PART I

[Frontispiece: OLD FLYNN, MOVING ALONG THE VERGE, BECAME IDYLLIC]

Further Experiences of an

Irish R.M.

By

E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross

Authors of "Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,"

"Some Irish Yesterdays," "All on the Irish Shore,"

"The Real Charlotte," etc. etc. etc.

With 35 Illustrations by E. Œ. Somerville

Longmans, Green, and Co.

39 Paternoster Row, London

New York, Bombay, and Calcutta

1908

All rights reserved

_BY THE SAME AUTHORS_

SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.

With 31 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo, 6s.

SOME IRISH YESTERDAYS

With 51 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo, 6s.

AN IRISH COUSIN

Crown 8vo, 6s.

THE REAL CHARLOTTE

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

THE SILVER FOX

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE

With 10 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo, 6s.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

CONTENTS

I. THE PUG-NOSED FOX

II. A ROYAL COMMAND

III. POISSON D'AVRIL

IV. "THE MAN THAT CAME TO BUY APPLES"

V. A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

VI. THE BOAT'S SHARE

VII. THE LAST DAY OF SHRAFT

VIII. "A HORSE! A HORSE!" (Part I.)

IX. "AHORSE! A HORSE!" (Part II.)

X. SHARPER THAN A FERRET'S TOOTH

XI. OWENEEN THE SPRAT

XII. THE WHITEBOYS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HALF-TONE

Old Flynn, moving along the verge, became idyllic . . . . Frontispiece

Suspicious of an ill-timed pleasantry

"Take me out of this"

Whizzed like a driven grouse past the combatants

The guard put his hand over his mouth

"And not a brown farthing more would he give"

"I'm dashed if she hasn't got Sullivan's pony"

He crowned the arrangement with the bottle of potheen

A trayful of burning sods of turf

He did not deny himself a most dissolute wink

Maria's performance was faultless

The Modulator opened with a long-drawn and nasal cadenza

"Did ye see the police!"

"Is that my darlin' Major Yeates?" shouted the cook

"I will walk--I should really prefer it"

Flurry and I put in a blazing September day on the mountain

Braney's Lake

An intricate and variously moving tide of people

"Them hounds are in my family, seed and breed, this hundred years"

"I'll go bail 'twas him that picked me wife's fashionable cocks"

IN THE TEXT

The egregious Slipper

The victim came

"Ye have them in great form, Michael"

Pure ecstasy stretched his grin from ear to ear

"They're lovely fish altogether! they're leppin' fresh!"

The invalid removed herself

Con Brickley

"Let the divil clear me out of the sthrand!"

A witness to be proud of

His mornings were spent in proffering Irish phrases

The Sergeant's manner was distressingly apologetic

"That's a great sign of fine weather when a horse will lie

down in wather that way"

My wife came and asked me if I would take her to the workhouse

"Thim's no joke, sir, thim's Sprats!"

"He knows what's what!" said the Locum

FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF

AN IRISH R.M.

I

THE PUG-NOSED FOX

"5 Turkies and their Mother

5 Ducks and the Drake

5 Hins and the Cock

CATHARINE O'DONOVAN, Skeagh."

A leaf from a copy-book, with these words written on it, was placed in

my hand as I was in the act of dragging on a new pair of gloves in the

stableyard. There was something rhythmic in the category, suggestive

of burnt-offerings and incantations; some touch of pathos, pointing to

tragedy; something, finally, that in the light of previous events

recalled to me suddenly and unpleasantly my new-born position of Deputy

M.F.H.

Not, indeed, that I was in need at that moment of circumstances to

remind me of it. A new hunting-cap, pressing implacably upon my

forehead, an equally new red coat, heavy as a coat of mail, a

glittering horn, red hot from the makers, and so far totally

unresponsive to my apoplectic wooings; these things in themselves,

without the addition of a poultry bill, were sufficient to bring home

to me my amazing folly in having succumbed to the wiles of Mr. Florence

McCarthy Knox, and accepted the charge of his hounds, during his

absence with the Irish Yeomanry at the South African war.

I had yielded in a burst of patriotic emotion to the spirit of

volunteering that was in the air. It would be, Flurry had assured me,

a purely nominal position.

"They'll only go out one day a week, and Jerome Hickey and Michael'll

do all the work. I do secretary for myself, but that'll be no trouble

to you. There's nothing at all to do but to send out the cards of the

meets. It'll be a comfort to me to think you were running the show."

I suggested other names that seemed to me infinitely more comfortable,

but found them blocked by intricate and insuperable objections, and

when I became aware that Mr. Knox had so engineered his case as to get

my wife on his side it seemed simpler to give in.

A week afterwards I saw Flurry off at the station. His last words to

me were:

"Well, good-bye, Major. Be fighting my grandmother for her

subscription, and whatever you do, don't give more than half-a-crown

for a donkey. There's no meat on them."

Upon this touching farewell the train steamed out, and left me

standing, shelterless, a reluctant and incapable Master of Hounds.

Exhaustive as Flurry's instructions had been on the subject of the

cuisine and other details of kennel management, he had not even hinted

at the difficulties that are usually composed by means of a fowl fund.

My first experience of these had taken place but a week ago, when from

the breakfast-table I had perceived a donkey and cart rambling,

unattended, in the shrubberies, among the young hydrangeas and azaleas.

The owner, a most respectable looking old man, explained that he had

left it there because he was "dilicate" to bring it up to the house,

and added that he had come for compensation for "a beautiful milking

goat" that the hounds had eaten last March, "and she having two kids

that died afther her."

I asked why he had not long since been to Mr. Knox about it, and was

favoured with an interminable history of the claimant's ill-health

during the summer, consequent on his fretting after the goat; of how he

had been anointed four times, and of how the donkey was lame this long

while where a branch bet her in the thigh one day she ran into the wood

from the hounds. Fearing that the donkey was about to be included in

the bill, I made haste to settle for the goat and her offspring, a

matter of fifteen shillings.

Next day two women took up a position on the steps at luncheon time, a

course which experience has taught me indicates affairs too exalted and

too personal to be transmitted _viâ_ the kitchen. They were, according

to their own showing, ruined proprietors of poultry yards, in proof of

which they pointed to a row of decapitated hens, laid forth on the

grass like the bag at a fashionable shoot. I was irritably aware of

their triumph in the trophy.

"Sure he didn't make off with anny of them only three, but he snapped

the heads off all that was in it, and faith, if Masther Flurry was at

home, he'd give us the blood of his arm before he'd see our little hins

desthroyed on us this way."

I gave them thirty-two and sixpence as an alternative compensation,

not, I admit, without an uneasy sense of something unusual in Peter

Cadogan's expression, as he assiduously raked the gravel hard by.

It was Michael Leary, Flurry's Michael, who placed the matter of a fowl

fund upon a basis. Catharine O'Donovan and her list of casualties had

been dismissed at a cost of ten shillings, a price so inadequate, and

so cheerfully accepted, as to confirm my dawning suspicions.

"Is it what would they get from Mr. Flurry?" replied Michael when I put

the matter to him; "it isn't ten shillings, no, nor thirty-two

shillings that they'd get from him, but a pelt of a curse after their

heels! Why wouldn't they keep their hens inside in the house with

themselves at night, the same as annyone that'd have sense, and not to

leave them out enticing the fox this way."

Michael was in a bad temper, and so, for the matter of that, was I,

quite irrespective of dealings in poultry. Our red coats, our horses,

and the presence of the hounds, did not betoken the chase, they merely

indicated that the Hunt was about to be photographed. The local

photographer, backed by Mrs. Sinclair Yeates, had extorted from me the

privilege of "a sitting," a figurative expression, involving a ride of

five miles to a covert, selected by my wife as being typical of the

country, accompanied by the fourteen and a-half couple of half-bred

harriers who figured in Hound Lists as "Mr. Knox's Fox-hounds."

It was a blazing day in late August, following on forty-eight hours of

blanketing sea-fog; a day for flannels and a languid game of croquet.

Lady Jane, the grey mare lent to me by Flurry, had been demoralised by

her summer at grass, and was in that peculiarly loathsome frame of mind

that is a blend of laziness and bumptiousness. If I left her to her

own devices she drowsed, stumbling, through the dust; if I corrected

her, she pranced and pulled, and kicked up behind like a donkey. My

huntsman, Doctor Jerome Hickey, who was to have been in the forefront

of the photograph, was twenty miles off in an open boat, on his way to

an island at the far end of his dispensary district, with fifteen cases

of measles ahead of him. I envied him; measles or no, he had on a

turned down collar. As a result of his absence I rode in solitary

dignity at the head of the pack, or, to speak more correctly, I

preceded Michael by some thirty yards of unoccupied road, while the

pack, callous to flogging, and disdainful of my cajoleries, clave to

the heels of Michael's horse.

In this order, we arrived at the tryst, a heathery hill-side, flanked

by a dense and rambling wood. A sea-gull scream from the hill-side

announced the presence of my wife, and summoned me to join her and the

photographer at the spot where they were encamped. I put the mare at a

suitable place in the wall by the roadside. She refused it, which was

no more than I had expected. I sampled my new spurs on her fat sides,

with the result that she charged the wall, slantways, at the exact spot

where Philippa had placed her bicycle against it, missed the bicycle by

a hair's-breadth, landed in the field with a thump, on all four feet,

and ended with two most distressing bucks. It was a consolation to me,

when I came in touch again with the saddle, to find that one of the new

spurs had ploughed a long furrow in her shoulder.

The photographer was a young man from Belfast, a new comer to the

neighbourhood; Philippa is also a photographer, a fact that did not

tend as much as might have been expected to the harmony of the occasion.

"Mrs. Yeates has selected this hillock," said Mr. McOstrich, in tones

of acrid resignation, indicating as he spoke a sugar-loaf shaped knoll,

thickly matted with furze and heather. "She considers the background

characteristic. My own suggestion would have been the grass-field

yonder."

It is an ancient contention of my wife that I, in common with all other

men, in any dispute between a female relative and a tradesman, side

with the tradesman, partly from fear, partly from masculine

clannishness, and most of all from a desire to stand well with the

tradesman. Nothing but the remembrance of this preposterous reproach

kept me from accepting Mr. McOstrich's point of view, and, while I

hesitated, Michael was already taking up his position on the hillock,

perhaps in obedience to some signal from Philippa, perhaps because he

had realised the excellent concealment afforded by the deep heather to

his horse's fetlocks, whose outline was of a somewhat gouty type. It

was part of Flurry Knox's demoniac gift for horseflesh that he should

be able to buy screws and make them serve his exacting purposes.

Michael's horse, Moses, had, at a distance, the appearance of standing

upon four champagne bottles, but he none the less did the work of two

sound horses and did it well.

I goaded Lady Jane through the furze, and established myself beside

Michael on the sugarloaf, the hounds disposed themselves in an interval

of bracken below, and Mr. McOstrich directed his camera upon us from an

opposite slope.

"Show your teeth, please," said Mr. McOstrich to Michael. Michael,

already simmering with indignation at the senseless frivolity of the

proceedings, glowered at his knuckles, evidently suspicious of an

ill-timed pleasantry.

[Illustration: SUSPICIOUS OF AN ILL-TIMED PLEASANTRY]

"Do you hear, Whip?" repeated Mr. McOstrich, raising his bleak northern

voice, "show your teeth, please!"

"He only wants to focus us," said I, foreseeing trouble, and hurriedly

displaying my own new front row in a galvanic smile.

Michael murmured to Moses' withers something that sounded like a

promise to hocus Mr. McOstrich when occasion should serve, and I

reflected on the hardship of having to feel apologetic towards both

Michael and the photographer.

Only those who have participated in "Hunt Groups" can realise the

combined tediousness and tension of the moments that followed. To keep

thirty hounds headed for the camera, to ensure that your horse has not

closed its eyes and hung its head in a doze of boredom, to preserve for

yourself that alert and workmanlike aspect that becomes a sportsman,

and then, when these things have been achieved and maintained for what

feels like a month, to see the tripod move in spider strides to a fresh

position and know that all has to be begun over again. After several

of these tentative selections of a site, the moment came when Mr.

McOstrich swung his black velvet pall in the air and buried his head

under its portentous folds. The hounds, though uneasy, had hitherto

been comparatively calm, but at this manifestation their nerve broke,

and they unanimously charged the glaring monster in the black hood with

loud and hysterical cries.

Had not Michael perceived their intention while there was time awful

things might have happened. As it was, the leaders were flogged off

with ignominy, and the ruffled artist returned from the rock to which

he had fled. Michael and I arranged ourselves afresh upon the hillock;

I squared my shoulders, and felt my wonted photographic expression of

hang-dog desperation settle down upon me.

"The dogs are not in the picture, Whip!" said Mr. McOstrich in the

chill tone of outraged dignity.

I perceived that the hounds, much demoralised, had melted away from the

slope in front of us, and were huddling in a wisp in the intervening

hollow. Blandishments were of no avail; they wagged and beamed

apologetically, but remained in the hollow. Michael, in whose

sensitive bosom the term "Whip" evidently rankled, became scarlet in

the face and avalanched from the hill top upon his flock with a fury

that was instantly recognised by them. They broke in panic, and the

astute and elderly Venus, followed by two of the young entry, bolted

for the road. They were there met by Mr. McOstrich's carman, who most

creditably headed the puppies with yells and his driving-whip, but was

out-played by Venus, who, dodging like a football professional, doubled

under the car horse, and fled irrevocably. Philippa, who had been

flitting from rock to rock with her kodak, and unnerving me with

injunctions as to the angle of my cap, here entered the lists with a

packet of sandwiches, with which, in spite of the mustard, she restored

a certain confidence to the agitated pack, a proceeding observed from

afar with trembling indignation by Minx, her fox-terrier. By reckless

expenditure of sandwich the hounds were tempted to their proper

position below the horses, but, unfortunately, with their sterns to the

camera, and their eyes fastened on Philippa.

"Retire, Madam!" said Mr. McOstrich, very severely, "_I_ will attract

the dogs!"

Thus rebuked, Madam scrambled hastily over the crest of the hillock and

sank in unseemly laughter into the deep heather behind it.

"Now, very quiet, please," continued Mr. McOstrich, and then

unexpectedly uttered the words, "Pop! Pop! Pop!" in a high soprano.

Michael clapped his hand over his mouth, the superseded siren in the

heather behind me wallowed in fresh convulsions; the hounds remained

unattracted.

Then arose, almost at the same moment, a voice from the wood behind us,

the voice of yet a third siren, more potent than that of either of her

predecessors, the voice of Venus hunting a line. For the space of a

breath the hounds hung on the eager hacking yelps, in the next breath

they were gone.

Matters now began to move on a serious scale, and with a speed that

could not have been foreseen. The wood was but fifty yards from our

sugar-loaf. Before Michael had got out his horn, the hounds were over

the wall, before the last stern had disappeared the leaders had broken

into full cry.

"Please God it might be a rabbit!" exclaimed Michael, putting spurs to

his horse and bucketing down through the furze towards the wood, with

blasts of the horn that were fraught with indignation and rebuke.

An instant later, from my point of vantage on the sugar-loaf, I saw a

big and very yellow fox cross an open space of heather high up on the

hill above the covert. He passed and vanished; in half-a-dozen seconds

Venus, plunging through the heather, came shrieking across the open

space and also vanished. Another all too brief an interval, and the

remainder of the pack had stormed through the wood and were away in the

open after Venus, and Michael, who had pulled up short on the hither

side of the covert wall, had started up the open hill-side to catch

them.

The characteristic background chosen by Philippa, however admirable in

a photograph, afforded one of the most diabolic rides of my experience.

Uphill, over courses of rock masked in furze bushes, round the head of

a boggy lake, uphill again through deep and purple heather, over a

horrid wall of long slabs half buried in it; past a ruined cabin, with

thorn bushes crowding low over the only feasible place in the bank, and

at last, the top of the hill, and Michael pulling up to take

observations.

The best pack in the kingdom, schoolmastered by a regiment of whips,

could not have precipitated themselves out of covert with more academic

precision than had been shown by Flurry Knox's irregulars. They had

already crossed the valley below us, and were running up a long hill as

if under the conventional tablecloth; their cry, floating up to us,

held all the immemorial romance of the chase.

Michael regarded me with a wild eye; he looked as hot as I felt, which

was saying a good deal, and both horses were puffing.

"He's all the ways for Temple Braney!" he said. "Sure I know him

well--that's the pug-nosed fox that's in it these last three seasons,

and it's what I wish----"

(I regret that I cannot transcribe Michael's wish in its own terms, but

I may baldly summarise it as a desire minutely and anatomically

specified that the hounds were eating Mr. McOstrich.)

Here the spurs were once more applied to Moses' reeking sides, and we

started again, battering down the twists of a rocky lane into the

steaming, stuffy valley. I felt as guilty and as responsible for the

whole affair as Michael intended that I should feel; I knew that he

even laid to my charge the disastrous appearance of the pug-nosed

Temple Braney fox. (Whether this remarkable feature was a freak of

nature, or of Michael's lurid fancy, I have never been able to

ascertain.)

The valley was boggy, as well as hot, and the deep and sinuous ditch

that by courtesy was supposed to drain it, was blind with rushes and

tall fronds of Osmunda Regalis fern. Where the landing was tolerable,

the take-off was a swamp, where the take-off was sound the landing was

feasible only for a frog: we lost five panting minutes, closely

attended by horse-flies, before we somehow floundered across and began

the ascent of the second hill. To face tall banks, uphill, is at no

time agreeable, especially when they are enveloped in a jungle of

briars, bracken, and waving grass, but a merciful dispensation of

cow-gaps revealed itself; it was one of the few streaks of luck in a

day not conspicuous for such.

At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded to us a

fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and all that

was therein, with, however, the single unfortunate exception of the

hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of a

reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and the

growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing,

ghostlike, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man in a

straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock with a wooden

rake, while a black and white cur slept in the young after-grass beside

him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity with a heated demand

whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill clamour from the dog

was at first the only reply; its owner took off his hat, wiped his

forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.

"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to look

us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more than

before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the heat of a

summer's day.

"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up

beside him.

"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain does

be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the say

from it."

"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round, "an'

stop in it! Whisht! Look over, sir! Look over!"

He pointed with his whip along the green slopes. I saw, about half a

mile away, two boys standing on a fence, and beyond them some cattle

galloping in a field: three or four miles farther on the woods of

Temple Braney were a purple smear in the hazy heat of the landscape.

My heart sank; it was obvious even to my limited capacities that the

pug-nosed fox was making good his line with a straightness not to be

expected from one of his personal peculiarity, and that the hounds were

still running as hard as ever on a scent as steamingly hot as the

weather. I wildly thought of removing my coat and leaving it in charge

of the man with neuralgia, but was restrained by the reflection that he

might look upon it as a gift, flung to him in a burst of compassion, a

misunderstanding that, in view of his affliction, it would be

impossible to rectify.

I picked up my lathered reins and followed Michael at a gloomy trot in

the direction of the galloping cattle. After a few fields a road

presented itself, and was eagerly accepted by the grey mare, on whom

the unbridled gluttonies of a summer's grass were beginning to tell.

"She's bet up, sir," said Michael, dragging down a rickety gate with

the handle of his whip. "Folly on the road, there's a near way to the

wood from the cross."

Moses here walked cautiously over the prostrate gate.

"I'm afraid you'll kill Moses," said I, by no means pleased at the

prospect of being separated from my Intelligence Department.

"Is it him?" replied Michael, scanning the country ahead of him with

hawk eyes. "Sure he's as hardy as a throut!"

The last I saw of the trout was his bottle fetlocks disappearing nimbly

in bracken as he dropped down the far side of a bank.

I "follied on the road" for two stifling miles. The heavy air was pent

between high hedges hung with wisps of hay from passing carts;

(hay-carrying in the south-west of Ireland conforms to the leisure of

the farmer rather than to the accident of season;) phalanxes of flies

arose as if at the approach of royalty, and accompanied my progress at

a hunting jog, which, as interpreted by Lady Jane, was an effective

blend of a Turkish bath and a churn.

The "near way" from the cross-roads opened seductively with a lane

leading to a farmhouse, and presently degenerated into an unfenced but

plausible cart track through the fields. Breaches had been made in the

banks for its accommodation, and I advanced successfully towards the

long woods of Temple Braney, endeavouring, less successfully, to repel

the attentions of two young horses, who galloped, squealed, and bucked

round me and Lady Jane with the imbecile pleasantry of their kind. The

moment when I at length slammed in their faces the gate of the wood,

was one of sorely needed solace.

Then came the sudden bath of coolness and shade, and the gradual

realisation that I did not in the least know what to do next. The air

was full of the deeply preoccupied hum of insects, and the interminable

monologue of a wood pigeon; I felt as if I ought to apologise for my

intrusion. None the less I pursued a ride that crossed the wood,

making persevering efforts to blow my horn, and producing nothing but

gramaphonic whispers, fragmentary groans, and a headache. I was near

the farther side of the wood when I saw fresh hoof-tracks on a path

that joined the ride; they preceded me to a singularly untempting bank,

with a branch hanging over it and a potato-field beyond it. A clod had

been newly kicked out of the top of it; I could not evade the

conviction that Michael had gone that way. The grey mare knew it too,

and bundled on to and over the bank with surprising celerity, and

dropped skilfully just short of where the potato beds began. An old

woman was digging at the other side of the field, and I steered for

her, making a long tack down a deep furrow between the "lazy-beds."

"Did you see the hounds, ma'am?" I called out across the intervening

jungle of potato stalks.

"Sir!"

She at all events was not deaf. I amended my inquiry.

"Did you see any dogs, or a man in a red coat?"

"Musha, bad cess to them, then I did!" bawled the old woman, "look at

the thrack o' their legs down thro' me little pratie garden! 'Twasn't

but a whileen ago that they come leppin' out o' the wood to me, and

didn't I think 'twas the Divil and all his young ones, an' I thrun

meself down in the thrinch the way they wouldn't see me, the Lord save

us!"

My heart warmed to her; I also would gladly have laid down among the

umbrageous stalks of the potatoes, and concealed myself for ever from

Michael and the hounds.

"What way did they go?" I asked, regretfully dismissing the vision, and

feeling in my pocket for a shilling.

"They went wesht the road, your Honour, an' they screeching always;

they crossed out the field below over-right the white pony, and faith

ye couldn't hardly see Michael Leary for the shweat! God help ye

asthore, yourself is getting hardship from them as well as another!"

The shilling here sank into her earthy palm, on which she prayed

passionately that the saints might be surprised at my success. I felt

that as far as I was concerned the surprise would be mutual; I had had

nothing but misfortune since ten o'clock that morning, and there seemed

no reason to believe that the tide had turned.

The pony proved to be a white mule, a spectral creature, standing in

malign meditation trace-high in bracken; I proceeded in its direction

at a trot, through clumps of bracken and coarse grass, and as I drew

near it uttered a strangled and heart-broken cry of greeting. At the

same moment Lady Jane fell headlong on to her nose and the point of her

right shoulder. It is almost superfluous to observe that I did the

same thing. As I rolled on my face in the bracken, something like a

snake uncoiled itself beneath me and became taut; I clutched at it,

believing it to be the reins, and found I was being hung up, like

clothes on a line, upon the mule's tethering rope. Lady Jane had got

it well round her legs, and had already fallen twice in her efforts to

get up, while the mule, round whose neck the tether rope had been

knotted, was backing hard, like a dog trying to pull its head through

its collar.

In sunstroke heat I got out my knife, and having cut the rope in two

places, an operation accomplished in the depths of a swarm of flies and

midges, I pulled the mare on to her legs. She was lame on the off

fore, and the rope had skinned her shins in several places; my own

shoulder and arm were bruised, and I had broken a stirrup leather.

Philippa and the photographer had certainly provided me with a day of

varied entertainment, and I could not be sure that I had even yet

drained the cup of pleasure to the dregs.

I led Lady Jane out into the road, and considered the position. We

were about nine miles from home, and at least five from any place where

I could hire a car. To walk, and lead the mare, was an alternative

that, powerless as events had proved me to be in the hands of

misfortune, I still refused to consider. It was then given me to

remember old McRory.

My acquaintance with old McRory was of the slightest. He was, it was

understood, a retired Dublin coal merchant, with an enormous family,

and a reputation for great riches. He had, within the last year or so,

taken the derelict house of Temple Braney, and having by strenuous

efforts attained that dubious honour, the Commission of the Peace, it

had happened to me to sit on the Bench with him on one or two

occasions. Of his family I knew little, save that whenever I saw an

unknown young man buying cigarettes at Mr. Dannaher's in Skebawn, I was

informed that it was one of the young McRorys, a medical student, and

"a bit of a lad, but nothing at all to the next youngest." The Misses

McRory were only occasionally viewed, whirling in large companies on

glittering bicycles, and the legend respectfully ran that they had

forty blouses apiece. Perhaps the most definite information about them

was supplied by our cook, Mrs. Cadogan, who assured Philippa that Wild

Pigs in America wouldn't be treated worse than what Mrs. McRory treated

her servants. All these things together made an unpromising aggregate,

but the fact remained that Temple Braney House was within a quarter of

a mile of me, and its charity my only hope.

The lodge gates of Temple Braney were wide open, so was the door of the

lodge; the weedy drive was scored with fresh wheel-tracks, as also, for

the matter of that, was the grass on either side. I followed it for a

short distance, in the roomy shade of splendid beech-trees, servants of

the old régime, preserving their dignity through the vicissitudes of

the new. Near the house was a second open gate, and on a species of

arch over it I was amazingly greeted by the word "Welcome" in white

letters on a blazing strip of Turkey-red. This was an attention that I

had not anticipated; did it mean a school-feast?

I made a cautious survey, but saw nobody, and nerved by the increasing

lameness of Lady Jane, I went on to the house and rang the bell. There

was no response; the hall-door was wide open, and from an inner hall

two lanky red setter puppies advanced with their tails between their

legs, barking uncertainly, and acutely conscious of the fact that upon

the collar of each was fastened a flaunting though much chewed bow of

white satin ribbon. Full of foreboding I rang again. The bell tinkled

vigorously in some fastness of the house, but nothing else happened. I

decided to try the stable-yard, and, attended by the decorated puppies,

set forth to find it.

It was a large quadrangle, of which one side was formed by a wing of

the house; had there been a few more panes of glass in the windows and

slates in the roof it might have been imposing. A cavernous coachhouse

stood open, empty save for the wheelless body of an outside car that

was seated on the floor, with wings outspread like a hatching hen.

Every stable-door gaped wide. Odds and ends of harness lay about, but

neither horse nor human being was visible. A turkey-cock, in

transports of wrath, stormed to and fro in front of his household, and

to some extent dispelled the sentiment of desertion and stampede that

pervaded the place. I led the limping mare into a stable wherein were

two loose-boxes. A sickly smell greeted me, and I perceived that in

one of the boxes was a long low cage, alive with the red-currant-jelly

eyes and pink noses of a colony of ferrets, and in the other was a pile

of empty wine-boxes and several bicycles. Lady Jane snorted heavily,

and I sought elsewhere for a refuge for her. I found it at length in a

long stable with six empty stalls, and proceeded to tie her up in one

of them.

It was while I was thus engaged that a strange succession of sounds

began overhead, heavy, shapeless sounds in which were blended the

suggestions of shove and thump. There was a brief interval of silence,

during which Lady Jane and I listened with equal intentness; then

followed a hoarse bellow, which resolved itself into the enquiry,

"Is there any one there?"

Here was the princess of the enchanted palace waking up with a

vengeance. More and angrier bellows followed; I went stealthily out

into the yard, and took stock of the windows above the stable. One of

them was open, and it was from it that the voice issued, loudly

demanding release. It roared a string of Christian names, which I

supposed to be those of the McRory family, it used most unchristian

language, and it finally settled down into shouts for help, and

asseverations that it was smothering. I admit that my first and almost

overwhelming impulse was to steal a bicycle and wing my way to my

far-away and peaceful home, leaving Michael, the hounds, and the

smothering gentleman to work out their own salvation. Unfortunately

for me, the voice of conscience prevailed. There was a ladder near at

hand leaning against the wall, and I put it to the window, and went up

it as fast as my top boots would allow me, with a vision before me of

old McRory in apoplexy as the probable reward of my labours. I thrust

my head in, blocking the light in so doing; the shouting ceased

abruptly, and after the glare of sunshine outside I could at first see

nothing. Then was revealed to me a long and darksome room, once,

probably, a loft, filled with broken chairs and varieties of primeval

lumber. In the middle of the floor lay an immense feather bed, and my

bewildered eyes discovered, at one end of it, a crimson face, the face,

not of old McRory, but that of a young gentleman of my acquaintance,

one Mr. Tomsy Flood of Curranhilty. The mysteries were deepening. I

straddled the window-sash, and arrived in the room with a

three-cornered tear in the shoulder of my coat, inflicted by a nail in

the frame, and one spur draped with ancestral cobweb.

"Take me out of this!" howled Mr. Flood hysterically, accepting my

pantomime entrance without question. "Can't you see I'm smothering in

this damned thing?"

[Illustration: "TAKE ME OUT OF THIS!"]

Fluff hung from his black moustache and clung to his eyebrows, his hair

was full of feathers; earthquake throes convulsed the feather-bed, and

the fact was suddenly revealed to me that Mr. Flood was not under it,

as I had at first imagined, but in it, stitched in, up to the chin.

The weaned child, or any other conventional innocent, could not have

failed for an instant to recognise the handiwork of practical humorists

of a high order. I asked no questions, but got out my knife once more,

and beginning with due precaution somewhere near Mr. Flood's jugular

vein, proceeded to slit open the end of the "tick." The stitches were

long and strong, and as each one yielded, the feathers burst forth in

stifling puffs, and Tomsy Flood's allusions to the young McRorys were

mercifully merged in sputtering. I did not laugh, not at least till I

found that I had to drag him out like a mummy, accompanied by half the

contents of the bed, and perceived that he was in full evening clothes,

and that he was incapable of helping himself because the legs of his

trousers were sewn together and his coat-sleeves sewn to his sides;

even then, I only gave way in painful secrecy behind the mighty calves

of his legs as I cut the stitches out. Tomsy Flood walked about

fifteen stone and was not in a mood to be trifled with, still less to

see the humour of the position. The medical students had done their

work with a surgical finish, and by the time that I had restored to

Tomsy the use of his legs and arms, the feathers had permeated to every

recess of my being, and I was sneezing as if I had hay fever.

Having at length, and with considerable difficulty, got Mr. Flood on to

his legs, I ventured, with the tact demanded by the situation, a

question as to whether he had been dining at Temple Braney.

"Dining?" queried Mr. Flood, with an obvious effort of memory. "Yes, I

was, to be sure! Amn't I staying in the house?" Then, with an equally

obvious shock of recollection, "Sure I'm Best Man at the wedding

to-day!"

The scattered elements of the situation began to fall symmetrically

into line, from the open gates to the white bows on the puppies'

collars. My chief concern, however, bearing in mind Tomsy Flood's

recent potations and provocations, was to let him down as easily as

possible, and, reserving my conclusions to myself, to escape, swiftly

and silently, while yet there was time. There was always that

stall-full of bicycles; I could borrow clothes from Tomsy, and leave

this accursed tom-foolery of hunting kit to be fetched with the mare, I

could write a beautifully explanatory note when I got home----

"Hadn't you better get out of your evening things as quickly as you

can?" I suggested.

Mr. Flood regarded me with heavy and bloodshot eyes of imperfect

intelligence.

"Oh! I've time enough. Ye wouldn't get a pick of breakfast here

before ten o'clock in the day. Now that I come to look into you," he

continued, "you're as big a show as myself! Is it for the wedding that

you have the red coat on you?"

I do not now remember with what lies I composed Tomsy Flood, but I got

him out of the room at last by a door into a passage of seemingly

interminable length; he took my arm, he treated me as his only friend,

he expressed his full confidence that I would see fair play when he got

a hold of Stanley McRory. He also gave it as his private opinion that

his cousin, Harry Flood, was making a hare of himself marrying that

impudent little Pinkie McRory, that was as vulgar as a bag of

straddles, in spite of the money. Indeed, the whole family had too

many airs about them for his fancy. "They take the English _Times_, if

you please, and they all dress for dinner--every night I tell ye! I

call that rot, y'know!"

We were all this time traversing the house by labyrinthine passages,

flights of stairs, and strange empty lobbies; we progressed

conversationally and with maddening slowness, followed by a fleecy

train of feathers that floated from us as we went. And all the time I

was trying to remember how long it took to get married. In my own case

it seemed as if I had been in the church for two hours at least.

A swing-door suddenly admitted us to the hall, and Tomsy stood still to

collect his faculties.

"My room's up there," he began, pointing vaguely up the staircase.

At this identical moment there was a loud and composite crash from

behind a closed door on our right, followed by minor crashes, and

noises as of chairs falling about.

"That's the boys!" said Tomsy, a sudden spark kindling in his eye;

"they're breakfasting early, I suppose."

He dropped my arm unexpectedly, and flung the door open with a yell.

The first object that met my eyes was the original sinner, Venus,

mounted on a long and highly-adorned luncheon table, cranching and

gulping cold chicken as fast as she could get it down; on the floor

half-a-dozen of her brethren tore at a round of beef amid the débris of

crockery and glass that had been involved in its overthrow. A cataract

of cream was pouring down the table-cloth, and making a lake on the

carpet for the benefit of some others; and President, the patriarch of

the pack, was apparently seated on the wedding-cake, while he

demolished a cold salmon. I had left my whip in the stable, but even

had this paralysing sight left me the force to use it, its services

would not have been needed. The leaders of the revel leaped from the

table, mowing down colonies of wine-glasses in the act, and fled

through the open window, followed by the rest of the party, with a

precipitancy that showed their full consciousness of sin--the last

scramblers over the sill yelping in agonised foretaste of the thong

that they believed was overtaking them.

At such a moment of catastrophe the craving for human sympathy is

paramount.

I turned even to the fuddled and feathered Tomsy Flood as to a man and

a brother, and was confronted in the doorway by the Bride and

Bridegroom.

Behind them, the hall was filling, with the swiftness of an evil dream,

with glowing faces and wedding bonnets; there was a turmoil of wheels

and hoofs at the door, and through it all, like "horns of Elfland

faintly blowing," Michael's blasts of summons to his pirates. Finally,

the towering mauve bonnet and equally towering wrath of Mrs. McRory, as

she advanced upon me and Tomsy Flood. I thought of the Wild Pigs in

America, and wished I were with them.

Lest I should find myself the object of a sympathy more acute than I

deserve, it may be well to transcribe portion of a paragraph from the

_Curranhilty Herald_ of the following week:--

"... After the ceremony a reception was held at Temple Braney House,

where a sumptuous collation had been provided by the hospitable Mr. and

Mrs. McRory. The health of the Happy Pair having been drunk, that of

the Bridesmaids was proposed, and Mr. T. Flood, who had been prevented

by a slight indisposition from filling the office of Best Man, was

happily sufficiently recovered to return thanks for them in his usual

sprightly vein. Major Sinclair Yeates, R.M., M.F.H., who, in honour of

the festive occasion had donned sporting attire, proposed the health of

the Bride's Mother in felicitous terms...."

II

A ROYAL COMMAND

When I heard that Bernard Shute, of Clountiss, Esquire, late Lieutenant

R.N., was running an Agricultural Show, to be held in his own demesne,

I did not for a moment credit him with either philanthropy or public

spirit. I recognised in it merely another outbreak of his exasperating

health and energy. He bombarded the country with circulars, calling

upon farmers for exhibits, and upon all for subscriptions; he made

raids into neighbouring districts on his motor car, turning vague

promises into bullion, with a success in mendicancy fortunately given

to few. It was in a thoroughly ungenerous spirit that I yielded up my

guinea and promised to attend the Show in my thousands: peace at

twenty-one shillings was comparatively cheap, and there was always a

hope that it might end there.

The hope was fallacious: the Show boomed; it blossomed into a Grand

Stand, a Brass Band, an Afternoon Tea Tent; finally, fortune, as usual,

played into Bernard's hands and sent a Celebrity. There arrived in a

neighbouring harbour a steam-yacht, owned by one of Mr. Shute's dearest

friends, one Captain Calthorpe, and having on board a coloured

potentate, the Sultan of X----, who had come over from Cowes to see

Ireland and the Dublin Horse Show. The dearest friend--who, as it

happened, having been for three days swathed in a wet fog from the

Atlantic, was becoming something pressed for entertainment for his

charge--tumbled readily into Bernard's snare, and paragraphs appeared

with all speed in the local papers proclaiming the intention of H.H.

the Sultan of X---- to be present at the Clountiss Agricultural Show.

Following up this coup, Bernard achieved for his function a fine, an

even sumptuous day, and the weather and the Sultan between them filled

the Grand Stand beyond the utmost hopes (and possibly the secret

misgivings) of its constructors.

Having with difficulty found seats on the top-most corner for myself,

my wife, and my two children, I had leisure to speculate upon its

probable collapse. For half an hour, for an hour, for an hour and a

half, we sat on its hot bare boards and surveyed the wide and empty

oval of grass that formed the arena of the Show. Five "made-up" jumps

of varying dimensions and two vagrant fox-terriers were its sole

adornment. A dark rim of spectators encircled it, awaiting

developments, _i.e._ the arrival of the Sultan, with tireless patience,

and the egregious Slipper, attired in a gala costume of tall hat,

frock-coat, white breeches, and butcher boots, gleanings, no doubt,

from bygone jumble sales, swaggered and rolled to and fro, selling

catalogues and cards of the jumping. Away under the tall elms near the

gate, amid the rival clamour of the cattle sheds and the poultry pens,

was stationed the green and yellow band of the "Sons of Liberty"; at

intervals it broke into an excruciating shindy of brass instruments,

through which the big drum drove a ferocious and unfaltering course.

Above the heads of the people, at the far end of the arena, tossing

heads and manes moving ceaselessly backwards and forwards told where

the "jumping horses" were waiting, eaten by flies, inconsolably

agitated by the band, becoming momently more jaded and stale from the

delay. I thanked Heaven that neither my wife nor Bernard Shute had

succeeded in inducing me to snatch my string of two from the paddock in

which they were passing the summer, to take part in this purgatorial

procession.

[Illustration: THE EGREGIOUS SLIPPER]

The Grand Stand, a structure bare as a mountain top to the assaults of

sun and wind, was canopied with parasols and prismatic with millinery.

The farmers, from regions unknown to me, had abundantly risen to the

occasion; so also had their wives and daughters; and fashionable

ladies, with comfortable brogues and a vigorous taste in scent, closed

us in on every side. Throughout that burning period of delay went the

searching catechisms of my two sons (aged respectively four and seven)

as to the complexion, disposition, and domestic arrangements of the

Sultan. Philippa says that I ought to have known that they were

thoroughly over-strung; possibly my descriptions of the weapons that he

wore and the cannibal feasts that he attended were a trifle lurid, but

it seemed simpler to let the fancy play on such details than to decide,

for the benefit of an interested _entourage_ of farmers' daughters,

whether the Sultan's face was the colour of my boots or of their

mother's, and whether he had a thousand or a million wives. The

inquiry was interrupted by the quack of a motor horn at the entrance

gate.

"Here he is!" breathed the Grand Stand as one man. There was a

flocking of stewards towards the gate, and the Sons of Liberty, full of

anxiety to say the suitable thing, burst into the melancholy strains of

"My Old Kentucky Home Far Away." To this somewhat "hearse-like air"

the group of green-rosetted stewards advanced across the arena,

escorting the yacht party, in whose midst moved a squat figure, clad in

grey flannel, and surmounted by a massive and snowy turban. My elder

son became very pale; the younger turned an ominous crimson, and the

corners of his mouth went down, slowly, but, as I well knew, fatally.

The inevitable bellow, that followed in the inevitable routine, had

scarcely died away in the heart of Philippa's feather boa, when Mr.

Shute's red face and monstrous Presidential rosette presented

themselves on the stairs at my elbow.

"Mrs. Yeates!" he began, in a gusty whisper, "Cecilia implores you to

come and fling yourself to the Lion! She says she simply can't and

won't tackle him single-handed, and she trusts to you to see her

through! He talks French all right, and I know your French is

top-hole! Do come----"

Incredible as it may appear, my wife received this suggestion with a

reluctance that was obviously but half-hearted. Such it is to have the

Social Gift.

I presently found myself alone with my offspring, both in tears, and

deaf to my assurances that neither the Sultan, nor his lion, would eat

their mother. Consolation, however, came with the entry of the

"jumping horses" into the arena, which followed with all speed upon

that of the Sultan. The first competitor bucketted up to the

starting-point, and at the same moment the discovery was made that

there was no water in the water-jump, a space of perhaps a foot in

depth by some five feet wide. Nothing but a thin paste of mud

remained, the water having disappeared, unnoticed, during the hot hours

of the morning.

Swift in expedient, the stewards supplied the difficulty with

quicklime, which was scattered with a lavish hand in the fosse, and

shone like snow through the barrier of furze bushes on the take-off

side. If, as I suppose, the object was to delude the horses into the

belief that it was a water-jump, it was a total failure; they

immediately decided that it was a practical joke, dangerous, and in

indifferent taste. If, on the other side, a variety entertainment for

the public was aimed at, nothing could have been more successful.

Every known class of refusal was successfully exhibited. One horse

endeavoured to climb the rails into the Grand Stand; another, having

stopped dead at the critical point, swung round, and returned in

consternation to the starting-point, with his rider hanging like a

locket round his neck. Another, dowered with a sense of humour unusual

among horses, stepped delicately over the furze-bushes, and, amidst

rounds of applause, walked through the lime with a stoic calm. Yet

another, a ponderous war-horse of seventeen hands, hung, trembling like

an aspen, on the brink, till a sympathiser, possibly his owner, sprang

irrepressibly from his seat on the stand, climbed through the rails,

and attacked him from behind with a large umbrella. It was during this

three-cornered conflict that the green-eyed filly forced herself into

the front rank of events. A chorus of "Hi! Hi! Hi!" fired at the

rate of about fifty per second, volleyed in warning from the crowd

round the starting-point, and a white-legged chestnut, with an

unearthly white face and flying flounces of tawny mane and tail, came

thundering down at the jump. Neither umbrella nor war-horse turned her

by a hair's-breadth from her course, still less did her rider, a lean

and long-legged country boy, whose single object was to keep on her

back. Picking up her white stockings, she took off six feet from the

jump, and whizzed like a driven grouse past the combatants and over the

furze bushes and the lime. Beneath her creamy forelock, I caught a

glimpse of her amazing blue-green eyes.

[Illustration: WHIZZED LIKE A DRIVEN GROUSE PAST THE COMBATANTS]

She skimmed the hurdle, she flourished over the wall, flinging high her

white heels with a twist that showed more consideration for their

safety than that of her rider. She ramped over the big double bank,

while the roars of approval swelled with each achievement, and she

ended a faultless round by bolting into the heart of the crowd, which

fled hilariously, and as hilariously, hived in round her again.

From my exalted seat I could see the Sultan clapping his hands in sweet

accord with Philippa. Somewhere near me a voice yelled:

"Gripes! She's a monkey! When she jumped the wall she went the height

of a tree over it!"

To which another voice replied that "It'd be a good bird that'd fly the

height she wouldn't lep, and John Cullinane'd be apt to get first with

her at the Skebawn Show." I remembered casually that John Cullinane

was a neighbour of mine.

"Well, I wouldn't fancy her at all," said a female voice. "I'd say she

had a very maleecious glance."

"Ah! ye wouldn't feel that when the winkers'd be on her," said the

first speaker; "she'd make a fine sweeping mare under a side-car."

Meantime, the war-horse, much embittered by the umbrella, floundered

through the lime, and, continuing his course, threw down the hurdle,

made a breach in the wall that would, as my neighbour put it, give

three hours' work to seven idlers, and came to a sudden conclusion in

front of the bank, while his rider slowly turned a somersault that, by

some process of evolution, placed him sitting on the fence, facing the

large and gloomy countenance of his horse.

It was after this performance that my wife looked round to see if her

sons were enjoying themselves, and waved her handkerchief. The snowy

turban of the Sultan moved round too, and beneath its voluminous folds

the round, black discs of a pair of field-glasses were directed at us.

The effect was instant. With a simultaneous shriek of terror, my

children flung themselves upon me and buried their faces in my breast.

I shall never forget it to the farmers' daughters that, in this black

hour, their sympathy was prompt and practical.

"Oh! Fie, fie! Oh! the creatures! 'T was the spy-glasses finished

them altogether! Eat a sweetie now, lovey! that's the grand man!

Pappy'll not let the dirty fella near ye!"

A piece of the brown sugar-stick, known as "Peggy's leg," accompanied

these consolations, and a tearful composure was gradually restored; but

"Pappy" had arrived at the conclusion that he had had about as much as

he could stand. In shameful publicity I clambered down the steep tiers

of seats, with one child under my arm, the other adhering to my

coat-tail. Philippa made agitated signals to me; I cut her dead, and

went to ground in the tea tent.

A couple of days later my duty took me to the farthest end of my

district--a matter that involved a night's absence from home. I left

behind me an infant family restored to calm, and a thoroughly

domesticated wife and mother, pledged to one o'clock dinner with the

children and tea in the woods. I returned in time for luncheon next

day, bicycling from the station, as was my wont. It was a hot day, and

as I walked my bicycle up the slope of the avenue, the shade of the

beech trees was passing pleasant; the dogs galloped to meet me over the

soft after-grass, and I thought about flannels and an idle afternoon.

In the hall I met Margaret, the parlour-maid, engaged, with the

housemaid, in carrying the writing-table out of my smoking-room. They

were talking loudly to each other, and I noticed that their eyes were

very bright and their complexions considerably above par. I am a man

of peace, but the veriest dove will protect its nest, and I demanded

with some heat the cause of this outrage.

"The Mistress told us to clear this room for the servant of the--the

gentleman's that's coming to lunch to-morrow, sir," replied Margaret

with every appearance of offence.

She and Hannah staggered onwards with my table, and the contents of the

drawers rolled and rattled.

"Put down that table," I said firmly. "Where is the Mistress?"

"I believe she's dressing, sir," replied Margaret; "she only came home

about an hour ago. She was out all night on the sea, I believe."

Instant on the heels of these astonishing statements the swing door to

the kitchen was flung open, and Mrs. Cadogan's angry voice was

projected through it.

"Hannah! go tell the Mistress the butcher's below, and he says he never

heard tell of the like, and would she lend him one o' the Major's

spears? How would the likes o' him have a spear! Such goings on!"

"What the devil is all this about?" I said with an equal anger. "No

one is to touch my spears!"

"Thanks be to God, the Major's come home!" exclaimed the ruler of the

kitchen, advancing weightily into the hall. "There's no fear I'd put a

hand on your spears, sir, nor the butcher neither, the poor, decent

man! He says he's supplying the gentry for twenty-five years, and he

was never asked to do the like of a nasty thing like that!"

"Like what!" I said, with growing wrath and bewilderment.

"It's what the Mistress said," rejoined Mrs. Cadogan, the flush of

injury mounting to her cap-frill. "That what-shall-I-call-him--that

King, wouldn't ate mate without it'd be speared! And it's what I say,"

she went on, perorating loudly and suddenly, "what's good enough for

Christians and gentry is good enough for an owld Blackamoor!"

It was now sufficiently obvious that Philippa had, with incredible

perfidy, taken advantage of my absence to embroil herself in the

entertainment of barbaric royalty. "Tell the butcher to wait," was all

I could trust myself to say, as I started in search of my wife.

"Wait, Sinclair! I'm coming down!" cried an urgent voice from the

upper landing, and Philippa, attired in what I may perhaps describe as

a tempestuous dressing-gown, came swiftly downstairs and swept me

before her into the drawing-room.

"My dear," she said breathlessly, "let me break it to you as gently as

possible. The Shutes called for me in the motor after you left

yesterday, and we went on board Bernard's yacht and sailed round to tea

with Captain Calthorpe and the Sultan. We were becalmed coming back,

and we were out all night--we had nothing to eat but the men's

food--not that I wanted anything!" She gave a nauseated shudder of

reminiscence. "There was an awful swell. It rained, too. Cecilia and

I tried to sleep in the cabin with all our clothes on; I never spent a

more horrible night. The yacht crawled in with the tide at about ten

o'clock this morning, and I got back here half-dead, and was just going

up to bed when Captain Calthorpe arrived on a car and said that the

Sultan wanted to lunch here to-morrow. He says we must have him--it's

a kind of Royal command--in fact, I suppose you ought to wear your

frock-coat!"

"I'm dashed if I do!" I said, with decision.

"Well, be that as it may," resumed Philippa, discreetly evading this

point, "that green-eyed thing that got the first prize for jumping is

to be here to meet him. He wants to buy it for his State carriage. I

did my best to get out of it, and I told Captain Calthorpe it would be

impossible to manage about the food. I forgot to tell you," faltered

Philippa, with a wan giggle, "that he said he must have speared mutton!"

"I call it an infernal liberty of Calthorpe's!" I said, with

indignation fanned by the spectacle of Philippa's sleepless

black-rimmed eyes and pallid face, "dumping his confounded menagerie

upon us in this way! And I may tell you that those spears of mine are

poisoned!"

"Oh! don't be so horrid, Sinclair," said Philippa, "inventing

difficulties like that!"

I arose the following morning with a heart of lead--of boiling lead--as

I went down early to the smoking-room to look for cigarettes and found

that they, in common with every other thing that I wanted, had been

tidied into oblivion. From earliest dawn I had heard the thumping of

feet, and the swish of petticoats, and the plying of brooms; but for me

the first shot of the engagement was not fired till 8.30, when, as I

was moodily stropping my razor, I was told that John Cullinane was

below, and would be thankful to see me. As I shaved, I could see John

Cullinane standing about in front of the house, in his Sunday clothes,

waiting for me; and I knew that he would so wait, patiently,

inexorably, if I did not come down till noonday.

I interviewed him, unsympathetically, on the hall door steps, and told

him, firstly, that, as I knew nothing of his filly, I could not "say a

good word" to the Sultan for her; and, secondly, that I certainly would

not mention to the Sultan that, in my opinion, she was a cheap mare at

£80. John Cullinane then changed the conversation by remarking that he

had brought over a small little donkey for a present for the young

gentlemen; to which, with suitable politeness, I responded that my

children already had a donkey, and that I could not think of depriving

him of his, and the interview closed.

Breakfast was late, and for the most part uneatable, the excitement of

the household having communicated itself to the kitchen-range.

"If I was to put my head under it, it wouldn't light for me!" Mrs.

Cadogan said to Philippa.

As a matter of fact, judging by a glimpse vouchsafed to me of her face

as I struggled forth from the cellar with a candle and the champagne,

one might have expected it to cause a conflagration anywhere.

My smoking-room had been dedicated to the Sultan's personal attendant,

a gentleman who could neither lunch with his master nor with my

servants; I was therefore homeless, and crept, an outcast, to the

drawing-room to try to read the newspaper undisturbed. Sounds from

above told me that trouble was brewing in the nursery; I closed the

door.

At about eleven-thirty an outside car drove up to the house, and I saw

a personable stranger descend from it, with a black bag in his hand, a

forerunner, no doubt, of the Sultan, come over to see that the

preparations were _en régle_. I saw no reason for my intervention,

and, with a passing hope that Providence might deliver him over to Mrs.

Cadogan, I returned to my paper. The door was flung open.

"Sinclair, dear," said my wife, very apologetically, "here is Mr.

Werner, the piano-tuner, from Dublin. He says he can't come again--he

thinks he can finish it by luncheon-time. I quite forgot that he was

coming----"

Mr. Werner's spectacled and supercilious face regarded me over her

shoulder; he evidently had a low opinion of me, I do not know why.

With one Cenci-like glance of reproach at Philippa, I rose and left the

room. As I put on my cap I heard the first fierce chords break forth,

followed by the usual chromatic passages, fluent and searching, which

merged in their turn into a concentrated attack upon a single note. I

hurried from the house.

It was a perfect August morning; the dogs lay on the hot gravel and

panted politely as I spoke to them, but did not move. Rejected by all,

I betook myself to a plantation near the front gate to see how the work

of clearing a ride was progressing. The cross-cut saw and a bill-hook

lay on the ground, but of workmen there was no sign. From the high

road came the sound of wheels and of rapid trotting, also something

that seemed like cheering.

"Good heavens!" I thought, my blood running cold, "here they are!"

I broke through the tall bracken and the larches to an opening from

which the high road was visible. My two workmen were lying on their

stomachs across the coping of the demesne wall, and a line of

countrymen, with their best clothes on and crape "weepers" on their

hats, sat on the opposite fence and applauded what was apparently a

trotting match between a long-legged bay colt and John Cullinane's

chestnut filly, owners up.

I joined the entertainment, my two men melting like snow from the top

of the wall, and it was explained to me that there had been a funeral

in the locality, and that these were a few of the neighbours that had

been at it, and were now waiting to see the Black Gentleman. An

outside car rested on its shafts by the side of the road, and a horse

with harness on it browsed voraciously on the shrubs inside my gate.

Far away down the road I saw the receding figures of my two children,

going forth to the picnic that had been arranged to allay their panic

and to remove them from the sphere of action. Any Irish person will

readily believe that one of them was mounted on "the small little

donkey," the bribe which I had that morning irrevocably repudiated. I

knew that John Cullinane saw them too, but I was too broken to

interfere; I turned my back and walked rapidly away.

The rhythmic rasp of the cross-cut told me that work at the clearing

had been resumed; I said to myself vindictively that I would see that

it continued, and returned to the ride. The bill-hook was doing

nothing, and picking it up I fell to snicking and chopping, with

soothing destructiveness, among the briars and ash-saplings.

Notwithstanding heat and horseflies, the time passed not disagreeably,

and I was, at all events, out of range of the piano. I had paused for

the fifteenth time to wipe a heated brow, and extract a thorn from my

finger, when the familiar voice of the Shutes' motor-horn roused me to

the appalling fact that it was nearly luncheon-time, and that I was far

from fit to receive Royalty. As I hurriedly emerged from the wood,

there was a sound of hard galloping, and I beheld the green-eyed filly

flying riderless up the avenue. She crossed the croquet ground,

thoroughly, from corner to corner, and disappeared into the shrubbery

in the direction of the flower garden. I ran as I have seldom run,

dimly aware of a pursuing party of mourners on the avenue behind me,

and, as I ran, I cursed profusely the Sultan, Calthorpe, and chiefly

Bernard Shute and all his works.

The chase lasted for twenty minutes, and was joined in by not less than

five-and-thirty people. The creamy mane of the filly floated like a

banner before us through the shrubberies, with the dogs in full cry

behind her; through it all went the reiterations of the piano, the

monotonous hammerings, the majestic chords, the pyrotechnic scales;

they expressed as fully as he himself could have desired the complete

indifference of the tuner. The filly was ubiquitous; at one moment she

was in the flower garden, the next, a distant uproar among the poultry

told that she had traversed the yard, whence she emerged,

_ventre-à-terre_, delivered herself of three bucks at sight of her

original enemy the motor, at the hall door, and was away again for the

croquet ground. At every turn I encountered a fresh pursuer; it was

Bernard Shute and the kitchen-maid who slammed the flower-garden gate

in her face; it was Philippa, in her very best dress, abetted by John

Cullinane, very dusty, and waving a crushed and weepered hat, who, with

the best intentions, frustrated a brilliant enveloping movement

directed by me; finally the cross-cut saw men, the tuner's car-driver,

and a selection from the funeral, came so near cornering her that she

charged the sunk fence, floated across its gulf with offensive ease,

and scurried away, with long and defiant squeals, to assault my horses

at the farther end of the paddock.

When we, _i.e._ Philippa, Bernard, and I, pulled ourselves together on

the top of the steps, it was two o'clock. By the special favour of

Providence the Sultan was late, but the position was desperate.

Philippa had trodden on the front of her dress and torn it, Bernard had

greened the knees of his trousers; I do not know what I looked like,

but when Cecilia Shute emerged, cool and spotless, from the hall, where

she had judiciously remained during the proceedings, she uttered a

faint shriek and covered her face with her hands.

"I know," I said, with deadly calm, stuffing my tie inside my

waistcoat, "I can't help it----"

"Here they are!" said Bernard.

The sound of wheels was indeed in the avenue. We fled as one man into

the back hall, and Philippa, stumbling over her torn flounce, fell on

her knees at the feet of Mr. Werner, the tuner, who stood there, his

task finished, awaiting with cold decorum the reward of his labours.

The wheels stopped. What precisely happened during that crowded moment

I cannot pretend to explain, but as we dragged my wife to her feet I

found that she had knelt on my eyeglass, with the result that may be

imagined.

All was now lost save honour. I turned at bay, and dimly saw,

silhouetted in the open doorway, a short figure in a frock-coat, with a

species of black turban on its head. I advanced, bowed, and heroically

began:

"Sire! J'ai l'honneur----"

"Yerrah my law! Major!" said the bewildered voice of Slipper. "Don't

be making game of me this way! Sure I have a tallagram for you." He

removed the turban, which I now perceived to be a brown tweed cap,

swathed in a crape "weeper," and handed me the telegram. "I got it

from the boy that was after breaking his bike on the road, an' I coming

from the funeral."

The telegram was from Calthorpe, and said, with suitable regrets, that

the Sultan had been summoned to London on instant and important

business.

I read it to the back hall, in a voice broken by many emotions.

"I saw the gentleman you speak of waiting for the Dublin train at Sandy

Bay Station this morning," remarked the tuner, condescending for a

moment to our level.

"Then why did you not tell us so?" demanded Philippa, with sudden

indignation.

"I was not aware, madam, that it was of any importance," replied Mr.

Werner, returning to his normal altitude of perpetual frost.

Incredible as it may seem, it was apparent that Philippa was

disappointed. As for me, my heart was like a singing bird.

III

POISSON D'AVRIL

The atmosphere of the waiting-room set at naught at a single glance the

theory that there can be no smoke without fire. The stationmaster,

when remonstrated with, stated, as an incontrovertible fact, that any

chimney in the world would smoke in a south-easterly wind, and further,

said there wasn't a poker, and that if you poked the fire the grate

would fall out. He was, however, sympathetic, and went on his knees

before the smouldering mound of slack, endeavouring to charm it to a

smile by subtle proddings with the handle of the ticket-punch.

Finally, he took me to his own kitchen fire and talked politics and

salmon-fishing, the former with judicious attention to my presumed

point of view, and careful suppression of his own, the latter with no

less tactful regard for my admission that for three days I had not

caught a fish, while the steam rose from my wet boots, in witness of

the ten miles of rain through which an outside car had carried me.

Before the train was signalled I realised for the hundredth time the

magnificent superiority of the Irish mind to the trammels of

officialdom, and the inveterate supremacy in Ireland of the Personal

Element.

"You might get a foot-warmer at Carrig Junction," said a species of lay

porter in a knitted jersey, ramming my suit-case upside down under the

seat. "Sometimes they're in it, and more times they're not."

The train dragged itself rheumatically from the station, and a cold

spring rain--the time was the middle of a most inclement April--smote

it in flank as it came into the open. I pulled up both windows and

began to smoke; there is, at least, a semblance of warmth in a

thoroughly vitiated atmosphere.

It is my wife's habit to assert that I do not read her letters, and

being now on my way to join her and my family in Gloucestershire, it

seemed a sound thing to study again her latest letter of instructions.

"I am starting to-day, as Alice wrote to say we must be there two days

before the wedding, so as to have a rehearsal for the pages. Their

dresses have come, and they look too delicious in them----"

(I here omit profuse particulars not pertinent to this tale)----

"It is sickening for you to have had such bad sport. If the worst

comes to the worst couldn't you buy one?----"

I smote my hand upon my knee. I had forgotten the infernal salmon!

What a score for Philippa! If these contretemps would only teach her

that I was not to be relied upon, they would have their uses, but

experience is wasted upon her; I have no objection to being called an

idiot, but, that being so, I ought to be allowed the privileges and

exemptions proper to idiots. Philippa had, no doubt, written to Alice

Hervey, and assured her that Sinclair would be only too delighted to

bring her a salmon, and Alice Hervey, who was rich enough to find much

enjoyment in saving money, would reckon upon it, to its final fin in

mayonnaise.

Plunged in morose meditations, I progressed through a country parcelled

out by shaky and crooked walls into a patchwood of hazel scrub and

rocky fields, veiled in rain. About every six miles there was a

station, wet and windswept; at one the sole occurrence was the

presentation of a newspaper to the guard by the station-master; at the

next the guard read aloud some choice excerpts from the same to the

porter. The Personal Element was potent on this branch of the Munster

and Connaught Railway. Routine, abhorrent to all artistic minds, was

sheathed in conversation; even the engine-driver, a functionary

ordinarily as aloof as the Mikado, alleviated his enforced isolation by

sociable shrieks to every level crossing, while the long row of

public-houses that formed, as far as I could judge, the town of Carrig,

received a special and, as it seemed, humorous salutation.

The Time-Table decreed that we were to spend ten minutes at Carrig

Junction; it was fifteen before the crowd of market people on the

platform had been assimilated; finally, the window of a neighbouring

carriage was flung open, and a wrathful English voice asked how much

longer the train was going to wait. The stationmaster, who was at the

moment engrossed in conversation with the guard and a man who was

carrying a long parcel wrapped in newspaper, looked round, and said

gravely--

"Well now, that's a mystery!"

The man with the parcel turned away, and convulsively studied a poster.

The guard put his hand over his mouth.

[Illustration: THE GUARD PUT HIS HAND OVER HIS MOUTH]

The voice, still more wrathfully, demanded the earliest hour at which

its owner could get to Belfast.

"Ye'll be asking me next when I take me breakfast," replied the

stationmaster, without haste or palpable annoyance.

The window went up again with a bang, the man with the parcel dug the

guard in the ribs with his elbow, and the parcel slipped from under his

arm and fell on the platform.

"Oh my! oh my! Me fish!" exclaimed the man, solicitously picking up a

remarkably good-looking salmon that had slipped from its wrapping of

newspaper.

Inspiration came to me, and I, in my turn, opened my window and

summoned the station-master.

Would his friend sell me the salmon? The stationmaster entered upon

the mission with ardour, but without success.

No; the gentleman was only just after running down to the town for it

in the delay, but why wouldn't I run down and get one for myself?

There was half-a-dozen more of them below at Coffey's, selling cheap;

there would be time enough, the mail wasn't signalled yet.

I jumped from the carriage and doubled out of the station at top speed,

followed by an assurance from the guard that he would not forget me.

Congratulating myself on the ascendancy of the Personal Element, I sped

through the soapy limestone mud towards the public-houses. En route I

met a heated man carrying yet another salmon, who, without preamble,

informed me that there were three or four more good fish in it, and

that he was after running down from the train himself.

"Ye have whips o' time!" he called after me. "It's the first house

that's not a public-house. Ye'll see boots in the window--she'll give

them for tenpence a pound if ye're stiff with her!"

I ran past the public-houses.

"Tenpence a pound!" I exclaimed inwardly, "at this time of year!

That's good enough."

Here I perceived the house with boots in the window, and dived into its

dark doorway.

A cobbler was at work behind a low counter. He mumbled something about

Herself, through lengths of waxed thread that hung across his mouth, a

fat woman appeared at an inner door, and at that moment I heard,

appallingly near, the whistle of the incoming mail. The fat woman

grasped the situation in an instant, and with what appeared but one

movement, snatched a large fish from the floor of the room behind her

and flung a newspaper round it.

"Eight pound weight!" she said swiftly. "Ten shillings!"

A convulsive effort of mental arithmetic assured me that this was more

than tenpence a pound, but it was not the moment for stiffness. I

shoved a half-sovereign into her fishy hand, clasped my salmon in my

arms, and ran.

Needless to say it was uphill, and at the steepest gradient another

whistle stabbed me like a spur; above the station roof successive and

advancing puffs of steam warned me that the worst had probably

happened, but still I ran. When I gained the platform my train was

already clear of it, but the Personal Element held good. Every soul in

the station, or so it seemed to me, lifted up his voice and yelled.

The stationmaster put his fingers in his mouth and sent after the

departing train an unearthly whistle, with a high trajectory and a

serrated edge. It took effect; the train slackened, I plunged from the

platform and followed it up the rails, and every window in both trains

blossomed with the heads of deeply-interested spectators. The guard

met me on the line, very apologetic and primed with an explanation that

the gentleman going for the boat-train wouldn't let him wait any

longer, while from our rear came an exultant cry from the

station-master.

"Ye _told_ him ye wouldn't forget him!"

"There's a few countrywomen in your carriage, sir," said the guard,

ignoring the taunt, as he shoved me and my salmon up the side of the

train, "but they'll be getting out in a couple of stations. There

wasn't another seat in the train for them!"

My sensational return to my carriage was viewed with the utmost

sympathy by no less than seven shawled and cloaked countrywomen. In

order to make room for me, one of them seated herself on the floor with

her basket in her lap, another, on the seat opposite to me, squeezed

herself under the central elbow flap that had been turned up to make

room. The aromas of wet cloaks, turf smoke, and salt fish formed a

potent blend. I was excessively hot, and the eyes of the seven women

were fastened upon me with intense and unwearying interest.

"Move west a small piece, Mary Jack, if you please," said a voluminous

matron in the corner, "I declare we're as throng as three in a bed this

minute!"

"Why then Julia Casey, there's little throubling yourself," grumbled

the woman under the flap. "Look at the way meself is! I wonder is it

to be putting humps on themselves the gentry has them things down on

top o' them! I'd sooner be carrying a basket of turnips on me back

than to be scrooged this way!"

The woman on the floor at my feet rolled up at me a glance of

compassionate amusement at this rustic ignorance, and tactfully changed

the conversation by supposing that it was at Coffey's I got the salmon.

I said it was.

There was a silence, during which it was obvious that one question

burnt in every heart.

"I'll go bail she axed him tinpence!" said the woman under the flap, as

one who touches the limits of absurdity.

"It's a beautiful fish!" I said defiantly. "Eight pounds weight. I

gave her ten shillings for it."

What is described in newspapers as "sensation in court" greeted this

confession.

"Look!" said the woman under the flap, darting her head out of the hood

of her cloak, like a tortoise, "'tis what it is, ye haven't as much

roguery in your heart as'd make ye a match for her!"

"Divil blow the ha'penny Eliza Coffey paid for that fish!" burst out

the fat woman in the corner. "Thim lads o' her's had a creel full o'

thim snatched this morning before it was making day!"

"How would the gentleman be a match for her!" shouted the woman on the

floor through a long-drawn whistle that told of a coming station.

"Sure a Turk itself wouldn't be a match for her! That one has a tongue

that'd clip a hedge!"

At the station they clambered out laboriously, and with groaning. I

handed down to them their monster baskets, laden, apparently, with

ingots of lead; they told me in return that I was a fine _grauver_ man,

and it was a pity there weren't more like me; they wished, finally,

that my journey might well thrive with me, and passed from my ken,

bequeathing to me, after the agreeable manner of their kind, a certain

comfortable mental sleekness that reason cannot immediately dispel.

They also left me in possession of the fact that I was about to present

the irreproachable Alice Hervey with a contraband salmon.

The afternoon passed cheerlessly into evening, and my journey did not

conspicuously thrive with me. Somewhere in the dripping twilight I

changed trains, and again later on, and at each change the salmon

moulted some more of its damp raiment of newspaper, and I debated

seriously the idea of interring it, regardless of consequences, in my

portmanteau. A lamp was banged into the roof of my carriage, half an

inch of orange flame, poised in a large glass globe, like a gold-fish,

and of about as much use as an illuminant. Here also was handed in the

dinner basket that I had wired for, and its contents, arid though they

were, enabled me to achieve at least some measure of mechanical

distension, followed by a dreary lethargy that was not far from

drowsiness.

At the next station we paused long; nothing whatever occurred, and the

rain drummed patiently upon the roof. Two nuns and some school-girls

were in the carriage next door, and their voices came plaintively and

in snatches through the partition; after a long period of apparent

collapse, during which I closed my eyes to evade the cold gaze of the

salmon through the netting, a voice in the next carriage said

resourcefully:

"Oh, girls, I'll tell you what we'll do! We'll say the Rosary!"

"Oh, that will be lovely!" said another voice; "well, who'll give it

out? Theresa Condon, you'll give it out."

Theresa Condon gave it out, in a not unmelodious monotone, interspersed

with the responses, always in a lower cadence; the words were

indistinguishable, but the rise and fall of the western voices was

lulling as the hum of bees. I fell asleep.

I awoke in total darkness; the train was motionless, and complete and

profound silence reigned. We were at a station, that much I discerned

by the light of the dim lamp at the far end of a platform glistening

with wet. I struck a match and ascertained that it was eleven o'clock,

precisely the hour at which I was to board the mail train. I jumped

out and ran down the platform; there was no one in the train; there was

no one even on the engine, which was forlornly hissing to itself in the

silence. There was not a human being anywhere. Every door was closed,

and all was dark. The name-board of the station was faintly visible;

with a lighted match I went along it letter by letter. It seemed as if

the whole alphabet were in it, and by the time I had got to the end I

had forgotten the beginning. One fact I had, however, mastered, that

it was not the junction at which I was to catch the mail.

I was undoubtedly awake, but for a moment I was inclined to entertain

the idea that there had been an accident, and that I had entered upon

existence in another world. Once more I assailed the station house and

the appurtenances thereof, the ticket-office, the waiting room,

finally, and at some distance, the goods store, outside which the

single lamp of the station commented feebly on the drizzle and the

darkness. As I approached it a crack of light under the door became

perceptible, and a voice was suddenly uplifted within.

"Your best now agin that! Throw down your Jack!"

I opened the door with pardonable violence, and found the guard, the

stationmaster, the driver, and the stoker, seated on barrels round a

packing case, on which they were playing a game of cards.

To have too egregiously the best of a situation is not, to a generous

mind, a source of strength. In the perfection of their overthrow I

permitted the driver and stoker to wither from their places, and to

fade away into the outer darkness without any suitable send-off; with

the guard and the stationmaster I dealt more faithfully, but the

pleasure of throwing water on drowned rats is not a lasting one. I

accepted the statements that they thought there wasn't a Christian in

the train, that a few minutes here or there wouldn't signify, that they

would have me at the junction in twenty minutes, and it was often the

mail was late.

Fired by this hope I hurried back to my carriage, preceded at an

emulous gallop by the officials. The guard thrust in with me the

lantern from the card table, and fled to his van.

"Mind the goods, Tim!" shouted the station-master, as he slammed my

door, "she might be coming anytime now!"

The answer travelled magnificently back from the engine.

"Let her come! She'll meet her match!" A war-whoop upon the steam

whistle fittingly closed the speech, and the train sprang into action.

We had about fifteen miles to go, and we banged and bucketed over it in

what was, I should imagine, record time. The carriage felt as if it

were galloping on four wooden legs, my teeth chattered in my head, and

the salmon slowly churned its way forth from its newspaper, and moved

along the netting with dreadful stealth.

All was of no avail.

"Well," said the guard, as I stepped forth on to the deserted platform

of Loughranny, "that owld Limited Mail's th' unpunctualest thrain in

Ireland! If you're a minute late she's gone from you, and may be if

you were early you might be half-an-hour waiting for her!"

On the whole the guard was a gentleman. He said he would show me the

best hotel in the town, though he feared I would be hard set to get a

bed anywhere because of the "_Feis_" (a Feis, I should explain, is a

Festival, devoted to competitions in Irish songs and dances). He

shouldered my portmanteau, he even grappled successfully with the

salmon, and, as we traversed the empty streets, he explained to me how

easily I could catch the morning boat from Rosslare, and how it was, as

a matter of fact, quite the act of Providence that my original scheme

had been frustrated.

All was dark at the uninviting portals of the hotel favoured by the

guard. For a full five minutes we waited at them, ringing hard: I

suggested that we should try elsewhere.

"He'll come," said the guard, with the confidence of the Pied Piper of

Hamelin, retaining an implacable thumb upon the button of the electric

bell. "He'll come. Sure it rings in his room!"

The victim came, half awake, half dressed, and with an inch of dripping

candle in his fingers. There was not a bed there, he said, nor in the

town neither.

[Illustration: THE VICTIM CAME]

I said I would sit in the dining-room till the time for the early train.

"Sure there's five beds in the dining-room," replied the boots, "and

there's mostly two in every bed."

His voice was firm, but there was a wavering look in his eye.

"What about the billiard-room, Mike?" said the guard, in wooing tones.

"Ah, God bless you! we have a mattress on the table this minute!"

answered the boots, wearily, "and the fellow that got the First Prize

for Reels asleep on top of it!"

"Well, and can't ye put the palliasse on the floor under it, ye

omadhawn?" said the guard, dumping my luggage and the salmon in the

hall, "sure there's no snugger place in the house! I must run away

home now, before Herself thinks I'm dead altogether!"

His retreating footsteps went lightly away down the empty street.

"Annything don't throuble _him_!" said the boots bitterly.

As for me, nothing save the Personal Element stood between me and

destitution.

It was in the dark of the early morning that I woke again to life and

its troubles. A voice, dropping, as it were, over the edge of some

smothering over-world, had awakened me. It was the voice of the First

Prize for Reels, descending through a pocket of the billiard-table.

"I beg your pardon, sir, are ye going on the 5 to Cork?"

I grunted a negative.

"Well, if ye were, ye'd be late," said the voice.

I received this useful information in indignant silence, and

endeavoured to wrap myself again in the vanishing skirts of a dream.

"I'm going on the 6.30 meself," proceeded the voice, "and it's unknown

to me how I'll put on me boots. Me feet is swelled the size o'

three-pound loaves with the dint of the little dancing-shoes I had on

me in the competition last night. Me feet's delicate that way, and I'm

a great epicure about me boots."

I snored aggressively, but the dream was gone. So, for all practical

purposes, was the night.

The First Prize for Reels arose, presenting an astonishing spectacle of

grass-green breeches, a white shirt, and pearl-grey stockings, and

accomplished a toilet that consisted of removing these and putting on

ordinary garments, completed by the apparently excruciating act of

getting into his boots. At any other hour of the day I might have been

sorry for him. He then removed himself and his belongings to the hall,

and there entered upon a resounding conversation with the boots, while

I crawled forth from my lair to renew the strife with circumstances and

to endeavour to compose a telegram to Alice Hervey of explanation and

apology that should cost less than seven and sixpence. There was also

the salmon to be dealt with.

Here the boots intervened, opportunely, with a cup of tea, and the

intelligence that he had already done up the salmon in straw

bottle-covers and brown paper, and that I could travel Europe with it

if I liked. He further informed me that he would run up to the station

with the luggage now, and that may be I wouldn't mind carrying the fish

myself; it was on the table in the hall.

My train went at 6.15. The boots had secured for me one of many empty

carriages, and lingered conversationally till the train started; he

regretted politely my bad night at the hotel, and assured me that only

for Jimmy Durkan having a little drink taken--Jimmy Durkan was the

First Prize for Reels--he would have turned him off the billiard-table

for my benefit. He finally confided to me that Mr. Durkan was engaged

to his sister, and was a rising baker in the town of Limerick,

"indeed," he said, "any girl might be glad to get him. He dances like

whalebone, and he makes grand bread!"

Here the train started.

It was late that night when, stiff, dirty, with tired eyes blinking in

the dazzle of electric lights, I was conducted by the Herveys'

beautiful footman into the Herveys' baronial hall, and was told by the

Herveys' imperial butler that dinner was over, and the gentlemen had

just gone into the drawing-room. I was in the act of hastily declining

to join them there, when a voice cried--

"Here he is!"

And Philippa, rustling and radiant, came forth into the hall, followed

in shimmers of satin, and flutterings of lace, by Alice Hervey, by the

bride elect, and by the usual festive rout of exhilarated relatives,

male and female, whose mission it is to keep things lively before a

wedding.

"Is this a wedding present for me, Uncle Sinclair?" cried the bride

elect, through a deluge of questions and commiserations, and snatched

from under my arm the brown paper parcel that had remained there from

force of direful habit.

"I advise you not to open it!" I exclaimed; "it's a salmon!"

The bride elect, with a shriek of disgust, and without an instant of

hesitation, hurled it at her nearest neighbour, the head bridesmaid.

The head bridesmaid, with an answering shriek, sprang to one side, and

the parcel that I had cherished with a mother's care across two

countries and a stormy channel, fell, with a crash, on the flagged

floor.

_Why did it crash?_

"A salmon!" screamed Philippa, gazing at the parcel, round which a pool

was already forming, "why that's whisky! Can't you smell it?"

The footman here respectfully interposed, and kneeling down, cautiously

extracted from folds of brown paper a straw bottle-cover full of broken

glass and dripping with whisky.

"I'm afraid the other things are rather spoiled, sir," he said

seriously, and drew forth, successively, a very large pair of high-low

shoes, two long grey worsted stockings, and a pair of grass-green

breeches.

They brought the house down, in a manner doubtless familiar to them

when they shared the triumphs of Mr. Jimmy Durkan, but they left Alice

Hervey distinctly cold.

"You know, darling," she said to Philippa afterwards, "I don't think it

was very clever of dear Sinclair to take the wrong parcel. I _had_

counted on that salmon."

IV

"THE MAN THAT CAME TO BUY APPLES"

It had been freezing hard all the way home, and the Quaker skated

perilously once or twice on the northerly stretches. As I passed the

forge near my gate I issued an order for frost-nails, and while I did

so the stars were kindling like diamonds over the black ridge of

Shreelane Hill.

The overture to the Frost Symphony had begun, with its usual beauties

and difficulties, and its leading theme was given forth in a missive

from Flurry Knox, that awaited me on the hall table. Flurry's

handwriting was an unattractive blend of the laundress's bill, and the

rambling zigzags of the temperature chart, but he exhibited no more of

it than was strictly necessary in getting to the point. Would I shoot

at Aussolas the following day? There were a lot of cock in, and he had

whipped up four guns in a hurry. There was a postscript, "Bernard

Shute is coming. Tell Mrs. Yeates he didn't kill any one yet this

season."

Since his marriage Flurry had been promoted to the position of agent to

his grandmother, old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas, and through the

unfathomable mazes of their dealings and fights with each other, the

fact remained that he had secured to himself the Aussolas shooting at

about half its market value. So Mrs. Knox said. Her grandson, on the

other hand, had often informed me that the privilege "had him beggared,

what with beaters and all sorts, and his grandmother's cattle turned

into the woods destroying all the covert--let alone her poaching."

Into the differences of such skilled combatants the prudent did not

intrude themselves, but they accepted without loss of time such

invitations to shoot at Aussolas as came their way. Notwithstanding

the buccaneerings of Flurry's grandmother, the woods of Aussolas, in

decent weather, were usually good for fifteen to twenty couple of cock.

I sent my acceptance before mentioning to Philippa that Bernard Shute

was to be of the party. It was impossible to make Philippa understand

that those who shot Bernard's pheasants at Clountiss, could hardly do

less than retaliate when occasion served. I had once, in a moment of

regrettable expansion, entertained my wife with an account of how an

entire shooting party had successively cast themselves upon their

faces, while the muzzle of Bernard's gun had followed, half way round

the compass, a rabbit that had broken back. No damage had ensued, not

even to the rabbit, but I had supplied Philippa with a fact that was an

unfortunate combination of a thorn in her pillow and a stone in her

sling.

The frost held; it did more than hold, it gripped. As I drove to

Aussolas the fields lay rigid in the constraining cold; the trees were

as dead as the telegraph poles, and the whistle of the train came thin

and ghostly across four miles of silent country. Everything was half

alive, with the single exception of the pony, which, filled with the

idiotic exaltation that frost imparts to its race, danced upon its

frost-nails, shied with untiring inventiveness, and made three several

and well-conceived attempts to bolt. Maria, with her nose upon my

gaiter, shuddered uninterruptedly throughout the drive, partly because

of the pinching air, partly in honour of the sovereign presence of the

gun-case.

Old Mrs. Knox was standing on the steps as I walked round to the hall

door of Aussolas Castle. She held a silver bowl in her hand; on her

head, presumably as a protection against the cold, was a table-napkin;

round her feet a throng of hens and pigeons squabbled for the bits that

she flung to them from the bowl, and a furtive and distrustful peacock

darted a blue neck in among them from the outskirts.

"'Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham,'" was Mrs. Knox's singular

greeting, "'a good soft pillow for that good grey head were better than

a churlish turf of France'!"

My friendship with Mrs. Knox was now of several years' standing, and I

knew enough of her to gather that I stood rebuked for being late.

"Flurry arrived only half-an-hour ago! my first intimation of a

shooting party," she continued, in the dictatorial voice that was

always a shock when taken in connection with her beggar woman's

costume, "a nice time of day to begin to look for beaters! And the

other feather-bed sportsmen haven't arrived yet. In old times they

would have had ten couple by this time, and then Mr. Flurry complains

of the shooting!"

She was here interrupted by the twitching of the table-napkin from her

head by her body-woman, who had advanced upon her from the rear, with

the reigning member of the dynasty of purple velvet bonnets in her

hand. The bonnet was substituted for the table-napkin, much as a stage

property is shoved on from the wings, and two bony hands, advancing

from behind, tied the strings under Mrs. Knox's chin, while she

uninterruptedly fed the hens, and denounced the effeteness of modern

cock-shooters. The hands descended and fixed a large pin in the

uppermost of her mistress' shawls.

"Mullins, have done!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox, suddenly tearing herself

from her captor, "you're an intolerable nuisance!"

"Oh, very well, ma'am, maybe you'd sooner go out with your head naked

and soak the cold!" returned Mullins, retiring with the honours of war

and the table-napkin.

"Mullins and I get on famously," observed Mrs. Knox, crushing an empty

egg-shell with her yellow diamonded fingers and returning it to its

original donors, "we're both mad, you know!"

Comment on this might have been difficult, but I was preserved from it

by the approach across the frozen gravel of a short, red-bearded man,

Mrs. Knox's gardener, wood-ranger, and ruling counsellor, John Kane.

He held in his hands two large apples of arsenical hue, and, taking off

his hat to me with much dignity, addressed himself to the lady of the

house.

"He says he'd sooner walk barefoot to Cork than to give three and

fippence for the likes of them!"

"I'm sure I've no objection if he does," responded Mrs. Knox, turning

the silver bowl upside down over the scrimmaging hens and pigeons, "I

daresay it would be no novelty to him."

"And isn't that what I told him!" said John Kane, his voice at once

ascending to the concert pitch of altercation, "I said to him if the

Lord Left'nant and the Pope was follying me around the yard of Aussolas

offering three and a penny for them apples they'd not get them! Sure

the nuns gave us that much for windfalls that was only fit to be making

cherubs with!"

I might have been struck by the fitness, as well as the ingenuity, of

this industry, but in some remote byway of my brain the remembrance

woke of a "black-currant cherub" prescribed by Mrs. Cadogan for sore

throats, and divined by Philippa to be a syrup. I turned away and lit

a cigarette in order to conceal my feelings from John Kane, round whose

red beard the smoke of battle hung almost palpably.

"What's between you?" asked his mistress sharply.

"Three and a penny he's offering, ma'am!" declaimed her deputy, "for

sheeps' noses that there isn't one in the country has but yourself!

And not a brown farthing more would he give!--the consecrated blagyard!"

[Illustration: "AND NOT A BROWN FARTHING MORE WOULD HE GIVE"]

Anything less like a sheep's nose than Mrs. Knox's hooked beak, as she

received this information, could hardly be imagined.

"You're half a fool, John Kane!" she snapped, "and the other half's not

sensible! Go back and tell him Major Yeates is here and wants to buy

every apple I have!" She dealt me a wink that was the next thing to a

dig in the ribs. As she spoke a cart drawn by a cheerful-looking grey

pony, and conducted by a tall, thin man, came into view from the

direction of the yard. It rattled emptily, and proclaimed, as was

intended, the rupture of all business relations.

"See here, sir," said John Kane to me in one hoarse breath, "when he's

over-right the door I'll ask him the three and fippence again, and when

he refuses, your Honour will say we should split the difference----"

The cart advanced, it passed the hall door with a dignity but little

impaired by the pony's apprehensive interest in the peacock, and the

tall man took off his hat to Mrs. Knox with as gloomy a respect as if

she had been a funeral.

John Kane permitted to the salutation the full time due to it, in the

manner of one who counts a semibreve rest, while the cart moved

implacably onwards. The exact, the psychic instant arrived.

"HONOMAUNDHIAOUL! SULLIVAN!" he shouted, with a full-blown burst of

ferocity, hurtling down the steps in pursuit, "will ye take them or

lave them?"

To manifest, no doubt, her complete indifference to the issue, Mrs.

Knox turned and went into the house, followed by the majority of the

hens, and left me to await my cue. The play was played out with

infinite credit to both artists, and at the full stretch of their

lungs; at the preordained moment I intervened with the conventional

impromptu, and suggested that the difference should be split. The

curtain immediately fell, and somewhere in the deep of the hall a

glimpse of the purple bonnet told me that Mrs. Knox was in the

auditorium.

When I rejoined her I found Flurry with her, and something in the

atmosphere told that here also was storm.

"Well, take them! Take them all!" Mrs. Knox was saying in high

indignation. "Take Mullins and the maids if you like! I daresay they

might be more use than the men!"

"They'll make more row, anyhow," said Flurry sourly. "I wonder is it

them that put down all the rabbit-traps I'm after seeing in the

coach-house this minute!"

"It may be _they_, but it certainly is not _them_," retorted Mrs. Knox,

hitting flagrantly below the belt; "and if you want beaters found for

you, you should give me more than five minutes' warning----" She

turned with the last word, and moved towards the staircase.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said John Kane, very respectfully, from the

hall door, "that Sullivan brought this down for your Honour."

He placed on the table a bottle imperfectly wrapped in newspaper.

"Tell Sullivan," said Flurry, without an instant's hesitation, "that he

makes the worst potheen in the country, and I'll prosecute him for

bringing it here, unless he comes out to beat with the rest of you."

Remembering my official position, I discreetly examined the barrels of

my gun.

"You'll give him no such message!" screamed Mrs. Knox over the dark

rail of the staircase. "Let him take himself and his apples off out of

this!" Then, in the same breath, and almost the same key, "Major

Yeates, which do you prefer, curry, or Irish stew?"

The _cuisine_ at Aussolas was always fraught with dark possibilities,

being alternately presided over by bibulous veterans from Dublin, or

aboriginal kitchenmaids off the estate. Feeling as Fair Rosamond might

have felt when proffered the dagger or the bowl, I selected curry.

"Then curry it shall be," said Mrs. Knox, with a sudden and awful

affability. In this gleam of stormy sunshine I thought it well to

withdraw.

"Did you ever eat my grandmother's curry?" said Flurry to me, later, as

we watched Bernard Shute trying to back his motor into the coach-house.

I said I thought not.

"Well, you'd take a splint off a horse with it," said Mrs. Knox's

grandson.

The Aussolas woods were full of birds that day. Birds bursting out of

holly bushes like corks out of soda-water bottles, skimming low under

the branches of fir trees, bolting across rides at a thousand miles an

hour, swinging away through prohibitive tree tops, but to me had

befallen the inscrutable and invincible accident of being "off my day,"

and, by an equal unkindness, Fate had allotted to me the station next

Flurry. Every kind of bird came my way except the easy ones, and, as a

general thing, when I had done no more than add a little pace to their

flight, they went down to Flurry, who never in my experience had been

off his day, and they seldom went farther afield. The beaters,

sportsmen every man of them, had a royal time. They flailed the bushes

and whacked the tree trunks; the discordant chorus of "Hi cock! Hi

cock! Cock! Cock! Prrrr!" rioted through the peaceful woods, and

every other minute a yell of "Mark!" broke like a squib through the

din. The clamour, the banging of the guns, and the expectancy, kept

the nerves tingling; the sky between the grey branches was as blue as

Italy's; despite fingers as icy as the gun-barrels, despite the

speechless reproach of Maria, slinking at my heels in unemployed

dejection, I enjoyed every breath of the frosty day. After all, hit or

miss, a good day with the cock comes very near a good day with the

hounds, without taking into consideration the comfortable fact that in

the former the risk is all on the side of the birds.

Little Bosanquet, the captain of coastguards, on my left, was doing

remarkably well, so apparently, was Murray the D.I. of Police; how

Bernard Shute was faring I knew not, but he was certainly burning a lot

of powder. At the end of the third beat I found myself beside Murray.

His face was redder than usual, even his freckles conveyed an

impression of impartially sprinkled cayenne pepper.

"Did you see Shute just now?" he demanded in a ferocious whisper. "A

bird got up between us, and he blazed straight at me! Straight bang in

my face, I tell you! Only that I was in a dead line with the bird he'd

have got me!"

"I suppose that was about the safest place," I said. "What did you do?"

"I simply told him that if ever he puts a grain into me I shall let him

have it back, both barrels."

"Every one says that to Bernard sooner or later," said I, pacifically;

"he'll settle down after lunch."

"We'll all settle down into our graves," grumbled Murray; "that'll be

the end of it."

After this it was scarcely composing to a husband and father to find

Mr. Shute occupying the position on my right hand as we embarked upon

the last beat of the Middle Wood. He was still distinctly unsettled,

and most distressingly on the alert. Nothing escaped his vigilance,

the impossible wood pigeon, clattering out of the wrong side of a fir

tree, received its brace of cartridges as instantly as the palpable

rabbit, fleeing down the ride before him, and with an equal immunity.

Between my desire to keep the thickest tree trunks between me and him,

and the companion desire that he should be thoroughly aware of my

whereabouts, my shooting, during that beat, went still more to pieces;

a puff of feathers, wandering softly down through the radiant air, was

the sum total of my achievements.

The end of the beat brought us to the end of the wood, and out upon an

open space of sedgy grass and bog that stretched away on the right to

the shore of Aussolas Lake; opposite to us, a couple of hundred yards

away, was another and smaller wood, clothing one side of a high

promontory near the head of the lake. Flurry and I were first out of

the covert.

"We'll have time to run through the Rhododendron Wood before lunch," he

said, looking at his watch. "Here! John Kane!" He put two fingers in

his mouth and projected a whistle that cleft my head like a scimitar.

John Kane emerged, nymph-like, from a laurel bush in our immediate

vicinity.

"'Tis only lost time to be beating them rosydandhrums, Master Flurry,"

he said volubly, "there wasn't a bird in that bit o' wood this winter.

Not a week passes but I'm in it, making up the bounds fence against the

cattle, and I never seen a one!"

"You might be more apt to be looking out for a rabbit than a cock,

John," said Flurry expressionlessly, "but isn't it down in the lower

paddocks you have the cattle and the young horses this hard weather?"

"Oh it is, sir, it is, of course, but indeed it's hard for me to know

where they are, with the Misthress telling this one and that one to put

them in their choice place. Sure she dhrives me to and fro in my mind

till I do have a headache from her!"

A dull rumble came to us across the marsh, and, as if Mrs. Knox had

been summoned by her henchman's accusation, there laboured into view on

the road that skirted the marsh a long and dilapidated equipage,

silhouetted, with its solitary occupant, against the dull shine of the

frozen lake.

"Tally-ho! Here comes the curry for you, Major! You'll have to eat it

I tell you!" He paused, "I'm dashed if she hasn't got Sullivan's pony!

Well, she'd steal the horns off a cow!"

[Illustration: "I'M DASHED IF SHE HASN'T GOT SULLIVAN'S PONY"]

It was indeed the grey pony that paced demurely in the shafts of Mrs.

Knox's phaeton, and at its head marched Sullivan; fragments of loud and

apparently agreeable conversation reached us, as the procession moved

onwards to the usual luncheon tryst at the head of the lake.

"Come now, John Kane," said Flurry, eyeing the cortège, "you're half

your day sitting in front of the kitchen fire. How many of my rabbits

went into that curry?''

"Rabbits, Master Flurry?" echoed John Kane almost pityingly, "there's

no call for them trash in Aussolas kitchen! And if we wanted them

itself, we'd not get them. I declare to me conscience there's not a

rabbit in Aussolas demesne this minute, with the way your Honour has

them ferreted--let alone the foxes!----"

"I suppose it's scarcely worth your while to put the traps down," said

Flurry benignly; "that's why they were in the coach-house this morning."

There was an undissembled titter from a group of beaters in the

background; Flurry tucked his gun under his arm and walked on.

"It'd be no more than a charity if ye'd eat the lunch now, sir," urged

John Kane at his elbow, in fluent remonstrance, "and leave Sullivan go

home. Sure it'll be black night on him before the Misthress will be

done with him. And as for that wood, it's hardly we can go through it

with the threes that's down since the night of the Big Wind, and

briars, and all sorts. Sure the last time I was through it me pants

was in shreds, and I was that tired when I got home I couldn't stoop to

pick a herrin' off a tongs, and as for the floods and the holes in the

western end--" John Kane drew a full breath, and with a trawling

glance gathered Bernard and me into his audience. "I declare to ye,

gintlemen, me boots when I took them off was more than boots! They

resimbled the mouth of a hake!"

"Ah, shut your own mouth," said Flurry.

The big rhododendron was one of the glories of Aussolas. Its original

progenitor had been planted by Flurry's great-grandmother, and now,

after a century of unchecked license, it and its descendants ran riot

among the pine stems on the hillside above the lake, and, in June,

clothed a precipitous half acre with infinite varieties of pale

mysterious mauve. The farm road by which Mrs. Knox had traversed the

marsh, here followed obediently the spurs of the wood and creeks of the

shore, in their alternate give and take. From the exalted station that

had been given me on the brow of the hill, I looked down on it between

the trunks of the pine trees, and saw, instead of mysterious mauve

blossoms, the defiant purple of Mrs. Knox's bonnet, glowing,

motionless, in a sheltered and sunny angle of the road just where it

met the wood. She was drawn up in her phaeton with her back to a

tumble-down erection of stones and branches, that was supposed to bar

the way into the wood, beside her was the great flat boulder that had

for generations been the table for shooting lunches. How, in any area

of less than a quarter of a mile, Sullivan had contrived to turn the

phaeton, was known only to himself, but he had accomplished it, and was

now adding to the varied and unforeseen occupations of his day the task

of unpacking the luncheon basket. As I waited for the whistle that was

the signal for the beat to begin, I viewed the proceedings up to the

point where Sullivan, now warming artistically to his work, crowned the

arrangement with the bottle of potheen.

[Illustration: HE CROWNED THE ARRANGEMENT WITH THE BOTTLE OF POTHEEN]

It was at that moment that I espied John Kane break from a rhododendron

bush beside the phaeton, with a sack over his shoulder. This, as far

as I could see through the branches, he placed upon Mrs. Knox's lap,

the invaluable Sullivan hurrying to his aid. The next instant I saw

Murray arrive and take up his allotted station upon the road; John Kane

retired into the evergreen thicket as abruptly as he had emerged from

it, Flurry's whistle sounded, and the yells of "Hi cock" began again.

We moved forward very slowly, in order to keep station with Murray, who

had to follow on the road the outer curve of the wood, while we struck

straight across it. It was a wood of old and starveling trees,

strangled by ivy, broken by combat with each other in the storms that

rushed upon them up the lake; it was two years since I had last been

through it, and I remembered well the jungle of ferns and the

undergrowth of briars that had shredded the pants of John Kane, and had

held in their thorny depths what Flurry had described as "a dose of

cock." To-day the wood seemed strangely bare, and remarkably out of

keeping with John Kane's impassioned indictment; the ferns, even the

bracken, had almost disappeared, the briar brakes were broken down, and

laced with black paths, and in the frozen paste of dead leaves and peat

mould the hoof-marks of cattle and horses bore witness against them,

like the thumb-prints of a criminal. In the first ten minutes not a

gun had been let off; I anticipated pleasantly, if inadequately, the

remarks that Flurry would address to John Kane at the conclusion of the

beat. To foreshadow John Kane's reply to Flurry was a matter less

simple. Bernard Shute was again the next gun on my left, and kept, as

was his wont, something ahead of his due place in the line; of this I

did not complain, it made it all the easier to keep my eye on him. The

idle cartridges in his gun were obviously intolerable to him; as he

crossed a little glade he discharged both barrels into the firmament,

where far above, in tense flight and steady as a constellation, moved a

wedge of wild geese. The wedge continued its course unshaken, but, as

if lifted by the bang, the first woodcock of the beat got up in front

of me, and swung away into the rhododendrons. "Mark!" I shouted,

loosing an ineffectual cartridge after him. Mr. Shute was equal to the

occasion, and let fly his usual postman's knock with both barrels. In

instant response there arose from behind the rhododendrons the bray of

a donkey, fraught with outrage and terror, followed by crashing of

branches and the thunderous galloping of many hoofs, and I had a

glimpse of a flying party of cattle and horses, bursting from the

rhododendron bushes and charging down a grassy slope in the direction

of the road. Every tail was in the air, the cattle bellowed, and the

donkey, heading the flight, did not cease to proclaim his injuries.

"How many of them have you hit?" I shouted.

"I believe I got 'em all, bar the cock!" returned Mr. Shute, with

ecstasy scarcely tempered by horror.

I hastened to the brow of the hill, and thence beheld Mrs. Knox's live

stock precipitate themselves on to the road, and turn as one man in the

direction of home. With a promptitude for which I have never been

given sufficient credit, I shoved my gun into the branches of a tree

and ran back through the wood at my best pace. In that glimpse of the

route I had recognised the streaming chestnut mane and white legs of

the venerable Trinket, the most indomitable old rogue that had ever

reared up generations of foals in the way they should not go, and I

knew by repute that once she was set going it would take more to stop

her than the half-demolished barricade at the entrance to the wood.

As I ran I seemed to see Trinket and her disciples hurling themselves

upon Mrs. Knox's phaeton and Sullivan's pony, with what results no man

could tell. They had, however, first to circumnavigate the promontory;

my chance was by crossing it at the neck to get to the phaeton before

them. The going was bad, and the time was short; I went for all I was

worth, and Maria, mystified, but burning with zeal, preceded me with

kangaroo leaps and loud and hysterical barks. A mossy wall ringed the

verge of the hill; I followed Maria over it, and the wall, or a good

part of it, followed me down the hill. I plunged onward amid the

coiling stems and branches of the big rhododendrons, an illuminative

flash of the purple bonnet giving me my bearings. A sort of track

revealed itself, doubling and dodging and dropping down rocky slides,

as if in flight before me. It was near the foot of the hill that a

dead branch extended a claw, and with human malignity plucked the

eye-glass from my eye and snapped the cord: the eye-glass, entering

into the spirit of the thing, aimed for the nearest stone and hit it.

It is the commonest of disasters for the short-sighted, yet custom

cannot stale it; I made the usual comment, with the usual fervour and

futility, and continued to blunder forward in all the discomfort of

half-sight. The trumpeting of the donkey heralded the oncoming of the

stampede; I broke my way through the last of the rhododendrons and

tumbled out on to the road twenty yards ahead of the phaeton.

Sullivan's pony was on its hind legs, and Sullivan was hanging on to

its head. Mrs. Knox was sitting erect in the phaeton with the reins in

her hand.

"Get out, ma'am! Get out!" Sullivan was howling, as I scrambled to my

feet.

"Don't be a fool!" replied Mrs. Knox, without moving.

The stampede was by this time confronted by the barrier. There was

not, however, a moment of hesitation; Trinket came rocketing out over

it as if her years were four, instead of four-and-twenty; she landed

with her white nose nearly in the back seat of the phaeton, got past

with a swerve and a slip up, and went away for her stable with her tail

over her back, followed with stag-like agility by her last foal, her

last foal but one, and the donkey, with the young cattle hard on their

flying heels. Bernard, it was very evident, had peppered them

impartially all round. Sullivan's pony was alternately ramping

heraldically, and wriggling like an eel in the clutches of Sullivan,

and I found myself snatching blindly at whatever came to my hand of his

headstall. What I caught was a mingled handful of forelock and

brow-band; the pony twitched back his head with the cunning that is

innate in ponies, and the head-stall, which was a good two sizes too

large, slid over its ears as though they had been buttered, and

remained, bit and all, in my hand. There was a moment of struggle, in

which Sullivan made a creditable effort to get the pony's head into

chancery under his arm; foreseeing the issue, I made for the old lady,

with the intention of dragging her from the carriage. She was at the

side furthest from me, and I got one foot into the phaeton and grasped

at her.

At that precise moment the pony broke away, with a jerk that pitched me

on to my knees on the mat at her feet. Simultaneously I was aware of

Sullivan, at the opposite side, catching Mrs. Knox to his bosom as the

phaeton whirled past him, while I, as sole occupant, wallowed prone

upon a heap of rugs. That ancient vehicle banged in and out of the

ruts with an agility that ill befitted its years, while, with extreme

caution, and the aid of the side rail, I gained the seat vacated by

Mrs. Knox, and holding on there as best I could, was aware that I was

being seriously run away with by the apple-man's pony, on whom my own

disastrous hand had bestowed his freedom.

The flying gang in front, enlivened no doubt by the noise in their

rear, maintained a stimulating lead. We were now clear of the wood,

and the frozen ditches of the causeway awaited me on either side in

steely parallel lines; out in the open the frost had turned the ruts to

iron, and it was here that the phaeton, entering into the spirit of the

thing, began to throw out ballast. The cushions of the front seat were

the first to go, followed, with a bomb-like crash, by a stone hot-water

jar, that had lurked in the deeps of the rugs. It was in negotiating a

stiffish outcrop of rock in the track that the back seat broke loose

and fell to earth with a hollow thump; with a corresponding thump I

returned to my seat from a considerable altitude, and found that in the

interval the cushion had removed itself from beneath me, and followed

its fellows overboard. Near the end of the causeway we were into

Trinket's rearguard, one of whom, a bouncing young heifer, slammed a

kick into the pony's ribs as he drew level with her, partly as a

witticism, partly as a token of contempt. With that the end came. The

pony wrenched to the left, the off front wheel jammed in a rut, came

off, and the phaeton rose like a live thing beneath me and bucked me

out on to the road.

A succession of crashes told that the pony was making short work of the

dash-board; for my part, I lay something stunned, and with a twisted

ankle, on the crisp whitened grass of the causeway, and wondered dully

why I was surrounded by dead rabbits.

By the time I had pulled myself together Sullivan's pony was continuing

his career, accompanied by a fair proportion of the phaeton, and on the

road lay an inexplicable sack, with a rabbit, like Benjamin's cup, in

its mouth.

Not less inexplicable was the appearance of Minx, my wife's

fox-terrier, whom I had last seen in an arm-chair by the drawing-room

fire at Shreelane, and now, in the role of the faithful St. Bernard,

was licking my face lavishly and disgustingly. Her attentions had the

traditional reviving effect. I sat up and dashed her from me, and in

so doing beheld my wife in the act of taking refuge in the frozen

ditch, as the cavalcade swept past, the phaeton and pony bringing up

the rear like artillery.

"What has happened? Are you hurt?" she panted, speeding to me.

"I am; very much hurt," I said, with what was, I think, justifiable

ill-temper, as I got gingerly on to my feet, almost annoyed to find

that my leg was not broken.

"But, dearest Sinclair, _has_ he shot you? I got so frightened about

you that I bicycled over to-- Ugh! Good gracious!"--as she trod on

and into a mound of rabbits--"what are you doing with all these

horrible things?"

I looked back in the direction from which I had come, and saw Mrs. Knox

advancing along the causeway arm-in-arm with the now inevitable

Sullivan (who, it may not be out of place to remind the reader, had

come to Aussolas early in the morning, with the pure and single

intention of buying apples). In Mrs. Knox's disengaged arm was

something that I discerned to be the bottle of potheen, and I instantly

resolved to minimise the extent of my injuries. Flurry, and various

items of the shooting party, were converging upon us from the wood by

as many and various short cuts. "I don't quite know what I am doing

with the rabbits," I replied, "but I rather think I'm giving them away."

As I spoke something darted past Mrs. Knox, something that looked like

a bundle of rags in a cyclone, but was, as a matter of fact, my

faithful water-spaniel, Maria. She came on in zig-zag bounds, in short

maniac rushes. Twice she flung herself by the roadside and rolled,

driving her snout into the ground like the coulter of a plough. Her

eyes were starting from her head, her tail was tucked between her legs.

She bit, and tore frantically with her claws at the solid ice of a

puddle.

"She's mad! She's gone mad!" exclaimed Philippa, snatching up as a

weapon something that looked like a frying-pan, but was, I believe, the

step of the phaeton.

Maria was by this time near enough for me to discern a canary-coloured

substance masking her muzzle.

"Yes, she's quite mad," I replied, possessed by a spirit of divination.

"She's been eating the rabbit curry."

[Illustration: Chapter IV tailpiece]

V

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

It has not often been my lot to be associated with a being of so

profound and rooted a pessimism as Michael Leary, Huntsman and

Kennelman to Mr. Flurry Knox's Fox-hounds. His attitude was that of

the one and only righteous man in a perfidious and dissolute world.

With, perhaps, the exception of Flurry Knox, he believed in no one save

himself. I was thoroughly aware of my inadequacy as Deputy-Master, and

cherished only a hope that Michael might look upon me as a kind of

Parsifal, a fool perhaps, yet at least a "blameless fool"; but during

my time of office there were many distressing moments in which I was

made to feel not only incapable, but culpable.

Michael was small, sandy, green-eyed, freckled, and, I believe,

considerably junior to myself; he neither drank nor smoked, and he had

a blistering tongue. I have never tried more sincerely to earn any

one's good opinion.

It was a pleasant afternoon towards the middle of December, and I was

paying my customary Sunday visit to the kennels to see the hounds fed.

What Michael called "the Throch" was nearly empty; the greedier of the

hounds were flitting from place to place in the line, in the undying

belief that others were better off than they. I was studying the row

of parti-coloured backs, and trying for the fiftieth time to fit each

with its name, when I was aware of a most respectable face, with grey

whiskers, regarding me from between the bars of the kennel door.

With an effort not inferior to that with which I had just discriminated

between Guardsman and General, I recognised my visitor as Mr. Jeremiah

Flynn, a farmer, and a cattle dealer on a large scale, with whom I had

occasionally done business in a humble way. He was a District

Councillor, and a man of substance; he lived twenty miles away, at a

place on the coast called Knockeenbwee, in a flat-faced, two-storeyed

house of the usual type of hideousness. Once, when an unkind fate had

sent me to that region, I had heard the incongruous tinkle of a piano

proceeding from Mr. Flynn's mansion, as I drove past fighting an

umbrella against the wet wind that swept in from the Atlantic.

"I beg your pardon, Major Yeates," began Mr. Flynn, with an agreeable

smile, which I saw in sections between the bars; "I had a little

business over this side of the country, and I took the liberty of

taking a stroll around to the kennels to see the hounds."

I made haste to extend the hospitality of the feeding-yard to my

visitor, who accepted it with equal alacrity, and went on to remark

that it was wonderful weather for the time of year. Having obeyed this

primary instinct of mankind, Mr. Flynn embarked upon large yet able

compliments on the appearance of the hounds. His manners were

excellent; sufficiently robust to accord with his grey frieze coat and

flat-topped felt hat, and with just the extra touch of deference that

expressed his respect for my high qualities and position.

"Ye have them in great form, Michael," he remarked, surveying the

hounds' bloated sides with a knowledgeable eye; "and upon me word,

there's our own poor Playboy! and a fine dog he is too!"

[Illustration: "YE HAVE THEM IN GREAT FORM, MICHAEL"]

"He is; and a fine dog to hunt rabbits!" said Michael, without a

relaxation of his drab countenance.

"I daresay, Major, you didn't know that it was in my place that fellow

was rared?" continued Mr. Flynn.

Owing to his providentially distinctive colouring of lemon and white,

Playboy was one of the hounds about whose identity I was never in

doubt. I was able to bestow a suitable glance upon him, and to recall

the fact of his having come from a trencher-fed pack, of which Mr.

Flynn was the ruling spirit, kept by the farmers in the wildernesses

beyond and around Knockeenbwee.

"Ah! Mr. Knox was too smart for us over that hound!" pursued Mr. Flynn

pleasantly; "there was a small difference between himself and meself in

a matter of a few heifers I was buying off him--a thrifle of fifteen

shillings it was, I believe----"

"Five and thirty," said Michael to the lash of his thong, in which he

was making a knot.

"And I had to give him the pup before we could come to terms," ended my

visitor.

Whether at fifteen or thirty-five shillings Playboy had been a cheap

hound. Brief, and chiefly ornamental, as my term of office had been, I

had learnt to know his voice in covert, and had learned also to act

upon it in moments of solitary and helpless ignorance as to what was

happening. This, however, was not the moment to sing his praises; I

preserved a careful silence.

"I rared himself and his sister," said Mr. Flynn, patting Playboy

heavily, "but the sister died on me. I think 'twas from all she

fretted after the brother when he went, and 'twas a pity. Those two

had the old Irish breed in them; sure you'd know it by the colour, and

there's no more of them now in the country only the mother, and she had

a right to be shot this long time."

"Come hounds," said Michael, interrupting this rhapsody, "open the

door, Bat."

The pack swept out of the feeding-yard and were away on their wonted

constitutional in half a minute.

"Grand training, grand training!" said Mr. Flynn admiringly, "they're a

credit to you, Major! It's impossible to have hounds anyway

disciplined running wild through the country the way our little pack

is. Indeed it came into my mind on the way here to try could I coax

you to come over and give us a day's hunting. We're destroyed with

foxes. Such marauding I never saw! As for turkeys and fowl, they're

tired of them, and it's my lambs they'll be after next!"

The moment of large and general acquiescence in Mr. Flynn's proposal

narrowed itself by imperceptible degrees to the moment, not properly

realised till it arrived, the horrid moment of getting up at a quarter

to seven on a December morning, in order to catch the early train for

Knockeenbwee.

In the belief that I was acting in the interest of sport I had

announced at the last meet that there was to be a by-day at

Knockeenbwee. To say that the fact was received without enthusiasm is

to put it mildly. I was assured by one authority that I should have to

hunt the hounds from a steam launch; another, more sympathetic,

promised a drag, but tempered the encouragement by saying that the

walls there were all made of slates, and that by the end of the run the

skin would be hanging off the horses' legs like the skins of bananas.

Nothing short of a heart-to-heart appeal to my Whip, Dr. Jerome Hickey,

induced him to promise his support. Michael, from first to last,

remained an impenetrable thunder-cloud. The die, however, was cast,

and the hospitality of Mr. Flynn accepted. The eve of the by-day

arrived, and the Thundercloud and the hounds were sent on by road to

Knockeenbwee, accompanied by my ancient ally Slipper, who led my mare,

and rode Philippa's pony, which had been commandeered for the occasion.

Next morning at 9.45 A.M. the train stopped by signal at the

flag-station of Moyny, a cheerless strip of platform, from which a dead

straight road retreated to infinity across a bog. An out side car was

being backed hard into the wall of the road by a long, scared rag of a

chestnut horse as Dr. Hickey and I emerged from the station, and its

driver was composing its anxieties as to the nature of trains by

beating it in the face with his whip. This, we were informed, was Mr.

Flynn's equipage, and, at a favourable moment in the conflict, Dr.

Hickey and I mounted it.

"It's seldom the thrain stands here," said the driver apologetically,

as we started at a strong canter, "and this one's very frightful

always."

The bog ditches fleeted by at some twelve miles an hour; they were the

softest, blackest, and deepest that I have ever seen, and I thanked

heaven that I was not in my red coat.

"I suppose you never met the Miss Flynns?" murmured Dr. Hickey to me

across the well of the car.

I replied in the negative.

"Oh, they're very grand," went on my companion, with a wary eye on the

humped back of the driver, "I believe they never put their foot outside

the door unless they're going to Paris. Their father told me last week

that lords in the streets of Cork were asking who they were."

"I suppose that was on their way to Paris," I suggested.

"It was not," said the driver, with stunning unexpectedness, "'twas

when they went up on th'excursion last month for to have their teeth

pulled. G'wout o' that!" This to the horse, who had shied heavily at

a goat.

Dr. Hickey and I sank into a stricken silence, five minutes of which,

at the pace we were travelling, sufficed to bring us to a little

plantation, shorn and bent by the Atlantic wind, low whitewashed walls,

an economical sweep of gravel, and an entrance gate constructed to fit

an outside car to an inch. From the moment that these came within the

range of vision the driver beat the horse with the handle of his whip,

a prelude, as we discovered, to the fact that a minor gate, obviously

and invitingly leading to the yard, lolled open on one hinge at the

outset of the plantation. There was a brief dissension, followed by a

hand gallop to the more fitting entrance; that we should find it too

fitting was a foregone conclusion, and Dr. Hickey whirled his legs on

to the seat at the moment when impact between his side of the car and

the gate post became inevitable. The bang that followed was a hearty

one, and the driver transmitted it to me in great perfection with his

elbow as he lurched on to me; there was a second and hollower bang as

the well of the car, detached by the shock, dropped on the axle and

turned over, flinging from it in its somersault a harlequinade

assortment of herrings, loaves of bread, and a band box. It was, I

think, a loaf of bread that hit the horse on the hocks, but under all

the circumstances even a herring would have been ample excuse for the

two sledge hammer kicks which he instantly administered to the

foot-board. While the car still hung in the gateway, a donkey, with a

boy sitting on the far end of its back, was suddenly mingled with the

episode. The boy was off the donkey's back and the driver was off mine

at apparently one and the same moment, and the car was somehow backed

off the pillar; as we scraped through the boy said something to the

driver in a brogue that was a shade more sophisticated than the peasant

tune. It seemed to me to convey the facts that Miss Lynie was waiting

for her hat, and that Maggie Kane was dancing mad for the soft sugar.

We proceeded to the house, leaving the ground strewn with what appeared

to be the elemental stage of a picnic.

"I suppose you're getting him into form for the hunt, Eugene?" said Dr.

Hickey, as the lathered and panting chestnut came to a stand some ten

yards beyond the hall door.

"Well, indeed, we thought it no harm to loosen him under the car before

Master Eddy went riding him," replied Eugene, "and begannies I'm not

done with him yet! I have to be before the masther at the next thrain."

He shed us and our belongings on the steps, and drove away at a gallop.

The meet had been arranged for half-past eleven. It was half-past ten

when Dr. Hickey and I were incarcerated in a dungeon-cold drawing-room

by a breathless being in tennis shoes, with her hair down her back,

doubtless Maggie Kane, hot from the war-dance brought on by the lack of

soft sugar. She told us in a gusty whisper that the masther would be

in shortly, and the ladies was coming down, and left us to meditate

upon our surroundings.

A cascade of white paper flowed glacially from the chimney to the

fender; the gloom was Cimmerian, and unalterable, owing to the fact

that the blind was broken; the cold of a never occupied room ate into

our vitals. Footsteps pounded overhead and crept in the hall. The

house was obviously full of people, but no one came near us. Had it

not been for my companion's biographical comments on the photographs

with which the room was decked, all of them, it appeared, suitors of

the Misses Flynn, I think I should have walked back to the station. At

eleven o'clock the hurrying feet overhead were stilled, there was a

rustling in the hall as of a stage storm, and the daughters of the

house made their entry, wonderfully attired in gowns suggestive of a

theatre, or a tropical garden party, and in picture hats. As I viewed

the miracles of hairdressing, black as the raven's wing, the necklaces,

the bracelets, and the lavish top-dressing of powder, I wildly wondered

if Dr. Hickey and I should not have been in evening clothes.

We fell to a laboured conversation, conducted upon the highest social

plane. The young ladies rolled their black eyes under arched eyebrows,

and in almost unimpeachable English accents supposed I found Ireland

very dull. They asked me if I often went to the London Opera. They

declared that when at home, music was their only resource, and made

such pointed reference to their Italian duetts that I found myself

trembling on the verge of asking them to sing. Dr. Hickey, under whose

wing I had proposed to shelter myself, remained sardonically aloof. A

blessed diversion was created by the entrance, at racing speed, of

Maggie Kane, bearing a trayful of burning sods of turf; the cascade was

torn from the chimney, and the tray was emptied into the grate.

Blinding smoke filled the room, and Maggie Kane murmured an imprecation

upon "jackdahs," their nests, and all their works.

[Illustration: A TRAYFUL OF BURNING SODS OF TURF]

The moment seemed propitious for escape; I looked at my watch, and said

that if they would kindly tell me the way to the yard I would go round

and see about things.

The arched eyebrows went up a shade higher; the Misses Flynn said they

feared they hardly knew the way to the stables.

Dr. Hickey rose. "Indeed it isn't easy to find them," he said, "but I

daresay the Major and myself will be able to make them out."

When we got outside he looked down his long nose at me.

"Stables indeed!" he said, "I hate that dirty little boasting!"

Mr. Flynn's yard certainly did not at the first glance betray the

presence of stables. It consisted of an indeterminate assembly of

huts, with a long corrugated iron shed standing gauntly in the midst;

swamp of varying depths and shades occupied the intervals. From the

shed proceeded the lamentable and indignant clamours of the hounds,

against its door leaned Michael in his red coat, enacting, obviously,

the role of a righteous man constrained to have his habitation in the

tents of Kedar. A reverential knot of boys admired him from the wall

of a neighbouring pigsty; countrymen of all ages, each armed with a

stick and shadowed by a cur, more or less resembling a fox-hound, stood

about in patient groups; two or three dejected horses were nibbling,

unattended, at a hayrick. Of our host there was no sign.

At the door of the largest hut Slipper was standing.

"Come in and see the mare, Major," he called to me in his bantam-cock

voice as I approached. "Last night when we got in she was clean dead

altogether, but this morning when I was giving the feed to the pony she

retched out her neck and met her teeth in me poll! Oh, she's in great

heart now!"

In confirmation of this statement a shrewish squeal from Lady Jane

proceeded from the interior.

"Sure I slep' in the straw last night with herself and the pony. She'd

have him ate this morning only for me."

The record of his devotion was here interrupted by a tremendous

rattling in the farm lane; it heralded the entrance of Mr. Flynn on his

outside car, drawn at full gallop by the young chestnut horse.

"Oh, look at me, Major, how late I am!" shouted Mr. Flynn jovially, as

he scrambled off the car. "I declare you could light a candle at me

eye with the shame that's in it, as they say! I was back in

Curranhilty last night buying stock, and this was the first train I

could get. Well, well, the day's long and drink's plenty!"

He bundled into a darksome hole, and emerged with a pair of dirty spurs

and a Malacca crop as heavy as a spade handle.

"Michael! Did they tell you we have a fox for you in the hill north?"

"I wasn't speaking to any of them," replied Michael coldly.

"Well, your hounds will be speaking to him soon! Here, hurry boys,

pull out the horses!"

His eye fell on the chestnut, upon whose reeking back Eugene was

cramming a saddle, while the boy who had met us at the entrance gate

was proffering to it a tin basin full of oats.

"What are you doing with the young horse?" he roared.

"I thought Master Eddy would ride him, sir," replied Eugene.

"Well, he will not," said Mr. Flynn, conclusively; "the horse has

enough work done, and let you walk him about easy till he's cool. You

can folly the hunt then."

Two more crestfallen countenances than those of the young gentlemen he

addressed it has seldom been my lot to see. The saddle was slowly

removed. Master Eddy, red up to the roots of his black hair, retired

silently with his basin of oats into the stable behind Slipper. Even

had I not seen his cuff go to his eyes I should have realised that life

would probably never hold for him a bitterer moment.

The hounds were already surging out of the yard with a following wave,

composed of every living thing in sight. As I took Lady Jane from the

hand of Slipper, Philippa's pony gave a snort. Some touch of

Philippa's criminal weakness for boys assailed me.

"That boy can ride the pony if he likes," I said to Slipper.

I followed the hounds and their cortège down a deep and filthy lane.

Mr. Flynn was just in front of me, on a broad-beamed white horse, with

string-halt; three or four of the trencher-fed aliens slunk at his

heels, the mouth of a dingy horn protruded from his coat pocket. I

trembled in spirit as I thought of Michael.

We were out at length into large and furzy spaces that slanted steeply

to the cliffs; like smuts streaming out of a chimney the followers of

the hunt belched from the lane and spread themselves over the pale

green slopes. From this point the proceedings became merged in total

incoherence. Accompanied, as it seemed, by the whole population of the

district, we moved _en masse_ along the top of the cliffs, while

hounds, curs, and boys strove and scrambled below us, over rocks and

along ledges, which, one might have thought, would have tried the head

of a seagull. Two successive bursts of yelling notified the capture

and slaughter of two rabbits; in the first hour and a half I can recall

no other achievement.

It was, however, evident that hunting, in its stricter sense, was

looked on as a mere species of side show by the great majority of the

field; the cream of the entertainment was found in the negotiation of

such jumps as fell to the lot of the riders. These were neither

numerous nor formidable, but the storm of cheers that accompanied each

performance would have dignified the win of a Grand National favourite.

To Master Eddy, on Philippa's pony, it was apparent that the birthday

of his life had come. Attended by Slipper and a howling company of

boon companions, he and the pony played a glorified game of pitch and

toss, in which, as it seemed to me, heads never turned up. It

certainly was an adverse circumstance that the pony's mane had, the day

before, been hogged to the bore, so that at critical moments the rider

slid, unchecked, from saddle to ears, but the boon companions, who

themselves jumped like antelopes, stride for stride with the pony,

replaced him unfailingly with timely snatches at whatever portion of

his frame first offered itself.

Music, even, was not wanting to our progress. A lame fiddler, on a

donkey, followed in our wake, filling Michael's cup of humiliation to

the brim, by playing jigs during our frequent moments of inaction. The

sun pushed its way out of the grey sky, the sea was grey, with a broad

and flashing highway to the horizon, a frayed edge of foam tracked the

broken coast-line, seagulls screamed and swooped, and the grass on the

cliff summits was wondrous green. Old Flynn, on his white horse,

moving along the verge, and bleating shrilly upon his horn to the

hounds below, became idyllic.

I believe that I ought to have been in a towering passion, and should

have swept the hounds home in a flood of blasphemy; as a matter of fact

I enjoyed myself. Even Dr. Hickey admitted that it was as pleasant a

day for smoking cigarettes as he had ever been out.

It must have been nearly three o'clock when one of Mr. Flynn's hounds,

a venerable lady of lemon and white complexion, poked her lean head

through furze-bushes at the top of the cliff, and came up on to the

level ground.

"That's old Terrible, Playboy's mother," remarked Dr. Hickey, "and a

great stamp of an old hound too, but she can't run up now. Flynn tells

me when she's beat out she'll sit down and yowl on the line, she's that

fond of it."

Meantime Terrible was becoming busier and looking younger every moment,

as she zigzagged up and across the trampled field towards the hillside.

Dr. Hickey paused in the lighting of what must have been his tenth

cigarette.

"If we were in a Christian country," he said, "you'd say she had a

line----"

Old Flynn came pounding up on his white horse, and rode slowly up the

hill behind Terrible, who silently pursued her investigations. Fifty

or sixty yards higher up, my eye lighted on something that might have

been a rusty can, or a wisp of bracken, lying on the sunny side of a

bank. As I looked, it moved, and slid away over the top of the bank.

A yell, followed by a frenzied tootling on Mr. Flynn's ancient horn,

told that he had seen it too, and, in a bedlam of shrieks, chaos was

upon us. Through an inextricable huddle of foot people the hounds came

bursting up from the cliffs, fighting every foot of ground with the

country-boys, yelping with the contagion of excitement, they broke

through, and went screaming up the hill to old Terrible, who was

announcing her find in deep and continuous notes.

How Lady Jane got over the first bank without trampling Slipper and two

men under foot is known only to herself; as I landed, Master Eddy and

the pony banged heavily into me from the rear, the pony having once and

for all resolved not to be sundered by more than a yard from his stable

companion of the night before. I can safely say that I have never seen

hounds run faster than did Mr. Knox's and the trencher-feds, in that

brief scurry from the cliffs at Knockeenbwee. By the time we had

crossed the second fence the foot people were gone, like things in a

dream. In front of me was Michael, and, in spite of Michael's spurs,

in front of Michael was old Flynn, holding the advantage of his start

with a most admirable jealousy. The white horse got over the ground in

bucks like a rabbit, the string-halt lending an additional fire to his

gait; on every bank his great white hind-quarters stood up against the

sky, like the gable end of a chapel. Had I had time to think of

anything, I should have repented acutely of having lent Master Eddy the

pony, who was practically running away. Twice I replaced his rider in

the saddle with one hand, as he landed off a fence under my stirrup.

Master Eddy had lost his cap and whip, his hair was full of mud, pure

ecstasy stretched his grin from ear to ear, and broke from him in

giggles of delight.

[Illustration: PURE ECSTASY STRETCHED HIS GRIN FROM EAR TO EAR]

Providentially, it was, as I have said, only a scurry. It seemed that

we had run across the neck of a promontory, and in ten minutes we were

at the cliffs again, the company reduced to old Flynn, his son, and the

Hunt establishment. Below us Moyny Bay was spread forth, enclosing in

its span a big green island; between us and the island was a good

hundred yards of mud, plump-looking mud, with channels in it. Deep in

this the hounds were wading; some of them were already ashore on the

island, struggling over black rocks thatched with yellow seaweed, their

voices coming faintly back to us against the wind. The white horse's

tail was working like a fan, and we were all, horses and men, blowing

hard enough to turn a windmill.

"That's better fun than to be eating your dinner!" puffed Mr. Flynn,

purple with pride and heat, as he lowered himself from the saddle.

"There isn't a hound in Ireland would take that stale line up from the

cliff only old Terrible!"

"What will we do now, sir?" said Michael to me, presenting the

conundrum with colourless calm, and ignoring the coat-tail trailed for

his benefit, "we'll hardly get them out of that island to-night."

"I suppose you know you're bare-footed, Major?" put in Hickey, my other

Job's comforter, from behind. "Your two fore-shoes are gone."

A December day is not good for much after half-past three. For half an

hour the horns of Michael and old Flynn blew their summons antiphonally

into the immensities of sea and sky, and summoned only the sunset, and

after it the twilight; the hounds remained unresponsive, invisible.

"There's rabbits enough in that island to keep ten packs of hounds busy

for a month," said Mr. Flynn; "the last time I was there I thought

'twas the face of the field was running from me. And what was it after

all but the rabbits!"

"_My_ hounds wouldn't hunt rabbits if they were throwing after them,"

said Michael ferociously.

"Oh, I suppose it's admiring the view they are!" riposted Mr. Flynn; "I

tell ye now, Major, there's a man on the strand below has a

flat-bottomed boat, and here's Eugene just come up, I'll send him over

with the horn as soon as there's water enough, and he'll flog them out

of it."

The tide crept slowly in over the mud, and a young moon was sending a

slender streak of light along it through the dusk before Eugene had

accomplished his mission.

The boat returned at last across the channel with a precarious cargo of

three hounds, while the rest splashed and swam after her.

"I have them all, only one," shouted Eugene as he jumped ashore, and

came scrambling up the steep slants and shaley ledges of the cliff.

"I hope it isn't Terrible ye left after ye?" roared Mr. Flynn.

"Faith, I don't know which is it it is. I seen him down from me

floating in the tide. It must be he was clifted. I think 'tis one of

Major Yeates's. We have our own whatever."

A cold feeling ran down my back. Michael and Hickey silently conned

over the pack in the growing darkness, striking matches and shielding

them in their hands as they told off one hound after another, hemmed in

by an eager circle of countrymen.

"It's Playboy's gone," said Michael, with awful brevity. "I suppose we

may go home now, sir?"

"Ah! hold on, hold on," put in Mr. Flynn, "are ye sure now, Eugene, it

wasn't a sheep ye saw? I wouldn't wish it for five pounds that the

Major lost a hound by us."

"Did ye ever see a sheep with yalla spots on her?" retorted Eugene.

A shout of laughter instantly broke from the circle of sympathisers. I

mounted Lady Jane in gloomy silence; there was nothing for it but to

face the long homeward road, minus Flurry Knox's best hound, and with

the knowledge that while I lived this day's work would not be forgotten

to me by him, by Dr. Hickey, and by Michael.

It was Hickey who reminded me that I was also minus two fore-shoes, and

that it was an eighteen mile ride. On my responding irritably that I

was aware of both facts, and would get the mare shod at the forge by

the station, Mr. Flynn, whose voluble and unceasing condolences had not

been the least of my crosses, informed me that the smith had gone away

to his father-in-law's wake, and that there wasn't another forge

between that and Skebawn.

The steps by which the final disposition of events was arrived at need

not here be recounted. It need only be said that every star went out

of its course to fight against me; even the special luminary that

presided over the Curranhilty and Skebawn branch railway was hostile; I

was told that the last train did not run except on Saturdays.

Therefore it was that, in a blend of matchlight and moonlight, a

telegram was written to Philippa, and, at the hour at which Dr. Hickey,

the hounds, and Michael were nearing their journey's end, I was seated

at the Knockeenbwee dinner-table, tired, thoroughly annoyed, devoured

with sleep, and laboriously discoursing of London and Paris with the

younger Miss Flynn.

A meal that had opened at six with strong tea, cold mutton, and bottled

porter, was still, at eight o'clock, in slow but unceasing progress,

suggesting successive inspirations on the part of the cook. At about

seven we had had mutton chops and potatoes, and now, after an abysmal

interval of conversation, we were faced by a roast goose and a rice

pudding with currants in it. Through all these things had gone the

heavy sounds and crashes that betokened the conversion of the

drawing-room into a sleeping-place for me. There was, it appeared, no

spare room in the house; I felt positively abject at the thought of the

trouble I was inflicting. My soul abhorred the roast goose, and was

yet conscious that the only possible acknowledgment of the hospitality

that was showered upon me, was to eat my way unflinchingly through all

that was put upon my plate.

It must have been nine o'clock before we turned our backs upon the

pleasures of the table, and settled down to hot whisky-punch over a

fierce turf fire. Then ensued upon my part one of the most prolonged

death-grapples with sleep that it has been my lot to endure. The

conversation of Mr. Flynn and his daughters passed into my brain like a

narcotic; after circling heavily round various fashionable topics, it

settled at length upon croquet, and it was about here that I began to

slip from my moorings and drift softly towards unconsciousness. I

pulled myself up on the delicious verge of a dream to agree with the

statement that "croquet was a fright! You'd boil a leg of mutton while

you'd be waiting for your turn!"

Following on this came a period of oblivion, and then an agonised

recovery. Where were we? Thank heaven, we were still at the croquet

party, and Miss Lynie's narrative was continuing.

"That was the last place I saw Mary. Oh, she was mad! She was mad

with me! 'I was born a lady,' says she, 'and I'll die a lady!' I

never saw her after that day."

Miss Lynie, with an elegantly curved little finger, finished her

wine-glass of toddy and awaited my comment.

I was, for the instant, capable only of blinking like an owl, but was

saved from disaster by Mr. Flynn.

"Indeed ye had no loss," he remarked. "She's like a cow that gives a

good pail o' milk and spoils all by putting her leg in it!"

I said, "Quite so--exactly," while the fire, old Flynn, and the picture

of a Pope over the chimney-piece, swam back into their places with a

jerk.

The tale, or whatever it was, wound on. Nodding heavily, I heard how

"Mary," at some period of her remarkable career, had been found

"bawling in the kitchen" because Miss Flynn had refused to kiss her on

both cheeks when she was going to bed, and of how, on that repulse,

Mary had said that Miss Flynn was "squat." I am thankful to say that I

retained sufficient control of my faculties to laugh ironically.

I think the story must then have merged into a description of some sort

of entertainment, as I distinctly remember Miss Lynie saying that they

"played 'Lodging-houses'--it was young Scully from Ennis made us do

it--a very vulgar game _I_ call it."

"I don't like that pullin' an' draggin'," said Mr. Flynn.

I did not feel called upon to intrude my opinion upon the remarkable

pastime in question, and the veils of sleep once more swathed me

irresistibly in their folds. It seemed very long afterwards that the

clang of a fire-iron pulled me up with what I fear must have been an

audible snort. Old Flynn was standing up in front of the fire; he had

obviously reached the climax of a narrative, he awaited my comment.

"That--that must have been very nice," I said desperately.

"Nice!" echoed Mr. Flynn, and his astounded face shocked me into

consciousness; "sure she might have burned the house down!"

What the catastrophe may have been I shall never know, nor do I

remember how I shuffled out of the difficulty; I only know that at this

point I abandoned the unequal struggle, and asked if I might go to bed.

The obligations of a troublesome and self-inflicted guest seal my lips

as to the expedients by which the drawing-room had been converted into

a sleeping-place for me. But though gratitude may enforce silence, it

could not enforce sleep. The paralysing drowsiness of the parlour

deserted me at the hour of need. The noises in the kitchen ceased, old

Flynn pounded up to bed, the voices of the young ladies overhead died

away, and the house sank into stillness, but I grew more wakeful every

moment. I heard the creeping and scurrying of rats in the walls, I

counted every tick, and cursed every quarter told off by a pragmatical

cuckoo clock in the hall. By the time it had struck twelve I was on

the verge of attacking it with the poker.

I suppose I may have dozed a little, but I was certainly aware that a

long track of time had elapsed since it had struck two, when a faint

but regular creaking of the staircase impressed itself upon my ear. It

was followed by a stealing foot in the hall; a hand felt over the door,

and knocked very softly. I sat up in my diminutive stretcher-bed and

asked who was there. The handle was turned, and a voice at the crack

of the door said "It's me!"

Even in the two monosyllables I recognised the accents of the son of

the house.

"I want to tell you something," pursued the voice.

I instantly surmised all possibilities of disaster; Slipper drunk and

overlaid by Lady Jane, Philippa's pony dead from over-exertion, or even

a further instalment of the evening meal, only now arrived at

completion.

"What's the matter? Is anything wrong?" I demanded, raising myself in

the trough of the bed.

"There is not; but I want to speak to you."

I had by this time found the matches, and my candle revealed Eddy

Flynn, fully dressed save for his boots, standing in the doorway. He

crept up to my bedside with elaborate stealth.

"Well, what is it?" I asked, attuning my voice to a conspirator's

whisper.

"Playboy's above stairs!"

"Playboy!" I repeated incredulously, "what do you mean?"

"Eugene cot him. He's above in Eugene's room now," said the boy, his

face becoming suddenly scarlet.

"Do you mean that he wasn't killed?" I demanded, instantly allocating

in my own mind half a sovereign to Eugene.

"He wasn't in the island at all," faltered Master Eddy, "Eugene cot him

below on the cliffs when the hounds went down in it at the first go

off, and he hid him back in the house here."

The allotment of the half-sovereign was abruptly cancelled.

I swallowed my emotions with some difficulty.

"Well," I said, after an awkward pause, "I'm very much obliged to you

for telling me. I'll see your father about it in the morning."

Master Eddy did not accept this as a dismissal. He remained

motionless, except for his eyes that sought refuge anywhere but on my

face.

There was a silence for some moments; he was almost inaudible as he

said:

"It would be better for ye to take him now, and to give him to Slipper.

I'd be killed if they knew I let on he was here." Then, as an

afterthought, "Eugene's gone to the wake."

The inner aspect of the affair began to reveal itself, accompanied by a

singularly unbecoming side light on old Flynn. I perceived also the

useful part that had been played by Philippa's pony, but it did not

alter the fact that Master Eddy was showing his gratitude like a hero.

The situation was, however, too delicate to admit of comment.

"Very well," I said, without any change of expression, "will you bring

the dog down to me?"

"I tried to bring him down with me, but he wouldn't let me put a hand

on him."

I hastily got into the few garments of which I had not divested myself

before getting into the misnamed stretcher-bed, aware that the horrid

task was before me of burglariously probing the depths of Eugene's

bedroom, and acutely uncertain as to Playboy's reception of me.

"There's a light above in the room," said Master Eddy, with a dubious

glance at the candle in my hand.

I put it down, and followed him into the dark hall.

I have seldom done a more preposterous thing than creep up old Flynn's

stairs in the small hours of the morning, in illicit search for my own

property; but, given the dual determination to recover Playboy, and to

shield my confederate, I still fail to see that I could have acted

otherwise.

We reached the first landing; it vibrated reassuringly with the

enormous snores of Mr. Flynn. Master Eddy's cold paw closed on my

hand, and led me to another and steeper flight of stairs. At the top

of these was a second landing, or rather passage, at the end of which a

crack of light showed under a door. A dim skylight told that the roof

was very near my head; I extended a groping hand for the wall, and

without any warning found my fingers closing improbably, awfully, upon

a warm human face. I defy the most hardened conspirator to have

refrained from some expression of opinion.

"Good Lord!" I gasped, starting back, and knocking my head hard against

a rafter. "What's that?"

"It's Maggie Kane, sir!" hissed a female voice. "I'm after bringing up

a bone for the dog to quieten him!"

That Maggie Kane should also be in the plot was a complication beyond

my stunned intelligence; I grasped only the single fact that she was an

ally, endued with supernatural and sympathetic forethought. She placed

in my hand a tepid and bulky fragment, which, even in the dark, I

recognised as the mighty drumstick of last night's goose; at the same

moment Master Eddy opened the door, and revealed Playboy, tied to the

leg of a low wooden bedstead.

He was standing up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as

big as a calf. He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of

Eugene's bower, and I failed to see any recognition of me in his

aspect, in point of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst

of suspicion that would waken the house once and for all. We held a

council of war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I

think it was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer

him the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded,

almost too well in fact. Following the alluring drumstick Playboy

burst into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still

preceded by the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic

stairs at a speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while

Maggie Kane held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's

door I was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too

good to enquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the

darkness of the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as

if to give the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think

Playboy must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of

the drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its

socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the

floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to

cuckoo with jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was not

Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously

muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open. We

struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in our

midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its protest

from under Maggie Kane's shawl.

In the kitchen we drew breath for the first time, and Maggie Kane put

the cuckoo clock into a flour bin; the house remained still as the

grave. Master Eddy opened the back door; behind his head the Plough

glittered wakefully in a clear and frosty sky. It was uncommonly cold.

Slipper had not gone to the wake, and was quite sober. I shall never

forget it to him. I told him that Playboy had come back, and was to be

taken home at once. He asked no inconvenient questions, but did not

deny himself a most dissolute wink. We helped him to saddle the pony,

while Playboy crunched his hard-earned drumstick in the straw. In less

than ten minutes he rode quietly away in the starlight, with Playboy

trotting at his stirrup, and Playboy's rope tied to his arm.

[Illustration: HE DID NOT DENY HIMSELF A MOST DISSOLUTE WINK]

I did not meet Mr. Flynn at breakfast; he had started early for a

distant fair. I have, however, met him frequently since then, and we

are on the best of terms. We have not shirked allusions to the day's

hunting at Knockeenbwee, but Playboy has not on these occasions been

mentioned by either of us.

I understand that Slipper has put forth a version of the story, in

which the whole matter is resolved into a trial of wits between himself

and Eugene. With this I have not interfered.

VI

THE BOAT'S SHARE

I was sitting on the steps of Shreelane House, smoking a cigarette

after breakfast. By the calendar, the month was November, by the map

it was the South-west of Ireland, but by every token that hot sun and

soft breeze could offer it was the Riviera in April.

Maria, my wife's water spaniel, elderly now, but unimpaired in figure,

and in character merely fortified in guile by the castigations of seven

winters, reclined on the warm limestone flags beside me. Minx, the

nursery fox-terrier, sat, as was her practice, upon Maria's ribs,

nodding in slumber. All was peace.

Peace, I say, but even as I expanded in it and the sunshine, there

arose to me from the kitchen window in the area the voice of Mrs.

Cadogan, uplifted in passionate questioning.

"Bridgie!" it wailed. "Where's me beautiful head and me lovely feet?"

The answer to this amazing inquiry travelled shrilly from the region of

the scullery.

"Bilin' in the pot, ma'am."

I realised that it was merely soup in its elemental stage that was

under discussion, but Peace spread her wings at the cry; it recalled

the fact that Philippa was having a dinner party that same night. In a

small establishment such as mine, a dinner party is an affair of many

aspects, all of them serious. The aspect of the master of the house,

however, is not serious, it is merely contemptible. Having got out the

champagne, and reverentially decanted the port, there remains for him

no further place in the proceedings, no moment in which his presence is

desired. If, at such a time, I wished to have speech with my wife, she

was not to be found; if I abandoned the search and stationed myself in

the hall, she would pass me, on an average, twice in every three

minutes, generally with flowers in her hands, always with an expression

so rapt as to abash all questionings. I therefore sat upon the steps

and read the paper, superfluous to all save the dogs, to whom I at

least offered a harbourage in the general stress.

Suddenly, and without a word of warning, Minx and Maria were converted

from a slumbrous mound into twin comets--comets that trailed a

continuous shriek of rage as they flew down the avenue. The cause of

the affront presently revealed itself, in the form of a tall woman,

with a shawl over her head, and a basket on her arm. She advanced

unfalteringly, Minx walking on her hind legs beside her, as if in a

circus, attentively smelling the basket, while Maria bayed her at large

in the background. She dropped me a curtsey fit for the Lord

Lieutenant.

"Does your Honour want any fish this morning?" Her rippling grey hair

gleamed like silver in the sunlight, her face was straight-browed and

pale, her grey eyes met mine with respectful self-possession. She

might have been Deborah the prophetess, or the Mother of the Gracchi;

as a matter of fact I recognised her as a certain Mrs. Honora Brickley,

mother of my present kitchen-maid, a lady whom, not six months before,

I had fined in a matter of trespass and assault.

"They're lovely fish altogether!" she pursued, "they're leppin' fresh!"

[Illustration: "THEY'RE LOVELY FISH ALTOGETHER! THEY'RE LEPPIN'

FRESH!"]

Here was the chance to make myself useful. I called down the area and

asked Mrs. Cadogan if she wanted fish. (It may or may not be necessary

to mention that my cook's name is locally pronounced "Caydogawn.")

"What fish is it, sir?" replied Mrs. Cadogan, presenting at the kitchen

window a face like a harvest moon.

"'Tis pollock, ma'am!" shouted Mrs. Brickley from the foot of the steps.

"'Sha! thim's no good to us!" responded the harvest moon in bitter

scorn. "Thim's not company fish!"

I was here aware of the presence of my wife in the doorway, with a

menu-slate in one hand, and one of my best silk pocket handkerchiefs,

that had obviously been used as a duster, in the other.

"Filleted with white sauce--" she murmured to herself, a world of

thought in her blue eyes, "or perhaps quenelles----"

Mrs. Brickley instantly extracted a long and shapely pollock from her

basket, and, with eulogies of its beauty, of Philippa's beauty, and of

her own magnanimity in proffering her wares to us instead of to a

craving market in Skebawn, laid it on the steps.

At this point a series of yells from the nursery, of the usual

blood-curdling description, lifted Philippa from the scene of action as

a wind whirls a feather.

"Buy them!" came back to me from the stairs.

I kept to myself my long-formed opinion that eating pollock was like

eating boiled cotton wool with pins in it, and the bargain proceeded.

The affair was almost concluded, when Mrs. Brickley, in snatching a

fish from the bottom of her basket to complete an irresistible

half-dozen, let it slip from her fingers. It fell at my feet,

revealing a mangled and gory patch on its side.

"Why, then, that's the best fish I have!" declared Mrs. Brickley in

response to my protest. "That's the very one her honour Mrs. Yeates

would fancy! She'd always like to see the blood running fresh!"

This flight of sympathetic insight did not deter me from refusing the

injured pollock, coupled with a regret that Mrs. Brickley's cat should

have been interrupted in its meal.

Mrs. Brickley did not immediately reply. She peeped down the area, she

glanced into the hall.

"Cat is it!" she said, sinking her voice to a mysterious whisper.

"Your Honour knows well, God bless you, that it was no cat done that!"

Obedient to the wholly fallacious axiom that those who ask no questions

will be told no lies, I remained silent.

"Only for the luck of God being on me they'd have left meself no

betther than they left the fish!" continued Mrs. Brickley. "Your

Honour didn't hear what work was in it on Hare Island Strand last

night? Thim Keohanes had the wooden leg pulled from undher me husband

with the len'th o' fightin'! Oh! Thim's outlawed altogether, and the

faymales is as manly as the men! Sure the polis theirselves does be in

dhread of thim women! The day-and-night-screeching porpoises!"

Seven years of Resident Magistracy had bestowed upon me some

superficial knowledge of whither all this tended. I rose from the

steps, with the stereotyped statement that if there was to be a case in

court I could not listen to it beforehand. I then closed the hall

door, not, however, before Mrs. Brickley had assured me that I was the

only gentleman, next to the Lord Almighty, in whom she had any

confidence.

The next incident in the affair occurred at about a quarter to eight

that evening. I was tying my tie when my wife's voice summoned me to

her room in tones that presaged disaster. Philippa was standing erect,

in a white and glittering garment. Her eyes shone, her cheeks glowed.

It is not given to every one to look their best when they are angry,

but it undoubtedly is becoming to Philippa.

"I ask you to look at my dress," she said in a level voice.

"It looks very nice----" I said cautiously, knowing there was a trap

somewhere. "I know it, don't I?"

"Know it!" replied Philippa witheringly, "did you know that it had only

one sleeve?"

She extended her arms; from one depended vague and transparent films of

whiteness, the other was bare to the shoulder. I rather preferred it

of the two.

"Well, I can't say I did," I said helplessly, "is that a new fashion?"

There was a spectral knock at the door, and Hannah, the housemaid, slid

into the room, purple of face, abject of mien.

"It's what they're afther tellin' me, ma'am," she panted. "'Twas took

to sthrain the soup!"

"They took my sleeve to strain the soup!" repeated Philippa, in a

crystal clarity of wrath.

"She said she got it in the press in the passage, ma'am, and she

thought you were afther throwin' it," murmured Hannah, with a glance

that implored my support.

"Who are you speaking of?" demanded Philippa, looking quite six feet

high.

The situation, already sufficiently acute, was here intensified by the

massive entry of Mrs. Cadogan, bearing in her hand a plate, on which

was a mound of soaked brownish rag. She was blowing hard, the glare of

the kitchen range at highest power lived in her face.

"There's your sleeve, ma'am!" she said, "and if I could fall down dead

this minute it'd be no more than a relief to me! And as for Bridgie

Brickley!" continued Mrs. Cadogan, catching her wind with a gasp, "I

thravelled many genthry's kitchens, but thanks be to God, I never seen

the like of her! Five weeks to-morrow she's in this house, and there

isn't a day but I gave her a laceratin'! Sure the hair's droppin' out

o' me head, and the skin rollin' off the soles o' me feet with the

heart scald I get with her! The big, low, dirty buccaneer! And I

declare to you, ma'am, and to the Major, that I have a pain switching

out through me hips this minute that'd bring down a horse!"

"Oh God!" said Hannah, clapping her hand over her mouth.

My eye met Philippa's; some tremor of my inward agony declared itself,

and found its fellow on her quivering lips. In the same instant,

wheels rumbled in the avenue.

"Here are the Knoxes!" I exclaimed, escaping headlong from the room

with my dignity as master of the house still intact.

Dinner, though somewhat delayed by these agitations, passed off

reasonably well. Its occasion was the return from the South African

war of my landlord and neighbour, Mr. Florence McCarthy Knox, M.F.H.,

J.P., who had been serving his country in the Yeomanry for the past

twelve months. The soup gave no hint of its cannibalistic origin, and

was of a transparency that did infinite credit to the services of

Philippa's sleeve; the pollock, chastely robed in white sauce, held no

suggestion of a stormy past, nor, it need scarcely be said, did they

foreshadow their influence on my future. As they made their circuit of

the table I aimed a communing glance at my wife, who, serene in pale

pink and conversation with Mr. Knox, remained unresponsive.

How the volcano that I knew to be raging below in the kitchen could

have brought forth anything more edible than molten paving stones I was

at a loss to imagine. Had Mrs. Cadogan sent up Bridget Brickley's head

as an _entremet_ it would not, indeed, have surprised me. I could not

know that as the gong sounded for dinner Miss Brickley had retired to

her bed in strong hysterics, announcing that she was paralysed, while

Mrs. Cadogan, rapt by passion to an ecstasy of achievement, coped

single-handed with the emergency.

At breakfast time next morning Philippa and I were informed that the

invalid had at an early hour removed herself and her wardrobe from the

house, requisitioning for the purpose my donkey-cart and the attendance

of my groom, Peter Cadogan; a proceeding on which the comments of

Peter's aunt, Mrs. Cadogan, left nothing to be desired.

[Illustration: THE INVALID REMOVED HERSELF]

The affair on the strand at Hare Island ripened, with infinite

complexity of summonses and cross-summonses, into an imposing Petty

Sessions case. Two separate deputations presented themselves at

Shreelane, equipped with black eyes and other conventional injuries,

one of them armed with a creelful of live lobsters to underline the

argument. To decline the bribe was of no avail: the deputation

decanted them upon the floor of the hall and retired, and the lobsters

spread themselves at large over the house, and to this hour remain the

nightmare of the nursery.

The next Petty Sessions day was wet; the tall windows of the Court

House were grey and streaming, and the reek of wet humanity ascended to

the ceiling. As I took my seat on the bench I perceived with an inward

groan that the services of the two most eloquent solicitors in Skebawn

had been engaged. This meant that Justice would not have run its

course till heaven knew what dim hour of the afternoon, and that that

course would be devious and difficult.

All the pews and galleries (any Irish courthouse might, with the

addition of a harmonium, pass presentably as a dissenting chapel) were

full, and a line of flat-capped policemen stood like church-wardens

near the door. Under the galleries, behind what might have answered to

choir-stalls, the witnesses and their friends hid in darkness, which

could, however, but partially conceal two resplendent young ladies,

barmaids, who were to appear in a subsequent Sunday drinking case. I

was a little late, and when I arrived Flurry Knox, supported by a

couple of other magistrates, was in the chair, imperturbable of

countenance as was his wont, his fair and delusive youthfulness of

aspect unimpaired by his varied experiences during the war, his roving,

subtle eye untamed by four years of matrimony.

A woman was being examined, a square and ugly country-woman, with wispy

fair hair, a slow, dignified manner, and a slight and impressive

stammer. I recognised her as one of the bodyguard of the lobsters.

Mr. Mooney, solicitor for the Brickleys, widely known and respected as

"Roaring Jack," was in possession of that much-enduring organ, the ear

of the Court.

"Now, Kate Keohane!" he thundered, "tell me what time it was when all

this was going on?"

"About duskish, sir. Con Brickley was slashing the f-fish at me mother

the same time. He never said a word but to take the shtick and fire me

dead with it on the sthrand. He gave me plenty of blood to dhrink

too," said the witness with acid decorum. She paused to permit this

agreeable fact to sink in, and added, "his wife wanted to f-fashten on

me the same time, an' she havin' the steer of the boat to sthrike me."

These were not precisely the facts that Mr. Murphy, as solicitor for

the defence, wished to elicit.

"Would you kindly explain what you mean by the steer of the boat?" he

demanded, sparring for wind in as intimidating a manner as possible.

The witness stared at him.

"Sure 'tis the shtick, like, that they pulls here and there to go in

their choice place."

"We may presume that the lady is referring to the tiller," said Mr.

Mooney, with a facetious eye at the Bench. "Maybe now, ma'am, you can

explain to us what sort of a boat is she?"

"She's that owld that if it wasn't for the weeds that's holding her

together she'd bursht up in the deep."

"And who owns this valuable property?" pursued Mr. Mooney.

"She's between Con Brickley and me brother, an' the saine is between

four, an' whatever crew does be in it should get their share, and the

boat has a man's share."

I made no attempt to comprehend this, relying with well-founded

confidence on Flurry Knox's grasp of such enigmas.

"Was Con Brickley fishing the same day?"

"He was not, sir. He was at Lisheen Fair; for as clever as he is, he

couldn't kill two birds under one slat!"

Kate Keohane's voice moved unhurried from sentence to sentence and her

slow pale eyes turned for an instant to the lair of the witnesses under

the gallery.

"And you're asking the Bench to believe that this decent man left his

business in Lisheen in order to slash fish at your mother?" said Mr.

Mooney truculently.

"B'lieve me, sorra much business he laves afther him wherever he'll

go!" returned the witness, "himself and his wife had business enough on

the sthrand when the fish was dividing, and it's then themselves put

every name on me."

"Ah, what harm are names!" said Mr. Mooney, dallying elegantly with a

massive watch-chain. "Come now, ma'am! will you swear you got any

ill-usage from Con Brickley or his wife?" He leaned over the front of

his pew, and waited for the answer with his massive red head on one

side.

"I was givin' blood like a c-cow that ye'd shtab with a knife!" said

Kate Keohane, with unshaken dignity. "If it was yourself that was in

it ye'd feel the smart as well as me. My hand and word on it, ye

would! The marks is on me head still, like the prints of dog-bites!"

She lifted a lock of hair from her forehead, and exhibited a

sufficiently repellant injury. Flurry Knox leaned forward.

"Are you sure you haven't that since the time there was that business

between yourself and the postmistress at Munig? I'm told you had the

name of the office on your forehead where she struck you with the

office stamp! Try now, sergeant, can you read Munig on her forehead?"

The Court, not excepting its line of church-wardens, dissolved into

laughter; Kate Keohane preserved an offended silence.

"I suppose you want us to believe," resumed Mr. Mooney sarcastically,

"that a fine hearty woman like you wasn't defending yourself!" Then

with a turkey-cock burst of fury, "On your oath now! What did you

strike Honora Brickley with? Answer me that now! What had you in your

hand?"

"I had nothing only the little rod I had afther the ass," answered Miss

Keohane, with childlike candour. "I done nothing to them; but as for

Con Brickley he put his back to the cliff and he took the flannel wrop

that he had on him, and he threwn it on the sthrand, and he said he

should have Blood, Murdher, or F-Fish!"

She folded her shawl across her breast, a picture of virtue assailed,

yet unassailable.

"You may go down now," said "Roaring Jack" rather hastily, "I want to

have a few words with your brother."

Miss Keohane retired, without having moulted a feather of her dignity,

and her brother Jer came heavily up the steps and on to the platform,

his hot, wary, blue eyes gathering in the Bench and the attorneys in

one bold comprehensive glance. He was a tall, dark man of about five

and forty, clean-shaved, save for two clerical inches of black

whiskers, and in feature of the type of a London clergyman who would

probably preach on Browning.

"Well, sir!" began Mr. Mooney stimulatingly, "and are you the biggest

blackguard from here to America?"

"I am not," said Jer Keohane tranquilly.

"We had you here before us not so very long ago about kicking a goat,

wasn't it? You got a little touch of a pound, I think?"

This delicate allusion to a fine that the Bench had thought fit to

impose did not distress the witness.

"I did, sir."

"And how's our friend the goat?" went on Mr. Mooney, with the furious

facetiousness reserved for hustling tough witnesses.

"Well, I suppose she's something west of the Skelligs by now," replied

Jer Keohane with great composure.

An appreciative grin ran round the court. The fact that the goat had

died of the kick and been "given the cliff" being regarded as an

excellent jest.

Mr. Mooney consulted his notes:

"Well, now, about this fight," he said pleasantly, "did you see your

sister catch Mrs. Brickley and pull her hair down to the ground and

drag the shawl off of her?"

"Well," said the witness airily, "they had a little bit of a scratch on

account o' the fish. Con Brickley had the shteer o' the boat in his

hand and says he, 'is there any man here that'll take the shteer from

me?' The man was dhrunk, of course," added Jer charitably.

"Did you have any talk with his wife about the fish?"

"I couldn't tell the words that she said to me!" replied the witness,

with a reverential glance at the Bench, "and she over-right three

crowds o' men that was on the sthrand."

Mr. Mooney put his hands in his pockets and surveyed the witness.

"You're a very refined gentleman upon my word! Were you ever in

England?"

"I was part of three years."

"Oh, that accounts for it, I suppose!" said Mr. Mooney, accepting this

lucid statement without a stagger, and passing lightly on. "You're a

widower, I understand, with no objection to consoling yourself?"

No answer.

"Now, sir! Can you deny that you made proposals of marriage to Con

Brickley's daughter last Shraft?"

The plot thickened. Con Brickley's daughter was my late kitchenmaid.

Jer Keohane smiled tolerantly.

"Ah! That was a thing o' nothing!"

"Nothing!" said Mr. Mooney, with the roar of a tornado, "do you call an

impudent proposal of marriage to a respectable man's daughter nothing!

That's English manners, I suppose!"

"I was goin' home one Sunday," said Jer Keohane, conversationally to

the Bench, "and I met the gerr'l and her mother. I spoke to the gerr'l

in a friendly way, and asked her why wasn't she gettin' marrid, and she

commenced to peg stones at me and dhrew several blows of an umbrella on

me. I had only three bottles o' porther taken. There now was the

whole of it."

Mrs. Brickley, from under the gallery, groaned heavily and ironically.

I found it difficult to connect these coquetries with my impressions of

my late kitchenmaid, a furtive and touzled being, who, in conjunction

with a pail and scrubbing brush, had been wont to melt round corners

and into doorways at my approach.

"Are we trying a breach of promise case?" interpolated Flurry, "if so,

we ought to have the plaintiff in."

"My purpose, sir," said Mr. Mooney, in a manner discouraging to levity,

"is to show that my clients have received annoyance and contempt from

this man and his sister such as no parents would submit to."

A hand came forth from under the gallery and plucked at Mr. Mooney's

coat. A red monkey face appeared out of the darkness, and there was a

hoarse whisper whose purport I could not gather. Con Brickley, the

defendant, was giving instructions to his lawyer.

It was perhaps as a result of these that Jer Keohane's evidence closed

here. There was a brief interval, enlivened by coughs, grinding of

heavy boots on the floor, and some mumbling and groaning under the

gallery.

"There's great duck-shooting out on a lake on this island," commented

Flurry to me, in a whisper. "My grand-uncle went there one time with

an old duck-gun he had, that he fired with a fuse. He was three hours

stalking the ducks before he got the gun laid. He lit the fuse then,

and it set to work sputtering and hissing like a goods-engine till

there wasn't a duck within ten miles. The gun went off then."

This useful side light on the matter in hand was interrupted by the

cumbrous ascent of the one-legged Con Brickley to the witness-table.

He sat down heavily, with his slouch hat on his sound knee, and his

wooden stump stuck out before him. His large monkey-face was immovably

serious; his eye was small, light grey, and very quick.

McCaffery, the opposition attorney, a thin, restless youth, with ears

like the handles of an urn, took him in hand. To the pelting

cross-examination that beset him Con Brickley replied with sombre

deliberation, and with a manner of uninterested honesty, emphasising

what he said with slight, very effective gestures of his big, supple

hands. His voice was deep and pleasant; it betrayed no hint of so

trivial a thing as satisfaction when, in the teeth of Mr. McCaffery's

leading questions, he established the fact that the "little rod" with

which Miss Kate Keohane had beaten his wife was the handle of a

pitchfork.

[Illustration: CON BRICKLEY]

"I was counting the fish the same time," went on Con Brickley, in his

rolling basso profundissimo, "and she said, 'Let the divil clear me out

of the sthrand, for there's no one else will put me out!' says she."

[Illustration: "LET THE DIVIL CLEAR ME OUT OF THE STHRAND!"]

"It was then she got the blow, I suppose!" said McCaffery venomously;

"you had a stick yourself, I daresay?"

"Yes. I had a stick. I must have a stick," deep and mellow pathos was

hinted at in the voice; "I am sorry to say. What could I do to her? A

man with a wooden leg on a sthrand could do nothing!"

Something like a laugh ran round the back of the court. Mr.

McCaffery's ears turned scarlet and became quite decorative. On or off

a strand Con Brickley was not a person to be scored off easily.

His clumsy yet impressive descent from the witness-stand followed

almost immediately, and was not the least telling feature of his

evidence. Mr. Mooney surveyed his exit with the admiration of one

artist for another, and rising, asked the Bench's permission to call

Mrs. Brickley.

Mrs. Brickley, as she mounted to the platform, in the dark and nun-like

severity of her long cloak, the stately blue cloth cloak that is the

privilege of the Munster peasant woman, was an example of the rarely

blended qualities of picturesqueness and respectability. As she took

her seat in the chair, she flung the deep hood back on to her

shoulders, and met the gaze of the Court with her grey head erect; she

was a witness to be proud of.

[Illustration: A WITNESS TO BE PROUD OF]

"Now Mrs. Brickley," said "Roaring Jack" urbanely, "will you describe

this interview between your daughter and Keohane."

"It was the last Sunday in Shrove, your Worship, Mr. Flurry Knox, and

gentlemen," began Mrs. Brickley nimbly, "meself and me little gerr'l

was comin' from mass, and Jer Keohane come up to us and got on in a

most unmannerable way. He asked me daughter would she marry him. Me

daughter told him she would not, quite friendly like. I'll tell ye no

lie, gentlemen, she was teasing him with the umbrella the same time,

an' he raised his shtick and dhrew a sthroke on her in the back, an'

the little gerr'l took up a small pebble of a stone and fired it at

him. She put the umbrella up to his mouth, but she called him no

names. But as for him, the names he put on her was to call her 'a

nasty long slopeen of a proud thing, and a slopeen of a proud tinker.'"

"Very lover-like expressions!" commented Mr. Mooney, doubtless

stimulated by lady-like titters from the barmaids; "and had this

romantic gentleman made any previous proposals for your daughter?"

"Himself had two friends over from across the water one night to make

the match, a Sathurday it was, and they should land the lee side o' the

island, for the wind was a fright," replied Mrs. Brickley, launching

her tale with the power of easy narration that is bestowed with such

amazing liberality on her class; "the three o' them had dhrink taken,

an' I went to shlap out the door agin them. Me husband said then we

should let them in, if it was a Turk itself, with the rain that was in

it. They were talking in it then till near the dawning, and in the

latther end all that was between them was the boat's share."

"What do you mean by 'the boat's share'?" said I.

"'Tis the same as a man's share, me worshipful gintleman," returned

Mrs. Brickley splendidly; "it goes with the boat always, afther the

crew and the saine has their share got."

I possibly looked as enlightened as I felt by this exposition.

"You mean that Jer wouldn't have her unless he got the boat's share

with her?" suggested Flurry.

"He said it over-right all that was in the house, and he reddening his

pipe at the fire," replied Mrs. Brickley, in full-sailed response to

the helm. "'D'ye think,' says I to him, 'that me daughter would leave

a lovely situation, with a kind and tendher masther, for a mean, hungry

blagyard like yerself,' says I, 'that's livin' always in this backwards

place!' says I."

This touching expression of preference for myself, as opposed to Mr.

Keohane, was received with expressionless respect by the Court.

Flurry, with an impassive countenance, kicked me heavily under cover of

the desk. I said that we had better get on to the assault on the

strand. Nothing could have been more to Mrs. Brickley's taste. We

were minutely instructed as to how Katie Keohane drew the shawleen

forward on Mrs. Brickley's head to stifle her; and how Norrie Keohane

was fast in her hair. Of how Mrs. Brickley had then given a stroke

upwards between herself and her face (whatever that might mean) and

loosed Norrie from her hair. Of how she then sat down and commenced to

cry from the use they had for her.

"'Twas all I done," she concluded, looking like a sacred picture, "I

gave a sthroke of a pollock on them." Then, an after-thought, "an' if

I did, 'twas myself was at the loss of the same pollock!"

I fixed my eyes immovably on my desk. I knew that the slightest

symptom of intelligence on my part would instantly draw forth the

episode of the fish-buying on the morning of the dinner party, with the

rape of Philippa's sleeve, and the unjust aspersion on Miss Brickley

following in due sequence, ending with the paralytic seizure and

dignified departure of the latter to her parents' residence in Hare

Island. The critical moment was averted by a question from Mr. Mooney.

"As for language," replied Mrs. Brickley, with clear eyes a little

uplifted in the direction of the ceiling, "there was no name from

heaven and hell but she had it on me, and wishin' the divil might burn

the two heels off me, and the like o' me wasn't in sivin parishes! And

that was the clane part of the discoorse, yer Worships!"

Mrs. Brickley here drew her cloak more closely about her, as though to

enshroud herself in her own refinement, and presented to the Bench a

silence as elaborate as a drop scene. It implied, amongst other

things, a generous confidence in the imaginative powers of her audience.

Whether or no this was misplaced, Mrs. Brickley was not invited further

to enlighten the Court. After her departure the case droned on in

inexhaustible rancour, and trackless complications as to the shares of

the fish. Its ethics and its arithmetic would have defied the allied

intellects of Solomon and Bishop Colenso. It was somewhere in that

dead hour of the afternoon, when it is too late for lunch and too early

for tea, that the Bench, wan with hunger, wound up the affair by

impartially binding both parties in sheaves "to the Peace."

As a sub-issue I arranged with Mr. Knox to shoot duck on the one-legged

man's land on Hare Island as soon as should be convenient, and lightly

dismissed from my mind my dealings, official and otherwise, with the

House of Brickley.

But even as there are people who never give away old clothes, so are

there people, of whom is Flurry Knox, who never dismiss anything from

their minds.

VII

THE LAST DAY OF SHRAFT

It was not many days after the Keohane and Brickley trial that my

wife's elderly step-brother, Maxwell Bruce, wrote to us to say that he

was engaged in a tour through the Irish-speaking counties, and would

look us up on his way from Kerry. The letter began "_O Bean uasal_,"

and broke into eruptions of Erse at various points, but the excerpts

from Bradshaw were, fortunately, in the vernacular.

Philippa assured me she could read it all. During the previous winter

she had had five lessons and a half in the Irish language from the

National Schoolmaster, and believed herself to be one of the props of

the Celtic movement. My own attitude with regard to the Celtic

movement was sympathetic, but a brief inspection of the grammar

convinced me that my sympathies would not survive the strain of

tripthongs, eclipsed consonants, and synthetic verbs, and that I should

do well to refrain from embittering my declining years by an impotent

and humiliating pursuit of the most elusive of pronunciations.

Philippa had attained to the height of being able to greet the

schoolmaster in Irish, and, if the day happened to be fine, she was

capable of stating the fact; other aspects of the weather, however

remarkable, she epitomised in a brilliant smile, and the schoolmaster

was generally considerate enough not to press the matter.

My step-brother-in-law neither hunted, shot, nor fished, yet as a guest

he never gave me a moment's anxiety. He possessed the attribute,

priceless in guests, a good portable hobby, involving no machinery,

accessories, or paraphernalia of any kind. It did not even involve the

personal attendance of his host. His mornings were spent in proffering

Irish phrases to bewildered beggars at the hall door, or to the

respectfully bored Peter Cadogan in the harness-room. He held

_conversaziones_ in the servants' hall after dinner, while I slept

balmily in front of the drawing-room fire. When not thus engaged, he

sat in his room making notes, and writing letters to the Archimandrites

of his faith. Truly an ideal visitor, one to whom neglect was a

kindness, and entertainments an abomination; certainly not a person to

take to Hare Island to shoot ducks with Flurry Knox.

[Illustration: HIS MORNINGS WERE SPENT IN PROFFERING IRISH PHRASES]

But it was otherwise ordained by Philippa. Hare Island was, she said,

and the schoolmaster said, a place where the Irish language was still

spoken with a purity worthy of the Isles of Aran. Its folk-lore was an

unworked mine, and it was moreover the home of one Shemus Ruadth, a

singer and poet (and, I may add, a smuggler of tobacco) of high local

renown: Maxwell should on no account miss such a chance. I mentioned

that Hare Island was at present going through the measles phase of its

usual rotation of epidemics. My wife wavered, in a manner that showed

me that I had been on the verge of a family picnic, and I said I had

heard that there was whooping-cough there too. The children had had

neither. The picnic expired without a sound, but my

step-brother-in-law had made up his mind.

It was a grey and bitter February morning when Maxwell and I,

accompanied by Peter Cadogan, stood waiting on the beach at Yokahn for

Flurry to arrive. Maria, as was her wont, was nosing my gun as if she

expected to see a woodcock fly out of it; that Minx was beside her was

due to the peculiar inveteracy of Minx. How she had achieved it is of

no consequence; the distressing fact remained that she was there,

seated, shuddering, upon a space of wet stone no larger than a

sixpence, and had to be accepted as one of the party. It struck me

that Mr. Cadogan had rather overdressed the part of dog-boy and

bag-bearer, being attired in a striped blue flannel suit that had once

been mine, a gaudy new cap, and yellow boots. The social possibilities

of Hare Island had faded from my mind; I merely experienced the usual

humiliation of perceiving how discarded garments can, in a lower

sphere, renew their youth and blossom as the rose. I was even

formulating a system of putting my old clothes out at grass, as it

were, with Peter Cadogan, when a messenger arrived with a note from

Flurry Knox in which he informed me, with many regrets, that he was

kept at home on unexpected business, but he had arranged that we should

find a boat ready to take us to the island, and Con Brickley would look

after us when we got there. The boat was even now nearing the beach,

rowed by two men, who, in beautiful accord with our "binding to the

Peace," proved to be the Widower, Jer Keohane, and his late antagonist,

the one-legged Con Brickley. In view of this millennial state of

affairs it seemed alarmingly probable that the boat which had come for

us was that on which, as on a pivot, the late battle had turned. A

witness had said, on oath, that "if it wasn't for the weeds that's

holding her together she'd bursht up in the deep." I inspected her

narrowly, and was relieved to see that the weeds still held their

ground.

A mile of slatey water tumbled between us and the island, and an undue

proportion of it, highly flavoured by fish, flowed in uneasy tides in

the bottom of the boat, with a final disposition towards the well-laden

stern. There were no bottom boards, and, judging by the depth of the

flood over the keel, her draught appeared to be equal to that of a

racing yacht. We sat precariously upon strips of nine-inch plank, our

feet propped against the tarred sides just out of the wash; the boat

climbed and wallowed with a three-cornered roll, the dogs panted in

mingled nausea and agitation, and the narrow blades of the oars dipped

their frayed edges in the waves in short and untiring jerks.

My brother-in-law, with a countenance leaden magenta from cold,

struggled with the whirling leaves of a phrase book. He was tall and

thin, of the famished vegetarian type of looks, with unpractical,

prominent eyes, and a complexion that on the hottest day in summer

imparted a chill to the beholder; in this raw November wind it was a

positive suffering even to think of his nose, and my eyes rested, in

unconscious craving for warmth, upon the changeless, impartial red of

Con Brickley's monkey face.

We landed with a rush on the steep shingle of a sheltered cove. The

island boasted a pier, built with "Relief" money, but it was two miles

from the lake where I was to shoot, and this small triangle of beach,

tucked away in a notch of the cliff, was within ten minutes' walk of

it. At the innermost angle of the cove, where the notch ended in a

tortuous fissure, there was a path that zigzagged to the top of the

cliff, a remarkably excellent path, and a well-worn one, with steps

here and there. I commented on it to Mr. Brickley.

"Why, thin, it was in this same place that I losht the owld leg, sir,"

he replied in his sombre voice. "I took a shlip on a dark night and me

landlord was that much sorry for me that he made a good pat' in it."

He was pitching himself up the steps on his crutches as he spoke, an

object of compassion of the most obvious and silencing sort. Why,

then, should Peter Cadogan smile furtively at the Widower?

At the top of the fissure, where it melted into a hollow between low,

grassy hills, stood the Brickleys' cottage, long, low, and whitewashed,

deep in shelter, with big stones, hung in halters of hay-rope, lying on

its thatch, to keep the roof on in the Atlantic gales. A thick fuchsia

hedge surrounded it; from its open door proceeded sounds of furious

altercation; apparently a man and woman hurling invective and

personalities at each other in Irish, at the tops of their voices. Con

Brickley sprang forward on his crutch, a girl at the door vanished into

the house, and a sudden silence fell. With scarcely a perceptible

interval, Mrs. Brickley appeared in the doorway, a red shawl tied over

her rippling grey hair, her manner an inimitable blend of deference and

hospitality.

"Your Honour's welcome, Major Yeates," she said with a curtsey. A door

banged at the back of the cottage. "That was a poor man from across

the water that came apologisin' to me for dhrawin' me name down in a

little disagreement that he had about a settin' o' goose eggs."

I suppose that it was contrition that caused the apologist to stumble

heavily as he came round the corner of the house, and departed at a

tangent through an opening in the fuchsia hedge. Feeling that comment

on the incident was too delicate a matter for my capacities, I

introduced Maxwell and his aspirations to the lady of the house. Any

qualms that I might have had as to how to dispose of him while I was

shooting were set at rest by Mrs. Brickley's instant grasp of the

situation. I regret to say that I can neither transcribe nor translate

the rolling periods in which my brother-in-law addressed himself to

her. I have reason to believe that he apostrophised her as "O worthy

woman of cows!" invoking upon her and her household a comprehensive and

classic blessing, dating from the time of Cuchulain.

Mrs. Brickley received it without a perceptible stagger, and in the

course of the next few minutes, Miss Bridget Brickley (who, it may be

remembered, had but recently renounced the office of kitchenmaid in my

house) emerged, beautifully dressed, from the cottage, and was

despatched, at full speed, to summon Shemus Ruadth, the poet, as well

as one or two of "the neighbours" reputed to speak Irish of the purest

kind. If to make a guest feel himself to be the one person in the

world whose welfare is of any importance is the aim of hostesses, they

can study the art in its perfection under the smoky rafters of Irish

cabins. If it is insincere, it is equally to be respected; it is often

amiable to be insincere.

My own share of the day's enjoyment opened plausibly enough, though

not, possibly, as cloudlessly as Maxwell's. Attended by Maria, Peter

Cadogan, and the Widower, and by a smell of whisky that floated to me

on the chill breeze when the Widower was to windward, I set forth,

having--as I fatuously imagined--disposed of Minx and of her intention

to join the shooting-party, by tying a stout piece of cord to her

collar, and placing its other end in my brother-in-law's hand. I had,

by Flurry's advice, postponed the shooting of the lake till the last

thing before leaving the island, and turning my back upon it, I tramped

inland along half-thawed marshes in search of snipe, and crept behind

walls after plover, whose elusive whistling was always two fields

ahead. After an unfruitful hour or so the entertainment began to drag,

and another plan of campaign seemed advisable: I made a cache of my

retinue behind a rock, one of the many rocks that stood like fossilised

mammoths upon the ragged hill slopes, and, with Maria at my heels,

accomplished a long and laborious detour. At length, through the

crannies of a wall, I perceived just within shot a stand of plover,

hopping, gobbling, squealing, quite unaware of my proximity. I

cautiously laid my gun on the top of the wall. As I cocked it, a white

form appeared on a fence behind the birds, poised itself for an instant

with elf-like ears spread wide, then, volleying barks, the intolerable

Minx burst like a firework into the heart of the plover. In lightning

response to her comrade's tally-ho Maria rocketted over the wall; the

plover rose as one man, and, as I missed with both barrels, swirled out

of range and sight. By way, I suppose, of rounding off the jest

effectively, Maria rushed in scientific zigzags through the field, in

search of the bird that she well knew I had not shot, deaf as the dead

to words of command, while Minx, stark mad with excitement, circled and

shrieked round Maria. To take off Maria's collar and thrash her

heavily with the buckle end of it was futile, except as a personal

gratification, but I did it. To thrash Minx was not only absurd but

impossible; one might as well have tried to thrash a grasshopper.

I whistled for Peter and the Widower without avail, and finally, in

just indignation, went back to look for them. They were gone. Not a

soul was in sight. I concluded that they had gone on towards the lake,

and having sacrificed a sandwich to the capture of Minx I coupled her

to Maria by means of the cord that still trailed from her collar, and

again set forth. The island was a large one, three or four miles long

by nearly as many wide; I had opened my campaign along its western

shores, where heather struggled with bog, and stones, big and little,

bestrewed any patch sound enough to carry them. Here and there were

places where turf had been cut for fuel, leaving a drop like a sunk

fence with black water at its foot, a matter requiring a hearty jump on

to what might or might not be sound landing. When two maniacs are

unequally yoked together by their necks, heartiness and activity are of

less importance than unanimity, and it was in unanimity that Maria and

Minx chiefly failed. At such moments, profoundly as I detested Minx,

my sympathies reluctantly were hers. Conscious, as are all little

dogs, of her superior astuteness, she yet had to submit to Maria's

choice of pace, to Maria's professional quarterings and questings of

obviously barren tracts of bogland. In bursts of squealing fury she

hung from Maria's ear, she tore mouthfuls of brown wool from her neck,

she jibbed with all her claws stuck into the ground; none the less she

was swept across the ditches, and lugged over the walls, in seeming

oneness of purpose, in total and preposterous absurdity. At one

juncture a snipe, who must, I think, have been deaf, remained long

enough within their sphere of action for me to shoot him. The couple,

unanimous for once, charged down upon the remains; the corpse was

secured by Maria, but was torn piecemeal from her jaws by Minx. They

then galloped emulously back to me for applause, still bitterly

contesting every inch of the snipe, and, having grudgingly relinquished

the fragments, waited wild-eyed and panting, with tongues hanging like

aprons to their knees.

It was towards the close of the incident that I was aware of a sibilant

whispering near me, and found that I was being observed from the rear

with almost passionate interest, by two little girls and a pair of

goats. I addressed the party with an enquiry as to whether they had

seen Jer Keohane.

The biggest little girl said that she had not seen him, but, in a _non

sequitur_ full of intelligence, added that she had seen Peter Cadogan a

while ago, sitting down under a wall, himself and Pidge.

"What's Pidge?" said I cautiously. "Is it a dog?"

"Oh Christians!" said the smaller child, swiftly covering her mouth

with her pinafore.

The elder, with an untrammelled grin, explained that "Pidge" was the

name by which my late kitchenmaid was known in the home circle.

I postponed comment till Peter should be delivered into my hand, then,

rightly concluding that the tendance of Hare Island goats would ensure

the qualities necessary for dealing with even Maria and Minx, I engaged

the pair as dog-boys.

My progress from this point to the lake might have been taken from the

Old Testament, or the Swiss Family Robinson. In front of me paced the

goats, who had sociably declined to be left out of the expedition;

behind me strove the dogs, with the wiry and scarlet fingers of their

attendants knotted in Mrs. Brickley's invaluable piece of string. It

proved to be a thoroughly successful working arrangement; I even shot a

plover, which was retrieved _en masse_ by all except the goats.

In complete amity we reached the lake, a reedy strip of water that

twisted in and out between low hills, its indeterminate shores cloaked

with reeds. It was now past three o'clock, and the cold grey afternoon

was already heaping into the west the pile of dark clouds that was to

be its equivalent for sunset. I crept warily forward round the flank

of the nearest hill, leaving the dogs and their keepers in death

grapple, and the goats snatching mouthfuls of grass beside them, in the

petulant, fractious manner of goats, that so ill assorts with their

Presbyterian grey beards.

The frost had been preceded by a flood, and the swamp bordering the

lake was very bad going; the tussocks were rotten, the holes were

delusively covered with lids of white ice, and to traverse these in the

attitude of a man with acute lumbago was no light matter. But the

ducks were there. I could hear them quacking and splashing beyond the

screen of reeds, and, straightening my back for an observation, caught

sight of four or five swimming in a line, well within range. There was

not an instant to lose; balancing precariously on a tussock, I flung up

my gun and fired. Terrific quacking followed, interspersed by distant

and heartrending yells from the dogs, but the inexplicable feature of

the case was that the ducks did not rise from the water. Had I slain

the whole crowd? There was a sound as if the marsh behind me was being

slashed with a flail; a brown body whizzed past me, closely followed by

a white one. "From his mountain home King James had rushing come," in

other words, my retrievers had hurled themselves upon their prey.

Maria's performance was faultless; in half a minute she had laid a bird

at my feet, a very large pale drake, quite unlike any wild drake that I

had ever----

[Illustration: MARIA'S PERFORMANCE WAS FAULTLESS]

Out of the silence that followed came a thin, shrill voice from the

hill:

"Thim's Mrs. Brickley's ducks!"

In horrid confirmation of this appalling statement I perceived the

survivors already landing on the far side of the lake, and hurrying

homeward up the hill with direful clamours, while a wedge-shaped ripple

in the grey water with a white speck at its apex, told of Minx in an

ecstasy of pursuit.

"Stop the dog!" I shouted to my maids-of-honour, "run round and catch

her!"

Maria here, in irrepressible appropriation of the mission, bolted

between my legs, and sent me staggering backwards into a very

considerable boghole.

I will not labour the details. After some flounderings I achieved

safety and the awe-stricken comments of the maids-of-honour, as wet as

I have ever been in my life, and about five times as cold. One of my

young ladies captured Minx in the act of getting ashore; the other

collected the slaughtered drake and shrouded him in her pinafore, with

a grasp of the position that did credit to both heart and head, and

they finally informed me that Mrs. Brickley's house was only a small

pieceen away.

I had left Mrs. Brickley's house a well-equipped sportsman, creditably

escorted by Peter Cadogan and the Widower. I returned to it a muddy

and dripping outcast, attended by two little girls, two goats, and her

own eight ducks, whom my hand had widowed. My sodden clothes clung

clammily about me; the wind, as it pierced them, carried with it all

the iciness of the boghole. I walked at top speed to get up some

semblance of a circulation; I should have run were it not for the

confusion that such a proceeding would have caused to my cortège. As

it was, the ducks fled before me in waddling panic, with occasional

help from their wings, and panting and pattering in the rear told that

the maids-of-honour, the goats, and the dogs were maintaining with

difficulty their due places in the procession. As I neared the cottage

I saw a boy go quickly into it and shut the door; I passed into the

yard within the fuchsia hedge and heard some one inside howling and

droning a song in Irish, and as I knocked, with frozen knuckles, the

house gave the indefinable feeling of being full of people. There was

no response; I lifted the latch. The door opened into the

frieze-covered backs of several men, and an evenly blended smell of

whisky, turf smoke, and crowded humanity steamed forth.

The company made way for me, awkwardly; I noticed a tendency amongst

them to hold on to each other, and there was a hilarious light in Mrs.

Brickley's eye as she hustled forward to meet me. My brother-in-law

was sitting at a table by the window writing in a notebook by the last

light of the waning day; he gave me a glance laden with affairs to

which I was superfluous. A red-eyed, red-headed man, evidently the

singer, was standing in the middle of the room; it must have been in

conformity with some irresistible law of nature that his hair stood out

round his head in the orthodox poetic aureole.

In spite of the painful publicity of the moment there was but one

course open to me. I tendered to my hostess the corpse of the drake,

with abject apologies and explanations. To say that Mrs. Brickley

accepted them favourably is quite inadequate. She heaped insults upon

the drake, for his age, for his ugliness, for his temerity in getting

in my way; she, in fact, accepted his slaughter in the light of a

personal favour and an excellent jest combined, and passed rapidly on

to explain that the company consisted of a few of the neighbours that

was gathered to talk to the gentleman, and to be singing "them owld

songs" for him; their number and their zeal being entirely due to the

deep personal regard entertained for me by Hare Island. She further

mentioned that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that people should "jolly

themselves" before Lent. I was hurriedly conveyed to what is known as

"Back in the room," a blend of best parlour and bedroom, with an

immense bed in the corner. A fire was lighted, by the simple method of

importing most of the kitchen fire, bodily, in a bucket, and placing it

on the hearth, and I was conjured to "sthrip" and to put on a new suit

of clothes belonging to my host while my own were being dried. He

himself valeted me, inaugurating the ceremony with a tumbler of hot

whisky and water. The suit of new clothes was of the thickest blue

cloth, stiff as boards, and they smelt horribly of stale turf smoke.

The discovery that the trousers consisted of but a leg and a half was

startling; I had forgotten this aspect of the case, but now, in the

proprietor's presence, it was impossible to withdraw from the loan. I

could, at all events, remain perdu. Through all these preparations I

was aware of highly incensed and fruitless callings for "Pidge"; of

Peter Cadogan no tidings were forthcoming, and although a conventional

sense of honour withheld me from disclosing the information I might

have given about the young lady, it did not deter me from mentally

preparing a warm reception for her squire.

I sat by the fire in regal seclusion, with my clothes steaming on a

chair opposite to me, and the strong glow of the red turf scorching the

shin that was unprotected. Maria and Minx, also steaming, sat in

exquisite serenity in front of the blaze, retiring every now and then

to fling themselves, panting, on a cold space of floor. The hot whisky

and water sent its vulgar and entirely acceptable consolations into the

frozen recesses of my being, a feeling of sociability stole upon me; I

felt magnanimously pleased at the thought that Maxwell, at least, had

had a perfectly successful day; I glowed with gratitude towards Con

Brickley and his wife.

Judged by the usual test of hostesses, that is to say, noise, the

_conversazione_ in Maxwell's honour was a high success. Gabble and

hum, harangue and argument, and, through all, Maxwell's unemotional

educated voice in discussion with the poet. Scraps of English here and

there presently told me that the talk had centred itself upon the

tragedy of the drake. I had the gratification of hearing Mrs. Brickley

inform her friends that "if that owld dhrake was shot, itself, he was

in the want of it, and divil mend him, going parading there till he had

the Major put asthray! Sure that's the gintleman that's like a child!

and Pidge could tell ye the same."

"Faith and thrue for ye," said another apologist, also female, "and ye

wouldn't blame him if he didn't leave duck nor dhrake livin' afther

him, with the annoyance he got from thim that should be tinding him,

and he bloated with the walk and all!"

(I may, in my own interest, explain that this unattractive description

merely implied that I was heated from excessive exercise.)

"And as for the same Pidge," broke in Mrs. Brickley with sudden fire,

"when I ketch her it isn't to bate her I'll go, no! but to dhrag her by

the hair o' the head round the kitchen."

These agreeable anticipations were interrupted by other voices. Some

one named Paddy was called upon to sing the song about Ned Flaherty's

drake.

"Sing up, Paddy boy, for the gentleman! Arrah, what ails ye, Paddy!

Don't be ashamed at all!"

"'Tis a lovely song, your honour, sir!" (this to my brother-in-law).

"Is it an ancient song?" I heard Maxwell enquire with serious eagerness.

"It is, your honour; 'twas himself made it up lasht year, and he sings

it beautiful! Oh! Paddy's a perfect modulator!"

With curiosity stimulated by this mysterious encomium I rose softly and

half opened the door in order to obtain a view of the Modulator. A

lamp with a glaring tin reflector was on the table beside Maxwell; it

illumined Paddy, the Modulator, an incredibly freckled youth, standing

in front of my brother-in-law, with eyes fixed on the ground and arms

hanging limply at his sides, like a prisoner awaiting sentence. It

illumined also the artistic contempt on the elder Poet's countenance,

and further revealed to me the fact that from twenty-five to thirty men

and women were packed into the small kitchen.

The Modulator opened with a long-drawn and nasal cadenza, suggestive of

the droning preliminary canter of a bagpipe, which merged into the

statement that

The poor little fella',

His legs they were yella',

His bosom was blue, he could swim like a hake;

But some wicked savage,

To grease his white cabbage,

Murdered Ned Flaherty's beautiful dhrake!

[Illustration: THE MODULATOR OPENED WITH A LONG-DRAWN AND NASAL CADENZA]

Riotous applause followed on this startlingly appropriate requiem.

Maxwell coldly laid down his stylograph with the manner of a reporter

during an unimportant speech; the Poet took a clay pipe out of his

pocket and examined its contents with an air of detachment; Paddy, with

a countenance of undiminished gloom, prepared the way for the next

verse with some half-dozen jig-steps, ending with a sledge-hammer stamp

on the earthen floor. Fresh thunders of approval greeted the effort.

It seemed to me that Con Brickley's hospitality had been a trifle

excessive; I even meditated a hint to that effect, but neither my host

nor my hostess was visible. They were apparently holding an overflow

meeting in a room at the other end of the house, and I noticed that

although there was a steady flow of passers in and out between it and

the kitchen, the door was carefully closed after each opening.

Suddenly the lamp on Maxwell's table flared up smokily as the door of

the house was burst open. The second verse of the drake's elegy ceased

at its first line. A woman whom I recognised as Kate Keohane, sister

of the Widower, drove her way into the kitchen, sweeping back the

people on either side of her with her arms, as though she was swimming.

Her face was scarlet.

"Is Jer Keohane within here?" she shouted.

"He is not!" replied several voices.

Instantly the door of the inner room flew open, and like a stag (or a

tom-cat, either simile would serve), answering the challenge of a

rival, Mrs. Brickley came forth.

"Is it yer brother you're wantin', ma'am?" she said with lofty

politeness. "Ye can search out the house for him if ye like. It's

little he troubles my house or myself now, thanks be to God, and to the

Magistrates that took my part before all that was in the Coort-house!

Me that he had goin' in dhread o' me life, with him afther me always in

me thrack like a lap-dog!"

"And who has him enticed now but your own daughther?" shrieked Miss

Keohane with lightning rapidity. "Isn't Ellen, the Chapel-woman,

afther tellin' me she seen herself and himself shneakin' down

behindside the chapel, like they'd be goin' aisht to the far sthrand,

and she dhressed out, and the coat she stole from Mrs. Yeates on her

and a bundle in her hand! Sure doesn't the world know she has her

passage paid to Ameriky this two months!"

"Ye lie!" panted Mrs. Brickley, catching her antagonist by the arm, not

in attack, but in the the awful truce of mutual panic.

Miss Keohane flung her off, only the better to gather force for the

prolonged and direful howl of which she delivered herself.

"If she didn't come here with him it's to Ameriky she's taken him!

Look in yer box an' ye'll see where she got the passage money! She has

the boat's share taken from ye in spite of yer teeth!" Miss Keohane

here dropped upon her knees. "An' I pray," she continued, lyrically,

"that the devil may melt her, the same as ye'd melt the froth off

porther----"

Groans, hoots, and drunken laughter overwhelmed the close of this

aspiration. Oblivious of my costume, I stepped forward, with the

intention of attracting Maxwell's attention, and withdrawing him and

myself as swiftly and unobtrusively as possible from a position that

threatened to become too hot to hold us.

Even as I did so, I saw in the dark blue space of the open door a face

that was strangely familiar, a face at once civilised and martial,

whose gaze was set incredulously upon me.

"Here's the Polis!" squeaked a little girl.

The poet blew out the lamp. The house was in an instant full of the

voiceless and strenuous shoving and trampling of people trying to

escape. I heard the table go over with a crash, and could only suppose

that Maxwell had gone with it, and Maria and Minx, convinced that a

cat-hunt was at the root of the matter, barked deafeningly and

unceasingly.

In a blinding flash of insight I realised that my brother-in-law and I

had been taken red-handed in a "Shebeen," that is to say, a house in

which drink is illicitly sold without a license.

The Police Sergeant was egregiously tactful. During the conversation

that I held with him in the inner room he did not permit his eye to

condescend lower than the top button of Mr. Brickley's coat, a

consideration that but served to make me more conscious of the

humiliating deficiency below, nor did it deviate towards the empty

tumbler, with the incriminating spoon in it, that stood on the table.

He explained to me and to Maxwell, whose presence I felt to be my sole

link with respectability, that the raid had been planned in consequence

of information received after the trial.

"I was going to you, sir, to sign the warrant, but Mr. Knox and Dr.

Hickey signed it for us. It was Mr. Knox advised us to come here

to-day. We've found three half-barrels of porter under the bed in the

room over there, and about two gallons of potheen hid under fishing

nets. I'll have about thirty summonses out of it."

The Sergeant's manner was distressingly apologetic. I said nothing,

but my heart burned within me as I recognised the hand of Flurry Knox.

[Illustration: THE SERGEANT'S MANNER WAS DISTRESSINGLY APOLOGETIC]

"In case you might be looking for your man Cadogan, sir," went on the

Sergeant, "we seen him in a boat, with two other parties, a man and a

woman, going to the mainland when we were coming over. The man that

was pulling the other oar had the appearance of having drink taken."

A second flash, less blinding than the first, but equally illuminative,

revealed to me that the brown boots, the flannel suit, had been a

wedding garment, the predetermined attire of the Best Man, and a third

recalled the fact that Shrove Tuesday was the last day between this and

Easter on which a marriage could take place.

Maxwell and I went back with the police, and Maxwell explained to me at

some length the origin of the word shebeen. As I neared the mainland,

which to-morrow would ring with Flurry's artistic version of the day's

events, the future held but one bright spot, the thought of putting

Peter Cadogan to fire and sword.

But even that was denied to me. It must have been at the identical

moment that my cook, Mrs. Cadogan (aunt of the missing Peter), was

placing her wedding ring in the Shrove Tuesday pancakes that evening,

that my establishment was felled as one man by tidings that still

remain preëminent among the sensations of Shreelane. They reached me,

irrepressibly, with the coffee.

Hard on the heels of the flushed parlour-maid followed the flat and

heavy tread of Mrs. Cadogan, who, like the avenging deities, was

habitually shod with felt.

"And now, sir, what do ye say to Pether Cadogan!" she began, launching

the enigma into space from the obscurity of the deep doorway. "What do

ye say to him now? The raving scamp!"

I replied that I had a great deal to say to him, and that if I might so

far trespass on his leisure as to request his presence in the hall, I

would say it.

"Hall is it!" echoed Peter's aunt in bitter wrath. "It's my heart's

grief that he ever stood in Shreelane hall to dhraw disgrace on me and

on yer Honour! God forgive me, when I heard it I had to spit! Himself

and Bridget Brickley got married in Skebawn this evening and the two o'

them is gone to Ameriky on the thrain to-night, and it's all I'll say

for her, whatever sort of a thrash she is, she's good enough for him!"

There was a pause while one might pant twice.

"I'll tell ye no lie. If I had a gun in me hand, I'd shoot him like a

bird! I'd down the brat!"

The avenging deity retired.

What part the Widower proposed to play in the day's proceedings will

never be clearly known. He was picked up next day in Hare Island

Sound, drifting seaward in the boat whose "share" had formed the

marriage portion of Mrs. Peter Cadogan. Both oars were gone; there

remained to him an empty bottle of "potheen," and a bucket. He was

rowing the boat with the bucket.

VIII

"A HORSE! A HORSE!"

PART I

"Old Jimmy Porteous!" I ejaculated, while a glow of the ancient

enthusiasm irradiated my bosom, "Philippa, I say! Do you see this?

Jimmy Porteous is to command this District!"

"No, darling, _not_ with an egg!" replied Philippa, removing the honey

spoon from the grasp of her youngest child, just too late to avert

disaster, "we _don't_ eat honey with eggs."

The heavy hand of experience has taught me that at moments such as

these the only possible course is to lie to, head to wind, till the

squall passes, and then begin from the beginning again. I readdressed

myself to my newspaper, while the incident went, like a successful

burlesque, with a roar, sustained from the foot of the stairs to the

point when the nursery door slammed upon it.

Philippa resumed her seat at the breakfast table.

"Yes, dear, what were you saying?" she said, yielding me the laborious

but vague attention that is the best any husband can expect from any

wife on such occasions.

I repeated my statement, and was scandalised to find that Philippa had

but the most shadowy remembrance of Jimmy Porteous, who, in the days

when I first joined my regiment had been its senior subaltern, and, for

me and my fellows, one of the most revered of its law-givers. As a

captain he left us, and proceeded to do something brilliant on

somebody's staff, and, what time I got my company, had moved on in

radiance into a lofty existence in the War Office and newspaper

paragraphs.

I recalled these things to my wife, coupling them with the information

that she would have to call on Lady Porteous, when the door opened, and

the face of Flurry Knox, unshaven and blue, with the miserable

mother-o'-pearl blueness of fair people in cold weather, appeared in

the opening.

He had looked in, he said, on his way home from the fair, to try would

we give him a cup of tea, and he went on to remark that the wind was

cold enough to cut the horns off a cow.

I asked him if he had seen my beasts there, and if they had been sold.

"Oh, they were, they were," he said tolerantly; "it was a wonderful

good fair. The dealers were buying all before them. There was a man

said to me, 'If you had a little dog there, and he to be a calf, you'd

have sold him.'"

It was one of Flurry Knox's ruling principles in life to disparage the

live stock of his friends; it was always within the bounds of

possibility that the moment might arrive when he would wish to buy them.

"I met a man from Sir Thomas Purcell's country yesterday," said Flurry

presently; "he says there's been the father and mother of a row down

there between old Sir Thomas and Hackett, that's the man has the

harriers. Sir Thomas is wild because they say the soldiers are giving

Hackett as good a subscription as himself, and he says Hackett has all

the foxes killed."

"But surely--harriers don't hunt foxes?" said Philippa ingenuously.

Flurry looked at her for a moment in silence. "Is it Hackett's

harriers!" he said compassionately; "sure he flogs them off hares."

"Talking of soldiers, they've just sent a man who used to be in my

regiment to command this district," I said, plucking my own topic from

the tangle of inter-hunt squabbles; "a great man to hounds he used to

be, too."

"Would he buy the Dodger?" asked Flurry swiftly. "Would he give a

price?"

"I daresay he would if he liked the horse. If I got a chance I might

tell him," I said, magnanimously.

"I tell you what, Major," said Flurry, with an eye on his ally,

Philippa, "you and me and Mrs. Yeates will go up and have a day with

Sir Thomas's hounds, and you'll say the word for me to the General!"

Looking back at it all now, I recognise that here was the moment for

firmness. I let the moment slip, and became immersed in tracking

General Sir James Porteous, K.C.B., through the pages of an elderly

Army List. By the time I had located him in three separate columns, I

found that Philippa and Flurry had arranged unalterably the details of

what my wife is pleased to call a ramp--_i.e._ an expedition that, as

its name implies, suggests a raid made by tramps.

"--Why, my gracious! aren't they cousins of my own? They'll be only

delighted! Sure, Sally had measles there three years ago, and 'twas as

good as a play for them!--Put us up, is it? Of course they will! The

whole lot of us. D'ye think Sally'd stay at home?--No, you'll not take

your own horses at all. Hire from Flavin; I'll see he does you well."

"And you know, Sinclair"--thus the other conspirator--"it would be an

excellent chance for you to meet your beloved Jimmy Porteous!"

It was not Mr. Knox's habit to let the grass grow under his feet.

Before I had at all grasped the realities of the project, my wife heard

from Mrs. Sally Knox to say that she had arranged it all with the

Butler-Knoxes, and that we were to stay on for a second night in order

to go to a dance at which we should meet the General. At intervals

during the following week I said to Philippa that it was preposterous

and monstrous to dump ourselves upon the Butler-Knoxes, unknown people

whom we had but once met at a function at the Bishop's. My remembrance

of them, though something blurred by throngs of the clergy and their

wives, did not suggest the type of person who might be expected to keep

open house for stray fox-hunters. I said all this to Philippa, who

entirely agreed with me, and continued her preparations, after the

manner of experienced wives.

It was raining hard one afternoon in the following week when a

four-wheeled inside car--an admirable vehicle, which I wish in no way

to disparage--disgorged its burden at the door of Garden Mount House.

One item of the burden was experiencing a sensation only too familiar,

such a sensation as a respectable seaman might feel on being pressed

into a crew of buccaneers. The house loomed over us, large, square,

and serious, in the wet moonlight of the January evening; the husky,

over-fed bark of an elderly dog was incessant in the hall. If by

laying hold of the coat-tails of the leading pirate, as he got out to

ring the bell, I could then and there have brought the expedition to a

close, I would thankfully have done so.

The door was opened by a melancholy old gentleman with a grey moustache

and whiskers; he might have been Colonel Newcome in his decadence, but

from the fact that he wore an evening coat and grey trousers, I

gathered that he was the butler, and for any one skilled in Irish

households, he at once placed the establishment--rich, godly, low

church, and consistently and contentedly dull. As we entered the hall

there arose from some fastness in the house a shrill clamour that

resolved itself into the first line of a hymn.

Flurry dug me in the ribs with his elbow. "They've found!" he

whispered, "you needn't look so frightened. It's only Lucy and Louisa

having the choir practice!"

To these strains Colonel Newcome ushered us into the drawing-room.

There was no one in it. It was a large double drawing-room, and

nothing but heavy maroon curtains now separated us from the choir

practice. The hymn continued, a loud and long-drawn proclamation, and,

pending its conclusion, my wife and Mrs. Flurry Knox swiftly and

stealthily circumnavigated the room, and appraised all its contents,

from a priceless Battersea basket filled with dusty bulbs, to a

Chippendale card-table with a sewing machine clamped on to it, while

Flurry, in a stage whisper, dilated to me upon the superfluous wealth

that Providence had seen fit to waste upon the Butler-Knoxes. The

household, as I had gradually learnt, consisted of an elderly bachelor,

Mr. Lucius Butler-Knox (commonly known as "Looshy "), his unmarried

sister, Miss Louisa, his widowed sister, Mrs. Hodnett, and a corpulent,

grey-muzzled black-and-tan terrier. Their occupations were gardening,

and going to what they called "the city," _i.e._ the neighbouring

county town, to attend charitable committee meetings; they kept a

species of philanthropic registry office for servants; their foible was

hospitality, disastrously coupled with the fact that they dined at

half-past six. It was one of the mysteries of kinship that Flurry Knox

and our host and hostess should possess a nearer relative in common

than Adam. That he should have established their respectable home as

his hostelry and house of call was one of the mysteries of Flurry Knox.

The hymn ceased, the raiders hastily formed into line, the maroon

drapery parted, and the ladies of the house, flushed with song, and

importing with them a potent sample of the atmosphere of the back

drawing-room, were upon us, loud in hospitable apologies, instant in

offers of tea; the situation opened and swallowed us up.

The half-past six o'clock dinner came all too swiftly. Glared upon by

an unshaded lamp that sat like a ball of fire in the centre of the

table, we laboured in the trough of a sea of the thickest ox-tail soup;

a large salmon followed; with the edge of dubious appetite already

turned, we saw the succeeding items of the menu spread forth on the

table like a dummy hand at bridge. The boiled turkey, with its

satellite ham, the roast saddle of mutton, with its stable companion

the stack of cutlets; the succeeding course, where a team of four wild

duck struggled for the lead with an open tart and a sago pudding. Like

Agag, we went delicately, and, like Agag, it availed us nothing.

I watched my _vis-à-vis_, little Mrs. Flurry, furtively burying a slab

of turkey beneath mashed potatoes as neatly as a little dog buries a

bone; her green kitten's eyes met mine without a change of expression,

and turned to her glass, which Colonel Newcome had filled with claret.

"The beaded bubbles, winking at the brim," had a greyish tinge.

"Cousin Lucius!" observed Mrs. Flurry, in a silence that presently

happened to fall, "can you remember who painted that picture of our

great-grandfather--the one over the door I mean?"

Mr. Butler-Knox, a small, grey-bearded, elderly gentleman, wholly, up

to the present, immersed in carving, removed the steam of the ducks

from his eye-glasses, and concentrated them upon the picture.

"It's by Maclise, isn't it?" went on Sally, leaning forward to get a

nearer view.

In that moment, when all heads turned to the picture, I plainly saw her

draw the glass of claret to the verge of the table, it disappeared

beneath it and returned to its place empty. Almost simultaneously, the

black-and-tan terrier sprang from a lair near my feet, and hurried from

the room, shaking his ears vigorously. Mrs. Flurry's eyes wavered from

the portrait to mine, and her face became slowly and evenly pink, like

an afterglow.

It was but one of the many shameless acts of my party during the

age-long evening. At ten o'clock we retired to rest, for my own part,

thoroughly overfed, not in the least sleepy, worn with conversation,

and oppressed by the consciousness of flippant, even brutal,

ingratitude.

The weather had cleared next morning to mild greyness, that softened

even the asperity of half-past eight breakfast. I lumbered stiffly

downstairs in a pair of new butcher boots, and found with thankfulness

that our hosts, exhausted possibly by their efforts, had kept their

rooms.

Marshalled in order upon the sideboard stood the remains of all the

more enduring items of last night's dinner, cold indeed, but firm and

undefeated; hot dishes of ancient silver roasted before the noble

brass-mounted fireplace; there were vats of lethargic cream, a clutch

of new-laid eggs, a heap of hot scones.

"It's easy seen it wasn't cracking blind nuts made Lucy Hodnett and

Louisa the size they are!" remarked Flurry, as the party, feeling more

piratical than ever, embarked upon this collation. "Mrs. Yeates, do

you think I am bound to dance with the pair of them to-night? You are,

Major, anyway! But I might get off with Louisa."

"Oh, Sinclair's card is full," said my wife, who was engaged in trying

to decipher the marks on the cream jug without upsetting the cream; "he

and the General are plighted to one another for the evening."

"I wonder if the claret has stained the carpet!" said Mrs. Flurry,

diving under the table. "It has! How awful!" Mrs. Flurry's voice

indicated the highest enjoyment. "Never mind, they'll never see it!

They're too fat to get under the table!"

"If they did, it'd be the first time old Looshy's claret ever put

anyone there!" said Flurry.

We have never known the precise moment in this speech at which "Old

Looshy's" butler entered the room; we only know that while Mrs. Flurry,

much hampered by habit and boots, was in the act of struggling from

beneath the table, he was there, melancholy and righteous, with a

telegram on a salver.

It was from Flavin, the livery stableman, and its effect upon the

spirits of the company was that of a puncture in a tyre.

"Regret horses not available; am trying to procure others; will send by

next train if possible."

We said that there was no answer, and we finished our breakfasts in a

gravity scarcely lightened by Flurry's almost religious confidence in

Flavin's infallibility, and in his power of making horses out of

rushes, like the fairies, if need be.

I was, I may admit, from the first thoroughly pessimistic. I almost

went up and got into ordinary clothes; I at least talked of doing so,

as a means of preparing Philippa for the worst. I said it was a mere

waste of time to send the Butler-Knox coachman to the station, as had

been arranged, and I did my best to dissuade Flurry from his intention

of riding to the meet by way of the station to help in unboxing animals

that could not possibly be there.

In abysmal dejection my wife and I surveyed the departing forms of Mr.

and Mrs. Florence Knox; the former on the Dodger, a leggy brown

four-year-old, the planting of whom upon General Porteous had been the

germ of the expedition; while Sally skipped and sidled upon a narrow,

long-tailed chestnut mare, an undefeated jumper, and up to about as

much weight as would go by parcel post for ninepence. There then

ensued a period of total desolation, in which we looked morosely at old

photograph books in the drawing-room, and faced the prospect of a long

day with the Butler-Knoxes, while heavy footsteps overhead warned us

that our entertainers were astir, and that at any moment the day's

conversation might begin.

I was engaged, not, I fancy, for the first time, in telling Philippa

that I had always said that the entire expedition was a mistake, when

Colonel Newcome again entered the room.

"The Master sent me to ask you, sir, if you'd like to have the

pony-phaeton to drive down to the station to meet the half-past ten

train. Flavin might be sending the horses on it, and it'd save you

time to meet them there."

We closed with the offer; at its worst, the pony-carriage could be

smoked in, which the drawing-room could not; at its best, it might save

half-an-hour in getting to the meet. We presently seated ourselves in

it, low down behind an obese piebald pony, with a pink nose, and a mane

hogged to the height of its ears. As I took up the whip it turned and

regarded us with an unblinkered eye, pink-lidded and small as a pig's.

"You should go through Fir Grove, sir," said the boy who had brought

the equipage to the door, "it's half a mile of a short cut, and that's

the way Tom will come with the horses. It's the first gate-lodge

you'll meet on the road."

The mud was deep, and the piebald pony plodded through it at a sullen

jog. The air was mild and chilly, like an uninteresting woman; the

fore-knowledge of fiasco lay heavily upon us; it hardly seemed worth

while to beat the pony when he sank into a walk; it was the most

heart-broken forlorn hope that ever took the field.

The gate-lodge of Fir Grove fulfilled the assignation made for it by

the stable boy, and met us on the road. The gates stood wide open, and

the pony turned in as by an accustomed route, and crawled through them

with that simulation of complete exhaustion that is the gift of lazy

ponies. Loud narrative in a male voice proceeded from the dark

interior of the lodge, and, as we passed, a woman's voice said, in

horrified rejoinder:

"The Lord save us! She must be Anti-Christ!"

Here, apparently, the speaker became aware of our proximity, and an old

woman looked forth. Her face was apprehensive.

"Did ye see the police, sir?" she asked.

[Illustration: "DID YE SEE THE POLICE?"]

We replied in the negative.

"Please God, she'll not come our way!" she said, and banged the door.

We moved on, heavily, in the deep gravel of the avenue.

"Isn't this rather awful? Shall we go on?" said Philippa.

I replied with truth that there was no room to turn. On either side of

the narrow drive laurels and rhododendrons were crammed as thickly as

they could be planted, their dark foliage met overhead; if the

inexpressible "She" referred to by the lodge-keeper did come our way,

retreat would be out of the question. The tunnel ran uphill, and I

drove the pony up it as one drives a hoop, by incessant beating; had I

relaxed my efforts he would probably, like a hoop, have lain down.

Presently, and still uphill, we turned a corner, the tunnel ceased, and

we were face to face with a large pink house.

As we advanced, feeling to the full the degradation of making a

short-cut past a strange house, in tall hats and a grovelling

pony-carriage, we beheld figures rushing past the windows of one of the

rooms on the ground floor, as if in headlong flight. Was this the

fulfilment of the dark sayings of the lodge-keeper, and was "She"

"coming our way?" The bouncing strains of a measure, known, I believe,

as "Whistling Rufus," came forth to us hilariously as we drew nearer.

The problem changed, but I am not sure that the horror did not deepen.

Divining the determination of the piebald pony to die, if necessary,

rather than pass a hall door without stopping at it, yet debarred by

the decencies from thrashing him past the long line of windows, I

administered two or three rousing tugs to his wooden mouth. At the

third tug the near rein broke. The pony stopped dead. Simultaneously

the hall door was flung open, and a young and lovely being, tall, and

beautifully dressed, fluttered out on to the steps and peered at us

through long-handled eye-glasses.

"Oh! I thought you were the police!" exclaimed the being, with

unaffected disappointment.

The position seemed, from all points, to demand an apology. I

disengaged myself from the pony-carriage and proffered it; I also

volunteered any help that a mere man, not a policeman, might be capable

of rendering.

The young lady aimed her glasses at the pie-bald, motionless in malign

stupor, and replied irrelevantly:

"Why! That's the Knoxes' pony!"

I made haste to explain our disaster and the position generally,

winding up with a request for a piece of string.

"You're staying at the Butler-Knoxes!" exclaimed the lady of the house.

"How funny that is! Do you know you're coming to our dance to-night,

to meet your old friend the General! I know all about it, you see!"

She advanced with a beaming yet perturbed countenance upon Philippa,

"I'm so glad to meet you. Do come in! We've got an infuriated cook at

bay in the kitchen, and things are rather disorganised, but I think we

can rise to a bit of string! The pony's all right--he'll sleep there

for months, he always does."

We followed her into a hall choked with the exiled furniture of the

drawing-room, and saw through an open door the whirling forms of two or

three couples of young men and maidens.

"They're polishing the floor," said our hostess, swiftly shutting the

door, "they make a hideous noise, but it keeps them quiet--if you know

what I mean. It's most disastrous that my husband has gone out

hunting," she pursued; "this odious cook only arrived two days ago,

and----"

At this juncture a door at the end of the hall burst open, disclosing a

long passage and a young and crimson housemaid.

"She's coming, my lady! She's coming! Mr. Ralph's sent me on to get

the door open!" she panted.

At the same moment a loud and wrathful voice arose in the passage and a

massive form, filling it from wall to wall, appeared; the capitulating

cook, moving down upon us with the leisurely and majestic truculence of

a traction-engine. As she came she chanted these words in measured

cadence:

"Lady Flora,

Gets her brother

To do her dirty work."

By the time this rune had been repeated three times she was in the

hall, shepherded by a tall young man, obviously the brother referred

to, and by the butler, the vista being filled in the rear by a wavering

assortment of female domestics. As the cook tacked to weather a sofa,

there was something about her that woke a vague and unpleasant chord of

memory. Her ranging eye met mine, and the chord positively twanged as

I recognised the formidable countenance of a female, technically known

as a "job-cook," who for two cyclonic weeks had terrorised our

household while Mrs. Cadogan was on leave. I backed convulsively into

Lady Flora, in futile and belated attempt to take cover, but even as I

did so the chanting ceased and I knew the worst had happened.

"Is that my darlin' Major Yeates?" shouted the cook, tacking again and

bearing down on me full-sailed. "Thanks be to God I have the gentleman

that'll see I get justice! And Mrs. Yeates, a noble lady, that'd never

set foot in my kitchen without she'd ask my leave! Ah, ha! As

Shakespeare says, I'd know a rale lady as soon as I'd put an eye on

her, if she was boiling cabbage!"

[Illustration: "IS THAT MY DARLIN' MAJOR YEATES?" SHOUTED THE COOK]

She caught my reluctant hand and waved it up and down, and the muffled

triumphings of "Whistling Rufus" in the drawing-room filled up the

position.

Through them came a sound of wheels on the gravel, and through this

again a strangled whisper from behind:

"Take her out to the steps; I hear the car with the police!"

Holding the fervid hand of the job-cook, I advanced with her through

the furniture, skew-wise, as in the visiting figure of the Lancers;

there was an undoubted effort on her part to keep time to the music,

and she did not cease to inform the company that Major and Mrs. Yeates

were the real old nobility, and that they would see she got her rights.

Followed closely by the shepherd and the butler, we moved forth on to

the steps. The police were not there. There was nothing there save a

complicated pattern of arcs and angles on the gravel, as of a

four-wheeled vehicle that has taken an uncommonly short turn. At the

bend of the avenue the pony-carriage, our link with the world without,

was disappearing from view, the piebald pony heading for home at a

pig-like but determined gallop. The job-cook clasped her hands on my

arm and announced to the landscape that she would live and die with the

Major.

IX

"A HORSE! A HORSE!"