There was one person who viewed the enthusiastic intimacy that had
sprung up between the houses of Coppinger and Talbot-Lowry, with a
disapproval as deep as it was prejudiced. It was a person whose
opinion might, by the thoughtless, be considered unimportant, but in
this the thoughtless would greatly err. Robert Evans was the butler at
Mount Music. He had held that position since the year 1859, from which
statement a brief and unexacting calculation will establish the fact
that he had taken office when his present master was no more than
twenty-one years old and, it being now 1894, he had so continued for
35 years. Possibly a vision of an adoring and devoted retainer may
here present itself. If so, it must be immediately dispelled. In Mr.
Evans' opinion, such devotion and adoration as the case demanded, were
owed to him by the House on which he had for so long a time bestowed
the boon of his presence, and those who were privileged with his
acquaintance had no uncertainty in the matter, since his age, his
length of service, his fidelity, and the difficulties with which he
daily contended, formed the main subjects of his conversation.
In the palmier days of the Irish gentry there were many households in
which the religion of the servants was a matter of considerable
importance, and those who could afford exclusiveness, were accustomed
to employ only Protestants as indoor servants. This may seem like an
unwarrantable invasion of the inner fortress of another individual,
making his views spiritual responsible for his fortunes temporal. But
in Ireland, in the earlier half of the troubled nineteenth century,
such differentiation was inspired not by bigotry, but by fear. When a
man's foes might be, and often were, those of his own household, that
his servants should be of his own religion was almost his only
safeguard against espionage. There is somewhat to be said on both
sides; it will not be said here, but that there have been times in
Ireland when such precautions were required, cannot be ignored.
Robert Evans was a survivor of such a period. Time was when he
strutted, autocratic and imperious as a turkey-cock, ruler of a flock
of lesser fowl, all of his own superior creed; brave days when he and
Mrs. Dixon, the housekeeper, herded and headed, respectively, a bevy
of "decent Protestant maids" into Family Prayers every morning, and
packed "the full of two covered cars" off to the Knockceoil Parish
Church on Sundays. Evans rarely went to church, believing that such
disciplines were superfluous for one in a state of grace, but the
glory of the House of Talbot-Lowry demanded a full and rustling pew of
female domestics, while the coachman, and a footman or a groom, were
generally to be relied on to give a masculine stiffening to the party.
With Lady Isabel's _régime_ had come a slackening of moral fibre,
a culpable setting of attainments, or of convenience, above creed, in
the administration of the household. Once had Lady Isabel been
actually overheard by Evans, offering to a friend, in excuse for the
indifferent show made by her household in the parish church, the
offensive explanation that "R.C.'s were so sympathetic, and so easy to
find, while Protestants were not only scarce, but were so proud of
being Protestants, and expected so much admiration"--here she had
perceived the presence of Evans, and had unavailingly begun upon the
weather, but Evans' deep-seated suspicions as to the laxity of the
English Church had been confirmed.
It is possible that the greatest shock that Evans was capable of
sustaining was administered when he heard of the secession to the
enemy of Colonel Tom Coppinger. Only second to it was the discovery
that Colonel Tom's poisoned offspring was to be received at Mount
Music and admitted to the fellowship of its children.
"No!" Evans said to Mrs. Dixon, standing on the hearthrug in the
sanctuary of the housekeeper's room, one wet afternoon, shortly after
the Coppinger return: "I see changes here, better and worse, good and
bad, but I didn't think I'd live to see what I seen to-day--the
children of this house consorting with a Papist!"
"Fie!" said Mrs. Dixon, without conviction. She was fat and
easy-tempered, and though ever anxious to conciliate him whom she
respected and feared as "Mr. Eevans," her powers of dissimulation
often failed at a pinch of this kind.
Mr. Evans looked at his table-companion with a contempt to which she
had long been resigned. He was a short, thin, bald man, with a sharp
nose curved like a reaping-hook, iron-grey whiskers and hair, and
fierce pale blue eyes. Later on, Christian, in the pride of her first
introduction to Tennyson, had been inspired by his high shoulders and
black tailed coat to entitle him "The many-wintered crow," and the
name was welcomed by her fellows, and registered in the repository of
phrases and nicknames that exists in all well-regulated families.
"'Fie!'" he repeated after Mrs. Dixon, witheringly. "I declare before
God, Mrs. Dixon, if I was to tell you the Pope o' Rome was coming to
dinner next Sunday, it's all you'd say would be 'Fie!'"
Mrs. Dixon received this supposition of catastrophe with annoying
calm, and even reverted to Mr. Evans' earlier statement in a manner
that might have bewildered a less experienced disputant than he.
"Well, indeed, Mr. Eevans," she said, appeasingly, "I'd say he was a
nice child enough, and the very dead spit of the poor Colonel. I dunno
what harm he could do the children at all?"
The Prophet Samuel could scarcely have regarded Saul, when he offered
those ill-fated apologies relative to King Agag, with a more sinister
disfavour than did Evans view Mrs. Dixon.
"I'll say one thing to you, Mrs. Dixon," he said, moving to the door
with that laborious shuffle that had inspired one of the hunted and
suffering tribe of his pantry-boys to the ejaculation: "I thank God,
there's more in his boots than what's there room for!"--"and I'll say
it once, and that's enough! As sure as God made little apples, trouble
and disgrace will follow jumpers!"
Mrs. Dixon, no less than Evans, disapproved of those who changed their
religion, but this denunciation did not seem to her to apply.
"That poor child's no jumper!" she called after her antagonist;
"'twasn't his fault he was born the way he was!"
Evans slammed the door.
Mrs. Dixon dismissed the controversy from her easy mind, looked at the
clock, and laid down her knitting.
"Miss Christian'll be looking for her birthday cake!" she said to
herself, hoisting her large person from her chair. Even as she did so,
there came a rapping, quick and urgent, at the window. "Look at that
now!" said Mrs. Dixon. "I wouldn't doubt that child to be wanting the
world in her pocket before it was made!"
"Dixie! Dixie! Open the window! Hurry! I want you!"
Christian's face, surmounted by a very old hunting-cap, and decorated
with a corked moustache, appeared at the window.
"The Lord save us, child! What have you done to yourself? And what are
you doing out there in the wet?" answered Mrs. Dixon, reprovingly;
"sure the cake won't be baked for ten minutes yet."
"I don't want the cake. I only want some biscuits, _please_.
Dixie, and hurry! Amazon's bolted, and Cottingham's asked _me_ to
catch her! If you _had_ a bone, Dixie, she'd simply--"
Mrs. Dixon was gone. She disapproved exceedingly of Christian's rôle
as kennel-boy, but as, since Christian's first birthday, she had never
refused her anything, she was not prepared on her tenth to break so
well-established a habit.
"I dunno in the world why Mr. Cottingham should make a young lady like
you do his business!" she said, putting the requisition bait into
Christian's eager, up-stretched hands, "and if your Mamma could see
you--"
"Oh, well done, Dixie! What a lovely bone! Oh, thank you most
awfully!" interrupted Christian, snatching at the dainties provided,
and flitting away through the grey veils of the rain, a preposterous
little figure, clad in a ragged kennel-coat, that had been long since
discarded by the huntsman, a pair of couples slung round her neck, and
a crop in her hand.
It was a chilly, wet August afternoon. It had rained for the past
three days, and was, by all appearances, prepared to continue to do so
for three more. Christian ran across the fields to the kennels,
regardless of wet overhead or underfoot, and oblivious of the corked
moustache, which ran too, almost as fast as she did. She had made a
_détour_ to avoid the schoolroom windows. Her birthday party was
toward, and charades (accounting for her moustache) were in full
swing. But the message from Cottingham, secretly conveyed together
with the couples, by the pantry boy, transcended in importance all
other human affairs. She had slipped away from her fellows, and having
endured the hunting cap and the kennel coat, as the wear suitable to
such an occasion, she had not lost a minute in coming to the horn.
Cottingham, Major Talbot-Lowry's First Whip and kennel huntsman, a
single-souled little Devonshire man, whose dyed hair was the solitary
indication of the age it was intended to conceal, awaited her outside
the kennels.
"Well, Missie, I knew you'd come," he said, approvingly. "It's Amazon
that's away--that little badger-pye bitch we got last week--I 'ad to
give 'er a bit of a 'iding--she tried to run a sheep when we was
walkin' out last evening--she's a revengeful sort, she is, and very
artful, and when we gets near kennels, her took an' bolted past Jimmy
over the 'ill, an' I says to Jimmy, 'Why you fool' I says--"
The tale continued at length, and with those repetitions and
recapitulations peculiar to the simple, but by no means short annals
of the poor, and especially of the English poor. Yet, Christian, the
impatient, the ardent, stood and listened with respectful and absorbed
interest. Cottingham might be elderly, egotistic, long-winded, but at
this period of her career, Christian's hot heart beat throb for throb
with his, and the thought, as he said, of "that pore little bitch
stoppin' out, and maybe spoilt, so that there'd be nothin' for us but
to shoot her, through learnin' to run sheep," had precisely the same
horror for her as for him.
"I couldn't, so to speak, lay me 'and on 'er now; her wouldn't let me
go anear 'er, nor she wouldn't let Jimmy neither, but she ain't far
away, and she'd 'ave what I might call cawnfidence in you, Missie--"
Cottingham had at length concluded: "Her's that sly we mightn't never
see 'er again! But you take and go up that 'ill, Missie, that's where
I seen 'er last, I'll lay you get 'er if anyone can!"
Christian, "still," as Rossetti says, "with the whole of pleasure,"
received these instructions reverently, and with the pockets of the
kennel-coat further loaded with broken biscuit, "took and went"
according to instructions. She climbed the fence behind the kennels,
and addressed herself lightly to the ascent of the hill. It was a long
hill, that began with pasture fields, that were merged imperceptibly
into moorland, heather and furze. There were sheep, and donkeys and
goats on it, and a melancholy old kennel-horse or two, all feeding
peacefully. Amazon could not be accused in connection with them, so
Christian reflected, and prepared herself to rebut any such slander.
The rain was lighter, and the soaking mist that had all day filled the
valley, was slowly thinning, and revealing the mighty scroll of silver
that was the river, while the woods and hillsides came and went,
illusive as the grey hints of landscape in a Japanese water-colour.
But at the mature age of ten years, Christian cared for none of these
things. She saw the smoke from the Mount Music kitchen chimney
blending bluely with the mist, and thought with a momentary pang of
the birthday cake. She wondered if the Companions of Finn would so far
forget honour and fidelity as to devour it without her. She thought of
the ten candles that would gutter to their end, untended by the
heroine of the celebration; she wondered if Cottingham would tell
Papa, and if Papa would tell Mother (thus did this child of the
'eighties speak of her parents, the musical abbreviations of a later
day, "Mum," and "Dad," not having penetrated the remoteness in which
her home was placed); she also wondered if there would be a row about
her getting wet. All these things seemed but too probable, but she was
in for it now.
Near a ridge of the hill, in one of the shallow valleys that furrowed,
like ploughshares, its long slant, there was a dolmen, three huge
stones, with a fourth poised on it. Their grey brows rose over the
billows of bracken, and briers, laden with the promise of fruit, made
garlands for their ancient heads. Christian's straying advance brought
her along the lip of the little valley in which they reposed, and
quite suddenly there rose in her the conviction that her quest was
nearing success. She was of that mysteriously-gifted company to whom
the lairs of things lost are revealed. She "found things"; she was
"lucky." She was regarded by the servants as one enfolded in the cloak
of St. Anthony, that inestimable saint, whose mission it is to find
and protect the lost. It had become a household habit to appeal to
Christian when one of every day's most common losses occurred. She
would hearken; her little thin body would stiffen, like a dog setting
his game, a spark would light in her brown eyes, and--how led who can
say?--she would fly like a wireless message to the thing sought for.
So it was now, on the furzy side of Cnocán an Ceoil Sidhe; she knew
that the moment had come. She sat down on a ledge of rock, and waited,
throbbing with anticipation, and had not long to wait. A brown shadow
moved in the bracken near the dolmen, a brown face peered with
infinite caution, round a flank of the great stones.
"Yoop! the little bitchie!" said Christian to the horizon. Christian
was an apt scholar, and Cottingham's tone and idiom were alike
accurately rendered.
The lady thus addressed gazed with a greater intensity, but did not
move. Christian took a piece of dog-biscuit from the ragged pocket of
the kennel-coat, and, still walking closely in Cottingham's steps, bit
it, ate a part of it, and carelessly flung the remainder in the
direction of the shadow. This stole forth, and, having snapped up the
biscuit, sank back into the covert. Christian did not move.
"Amazon!" she crooned, in tones in which a doting wood-pigeon might
apostrophise a sickly fledgling; "Amazon, my darling!"
Another piece of biscuit accompanied the apostrophe, and poor Amazon,
who was indeed very lonely and very hungry, capitulated, and came
sidling up to the charmer, with propitiatory smiles, and deprecating
stern wagging, beneath her, and in advance of her hind legs, instead
of above her and behind them.
"'Olding the buckle in the right 'and," said Christian to herself, in
faithful quotation from the great ensample, as with a swiftness and
decision that were creditable to her training, she put the couples on
Amazon.
Then she produced the bone that had been "Dixie's" bright achievement,
and it was while, in contentment and friendship, Amazon was crunching
it, that Larry Coppinger appeared.
He rose from behind a spur of rock and furze, and came towards
Christian.
"Oh, good for you!" he said, admiringly, "I was afraid to show up till
you had got her."
Christian was not sure that she was pleased at this intervention.
"How did you know where I was?"
"The servants told me you had gone to the kennels, and Jimmy showed me
the hill, and then I spotted your white coat--not that it's so awfully
white!--I thought it was rather rotten to let you go alone."
"And why not, pray?" enquired Christian, haughtily. Male assumption of
the duties of guardianship was a thing she found highly offensive; "I
always go about alone!"
"Well, I wanted to come, anyway," said Larry, with a placating grin.
"I say, that _is_ an awful nice dog!"
"You never call foxhounds '_dogs_'!" said Christian, still with
hauteur; "Larry, you _are_ an owl!"
But she enjoyed the consciousness of knowing more than he did; she
even forgave him his superfluousness. She thought it was rather decent
of him to have come, and she let him lead Amazon for a part of the
way, only reserving to herself the entry into the presence of
Cottingham, bringing her sheaf with her.