I
GREAT-UNCLE McCARTHY
A Resident Magistracy in Ireland is not an easy thing to come by
nowadays; neither is it a very attractive job; yet on the evening when
I first propounded the idea to the young lady who had recently
consented to become Mrs. Sinclair Yeates, it seemed glittering with
possibilities. There was, on that occasion, a sunset, and a string
band playing "The Gondoliers," and there was also an ingenuous belief
in the omnipotence of a godfather of Philippa's--(Philippa was the
young lady)--who had once been a member of the Government.
I was then climbing the steep ascent of the Captains towards my
Majority. I have no fault to find with Philippa's godfather; he did
all and more than even Philippa had expected; nevertheless, I had
attained to the dignity of mud major, and had spent a good deal on
postage stamps, and on railway fares to interview people of influence,
before I found myself in the hotel at Skebawn, opening long envelopes
addressed to "Major Yeates, R.M."
My most immediate concern, as any one who has spent nine weeks at Mrs.
Raverty's hotel will readily believe, was to leave it at the earliest
opportunity; but in those nine weeks I had learned, amongst other
painful things, a little, a very little, of the methods of the artisan
in the West of Ireland. Finding a house had been easy enough. I had
had my choice of several, each with some hundreds of acres of shooting,
thoroughly poached, and a considerable portion of the roof intact. I
had selected one; the one that had the largest extent of roof in
proportion to the shooting, and had been assured by my landlord that in
a fortnight or so it would be fit for occupation.
"There's a few little odd things to be done," he said easily; "a lick
of paint here and there, and a slap of plaster----"
I am short-sighted; I am also of Irish extraction; both facts that make
for toleration--but even I thought he was understating the case. So
did the contractor.
At the end of three weeks the latter reported progress, which mainly
consisted of the facts that the plumber had accused the carpenter of
stealing sixteen feet of his inch-pipe to run a bell wire through, and
that the carpenter had replied that he wished the divil might run the
plumber through a wran's quill. The plumber having reflected upon the
carpenter's parentage, the work of renovation had merged in battle, and
at the next Petty Sessions I was reluctantly compelled to allot to each
combatant seven days, without the option of a fine.
These and kindred difficulties extended in an unbroken chain through
the summer months, until a certain wet and windy day in October, when,
with my baggage, I drove over to establish myself at Shreelane. It was
a tall, ugly house of three storeys high, its walls faced with
weather-beaten slates, its windows staring, narrow, and vacant. Round
the house ran an area, in which grew some laurustinus and holly bushes
among ash heaps, and nettles, and broken bottles. I stood on the
steps, waiting for the door to be opened, while the rain sluiced upon
me from a broken eaveshoot that had, amongst many other things, escaped
the notice of my landlord. I thought of Philippa, and of her plan,
broached in to-day's letter, of having the hall done up as a
sitting-room.
The door opened, and revealed the hall. It struck me that I had
perhaps overestimated its possibilities. Among them I had certainly
not included a flagged floor, sweating with damp, and a reek of cabbage
from the adjacent kitchen stairs. A large elderly woman, with a red
face, and a cap worn helmet-wise on her forehead, swept me a
magnificent curtsey as I crossed the threshold.
"Your honour's welcome----" she began, and then every door in the house
slammed in obedience to the gust that drove through it. With something
that sounded like "Mend ye for a back door!" Mrs. Cadogan abandoned her
opening speech and made for the kitchen stairs. (Improbable as it may
appear, my housekeeper was called Cadogan, a name made locally possible
by being pronounced Caydogawn.)
Only those who have been through a similar experience can know what
manner of afternoon I spent. I am a martyr to colds in the head, and I
felt one coming on. I made a laager in front of the dining-room fire,
with a tattered leather screen and the dinner table, and gradually,
with cigarettes and strong tea, baffled the smell of must and cats, and
fervently trusted that the rain might avert a threatened visit from my
landlord. I was then but superficially acquainted with Mr. Florence
McCarthy Knox and his habits.
At about 4.30, when the room had warmed up, and my cold was yielding to
treatment, Mrs. Cadogan entered and informed me that "Mr. Flurry" was
in the yard, and would be thankful if I'd go out to him, for he
couldn't come in. Many are the privileges of the female sex; had I
been a woman I should unhesitatingly have said that I had a cold in my
head. Being a man, I huddled on a mackintosh, and went out into the
yard.
My landlord was there on horseback, and with him there was a man
standing at the head of a stout grey animal. I recognised with despair
that I was about to be compelled to buy a horse.
"Good afternoon, Major," said Mr. Knox in his slow, sing-song brogue;
"it's rather soon to be paying you a visit, but I thought you might be
in a hurry to see the horse I was telling you of."
I could have laughed. As if I were ever in a hurry to see a horse! I
thanked him, and suggested that it was rather wet for horse-dealing.
"Oh, it's nothing when you're used to it," replied Mr. Knox. His
gloveless hands were red and wet, the rain ran down his nose, and his
covert coat was soaked to a sodden brown. I thought that I did not
want to become used to it. My relations with horses have been of a
purely military character, I have endured the Sandhurst riding-school,
I have galloped for an impetuous general, I have been steward at
regimental races, but none of these feats have altered my opinion that
the horse, as a means of locomotion, is obsolete. Nevertheless, the
man who accepts a resident magistracy in the south-west of Ireland
voluntarily retires into the prehistoric age; to institute a stable
became inevitable.
"You ought to throw a leg over him," said Mr. Knox, "and you're welcome
to take him over a fence or two if you like. He's a nice flippant
jumper."
Even to my unexacting eye the grey horse did not seem to promise
flippancy, nor did I at all desire to find that quality in him. I
explained that I wanted something to drive, and not to ride.
"Well, that's a fine raking horse in harness," said Mr. Knox, looking
at me with his serious grey eyes, "and you'd drive him with a sop of
hay in his mouth. Bring him up here, Michael."
Michael abandoned his efforts to kick the grey horse's forelegs into a
becoming position, and led him up to me.
I regarded him from under my umbrella with a quite unreasonable
disfavour. He had the dreadful beauty of a horse in a toy-shop, as
chubby, as wooden, and as conscientiously dappled, but it was
unreasonable to urge this as an objection, and I was incapable of
finding any more technical drawback. Yielding to circumstance, I
"threw my leg" over the brute, and after pacing gravely round the
quadrangle that formed the yard, and jolting to my entrance gate and
back, I decided that as he had neither fallen down nor kicked me off,
it was worth paying twenty-five pounds for him, if only to get in out
of the rain.
Mr. Knox accompanied me into the house and had a drink. He was a fair,
spare young man, who looked like a stable boy among gentlemen, and a
gentleman among stable boys. He belonged to a clan that cropped up in
every grade of society in the county, from Sir Valentine Knox of Castle
Knox down to the auctioneer Knox, who bore the attractive title of
Larry the Liar. So far as I could judge, Florence McCarthy of that ilk
occupied a shifting position about midway in the tribe. I had met him
at dinner at Sir Valentine's, I had heard of him at an illicit auction,
held by Larry the Liar, of brandy stolen from a wreck. They were
"Black Protestants," all of them, in virtue of their descent from a
godly soldier of Cromwell, and all were prepared at any moment of the
day or night to sell a horse.
"You'll be apt to find this place a bit lonesome after the hotel,"
remarked Mr. Flurry, sympathetically, as he placed his foot in its
steaming boot on the hob, "but it's a fine sound house anyway, and lots
of rooms in it, though indeed, to tell you the truth, I never was
through the whole of them since the time my great-uncle, Denis
McCarthy, died here. The dear knows I had enough of it that time." He
paused, and lit a cigarette--one of my best, and quite thrown away upon
him. "Those top floors, now," he resumed, "I wouldn't make too free
with them. There's some of them would jump under you like a spring
bed. Many's the night I was in and out of those attics, following my
poor uncle when he had a bad turn on him--the horrors, y' know--there
were nights he never stopped walking through the house. Good Lord!
will I ever forget the morning he said he saw the devil coming up the
avenue! 'Look at the two horns on him,' says he, and he out with his
gun and shot him, and, begad, it was his own donkey!"
Mr. Knox gave a couple of short laughs. He seldom laughed, having in
unusual perfection, the gravity of manner that is bred by
horse-dealing, probably from the habitual repression of all emotion
save disparagement.
The autumn evening, grey with rain, was darkening in the tall windows,
and the wind was beginning to make bullying rushes among the shrubs in
the area; a shower of soot rattled down the chimney and fell on the
hearthrug.
"More rain coming," said Mr. Knox, rising composedly; "you'll have to
put a goose down these chimneys some day soon, it's the only way in the
world to clean them. Well, I'm for the road. You'll come out on the
grey next week, I hope; the hounds'll be meeting here. Give a roar at
him coming in at his jumps." He threw his cigarette into the fire and
extended a hand to me. "Good-bye, Major, you'll see plenty of me and
my hounds before you're done. There's a power of foxes in the
plantations here."
This was scarcely reassuring for a man who hoped to shoot woodcock, and
I hinted as much.
"Oh, is it the cock?" said Mr. Flurry; "b'leeve me, there never was a
woodcock yet that minded hounds, now, no more than they'd mind rabbits!
The best shoots ever I had here, the hounds were in it the day before."
When Mr. Knox had gone, I began to picture myself going across country
roaring, like a man on a fire-engine, while Philippa put the goose down
the chimney; but when I sat down to write to her I did not feel equal
to being humorous about it. I dilated ponderously on my cold, my hard
work, and my loneliness, and eventually went to bed at ten o'clock full
of cold shivers and hot whisky-and-water.
After a couple of hours of feverish dozing, I began to understand what
had driven Great-Uncle McCarthy to perambulate the house by night.
Mrs. Cadogan had assured me that the Pope of Rome hadn't a betther bed
undher him than myself; wasn't I down on the new flog mattherass the
old masther bought in Father Scanlan's auction? By the smell I
recognised that "flog" meant flock, otherwise I should have said my
couch was stuffed with old boots. I have seldom spent a more wretched
night. The rain drummed with soft fingers on my window panes; the
house was full of noises. I seemed to see Great-Uncle McCarthy ranging
the passages with Flurry at his heels; several times I thought I heard
him. Whisperings seemed borne on the wind through my keyhole, boards
creaked in the room overhead, and once I could have sworn that a hand
passed, groping, over the panels of my door. I am, I may admit, a
believer in ghosts; I even take in a paper that deals with their
culture, but I cannot pretend that on that night I looked forward to a
manifestation of Great-Uncle McCarthy with any enthusiasm.
The morning broke stormily, and I woke to find Mrs. Cadogan's
understudy, a grimy nephew of about eighteen, standing by my bedside,
with a black bottle in his hand.
"There's no bath in the house, sir," was his reply to my command; "but
me A'nt said, would ye like a taggeen?"
This alternative proved to be a glass of raw whisky. I declined it.
I look back to that first week of housekeeping at Shreelane as to a
comedy excessively badly staged, and striped with lurid melodrama.
Towards its close I was positively home-sick for Mrs. Raverty's, and I
had not a single clean pair of boots. I am not one of those who hold
the convention that in Ireland the rain never ceases, day or night, but
I must say that my first November at Shreelane was composed of weather
of which my friend Flurry Knox remarked that you wouldn't meet a
Christian out of doors, unless it was a snipe or a dispensary doctor.
To this lamentable category might be added a resident magistrate.
Daily, shrouded in mackintosh, I set forth for the Petty Sessions
Courts of my wide district; daily, in the inevitable atmosphere of wet
frieze and perjury, I listened to indictments of old women who plucked
geese alive, of publicans whose hospitality to their friends broke
forth uncontrollably on Sunday afternoons, of "parties" who, in the
language of the police sergeant, were subtly defined as "not to say
dhrunk, but in good fighting thrim."
I got used to it all in time--I suppose one can get used to anything--I
even became callous to the surprises of Mrs. Cadogan's cooking. As the
weather hardened and the woodcock came in, and one by one I discovered
and nailed up the rat holes, I began to find life endurable, and even
to feel some remote sensation of home-coming when the grey horse turned
in at the gate of Shreelane.
The one feature of my establishment to which I could not become inured
was the pervading sub-presence of some thing or things which, for my
own convenience, I summarised as Great-Uncle McCarthy. There were
nights on which I was certain that I heard the inebriate shuffle of his
foot overhead, the touch of his fumbling hand against the walls. There
were dark times before the dawn when sounds went to and fro, the moving
of weights, the creaking of doors, a far-away rapping in which was a
workmanlike suggestion of the undertaker, a rumble of wheels on the
avenue. Once I was impelled to the perhaps imprudent measure of
cross-examining Mrs. Cadogan. Mrs. Cadogan, taking the preliminary
precaution of crossing herself, asked me fatefully what day of the week
it was.
"Friday!" she repeated after me. "Friday! The Lord save us! 'Twas a
Friday the old masther was buried!"
At this point a saucepan opportunely boiled over, and Mrs. Cadogan fled
with it to the scullery, and was seen no more.
In the process of time I brought Great-Uncle McCarthy down to a fine
point. On Friday nights he made coffins and drove hearses; during the
rest of the week he rarely did more than patter and shuffle in the
attics over my head.
One night, about the middle of December, I awoke, suddenly aware that
some noise had fallen like a heavy stone into my dreams. As I felt for
the matches it came again, the long, grudging groan and the
uncompromising bang of the cross door at the head of the kitchen
stairs. I told myself that it was a draught that had done it, but it
was a perfectly still night. Even as I listened, a sound of wheels on
the avenue shook the stillness. The thing was getting past a joke. In
a few minutes I was stealthily groping my way down my own staircase,
with a box of matches in my hand, enforced by scientific curiosity, but
none the less armed with a stick. I stood in the dark at the top of
the back stairs and listened; the snores of Mrs. Cadogan and her nephew
Peter rose tranquilly from their respective lairs. I descended to the
kitchen and lit a candle; there was nothing unusual there, except a
great portion of the Cadogan wearing apparel, which was arranged at the
fire, and was being serenaded by two crickets. Whatever had opened the
door, my household was blameless. The kitchen was not attractive, yet
I felt indisposed to leave it. None the less, it appeared to be my
duty to inspect the yard. I put the candle on the table and went forth
into the outer darkness. Not a sound was to be heard. The night was
very cold, and so dark, that I could scarcely distinguish the roofs of
the stables against the sky; the house loomed tall and oppressive above
me; I was conscious of how lonely it stood in the dumb and barren
country. Spirits were certainly futile creatures, childish in their
manifestations, stupidly content with the old machinery of raps and
rumbles. I thought how fine a scene might be played on a stage like
this; if I were a ghost, how bluely I would glimmer at the windows, how
whimperingly chatter in the wind. Something whirled out of the
darkness above me, and fell with a flop on the ground, just at my feet.
I jumped backwards, in point of fact I made for the kitchen door, and,
with my hand on the latch, stood still and waited. Nothing further
happened; the thing that lay there did not stir. I struck a match.
The moment of tension turned to bathos as the light flickered on
nothing more fateful than a dead crow.
Dead it certainly was. I could have told that without looking at it;
but why should it, at some considerable period after its death, fall
from the clouds at my feet. But did it fall from the clouds? I struck
another match, and stared up at the impenetrable face of the house.
There was no hint of solution in the dark windows, but I determined to
go up and search the rooms that gave upon the yard.
How cold it was! I can feel now the frozen musty air of those attics,
with their rat-eaten floors and wall-papers furred with damp. I went
softly from one to another, feeling like a burglar in my own house, and
found nothing in elucidation of the mystery. The windows were
hermetically shut, and sealed with cobwebs. There was no furniture,
except in the end room, where a wardrobe without doors stood in a
corner, empty save for the solemn presence of a monstrous tall hat. I
went back to bed, cursing those powers of darkness that had got me out
of it, and heard no more.
My landlord had not failed of his promise to visit my coverts with his
hounds; in fact, he fulfilled it rather more conscientiously than
seemed to me quite wholesome for the cock-shooting. I maintained a
silence which I felt to be magnanimous on the part of a man who cared
nothing for hunting and a great deal for shooting, and wished the
hounds more success in the slaughter of my foxes than seemed to be
granted to them. I met them all, one red frosty evening, as I drove
down the long hill to my demesne gates, Flurry at their head, in his
shabby pink coat and dingy breeches, the hounds trailing dejectedly
behind him and his half-dozen companions.
"What luck?" I called out, drawing rein as I met them.
"None," said Mr. Flurry briefly. He did not stop, neither did he
remove his pipe from the down-twisted corner of his mouth; his eye at
me was cold and sour. The other members of the hunt passed me with
equal hauteur; I thought they took their ill luck very badly.
On foot, among the last of the straggling hounds, cracking a carman's
whip, and swearing comprehensively at them all, slouched my friend
Slipper. Our friendship had begun in Court, the relative positions of
the dock and the judgment-seat forming no obstacle to its progress, and
had been cemented during several days' tramping after snipe. He was,
as usual, a little drunk, and he hailed me as though I were a ship.
"Ahoy, Major Yeates!" he shouted, bringing himself up with a lurch
against my cart; "it's hunting you should be, in place of sending poor
divils to gaol!"
"But I hear you had no hunting," I said.
"Ye heard that, did ye?" Slipper rolled upon me an eye like that of a
profligate pug. "Well, begor, ye heard no more than the thruth."
"But where are all the foxes?" said I.
"Begor, I don't know no more than your honour. And Shreelane--that
there used to be as many foxes in it as there's crosses in a yard of
check! Well, well, I'll say nothin' for it, only that it's quare!
Here, Vaynus! Naygress!" Slipper uttered a yell, hoarse with whisky,
in adjuration of two elderly ladies of the pack who had profited by our
conversation to stray away into an adjacent cottage. "Well,
good-night, Major. Mr. Flurry's as cross as briars, and he'll have me
ate!"
He set off at a surprisingly steady run, cracking his whip, and
whooping like a madman. I hope that when I also am fifty I shall be
able to run like Slipper.
That frosty evening was followed by three others like unto it, and a
flight of woodcock came in. I calculated that I could do with five
guns, and I despatched invitations to shoot and dine on the following
day to four of the local sportsmen, among whom was, of course, my
landlord. I remember that in my letter to the latter I expressed a
facetious hope that my bag of cock would be more successful than his of
foxes had been.
The answers to my invitations were not what I expected. All, without
so much as a conventional regret, declined my invitation; Mr. Knox
added that he hoped the bag of cock would be to my liking, and that I
need not be "affraid" that the hounds would trouble my coverts any
more. Here was war! I gazed in stupefaction at the crooked scrawl in
which my landlord had declared it. It was wholly and entirely
inexplicable, and instead of going to sleep comfortably over the fire
and my newspaper as a gentleman should, I spent the evening in
irritated ponderings over this bewildering and exasperating change of
front on the part of my friendly squireens.
My shoot the next day was scarcely a success. I shot the woods in
company with my gamekeeper, Tim Connor, a gentleman whose duties mainly
consisted in limiting the poaching privileges to his personal friends,
and whatever my offence might have been, Mr. Knox could have wished me
no bitterer punishment than hearing the unavailing shouts of "Mark
cock!" and seeing my birds winging their way from the coverts, far out
of shot. Tim Connor and I got ten couple between us; it might have
been thirty if my neighbours had not boycotted me, for what I could
only suppose was the slackness of their hounds.
I was dog-tired that night, having walked enough for three men, and I
slept the deep, insatiable sleep that I had earned. It was somewhere
about 3 A.M. that I was gradually awakened by a continuous knocking,
interspersed with muffled calls. Great-Uncle McCarthy had never before
given tongue, and I freed one ear from blankets to listen. Then I
remembered that Peter had told me the sweep had promised to arrive that
morning, and to arrive early. Blind with sleep and fury I went to the
passage window, and thence desired the sweep to go to the devil. It
availed me little. For the remainder of the night I could hear him
pacing round the house, trying the windows, banging at the doors, and
calling upon Peter Cadogan as the priests of Baal called upon their
god. At six o'clock I had fallen into a troubled doze, when Mrs.
Cadogan knocked at my door and imparted the information that the sweep
had arrived. My answer need not be recorded, but in spite of it the
door opened, and my housekeeper, in a weird _déshabille_, effectively
lighted by the orange beams of her candle, entered my room.
"God forgive me, I never seen one I'd hate as much as that sweep!" she
began; "he's these three hours--arrah, what, three hours!--no, but all
night, raising tallywack and tandem round the house to get at the
chimbleys."
"Well, for Heaven's sake let him get at the chimneys and let me go to
sleep," I answered, goaded to desperation, "and you may tell him from
me that if I hear his voice again I'll shoot him!"
Mrs. Cadogan silently left my bedside, and as she closed the door she
said to herself, "The Lord save us!"
Subsequent events may be briefly summarised. At 7.30 I was awakened
anew by a thunderous sound in the chimney, and a brick crashed into the
fireplace, followed at a short interval by two dead jackdaws and their
nests. At eight, I was informed by Peter that there was no hot water,
and that he wished the divil would roast the same sweep. At 9.30, when
I came down to breakfast, there was no fire anywhere, and my coffee,
made in the coachhouse, tasted of soot. I put on an overcoat and
opened my letters. About fourth or fifth in the uninteresting heap
came one in an egregiously disguised hand.
"Sir," it began, "this is to inform you your unsportsmanlike conduct
has been discovered. You have been suspected this good while of
shooting the Shreelane foxes, it is known now you do worse. Parties
have seen your gamekeeper going regular to meet the Saturday early
train at Salters Hill Station, with your grey horse under a cart, and
your labels on the boxes, and we know as well as _your agent in Cork_
what it is you have in those boxes. Be warned in time.--Your
Wellwisher."
I read this through twice before its drift became apparent, and I
realised that I was accused of improving my shooting and my finances by
the simple expedient of selling my foxes. That is to say, I was in a
worse position than if I had stolen a horse, or murdered Mrs. Cadogan,
or got drunk three times a week in Skebawn.
For a few moments I fell into wild laughter, and then, aware that it
was rather a bad business to let a lie of this kind get a start, I sat
down to demolish the preposterous charge in a letter to Flurry Knox.
Somehow, as I selected my sentences, it was borne in upon me that, if
the letter spoke the truth, circumstantial evidence was rather against
me. Mere lofty repudiation would be unavailing, and by my infernal
facetiousness about the woodcock I had effectively filled in the case
against myself. At all events, the first thing to do was to establish
a basis, and have it out with Tim Connor. I rang the bell.
"Peter, is Tim Connor about the place?"
"He is not, sir. I heard him say he was going west the hill to mend
the bounds fence." Peter's face was covered with soot, his eyes were
red, and he coughed ostentatiously. "The sweep's after breaking one of
his brushes within in yer bedroom chimney, sir," he went on, with all
the satisfaction of his class in announcing domestic calamity; "he's
above on the roof now, and he'd be thankful to you to go up to him."
I followed him upstairs in that state of simmering patience that any
employer of Irish labour must know and sympathise with. I climbed the
rickety ladder and squeezed through the dirty trapdoor involved in the
ascent to the roof, and was confronted by the hideous face of the
sweep, black against the frosty blue sky. He had encamped with all his
paraphernalia on the flat top of the roof, and was good enough to rise
and put his pipe in his pocket on my arrival.
"Good morning, Major. That's a grand view you have up here," said the
sweep. He was evidently far too well bred to talk shop. "I thravelled
every roof in this counthry, and there isn't one where you'd get as
handsome a prospect!"
Theoretically he was right, but I had not come up to the roof to
discuss scenery, and demanded brutally why he had sent for me. The
explanation involved a recital of the special genius required to sweep
the Shreelane chimneys; of the fact that the sweep had in infancy been
sent up and down every one of them by Great-Uncle McCarthy; of the
three ass-loads of soot that by his peculiar skill he had this morning
taken from the kitchen chimney; of its present purity, the draught
being such that it would "dhraw up a young cat with it."
Finally--realising that I could endure no more--he explained that my
bedroom chimney had got what he called "a wynd" in it, and he proposed
to climb down a little way in the stack to try "would he get to come at
the brush." The sweep was very small, the chimney very large. I
stipulated that he should have a rope round his waist, and despite the
illegality, I let him go. He went down like a monkey, digging his toes
and fingers into the niches made for the purpose in the old chimney;
Peter held the rope. I lit a cigarette and waited.
Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It
was rough, heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue
lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry hill,
and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and
heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told
where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight. I turned to
survey with an owner's eye my own grey woods and straggling plantations
of larch, and espied a man coming out of the western wood. He had
something on his back, and he was walking very fast; a rabbit poacher
no doubt. As he passed out of sight into the back avenue he was
beginning to run. At the same instant I saw on the hill beyond my
western boundaries half-a-dozen horsemen scrambling by zigzag ways down
towards the wood. There was one red coat among them; it came first at
the gap in the fence that Tim Connor had gone out to mend, and with the
others was lost to sight in the covert, from which, in another instant,
came clearly through the frosty air a shout of "Gone to ground!"
Tremendous horn blowings followed, then, all in the same moment, I saw
the hounds break in full cry from the wood, and come stringing over the
grass and up the back avenue towards the yard gate. Were they running
a fresh fox into the stables?
I do not profess to be a hunting-man, but I am an Irishman, and so, it
is perhaps superfluous to state, is Peter. We forgot the sweep as if
he had never existed, and precipitated ourselves down the ladder, down
the stairs, and out into the yard. One side of the yard is formed by
the coach-house and a long stable, with a range of lofts above them,
planned on the heroic scale in such matters that obtained in Ireland
formerly. These join the house at the corner by the back door. A long
flight of stone steps leads to the lofts, and up these, as Peter and I
emerged from the back door, the hounds were struggling helter-skelter.
Almost simultaneously there was a confused clatter of hoofs in the back
avenue, and Flurry Knox came stooping at a gallop under the archway
followed by three or four other riders. They flung themselves from
their horses and made for the steps of the loft; more hounds pressed,
yelling, on their heels, the din was indescribable, and justified Mrs.
Cadogan's subsequent remark that "when she heard the noise she thought
'twas the end of the world and the divil collecting his own!"
I jostled in the wake of the party, and found myself in the loft,
wading in hay, and nearly deafened by the clamour that was bandied
about the high roof and walls. At the farther end of the loft the
hounds were raging in the hay, encouraged thereto by the whoops and
screeches of Flurry and his friends. High up in the gable of the loft,
where it joined the main wall of the house, there was a small door, and
I noted with a transient surprise that there was a long ladder leading
up to it. Even as it caught my eye a hound fought his way out of a
drift of hay and began to jump at the ladder, throwing his tongue
vociferously, and even clambering up a few rungs in his excitement.
"There's the way he's gone!" roared Flurry, striving through hounds and
hay towards the ladder, "Trumpeter has him! What's up there, back of
the door, Major? I don't remember it at all."
My crimes had evidently been forgotten in the supremacy of the moment.
While I was futilely asserting that had the fox gone up the ladder he
could not possibly have opened the door and shut it after him, even if
the door led anywhere, which, to the best of my belief, it did not, the
door in question opened, and to my amazement the sweep appeared at it.
He gesticulated violently, and over the tumult was heard to asseverate
that there was nothing above there, only a way into the flue, and any
one would be destroyed with the soot----
"Ah, go to blazes with your soot!" interrupted Flurry, already half-way
up the ladder.
I followed him, the other men pressing up behind me. That Trumpeter
had made no mistake was instantly brought home to our noses by the reek
of fox that met us at the door. Instead of a chimney, we found
ourselves in a dilapidated bedroom full of people. Tim Connor was
there, the sweep was there, and a squalid elderly man and woman on whom
I had never set eyes before. There was a large open fireplace, black
with the soot the sweep had brought down with him, and on the table
stood a bottle of my own special Scotch whisky. In one corner of the
room was a pile of broken packing-cases, and beside these on the floor
lay a bag in which something kicked.
Flurry, looking more uncomfortable and nonplussed than I could have
believed possible, listened in silence to the ceaseless harangue of the
elderly woman. The hounds were yelling like lost spirits in the loft
below, but her voice pierced the uproar like a bagpipe. It was an
unspeakably vulgar voice, yet it was not the voice of a countrywoman,
and there were frowzy remnants of respectability about her general
aspect.
"And is it you, Flurry Knox, that's calling me a disgrace! Disgrace,
indeed, am I? Me that was your poor mother's own uncle's daughter, and
as good a McCarthy as ever stood in Shreelane!"
What followed I could not comprehend, owing to the fact that the sweep
kept up a perpetual undercurrent of explanation to me as to how he had
got down the wrong chimney. I noticed that his breath stank of
whisky--Scotch, not the native variety.
* * * * *
Never, as long as Flurry Knox lives to blow a horn, will he hear the
last of the day that he ran his mother's first cousin to ground in the
attic. Never, while Mrs. Cadogan can hold a basting spoon, will she
cease to recount how, on the same occasion, she plucked and roasted ten
couple of woodcock in one torrid hour to provide luncheon for the hunt.
In the glory of this achievement her confederacy with the stowaways in
the attic is wholly slurred over, in much the same manner as the
startling outburst of summons for trespass, brought by Tim Connor
during the remainder of the shooting season, obscured the unfortunate
episode of the bagged fox. It was, of course, zeal for my shooting
that induced him to assist Mr. Knox's disreputable relations in the
deportation of my foxes; and I have allowed it to remain at that.
In fact, the only things not allowed to remain were Mr. and Mrs.
McCarthy Gannon. They, as my landlord informed me, in the midst of
vast apologies, had been permitted to squat at Shreelane until my
tenancy began, and having then ostentatiously and abusively left the
house, they had, with the connivance of the Cadogans, secretly returned
to roost in the corner attic, to sell foxes under the ægis of my name,
and to make inroads on my belongings. They retained connection with
the outer world by means of the ladder and the loft, and with the house
in general, and my whisky in particular, by a door into the other
attics--a door concealed by the wardrobe in which reposed Great-Uncle
McCarthy's tall hat.
It is with the greatest regret that I relinquish the prospect of
writing a monograph on Great-Uncle McCarthy for a Spiritualistic
Journal, but with the departure of his relations he ceased to manifest
himself, and neither the nailing up of packing-cases, nor the rumble of
the cart that took them to the station, disturbed my sleep for the
future.
I understand that the task of clearing out the McCarthy Gannon's
effects was of a nature that necessitated two glasses of whisky per
man; and if the remnants of rabbit and jackdaw disinterred in the
process were anything like the crow that was thrown out of the window
at my feet, I do not grudge the restorative.