"Well, if you didn't want him to be lent to me you shouldn't have sold
him to Mr. Shute!" retorted Miss Knox, in her clear, provoking little
voice.
"I suppose he's afraid to ride him himself," said Flurry, turning his
horse in at a gate. "Get ahead there, Jerome, can't you? It's better
to put them in at this end than to have every one riding on top of
them!"
Miss Sally's cheeks were still very pink when I came up and began to
talk to her, and her grey-green eyes had a look in them like those of
an angry kitten.
The riders moved slowly down a rough pasture-field, and took up their
position along the brow of Ardmeen covert, into which the hounds had
already hurled themselves with their customary contempt for the
convenances. Flurry's hounds, true to their nationality, were in the
habit of doing the right thing in the wrong way.
Untouched by autumn, the furze bushes of Ardmeen covert were darkly
green, save for a golden fleck of blossom here and there, and the
glistening grey cobwebs that stretched from spike to spike. The look
of the ordinary gorse covert is familiar to most people as a tidy
enclosure of an acre or so, filled with low plants of well-educated
gorse; not so many will be found who have experience of it as a rocky,
sedgy wilderness, half a mile square, garrisoned with brigades of furze
bushes, some of them higher than a horse's head, lean, strong, and
cunning, like the foxes that breed in them, impenetrable, with their
bristling spikes, as a hedge of bayonets. By dint of infinite leisure
and obstinate greed, the cattle had made paths for themselves through
the bushes to the patches of grass that they hemmed in; their
hoofprints were guides to the explorer, down muddy staircases of rock,
and across black intervals of unplumbed bog. The whole covert slanted
gradually down to a small river that raced round three sides of it, and
beyond the stream, in agreeable contrast, lay a clean and wholesome
country of grass fields and banks.
The hounds drew slowly along and down the hill towards the river, and
the riders hung about outside the covert, and tried--I can answer for
at least one of them--to decide which was the least odious of the ways
through it, in the event of the fox breaking at the far side. Miss
Sally took up a position not very far from me, and it was easy to see
that she had her hands full with her borrowed mount, on whose temper
the delay and suspense were visibly telling. His iron-grey neck was
white from the chafing of the reins; had the ground under his feet been
red-hot he could hardly have sidled and hopped more uncontrollably;
nothing but the most impassioned conjugation of the verb to condemn
could have supplied any human equivalent for the manner in which he
tore holes in the sedgy grass with a furious forefoot. Those who were
even superficial judges of character gave his heels a liberal allowance
of sea-room, and Mr. Shute, who could not be numbered among such, and
had, as usual, taken up a position as near Miss Sally as possible, was
rewarded by a double knock on his horse's ribs that was a cause of
heartless mirth to the lady of his affections.
Not a hound had as yet spoken, but they were forcing their way through
the gorse forest and shoving each other jealously aside with growing
excitement, and Flurry could be seen at intervals, moving forward in
the direction they were indicating. It was at this juncture that the
ubiquitous Slipper presented himself at my horse's shoulder.
"'Tis for the river he's making, Major," he said, with an upward roll
of his squinting eyes, that nearly made me sea-sick. "He's a Castle
Knox fox that came in this morning, and ye should get ahead down to the
ford!"
A tip from Slipper was not to be neglected, and Philippa and I began a
cautious progress through the gorse, followed by Miss Knox as quietly
as Moonlighter's nerves would permit.
"Wishful has it!" she exclaimed, as a hound came out into view, uttered
a sharp yelp, and drove forward.
"Hark! hark!" roared Flurry with at least three r's reverberating in
each "hark"; at the same instant came a holloa from the farther side of
the river, and Dr. Hickey's renowned and blood-curdling screech was
uplifted at the bottom of the covert. Then babel broke forth, as the
hounds, converging from every quarter, flung themselves shrieking on
the line. Moonlighter went straight up on his hind-legs, and dropped
again with a bound that sent him crushing past Philippa and Cruiskeen;
he did it a second time, and was almost on to the tail of the Quaker,
whose bulky person was not to be hurried in any emergency.
"Get on if you can, Major Yeates!" called out Sally, steadying the grey
as well as she could in the narrow pathway between the great gorse
bushes.
Other horses were thundering behind us, men were shouting to each other
in similar passages right and left of us, the cry of the hounds filled
the air with a kind of delirium. A low wall with a stick laid along it
barred the passage in front of me, and the Quaker firmly and
immediately decided not to have it until some one else had dislodged
the pole.
"Go ahead!" I shouted, squeezing to one side with heroic disregard of
the furze bushes and my new tops.
The words were hardly out of my mouth when Moonlighter, mad with
thwarted excitement, shot by me, hurtled over the obstacle with
extravagant fury, landed twelve feet beyond it on clattering slippery
rock, saved himself from falling with an eel-like forward buck on to
sedgy ground, and bolted at full speed down the muddy cattle track.
There are corners--rocky, most of them--in that cattle track, that
Sally has told me she will remember to her dying day; boggy holes of
any depth, ranging between two feet and half-way to Australia, that she
says she does not fail to mention in the General Thanksgiving; but at
the time they occupied mere fractions of the strenuous seconds in which
it was hopeless for her to do anything but try to steer, trust to luck,
sit hard down into the saddle and try to stay there. (For my part, I
would as soon try to adhere to the horns of a charging bull as to the
crutches of a side-saddle, but happily the necessity is not likely to
arise.) I saw Flurry Knox a little ahead of her on the same track,
jamming his mare into the furze bushes to get out of her way; he
shouted something after her about the ford, and started to gallop for
it himself by a breakneck short cut.
The hounds were already across the river, and it was obvious that, ford
or no ford, Moonlighter's intentions might be simply expressed in the
formula "Be with them I will." It was all down-hill to the river, and
among the furze bushes and rocks there was neither time nor place to
turn him. He rushed at it with a shattering slip upon a streak of
rock, with a heavy plunge in the deep ground by the brink; it was as
bad a take-off for twenty feet of water as could well be found. The
grey horse rose out of the boggy stuff with all the impetus that pace
and temper could give, but it was not enough. For one instant the
twisting, sliding current was under Sally, the next a veil of water
sprang up all round her, and Moonlighter was rolling and lurching in
the desperate effort to find foothold in the rocky bed of the stream.
I was following at the best pace I could kick out of the Quaker, and
saw the water swirl into her lap as her horse rolled to the near-side.
She caught the mane to save herself, but he struggled on to his legs
again, and came floundering broadside on to the farther bank. In three
seconds she had got out of the saddle and flung herself at the bank,
grasping the rushes, and trying, in spite of the sodden weight of her
habit, to drag herself out of the water.
At the same instant I saw Flurry and the brown mare dashing through the
ford, twenty yards higher up. He was off his horse and beside her with
that uncanny quickness that Flurry reserved for moments of emergency,
and, catching her by the arms, swung her on to the bank as easily as if
she had been the kennel terrier.
"Catch the horse!" she called out, scrambling to her feet.
"Damn the horse!" returned Flurry, in the rage that is so often the
reaction from a bad scare.
I turned along the bank and made for the ford; by this time it was full
of hustling, splashing riders, through whom Bernard Shute, furiously
picking up a bad start, drove a devastating way. He tried to turn his
horse down the bank towards Miss Knox, but the hounds were running
hard, and, to my intense amusement, Stockbroker refused to abandon the
chase, and swept his rider away in the wake of his stable companion,
Dr. Hickey's young chestnut. By this time two country boys had, as is
usual in such cases, risen from the earth, and fished Moonlighter out
of the stream. Miss Sally wound up an acrimonious argument with her
cousin by observing that she didn't care what he said, and placing her
water-logged boot in his obviously unwilling hand, in a second was
again in the saddle, gathering up the wet reins with the trembling,
clumsy fingers of a person who is thoroughly chilled and in a violent
hurry. She set Moonlighter going, and was away in a moment, galloping
him at the first fence at a pace that suited his steeple-chasing ideas.
"Mr. Knox!" panted Philippa, who had by this time joined us, "make her
go home!"
"She can go where she likes as far as I'm concerned," responded Mr.
Knox, pitching himself on his mare's back and digging in the spurs.
Moonlighter had already glided over the bank in front of us, with a
perfunctory flick at it with his heels; Flurry's mare and Cruiskeen
jumped it side by side with equal precision. It was a bank of some
five feet high; the Quaker charged it enthusiastically, refused it
abruptly, and, according to his infuriating custom at such moments,
proceeded to tear hurried mouthfuls of grass.
"Will I give him a couple o' belts, your Honour?" shouted one of the
running accompaniment of country boys.
"You will!" said I, with some further remarks to the Quaker that I need
not commit to paper.
Swish! Whack! The sound was music in my ears, as the good,
remorseless ash sapling bent round the Quaker's dappled hind-quarters.
At the third stripe he launched both his heels in the operator's face;
at the fourth he reared undecidedly; at the fifth he bundled over the
bank in a manner purged of hesitation.
"Ha!" yelled my assistants, "that'll put the fear o' God in him!" as
the Quaker fled headlong after the hunt. "He'll be the betther o' that
while he lives!"
Without going quite as far as this, I must admit that for the next
half-hour he was astonishingly the better of it.
The Castle Knox fox was making a very pretty line of it over the seven
miles that separated him from his home. He headed through a grassy
country of Ireland's mild and brilliant green, fenced with sound and
buxom banks, enlivened by stone walls, uncompromised by the presence of
gates, and yet comfortably laced with lanes for the furtherance of
those who had laid to heart Wolsey's valuable advice: "Fling away
ambition: by that sin fell the angels." The flotsam and jetsam of the
hunt pervaded the landscape: standing on one long bank, three
dismounted farmers flogged away at the refusing steeds below them, like
anglers trying to rise a sulky fish; half-a-dozen hats, bobbing in a
string, showed where the road riders followed the delusive windings of
a bohereen. It was obvious that in the matter of ambition they would
not have caused Cardinal Wolsey a moment's uneasiness; whether angels
or otherwise, they were not going to run any risk of falling.
Flurry's red coat was like a beacon two fields ahead of me, with
Philippa following in his tracks; it was the first run worthy of the
name that Philippa had ridden, and I blessed Miss Bobby Bennett as I
saw Cruiskeen's undefeated fencing. An encouraging twang of the
Doctor's horn notified that the hounds were giving us a chance; even
the Quaker pricked his blunt ears and swerved in his stride to the
sound. A stone wall, a rough patch of heather, a boggy field, dinted
deep and black with hoof marks, and the stern chase was at an end. The
hounds had checked on the outskirts of a small wood, and the field,
thinned down to a panting dozen or so, viewed us with the disfavour
shown by the first flight towards those who unexpectedly add to their
select number. In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard
uttering those singular little yelps of encouragement that to the
irreverent suggest a milkman in his dotage. Bernard Shute, who neither
knew nor cared what the hounds were doing, was expatiating at great
length to an uninterested squireen upon the virtues and perfections of
his new mount.
"I did all I knew to come and help you at the river," he said, riding
up to the splashed and still dripping Sally, "but Stockbroker wouldn't
hear of it. I pulled his ugly head round till his nose was on my boot,
but he galloped away just the same!"
"He was quite right," said Miss Sally; "I didn't want you in the least."
As Miss Sally's red gold coil of hair was turned towards me during this
speech, I could only infer the glance with which it was delivered, from
the fact that Mr. Shute responded to it with one of those firm gazes of
adoration in which the neighbourhood took such an interest, and
crumbled away into incoherency.
A shout from the top of a hill interrupted the amenities of the check;
Flurry was out of the wood in half-a-dozen seconds, blowing shattering
blasts upon his horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone
away" note that was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out
through the trees and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind,
and jumped across a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the
hounds splashed and struggled after him, and, as they landed, the first
ecstatic whimpers broke forth. In a moment it was full cry,
discordant, beautiful, and soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped,
and settled to the line. I saw the absurd dazzle of tears in
Philippa's eyes, and found time for the insulting proffer of the clean
pocket-handkerchief, as we all galloped hard to get away on good terms
with the hounds.
It was one of those elect moments in fox-hunting when the fittest alone
have survived; even the Quaker's sluggish blood was stirred by good
company, and possibly by the remembrance of the singing ash-plant, and
he lumbered up tall stone-faced banks and down heavy drops, and across
wide ditches, in astounding adherence to the line cut out by Flurry.
Cruiskeen went like a book--a story for girls, very pleasant and safe,
but rather slow. Moonlighter was pulling Miss Sally on to the sterns
of the hounds, flying his banks, rocketing like a pheasant over
three-foot walls--committing, in fact, all the crimes induced by youth
and over-feeding; he would have done very comfortably with another six
or seven stone on his back.
Why Bernard Shute did not come off at every fence and generally die a
thousand deaths I cannot explain. Occasionally I rather wished he
would, as, from my secure position in the rear, I saw him charging his
fences at whatever pace and place seemed good to the thoroughly
demoralised Stockbroker, and in so doing cannon heavily against Dr.
Hickey on landing over a rotten ditch, jump a wall with his spur
rowelling Charlie Knox's boot, and cut in at top speed in front of
Flurry, who was scientifically cramming his mare up a very awkward
scramble. In so far as I could think of anything beyond Philippa and
myself and the next fence, I thought there would be trouble for Mr.
Shute in consequence of this last feat. It was a half-hour long to be
remembered, in spite of the Quaker's ponderous and unalterable gallop,
in spite of the thump with which he came down off his banks, in spite
of the confiding manner in which he hung upon my hand.
We were nearing Castle Knox, and the riders began to edge away from the
hounds towards a gate that broke the long barrier of the demesne wall.
Steaming horses and purple-faced riders clattered and crushed in at the
gate; there was a moment of pulling up and listening, in which
quivering tails and pumping sides told their own story. Cruiskeen's
breathing suggested a cross between a grampus and a gramophone;
Philippa's hair had come down, and she had a stitch in her side.
Moonlighter, fresher than ever, stamped and dragged at his bit; I
thought little Miss Sally looked very white. The bewildering clamour
of the hounds was all through the wide laurel plantations. At a word
from Flurry, Dr. Hickey shoved his horse ahead and turned down a ride,
followed by most of the field.
"Philippa," I said severely, "you've had enough, and you know it."
"Do go up to the house and make them give you something to eat," struck
in Miss Sally, twisting Moonlighter round to keep his mind occupied.
"And as for you, Miss Sally," I went on, in the manner of Mr.
Fairchild, "the sooner you get off that horse and out of those wet
things the better."
Flurry, who was just in front of us, said nothing, but gave a short and
most disagreeable laugh. Philippa accepted my suggestion with the
meekness of exhaustion, but under the circumstances it did not surprise
me that Miss Sally did not follow her example.
Then ensued an hour of woodland hunting at its worst and most
bewildering. I galloped after Flurry and Miss Sally up and down long
glittering lanes of laurel, at every other moment burying my face in
the Quaker's coarse white mane to avoid the slash of the branches, and
receiving down the back of my neck showers of drops stored up from the
rain of the day before; playing an endless game of hide-and-seek with
the hounds, and never getting any nearer to them, as they turned and
doubled through the thickets of evergreens. Even to my limited
understanding of the situation it became clear at length that two foxes
were on foot; most of the hounds were hard at work a quarter of a mile
away, but Flurry, with a grim face and a faithful three couple, stuck
to the failing line of the hunted fox.
There came a moment when Miss Sally and I--who through many
vicissitudes had clung to each other--found ourselves at a spot where
two rides crossed. Flurry was waiting there, and a little way up one
of the rides a couple of hounds were hustling to and fro, with the
thwarted whimpers half breaking from them; he held up his hand to stop
us, and at that identical moment Bernard Shute, like a bolt from the
blue, burst upon our vision. It need scarcely be mentioned that he was
going at full gallop--I have rarely seen him ride at any other
pace--and as he bore down upon Flurry and the hounds, ducking and
dodging to avoid the branches, he shouted something about a fox having
gone away at the other side of the covert.
"Hold hard!" roared Flurry; "don't you see the hounds, you fool?"
Mr. Shute, to do him justice, held hard with all the strength of his
body, but it was of no avail. The bay horse had got his head down and
his tail up, there was a piercing yell from a hound as it was ridden
over, and Flurry's brown mare will not soon forget the moment when
Stockbroker's shoulder took her on the point of the hip and sent her
staggering into the laurel branches. As she swung round, Flurry's whip
went up, and with a swift backhander the cane and the looped thong
caught Bernard across his broad shoulders.
"O Mr. Shute!" shrieked Miss Sally, as I stared dumfoundered; "did that
branch hurt you?"
"All right! Nothing to signify!" he called out as he bucketed past,
tugging at his horse's head. "Thought some one had hit me at first!
Come on, we'll catch 'em up this way!"
He swung perilously into the main ride and was gone, totally unaware of
the position that Miss Sally's quickness had saved.
Flurry rode straight up to his cousin, with a pale, dangerous face.
"I suppose you think I'm to stand being ridden over and having my
hounds killed to please you," he said; "but you're mistaken. You were
very smart, and you may think you've saved him his licking, but you
needn't think he won't get it. He'll have it in spite of you, before
he goes to his bed this night!"
A man who loses his temper badly because he is badly in love is
inevitably ridiculous, far though he may be from thinking himself so.
He is also a highly unpleasant person to argue with, and Miss Sally and
I held our peace respectfully. He turned his horse and rode away.
Almost instantly the three couple of hounds opened in the underwood
near us with a deafening crash, and not twenty yards ahead the hunted
fox, dark with wet and mud, slunk across the ride. The hounds were
almost on his brush; Moonlighter reared and chafed; the din was
redoubled, passed away to a little distance, and suddenly seemed
stationary in the middle of the laurels.
"Could he have got into the old ice-house?" exclaimed Miss Sally, with
reviving excitement. She pushed ahead, and turned down the narrowest
of all the rides that had that day been my portion. At the end of the
green tunnel there was a comparatively open space; Flurry's mare was
standing in it, riderless, and Flurry himself was hammering with a
stone at the padlock of a door that seemed to lead into the heart of a
laurel clump. The hounds were baying furiously somewhere back of the
entrance, among the laurel stems.
"He's got in by the old ice drain," said Flurry, addressing himself
sulkily to me, and ignoring Miss Sally. He had not the least idea of
how absurd was his scowling face, draped by the luxuriant
hart's-tongues that overhung the doorway.
The padlock yielded, and the opening door revealed a low, dark passage,
into which Flurry disappeared, lugging a couple of hounds with him by
the scruff of the neck; the remaining two couple bayed implacably at
the mouth of the drain. The croak of a rusty bolt told of a second
door at the inner end of the passage.
"Look out for the steps, Flurry, they're all broken," called out Miss
Sally in tones of honey.
There was no answer. Miss Sally looked at me; her face was serious,
but her mischievous eyes made a confederate of me.
"He's in an _awful_ rage!" she said. "I'm afraid there will certainly
be a row."
A row there certainly was, but it was in the cavern of the ice-house,
where the fox had evidently been discovered. Miss Sally suddenly flung
Moonlighter's reins to me and slipped off his back.
"Hold him!" she said, and dived into the doorway under the overhanging
branches.
Things happened after that with astonishing simultaneousness. There
was a shrill exclamation from Miss Sally, the inner door was slammed
and bolted, and at one and the same moment the fox darted from the
entry, and was away into the wood before one could wink.
"What's happened?" I called out, playing the refractory Moonlighter
like a salmon.
Miss Sally appeared at the doorway, looking half scared and half
delighted.
"I've bolted him in, and I won't let him out till he promises to be
good! I was only just in time to slam the door after the fox bolted
out!"
"Great Scott!" I said helplessly.
Miss Sally vanished again into the passage, and the imprisoned hounds
continued to express their emotions in the echoing vault of the
ice-house. Their master remained mute as the dead, and I trembled.
"Flurry!" I heard Miss Sally say. "Flurry, I--I've locked you in!"
This self-evident piece of information met with no response.
"Shall I tell you why?"
A keener note seemed to indicate that a hound had been kicked.
"I don't care whether you answer me or not, I'm going to tell you!"
There was a pause; apparently telling him was not as simple as had been
expected.
"I won't let you out till you promise me something. Ah, Flurry, don't
be so cross! What do you say?---- Oh, that's a ridiculous thing to
say. You know quite well it's not on his account!"
There was another considerable pause.
"Flurry!" said Miss Sally again, in tones that would have wiled a
badger from his earth. "Dear Flurry--"
At this point I hurriedly flung Moonlighter's bridle over a branch and
withdrew.
My own subsequent adventures are quite immaterial, until the moment
when I encountered Miss Sally on the steps of the hall door at Castle
Knox.
"I'm just going in to take off these wet things," she said airily.
This was no way to treat a confederate.
"Well?" I said, barring her progress.
"Oh--he--he promised. It's all right," she replied, rather
breathlessly.
There was no one about; I waited resolutely for further information.
It did not come.
"Did he try to make his own terms?" said I, looking hard at her.
"Yes, he did." She tried to pass me.
"And what did you do?"
"I refused them!" she said, with the sudden stagger of a sob in her
voice, as she escaped into the house.
Now what on earth was Sally Knox crying about?
X
THE HOUSE OF FAHY
Nothing could shake the conviction of Maria that she was by nature and
by practice a house dog. Every one of Shreelane's many doors had, at
one time or another, slammed upon her expulsion, and each one of them
had seen her stealthy, irrepressible return to the sphere that she felt
herself so eminently qualified to grace. For her the bone, thriftily
interred by Tim Connor's terrier, was a mere diversion; even the
fruitage of the ashpit had little charm for an accomplished _habitué_
of the kitchen. She knew to a nicety which of the doors could be burst
open by assault, at which it was necessary to whine sycophantically;
and the clinical thermometer alone could furnish a parallel for her
perception of mood in those in authority. In the case of Mrs. Cadogan
she knew that there were seasons when instant and complete
self-effacement was the only course to pursue; therefore when, on a
certain morning in July, on my way through the downstairs regions to my
office, I saw her approach the kitchen door with her usual
circumspection, and, on hearing her name enunciated indignantly by my
cook, withdraw swiftly to a city of refuge at the back of the hayrick,
I drew my own conclusions.
Had she remained, as I did, she would have heard the disclosure of a
crime that lay more heavily on her digestion than her conscience.
"I can't put a thing out o' me hand but he's watching me to whip it
away!" declaimed Mrs. Cadogan, with all the disregard of her kind for
the accident of sex in the brute creation. "'Twas only last night I
was back in the scullery when I heard Bridget let a screech, and there
was me brave dog up on the table eating the roast beef that was after
coming out from the dinner!"
"Brute!" interjected Philippa, with what I well knew to be a simulated
wrath.
"And I had planned that bit of beef for the luncheon," continued Mrs.
Cadogan in impassioned lamentation, "the way we wouldn't have to
inthrude on the cold turkey! Sure he has it that dhragged, that all we
can do with it now is run it through the mincing machine for the
Major's sandwiches."
At this appetising suggestion I thought fit to intervene in the
deliberations.
"One thing," I said to Philippa afterwards, as I wrapped up a bottle of
Yanatas in a Cardigan jacket and rammed it into an already apoplectic
Gladstone bag, "that I do draw the line at, is taking that dog with us.
The whole business is black enough as it is."
"Dear," said my wife, looking at me with almost clairvoyant
abstraction, "I could manage a second evening dress if you didn't mind
putting my tea-jacket in your portmanteau."
Little, thank Heaven! as I know about yachting, I knew enough to make
pertinent remarks on the incongruity of an ancient 60-ton hireling and
a fleet of smart evening dresses; but none the less I left a pair of
indispensable boots behind, and the tea-jacket went into my portmanteau.
It is doing no more than the barest justice to the officers of the
Royal Navy to say that, so far as I know them, they cherish no mistaken
enthusiasm for a home on the rolling deep when a home anywhere else
presents itself. Bernard Shute had unfortunately proved an exception
to this rule. During the winter, the invitation to go for a cruise in
the yacht that was in process of building for him hung over me like a
cloud; a timely strike in the builder's yard brought a respite, and, in
fact, placed the completion of the yacht at so safe a distance that I
was betrayed into specious regrets, echoed with an atrocious sincerity
by Philippa. Into a life pastorally compounded of Petty Sessions and
lawn-tennis parties, retribution fell when it was least expected.
Bernard Shute hired a yacht in Queenstown, and one short week
afterwards the worst had happened, and we were packing our things for a
cruise in her, the only alleviation being the knowledge that, whether
by sea or land, I was bound to return to my work in four days.
We left Shreelane at twelve o'clock, a specially depressing hour for a
start, when breakfast has died in you, and lunch is still remote. My
last act before mounting the dogcart was to put her collar and chain on
Maria and immure her in the potato-house, whence, as we drove down the
avenue, her wails rent the heart of Philippa and rejoiced mine. It was
a very hot day, with a cloudless sky; the dust lay thick on the white
road, and on us also, as, during two baking hours, we drove up and down
the long hills and remembered things that had been left behind, and
grew hungry enough to eat sandwiches that tasted suspiciously of roast
beef.
The yacht was moored in Clountiss Harbour; we drove through the village
street, a narrow and unlovely thoroughfare, studded with public-houses,
swarming with children and poultry, down through an ever-growing smell
of fish, to the quay.
Thence we first viewed our fate, a dingy-looking schooner, and the hope
I had secretly been nourishing that there was not wind enough for her
to start, was dispelled by the sight of her topsail going up. More
than ever at that radiant moment--as the reflection of the white sail
quivered on the tranquil blue, and the still water flattered all it
reproduced, like a fashionable photographer--did I agree with George
Herbert's advice, "Praise the sea, but stay on shore."
"We must hail her, I suppose," I said drearily. I assailed the _Eileen
Oge_, such being her inappropriate name, with desolate cries, but
achieved no immediate result beyond the assembling of some village
children round us and our luggage.
"Mr. Shute and the two ladies was after screeching here for the boat
awhile ago," volunteered a horrid little girl, whom I had already twice
frustrated in the attempt to seat an infant relative on our bundle of
rugs. "Timsy Hallahane says 'twould be as good for them to stay
ashore, for there isn't as much wind outside as'd out a candle."
With this encouraging statement the little girl devoted herself to the
alternate consumption of gooseberries and cockles.
All things come to those who wait, and to us arrived at length the gig
of the _Eileen Oge_, and such, by this time, were the temperature and
the smells of the quay that I actually welcomed the moment that found
us leaving it for the yacht.
"Now, Sinclair, aren't you glad we came?" remarked Philippa, as the
clear green water deepened under us, and a light briny air came coolly
round us with the motion of the boat.
As she spoke, there was an outburst of screams from the children on the
quay, followed by a heavy splash.
"Oh stop!" cried Philippa in an agony; "one of them has fallen in! I
can see its poor little brown head!"
"'Tis a dog, ma'am," said briefly the man who was rowing stroke.
"One might have wished it had been that little girl," said I, as I
steered to the best of my ability for the yacht.
We had traversed another twenty yards or so, when Philippa, in a voice
in which horror and triumph were strangely blended, exclaimed, "She's
following us!"
"Who? The little girl?" I asked callously.
"No," returned Philippa; "worse."
I looked round, not without a prevision of what I was to see, and
beheld the faithful Maria swimming steadily after us, with her brown
muzzle thrust out in front of her, ripping through the reflections like
a plough.
"Go home!" I roared, standing up and gesticulating in fury that I well
know to be impotent. "Go home, you brute!"