"She fell over the stick with you," said Miss Bennett; "the dirty
brute!"
With another great effort I hooked myself on to the march of events, as
a truck is dragged out of a siding and hooked to a train.
"Oh, the Lord save us!" said a grey-haired woman who held the jug,
"ye're desthroyed entirely, asthore! Oh, glory be to the merciful will
of God, me heart lepped across me shesht when I seen him undher the
horse!"
"Go out and see if the trap's coming," said Miss Bennett; "he should
have found the doctor by this." She stared very closely at my face,
and seemed to find it easier to talk in short sentences.
"We must get those cuts looking better before Mrs. Yeates comes."
After an interval, during which unexpected places in my head ached from
the cold water, the desire to be polite and coherent again came upon me.
"I am sure it was not your mare's fault," I said.
Miss Bennett laughed a very little. I was glad to see her laugh; it
had struck me her face was strangely haggard and frightened.
"Well, of course it wasn't poor Cruiskeen's fault," she said. "She's
nearly home with Mr. Shute by now. That's why I came after you!"
"Mr. Shute!" I said; "wasn't he at the fair that day?"
"He was," answered Miss Bobby, looking at me with very compassionate
eyes; "you and he got on each other's horses by mistake at the hotel,
and you got the worst of the exchange!"
"Oh!" I said, without even trying to understand.
"He's here within, your honour's ladyship, Mrs. Yeates, ma'am," shouted
the grey-haired woman at the door; "don't be unaisy, achudth; he's
doing grand. Sure, I'm telling Miss Binnitt if she was his wife
itself, she couldn't give him betther care!"
The grey-haired woman laughed.
VIII
THE HOLY ISLAND
For three days of November a white fog stood motionless over the
country. All day and all night smothered booms and bangs away to the
south-west told that the Fastnet gun was hard at work, and the sirens
of the American liners uplifted their monstrous female voices as they
felt their way along the coast of Cork. On the third afternoon the
wind began to whine about the windows of Shreelane, and the barometer
fell like a stone. At 11 P.M. the storm rushed upon us with the roar
and the suddenness of a train; the chimneys bellowed, the tall old
house quivered, and the yelling wind drove against it, as a man puts
his shoulder against a door to burst it in.
We none of us got much sleep, and if Mrs. Cadogan is to be
believed--which experience assures me she is not--she spent the night
in devotional exercises, and in ministering to the panic-stricken
kitchen-maid by the light of a Blessed candle. All that day the storm
screamed on, dry-eyed; at nightfall the rain began, and next morning,
which happened to be Sunday, every servant in the house was a messenger
of Job, laden with tales of leakages, floods, and fallen trees, and
inflated with the ill-concealed glory of their kind in evil tidings.
To Peter Cadogan, who had been to early Mass, was reserved the crowning
satisfaction of reporting that a big vessel had gone on the rocks at
Yokahn Point the evening before, and was breaking up fast; it was
rumoured that the crew had got ashore, but this feature, being
favourable and uninteresting, was kept as much as possible in the
background. Mrs. Cadogan, who had been to America in an ocean liner,
became at once the latest authority on shipwrecks, and was of opinion
that "whoever would be dhrownded, it wouldn't be thim lads o' sailors.
Sure wasn't there the greatest storm ever was in it the time meself was
on the say, and what'd thim fellows do but to put us below entirely in
the ship, and close down the doors on us, the way theirselves'd leg it
when we'd be dhrownding!"
This view of the position was so startlingly novel that Philippa
withdrew suddenly from the task of ordering dinner, and fell up the
kitchen stairs in unsuitable laughter. Philippa has not the most
rudimentary capacity for keeping her countenance.
That afternoon I was wrapped in the slumber, balmiest and most
profound, that follows on a wet Sunday luncheon, when Murray, our D.I.
of police, drove up in uniform, and came into the house on the top of a
gust that set every door banging and every picture dancing on the
walls. He looked as if his eyes had been blown out of his head, and he
wanted something to eat very badly.
"I've been down at the wreck since ten o'clock this morning," he said,
"waiting for her to break up, and once she does there'll be trouble.
She's an American ship, and she's full up with rum, and bacon, and
butter, and all sorts. Bosanquet is there with all his coastguards,
and there are five hundred country people on the strand at this moment,
waiting for the fun to begin. I've got ten of my fellows there, and I
wish I had as many more. You'd better come back with me, Yeates, we
may want the Riot Act before all's done!"
The heavy rain had ceased, but it seemed as if it had fed the wind
instead of calming it, and when Murray and I drove out of Shreelane,
the whole dirty sky was moving, full sailed, in from the south-west,
and the telegraph wires were hanging in a loop from the post outside
the gate. Nothing except a Skebawn car-horse would have faced the
whooping charges of the wind that came at us across Corran Lake;
stimulated mysteriously by whistles from the driver, Murray's yellow
hireling pounded woodenly along against the blast, till the smell of
the torn sea-weed was borne upon it, and we saw the Atlantic waves come
towering into the bay of Tralagough.
The ship was, or had been, a three-masted barque; two of her masts were
gone, and her bows stood high out of water on the reef that forms one
of the shark-like jaws of the bay. The long strand was crowded with
black groups of people, from the bank of heavy shingle that had been
hurled over on to the road, down to the slope where the waves pitched
themselves and climbed and fought and tore the gravel back with them,
as though they had dug their fingers in. The people were nearly all
men, dressed solemnly and hideously in their Sunday clothes; most of
them had come straight from Mass without any dinner, true to that Irish
instinct that places its fun before its food. That the wreck was
regarded as a spree of the largest kind was sufficiently obvious. Our
car pulled up at a public-house that stood askew between the road and
the shingle; it was humming with those whom Irish publicans are pleased
to call "Bonâ feeds," and sundry of the same class were clustered round
the door. Under the wall on the lee-side was seated a bagpiper,
droning out "The Irish Washerwoman" with nodding head and tapping heel,
and a young man was cutting a few steps of a jig for the delectation of
a group of girls.
So far Murray's constabulary had done nothing but exhibit their
imposing chest measurement and spotless uniforms to the Atlantic, and
Bosanquet's coastguards had only salvaged some spars, the debris of a
boat, and a dead sheep, but their time was coming. As we stumbled down
over the shingle, battered by the wind and pelted by clots of foam,
some one beside me shouted, "She's gone!" A hill of water had
smothered the wreck, and when it fell from her again nothing was left
but the bows, with the bowsprit hanging from them in a tangle of
rigging. The clouds, bronzed by an unseen sunset, hung low over her;
in that greedy pack of waves, with the remorseless rocks above and
below her, she seemed the most lonely and tormented of creatures.
About half-an-hour afterwards the cargo began to come ashore on the top
of the rising tide. Barrels were plunging and diving in the trough of
the waves, like a school of porpoises; they were pitched up the beach
in waist-deep rushes of foam; they rolled down again, and were swung up
and shouldered by the next wave, playing a kind of Tom Tiddler's ground
with the coastguards. Some of the barrels were big and dangerous, some
were small and nimble like young pigs, and the bluejackets were up to
their middles as their prey dodged and ducked, and the police lined out
along the beach to keep back the people. Ten men of the R.I.C. can do
a great deal, but they cannot be in more than twenty or thirty places
at the same instant; therefore they could hardly cope with a scattered
and extremely active mob of four or five hundred, many of whom had
taken advantage of their privileges as "bonâ-fide travellers," and all
of whom were determined on getting at the rum.
As the dusk fell the thing got more and more out of hand; the people
had found out that the big puncheons held the rum, and had succeeded in
capturing one. In the twinkling of an eye it was broached, and fifty
backs were shoving round it like a football scrummage. I have heard
many rows in my time: I have seen two Irish regiments--one of them
Militia--at each other's throats in Fermoy barracks; I have heard
Philippa's water spaniel and two fox-terriers hunting a strange cat
round the dairy; but never have I known such untrammelled bedlam as
that which yelled round the rum-casks on Tralagough strand. For it was
soon not a question of one broached cask, or even of two. The barrels
were coming in fast, so fast that it was impossible for the
representatives of law and order to keep on any sort of terms with
them. The people, shouting with laughter, stove in the casks, and
drank rum at 34° above proof, out of their hands, out of their hats,
out of their boots. Women came fluttering over the hillsides through
the twilight, carrying jugs, milk-pails, anything that would hold the
liquor; I saw one of them, roaring with laughter, tilt a filthy zinc
bucket to an old man's lips.
With the darkness came anarchy. The rising tide brought more and yet
more booty: great spars came lunging in on the lap of the waves, mixed
up with cabin furniture, seamen's chests, and the black and slippery
barrels, and the country people continued to flock in, and the drinking
became more and more unbridled. Murray sent for more men and a doctor,
and we slaved on hopelessly in the dark, collaring half-drunken men,
shoving pig-headed casks up hills of shingle, hustling in among groups
of roaring drinkers--we rescued perhaps one barrel in half-a-dozen. I
began to know that there were men there who were not drunk and were not
idle; I was also aware, as the strenuous hours of darkness passed, of
an occasional rumble of cart wheels on the road. It was evident that
the casks which were broached were the least part of the looting, but
even they were beyond our control. The most that Bosanquet, Murray,
and I could do was to concentrate our forces on the casks that had been
secured, and to organise charges upon the swilling crowds in order to
upset the casks that they had broached. Already men and boys were
lying about, limp as leeches, motionless as the dead.
"They'll kill themselves before morning, at this rate!" shouted Murray
to me. "They're drinking it by the quart! Here's another barrel; come
on!"
We rallied our small forces, and after a brief but furious struggle
succeeded in capsizing it. It poured away in a flood over the stones,
over the prostrate figures that sprawled on them, and a howl of
reproach followed.
"If ye pour away any more o' that, Major," said an unctuous voice in my
ear, "ye'll intoxicate the stones and they'll be getting up and
knocking us down!"
I had been aware of a fat shoulder next to mine in the throng as we
heaved the puncheon over, and I now recognised the ponderous wit and
Falstaffian figure of Mr. James Canty, a noted member of the Skebawn
Board of Guardians, and the owner of a large farm near at hand.
"I never saw worse work on this strand," he went on. "I considher
these debaucheries a disgrace to the counthry."
Mr. Canty was famous as an orator, and I presume that it was from long
practice among his fellow P.L.G.'s that he was able, without apparent
exertion, to out-shout the storm.
At this juncture the long-awaited reinforcements arrived, and along
with them came Dr. Jerome Hickey, armed with a black bag. Having
mentioned that the bag contained a pump--not one of the common or
garden variety--and that no pump on board a foundering ship had more
arduous labours to perform, I prefer to pass to other themes. The
wreck, which had at first appeared to be as inexhaustible and as
variously stocked as that in the "Swiss Family Robinson," was beginning
to fail in its supply. The crowd were by this time for the most part
incapable from drink, and the fresh contingent of police tackled their
work with some prospect of success by the light of a tar barrel,
contributed by the owner of the public-house. At about the same time I
began to be aware that I was aching with fatigue, that my clothes hung
heavy and soaked upon me, that my face was stiff with the salt spray
and the bitter wind, and that it was two hours past dinner-time. The
possibility of fried salt herrings and hot whisky and water at the
public-house rose dazzlingly before my mind, when Mr. Canty again
crossed my path.
"In my opinion ye have the whole cargo under conthrol now, Major," he
said, "and the police and the sailors should be able to account for it
all now by the help of the light. Wasn't I the finished fool that I
didn't think to send up to my house for a tar barrel before now!
Well--we're all foolish sometimes! But indeed it's time for us to give
over, and that's what I'm after saying to the Captain and Mr. Murray.
You're exhausted now the three of ye, and if I might make so bold, I'd
suggest that ye'd come up to my little place and have what'd warm ye
before ye'd go home. It's only a few perches up the road."
The tide had turned, the rain had begun again, and the tar barrel
illumined the fact that Dr. Hickey's dreadful duties alone were
pressing. We held a council and finally followed Mr. Canty, picking
our way through wreckage of all kinds, including the human variety.
Near the public-house I stumbled over something that was soft and had a
squeak in it; it was the piper, with his head and shoulders in an
overturned rum-barrel, and the bagpipes still under his arm.
I knew the outward appearance of Mr. Canty's house very well. It was a
typical southern farm-house, with dirty whitewashed walls, a slated
roof, and small, hermetically-sealed windows staring at the morass of
manure which constituted the yard. We followed Mr. Canty up the filthy
lane that led to it, picked our way round vague and squelching spurs of
the manure heap, and were finally led through the kitchen into a
stifling best parlour. Mrs. Canty, a vast and slatternly matron, had
evidently made preparations for us; there was a newly-lighted fire
pouring flame up the chimney from layers of bogwood, there were whisky
and brandy on the table, and a plateful of biscuits sugared in white
and pink. Upon our hostess was a black silk dress which indifferently
concealed the fact that she was short of boot-laces, and that the boots
themselves had made many excursions to the yard and none to the
blacking-bottle. Her manners, however, were admirable, and while I
live I shall not forget her potato cakes. They came in hot and hot
from a pot-oven, they were speckled with caraway seeds, they swam in
salt butter, and we ate them shamelessly and greasily, and washed them
down with hot whisky and water; I knew to a nicety how ill I should be
next day, and heeded not.
"Well, gentlemen," remarked Mr. Canty later on, in his best Board of
Guardians' manner, "I've seen many wrecks between this and the Mizen
Head, but I never witnessed a scene of more disgraceful ex-cess than
what was in it to-night."
"Hear, hear!" murmured Bosanquet with unseemly levity.
"I should say," went on Mr. Canty, "there was at one time to-night
upwards of one hundhred men dead dhrunk on the strand, or anyway so
dhrunk that if they'd attempt to spake they'd foam at the mouth."
"The craytures!" interjected Mrs. Canty sympathetically.
"But if they're dhrunk to-day," continued our host, "it's nothing at
all to what they'll be to-morrow and afther to-morrow, and it won't be
on the strand they'll be dhrinkin' it."
"Why, where will it be?" said Bosanquet, with his disconcerting English
way of asking a point-blank question.
Mr. Canty passed his hand over his red cheeks.
"There'll be plenty asking that before all's said and done, Captain,"
he said, with a compassionate smile, "and there'll be plenty that could
give the answer if they'll like, but by dam I don't think ye'll be apt
to get much out of the Yokahn boys!"
"The Lord save us, 'twould be better to keep out from the likes o'
thim!" put in Mrs. Canty, sliding a fresh avalanche of potato cakes on
to the dish; "didn't they pull the clothes off the gauger and pour
potheen down his throath till he ran screeching through the streets o'
Skebawn!"
James Canty chuckled.
"I remember there was a wreck here one time, and the undherwriters put
me in charge of the cargo. Brandy it was--cases of the best Frinch
brandy. The people had a song about it, what's this the first verse
was--
"One night to the rocks of Yokahn
Came the barque _Isabella_ so dandy,
To pieces she went before dawn,
Herself and her cargo of brandy.
And all met a wathery grave
Excepting the vessel's car_pen_ther,
Poor fellow, so far from his home."
Mr. Canty chanted these touching lines in a tuneful if wheezy tenor.
"Well, gentlemen, we're all friends here," he continued, "and it's no
harm to mention that this man below at the public-house came askin' me
would I let him have some of it for a consideration. 'Sullivan,' says
I to him, 'if ye ran down gold in a cup in place of the brandy, I
wouldn't give it to you. Of coorse,' says I, 'I'm not sayin' but that
if a bottle was to get a crack of a stick, and it to be broken, and a
man to drink a glass out of it, that would be no more than an
accident.' 'That's no good to me,' says he, 'but if I had twelve
gallons of that brandy in Cork,' says he, 'by the Holy German!' says
he, saying an awful curse, 'I'd sell twenty-five out of it!' Well,
indeed, it was true for him; it was grand stuff. As the saying is, it
would make a horse out of a cow!"
"It appears to be a handy sort of place for keeping a pub," said
Bosanquet.
"Shut to the door, Margaret," said Mr. Canty with elaborate caution.
"It'd be a queer place that wouldn't be handy for Sullivan!"
A further tale of great length was in progress when Dr. Hickey's
Mephistophelian nose was poked into the best parlour.
"Hullo, Hickey! Pumped out? eh?" said Murray.
"If I am, there's plenty more like me," replied the Doctor
enigmatically, "and some of them three times over! James, did these
gentlemen leave you a drop of anything that you'd offer me?"
"Maybe ye'd like a glass of rum, Doctor?" said Mr. Canty with a wink at
his other guests.
Dr. Hickey shuddered.
I had next morning precisely the kind of mouth that I had anticipated,
and it being my duty to spend the better part of the day administering
justice in Skebawn, I received from Mr. Flurry Knox and other of my
brother magistrates precisely the class of condolences on my "Monday
head" that I found least amusing. It was unavailing to point out the
resemblance between hot potato cakes and molten lead, or to dilate on
their equal power of solidifying; the collective wisdom of the Bench
decided that I was suffering from contraband rum, and rejoiced over me
accordingly.
During the next three weeks Murray and Bosanquet put in a time only to
be equalled by that of the heroes in detective romances. They began by
acting on the hint offered by Mr. Canty, and were rewarded by finding
eight barrels of bacon and three casks of rum in the heart of Mr.
Sullivan's turf rick, placed there, so Mr. Sullivan explained with much
detail, by enemies, with the object of getting his licence taken away.
They stabbed potato gardens with crowbars to find the buried barrels,
they explored the chimneys, they raided the cow-houses; and in every
possible and impossible place they found some of the cargo of the late
barque _John D. Williams_, and, as the sympathetic Mr. Canty said, "For
as much as they found, they left five times as much afther them!"
It was a wet, lingering autumn, but towards the end of November the
rain dried up, the weather stiffened, and a week of light frosts and
blue skies was offered as a tardy apology. Philippa possesses, in
common with many of her sex, an inappeasable passion for picnics, and
her ingenuity for devising occasions for them is only equalled by her
gift for enduring their rigours. I have seen her tackle a moist
chicken pie with a splinter of slate and my stylograph pen. I have
known her to take the tea-basket to an auction, and make tea in a
four-wheeled inside car, regardless of the fact that it was coming
under the hammer in ten minutes, and that the kettle took twenty
minutes to boil. It will therefore be readily understood that the rare
occasions when I was free to go out with a gun were not allowed to pass
uncelebrated by the tea-basket.
"You'd much better shoot Corran Lake to-morrow," my wife said to me one
brilliant afternoon. "We could send the punt over, and I could meet
you on Holy Island with----"
The rest of the sentence was concerned with ways, means, and the
tea-basket, and need not be recorded.
I had taken the shooting of a long snipe bog that trailed from Corran
Lake almost to the sea at Tralagough, and it was my custom to begin to
shoot from the seaward end of it, and finally to work round the lake
after duck.
To-morrow proved a heavenly morning, touched with frost, gilt with sun.
I started early, and the mists were still smoking up from the calm,
all-reflecting lake, as the Quaker stepped out along the level road,
smashing the thin ice on the puddles with his big feet. Behind the
calves of my legs sat Maria, Philippa's brown Irish water-spaniel,
assiduously licking the barrels of my gun, as was her custom when the
ecstasy of going out shooting was hers. Maria had been given to
Philippa as a wedding-present, and since then it had been my wife's
ambition that she should conform to the Beth Gelert standard of being
"a lamb at home, a lion in the chase." Maria did pretty well as a
lion: she hunted all dogs unmistakably smaller than herself, and
whenever it was reasonably possible to do so she devoured the spoils of
the chase, notably jack snipe. It was as a lamb that she failed;
objectionable as I have no doubt a lamb would be as a domestic pet, it
at least would not snatch the cold beef from the luncheon-table, nor
yet, if banished for its crimes, would it spend the night in scratching
the paint off the hall door. Maria bit beggars (who valued their
disgusting limbs at five shillings the square inch), she bullied the
servants, she concealed ducks' claws and fishes' backbones behind the
sofa cushions, and yet, when she laid her brown snout upon my knee, and
rolled her blackguard amber eyes upon me, and smote me with her
feathered paw, it was impossible to remember her iniquities against
her. On shooting mornings Maria ceased to be a buccaneer, a glutton,
and a hypocrite. From the moment when I put my gun together her
breakfast stood untouched until it suffered the final degradation of
being eaten by the cats, and now in the trap she was shivering with
excitement, and agonising in her soul lest she should even yet be left
behind.
Slipper met me at the cross roads from which I had sent back the trap;
Slipper, redder in the nose than anything I had ever seen off the
stage, very husky as to the voice, and going rather tender on both
feet. He informed me that I should have a grand day's shooting, the
head-poacher of the locality having, in a most gentlemanlike manner,
refrained from exercising his sporting rights the day before, on
hearing that I was coming. I understood that this was to be considered
as a mark of high personal esteem, and I set to work at the bog with
suitable gratitude.
In spite of Mr. O'Driscoll's magnanimity, I had not a very good
morning. The snipe were there, but in the perfect stillness of the
weather it was impossible to get near them, and five times out of six
they were up, flickering and dodging, before I was within shot. Maria
became possessed of seven devils and broke away from heel the first
time I let off my gun, ranging far and wide in search of the bird I had
missed, and putting up every live thing for half a mile round, as she
went splashing and steeple-chasing through the bog. Slipper expressed
his opinion of her behaviour in language more appallingly picturesque
and resourceful than any I have heard, even in the Skebawn Courthouse;
I admit that at the time I thought he spoke very suitably. Before she
was recaptured every remaining snipe within earshot was lifted out of
it by Slipper's steam-engine whistles and my own infuriated bellows; it
was fortunate that the bog was spacious and that there was still a long
tract of it ahead, where beyond these voices there was peace.
I worked my way on, jumping treacle-dark drains, floundering through
the rustling yellow rushes, circumnavigating the bog-holes, and taking
every possible and impossible chance of a shot; by the time I had
reached Corran Lake I had got two and a half brace, retrieved by Maria
with a perfection that showed what her powers were when the sinuous
adroitness of Slipper's woodbine stick was fresh in her mind. But with
Maria it was always the unexpected that happened. My last snipe, a
jack, fell in the lake, and Maria, bursting through the reeds with
kangaroo bounds, and cleaving the water like a torpedo-boat, was a
model of all the virtues of her kind. She picked up the bird with a
snake-like dart of her head, clambered with it on to a tussock, and
there, well out of reach of the arm of the law, before our indignant
eyes crunched it twice and bolted it.
"Well," said Slipper complacently, some ten minutes afterwards, "divil
such a bating ever I gave a dog since the day Prince killed owld Mrs.
Knox's paycock! Prince was a lump of a brown tarrier I had one time,
and faith I kicked the toes out o' me owld boots on him before I had
the owld lady composed!"
However composing Slipper's methods may have been to Mrs. Knox, they
had quite the contrary effect upon a family party of duck that had been
lying in the reeds. With horrified outcries they broke into flight,
and now were far away on the ethereal mirror of the lake, among strings
of their fellows that were floating and quacking in preoccupied
indifference to my presence.
A promenade along the lake-shore demonstrated the fact that without a
boat there was no more shooting for me; I looked across to the island
where, some time ago, I had seen Philippa and her punt arrive. The
boat was tied to an overhanging tree, but my wife was nowhere to be
seen. I was opening my mouth to give a hail, when I saw her emerge
precipitately from among the trees and jump into the boat; Philippa had
not in vain spent many summers on the Thames, she was under way in a
twinkling, sculled a score of strokes at the rate of a finish, then
stopped and stared at the peaceful island. I called to her, and in a
minute or two the punt had crackled through the reeds, and shoved its
blunt nose ashore at the spot where I was standing.
"Sinclair," said Philippa in awe-struck tones, "there's something on
the island!"
"I hope there's something to eat there," said I.
"I tell you there _is_ something there, alive," said my wife with her
eyes as large as saucers; "it's making an awful sound like snoring."
"That's the fairies, ma'am," said Slipper with complete certainty;
"sure I known them that seen fairies in that island as thick as the
grass, and every one o' them with little caps on them."
Philippa's wide gaze wandered to Slipper's hideous pug face and back to
me.
"It was not a human being, Sinclair!" she said combatively, though I
had not uttered a word.
Maria had already, after the manner of dogs, leaped, dripping, into the
boat: I prepared to follow her example.
"Major," said Slipper, in a tragic whisper, "there was a man was a
night on that island one time, watching duck, and Thim People cot him,
and dhragged him through Hell and through Death, and threw him in the
tide----"
"Shove off the boat," I said, too hungry for argument.
Slipper obeyed, throwing his knee over the gunwale as he did so, and
tumbling into the bow; we could have done without him very comfortably,
but his devotion was touching.
Holy Island was perhaps a hundred yards long, and about half as many
broad; it was covered with trees and a dense growth of rhododendrons;
somewhere in the jungle was a ruined fragment of a chapel, smothered in
ivy and briars, and in a little glade in the heart of the island there
was a holy well. We landed, and it was obviously a sore humiliation to
Philippa that not a sound was to be heard in the spell-bound silence of
the island, save the cough of a heron on a tree-top.
"It _was_ there," she said, with an unconvinced glance at the
surrounding thickets.
"Sure, I'll give a thrawl through the island, ma'am," volunteered
Slipper with unexpected gallantry, "an' if it's the divil himself is in
it, I'll rattle him into the lake!"
He went swaggering on his search, shouting, "Hi, cock!" and whacking
the rhododendrons with his stick, and after an interval returned and
assured us that the island was uninhabited. Being provided with
refreshments he again withdrew, and Philippa and Maria and I fed
variously and at great length, and washed the plates with water from
the holy well. I was smoking a cigarette when we heard Slipper
addressing the solitudes at the farther end of the island, and ending
with one of his whisky-throated crows of laughter.
He presently came lurching towards us through the bushes, and a glance
sufficed to show even Philippa--who was as incompetent a judge of such
matters as many of her sex--that he was undeniably screwed.
"Major Yeates!" he began, "and Mrs. Major Yeates, with respex to ye,
I'm bastely dhrunk! Me head is light since the 'fluenzy, and the
docthor told me I should carry a little bottle-een o' sperrits----"
"Look here," I said to Philippa, "I'll take him across, and bring the
boat back for you."
"Sinclair," responded my wife with concentrated emotion, "I would
rather die than stay on this island alone!"
Slipper was getting drunker every moment, but I managed to stow him on
his back in the bows of the punt, in which position he at once began to
uplift husky and wandering strains of melody. To this accompaniment
we, as Tennyson says,
"moved from the brink like some full-breasted swan,
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy web."
Slipper would certainly have been none the worse for taking the flood,
and, as the burden of "Lannigan's Ball" strengthened and spread along
the tranquil lake, and the duck once more fled in justifiable
consternation, I felt much inclined to make him do so.
We made for the end of the lake that was nearest Shreelane, and, as we
rounded the point of the island, another boat presented itself to our
view. It contained my late entertainer, Mrs. Canty, seated bulkily in
the stern, while a small boy bowed himself between the two heavy oars.
"It's a lovely evening, Major Yeates," she called out. "I'm just going
to the island to get some water from the holy well for me daughter that
has an impression on her chest. Indeed, I thought 'twas yourself was
singing a song for Mrs. Yeates when I heard you coming, but sure
Slipper is a great warrant himself for singing."
"May the divil crack the two legs undher ye!" bawled Slipper in
acknowledgment of the compliment.
Mrs. Canty laughed genially, and her boat lumbered away.
I shoved Slipper ashore at the nearest point; Philippa and I paddled to
the end of the lake, and abandoning the duck as a bad business, walked
home.
A few days afterwards it happened that it was incumbent upon me to
attend the funeral of the Roman Catholic Bishop of the diocese. It was
what is called in France "_un bel enterrement_," with inky flocks of
tall-hatted priests, and countless yards of white scarves, and a repast
of monumental solidity at the Bishop's residence. The actual interment
was to take place in Cork, and we moved in long and imposing procession
to the railway station, where a special train awaited the cortège. My
friend Mr. James Canty was among the mourners: an important and active
personage, exchanging condolences with the priests, giving directions
to porters, and blowing his nose with a trumpeting mournfulness that
penetrated all the other noises of the platform. He was condescending
enough to notice my presence, and found time to tell me that he had
given Mr. Murray "a sure word" with regard to some of "_the
wreckage_"--this with deep significance, and a wink of an inflamed and
tearful eye. I saw him depart in a first-class carriage, and the odour
of sanctity; seeing that he was accompanied by seven priests, and that
both windows were shut, the latter must have been considerable.
Afterwards, in the town, I met Murray, looking more pleased with
himself than I had seen him since he had taken up the unprofitable task
of smuggler-hunting.
"Come along and have some lunch," he said, "I've got a real good thing
on this time! That chap Canty came to me late last night, and told me
that he knew for a fact that the island on Corran Lake was just stiff
with barrels of bacon and rum, and that I'd better send every man I
could spare to-day to get them into the town. I sent the men out at
eight o'clock this morning; I think I've gone one better than Bosanquet
this time!"
I began to realise that Philippa was going to score heavily on the
subject of the fairies that she had heard snoring on the island, and I
imparted to Murray the leading features of our picnic there.
"Oh, Slipper's been up to his chin in that rum from the first," said
Murray. "I'd like to know who his sleeping partner was!"
It was beginning to get dark before the loaded carts of the salvage
party came lumbering past Murray's windows and into the yard of the
police-barrack. We followed them, and in so doing picked up Flurry
Knox, who was sauntering in the same direction. It was a good haul,
five big casks of rum, and at least a dozen smaller barrels of bacon
and butter, and Murray and his Chief Constable smiled seraphically on
one another as the spoil was unloaded and stowed in a shed.
"Wouldn't it be as well to see how the butter is keeping?" remarked
Flurry, who had been looking on silently, with, as I had noticed, a
still and amused eye. "The rim of that small keg there looks as if it
had been shifted lately."
The sergeant looked hard at Flurry; he knew as well as most people that
a hint from Mr. Knox was usually worth taking. He turned to Murray.
"Will I open it, sir?"
"Oh! open it if Mr. Knox wishes," said Murray, who was not famous for
appreciating other people's suggestions.
The keg was opened.
"Funny butter," said Flurry.
The sergeant said nothing. The keg was full of black bog-mould.
Another was opened, and another, all with the same result.
"Damnation!" said Murray, suddenly losing his temper. "What's the use
of going on with those? Try one of the rum casks."
A few moments passed in total silence while a tap and a spigot were
sent for and applied to the barrel. The sergeant drew off a mugful and
put his nose to it with the deliberation of a connoisseur.
"Water, sir," he pronounced, "dirty water, with a small indication of
sperrits."
A junior constable tittered explosively, met the light blue glare of
Murray's eye, and withered away.
"Perhaps it's holy water!" said I, with a wavering voice.
Murray's glance pinned me like an assegai, and I also faded into the
background.
"Well," said Flurry in dulcet tones, "if you want to know where the
stuff is that was in those barrels, I can tell you, for I was told it
myself half-an-hour ago. It's gone to Cork with the Bishop by special
train!"
Mr. Canty was undoubtedly a man of resource. Mrs. Canty had mistakenly
credited me with an intelligence equal to her own, and on receiving
from Slipper a highly coloured account of how audibly Mr. Canty had
slept off his potations, had regarded the secret of Holy Island as
having been given away. That night and the two succeeding ones were
spent in the transfer of the rum to bottles, and the bottles and the
butter to fish boxes; these were, by means of a slight lubrication of
the railway underlings, loaded into a truck as "Fresh Fish, Urgent,"
and attached to the Bishop's funeral train, while the police, decoyed
far from the scene of action, were breaking their backs over barrels of
bog-water. "I suppose," continued Flurry pleasantly, "you don't know
the pub that Canty's brother has in Cork. Well, I do. I'm going to
buy some rum there next week, cheap."
"I shall proceed against Canty," said Murray, with fateful calm.
"You won't proceed far," said Flurry; "you'll not get as much evidence
out of the whole country as'd hang a cat."
"Who was your informant?" demanded Murray.
Flurry laughed. "Well, by the time the train was in Cork, yourself and
the Major were the only two men in the town that weren't talking about
it."
IX
THE POLICY OF THE CLOSED DOOR
The disasters and humiliations that befell me at Drumcurran Fair may
yet be remembered. They certainly have not been forgotten in the
regions about Skebawn, where the tale of how Bernard Shute and I stole
each other's horses has passed into history. The grand-daughter of the
Mountain Hare, bought by Mr. Shute with such light-hearted enthusiasm,
was restored to that position between the shafts of a cart that she was
so well fitted to grace; Moonlighter, his other purchase, spent the two
months following on the fair in "favouring" a leg with a strained
sinew, and in receiving visits from the local vet., who, however
uncertain in his diagnosis of Moonlighter's leg, had accurately
estimated the length of Bernard's foot.
Miss Bennett's mare Cruiskeen, alone of the trio, was immediately and
thoroughly successful. She went in harness like a hero, she carried
Philippa like an elder sister, she was never sick or sorry; as Peter
Cadogan summed her up, "That one 'd live where another 'd die." In her
safe keeping Philippa made her début with hounds at an uneventful
morning's cubbing, with no particular result, except that Philippa
returned home so stiff that she had to go to bed for a day, and arose
more determined than ever to be a fox-hunter.
The opening meet of Mr. Knox's foxhounds was on November 1, and on that
morning Philippa on Cruiskeen, accompanied by me on the Quaker, set out
for Ardmeen Cross, the time-honoured fixture for All Saints' Day. The
weather was grey and quiet, and full of all the moist sweetness of an
Irish autumn. There had been a great deal of rain during the past
month; it had turned the bracken to a purple brown, and had filled the
hollows with shining splashes of water. The dead leaves were slippery
under foot, and the branches above were thinly decked with yellow,
where the pallid survivors of summer still clung to their posts. As
Philippa and I sedately approached the meet the red coats of Flurry
Knox and his whip, Dr. Jerome Hickey, were to be seen on the road at
the top of the hill; Cruiskeen put her head in the air, and stared at
them with eyes that understood all they portended.
"Sinclair," said my wife hurriedly, as a straggling hound, flogged in
by Dr. Hickey, uttered a grievous and melodious howl, "remember, if
they find, it's no use to talk to me, for I shan't be able to speak."
I was sufficiently acquainted with Philippa in moments of enthusiasm to
exhibit silently the corner of a clean pocket-handkerchief; I have seen
her cry when a police constable won a bicycle race in Skebawn; she has
wept at hearing Sir Valentine Knox's health drunk with musical honours
at a tenants' dinner. It is an amiable custom, but, as she herself
admits, it is unbecoming.
An imposing throng, in point of numbers, was gathered at the
cross-roads, the riders being almost swamped in the crowd of traps,
outside cars, bicyclists, and people on foot. The field was an
eminently representative one. The Clan Knox was, as usual, there in
force, its more aristocratic members dingily respectable in black coats
and tall hats that went impartially to weddings, funerals, and hunts,
and, like a horse that is past mark of mouth, were no longer to be
identified with any special epoch; there was a humbler squireen element
in tweeds and flat-brimmed pot-hats, and a good muster of farmers, men
of the spare, black-muzzled, West of Ireland type, on horses that
ranged from the cart mare, clipped trace high, to shaggy and leggy
three-year-olds, none of them hunters, but all of them able to hunt.
Philippa and I worked our way to the heart of things, where was Flurry,
seated on his brown mare, in what appeared to be a somewhat moody
silence. As we exchanged greetings I was aware that his eye was
resting with extreme disfavour upon two approaching figures. I put up
my eye-glass, and perceived that one of them was Miss Sally Knox, on a
tall grey horse; the other was Mr. Bernard Shute, in all the flawless
beauty of his first pink coat, mounted on Stockbroker, a well-known,
hard-mouthed, big-jumping bay, recently purchased from Dr. Hickey.
During the languors of a damp autumn the neighbourhood had been much
nourished and sustained by the privilege of observing and diagnosing
the progress of Mr. Shute's flirtation with Miss Sally Knox. What made
it all the more enjoyable for the lookers-on--or most of them--was,
that although Bernard's courtship was of the nature of a proclamation
from the housetops, Miss Knox's attitude left everything to the
imagination. To Flurry Knox the romantic but despicable position of
slighted rival was comfortably allotted; his sole sympathisers were
Philippa and old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas, but no one knew if he needed
sympathisers. Flurry was a man of mystery.
Mr. Shute and Miss Knox approached us rapidly, the latter's mount
pulling hard.
"Flurry," I said, "isn't that grey the horse Shute bought from you last
July at the fair?"
Flurry did not answer me. His face was as black as thunder. He turned
his horse round, cursing two country boys who got in his way, with low
and concentrated venom, and began to move forward, followed by the
hounds. If his wish was to avoid speaking to Miss Sally it was not to
be gratified.
"Good-morning, Flurry," she began, sitting close down to Moonlighter's
ramping jog as she rode up beside her cousin. "What a hurry you're in!
We passed no end of people on the road who won't be here for another
ten minutes."
"No more will I," was Mr. Knox's cryptic reply, as he spurred the brown
mare into a trot.
Moonlighter made a vigorous but frustrated effort to buck, and
indemnified himself by a successful kick at a hound.
"Bother you, Flurry! Can't you walk for a minute?" exclaimed Miss
Sally, who looked about as large, in relation to her horse, as the
conventional tomtit on a round of beef. "You might have more sense
than to crack your whip under this horse's nose! I don't believe you
know what horse it is even!"