arrival he removed his hat with stately grace, and with

an effort I recognised Cantillon the sweep, in mufti--that is to say,

minus some of his usual top-dressing of soot.

"It's what I was saying, Major Yeates," he resumed. "I'm sweeping

those chimneys thirty years, and five managers I seen in this house,

and there wasn't one o' them that got the price of their ticket to Cork

out o' that mine. This poor man was as well-liked as anyone in the

world, but there was a covey of blagyards in it that'd rob St. Pether,

let alone poor Mr. Harrington!"

The company assented with a groan of general application, and the

ensuing pause was filled by the piano in the next room, large and heavy

chords, suggestive of the hand of Andrew.

"God! Mrs. Harrington was a fine woman!" croaked one of the rooks on

the bench.

"She was, and very stylish," answered another. "Oh, surely she was a

crown!"

"And very plain," put in a third, taking up the encomium like a part in

a fugue, "as plain as the grass on the hills!"

I moved on, and met my wife in a crowd at the door of the dining-room,

and in an atmosphere which I prefer not to characterise.

"I've got the barometer!" she said breathlessly. "No one bid for it,

and I got it for five shillings! A lovely old one. It's been in the

house for at least fifty years, handed on from one manager to another."

"It doesn't seem to have brought them luck," I said. "What have you

done with Anthony? Lost him, I hope!"

"There have been moments when I could have spared him," Philippa

admitted, "especially when it came to his bidding against me, from the

heart of the crowd, for a brass tea-kettle, and running the price up to

the skies before I discovered him. Then I found him upstairs,

auctioning a nauseous old tail of false hair, amidst the yells of

country girls; and finally he tried to drop out of the staircase

window--ten feet at least--with a stolen basket of tools round his

neck. I just saw his hands on the edge of the window-sill."

"I think it's time to go home," I said grimly.

"Darling, _not_ till I've bought the copper coal-scuttle. Come and

look at it!"

I followed her, uttering the impotent growls of a husband. As we

approached the drawing-room the music broke forth again, this time in

power. Three broad countrywomen, in black hooded cloaks and brown kid

gloves, were seated on a sofa; two deeply-engrossed backs at the piano

accounted for the music. There is no denying the fact that a piano

duet has some inescapable association with the schoolroom, no matter

how dashing the execution, how superior the performers.

"Poor old 'Semiramide'!" whispered Philippa; "I played that overture

when I was twelve!" Over her shoulder I had a view of Andrew's sleek

black poll and brown neck, and an impression of fluffy hair, and a

slight and shapely back in a Norfolk jacket.

"He seems to have done very well in the time," I said. "That's the

pretty one, isn't it?"

I here became aware that the hall was filling with people, and that Mr.

Armstrong, the auctioneer, with his attendant swarm of buyers, was at

my elbow.

"That's a sweet instrument," he said dispassionately, "and, I may say,

magnificently played. Come, ladies and gentlemen, we'll not interrupt

the concert. It might be as good for me to take the yard next, before

the rain comes."

He led away his swarm, like a queen bee; "Semiramide" stormed on; some

people strayed into the room and began to examine the furniture. The

afternoon had grown overcast and threatening, and I noticed that a tall

man in dark clothes and a yachting cap had stationed himself near the

treble's right hand. He was standing between her and the light, rather

rudely, it seemed to me, but the players did not appear to notice.

"That was rather a free and easy fellow," I said to Philippa, as we

were borne along to the back door by the tide of auction.

"Who? Do you mean Mr. Armstrong?" said Philippa. "I'm rather fond of

him----"

"No, the tall chap in the yachting cap."

"I didn't notice him--" began Philippa, but at this moment we were shot

into the yard by pressure from behind. Mr. Armstrong took his stand on

a packing-case, the people hived in round him, and I saw my wife no

more.

Coils of fencing wire and sheets of corrugated iron were proffered, and

left the audience cold; a faint interest was roused when the

auctioneer's clerk held up one of a party of zinc pails for inspection.

"You'd count the stars through that one!" said a woman beside me.

"You can buy it for a telescope, ma'am!" said Mr. Armstrong swiftly.

"Well, well, hasn't he a very fine delivery!" said my neighbour,

regarding Mr. Armstrong as if he were a landscape.

"Hannah," said the woman on my other hand, in a deep and reproachful

contralto, speaking as if I did not exist, "did ye let the kitchen

chairs go from you?"

"There wasn't one o' them but had a leg astray," apologised

Hannah--"they got great hardship. When Harrington 'd have a drop taken

he'd throw them here and there."

"Ladies! Ladies!" reproved Mr. Armstrong. "Is this an oxtion or is it

a conversassiony? John! show that ladder."

"A big lot of use a forty-foot ladder'd be to the people round this

place!" said a superior young farmer in a new suit of clothes; "there

isn't a house here, unless it's my father's, would have any occasion

for it."

Hannah dug me hard in the ribs with her elbow and put out her tongue.

"Five shillings I am bid for a forty-foot ladder!" said Mr. Armstrong

to the Heavens; "I'd get a better price at a jumble sale!"

"Look at the poker they have in it by the way of a rung!" continued the

young farmer. "I wouldn't be bothered buying things at oxtions; if it

was only gettin' marr'ed you were you'd like a new woman!"

"Seven and six!"

To my own astonishment I heard my voice saying this.

"Seven and six I am bid," said the auctioneer, seizing me with his eye.

"Ten shillings may I say? Thank you, sir----"

The clergyman had entered the lists against me.

I advanced against him by half-crowns; the audience looked on as at a

battle of giants. At twenty-five shillings I knew that he was

weakening; at thirty shillings the ladder was mine.

I backed out of the crowd with the victor's laurels on my brow, and, as

I did so, a speck of rain hit me in the eye. The sea was looking cold

and angry, and the horizon to windward was as thick as a hedge. It was

obviously time to go, and I proceeded in the direction of the car.

As I left the yard a remarkable little animal, which for a single wild

instant I took for a fox or a badger, came running up the road. It was

reddish brown, with white cheeks and a white throat; it advanced

hesitatingly and circled round me with agitated and apologetic whimpers.

"Minx!" I said incredulously.

The fox or badger flung itself on its side and waved a forepaw at me.

"It's hunting rabbits below on the cliffs she was," said a boy in a

white flannel jacket, who was sitting on the wall.

"Oh, there you are," said Philippa's voice behind me; "I wanted to

remind you to remember the aneroid. It's on the dining-room table.

I'm feeling rather unhappy about that child," she went on, "I can't

find him anywhere."

"_I'll_ go in and find him," I said, with a father's ferocity.

"I hope he's there," said Philippa uncomfortably. "Good gracious! Is

that Minx?"

I left the boy to explain, and made for the house, getting through the

crowd in the doorway by the use of tongue and elbows, and making my way

upstairs, strode hastily through the dark and repellent bedrooms of

"Harrington's." Anthony was not there.

In the dining-room I heard Andrew's voice. I went in and found him

sitting at the dinner-table with two ladies, one of whom was holding

his hand and examining it attentively.

She had pale eyelashes, and pale golden hair, very firmly and

repressively arranged; she was big and fresh and countrified looking,

and her eyes were water-green. She looked like an Icelander or a Finn,

but I recognised her as the second Chicken Farmer, Dr. Fraser.

"I was looking for Anthony," I said, withholding with difficulty an

apology for intrusion. "We've got to get away, Andrew----"

"I was having my fortune told," said Andrew, looking foolish.

"I saw your little boy going across the field there, about half an hour

ago," said Dr. Fraser, looking up at me with eyes of immediate

understanding. "The white terrier was with him."

"Towards the cliffs?" I said, feeling glad that Philippa was not there.

"No, to the right--towards the tower." She went to the window. "There

was some one with him," she added quickly. "There he is now--that man

in a yachting cap, by the tower----"

"I don't see anyone," I said, refixing my eye-glass.

Miss Fraser continued to stare out of the window. "You're

short-sighted," she said, without looking at me. "Perhaps if the

window were open----"

Before I could help her she had opened it, and the west wind rushed in,

with big drops in it.

"I must be blind," I said, "I can see no one."

"Nor can I--now," she said, drawing back from the window.

She sat down at the table as if her knees had given way, and her strong

white hand fell slackly on Philippa's purchase, the old aneroid

barometer, and rested there. The other girl looked at her anxiously.

"Hold up, Cathie!" she said, as one speaks to a horse when it stumbles.

Her friend's eyes were fixed, and empty of expression, and the fresh

pervading pink of her face had paled.

"Perhaps we had better go and look for that kid," said Andrew, getting

up, and I knew that he too was aware of something uncomfortable in the

atmosphere. Before we could get out of the room, Dr. "Cathie" spoke.

"I see tram-lines," she said gropingly, "and water--I wonder if he's

asleep----"

She sighed. Andrew and I, standing aghast, saw her colour begin to

return.

Her friend's eye indicated to us the door. We closed it behind us, and

shoved our way through the hall.

"I say!" said Andrew, as we got outside, "I thought she was going to

chuck a fit, or have hysterics, or something. Didn't you?"

I did not answer. Cantillon, the sweep, was hurrying towards me with

tidings in his face.

"Mrs. Yeates is after going to the cliff looking for the young

gentleman--but sure what I was saying----"

I did not wait to hear what Cantillon's observations had been, because

I had caught sight of Philippa, away in a field near the edge of the

cliffs. She was running, and the boy with the white flannel jacket was

in front of her. It seemed ridiculous to hurry, when I knew that

Anthony had been accompanied by a large man in a yachting cap (in

itself a guarantee of competency).

None the less, I ran, with the wind and the heavy raindrops in my face,

across country, not round by the road, and ran the faster for seeing my

wife and her companion sinking out of sight over the edge of the cliff,

as by an oblique path. My way took me past the tower; there was a

little plateau there, with a drooping wire fence round it, and I had a

glimpse of the square black mouth of the disused shaft.

"Near the tower," the girl had said; but she had also said there was a

man with him.

I ran on, but fear had sprung out of the shaft and came with me.

A hard-trodden path led from the tower to the cliff; it fell steeper

and steeper, till, at a hairpin turn, it became rocky steps, slanting

in sharp-cut zigzags down the face of the cliff. On the right hand the

rocks leaned out above my head, yellow and grey and dripping, and

tufted with sea pinks; on the left there was nothing except the wind.

A couple of hundred feet below the sea growled and bellowed, plunging

among broken rocks. I did not give room to the thought of Anthony's

light body, tossed about there.

At a corner far below I had a glimpse of Philippa and the boy in the

white jacket; he was leading her down--holding her hand--my poor

Philippa, whose nightmare is height, who has _vertige_ on a

step-ladder. She must have had a sure word that Anthony had gone down

this dizzy path before her. A mass of rock rose up between us, and

they were gone, and in that gusty and treacherous wind it was

impossible to make better speed.

The damnable iteration of the steps continued till my knees shook and

my brain was half numb. They ceased at last at the mouth of a tunnel,

half-way down the vertical face of the cliff; there was a platform

outside it, over the edge of which two rusty rails projected into space

above a narrow cove, where yellow foam, far below, churned and blew

upwards in heavy flakes. Philippa and her guide had vanished. I felt

for my match-box, and plunged into the dark and dripping tunnel.

I pushed ahead, at such speed as is possible for a six-foot man in a

five-foot passage, splashing in the stream that gurgled between the

tram-rails, and stumbling over the sleepers. Soon the last touches of

daylight glinted in the water, they died, and it was pitch dark. I

struck a match, sheltering it with my cap from the drips of the roof,

and shouted, and stood still, listening. There was no sound, except

the muffled roar of the sea outside; the match kindled broad sparkles

of copper ore in the rock, but other response there was none.

Match by match I got ahead, shouting at intervals, stooping, groping,

clutching at the greasy baulks of timber that supported the roof and

sides, till a cold draught blew out my match. My next revealed a

cross-gallery, with a broken truck blocking one entrance. There

remained two ways to choose between. It was certain that the

tram-rails must lead to the shaft, but which way had Philippa gone?

And Anthony--I stood in maddening blackness; some darkness is a

negative thing, this seemed an active, malevolent pressure. I counted

my matches, and shouted, and still my voice came back to me, baffled,

and without a hope in it. There were not half a dozen matches left.

A faint, paddling sound became audible above the drippings from the

roof; I struck another of my matches, and something low and brown came

panting into the circle of light. It was Minx, coming to me along the

gallery of the tram-rails. She paused just short of the cross-ways,

staring as though I were a stranger, and again a circling wind blew out

my match. A fresh light showed her, still motionless; her back was up,

not in the ordinary ridge, but in patches here and there; she was

looking at something behind me; she made her mouth as round as a

shilling, held up her white throat, and howled, thinly and carefully,

as if she were keening. I cannot deny that I stiffened as I stood, and

that second being that inhabits us, the being that is awake when we are

asleep (and is always afraid), took charge for a moment; the other

partner, who is, I try to think, my real self, pulled himself together

with a certain amount of bad language, thrust Minx aside, and went

ahead along the gallery of the tram-lines.

It needed only a dozen steps, and what Minx had or had not seen became

a negligible matter. A white light, that turned the flame of my match

to orange, began to irradiate the tunnel like moonrise, defining

theatrically the profiles of rock, and the sagging props and beams. It

came from an electric lamp, Anthony's electric lamp, standing on a heap

of shale. The boy in the flannel jacket was holding a lighted

candle-end in his fingers, and bending low over Philippa, who was

kneeling between the tram-lines in the muddy water, holding Anthony in

her arms. He was motionless and limp, and I felt that sickening drop

of the heart that comes when the thing that seems too bad to think of

becomes in an instant the thing that is.

"Tram-lines and water--" said a level voice in my brain. "I wonder if

he is asleep----"

I wondered too.

Philippa looked up, with eyes that accepted me without comment.

"Only stunned, I think," she said hoarsely. "He opened his eyes an

instant ago."

"The timber fell on him," said the country boy. "Look where he have

the old prop knocked. 'Twas little but he was dead."

Anthony stirred uneasily.

"Oh, mother, you're holding me too tight!" he said fractiously.

From somewhere ahead vague noises came, rumblings, scrapings, hangings

like falling stones--

"It must be they're putting a ladder down in the shaft," said the boy.

Anthony had broken his collar-bone. So Dr. Fraser said; she tied him

up with her knitted scarf by the light of the electric torch; I carried

him up the ladder, and have an ineffaceable memory of the lavender

glare of daylight that met us, and of the welcome that was in the

everyday rain and the wet grass. In the relief of the upper air I even

bore with serenity the didactics of Andrew, who assured me that he had

seen from the first that the shaft was the centre of the position,

though he had never been in the slightest degree uneasy, because Dr.

Fraser had seen some one with Anthony.

Dr. Fraser said nothing; no more did I.

"See now," said Cantillon the sweep, who, in common with the rest of

the auction, was standing round the car to view our departure, "it

pinched me like death when they told me the Major had that laddher

bought!"

Being at the time sufficiently occupied in preparing to get away, I did

not enquire why Cantillon should have taken the matter so much to heart.

"But after all," he proceeded, having secured the attention of his

audience by an effective opening, "wasn't it the mercy of God them

chaps Mr. Knox has at the kennels had it lent to the Mahonys, and them

that's here took it from the Mahonys in a hurry the time Mr. Harrington

died! And through all it was the Major's ladder."

Andrew had the ill-breeding to laugh.

"Sure it'd be no blame for a gentleman not to know the like of it,"

said Cantillon with severity. "Faith, I mightn't know it meself only

for the old poker I stuck in it one time at Mr. Knox's when a rung

broke under me----"

It is a valuable property of the motor-car that it can, at a moment's

notice, fill an inconvenient interval with loud noises. I set the

engine going and jumped into the car.

Something, covered by a rug, cracked and squashed under my foot. It

was the aneroid.

When we reached a point in the road where it skirts the cliff I stopped

the car, and flung the aneroid, like a quoit, over the edge, through

the wind and the rain, into oblivion.

V

THE MAROAN PONY

It had taken ten minutes to work the car over the bridge at Poundlick,

so intricate was the crowd of people and carts, so blind and deaf to

any concerns save their own; a crowd that offered sometimes the

resistance of the feather bed, sometimes that of the dead wall, an

intractable mass, competent to reduce the traffic of Piccadilly to

chaos, and the august Piccadilly police to the point of rushing to the

nearest lunatic asylum, and saying, "Let us in! We are mad!"

The town of Poundlick is built at so accommodating a tilt that it is

possible to stand on the bridge at its foot, and observe the life of

its single street displayed like a poster on the hillside; even to

compare the degrees of custom enjoyed by its public-houses, and to

estimate the number of cur dogs to the square yard of pavement. I

speak of an ordinary day. But this hot twentieth of September was far

from being ordinary.

The Poundlick Races are, I believe, an ancient and annual function,

but, being fifteen miles from anywhere, I had hitherto been content to

gauge their attractions by their aftermath of cases in the Petty

Sessions Court next following the fixture. There is, however, no

creature more the sport of circumstances than a married man with a

recent motor; my attendance, and that of the car, at the Poundlick

Races had been arranged to the last sandwich before I had time to

collect objections (and this method, after all, saves some wear and

tear).

The races are held on the banks of the Arrigadheel River, within hail

of the town, and are reached--as everything in Ireland is reached--by a

short cut. We--that is to say, my wife, her cousin, Captain Andrew

Larpent, R.E., and I--were gathered into the jovial crowd that

straggled, and hustled, and discoursed over the marshy meadows of the

river, and ploughed through the brown mud in the gaps without a check

in pace or conversation. The Committee had indeed "knocked" walls, and

breached banks, but had not further interfered with the course of

nature, and we filed at length on to the course across a tributary of

the river, paying a penny each for the facilities offered by a narrow

and bounding plank and the muddy elbow of a young man who stood in

mid-stream; an amenity accepted with suitable yells by the ladies (of

whom at least ninety per cent. remarked "O God!" in transit).

The fact that there are but four sound and level fields within a

ten-mile radius of Poundlick had simplified the labours of the

Committee in the selection of a course. Rocky hills rose steeply on

two sides of the favoured spot, the Arrigadheel laid down the law as to

its boundaries, and within these limitations an oval course had been

laid out by the simple expedient of breaking gaps in the banks. The

single jump-race on the programme was arranged for by filling the gaps

with bundles of furze, and there was also a water-jump, more or less

forced upon the Committee by the intervention of a ditch pertaining to

one of the fences. A section of the ditch had been widened and dammed,

and the shallow trough of pea-soup that resulted had been raised from

the rank of a puddle by a thin decoration of cut furze-bushes.

The races had not begun, but many horses were galloping about and over

the course, whether engaged in unofficial competitions or in adding a

final bloom to their training, I am unable to say. We wandered

deviously among groups of country people, anchored in conversation, or

moving, still in conversation, as irresistibly as a bog-slide. Whether

we barged into them, or they into us, was a matter of as complete

indifference to them as it would have been to a drove of their own bony

cattle.

"These are the sort of people I love," said Philippa, her eyes ranging

over the tented field and its throngs, and its little red and green

flags flapping in the sunshine. "Real Primitives, like a chorus in

_Acis and Galatea_!"

She straightened her hat with a gasp, as a couple of weighty female

primitives went through us and passed on. (In all circumstances and

fashions, my wife wears a large hat, and thereby adds enormously to the

difficulties of life.) Among the stalls of apples and biscuits, and

adjacent to the drink tent, a roulette table occurred, at which the

public were invited to stake on various items of the arms of the United

Kingdom. The public had accepted the invitation in considerable

numbers, and I did not fail to point out to Philippa the sophisticated

ease with which Acis flung his penny upon "Harp," while Galatea,

planking twopence upon the Prince of Wales' plumes, declared that the

last races she was at she got the price of her ticket on "Feather."

We passed on, awaking elusive hopes in the bosoms of two neglected

bookmakers, who had at intervals bellowed listlessly to the elements,

and now eagerly offered me Rambling Katty at two to one.

"Boys, hurry! There's a man dead, north!" shrieked a boy, leaping from

the top of a bank. "Come north till we see him!"

A rush of boys went over us; the roulette table was deserted in a

flash, and its proprietor and the bookmakers exchanged glances

expressive of the despicable frivolity of the rustics of Poundlick.

"We ought to try to find Dr. Fraser," said Philippa, hurrying in the

wake of the stampede.

"I did not know that the Chicken Farmers were to be among the

attractions," I said to Andrew, realising, not for the first time, that

I am but an infant crying in the night where matters of the higher

diplomacy are toward.

Andrew made no reply, as is the simple method of some men when they do

not propose to give themselves away, and we proceeded in the direction

of the catastrophe.

The dead man was even less dead than I had expected. He was leaning

against a fence, explaining to Dr. Catherine Fraser that he felt all

the noise of all the wars of all the worlds within in his head.

Dr. Fraser, who was holding his wrist, while her friend, Miss Longmuir,

kept the small boys at bay, replied that she would like a more precise

description. The sufferer, whose colour was returning, varied the

metaphor, and said that the sound was for all the world like the

quacking of ducks.

"You'd better go home and keep quiet," said Dr. Fraser, accepting the

symptom with professional gravity.

I asked my next door neighbour how the accident had occurred.

"Danny Lyons here was practising this young mare of Herlihy's for Lyney

Garrett, that's to ride her in the first race," said my neighbour, a

serious man with bushy black whiskers, like an old-fashioned French

waiter, "and sure she's as loose as a hare, and when she saw the flag

before her on the fence, she went into the sky, and Danny dhruv in the

spur to keep the balance, and with that then the sterrup broke."

"It's little blagyarding she'd have if it was Lyney was riding her!"

said some one else.

"Ah, Lyney's a tough dog," said my neighbour; "in the Ring of Ireland

there isn't a nicer rider."

[Illustration: "Lyney's a tough dog!"]

"There might be men as good as him in Poundlick!" said an ugly little

black-muzzled fellow, suddenly and offensively, "and horses too! As

good as any _he'll_ throw his leg over!"

Dr. Fraser's patient stood up abruptly.

"Oh, oh, oh!" said the man with the bushy whiskers, placing himself in

front of the invalid. "Let you be said by the lady, Danny, and go

home! Have behaviour now, Peter Lynch!"

The matter hung for a moment; a bell began to ring in the middle of the

course, and the onlookers flung the situation from them like a squeezed

lemon, and swept _en masse_ towards the summons, bearing with them the

invalid.

"Off the stage I have never seen people clear out so fast," remarked

Andrew. "Now that we've seen Dr. Fraser's Lightning Cure, I suppose we

may as well go too."

His eyes, by a singular coincidence, met those of Miss Longmuir, which

were very pretty eyes, dark and soft.

"I must go and hunt up our pony," she said, with a very businesslike

air; "we've entered her for the third race, you know."

She put back her hair as it blew across her forehead, and the gold in

it glinted in the sun.

"How sporting of you!" we heard Andrew say, as they walked away

together.

My wife and Dr. Fraser and I turned as one man, and went in the

opposite direction.

We steered for an island of furze and grey boulders that had been flung

into the valley like a vedette from the fortified hill-side, and was

placed, considerately, at the apex of the oval course. Half a dozen

men were already grouped upon the boulders, like cormorants. We

clambered to a higher _etage_, and there spread forth ourselves and our

belongings upon the warm slabs. The sun was hot, yet not too hot, the

smell of trodden turf was pleasant in the air, the river sparkled and

gurgled beside us; the chimneys of Poundlick sent up languid spires of

blue smoke; its yellow and pink and white houses became poetic in the

September haze. The first delicate pangs of hunger were stealing upon

us, and I felt reasonably certain that nothing necessary to our welfare

had been forgotten. I lit a cigarette and pulled my cap over my eyes,

and listened to a lark, spiring, like the smoke, into the blue, while

my wife clattered in the luncheon basket. It was a moment of entire

well-being, overshadowed only by the prospect of having to take an

interest in the racing.

I said as much to Dr. Fraser, who was dismembering a cold chicken with

almost awful surgical dexterity.

"You must wake up for our race," she said. "I'll call you in time."

"Must I? I hope you're going to ride."

"Heaven forfend!" replied Dr. Fraser. "Nothing more spirited than a

weight-carrying bicycle! I'm not in the least horsey. Meg was dying

to ride, but as we bought the pony from the great Lyney, and he had won

any number of races on her, he was distinctly indicated."

"Quite right too," I said, with dowager-like propriety. "And I should

wish it to be clearly understood that if, at the last moment, your

friend Mr. Lyney should be too drunk to ride, I will not take his

place."

"He doesn't drink," said Dr. Fraser, who has an unsympathetic way of

keeping to the point. "He's been a great friend of mine ever since I

mended a broken finger for him."

There was a stir among the cormorants on the lower tier of boulders, a

shot was fired at the far end of the course, every one began to shout,

and an irregularly shaped mass was detached from the crowd, and

resolved itself into a group of seven horses, pounding towards us at a

lumbering canter. One of the riders had a green jacket, the others

were in shirt sleeves, with coloured scarves over their shoulders; all

were bareheaded. As they neared the first jump, I found myself on my

feet on my boulder, with two unknown men hanging on to me to steady

themselves.

"That's no throuble to them!" shouted one of my _attaches_, as each

horse in turn galloped over or through the barrier of furze in the gap.

"Which is Lyney Garrett?" I asked.

"That's him on the chestnut mare--the jock that have the dhress on

him." He pointed to the wearer of the green jacket.

"Ah ha! Lyney's the boy! Look at him now, how he'll stoop and leave

the horse to go for herself! He'll easy the horse, and he'll easy

himself!"

"That Rambling Katty he's riding's a nice loose mare--she has a good

fly in her," said another.

"Lyney's built for it. If there's any sort of a spring in a horse at

all, he'll make him do it."

"He'd make a donkey plough!" flung in another enthusiast.

As they neared the flags at the turn of the oval--and an uncommonly

sharp turn it was--the pace improved, each man trying to get the inside

station; I could already see, written on the countenance of a large

young grey horse, his determination to pursue an undeviating course of

his own.

"Now, Lyney! Spare him in the angle!" shouted my neighbour, hanging on

to my sleeve and rocking perilously.

Lyney, a square-shouldered young man, pale and long-jawed, bored

determinedly on to the first flag, hit it with his right knee, wrenched

Rambling Katty round the second flag, and got away for the water-jump

three lengths ahead of anyone else.

"Look at that for ye--how he goes round the corner on one leg!" roared

his supporter. "He'd not stop for the Lord Leftenant!"

The remaining riders fought their way round the flags, with strange

tangents and interlacing curves; all, that is to say, save the grey

horse, who held on unswervingly and made straight for the river. The

spectators, seated on the low bank at its edge, left their seats with

singular unanimity. The majority fled, a little boy turned a

somersault backwards into the water, but three or four hardier spirits

tore off their coats, swung them like flails in front of the grey, and

threw their caps in his face, with a wealth of objurgation that I have

rarely heard equalled.

"The speed was in him and he couldn't turn," explained one of my

neighbours, at the top of his voice, as the grey, yielding to public

opinion, returned to the course and resumed the race.

"That horse is no good," said a dapper young priest, who had joined our

crowd on the rock. "Look at his great flat feet! You'd bake a cake on

each of them!"

"Well, that's the case indeed, Father," replied a grizzled old farmer,

"but he's a fine cool horse, and a great farming horse for ever. Be

gance! He'd plough the rocks!"

"Well, he'll get a nice view of the race, anyway," said the young

priest, "he has it all before him."

"They don't seem to be getting any delay with the water-jump," said

some one else regretfully.

"Ah, what's in it but the full of a few tin cans!" said my adherent.

"Well, for all, it knocked a good lep out o' Rambling Katty: she went

mountains over it!"

"Look south! Look south! They're coming on again, and only five o'

them in it----"

The cheering was hotter this time, and it was entirely characteristic

that it was the riders who were shouted for and not the horses.

"They'll win now this turn--there's three o' them very thick, that's a

nice tidy race," said the old farmer.

"Good boy, Kenny! Go on, Kenny!" bellowed some one on a lower ledge.

"Who's second, coming up to the flag now?" panted Philippa, who was

hanging on to the collar of my coat and trying to see over my shoulder.

"That's Jimmy Kenny," responded the man below, turning a black-muzzled

face up towards us, his light eyes gleaming between their black lashes

in the sunshine, like aquamarines. I recognised Peter Lynch, whom we

had met earlier in the day.

"It's young Kenny out of the shop," explained the old farmer to me; "he

rides very nate."

No one was found to endorse his opinion. The horses came on, sweating

and blowing, the riders, by this time very red in the face, already

taking to their whips. By some intricate process of jostling, young

Kenny got the inside place at the first flag.

"Now is he nate! What was I saying!" exulted the old farmer.

"Lyney! Lyney!" roared the faithful gallery, as the leaders hustled

round the second flag and went away up the course.

"Up, Kenny!" replied the raucous tenor of Peter Lynch in solitary

defiance.

Last of all, the grey horse, who would plough the rocks, came on

indomitably, and made, as before, a bee-line for the river. Here,

however, he was confronted by a demonstration hurriedly arranged by his

friends, who advanced upon him waving tall furze-bushes, with which

they beat him in the face. The grey horse changed his mind with such

celerity that he burst his girths; some one caught him by the head,

while his rider hung precariously upon his neck; some one else dragged

off the saddle, replanted his jockey upon his broad bare back, and

speeded him on his way by bringing the saddle down upon his

hind-quarters with an all-embracing thump.

"It's only the age he wants," said a partisan. "If they'd keep him up

to the practice, he'd be a sweeper yet!"

Tumult at the end of the course, and a pistol-shot, here announced that

the race was over.

"Lyney have it!" shouted some men, standing on the fence by the

water-jump.

"What happened Kenny?" bawled Peter Lynch.

"He was passing the flag and he got clung in the pole, and the next man

knocked him down out of the pole!" shouted back the Field Telegraph.

"Oh pity!" said the old farmer.

"He didn't get fair play!" vociferated Peter Lynch, glowering up at the

adherents of Lyney with a very green light in his eye.

The young priest made a slight and repressive gesture with his hand.

"That'll do now, Peter," he said, and turned to the old farmer. "Well,

Rambling Katty's a hardy bit of stuff," he went on, brushing the

rock-lichen from his black coat.

"She is that, Father," responded my late adherent, who, to my

considerable relief, had now ceased to adhere. "And nothing in her but

a fistful of bran!"

"She's the dryest horse that came in," said the young priest,

descending actively from the rock.

With the knowledge that the Committee would allow an hour at least for

the effects of a race to pass off before launching another, we climbed

to the summit of the island, and began upon the luncheon basket; and,

as vultures drop from the blue empyrean, so did Andrew and Miss

Longmuir arrive from nowhere and settle upon the sandwiches.

"Oh, I can't eat our own game, can I?" said the latter, with a slight

shudder, as I placed the chicken before her. "No--really--not even for

your sake!" She regarded me very pleasingly, but I notice that it is

only since my hair began to turn grey over my ears that these things

are openly said to me. "I had to feed four dozen of the brutes before

we started this morning, and I shall have to do it all over again when

we get home!"

"I don't know how you stand it, I should let 'em starve," said Andrew,

his eyes travelling from her white forehead to her brown hands. "_I_

don't consider it is work for ladies."

"You can come and help the ladies if you like," said Miss Longmuir,

glancing at him as she drove her white teeth into a sandwich.

"Do you mean that?" said Andrew in a low voice.

"She's blown him to pieces before he's left the covert," I said to

myself, and immediately withdrew into blameless conversation with my

wife and Dr. Fraser.

We had gone pretty well down through the luncheon basket, and had

arrived at a second and even more balmy--being well-fed--period of

peace, before it occurred to Miss Longmuir to look at her watch, and to

spoil the best cigarette of the day with agitations concerning the

non-appearance of her pony. I suggested that she and Captain Larpent

should go in search of it, and for a brief interval the disturbing

element was eliminated. It returned, with added agitation, in a

quarter of an hour.

"Cathie! I can't find Nancy anywhere! We've been all round the

course," cried Miss Longmuir from below. "And John Sullivan is nowhere

to be found either, and I can't get near Lyney, he's riding in the

Trotting Race."

"You'll find the pony is somewhere about all right," I said, with the

optimism of combined indolence and indifference.

"That seems probable," said Andrew, "but the point is, she's somewhere

where we're not."

"The point is, she ought to be here," said Miss Longmuir, with a very

bright colour in her cheeks as she looked up at us.

"Heavens! They're very angry!" I murmured to Dr. Fraser.

"Well, what do you want us to do?" enquired Dr. Fraser lethargically.

"You might take some faint shadow of interest in the fact that Nancy is

lost," replied Miss Longmuir.

"I think we'd better organise a search-party," said Philippa (who does

not smoke).

We rose stiffly, descended from our sun-warmed boulders, and took up

the White Man's Burden.

A sweeping movement was inaugurated, whose objects were to find the

pony or her attendant, John Sullivan, or Lyney.

"Should you know the pony if you saw her?" I said confidentially to Dr.

Fraser, as she and I set forth together.

"We've not had it very long," she replied dubiously. "Luckily it's an

easy colour. John Sullivan calls it maroan--a sort of mixture of roan

and maroon."

We advanced from field to field, driving like twin darning-needles

through the groups of people, but neither John Sullivan nor the maroan

pony transpired.

"Come on, come on! The Stepping Match is starting!" shouted some one.

Dr. Fraser and I were caught in the tightening mesh of the crowd, as in

the intricacies of a trammel net; an irregular thumping of hoofs, and a

row of bare and bobbing heads, passing above the heads of the crowd,

indicated that the Stepping Match was under way. Lyney's dour face and

green jacket were in the lead, and, as before, had he been Diana of the

Ephesians, he could not have been more passionately called upon. As it

was obviously useless for us to do so at this juncture, we climbed on

to a bank near the winning post, and watched the race. Lyney was

riding a long-backed yellow animal with a face as cross as his own, and

a step as fast as the tick of a watch.

"Anny other man than Lyney wouldn't carry that old pony round," said

one man.

"She has a score o' years surely, but she's as wicked as a bee," said

another.

"Lyney's very knacky; he couldn't be bate," said the first man.

"Well, well, look at Jimmy Kenny and his father, and the two o' them

riding!" went on the commentator. "Faith, I'd give the father the

sway. Jimmy's riding uneven. When the nag is rising, he's falling."

"Sure he has his two elbows into his ears! Go on, Lyney boy!"

The horses pounded past, splashing through the shallow flood of the

water-jump, and trampling over such furze-bushes as had withstood the

vicissitudes of the steeplechase. They passed from our view, and Dr.

Fraser and I agreed that we should be justified in staying where we

were till the finish. Three times they passed us, enveloped in a

travelling roar of encouragements, and with each passing the supporters

of Lyney and Kenny bayed and howled more emulously. The competitors,

now, to all practical intent, reduced to the Kennys, _pere et fils_,

and Lyney, again disappeared on their last round, and the volleys of

incitement became a dropping fire of criticism.

"Kenny's mare is the one, the others is too crippled."

"She'll not bate Lyney! Divil blast the bate she have in her! she's

too dropped and too narra!"

"What horse is first?"

"I d'know; only one, I think."

"Look at young Kenny coming up on the father now!"

"Ah, there's more in the owld fella, never fear him!"

"Come on, Lyney! Come on, Kenny! Lyney! Lyney!"

Lyney won. The bee-like wickedness of the yellow mare apparently

served her as well as youth, and despite the fact that she was but

little over fourteen hands and was carrying twelve stone, she finished

a dozen lengths in front. The interest of the race was at once

transferred to the struggle for second place between the Kennys.

"Come on, Tom! Come on, Jimmy! Begor' the father have it!" yelled the

crowd, as Kenny _pere_, flourishing his whip over his grey head,

finished half a length in front of his son.

"Them two tight wheels at the corner, 'twas there he squeezed the

advantage on the son."

"No, but the father had a drop taken, 'twas that that gave him the

heart."

Dr. Fraser and I got off our fence and steered for Lyney.

He was in the act of throwing the reins on the pony's neck and himself

off her back as we arrived.

"Here!" he said to the owner, "take your old skin!"--he tossed his whip

on to the ground--"and your old whip too!"

The owner took the "old skin" by her drooping and dripping head, and

picked up the whip, in reverential submission, and the ring of admirers

evidently accepted this mood of the hero as entirely befitting his

dignity.

Dr. Fraser advanced through them with the effortless impressiveness of

a big woman, and made her enquiries about the pony. Lyney dropped the

hero manner.

"I don't at all doubt but John Sullivan's gone up to Lynch's for her,

Doctor; you needn't be uneasy at all," he said, with a respect that

must have greatly enhanced our position in the eyes of the crowd. "I

told him he shouldn't bring her too soon for fear she'd sour on us. We

have an hour yet."

Soothed by this assurance we moved on, and even, in this moment of

unexpected leisure, dallied with the roulette table. I had, in fact,

lost ninepence, when the remainder of the search-party bore down upon

us at speed.

"The pony is _not_ here!" said Miss Longmuir, regarding our outspread

coppers with an eye of burning indignation, "and Sullivan's brother

doesn't know where he is--says he went up to the town two hours ago.

I'm going up to look for him, but of course if you'd rather stay and

play roulette--" Her voice shook. I need hardly say that we went.

On our arrival at the town of Poundlick we found it to be exclusively

inhabited by grandmothers. Lynch's public-house was garrisoned by a

very competent member of the force, who emerged from the kitchen with

an infant in her arms, and another attached to her clothing. She knew

nothing of the pony, she knew nothing of John Sullivan. There was

certainly a young lad that came in, and he having drink taken, and

wherever he got it, it wasn't in this house, and what did he do but to

commence jumping the counter, you'd think he'd jump the house. She

paused, and I murmured to Dr. Fraser that she was like a Holbein, and

Dr. Fraser replied that she did not believe one word she said, which

was rather my own idea, only more so. It appeared that her son Peter

had, an hour ago, expelled the young lad from the house (lest its fair

fame should be sullied), and as for Peter, the dear knew where he was,

she didn't see him since.

Miss Longmuir and Andrew here left the shop, very purposefully; we

pursued, and saw them open the gate of Lynch's yard and stride in. The

yard was a small one, littered with cases of bottles, and congested by

the outside cars and carts of race-goers; such level spaces as it

possessed had been dug out of the side of the hill, and slatternly

stables and outhouses were perched on the different levels. Through a

low-browed doorway might be seen the horses of race-goers, standing

"ready dight," like the steeds of Branksome Hall, with heads hanging,

in resigned depression, before empty ranks and mangers. But of the

maroan pony there was no sign.

Fierce as terriers on a rat-hunt, Miss Longmuir and Andrew dashed in

and out of the dark sheds and outhouses, till there remained unexplored

but one hovel, whose open door revealed only semi-darkness, edged with

fern-litter. None the less, the leading terrier determined to make

good the ground. A sharp yelp told of a find, and Miss Longmuir

emerged, holding aloft a new check horse-sheet, with the initials

"M.L." large upon it.

"They must have taken her down to the race-course, after all--" I began.

"Thoughtless of them to take her without her saddle or bridle," said

Andrew bitingly. "Here they are behind the door!"

The silence that followed this discovery was broken by Philippa.

"I hear some one snoring!" she said in a conspirator's whisper. "Do

come away. I'm sure it's a drunken man."

"Quite so," said Andrew, who had been pursuing his researches. "Allow

me to introduce Mr. John Sullivan."

In the dark corner behind the door lay a stout youth, comfortably

extended, with his flushed face half hidden in the dry and tawny

bracken, and his open mouth framing long and quiet snores. He was

obviously at peace with all the world.

Some heartless assaults on the part of Captain Larpent had no

appreciable result, so inveterate was the peace, so potent the means by

which it had been invoked. The ladies had retired during the

interview, and, as we rejoined them in the yard, we all became aware of

muffled and thunderous sounds near at hand; they were suggestive of a

ponderous and chaotic clog-dance, and proceeded from an outhouse, built

against the bank that formed the upper side of the yard, with its gable

askew to the other buildings.

"'Lots of things is coor'us,' as Anthony said when I told him about

Jonah and the Whale," remarked Philippa, who, throughout, had not taken

the affair as seriously as it deserved. "I suppose the party that John

Sullivan was at is going on up there."

Miss Longmuir darted round the gable of the house, a wild and summoning

cry followed, the call of the terrier who has run his rat to ground.

We found her at the foot of a low flight of irregular stone steps (in

telling the story I have formed the habit of saying that there were ten

of them) that led to a doorway in a loft. In the doorway, with a

cabbage leaf in her mouth, was the maroan pony, looking down at us with

an expression of mild surprise.

We all said unanimously, and with equal futility, "How--on--earth----?"

After which Andrew, who dislikes miracles, arranged that she had, of

course, got into the loft from the back, where the ground was high.

Unfortunately the theory did not work, an inspection of the loft

revealing nothing but four walls, a large store of dried bracken, and a

donkey-panier filled with cabbages.

"These mountainy ponies climb like monkeys," said Philippa, with her

inevitable effort to shelter the discomfited, as Andrew returned with

the ruins of his theory, "she must have walked up the steps!"

Miss Longmuir, snatching out her watch, said she didn't care how the

pony got there, the point was to get her down as quickly as possible.

"If people would only do something and not talk!" she added, under her

breath.

"If she walked up she can walk down," said Andrew firmly.

He mounted the steps and took the pony by the halter. The pony

immediately backed thunderously out of sight, taking Andrew with her.

Miss Longmuir flew up the steps to his assistance, and unseen sarabands

pummelled the floor of the loft.

"Go up and help them, you great lazy thing!" said Philippa to me.

"There's no room for any one else," I protested.

Here the combatants reappeared in the doorway, gradually, with

endearments on one side, and suspicious snortings on the other. The

steps were broad and not too intimidating; the pony advanced almost to

the sill, repented in haste, and in her retreat flung Andrew against

the panier of cabbages. A donkey's panier is made to resist shocks; in

this case it apparently gave more than it took; Andrew said nothing,

but he dragged the basket over the sill and hurled it down the steps

with considerable emotion. I joined the party in the loft, and

Philippa collected the cabbages, and laid them in rows upon the steps

as if it were a harvest festival, in the hope of luring the pony to the

descent. The lure was rejected with indignation, and I proceeded to

offer a few plain truths. That the floor would come down before the

mare did. That it would take six men, and planks, and cartloads of

straw, to get her out. Finally, that her race was due to start in

twenty minutes.

"We're done," said Miss Longmuir tragically, addressing Philippa and

Dr. Fraser from the top of the steps, as if they were a stage mob.

"These brutes have beaten us! Don't you remember that Lyney's father

said, 'Let ye keep out from them lads in Poundlick'? And after all our

trouble, and the training, and everything--" She turned abruptly away

from the door.

Dr. Fraser stood still, with her hand to her forehead, as though she

were trying to remember something. Then she too came up into the loft.

The pony had now backed into the pile of bracken; Andrew, whose back

teeth were evidently set tight, was tugging at her halter, and she was

responding by throwing her nose in the air and showing the whites of

her eyes.

"Meg," said Dr. Fraser, at the doorway, "I've remembered something that

I was once told--" She peered into the darkness of the loft. "May I

try?" she said, advancing quietly to the pony's head.

"By all means," said Andrew, as chillingly as was possible for a man

who was very red in the face and was draped with cobwebs.

Looking back now to the affair, I cannot remember that Dr. Fraser did

anything in the least remarkable. She took hold of the halter with one

hand and with the other patted the pony's neck, high up, near the ears.

She also spoke to it, the sort of things anyone might say. For the

life of me I could not see that she did more than anyone else had done,

but Nancy lowered her head and put her ears forward.

Dr. Fraser gave the halter a gentle pull, and said, "Come on, old

girl!" and the pony started forward with a little run.

At the doorway she stopped. We held our breaths. Dr. Fraser patted

her again and placidly descended the first step; the maroan pony placed

a trembling foot upon the threshold, steadied herself, poked her nose

forward, and dropped her forefeet on to the second step.

"She'll come down on top of her!" said Andrew, starting forward.

"Don't touch her!" exclaimed Miss Longmuir, grasping his arm.

With the tense caution of an old dog, the pony let herself down from

step to step, planting her little hoofs cunningly on the rough-set

stones, bracing herself with the skill learned on the rocky staircases

of her native hills. Dr. Fraser kept a step in advance of her. Thus,

with slow clattering, and in deep gravity, they joined Philippa in the

yard.

Five people cannot advantageously collaborate in putting a saddle and

bridle on a pony, but we tried, and in the grim hustle that resulted no

one asked questions or made comments. Amongst us the thing was done,

and there were still seven minutes in hand when Andrew shot out of the

yard on her back. Hard on her heels followed Philippa and Miss

Longmuir, with scarcely inferior velocity. I returned to the remaining

member of the party and found that she had seated herself on the steps.

She said she was tired, and she looked it.

"I daresay getting that beast down the steps was rather a strain?" I

said, spreading the pony's rug for her to sit on.

"Oh, that was nothing. Please don't wait for me."

I said in my best ironic manner that doctors were of course impervious

to fatigue, and indeed superior to all human ills.

She laughed. "I admit that I was rather nervous that the thing

wouldn't work, or would break down half-way."

"What thing?" I demanded. "The pony?"

"No. The secret. It _is_ a secret, you know. My grandfather gave

Rarey thirty pounds for it. I've never had much to say to horses, but

I have started a jibbing hansom horse in Oxford Street with it." She

laughed again, apologetically.

"You needn't believe it unless you like. I must say I was afraid it

mightn't include a flight of steps!" She paused and put back her

abundant fair hair. "How hot it was up in that loft! I wonder if you

could get me a glass of water?"

I told her that I was old enough to believe anything, but added that

after what she had told me I would get a second glass of water, with

sal volatile in it, for myself.

The Holbein grandmother was standing at the back door of the house,

with the baby still on her arm. She and the baby fetched the glass of

water. She said wasn't the pony a Fright for ever after the way he

came down them steps, but why wouldn't the lady take him out through

the other door into the field above?

I made no reply, but while Dr. Fraser was drinking the water, I went up

into the loft, and cleared away the bracken that had been piled in

front of the "door into the field above." I opened the door, and

walked out into the field, and viewed the small hoof-prints that led to

the door of the loft.

I returned to Dr. Fraser, and very gently broke the news to her.

* * * * *

Of course Lyney and the maroan pony won the race. Had this not been a

foregone conclusion it is possible that John Sullivan might have scored

less heavily in the matter of free drinks.

As I was conducting my exhausted but triumphant party off the course,

the Poundlick Sergeant of Police met me and asked me if I would sign a

few summonses for him, as he was after taking some parties into custody

for fighting.

"Drunk, I suppose?"

The Sergeant admitted it, and said the dispute had arisen between the

Kennys and the Lynches on the one side, and the partisans of Lyney

Garrett on the other, out of "circumstances connected with the last

race." The Sergeant's eye rested for an instant, with what may be

described as a respectful twinkle, upon Miss Longmuir.

"It was mostly heavy offers and small blows, Major," he concluded.

"Look here, Sergeant," I said oracularly, "take them all to the

water-jump. Build up the furze in front of it. Make them jump it.

Anyone that gets over it may be considered sober. Anyone that falls in

will be sober enough when he gets out."

I have not, in my judicial career, delivered a judgment that gave more

satisfaction to the public.

VI

MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS

PART I

The leave of Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was expiring, dying hard,

"in rings of strenuous flight," (and my motor) on the road between

Shreelane and Licknavar, which is the home of the Chicken Farmers.

Philippa, who regards a flirtation with an enthusiasm that is as

disinterested as it is inexplicable, assured me that the state of

affairs was perfectly unmistakable. She further said that the male

determination to deny and ignore these things was partly sympathetic

secretiveness, partly the affectation of despising gossip, and mainly

stupidity. She took a long breath after all this, and, seeing Andrew

approaching along the garden path in apparently romantic meditation,

enjoined me to be nice to the poor thing, and departed.

The sun was bright, with the shallow brightness of early October, and

the Virginian creeper made a conflagration on the weather-slated end of

the house. The poor thing deposited himself beside me on the garden

seat. I noticed that his eye rested upon a white chicken with a

brilliant scarlet comb; it was one of several, purchased from the

Chicken Farmers. I would not for worlds have admitted it to Philippa,

but there was undoubtedly sentiment in the glance.

"I hear they're having beastly weather at the Curragh," he said,

leaning back and looking gloomily up into the melting blue sky.

"Stunning that red stuff looks on the house!" He surveyed it, and

sighed; then, suddenly, sentiment faded from his glance. "D'you know,

old boy, that chimney up there is well out of the perpendicular. It'll

be down about your ears some day."

I replied that it had maintained that angle for the seven years of my

tenancy.

"It won't do it much longer," returned my guest. "Look at that crack

in the plaster!"

"Which crack?" I said coldly. (Mr. Flurry Knox is my landlord, and it

is my misfortune to have a repairing lease.)

"Take your choice," said Andrew, scanning the chimneys with the alert

and pitiful eye of the Royal Engineer. "My money's on the northern

one, under the jackdaw."

"Oh, confound you and the jackdaws!" I said pettishly. "The chimney

draws all right."

But the matter did not end there. Before luncheon, Andrew and I had

made a tour of the roof, and he had demonstrated unanswerably, and with

appalling examples from barracks that he had repaired in Central India,

and built in Wei-hai-Wei, that nothing but habit and family feeling

induced any one of the chimney stacks to stand up.

At luncheon he told Philippa that he hoped she would insure the

children before the next westerly gale. Philippa replied by asking if

he, or anyone else, had ever heard of a chimney falling, unless it had

been struck by lightning, in which case it wouldn't matter if it were

straight or crooked; and though this was manifestly worthless as an

argument, neither Andrew nor I could remember an instance in support of

our case. That the case had now become mine as well as Andrew's was

the logical result of illogical opposition, and at Philippa's door I

deposit the responsibility for a winter of as varied discomforts as it

has been our lot to endure.

The matter matured rapidly. In the mellow moment that comes with

coffee and cigarettes, I began, almost pleasurably, to lay out the

campaign.

"I can't see any point in wasting money on a contractor," said Andrew

airily. "Any of your local masons could do it if I explained the job

to him. A fortnight ought to see it through."

It was at this point that I should have sat heavily upon Andrew. I was

not without experience of the local mason and his fortnights; what

could Andrew know of such? I had a brief and warning vision of Captain

Larpent, seated at an office table adorned with sheets of perfect

ground-plans and elevations, issuing instructions to a tensely

intelligent Sapper Sergeant. I saw the Sergeant, supreme in scientific

skill (and invariably sober), passing on the orders to a scarcely less

skilled company of prompt subordinates--but my "worser angel"

obliterated it. And that very afternoon, on our way to Aussolas, we

chanced to meet upon the road the local mason himself, William

Shanahan, better known to fame as "Walkin' Aisy." He was progressing

at a rate of speed that accorded with his sub-title, and, as I

approached him, a line of half-forgotten verse came back:

"Entreat her not, her eyes are full of dreams."

Nevertheless, I stopped the car.

[Illustration: "Walkin' Aisy."]

In answer to enquiries, he mused, with his apostolic countenance bent

upon the ground; after a period of profound meditation, he asked me why

wouldn't I get one of the big fellas out from the town? I have never

known Walkin' Aisy to accept a job without suggesting that some one

else could do it better than he (in which he was probably quite right).

This may have been humility, due to the fact that his father had been

that despised thing, "a dry-wall builder"; it may have been from

coquetry, but I am inclined to think it was due to a mixture of

other-worldliness and sloth.

On pressure he said that he had still a small pieceen of work to

finish, but he might be able to come down to-morrow to travel the roof

and see what would be wanting to us, and on Monday week, with the help

of God, he would come in it. His blue eyes wavered towards the

horizon. The interview closed.

"'Fair and young were they when in hope they began that long journey,'"

cooed Philippa, as we moved away. The quotation did not, as I well

knew, refer to our visit to the Knoxes.

At Aussolas I aired my project to my landlord. Flurry is not a person

to whom it is agreeable to air a project.

"Rebuild the chimneys, is it? Oh, with all my heart. Is there

anything the matter with them?"

Andrew explained the imminence of our peril, and Flurry listened to him

with his inscrutable eye on me.

"Well, it'll be some fun for you during the winter, Major, but be

careful when you're cutting the ivy!"

I was betrayed into asking why.

"Because there's only it and the weather-slating keeping the walls

standing."

"If I may presume to contradict one so much younger than myself," said

old Mrs. Knox, "Shreelane is as well built a house as there is in the

county." Her voice was, as ever, reminiscent of a bygone century and

society; it was also keen-edged, as became a weapon of many wars,

ancient and modern. She turned to me. "In the storm of '39 I remember

that my father said that if Shreelane fell not a house in Ireland would

stand. Every one in the house spent that night in the kitchen."

"May be that was nothing new to them," suggested Flurry.

Mrs. Knox regarded her grandson steadfastly and continued her story.

It has already been noted that when he and she were of the same company

they considered no other antagonist worthy of their steel.

"It was my great-grandfather who built Shreelane in honour of his

marriage," she went on. "He married a Riggs of Castle Riggs, a cousin

of the celebrated Major Apollo--and thereby hangs a tale!" She blinked

her eyes like an old rat, and looked round at each of us in turn. I

felt as if I were being regarded through a telescope, from the

standpoint of a distant century.

"They knew how to build in those days," she began again. "The basement

story of Shreelane is all vaulted."

"I daresay the kitchen would make a nice vault," said Flurry.

His grandmother looked hard at him, and was silent, which seemed to me

a rather remarkable occurrence.

On the following day, Andrew and Walkin' Aisy "travelled the roof," and

I accompanied them--that is to say, I sat on the warm lead, with my

back against the sunny side of a chimney, and smoked torpidly, while

Andrew preached, firmly and distinctly, from the top of a ladder.

Walkin' Aisy stood at the foot of the ladder, submissive, with folded

hands, and upturned bearded face, looking like an elderly saint in the

lower corner of a stained-glass window. At the conclusion of the

lecture he said that surely the chimneys might fall any minute, but,

for all, they might stand a hundred years; a criticism almost

stupefying in its width of outlook.

The following day Captain Larpent departed to the Curragh, and, as is

often the way of human beings with regard to their guests, we partly

breathed more freely, and partly regretted him. On the whole it was

restful.

A fortnight passed, and I had almost forgotten about the chimneys; I

was in the act of making an early start for an absence of a couple of

days at the farther side of my district, when I encountered Walkin'

Aisy at the hall door.

"I'm here since six o'clock this morning, but I had no one to tend me,"

he began.

I was familiar with this plaint, and proffered him the yard boy.

"The young fella's too wake," replied Walkin' Aisy, in his slow and

dreamy voice, "and they takes him from me." His mild eyes rested upon

me in saddened reverie. "And there should be morthar mixed," he

resumed slowly, "and there's not a pick of gravel in the yard."

I said, as I pulled on my gloves, that he could have Johnny Brien from

the garden to minister to him, and that there was no hurry about the

mortar.

"Well, it's what I was saying to the gardener," returned Walkin' Aisy

very slowly, "I have no business coming here at all till those chimneys

is taken down. The sahmint that's on them is very strong. It's what

the gardener said, that quarry-men would be wanting."

"Why the devil didn't you say this at first?" I demanded, not without

heat. "You and Captain Larpent told me that the old cement had no more

hold than the sugar on a cake."

"Well, the Captain knows best," replied Walkin' Aisy gently, "we should

do what he says."

"Well, get the chimneys down; I don't care who does it."

I drove away, and from the turn of the drive saw Walkin' Aisy, in

motionless trance, looking after the car as if it were a chariot of

fire.

The well-known routine followed; the long and airless day in the

Court-house, the roar of battle of the rival solicitors, the wearisome

iteration of drunks and trespasses, the intricacies of family feuds;

the stodgy and solitary dinner at the hotel, followed by the evening in

the arid smoking-room, the stale politics of its habitues, the stagnant

pessimism of the proprietor, the same thing over again next day and the

day after.

It was not until the afternoon of the third day that I found myself

serenely gliding homeward, with the wind behind me, and before me the

prospect of that idleness that, like the only thirst worth having, has

been earned. I was in the straight for the hall door, when I saw my

wife dart from the house, gesticulating, and waving her handkerchief as

if to check my approach. She was followed, at no great interval, by an

avalanche of rubble and bricks from the roof, that fell like a portent

from heaven, and joined itself to a considerable heap by the steps.

"You never know when it's coming!" she cried breathlessly. "I've been

watching for you. It's impossible to make them hear from below, and I

can't find any of the men--they're all on the roof."

The restoration had begun, but that fact might not have occurred to a

stranger. Next day, and for many days--six weeks, to be exact--the

house shook as from the blows of a battering-ram, in response to the

efforts of the quarrymen to remove from the chimneys the cement that

had no more hold on them than the sugar on a cake, and at frequent and

uncertain intervals various debris rumbled down the roof and fell

heavily below. There were days when it fell in front of the house,

there were days when it fell in the flower garden; where it fell, there

it lay, because there was no one to take it away; all were absorbed in

tending Walkin' Aisy, and the murmurs of their inexhaustible

conversation came to us down the chimneys like the hoarse cooing of

wood pigeons. There were also days when by reason of storms and rain

nothing was done, and black and evil floods descended into the rooms

down the ruins of the chimneys, and through the slates, broken by the

feet of the quarrymen. At Christmas the kitchen chimney alone remained

in action, and we ate our Christmas dinner in fur coats and a fireless

dining-room. Philippa refrained from any allusion to the quotation

from Longfellow that she had made after that first interview with

Walkin' Aisy. She even denied herself the gratification of adding its

context:

"Faded and old were they when in disappointment it ended," but I knew

that she was thinking it.