Young Mr. Coppinger had been well inspired in his selection of a site
for the entertainment. The trees along the river's bank had ceased for
a space, leaving a level ring of grass, whereon certain limestone
boulders had scattered themselves, with the deliberate intention, as
it would seem, of providing seats for picnickers. Across that fairy
circle of greenness a small vassal-stream bore its tribute waters to
the Ownashee, with as much dignity as it had been able to assume in
the forty level yards that lay between its suzerain and the steep glen
down which it had flung itself. Not only had young Mr. Coppinger been
so gracious as to provide this setting for the revel, but he was even
now sacrificing a spotless pair of white flannel trousers to the needs
of the company, and had concentrated on the cajolery of the fire,
which, obedient to the etiquette that rules picnic fires, refused to
consume any fuel less stimulating than matches. Other of the young
gentlemen of the party, including the half-twin, Mr. George
Talbot-Lowry (now a sub-lieut. R.N.) were detailed to gather sticks, a
duty that was so arranged as to involve, with each load of firewood,
the jumping of the vassal-stream, and thus gave opportunity for a
display akin to that of the jungle-cocks, who, naturalists inform us,
leap emulatively before their ladies. Prominent among these was that
youth who, as a medical student, had inspired Miss Mangan in
flapperhood, with an admiration for his gifts, intellectual and
physical, that was only equalled by his own appreciation of these
advantages. His opinion remained unchanged, but he was beginning to
fear that Tishy's taste was deteriorating. None sprang more lightly
across that little stream, or commented more humorously on men and
things, than Captain Edward Cloherty, R.A.M.C.; yet Miss Mangan, to
whom these exercises were dedicated, remained oblivious of them and
aloof, apparently wholly absorbed by Martha-like attentions with
regard to the public welfare, and particularly those connected with
the fire. It was not for nothing that Tishy had had to rise early on
many a winter morning to see that her father should go forth to his
work suitably warmed and fed. Now, with scathing criticisms of the
methods of Mr. Coppinger, she swept him from his position as stoker,
and, as by magic, or so it seemed to him, the sticks blazed, the
kettle began to sing. Miss Mangan's skill was not limited to the
prosaic lighting of material fires only. With the two most
distinguished young men of the party at her feet, she rose to the
height of all her various powers. The fire roared and crackled, the
kettle bubbled, and Tishy's grey and gleaming glances through the
smoke were like a succession of boxes of matches, cast upon the
responsive fires of Larry's and Georgy's holiday hearts.
The young May moon has often been a factor in affairs of the heart
whose importance cannot be ignored. It is true that on this especial
afternoon the mischief might seem to have been begun before she could,
strictly, have been held responsible; none the less her madness must
have been in the air, otherwise it is difficult to account for the
joint and simultaneous overthrow of two young gentlemen of taste and
quality, by Miss Tishy Mangan.
Georgy, aged but 19, just home from far and forlorn seas, with, as the
poet says, a heart for any fate, might have been excused for
swallowing any good provided for him by the gods, whole, and without
criticism, but for Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger, lately come of age, a
man of taste, endowed with special _finesse_ of feeling, it might
have been expected that a highly-coloured peacock butterfly would have
had but scant appeal. In fact, one is driven back upon the young May
Moon as the sole plausible explanation of the fact that, on that
afternoon of bewitchment, Tishy Mangan went to Larry's head.
These temporary aberrations are afflictions for which the most refined
young men must occasionally be prepared, and Larry's overthrow was not
without justification. Quite apart from her looks--and anyone would
have been forced to admit that they were undeniable--there was her
voice, the true contralto _timbre_, thick and mellow, dark and
sweet, like heather honey, he thought, while he and Georgy sprawled on
the grass at her feet (and she had good feet) making very indifferent
jokes, in that exaggerated travesty of an Irish brogue which is often
all that an English school will leave with Irish boys, and vicing with
each other in the folly proper to such an occasion.
"I don't see your shoe-buckles!" Larry said, looking from her feet to
her lips, with a meaning and impudent lift of his blue eyes. "Have you
given up wearing them?"
Tishy's colour deepened; she remembered instantly what she was meant
to remember.
"You're regretting the choice you made, are you?" she said, with a
toss of her head. "Never fear! The buckles will be there when they're
wanted!"
"Don't trouble about them!" says Larry, tremendously pleased with his
success as a flirtatious man of the world; "I don't think they will be
required!"
It is necessary to have attained to a reasonably advanced age to be
able to recognise pathos in the fatuities that so frequently form a
feature of love's young dream. Christian, listening with one ear to
her brother and cousin, while into the other the genuine idiom of her
native land flowed, ardently, from the now unsealed lips of Barty
Mangan, began to wonder why the boys were talking like stage Irishmen;
Georgy, she knew, was idiot enough for anything, but she had to admit
to herself that Larry, also, was rather overdoing it. Christian was
able to feel amused, but she also felt, quite illogically, that what
had been distaste for Tishy Mangan was rapidly deepening into dislike.
The picnic raged on, with prodigious eatings and drinkings, with
capsizings of teapots in full sail, with disastrous slaughterings of
insects (disastrous to plates and tablecloths rather than to the
insects) with facetious doings with heated tea-spoons and pellets of
bread, with, in short, all that Mrs. Mangan and her fellow hostesses
expected of a truly prosperous picnic.
Captain Cloherty, alone, of all the company, failed to contribute his
share to the sum of success. He sat silent, a thing of gloom, the
lively angle of whose waxed, red moustache only accentuated the
downward droop of the mouth beneath it. But the skeleton at the feast
has its uses, if only as a contrast, and Mrs. Mangan, who was more
observant than she appeared to be, noted the gloom with a gratified
eye, and being entirely aware of its cause, said to herself with
satisfaction:
"Ha, ha, me young man!"
This picnic was, in truth, made ever memorable in the circle of Mrs.
Mangan's friends by reason of the triumph of Tishy.
"Ah, that was the day she cot the two birds under the one stone!"
Great-Aunt Cantwell (who did not care for her great-niece) was
accustomed to say. "Well! Such goings-on! And after all, Tishy's
nothing so much out of the way, for all Frankie Mangan thinks the
world should die down before her!"
The two birds referred to were still fluttering round their captor,
when a new element was added to the party in the large presence of
"Frankie Mangan" himself. The Big Doctor approached slowly,
elephant-like in his noiseless, rolling gait, impressive, as is an
elephant, in size, in the feeling he imparted of restrained strength,
of intense intelligence, masked, as in an elephant, with benevolence,
and held watchfully in reserve.
He now advanced upon the scene of festivity with purpose in his
manner.
"Now, ladies! Let me tell you I'm come on a very unpopular errand! To
apply the closure! I think you're all sitting out here long enough for
the time of year. Remember it's only May!"
"We're more likely to remember it's Mayn't!" retorted Mrs. Whelply,
who was a recognised wit, and opponent of the Big Doctor. "Isn't it
enough for him to bully us when we're sick, but he comes tormenting us
when we're well, too!"
Thus she appealed to her fellow-matrons, looking round upon them for
support with a festive eye.
"You'll none of you be well long, if you don't mind yourselves!"
answered, with equal spirit, the Doctor, with a quiet eye on his
daughter and her attendant swains.
"Why then I have a sore throat this minute with scolding Mr. Coppinger
for the nonsense he's talking!" declared Mrs. Whelply. "Asking me to
sing a cawmic at the concert he says he's going to have! There's no
fear but whatever _I_ sing will be cawmic enough!"
"I'm sure I'll have great pleasure in cauterising you!" responded the
Doctor, gallantly; "but if you'll take my advice now, you won't want
so much of it later on!"
"I thought you were going to take me on the river," said Tishy in a
low voice to Larry, looking resentfully at her father.
"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Larry, quickly; "much better than
the river--we'll go back to the house and dance! I'll fix it up with
your father!"
"Good egg!" said Sub-Lieut. Talbot-Lowry, with seaman-like decision,
"Miss Mangan will kindly note all waltzes are reserved for use of
naval officers!"
"Miss Mangan will kindly do no such thing!" returned that young lady,
dealing a flash from between her curled eyelashes that put the naval
officer temporarily out of action, so devastating was its effect.
Had not Frederica Coppinger, resting in her club in Dublin, after a
severe afternoon with her dentist, some intuition, some
spirit-warning, of what was befalling at the home of her ancestors? I
believe that those spear-thrusts of nerve-pain that assailed her just
before dinner, must have been the result of the wireless summons of
distress sent forth to her by her upper-housemaid.
"What next, I wonder, will Master Larry be asking for?" said the upper
housemaid to the cook. "The drawing-room carpet pitched into the
study, and Miss Coppinger's own room turned upside down for the
riff-raff of Cluhir to be powdering their noses in! 'Haven't she no
powder?' says they. 'No matter,' says the Doctor's daughter, 'sure I
have a book of it in me little bag!'"
"I wouldn't at all doubt her!" said the cook, saturninely, "But what's
the drawn'-room carpet to conjuring a supper out of me pocket in five
minutes? I ask you that, Eliza Hosford!"
None the less, with that deep loyalty to the honour of the house that
is a feature in Irish domestic life as wonderful as it is touching,
the staff of Coppinger's Court were resolved that--as they say in
China--the face of Master Larry should not be blackened, and The
Riff-Raff of Cluhir were served with a ceremony and a success that
left nothing to be desired.
Dr. Mangan sat in a very large armchair in front of a big fire of
logs, in the hall, and smoked meditatively, and was seemingly quite
unaware of the couples who moved past him between the dances, passing
out through the open hall-door into the moon-lit May night. He did not
even raise an eyelid when his daughter sailed by him, as she did many
times, with the ostentation of the young lady who is aware that her
prowess is the subject of comment, in company, alternately, with the
two captives of her bow and spear who had offered so feeble a
resistance to those weapons. Tishy and her father alike ascribed her
victory to that redoubtable and already creditably battle-scarred bow
and spear; they neither of them recognised the acknowledgments that
were due to a certain powerful ally, the May moon. She had stolen up
the sky at the back of the woods. The first Larry knew of her was the
vast, incredible, pale disc behind the topmost boughs of the pine
trees, so near that it seemed to him as though the crooked black
branches alone were holding her back, and that her white fire that was
pouring through them must consume them, "and then it will be our
turn," he said, seriously, and without preamble, to Tishy.
"Our turn for what?" asked Tishy, very naturally.
"Our turn to be resolved into moonshine. You'll see me fading away
into silver smoke in a minute," replied Larry. "Let's get out of this,
I'm getting frightened! Hold my hand tight!"
"Go on with your nonsense!" said Tishy. "And will you tell me how can
I hold your hand when it's round my waist?"
Which was reasonable enough, and may be taken as a sufficient
indication of what the moon was already responsible for.
A point of red light moved in the darkness above the seat under the
laurels, to which they were repairing, and the scent of a Virginian
cigarette was wafted to them.
"Who's that?" Tishy whispered, pressing nearer to Larry; but she was
agreeably certain that it was the gloomy and misanthropic Captain
Cloherty, whose place of refuge they had invaded.
Christian, meanwhile, unlike Captain Cloherty, was conscientiously
endeavouring to enjoy herself, and was finding that the wheels of the
chariot of pleasure drave heavily. That Barty Mangan was a good dancer
was an alleviation, but among those stigmatised by Eliza Hosford as
the riff-raff of Cluhir, those now forgotten measures of the first
years of this century, the prancing barn-dance, the capering
_pas-de-quatre_, lent themselves to a violence that, even at the
uncritical age of eighteen, Christian found overpowering. "They danced
like the Priests of Baal," she told Judith. "One expected to see them
cut themselves with knives!"
The information that the dog-cart had come for her was of the nature
of a release. Barty put her into it. The May moon shone on his pale
face as he looked up at Christian, and reverently took her hand in
farewell. She had begun to find his dark and humble devotion
oppressive; she liked him, which did not prevent her from thanking
heaven when he released her hand from a pressure that had lasted
longer than he knew. He stood on the gravel and watched the departing
dog-cart vanish, like a ghostly thing, into the elusive mist of
moonlight. The May moon, now sailing full overhead, looked with a
broad satisfaction on the hardest hit of her victims.