PART III

It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that

the impossible invariably occurs. When on Monday morning I learned

that Flurry was to be one of the hares, and beheld him mounted on his

best horse, as covered with bags as a postman on Christmas Day, I

recalled the epigram. Another confirmation of the law of the

unexpected was the fact that Meg Longmuir, on the "maroan" pony, was

his fellow hare, very smart, much elated, and quite unaware that she

had been substituted for Sally Knox at the last moment, in order that

she might be as a millstone hung round the neck of Flurry. That this

arrangement was not what Captain Larpent had desired was sufficiently

apparent to the naked eye: why Flurry submitted to it was less obvious.

About a dozen riders had been whipped up to take part in this

preposterous affair, and were standing about on the grass in front of

Shreelane, cutting up the turf as much as the hardness of the ground

would permit, and making as much noise as a pack of hounds at feeding

time. The April sun glared hot, the better part of a north-easterly

gale was blowing, the horses had over-eaten themselves with the bread

of idleness, and were fat and frisky.

"Is he any good?" said Flurry to me in a low voice, with his eye on

Andrew, who was sitting, shrouded in gloom and remoteness, on the

chestnut horse.

"Ask Miss Longmuir," I said. "She was schooling with him on Saturday."

"I'll have plenty to do minding her, without asking her questions that

she couldn't answer," returned Flurry. He resumed his survey of

Andrew. "I wonder will he be able to hold that horse in a snaffle? He

catches hold an odd time."

"Stand by!" said Doctor Hickey, his watch in his hand. "Fifteen

seconds more before the hares start!"

"Well, if Larpent goes as big as he talks, he'll do," said Flurry,

gathering up his reins.

The ten minutes of grace ebbed slowly away, and preposterous though I

still held the affair to be, I do not deny that I was aware of an

inward simmering of impatience.

"I'll have the face worn off my watch looking at it if you don't let us

start soon!" said Miss Larkie McRory to Hickey.

She was mounted on a long-legged animal that had been summarised by

Flurry as "the latter end of a car-horse," and was certainly in need of

all the time it could get.

"Don't excite yourself now, or I'll be having to order you a cooling

draught!" returned the Doctor, but I perceived that he, in common with

everyone else, was edging his horse towards the point of departure.

"Go!"

In the riot of the break-away, I was able to think of nothing but of

keeping Daniel from bucking me over his head, but during the hustle at

the avenue gates I observed Andrew riding off Bernard, and getting to

the front with pale and ferocious determination. The "scent" took us

along the road; we followed it over a stony bank and across two fields,

at steeplechase pace, and then it ceased. By this time any lingering

sense of absurdity had ceased also. We cast ourselves feverishly, like

hounds; we galloped great circles; someone found the paper again, and

yelled like a maniac. We all yelled in response, a variety of yells,

from "Tally Ho" to "Cooee," as, like Bedlam let loose, we rushed to the

discoverer. We were up on high land now, and the wind was whirling in

our ears, snatching our voices away to infinity, and blowing up the

temperatures of horses and riders like a bellows. It had caught away

the torn paper and flung it to leeward, into furze brakes, against the

sides of the banks, and checks were many, and the horses, convinced

that the hounds were somewhere ahead, pulled double. In the bare

fields, with their scanty April grass, everything showed up; we were

deceived by white stones, by daisies, by dandelion puff-balls, by

goose-feathers; most of all we were deceived by country-people, whom, I

have no doubt, Flurry had instructed to mislead us.

We had had a long check, consequent on a false trail, when, three

fields away, Andrew held up his hat.

"Look at him now, running mute!" giggled Sally Knox in my ear, as we

battered down a road. "He's too cross to shout. He's frantic because

he's not the hare, and Meg Longmuir was sent with Flurry! And poor

Flurry, who's going such a nice safe line!"

"I suppose we may thank Miss Longmuir for the safe line?" I responded

with some difficulty, because Daniel was enjoying himself on the road,

according to the idiotic manner of horses.

"No! You may thank the chestnut horse!" ejaculated Flurry Knox's wife,

as she hoisted out of the road over a loose wall.

Remembering that Andrew was intended to buy the chestnut horse, the

deduction was a simple one. It was also quite clear that,

disappointing as it might be, and contrary to the most cherished

convention, Andrew was going as big as he talked, and even bigger.

"'Them that's in love is like no one'!" I quoted to Mrs. Flurry, as

Captain Larpent, taking the shortest way to a drift of paper on a

hillside, charged a tall, furze-tufted fence, and got over with a

scramble. We followed, less heroically, by a gap, and ascended the

hill, with the torn paper scurrying in front of us in the gusty wind.

We had now been going for thirty-five minutes, and were all, horses and

riders, something blown; Miss Larkie's car-horse could have been heard

down-wind for half a mile, and I would have backed Daniel to out-roar

any lion in the den.

Nothing but the checks held us together. Doctor Hickey, and Irving,

the District Inspector, were taking the matter seriously, and were

riding hard to catch Andrew, for the honour of the country. Bernard

Shute and two or three other heavy-weights were afoot, dragging their

dripping horses over a bank with an up-hill take off; Miss McRory and

the car-horse were making an extremely gradual progress in the rear,

and Philippa had pulled back to give her leads, with an unselfishness

that was not only futile, but was also a reproach to me and my

fellow-men.

We had been going in a big ring, and from the top of the hill we could

again see Shreelane, below us among its trees. It was there also that

we caught the first sight of the hares, now heading for home and

safety. The wind had strengthened to half a gale, and the wild and

composite yell with which the hounds viewed their quarry was blown back

into their throats. The maroan pony had fulfilled her mission as a

handicap; twice we saw Flurry dismount and pull down a gap; once, at a

bank, he got behind her and whipped her over like a peg-top. Another

field took them to the high road. A puff of white paper fluttered out,

and Miss Longmuir looked back and flourished a defiant whip; they

turned, and galloped in a cloud of dust along the road for Shreelane.

It was not a nice hill to get down in a hurry, and I should think the

chestnut horse dreams of it now, somewhere in the level English

Midlands, after he has over-eaten himself on fat English oats. For my

part, I remembered a humble but useful path, that links a little group

of cottages with the rest of the world.

The paper lay thick on the road in the shelter of the fences; everyone

began to ride for a finish, and after a quarter of a mile of pounding

in the dust at the heel of the hunt, I considered that Daniel and I had

satisfied the demands of honour, and ignobly turned in at the back way

to the stable yard, permitting the chase to sweep on to the front gates

without me.

In the stable yard I found several objects of interest. The hares were

there, dismounted, very hot, and uncaptured; Mrs. Knox was there,

seated in her phaeton; there was a cluster of servants at the back

door; there were McRorys, leaning on bicycles; there was Cecilia Shute,

in her motor, with unknown rank and fashion billowing in motor veils

beside her.

All were gazing at a mass of sooty bricks and shattered chimney-pots

that lay, scattered wide, in and about the black dredgings of the

turf-house well.

"That's the gable chimney," said Flurry coolly; "it got tired of

waiting for Walkin' Aisy. We heard the roar of it as we came in the

front gate!" He turned his mail-bag upside down so that its ultimate

dregs were blown far and wide. "How did the chestnut horse go

with----?"

As if in reply, hoofs clattered outside the yard, and the white nose of

the chestnut shot into the opening of the yard gate. He plunged past

me, with Andrew lying back and tugging at the snaffle. The Shreelane

yard was fairly spacious, but I began to think that the thing wasn't as

funny as it looked. The horse swerved at Mrs. Knox's phaeton, swerved

again as Flurry turned him from his stable door with a flourish of the

mail-bag. Andrew wrenched his head straight for the open back gate,

and might have got him out without disaster, had not the widespread

ruin of the chimney intervened. The chestnut once more tried to

swerve, his legs went from under him, and he fell, striking fire from

the cobble stones of the yard. Andrew stuck to him to the last

instant, but was shot clear, and was flung, head first, into the heap

of stones and black mud.

It seemed long, long hours between this catastrophe, and a sufficient

subsidence of things in general, for me to be able, without inhumanity,

to envisage a whisky and soda. Old Mrs. Knox watched me with approval.

"I'm tired of looking at young men drinking tea," she commented. (It

was Mrs. Knox's pleasing idiosyncrasy to look upon me as a young man.)

"They were like a pack of curates at a school-feast! Not that I was

ever at a school-feast, thank God!" she added, with an abandoned

chuckle.

We were sitting in a corner of the dining-room, surrounded by empty

cups and crumby plates; tides of tea and of talkers had ebbed and

flowed, but Mrs. Knox had sat on--to hear my personal report of Andrew,

she said.

"Upon my honour, he escaped very well! A dislocated shoulder is

nothing, and the young lady is there to 'tend the wounded Deloraine!'"

She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the

prompter. "How does it go? 'She thought some spirit of the sky had

done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'"

She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her

spectacles, and made them impenetrable.

"Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!'

says Major Yeates, R.M.!"

I protested that I had said nothing of the kind. She prodded me in the

knee with a goblin finger.

"_Close that well_! Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!"

She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain.

"Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the

time of the Famine!"

I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would

be interesting to know why.

Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by

something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace. It was a

cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold

smooth from age.

"I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs? He drove up to this

house one fine day in a coach-and-four. Next day the coach-and-four

drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!"

"He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested.

"Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox

portentously.

"A duel?" I asked.

"He was never seen again, my dear!" replied Mrs. Knox. (There are

moments, in Ireland, when this term of affection is used not so much

affectionately as confidentially.)

At this point the door opened. Mrs. Knox put the goblin finger on her

lips, as Philippa, still in her habit, slid into the room.

"The patient and Meg are extremely self-sufficing," she said, dropping

into a chair. "His face is turning all colours of the rainbow, and one

eye has disappeared, but the other is full of expression and is fixed

on Meg!"

"There's not much colour about _you_," I said. "You ought to have a

whisky and soda."

"Nonsense!" said Philippa, waving me away; "we've got most of the black

stuff out of his hair; even his waistcoat pocket was full of it! And

bits of the torn paper had stuck to it, like confetti."

"That suggests a wedding," I observed.

"Quite," said Philippa. "But the absurd thing was that one of the

confetti--obviously a bit of those old letters that the children tore

up--had the word 'Apollo' on it! It was stuck on to him like a label."

Mrs. Knox clasped her hands, and lay back in her chair.

"I said it was, of course, a tribute to his beauty, but Meg was not at

all amused. She thought it was 'lese majeste.'"

"She'll get over that in time," I said, putting the seal in my pocket.

VII

WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY

There was a wonderful chandelier in the hotel dining-room. Fine bronze

it was made of, with mermaids, and Tritons, and dolphins flourishing

their tails up towards the dingy ceiling-paper, and beaked galleys, on

whose prows sat six small lamps, with white china receptacles for

paraffin, and smoky brown chimneys. Gone were the brave days when each

prow had borne a galaxy of tall wax candles; the chandelier might

consider itself lucky in that it had even the paraffin lamps to justify

its existence, and that it still hung from a ceiling, instead of

sharing the last resting-place of its twin brother, in the bed of the

tidal river under the hotel windows.

James, the hotel waiter, knew the family history of the chandelier, as

he knew that of most people and things in the county. I commented upon

it to a young gentleman with a pointed beard, who sat next to me at

dinner, and said that it looked to me like Renaissance. The young

gentleman suggested, alternatively, that it looked more like bronze. I

did not dispute the point, but I think he found the subject precarious,

as he turned to the young lady on his left, and I heard him embark upon

a new theme.

[Illustration: James.]

"I was half dead with the toothache all day," he observed.

The young lady replied sympathetically that toothache was a fright.

"Well, indeed, that's true," said James, smoothly entering the

conversation from behind my chair. "I got my own share of it. Sure

there was one time I used to be roaring like a Banshee all night with

it."

"Were you so?" said the gentleman, with a wink at me. "That must have

been a long time ago, James."

"Well, indeed, it is too, Doctor," replied James meditatively, "going

on forty years, I daresay. I went to Dublin, and I went to a great

dentist that was in it that time, and he pulled all the teeth I had,

and he gave me a new set entirely."

"Oh, my!" said the young lady, "that must have been very expensive."

"It was so," said James, not without pride. "Twenty pounds I gave him."

"That was awful," said the young lady, feelingly; "it was well to be

you that had it to spend."

"Well, it wasn't all out so bad," said James; "sure I only wore them a

few times--I wouldn't be bothered with them, and a doctor that was a

friend of mine gave me ten pounds for them."

"I suppose they were a fit for a patient of his?" said the doctor.

"They were a bad fit for me, anyway," returned James, glancing over his

shoulder at the clattering operations of his two female subordinates,

with the eye of the sergeant-major--the eye that always contains a

grievance. "I was a footman with the old Lord Garretmore that time.

Sure that was where the chandelier came from. A grand house it was,

too--big slobs of marble on the tables, and gold legs under them, and

ye'd bog to the knees in the carpets. Well, it was the first night

after me getting the teeth, there was a gentleman stayed for dinner,

and he was to go away by the night train. Forty horses were in the

stables, and there wasn't one but was out at grass, and I had to go out

beating the bushes for an old mare that was round the house always,

herself and her foal, to put her under the side car. 'Prua! Prua!'

says I, calling the mare in the dark, and with that the teeth lepped

out of my mouth, with respects to you!"

"Oh, fie!" said the mother of the young lady.

"What did you do then, James?" inquired the Doctor.

"I took the white tie off me, and I tied it to the bush that was next

me, for a token, and 'twas that way I got them again the next morning,

thanks be to God."

Having concluded his story, James started on a perfunctory tour of the

table with the wine card. He stopped to pull the turf fire together,

and, with a furtive eye at the glass over the chimney-piece, he

rearranged the long lock of hair that draped his bald pate. It was

dyed, of that peculiar shade of chestnut that disdains subterfuge, and

the fact and its suggestions were distressing where an old servant was

concerned; so also was the manner in which he hobbled on his heels.

"His walk's full of corns," said the young doctor, eyeing him not

without sympathy. "He's a great old character. I believe they keep

him here to talk to the tourists."

It is a melancholy fact that in Ireland, in these later days,

"characters" have become aware of their position, and palpably live up

to their reputation. But James was in a class of his own.

I said didactically, even combatively, that "characters" were free and

easy, but that James was easy without being free.

"I'll bet he's not easy in his feet, anyhow!" said the Doctor brutally.

"Have you any more soup there, James?"

The mother of the young lady, who had hitherto preserved a silence,

broken only by the audible assimilation of her soup, here laid down her

spoon and said in cryptic disparagement:

"Tin!"

"Well, I'd say it was the best we had yet," said the Doctor. "I'd

undertake to pull a puppy through distemper with it."

"That's the soup she has always for th'assizes," said James. "Grand

soup it is, and I declare to ye, she makes it out of egg shells and

every old rubbish!"

The young lady's mother emitted a short laugh, but her empty soup-plate

told heavily against her.

The meal wore slowly on. A sea fish, of a genus unknown to me, and

amazingly endowed with bones, was consumed in distracted silence.

"I hear you have a fish shop opened in Ballinagar, Mrs. M'Evoy,"

remarked the Doctor, taking his last fish bone out of action with

professional adroitness, and addressing the mother of the young lady,

"That's very up-to-date. There wasn't one I met from Ballinagar but

was bragging of it."

"It was the Hoolahanes that had it," said Mrs. M'Evoy. "It's closed."

"Oh dear, why so?" said the Doctor. "Why did they do that, I wonder?"

"They said that morning, noon, and night people were bothering them for

fish," returned Mrs. M'Evoy, to whom this triumph of the artistic

temperament presented no exceptional feature.

"Unless it might be on a fast day, I'd never ask to taste a bit of

fish," remarked James, giving a helping hand to the conversation.

"There was a man I knew from this place got his death in Liverpool from

a bit of fish. It stuck to the upper gum. 'Bill,' says he to the one

that was with him, 'so help me God,' says he, 'I'm dyin',' says he; and

sure that's how he met his death! It was in some grand hotel he was,

and he was too shy to give the puff to send out the bit."

"I'd like to send that to the 'B.M.J.'," said the Doctor gravely.

"Maybe you could give me the man's name, James?"

"There was them that could swear to it," said James, depositing a

syphon on the table in a determined manner, "but they were before your

day, Doctor Hickey."

"How young he is!" said Miss M'Evoy archly. "Don't be flattering him,

James."

"Indeed I'll not flatter him," returned James, "there's plenty doing

that."

It was at about this point that a dish containing three roast ducks was

placed in front of me. Circumstances had decreed that I sat at the end

of the table; it was my task to deal with the ducks, and during the

breathless and steamy struggle that ensued, I passed out of the

conversation, which, indeed, had resolved itself into a more personal

affair between Dr. Hickey and Miss M'Evoy.

It was somewhere in the reposeful period that came with the cheese,

that Dr. Hickey ordered a bottle of port, of which he very handsomely

invited the ladies and me to partake. He leaned back in his chair.

"Was this in the cellar the time of the flood?" he said, putting down

his glass. "I don't mean Noah's flood, James; you mightn't remember

that; but the time the river came up in the town here."

"If it was Noah's flood itself," said James, instantly accepting

combat, "it couldn't get into our cellars. But, faith, it was up in

this room you're sitting in, and I had to get up on the table from it,

and it ruz to the table, and I had to hang out of the chandelier, and a

boat came into the room then and took me out. Sure that was the time

that the porpoise came up the river, with the dint of the flood, and

she was in it for a week, in front of the hotel."

"In compliment to the visitors, I suppose?" said the Doctor. "And what

happened her, James?"

"She was in it till a whale came up the river," replied James, with the

simplicity of Holy Writ, "and b'Jove he banished her!"

"It's a wonder you'd let him treat a lady that way, James," said Dr.

Hickey.

It was still twilight when we left the dining-room, and strayed to the

open hall door, and out into the September evening. In the east a

rose-pink moon was rising in lavender haze, and a faint wind blew from

it; the subtle east wind of September, warmed by its journey across the

cornfields, turf-scented by the bogs. There was a narrow garden

between the hotel and the river, a place where were new and

already-neglected flower-beds, and paths heavy with coarse river

gravel, and grass that had been cut, not too recently, with a scythe.

A thatched summer-house completed the spasmodic effort of the hotel to

rise to smartness. The West of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any

right-minded person desire that it should be so.

Dr. Hickey and I sat and smoked on the parapet wall above the river,

while the slated and whitewashed town darkened into mystery. Little

lights came slowly out, and behind the town the grey shape of Dreelish

mountain lowered in uncompromising abruptness, a brooding presence,

felt rather than seen. In the summer-house James was lighting a

Chinese lantern, of a somewhat crumpled and rheumatic outline.

"Well, now, that's a great notion!" said Dr. Hickey, with the lethargic

and pessimistic humour of his type. "That'll be in the

prospectus--'Hotel grounds illuminated every night.' I wonder did they

buy that at the Jumble Sale after the Fancy Fair in the Town Hall?"

We sat there, and the moon and the round red Chinese lantern looked at

each other across the evening, and had a certain resemblance, and I

reflected on the fact that an Irishman is always the critic in the

stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.

"Look at James now," said the Doctor. "He's inviting the ladies out to

have coffee in the summer-house. That's very fashionable. I suppose

we should go there too."

We sat with Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in the summer-house, and drank

something that was unearthly black in the red light, and was singularly

unsuggestive of coffee. The seats were what is known as "rustic," and

had aggressive knobs in unexpected places; the floor held the

invincible dampness of the West, yet the situation was not

disagreeable. At the other side of the river men were sitting on a

wall, and talking, quietly, inexhaustibly; now and then a shout of

laughter broke from one of them, like a flame from a smouldering fire.

"These lads are waiting to go back on the night mail," said the Doctor;

"you wouldn't think they're up since maybe three this morning to come

in to the fair."

Here a railway whistle made a thin bar of sound somewhere out under the

low moon, that had now lifted herself clear of the haze. A voice

called from the hill-side:

"Hora-thu! Tommeen! Let yee be coming on!"

The men tumbled on to the road, and hurried, heavy-footed, in the

direction of the station.

"Sure, they've half an hour yet, the creatures," said Mrs. M'Evoy.

"They have, and maybe an hour before they have the pigs shunted," said

James, re-entering with a plate of biscuits, adorned with pink and

white sugar.

"Ah! what signifies half an hour here or there on this line!" said Dr.

Hickey. "I'm told there was a lady travelling on it last week, and she

had a canary in a cage, and the canary got loose and flew out of the

window, and by George, the lady pulled the communication cord, and

stopped the train!"

"Well, now, she showed her sense," said Mrs. M'Evoy, with an utterance

slightly muffled in pink biscuit.

"She and the guard went then trying to catch the canary," continued Dr.

Hickey, "and he'd sit till they'd get near him, and then he'd fly on

another piece. Everyone that was in the train was hanging out of it,

and betting on it, from one carriage to another, and some would back

the lady and some would back the bird, and everyone telling them what

to do."

"It's a pity _you_ weren't in it," said Miss M'Evoy, "they'd have been

all right then."

"It was that bare bit of bog near Bohirmeen," pursued Dr. Hickey,

without a stagger, "not a tree in it. 'If he have a fly left in him at

all,' says a chap out of a Third Smoker, 'ye'll get him in Mike

Doogan's bush.' That was the only bush in the country."

"'Twas true for him," said James.

"Well, they got him in the bush," proceeded Dr. Hickey, "singing away

for himself; but they had some trouble crossing the drains. I'm told

the guard said the lady lepped like a horse!"

"You had it right, all to the singing," commented Mrs. M'Evoy,

advancing as it were to the footlights. "I have the little bird

upstairs this minute, and she never sang a note yet!"

Mrs. M'Evoy here permitted herself to subside into fat and deep-seated

chuckles, and Miss M'Evoy, James, and I gave way suitably to our

feelings.

"Well, now, I thought it was a nice idea, the canary to be singing,"

said Dr. Hickey, emerging from the situation as from a football

scrimmage, in which he had retained possession of the ball. "The next

time I tell the story, I'll leave that out, and I can say that the lady

that lepped like a horse was Mrs. M'Evoy. They'll believe me then."

"Why wouldn't you say the canary was an eagle?" said Miss M'Evoy.

"There used to be plenty eagles in these mountains back here."

"Well, indeed, I might too," said Dr. Hickey. "I remember it was

somewhere in these parts that an uncle of mine was staying one time,

and a man came to the hotel with an eagle to sell to the tourists. My

uncle was like Mrs. M'Evoy here, he was very fond of birds; and the man

said the eagle'd be a lovely pet. Whatever way it was, he bought it."

He paused to light a cigarette, and James pretended to collect the

coffee cups.

"He gave the eagle to the Boots to mind for him," resumed the Doctor,

"and the Boots put it into an empty bedroom. It wasn't more than seven

o'clock next morning when my uncle was wakened up, and the waiter came

in. 'There's a man in the kitchen, your honour,' says he, 'and he has

a great fighting aigle, and he says he'll fight your honour's aigle in

the passage.' They had a grand fight between the two o' them in the

spare room, and in the end my uncle's eagle went up the chimney, and

the man's eagle went out through the glass in the window. My uncle had

a nice bill to pay for all that was broken in the room, and in the end

he gave the eagle to the Zoo."

"Faith, he did not!" shouted James suddenly. "He left him stuck in the

chimbley! And sure it was I that got him out, and meself that sold him

to a gentleman that was going to Ameriky. Sure, I was the waiter!"

Dr. Hickey threw himself back in his rustic chair.

"Holy smoke! This is no place for me," he said; "every story I have is

true in spite of me."

Soon afterwards the ladies went to bed, and Dr. Hickey and I smoked on

for a time. He explained to me that he was here as "locum" for a

friend of his; it wasn't much of a catch, but he was only just after

passing for his Medical, and you'd nearly go as locum for a tinker's

dog after you had three years' grinding in Dublin put in. This was a

God-forsaken sort of a hole, not a hound within fifty miles, nor anyone

that would know a hound if they saw one, but the fishing was middling

good. From this point the conversation flowed smoothly into channels

of sport, and the dual goals of Dr. Hickey's ambition were divulged to

me.

"There was a chap I was at school with--Knox his name was--that has a

little pack of foxhounds down in the South, and he's as good as

promised me I'm to whip in to him if I can get the Skebawn Dispensary

that's vacant now, and I might have as good a chance of it as another."

My own ambitions were also, at the moment, dual, being matrimonial,

with a Resident Magistracy attached, but I did not feel it necessary to

reveal them. I mentioned that I was having a day's fishing here on my

way to Donegal to shoot grouse, but did not add that Philippa, to whom

I was newly engaged, was implicated in the grouse party, still less

that it was my intention to meet her the next afternoon at Carrow Cross

Junction, an hour away, and proceed with her to the home of her uncle,

an hour or so further on.

"You might have three hours, or maybe four, to wait at Carrow Cross,"

said Dr. Hickey, as if tracking my thought; "why wouldn't you drive out

to the Sports at Carrow Bay? It's only four miles, and there's a

Regatta there to-morrow, and when the tide goes out they have races on

the sands. I believe there's a trotting-match too, and an exhibition

of crochet."

It did not seem to me that I wanted to go to Carrow Bay, but it was not

necessary to say so.

Trucks at the station were banging into their neighbours, with much

comment from the engine; I thought of Tommeen and his comrades, up

since 3 A.M., and still waiting to get home, and it suggested the

privileges of those who could go to bed.

It was over a whisky and soda in the heavily reminiscent atmosphere of

the smoking-room that Dr. Hickey told me he was going to take the

ladies to the Sports, and mentioned that there would be a train at

eleven, and a spare seat on the car from Carrow Cross. It required no

special effort to see the position that I was to occupy in relation to

Mrs. M'Evoy; I followed the diplomatic method of my country; I looked

sympathetic, and knew certainly that I should not be there.

I leaned out of my window that night, to look at the river, with the

moon on it, hustling over the shallows, and thought of the porpoise,

who had been so unchivalrously banished by the whale. I also wondered

when the English post got in. I was presently aware of a head

projecting from a window just below, and a female voice said, as if in

continuance of a conversation:

"We should coax James for the cold duck to take with us."

"That's a good idea," replied the rotund voice of Mrs. M'Evoy; "we'll

get nothing out there that a Christian could eat, and there might be

that gentleman too." (That gentleman closed one eye.) "Come in now,

Ally! There's an east wind coming in that would perish the crows."

The guillotine slam of the sash followed. The river warbled and washed

through the stillness; its current was not colder, more clear, than

"that gentleman's" resolve that he would not grace the luncheon party

at Carrow Bay Sports.

I breakfasted late and in solitude, ministered to by one of the female

underlings of James; the voice of James himself, I heard distantly, in

war and slaughtering, somewhere behind the scenes. The letter that I

wanted had not failed me, and I smoked a very honeyed cigarette over it

in the garden afterwards. A glimpse of Dr. Hickey at the hotel door in

a palpably new tie, and of Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in splendour in the

hall, broke into my peace. I quietly but unhesitatingly got over the

wall of the garden, and withdrew by way of the river bank.

When the 11 o'clock train had left I returned to the halcyon stillness

of the hotel; my own train left at 1.30; it was a time favourable, and

almost attractive, for letter writing. As I wrote, I heard the voice

of James demanding in thunder where was Festus O'Flaherty, and why

hadn't he the chickens plucked. A small female voice replied that the

Doctor and the ladies had left their lunch after them, and that Festus

had run up to the station to try would he overtake them with it, and

the thrain was gone.

"And if it was themselves they left after them," retorted James, still

in thunder, "what was that to him?"

To this conundrum no answer was attempted; I bestowed upon Mrs. M'Evoy

some transient compassion, and she and her company departed, hull down,

below the horizon of my thoughts.

A few hours afterwards, I trod the solitudes of Carrow Cross Junction,

and saw the train that had brought me there bend like a caterpillar

round a spur of hill, and disappear. When I looked round again the

little bookstall was shuttered up, and the bookstall lady was vanishing

down a flight of steps; the porter had entrenched himself in the goods

store; the stationmaster was withdrawn from human ken with the

completeness only achievable by his kind. I was suspended in space for

three hours, and the indifference of my fellow-creatures was

unconcealed. A long walk to nowhere and back again was the obvious

resource of the destitute.

The town of Carrow Cross lay in a hollow below the station, with the

blue turf smoke stagnant above its muddle of slate and thatched roofs;

I skirted it, and struck out into the country. I did not find it

attractive. Potato fields in September are not looking their best;

there were no trees, and loose, crooked walls overran the landscape.

The peak of Dreelish mountain was visible, but the dingy green country

rose high between me and it, like the cope on the neck of a priest. I

walked for an hour; I sat on a wall and read Philippa's letter again,

and found, with a shock, that I had only one cigarette left. A fatuous

fear of missing the train turned me back in the direction of the

station, slightly hungry, and profoundly bored. I came into the town

by a convent, and saw the nuns walking flowingly in twos, under

chestnut trees; asceticism in its most pictorial aspect, with the

orange leaves and the blue September haze, and the black robes and

white headgear. I wondered how they managed to go on walking neatly to

nowhere and back again with such purpose, and if they felt as jaded as

I, and as little enlivened by the environs of Carrow Cross.

The town was an unprepossessing affair of two or three streets,

whitewash and thatch squeezed between green and gold pubs, like old

country-women among fashionable daughters. Everything was closed; as I

looked along the empty street an outside car drawn by a dun pony turned

into it at high speed, the pony forging with a double click-clack. As

the car swung towards me some one flourished a stick, some one else a

red parasol.

"We got a bit tired waiting for the sports," Dr. Hickey said, as he

assisted Mrs. M'Evoy to alight at a house labelled Lynch's Railway

Hotel, in royal blue; "it seemed that the tide wasn't going out as fast

as the Committee expected. It might be another hour or more before the

race-course would be above water, and we thought we might as well come

on here and get something to eat at the Hotel."

"It has the appearance of being closed," said Mrs. M'Evoy, in a voice

thinned by famine.

"That might be a fashion it has in the afternoon, when themselves does

be at their dinner," said the car-driver.

The front door was certainly closed, and there was neither knocker nor

bell, nothing but a large well-thumbed keyhole. Dr. Hickey hammered

with his stick; nothing happened.

"They're gone to the races so," said the car-driver.

In the silence that followed it seemed that I could hear the flagging

beat of Mrs. M'Evoy's heart.

"Wait awhile," said Dr. Hickey; "the window isn't bolted!"

The sill was no more than two feet from the ground, the sash yielded to

pressure and went up; Dr. Hickey dived in, and we presently heard him

assail the front door from inside.

It was locked, and its key had apparently gone to the races. I

followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled

our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot

by three, steadily, as the great god Pan drew the pith from the reed.

We found ourselves in a small sitting-room, almost filled by a table;

there was a mature smell of cabbage, but there was nothing else to

suggest the presence of food. We proceeded to the nether regions,

which were like a chapter in a modern realistic novel, and found a

sickly kitchen fire, the horrid remains of the Lynch family breakfast,

an empty larder, and some of the home attire of the race-goers, lying,

as the tree lies, where it fell.

"There's a sort of a butcher in the town," said Dr. Hickey, when the

search-parties had converged on each other, empty-handed, "maybe we

could cook something----"

"If it was even a bit of salt pork--" said Mrs. M'Evoy, seizing the

poker and attacking the sleepy fire.

"Let you get some water, and I'll wash the plates," said Miss M'Evoy to

Dr. Hickey.

I looked at my watch, saw that I had still an hour and a half to play

with, and departed to look for the butcher.

Neither by sign-board nor by shop front did the Carrow Cross butcher

reveal himself. I was finally investigating a side street, where the

houses were one-storeyed, and thatched, and wholly unpromising, when a

heavy running step, that might have been a horse's, thundered behind

me, and a cumbrous pale woman, with the face of a fugitive, plunged

past me, and burst in at a cottage door like a mighty blast of wind. A

little girl, in tears, thudded barefooted after her. The big woman

turned in the doorway, and shrieked to me.

"Thim's madmen, from th' Asylum! Come inside from them, for God's

sake!"

I looked behind me up the street, and saw a small, decorous party of

men, flanked by a couple of stalwart keepers in uniform. One of the

men, a white-faced being in seedy black, headed them, playing an

imaginary fiddle on his left arm, and smiling secretly to himself.

Whether the lady had invited me to her house as a protector, or as a

refugee, I did not know: she herself had vanished, but through the

still open door I saw, miraculously, a fragment or two of meat, hanging

in the interior. I had apparently chanced upon the home of the Carrow

Cross butcher.

A greasy counter and a chopping-block put the matter beyond doubt; I

beat upon an inner door: a wail of terror responded, and then a muffled

voice:

"Come in under the bed to me, Chrissie, before they'd ketch ye!"

There was nothing for it but to take from a hook a grey and white

fragment that looked like bacon, place half-a-crown on the counter, and

depart swiftly.

"I gave a few of the Asylum patients leave to go to the Sports," said

Dr. Hickey, a little later, when we were seated between the large bare

table and the wall of the little sitting-room, with slices of fried

pork weltering on our plates. "I saw the fellow waltzing down the

street. Ah! he's fairly harmless, and they've a couple o' keepers with

them anyway."

"The only pity was that you left the half-crown," said Mrs. M'Evoy; "a

shilling was too much for it."

Mrs. M'Evoy was considerably flushed, and had an effective black smear

on her forehead, but her voice had recovered its timbre. There was a

tin of biscuits on the table, there was a war-worn brown teapot, and

some bottles of porter; it was now four hours since I had eaten

anything; in spite of the cold and clear resolve of the night before, I

was feeding, grossly yet enjoyably, with Dr. Hickey and his friends.

"This is a Temperance Hotel for the past year," remarked Dr. Hickey,

delicately knocking off the head of a porter bottle with the

sitting-room poker. "That's why it was upstairs I found the porter. I

suppose they took the corkscrew to the Sports with them."

"How did they lose the license at all?" said Mrs. M'Evoy; "I thought

there wasn't a house in Carrow Cross but had one."

"It was taken from them over some little mistake about selling

potheen," replied Dr. Hickey, courteously applying the broken neck of

the bottle to Mrs. M'Evoy's tumbler. "The police came to search the

house, and old Lynch, that was in bed upstairs, heard them, and threw a

two-gallon jar of potheen out of the top back window, to break it. The

unlucky thing was that there was a goose in the yard, and it was on the

goose it fell."

"The creature!" said Miss M'Evoy, "was she killed?"

"Killed to the bone, as they say," replied the Doctor; "but the trouble

was, that on account of falling on the goose the jar wasn't broken, so

the bobbies got the potheen."

"Supposing they summons you now for the porter!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,

facetiously, casting her eye through the open window into the bare

sunshiny street.

"They'll have summonses enough at Carrow Bay to keep them out of

mischief," returned Dr. Hickey. "It's a pity now, Major, you didn't

patronise the Sports. They might have put you on judging the cakes

with Mrs. M'Evoy."

"Why then, the one they put on with me was the man they had judging the

vegetables," said Mrs. M'Evoy, after a comfortable pull at the

contraband porter. "'That's a fine weighty cake,' says me lad,

weighing a sponge-cake on his hand. 'We'll give that one the prize.'"

"I wish you brought it here with you," said her daughter, "as weighty

as it was."

"They put _me_ judging the row-boats," said Dr. Hickey, "but after the

third race I had to give up, and put five stitches in one of the men

that was in the mark-boat."

I said that the mark-boat ought to have been a fairly safe place.

"Safe!" said Dr. Hickey. "It was the hottest corner in the course. I

thought they were sunk twice, but they might have been all right if

they hadn't out-oars and joined in the race on the second round. They

got in first, as it happened, and it was in the course of the protest

that I had to put in the stitches. It was a good day's sport, as far

as it went."

"Ah, there's no life in a Regatta without a band," said Miss M'Evoy

languidly, with her elbows on the table and her cup in her hand. "Now

Ringsend Regatta's sweet!"

"I'm afraid Miss M'Evoy didn't enjoy herself to-day," said Dr. Hickey.

"Of course she's used to so much attention in Dublin----"

"It's kind of you to say that," said Miss M'Evoy; "I'm sure you're

quite an authority on Dublin young ladies."

"Is it me?" said Dr. Hickey; "I'd be afraid to say Boo to a goose. But

I've a brother that could tell you all about them. He's not as shy as

I am."

"He must be a great help and comfort to you," returned Miss M'Evoy.

"He's very romantic," said Dr. Hickey, "and poetical. He was greatly

struck with two young ladies he met at the Ringsend Regatta last month.

He mistook their address, someway, and when he couldn't find them, what

did he do but put a poem in the papers--the Agony Column, y'know----"

"We'd like to hear that," said Mrs. M'Evoy, putting her knife into the

salt with unhurried dexterity.

"I forget it all, only the last verse," said Dr. Hickey, "it went this

way:

'You are indeed a charming creature,

Perfect alike in form and feature,

I love you and none other.

Oh, Letitia--Here's your Mother!'"

As Dr. Hickey, his eyes modestly on his plate, concluded the ode, I

certainly intercepted a peculiar glance between the ladies.

"I call that very impident," said Mrs. M'Evoy, winking at me.

"It was worth paying a good deal to put that in print!" commented Miss

M'Evoy unkindly. "But that was a lovely Regatta," she continued, "and

the music and the fireworks were grand, but the society's very mixed.

Do you remember, M'ma, what happened to Mary and me that evening, the

time we missed you in the dark?"

"Indeed'n I do," said Mrs. M'Evoy, her eyes still communing with her

daughter's, "and I remember telling you it was the last evening I'd let

you out of my sight."

"It was a gentleman that picked up my umbrella," began Miss M'Evoy

artlessly.

Dr. Hickey dropped his knife on the floor, and took some time to pick

it up.

"And he passed the remark to me that it was a nice evening," went on

Miss M'Evoy. "'It is,' said I. Now, M'ma, why wouldn't I give him a

civil answer?"

"That's according to taste," said Mrs. M'Evoy.

"Well indeed I didn't fancy his looks at all. It was pitch dark only

for the fireworks, but I thought he had a nasty kind of a foreign look,

and a little pointed beard on him too. If you saw the roll of his eye

when the green fire fell out of the rockets you'd think of

Mephistopheles----"

"There's no doubt Mephistopheles was one of Shakespeare's grandest

creations," said Dr. Hickey hurriedly. His eyes besought my aid. It

struck me that this literary digression was an attempt to change the

conversation.

Miss M'Evoy resumed her narrative.

"'That's a pretty flower you have in your button-hole,' said he. 'It

is,' said I."

"You didn't tell him a great deal he didn't know," said her mother.

"'Maybe you might give it to me?' said he. 'Maybe I might not!' said

I. 'And where do you live?' said he. 'Percy Place,' says Mary, before

you could wink. Anyone would have to believe her. 'Upon my soul,'

said he, 'I'll have the pleasure of calling upon you. Might I ask what

your name is?' 'O'Rooney,' says Mary, 'and this is my cousin, Miss

Letitia Gollagher.' Well, when Mary said 'Gollagher,' I _burst!_"

Miss M'Evoy here put down her cup, and to some slight extent repeated

the operation.

"I suppose the foreign gentleman told you his own name then?" said Dr.

Hickey, whose complexion had warmed up remarkably.

"He did not," said Miss M'Evoy; "but perhaps that was because he wasn't

asked, and it was then M'ma came up. I can tell you he didn't wait to

be introduced!"

"I have a sister-in-law living in Percy Place," said Mrs. M'Evoy,

passing her handkerchief over her brow, and addressing no one in

particular, "and it was some day last month she was telling me of a

young man that was knocking at all the doors down the street, and she

thought he was a Collector of some sort. He came to her house too, and

he told the girl he was looking for some ladies of the name of

Gollagher or O'Rooney."

She paused, and regarded Dr. Hickey.

"I wonder did he find them?" asked Dr. Hickey, who was obviously being

forced on to the ropes.

"I thought you might be able to tell us that!" said Mrs. M'Evoy,

delivering her knock-out blow with the suddenness that belongs to the

highest walks of the art.

Miss M'Evoy, with equal suddenness, uttered a long and strident yell,

and lay back in her place, grasping my arm as she did so, in what I am

convinced was wholly unconscious sympathy. She and I were side by

side, facing the window, and through the window, which, as I have

mentioned, was wide open, I was aware of a new element in the situation.

It was a figure in blue in the street outside; a soft and familiar

blue, and it bore a parasol of the same colour. The figure was at a

standstill; and very blue, the burning blue of tropical heavens, were

the eyes that met mine beneath the canopy of the parasol. Even before

my own had time to blink I foreknew that never, in time or in eternity,

should I be able to make Philippa accept thoroughly my explanation.

Philippa's explanation was extremely brief, and was addressed rather to

the empty street of Carrow Cross than to me, as I crawled by her side.

There had been, she said, half an hour to wait, and as I was not at the

station--the blue eyes met mine for a steely moment--she had gone for a

little walk. She had met some horrid drunken men, and turned into

another street to avoid them, and then----

A brimming silence followed. We turned up the road that led to the

station.

"There are those men again!" exclaimed Philippa, coming a little nearer

to me.

In front of us, deviously ascending the long slope, was the Asylum

party; the keepers, exceedingly drunk, being assisted to the station by

the Lunatics.

VIII

THE BOSOM OF THE McRORYS

Since the day when fate had shipwrecked us at the end of the Temple

Braney shrubbery, and flung us, dripping, into the bosoms of the

McRorys, we had been the victims of an indissoluble friendship with the

family. This fulfilled itself in many ways.

Gratitude, what is known as Common Gratitude (which is merely a hollow

compliance with the voice of conscience), impelled us to lunch Mr. and

Mrs. McRory, heavily and elaborately (but without any one to meet

them); to invite the whole family to a lawn-tennis party (and the whole

family came); and, at other people's tennis parties, to fawn upon them

(when it was no longer possible to elude them). It was a despicable

position, and had I at all foreseen, when the picnic sank at Temple

Braney pier, that the result would have been dinner-parties, I should

unhesitatingly have left Philippa to drown.

The intimacies imposed by Common Gratitude had, under the healing hand

of time, become less acute, and might, indeed, have ceased to affect

us, had not fate again intervened, and cemented the family friendship

in the most public way possible. There befell a Harvest Festival in

Skebawn Church, with a Bishop, and an Anthem, and a special collection.

To it the McRorys, forsaking their own place of worship, came in power,

and my wife, very superfluously, indicated to Mrs. McRory a seat in our

pew. The pew is a front one, and Mrs. McRory became at once a

figure-head to the rest of the congregation--a buxom figure-head,

upholstered tightly in royal blue satin, that paled the ineffectual

fires of the pulpit dahlias, and shouted in a terrible major chord with

the sunflowers in the east window. She creaked mysteriously and

rhythmically with every breath; a large gold butterfly, poised on an

invisible spring, quivered and glittered above her bonnet. It was

while waiting for the service to begin that Philippa was inspired to

whisper to Mrs McRory some information, quite immaterial, connected

with the hymns. The next moment I perceived that Mrs. McRory's

butterfly had fixed its antennae into some adjunct of my wife's hat that

was at once diaphanous and sinewy, with the result that the heads of

the two ladies were locked together. A silent struggle ensued; the

butterfly's grappling-irons held, so also did the hat-trimming, and

Philippa and Mrs. McRory remained brow to brow in what seemed to be a

prolonged embrace. At this point Philippa showed signs of collapse;

she said that Mrs. McRory's nose, glowing like a ruby within two inches

of her own, made her hysterical. I affected unconsciousness, while my

soul thirsted for an axe with which to decapitate one or both of the

combatants, and subsequently to run amok among the congregation, now,

as the poet says, "abashlessly abandoned to delight." The butterfly's

vitals slowly uncoiled, and were drawn out into a single yet

indomitable strand of gold wire; the Bishop was imminent, when a female

McRory in the pew behind (known to the Fancy as "Larkie") intervened

with what were, I believe, a pair of manicure scissors, and the

incident closed.

It was clear that our blood-brotherhood with the McRorys was

foreordained and predestined. We evaded two invitations to dinner, but

a third was inescapable, even though an alarming intimacy was

foreshadowed by the request that we should come "in a very quiet way."

"Do they expect us to creep in in tennis shoes?" I demanded.

"I think it only means a black tie," said Philippa, with the idea that

she was soothing me.

"If I have to go to a McRory Free-and-Easy, I shall not act as such," I

returned, slamming myself into my dressing-room, and dragging forth

ceremonial attire.

As, with a docility that I was far from feeling, I followed my wife

into the drawing-room at Temple Braney, and surveyed the semicircle of

McRorys and unknown notabilities (summarised as "Friends from Dublin")

that silently awaited us, I felt that neither freedom nor ease would be

my lot. But few things in life are quite as bad as one expects them to

be--always excepting sea-sickness. In its dreary circuit of the room,

my eye met that of my old friend Miss Bobby Bennett, of the Curranhilty

Hunt, niece of its Master, and consultant and referee in all its

affairs. My friendship with Miss Bennett was of an ideal nature; when

we met, which was seldom, we were delighted to see one another; in the

intervals we forgot one another with, I felt sure, an equal

completeness. Her social orbit was incalculable; she resembled a fox

of whom I heard an earth-stopper say that you "couldn't tell any

certain place where he wouldn't puck out." Whether it was at

Punchestown, or at a Skebawn Parish tea, or judging cakes and crochet

at an Agricultural Show, wherever she appeared it was with the same air

of being on top of the situation and of extracting the utmost from it.

To me befell the onerous task of taking the Lady of the House in to

dinner, but upon my other hand sat Miss Bennett (squired by a Friend

from Dublin of apparently negligible quality), and before I had

recovered from the soup--a hell-broth of liquid mustard that called

itself mulligatawny--I found that to concentrate upon her was no more

than was expected of me by both ladies. Mrs. McRory's energies were

indeed fully engrossed by the marshalling of a drove of heated females,

who hurried stertorously and spasmodically round the table, driven as

leaves before the wind by fierce signals from their trainer. Opposite

to me sat that daughter of the house whose manicure scissors had

terminated the painful episode of the butterfly. I had always

maintained that she was the prettiest of the McRorys, and it was

evident that Irving, the new District Inspector of R.I.C., who sat

beside her, shared my opinion. He was a serious, lanky young man, and

at such moments as he found himself deprived of Miss McRory's exclusive

attention, he accepted no alternative, and devoted himself austerely to

his food.

Miss Bennett's intention was, I presently discovered, to hunt with

Flurry Knox's hounds on the following day: she had brought over a

horse, and it became clear to me that her secondary intention was to

return without it.

"Larkie McRory's going to take up hunting," she said in her low swift

voice. "The new D.I. hunts, you know."

Miss Bennett's astute grey eyes rested upon the young lady in question,

and returned to me laden with inference.

"He's got a horse from a farmer for her to ride to-morrow--goodness

knows what sort of a brute it is!--I hope she won't break her neck.

She's the best of the lot. If the old man had sense he'd buy my mare

for her--he's full of money--and I'd let her go cheap, too, as I have a

young one coming on."

It is worthy of mention that I have never known Miss Bennett's stable

composed of anything save old ones to go cheap and young ones coming

on. I asked her what she would give me if I didn't tell Mr. McRory

that her mare was touched in the wind.

"I'll give you in charge for defamation of character," replied Miss

Bennett, with speed comparable only to the dart of an ant-eater's

tongue. "Anything else you'd like to know? But look at Larkie now, I

ask of you! Quick!"

I did as desired, and was fortunate enough to see Miss McRory in the

act of putting a spoonful of salt in Mr. Irving's champagne, what time

he was engaged in repulsing one of Mrs. McRory's band of flaming

ministers, who, with head averted in consultation with a collaborator,

was continuously offering him melted butter, regardless of the fact

that he had, at the moment, nothing in front of him but the tablecloth.

"There's Miss Larkie's Dublin manners for you," said Miss Bennett, and

passed on to other themes.

I should say theme, because, speaking broadly, Miss Bennett had but

one, and all roads sooner or later led to it. During the slow progress

of the meal I was brought up to date in the inner gossip of the

Curranhilty country. I learned that Mrs. Albert Dougherty had taken to

riding astride because she thought it was smart, and it was nothing but

the grab she got of the noseband that saved her from coming off every

time she came down a drop. I asked for that Mr. Tomsy Flood whose

career had twice, at vital points, been intersected by me.

"Ah, poor Tomsy! He took to this, y'know," Miss Bennett slightly

jerked her little finger, "and he wouldn't ride a donkey over a sod of

turf. They sent him out to South Africa, to an ostrich farm, and when

the people found he couldn't ride they put him to bed with a setting of

ostrich eggs to keep them warm, and he did that grand, till some one

gave him a bottle of whisky, and he got rather lively and broke all the

eggs. They say it's a lay-preacher he's going to be now!"

Across a dish of potatoes, thrust at me for the fourth time, I told

Miss Bennett that it was all her fault, and that she had been very

unkind to Tomsy Flood. Miss Bennett gave me a look that showed me what

she still could do if she liked, and replied that she supposed I was

sorry that she hadn't gone to South Africa with him.

"I suppose we'll all be going there soon," she went on. "Uncle says if

Home Rule comes there won't be a fox or a Protestant left in Ireland in

ten years' time; and he said, what's more, that if _he_ had to choose

it mightn't be the Protestants he'd keep! But that was because the

Dissenting Minister's wife sent in a claim of five pounds to the Fowl

Fund, and said she'd put down poison if she didn't get it."

Not thus did Philippa and old McRory, at their end of the table, fleet

the time away. Old McRory, as far as I could judge, spoke not at all,

but played tunes with his fingers on the tablecloth, or preoccupied

himself with what seemed to be an endeavour to plait his beard into a

point. On my wife's other hand was an unknown gentleman, with rosy

cheeks, a raven moustache, and a bald head, who was kind enough to

solace her isolation with facetious stories, garnished with free and

varied gestures with his knife, suggestive of sword-practice, all

concluding alike in convulsive tenor laughter. I was aware, not

unpleasantly, that Philippa was bearing the brunt of the McRory

bean-feast.

When at length my wife's release was earned, and the ladies had rustled

from the room in her wake, with all the conscious majesty of the Mantle

Department, I attempted some conversation with my host, but found that

it was more considerate to leave him to devour unmolested the

crystallised fruits and chocolates that were not, I felt quite sure,

provided by Mrs. McRory for the Master of the House. I retired upon

the D.I., my opinion of whom had risen since I saw him swallow his

salted champagne without a change of countenance. That he addressed me

as "Sir" was painful, but at about my age these shocks have to be

expected, and are in the same category as lumbago, and what my dentist

delicately alludes to as "dentures."

The young District Inspector of Irish Constabulary has wisdom beyond

his years: we talked profoundly of the state of the country until the

small voice of old McRory interrupted us.

"Major," it said, "if you have enough drink taken we might join the

ladies."

Most of the other gallants had already preceded us, and as I crossed

the hall I heard the measured pounding of a waltz on the piano: it

created an impulse, almost as uncontrollable as that of Spurius Lartius

and Herminius, to dart back to the dining-room.

"That's the way with them every night," said old McRory

dispassionately. "They mightn't go to bed now at all."

Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not unusual

in small fathers of large families; it always struck me that he

understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected, and pursued

an unnoticed, peaceful, and observant path of his own in the

background. I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner,

like a partly-chloroformed ferret. "'Oh, well is thee, thou art

asleep!'--or soon will be," I said to myself, as I turned my back on

him and faced the music.

I was immediately gratified by the spectacle of Philippa, clasped to

the heart of the gentleman who had been kind to her at dinner, and

moving with him in slow and crab-like sidlings round the carpet. Her

eyes met mine with passionate appeal; they reminded me of those of her

own fox-terrier, Minx, when compelled to waltz with my younger son.

The furniture and the elder ladies had been piled up in corners, and

the dancing element had been reinforced by a gang of lesser McRorys and

their congeners, beings who had not been deemed worthy of a place at

the high table. Immured behind the upright piano sat Mrs. McRory,

thumping out the time-honoured "Blue Danube" with the plodding rhythm

of the omnibus horse. I furtively looked at my watch; we had dined at

7.30, and it was now but a quarter to ten o'clock. Not for half an

hour could we in decency withdraw, and, finding myself at the moment

beside Miss Larkie McRory, it seemed to me that I could do no less than

invite her to take the carpet with me.

I am aware that my dancing is that of ten years ago, which places it in

the same scrap-heap class as a battleship of that date, but Miss McRory

told me that she preferred it, and that it exactly suited her step. It

would be as easy to describe the way of a bird in the air as to define

Miss McRory's step; scrap-heap or no, it made me feel that I walked the

carpet like a thing of life. We were occasionally wrecked upon reefs

of huddled furniture, and we sustained a collision or two of first-rate

magnitude: after these episodes my partner imperceptibly steered me to

a corner, in which I leaned heavily against whatever was most stable,

and tried to ignore the fact that the floor was rocking and the walls

were waving, and that it was at least two years since I had exceeded in

this way.

It was in one of these intervals that Miss McRory told me that she was

going hunting next day, and that he--her long hazel-grey eyes indicated

Mr. Irving, now slowly and showily moving a partner about the room--had

got a horse for her to ride, and she had never hunted before. She

hoped to goodness she wouldn't fall off, and (here she dealt me the

fraction of a glance) she hoped I'd pick her up now and again. I said

that the two wishes were incompatible, to which she replied that she

didn't know what incompatible meant; and I told her to ask Mr. Irving

whether he had found that salt and champagne were compatible.

"I thought you only wore that old eyeglass for show," replied Miss

McRory softly, and again looked up at me from under her upcurled Irish

eyelashes; "it was out of spite he drank it! A girl did that to my

brother Curly at a dance, and he poured it down her back."

"I think Mr. Irving treated you better than you deserved," I replied

paternally, adventuring once more into the tide of dancers.

When, some five minutes afterwards, I resigned my partner to Irving

D.I., I felt that honour had been satisfied, and that it was now

possible to leave the revel. But in this I found that I had reckoned,

not so much without my host, as without my fellow-guest. Philippa, to

my just indignation, had blossomed into the success of the evening.

Having disposed of the kind-hearted gentleman (with the pink cheeks and

the black moustache), she was immediately claimed by Mr. De Lacey

McRory, the eldest son of the house, and with him exhibited a

proficiency in the latest variant of the waltz that she had hitherto

concealed from me. The music, like the unseen orchestra of a

merry-go-round, was practically continuous. Scuffles took place at

intervals behind the upright piano, during which music-books fell

heavily upon the keys, and one gathered that a change of artist was

taking place, but the fundamental banging of the bass was maintained,

and the dancing ceased not. The efforts of the musicians were

presently reinforced by a young lady in blue, who supplied a shrill and

gibbering _obligato_ upon a beribboned mandoline, and even, at some

passionate moments, added her voice to the _ensemble_.

"Will this go on much longer?" I asked of Miss Bennett, with whom I had

withdrawn to the asylum of a bow window.

"D'ye mean Miss Cooney O'Rattigan and her mandoline?" replied Miss

Bennett. "I can tell you it was twice worse this afternoon when she

was singing Italian to it. I never stayed here before, and please

goodness I never will again; the wardrobe in my room is crammed with

Mrs. McRory's summer clothes, and the chest of drawers is full of

apples! Ah, but after all," went on Miss Bennett largely, "what can

you expect from a cob but a kick? Didn't Tomsy Flood find a collection

of empty soda-water bottles in his bed the time he stayed here for the

wedding, when you found him stitched up in the feather bed!"

[Illustration: Miss Cooney O'Rattigan.]

I said that the soda-water bottles had probably prepared him for the

ostrich eggs, and Miss Bennett asked me if it were true that I had once

found a nest of young mice in the foot of my bed at Aussolas, because

that was the story she had heard. I was able to assure her that, on

the contrary, it had been kittens, and passing from these pleasing

reminiscences I asked her to come forth and smoke a cigarette in the

hall with me, as a preliminary to a farther advance in the direction of

the motor. I have a sincere regard for Miss Bennett, but her dancing

is a serious matter, with a Cromwellian quality in it, suggestive of

jack boots and the march of great events.

The cigarettes were consolatory, and the two basket-chairs by the fire

in the back-hall were sufficiently comfortable; but the prospect of

home burned like a beacon before me. The clock struck eleven.

"They're only beginning now!" said Miss Bennett, interpreting without

resentment my glance at it. "Last night it was near one o'clock in the

morning when they had high tea, and then they took to singing songs,

and playing 'Are you there, Mike?' and cock-fighting."

I rose hastily, and began to search for my overcoat and cap, prepared

to plunge into the frosty night, when Miss Bennett offered to show me a

short way through the house to the stableyard, where I had left the car.

"I slipped out that way after dinner," she said, picking up a fur-lined

cloak and wrapping it about her. "I wanted to make sure the mare had a

second rug on her this cold night."

I followed Miss Bennett through a wheezy swing-door; a flagged passage

stretched like a tunnel before us, lighted by a solitary candle planted

in its own grease in a window. A long battle-line of bicycles occupied

one side of the passage; there were doors, padlocked and cobwebbed, on

the other. A ragged baize door at the end of the tunnel opened into

darkness that smelt of rat-holes, and was patched by a square or two of

moonlight.

"This is a sort of a lobby," said Miss Bennett. "Mind! There's a

mangle there--and there are oars on the floor somewhere----"

As she spoke I was aware of a distant humming noise, like bees in a

chimney.

"That sounds uncommonly like a motor," I said.

"That's only the boiler," replied Miss Bennett; "we're at the back of

the kitchen here."

She advanced with confidence, and flung open a door. A most startling

vista was revealed, of a lighted room with several beds in it.

Children's faces, swelled and scarlet, loomed at us from the pillows,

and an old woman, with bare feet and a shawl over her head, stood

transfixed, with a kettle in one hand and a tumbler in the other.

Miss Bennett swiftly closed the door upon the vision.

"My gracious heavens!" she whispered, "what on earth children are

those? I'm sure it's mumps they have, whoever they are. And how

secret the McRorys kept it!--and did you see it was punch the old woman

was giving them?"

"We might have asked her the way to the yard," I said, inwardly

resolving to tell Philippa it was scarlatina; "and she might have given

us a light."

"It was this door I should have tried," said my guide, opening another

with considerable circumspection.

Sounds of hilarity immediately travelled to us along a passage; I

followed Miss Bennett, feeling much as if I were being led by a

detective into Chinatown, San Francisco. A square of light in the wall

indicated one of those inner windows that are supposed to give light

mutually to room and passage, and are, as a matter of fact, an

architect's confession of defeat. Farther on a door was open, and

screams of laughter and singing proceeded from it. I admit, without

hesitation, that we looked in at the window, and thus obtained a full

and sufficient view of the _vie intime_ of the Temple Braney kitchen.

A fat female, obviously the cook, was seated in the midst of a

remarkably lively crowd of fellow-retainers and camp-followers,

thumping with massive knuckles on a frying-pan, as though it were a

banjo, and squalling to it something in an unknown tongue.

"She's taking off Miss Cooney O'Rattigan!" hissed Miss Bennett, in

ecstasy. "She's singing Italian, by way of! And look at those two

brats of boys, Vincent and Harold, that should have been in their beds

two hours ago!"

Masters Vincent and Harold McRory were having the time of their lives.

One of them, seated on the table, was shovelling tipsy-cake into his

ample mouth with a kitchen spoon; the other was smoking a cigarette,

and capering to the squalls of the cook.

As noiselessly as two bats Miss Bennett and I flitted past the open

door, but a silence fell with a unanimity that would have done credit

to any orchestra.

"They saw us," said Miss Bennett, scudding on, "but we'll not tell on

them--the creatures!"

An icy draught apprised us of an open door, and through it we escaped

at length from the nightmare purlieus of the house into the yard, an

immense quadrangle, where moonlight and black shadows opposed one

another in a silence that was as severe as they. Temple Braney House

and its yard dated from what may be called the Stone Age in Ireland,

about the middle of the eighteenth century, when money was plenty and

labour cheap, and the Barons of Temple Braney, now existent only in

guidebooks, built, as they lived, on the generous scale.

We crossed the yard to the coach-house in which I had left my motor:

its tall arched doorway was like the mouth of a cave, and I struck a

match. It illuminated a mowing-machine, a motor-bicycle, and a flying

cat. But not my car. The first moment of bewilderment was closed by

the burning of my fingers by the match.

"Are you sure it was here you left it?" said Miss Bennett, with a

fatuity of which I had not believed her capable.

The presence of a lady was no doubt a salutary restraint, but as I went

forth into the yard again, I felt as though the things I had to leave

unsaid would break out all over me like prickly heat.

"It's the medical student one," said Miss Bennett with certainty, "the

one that owns the motor-bike."

The yard and the moonlight did not receive this statement with a more

profound silence than I.

"I'm sure he won't do it any harm," she went on, making the elementary

mistake of applying superficial salves to a wound whose depths she was

incapable of estimating. "He's very good about machinery--maybe it's

only round to the front door he took it."

As Miss Bennett offered these consolations I saw two small figures

creep from the shadows of the house. Their white collars shone in the

moonlight, and, recognising them as the youngest members of the

inveterate clan of McRory, I hailed them in a roar that revealed very

effectively the extent of my indignation. It did not surprise me that

the pair, in response to this, darted out of the yard gate with the

speed of a pair of minnows in a stream.

I pursued, not with any hope of overtaking them, but because they were

the only clue available, and in my wake, over the frosty ground, in her

satin shoes, followed that sound sportswoman, Miss Bennett.

The route from the stable-yard to the front of Temple Braney House is a

long and circuitous one, that skirts a plantation of evergreens. At

the first bend the moonlight displayed the track of a tyre in the

grass; at the next bend, where the edge was higher, a similar economy

of curve had been effected, and that the incident had been of a fairly

momentous nature was suggested by the circumstance that the tail lamp

was lying in the middle of the drive. It was as I picked it up that I

heard a familiar humming in the vicinity of the hall door.

"He didn't go so far, after all," said Miss Bennett, somewhat blown,

but holding her own, in spite of the satin shoes.

I turned the last corner at a high rate of speed, and saw the dignified

Georgian facade of the house, pale and placid in the moonlight; through

the open hall door a shaft of yellow light fell on the ground. The car

was nowhere to be seen, yet somewhere, close at hand, the engine

throbbed and drummed to me,--a _cri de coeur_, as I felt it, calling to

me through the accursed jingle of the piano that proceeded from the

open door.

"Where the devil----?" I began.

Even as I spoke I descried the car. It was engaged, apparently, in

forcing its way into the shrubbery that screened one end of the house.

The bonnet was buried in a holly bush, the engine was working, slowly

but industriously. The lamps were not lighted, and there was no one in

it.

"Those two imps made good use of their legs, never fear them!" puffed

Miss Bennett; "the 'cuteness of them--cutting away to warn the brother!"

"What's this confounded thing?" I said fiercely, snatching at something

that was caught in the handle of the brake.

Miss Bennett snatched it in her turn, and held it up in the moonlight,

while I stilled the fever of the engine.

"Dublin for ever!" she exclaimed. "What is it but the streamers of

Miss Cooney's mandoline! There's the spoils of war for you! And it's

all the spoils you'll get--the whole pack of them's hid in the house by

now!"

From an unlighted window over the hall door a voice added itself to the

conversation.

"God help the house that holds them!" it said, addressing the universe.

The window was closed.

"That's old McRory!" said Miss Bennett in a horrified whisper.

Again I thought of Chinatown, sleepless, incalculable, with its

infinite capacity for sheltering the criminal.

"--But, darling," said Philippa, some quarter of an hour later, as we

proceeded down the avenue in the vaulted darkness of the beech-trees

(and I at once realised that she had undertaken the case for the

defence), "you've no reason to suppose that they took the car any

farther than the hall door."

"It is the last time that it will be taken to _that_ hall door," I

replied, going dead slow, with my head over the side of the car,

listening to unfamiliar sounds in its interior--sounds that did not

suggest health. "I should like to know how many of your young friends

went on the trip----"

"My dear boy," said Philippa pityingly, "I ask you if it is likely that

there would have been more than two, when one of them was the lady with

the mandoline! And," she proceeded with cat-like sweetness, "I did not

perceive that you took a party with you when you retired to the hall

with your old friend Miss Bennett, and left me to cope single-handed

with the mob for about an hour!"

"Whether there were two or twenty-two of them in the car," I said,

treating this red herring with suitable contempt, "I've done with your

McRorys."

I was, very appropriately, in the act of passing through the Temple

Braney entrance gates as I made this pronouncement, and it was the

climax of many outrages that the steering-gear, shaken by heaven knows

what impacts and brutalities, should suddenly have played me false.

The car swerved in her course--fortunately a slow one--and laid her

bonnet impulsively against the Temple Braney gate pillar, as against a

loved one's shoulder.

As we regained our composure, two tall forms appeared in the light of

the head lamps, and one of them held up his hand. I recognised a

police patrol.

"That's the car right enough," said one of them. He advanced to my

side. "I want your name, please. I summons you for furious driving on

the high road, without lights, a while ago, and refusing to stop when

called on to do so. Go round and take the number, M'Caffery."

When, a few days later, the story flowed over and ran about the

country, some things that were both new and interesting came to my ears.

Flurry Knox said that Bobby Bennett had sold me her old mare by

moonlight in the Temple Braney yard, and it was a great credit to old

McRory's champagne.

Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run

in the car at one o'clock in the morning, and on hearing it said "De

gustibus non est disputandum."

Some one, unknown, repeated this to Mrs. McRory, and told her that it

meant "You cannot touch pitch without being disgusted."

Mrs. Cadogan, my cook, reported to Philippa that the boy who drove the

bread-cart said that it was what the people on the roads were saying

that the Major was to be fined ten pounds; to which Mrs. Cadogan had

replied that it was a pity the Major ever stood in Temple Braney, but

she supposed that was laid out for him by the Lord.

IX

PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO

The promise of that still and moonlit December night, wherein we had

bean-feasted with the McRorys, was shamelessly broken.

The weather next morning was a welter of wind and mist, with rain flung

in at intervals. The golden fox on the stable weathercock was not at

peace for a moment, facing all the southern points of the compass as if

they were hounds that held it at bay. For my part, I do not know why

people go out hunting on such days, unless it be for the reason that

many people go to church, to set an example to others.

Philippa said she went because she had done her hair for riding before

she could see out of the window--a fiction beneath the notice of any

intelligent husband. I went because I had told my new groom, Wilson

(an English disciplinarian), that I was going, and I was therefore

caught in the cogs of the inexorable wheel of stable routine. I also

went because I nourished a faint hope that I might be able to place

before the general public, and especially before Flurry Knox, an

authentic first version of the McRory episode. Moreover, I had a

headache; but this I was not going to mention, knowing that the sun

never sets upon the jests consecrated to after-dinner headaches.

As we rode away from Shreelane, and felt the thick small rain in our

faces, and saw the spray blown off the puddles by the wind, and heard

the sea-gulls, five miles inland, squealing in the mist overhead, I

said that it was preposterous to think of hunting at Lonen Hill in such

weather, and that I was going home. Philippa said that we might as

well go on to the meet, to exercise the horses, and that we could then

come straight home. (I have a sister who has said that I am a lath

painted to look like iron, and that Philippa is iron painted to look

like a lath.)

The meet was in shelter, the generous shelter of Lonen Hill, which

interposed itself between us and the weather. There is just space for

the road, between the shore of Lough Lonen and the southern face of the

hill, that runs precipitously up into the sky for some six hundred

feet, dark with fir-trees, and heather, and furze, fortified with

rock--a place renowned as a fastness for foxes and woodcock (whose

fancies as to desirable winter residences generally coincide). One

would have thought that only a pack of monkeys could deal with such a

covert, but hounds went through it, and so did beaters--or said they

did.

We found the hounds waiting in an old quarry under the side of the

hill, and, a little farther on, a very small and select company of

waterproofs was huddled under the branches of a fir-tree that hung over

the road. As we neared them I recognised Miss Bennett's firm and

capable back: she was riding the black mare that she had come over to

"pass on" to old McRory. It was Philippa who pointed out that she was

accompanied by Miss Larkie McRory, seated on a stout and shaggy animal,

whose grey hindquarters were draped by the folds of its rider's

voluminous black macintosh, in a manner that recalled the historic

statue of the Iron Duke. Farther on, Mrs. Flurry and her mother, the

redoubtable Lady Knox, were getting out of a motor and getting

themselves on to their horses.

"There's room under the umbrella for Mrs. Yeates!" called out Miss

Bennett hospitably, "but the Major must find one for himself, and a

very big one, too!"

"We could make room for him here," said Miss Larkie McRory, "if he

liked to come."

I maintained, I hope, an imperturbable demeanour, and passed on.

"Who is that?" said Lady Knox, approaching me, on her large and

competent iron grey.

I informed her, briefly, and without prejudice.

"Oh, one of that crew," said Lady Knox, without further comment.

Lady Knox is not noted for receptive sympathy, yet this simple

statement indicated so pleasingly our oneness of soul in the matter of

the McRorys, that I was on the verge of flinging overboard the

gentlemanlike scruples proper to a guest, and giving her the full

details of last night's revel. At this moment, however, her son-in-law

came forth from the quarry with his hounds, and his coadjutors, Dr.

Hickey and Michael, and moved past us.

"Yeates!" he called out, "I'd be obliged to you if you'd take that

point up on the hill, on the down-wind side, where he often breaks."

He looked at me with a serious, friendly face. "He won't break _down_,

you know--it's only motors do that."

This witticism, concocted, no doubt, in the seclusion of the quarry,

called for no reply on my part--(or, to be accurate, no suitable reply

presented itself). There was an undoubted titter among the

waterproofs; I moved away upon my mission at a dignified trot: a trot

is seldom dignified, but Daniel has dignity enough for himself and his

rider.

Daniel stands sixteen hands two inches in his stockings, of which he

wears one white one, the rest of his enormous body being of that

unlovely bluish-dun colour to which a dark bay horse turns when

clipped. His best friend could not deny that he "made a noise"; his

worst enemy was fain to admit that he was glad to hear it in front of

him at a nasty place. Some one said that he was like a Settled

Religious Faith, and no lesser simile conveys the restful certainty

imparted by him. It was annoying, no doubt, to hear people say, after

I had accomplished feats of considerable valour, that that horse

couldn't make a mistake, and a baby could ride him; but these were mere

chastenings, negligible to the possessor of a Settled Religious Faith.

I trotted on through the rain, up a steep road seamed with

watercourses, with Lonen Hill towering on my left, and a lesser hill on

my right. Looking back, I saw Flurry dismount, give his horse to a

boy, and clamber on to the wall of the road: he dropped into the wood,

and the hounds swarmed over after him, looking like midgets beside the

tremendous citadel that they were to attack. Hickey and Michael,

equally dwarfed by the immensities of the position, were already

betaking themselves through the mist to their allotted outposts in

space. Five-and-twenty couple of hounds would have been little enough

for that great hill-side; Flurry had fifteen, and with them he began

his tough struggle through the covert, a solitary spot of red among

pine-stems, and heather, and rocks, cheering his fifteen couple with

horn and voice, while he climbed up and up by devious ways, seemingly

as marvellously endowed with wind as the day itself. I cantered on

till, at the point where the wood ended, it became my melancholy duty

to leave the road and enter upon the assault of the hill. I turned in

at a gap beside the guardian thorn-bush of a holy well, on whose

branches votive rags fluttered in the wind, and addressed Daniel to his

task of carrying thirteen stone up an incline approximating to a rise

of one in three.

A path with the angles of a flash of lightning indicated the views of

the local cow as to the best method of dealing with the situation.

Daniel and I accepted this, as we had done more than once before, and

we laboured upwards, parallel with the covert, while the wind, heavy

with mist, came down to meet us, and shoved against us like a living

thing. We gained at length a shelf on the hill-side, and halting there

in the shelter of a furzy hummock, I applied myself to my job. From

the shelf I commanded a long stretch of the boundary wall of the wood,

including a certain gap which was always worthy of special attention,

and for a quarter of an hour I bent a zealous and travelling gaze upon

the wall, with the concentration of a professor of a Higher Thought

Society.

As is not unusual in such cases, nothing happened. At rare intervals a

hint of the cry of hounds was carried in the wind, evanescent as a

whiff from a summer garden. Once or twice it seemed to swing towards

me, and at such moments the concentration of my eyeglass upon the gap

was of such intensity that had the fox appeared I am confident that he

would instantly have fallen into a hypnotic trance. As time wore on I

arrived at the stage of obsession, when the music of the hounds and the

touches of the horn seemed to be in everything, the wind, the streams,

the tree branches, and I could almost have sworn hounds were away and

running hard, until some vagrant voice in the wood would dispel the

mirage of sound. This was followed by the reactionary period of

pessimism, when I seemed to myself merely an imbecile, sitting in heavy

rain, staring at a stone wall. Half an hour, or more, passed.

"I'm going out of this," I said to myself defiantly; "there's reason in

the roasting of eggs."

It seemed, however, my duty to go up rather than down, and I coerced

Daniel into the bed of a stream, as offering the best going available.

It led me into a cleft between the hill-side and the wall of the

covert, which latter was, like a thing in a fairy tale, changing very

gradually from a wall into a bank. I ascended the cleft, and presently

found that it, too, was changing its nature, and becoming a flight of

stairs. Daniel clattered slowly and carefully up them, basing his

feet, like Sir Bedivere, on "juts of slippery crag that rang

sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels."

We had reached the top in safety when I heard a thin and wavering

squeal behind me, and looking back saw Miss Larkie McRory ascending the

rocky staircase on the grey cob, at a speed that had obviously, and

legitimately, drawn forth the squeal.

"Oh, gracious! The brute! I can't stop him!" she cried as she rushed

upon me.

The grey cob here bumped into Daniel's massive stern, rebounded, and

subsided, for the excellent reason that no other course was open to it.

Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned

from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the

Order of the Medjidie: her hat was hanging down her back, and there was

a picturesqueness about her hair that promised disaster later on. Her

hazel eyes shone, and her complexion glowed like a rose in rain.

"Mr. Irving's fit to be tied!" she continued. "His horse jumped about

like a mad thing when he saw those awful steps----!"

Sounds of conflict and clattering came from below. I splashed onwards

in the trough between the hill and the fence, and had emerged into a

comparatively open space with my closely attendant McRory, when the

impassioned face of Mr. Irving's Meath mare shot into view at the top

of the steps. The water in the trough was apparently for her the limit

of what should or could be endured. She made a crooked spring at the

hill-side, slipped, and, recognising the bank as the one civilised

feature in a barbarous country, bounced sideways on to the top of it,

pivoted there, and sat down backwards into a thicket of young ash and

hazel trees. A succession of short yells from Miss McRory acclaimed

each phase of the incident; Mr. Irving's face, as he settled down

amongst the branches, was as a book where men might read strange

matters, not of an improving nature.

It was probably the reception accorded to the bay mare by the branches

and briars in which she had seated herself that caused her to return to

the top of the bank in a kangaroo-bound, as active as it was

unexpected. Horses can do these things when they choose, but they

seldom choose. From the top of the bank she dropped into the trough,

and joined us, with her nerves still in a state of acute indignation,

and less of her rider in the saddle than is conventional, but a dinge

in his pot-hat appeared to be the extent of the damage. Miss McRory's

eye travelled from it to me, but she abstained from comment. It was

the eye of a villain and a conspirator. I had by no means forgotten

the injuries inflicted on me by her brothers, nor did I forget that

Flurry had said that there wasn't one of the family but was as clever

as the devil and four times as unscrupulous. Yet, taken in conjunction

with the genuineness of her complexion, and with the fact that Irving

was probably twenty years my junior, "I couldn't"--as the song

says--"help smiling at McRory O'More" (behind the back of young Mr.

Irving, D.I.).

It transpired that Irving, from some point of vantage below, shared, it

would appear, with Miss McRory, had seen the hounds running out of the

top of the wood, and had elected to follow me. He did not know where

any one was, had not heard a sound of the horn, and gave it as his

opinion that Flurry was dead, and that trying to hunt in this country

was simply farcical. He bellowed these things at me in his

consequential voice as we struggled up the hill against the immense

weight of wind, in all the fuss, anxiety, and uncertainty out of which

the joys of hunting are born. It was as we topped the ultimate ridge

that, through the deafening declamations of the wind, I heard, faint as

a bar of fairy music, distant harmonies as of hounds running.

The wind blew a hole in the mist, and we had a bird's-eye view of a few

pale-green fields far below: across one of them some pigmy forms were

moving; they passed over a dark line that represented a fence, and

proceeded into the heart of a cloud.

"That's about the limit," shouted Irving, dragging at his mare's mouth,

as she swerved from a hole in the track. "It's only in this

God-forsaken country that a fox'd go away in the teeth of a storm like

this!"

To justify to Mr. Irving the disregard of the Lonen Hill foxes for the

laws of the game was not my affair. It seemed to me that in piloting

him and Miss McRory I was doing rather more than humanity had any right

to expect. I have descended Lonen Hill on various occasions, none of

them agreeable, but never before with an avalanche travelling hard on

my heels--a composite avalanche that slid, and rushed, and dropped its

hind-legs over the edge at bad corners, and was throughout vocal with

squeals, exclamations, inquiries as to facts of which Providence could

alone be cognisant, and thunderous with objurgations. The hill-side

merged at length into upland pasture, strange little fields, composed

partly of velvet patches, like putting-greens, predominantly of

nightmare bunkers of rocks and furze. We rushed downwards through

these, at a pace much accelerated by the prevalence of cattle gaps; the

bay mare, with her head in the air, zigzagging in bounds as

incalculable as those of a grasshopper; the grey cob, taking sole

charge of Miss McRory, tobogganing with her hind feet, propping with

her fore, and tempering her enthusiasm with profound understanding of

the matter. Finally, a telegraph-post loomed through the fog upon us,

and a gate discovered itself, through which we banged in a bunch on to

the high road. A cottage faced us, with a couple of women and an old

man standing outside it.

To them we put the usual question, with the usual vehemence (always

suggestive of the King's Troopers in romance, hotly demanding

information about a flying rebel).

"I didn't see a fox this long while," replied the old man deliberately,

"but there was a few jocks went west the road a while ago."