PART I

[Illustration: “ROBERT TRINDER, ESQ., M.F.H.” _A Grand Filly._]

All on the Irish Shore

Irish Sketches

By

E.OE. Somerville and Martin Ross

Authors of

“Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” “The Real Charlotte” “The Silver

Fox,” “A Patrick’s Day Hunt” etc., etc.

With Illustrations by E.OE. Somerville

_SECOND IMPRESSION_

Longmans, Green, and Co.

39 Paternoster Row, London

New York and Bombay

1903

CONTENTS.

THE TINKER’S DOG

FANNY FITZ’S GAMBLE

THE CONNEMARA MARE

A GRAND FILLY

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE

HIGH TEA AT MCKEOWN’S

THE BAGMAN’S PONY

AN IRISH PROBLEM

THE DANE’S BREECHIN’

“MATCHBOX”

“AS I WAS GOING TO BANDON FAIR”

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

“ROBERT TRINDER, ESQ., M.F.H.”

“A SILENCE THAT WAS THE OUTCOME PARTLY OF STUPIDITY, PARTLY OF CAUTION,

AND PARTLY OF LACK OF ENGLISH SPEECH”

“MR. GUNNING WAS LOOKIN’ OUT FOR A COB”

ROBERT’S AUNT

THE BLOOD-HEALER

“THE GREY-HAIRED KITCHEN-MAID”

SWEENY

“MUSHA! MUSHA!”

“CROPPY”

A HIERARCH OF HORSE-DEALING

THE TINKER’S DOG

“Can’t you head ’em off, Patsey? Run, you fool! _run_, can’t you?”

Sounds followed that suggested the intemperate use of Mr. Freddy

Alexander’s pocket-handkerchief, but that were, in effect, produced by

his struggle with a brand new hunting-horn. To this demonstration about

as much attention was paid by the nine couple of buccaneers whom he was

now exercising for the first time as might have been expected, and it

was brought to abrupt conclusion by the sudden charge of two of them

from the rear. Being coupled, they mowed his legs from under him as

irresistibly as chain shot and being puppies, and of an imbecile

friendliness they remained to lick his face and generally make merry

over him as he struggled to his feet.

By this time the leaders of the pack were well away up a ploughed field,

over a fence and into a furze brake, from which their rejoicing yelps

streamed back on the damp breeze. The Master of the Craffroe Hounds

picked himself up, and sprinted up the hill after the Whip and Kennel

Huntsman--a composite official recently promoted from the stable

yard--in a way that showed that his failure in horn-blowing was not the

fault of his lungs. His feet were held by the heavy soil, he tripped in

the muddy ridges; none the less he and Patsey plunged together over the

stony rampart of the field in time to see Negress and Lily springing

through the furze in kangaroo leaps, while they uttered long squeals of

ecstasy. The rest of the pack, with a confidence gained in many a

successful riot, got to them as promptly as if six Whips were behind

them, and the whole faction plunged into a little wood on the top of

what was evidently a burning scent.

“Was it a fox, Patsey?” said the Master excitedly.

“I dunno, Master Freddy: it might be ’twas a hare,” returned Patsey,

taking in a hurried reef in the strap that was responsible for the

support of his trousers.

Freddy was small and light, and four short years before had been a

renowned hare in his school paper-chases: he went through the wood at a

pace that gave Patsey and the puppies all they could do to keep with

him, and dropped into a road just in time to see the pack streaming up a

narrow lane near the end of the wood. At this point they were reinforced

by a yellow dachshund who, with wildly flapping ears, and at that

caricature of a gallop peculiar to his kind, joined himself to the

hunters.

“Glory be to Mercy!” exclaimed Patsey, “the misthress’s dog!”

Almost simultaneously the pack precipitated themselves into a ruined

cabin at the end of the lane; instantly from within arose an uproar of

sounds--crashes of an ironmongery sort, yells of dogs, raucous human

curses; then the ruin exuded hounds, hens and turkeys at every one of

the gaps in its walls, and there issued from what had been the doorway a

tall man with a red beard, armed with a large frying-pan, with which he

rained blows on the fleeing Craffroe Pack. It must be admitted that the

speed with which these abandoned their prey, whatever it was, suggested

a very intimate acquaintance with the wrath of cooks and the perils of

resistance.

Before their lawful custodians had recovered from this spectacle, a tall

lady in black was suddenly merged in the _mêlée_, alternately calling

loudly and incongruously for “Bismarck,” and blowing shrill blasts on a

whistle.

“If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress’s dog, the

Lord help him!” said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail

tucked in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself

swiftly from the scene of action.

Mrs. Alexander shoved her way into the cabin, through a filthy group of

gabbling male and female tinkers, and found herself involved in a wreck

of branches and ragged tarpaulin that had once formed a kind of tent,

but was now strewn on the floor by the incursion and excursion of the

chase. Earthquake throes were convulsing the tarpaulin; a tinker woman,

full of zeal, dashed at it and flung it back, revealing, amongst other

_débris_, an old wooden bedstead heaped with rags. On either side of one

of its legs protruded the passion-fraught faces of the coupled

hound-puppies, who, still linked together, had passed through the period

of unavailing struggle into a state of paralysed insanity of terror.

Muffled squeals and tinny crashes told that conflict was still raging

beneath the bed; the tinker women screamed abuse and complaint; and

suddenly the dachshund’s long yellow nose, streaming with blood, worked

its way out of the folds. His mistress snatched at his collar and

dragged him forth, and at his heels followed an infuriated tom cat,

which, with its tail as thick as a muff, went like a streak through the

confusion, and was lost in the dark ruin of the chimney.

Mrs. Alexander stayed for no explanations: she extricated herself from

the tinker party, and, filled with a righteous wrath, went forth to look

for her son. From a plantation three fields away came the asphyxiated

bleats of the horn and the desolate bawls of Patsey Crimmeen. Mrs.

Alexander decided that it was better for the present to leave the

_personnel_ of the Craffroe Hunt to their own devices.

It was but three days before these occurrences that Mr. Freddy Alexander

had stood on the platform of the Craffroe Station, with a throbbing

heart, and a very dirty paper in his hand containing a list of eighteen

names, that ranged alphabetically from “Batchellor” to “Warior.” At his

elbow stood a small man with a large moustache, and the thinnest legs

that were ever buttoned into gaiters, who was assuring him that to no

other man in Ireland would he have sold those hounds at such a price; a

statement that was probably unimpeachable.

“The only reason I’m parting them is I’m giving up me drag, and selling

me stock, and going into partnership with a veterinary surgeon in Rugby.

You’ve some of the best blood in Ireland in those hounds.”

“Is it blood?” chimed in an old man who was standing, slightly drunk, at

Mr. Alexander’s other elbow. “The most of them hounds is by the Kerry

Rapparee, and he was the last of the old Moynalty Baygles. Black dogs

they were, with red eyes! Every one o’ them as big as a yearling calf,

and they’d hunt anything that’d roar before them!” He steadied himself

on the new Master’s arm. “I have them gethered in the ladies’

waiting-room, sir, the way ye’ll have no throuble. ’Twould be as good

for ye to lave the muzzles on them till ye’ll be through the town.”

Freddy Alexander cannot to this hour decide what was the worst incident

of that homeward journey; on the whole, perhaps, the most serious was

the escape of Governess, who subsequently ravaged the country for two

days, and was at length captured in the act of killing Mrs. Alexander’s

white Leghorn cock. For a young gentleman whose experience of hounds

consisted in having learned at Cambridge to some slight and painful

extent that if he rode too near them he got sworn at, the purchaser of

the Kerry Rapparee’s descendants had undertaken no mean task.

On the morning following on the first run of the Craffroe Hounds, Mrs.

Alexander was sitting at her escritoire, making up her weekly accounts

and entering in her poultry-book the untimely demise of the Leghorn

cock. She was a lady of secret enthusiasms which sheltered themselves

behind habits of the most business-like severity. Her books were models

of order, and as she neatly inscribed the Leghorn cock’s epitaph,

“Killed by hounds,” she could not repress the compensating thought that

she had never seen Freddy’s dark eyes and olive complexion look so well

as when he had tried on his new pink coat.

At this point she heard a step on the gravel outside; Bismarck uttered a

bloodhound bay and got under the sofa. It was a sunny morning in late

October, and the French window was open; outside it, ragged as a Russian

poodle and nearly as black, stood the tinker who had the day before

wielded the frying-pan with such effect.

“Me lady,” began the tinker, “I ax yer ladyship’s pardon, but me little

dog is dead.”

“Well?” said Mrs. Alexander, fixing a gaze of clear grey rectitude upon

him.

“Me lady,” continued the tinker, reverentially but firmly, “’twas afther

he was run by thim dogs yestherday, and ’twas your ladyship’s dog that

finished him. He tore the throat out of him under the bed!” He pointed

an accusing forefinger at Bismarck, whose lambent eyes of terror glowed

from beneath the valance of the sofa.

“Nonsense! I saw your dog; he was twice my dog’s size,” said Bismarck’s

mistress decidedly, not, however, without a remembrance of the blood on

Bismarck’s nose. She adored courage, and had always cherished a belief

that Bismarck’s sharklike jaws implied the possession of latent

ferocity.

“Ah, but he was very wake, ma’am, afther he bein’ hunted,” urged the

tinker. “I never slep’ a wink the whole night, but keepin’ sups o’ milk

to him and all sorts. Ah, ma’am, ye wouldn’t like to be lookin’ at him!”

The tinker was a very good-looking young man, almost apostolic in type,

with a golden red aureole of hair and beard and candid blue eyes. These

latter filled with tears as their owner continued:--

“He was like a brother for me; sure he follied me from home. ’Twas he

was dam wise! Sure at home all me mother’d say to him was, “Where’s the

ducks, Captain?” an’ he wouldn’t lave wather nor bog-hole round the

counthry but he’d have them walked and the ducks gethered. The pigs

could be in their choice place, wherever they’d be he’d go around them.

If ye’d tell him to put back the childhren from the fire, he’d ketch

them by the sleeve and dhrag them.”

The requiem ceased, and the tinker looked grievingly into his hat.

“What is your name?” asked Mrs. Alexander sternly. “How long is it since

you left home?”

Had the tinker been as well acquainted with her as he was afterwards

destined to become, he would have been aware that when she was most

judicial she was frequently least certain of what her verdict was going

to be.

“Me name’s Willy Fennessy, me lady,” replied the tinker, “an’ I’m goin’

the roads no more than three months. Indeed, me lady, I think the time

too long that I’m with these blagyard thravellers. All the friends I

have was poor Captain, and he’s gone from me.”

“Go round to the kitchen,” said Mrs. Alexander.

The results of Willy Fennessy’s going round to the kitchen were

far-reaching. Its most immediate consequences were that (1) he mended

the ventilator of the kitchen range; (2) he skinned a brace of rabbits

for Miss Barnet, the cook; (3) he arranged to come next day and repair

the clandestine devastations of the maids among the china.

He was pronounced to be a very agreeable young man.

Before luncheon (of which meal he partook in the kitchen) he had been

consulted by Patsey Crimmeen about the chimney of the kennel boiler, had

single-handed reduced it to submission, and had, in addition, boiled the

meal for the hounds with a knowledge of proportion and an untiring

devotion to the use of the potstick which produced “stirabout” of a

smoothness and excellence that Miss Barnet herself might have been proud

of.

“You know, mother,” said Freddy that evening, “you do want another chap

in the garden badly.”

“Well it’s not so much the garden,” said Mrs. Alexander with alacrity,

“but I think he might be very useful to you, dear, and it’s such a

great matter his being a teetotaler, and he seems so fond of animals. I

really feel we ought to try and make up to him somehow for the loss of

his dog; though, indeed, a more deplorable object than that poor mangy

dog I never saw!”

“All right: we’ll put him in the back lodge, and we’ll give him Bizzy as

a watch dog. Won’t we, Bizzy?” replied Freddy, dragging the somnolent

Bismarck from out of the heart of the hearthrug, and accepting without

repugnance the comprehensive lick that enveloped his chin.

From which it may be gathered that Mrs. Alexander and her son had

fallen, like their household, under the fatal spell of the fascinating

tinker.

At about the time that this conversation was taking place, Mr. Fennessy,

having spent an evening of valedictory carouse with his tribe in the

ruined cottage, was walking, somewhat unsteadily, towards the wood,

dragging after him by a rope a large dog. He did not notice that he was

being followed by a barefooted woman, but the dog did, and, being an

intelligent dog, was in some degree reassured. In the wood the tinker

spent some time in selecting a tree with a projecting branch suitable to

his purpose, and having found one he proceeded to hang the dog. Even in

his cups Mr. Fennessy made sentiment subservient to common sense.

It is hardly too much to say that in a week the tinker had taken up a

position in the Craffroe household only comparable to that of Ygdrasil,

who in Norse mythology forms the ultimate support of all things. Save

for the incessant demands upon his skill in the matter of solder and

stitches, his recent tinkerhood was politely ignored, or treated as an

escapade excusable in a youth of spirit. Had not his father owned a farm

and seven cows in the county Limerick, and had not he himself three

times returned the price of his ticket to America to a circle of adoring

and wealthy relatives in Boston? His position in the kitchen and yard

became speedily assured. Under his _régime_ the hounds were valeted as

they had never been before. Lily herself (newly washed, with “blue” in

the water) was scarcely more white than the concrete floor of the kennel

yard, and the puppies, Ruby and Remus, who had unaccountably developed a

virulent form of mange, were immediately taken in hand by the

all-accomplished tinker, and anointed with a mixture whose very

noisomeness was to Patsey Crimmeen a sufficient guarantee of its

efficacy, and was impressive even to the Master, fresh from much anxious

study of veterinary lore.

“He’s the best man we’ve got!” said Freddy proudly to a dubious uncle,

“there isn’t a mortal thing he can’t put his hand to.”

“Or lay his hands on,” suggested the dubious uncle. “May I ask if his

colleagues are still within a mile of the place?”

“Oh, he hates the very sight of ’em!” said Freddy hastily, “cuts ’em

dead whenever he sees ’em.”

“It’s no use your crabbing him, George,” broke in Mrs. Alexander, “we

won’t give him up to you! Wait till you see how he has mended the lock

of the hall door!”

“I should recommend you to buy a new one at once,” said Sir George Ker,

in a way that was singularly exasperating to the paragon’s proprietors.

Mrs. Alexander was, or so her friends said, somewhat given to vaunting

herself of her paragons, under which heading, it may be admitted,

practically all her household were included. She was, indeed, one of

those persons who may or may not be heroes to their valets, but whose

valets are almost invariably heroes to them. It was, therefore,

excessively discomposing to her that, during the following week, in the

very height of apparently cloudless domestic tranquillity, the housemaid

and the parlour-maid should in one black hour successively demand an

audience, and successively, in the floods of tears proper to such

occasions, give warning. Inquiry as to their reasons was fruitless. They

were unhappy: one said she wouldn’t get her appetite, and that her

mother was sick; the other said she wouldn’t get her sleep in it, and

there was things--sob--going on--sob.

Mrs. Alexander concluded the interview abruptly, and descended to the

kitchen to interview her queen paragon, Barnet, on the crisis.

Miss Barnet was a stout and comely English lady, of that liberal forty

that frankly admits itself in advertisements to be twenty-eight. It was

understood that she had only accepted office in Ireland because, in the

first place, the butler to whom she had long been affianced had married

another, and because, in the second place, she had a brother buried in

Belfast. She was, perhaps, the one person in the world whose opinion

about poultry Mrs. Alexander ranked higher than her own. She now allowed

a restrained acidity to mingle with her dignity of manner, scarcely more

than the calculated lemon essence in her faultless castle puddings, but

enough to indicate that she, too, had grievances. _She_ didn’t know why

they were leaving. She had heard some talk about a fairy or something,

but she didn’t hold with such nonsense.

“Gerrls is very frightful!” broke in an unexpected voice; “owld

standards like meself maybe wouldn’t feel it!”

A large basket of linen had suddenly blocked the scullery door, and

from beneath it a little woman, like an Australian aborigine, delivered

herself of this dark saying.

“What are you talking about, Mrs. Griffen?” demanded Mrs. Alexander,

turning in vexed bewilderment to her laundress, “what does all this

mean?”

“The Lord save us, ma’am, there’s some says it means a death in the

house!” replied Mrs. Griffen with unabated cheerfulness, “an’ indeed

’twas no blame for the little gerrls to be frightened an’ they meetin’

it in the passages--”

“Meeting _what_?” interrupted her mistress. Mrs. Griffen was an old and

privileged retainer, but there were limits even for Mrs. Griffen.

“Sure, ma’am, there’s no one knows what was in it,” returned Mrs.

Griffen, “but whatever it was they heard it goin’ on before them always

in the panthry passage, an’ it walkin’ as sthrong as a man. It whipped

away up the stairs, and they seen the big snout snorting out at them

through the banisters, and a bare back on it the same as a pig; and the

two cheeks on it as white as yer own, and away with it! And with that

Mary Anne got a wakeness, and only for Willy Fennessy bein’ in the

kitchen an’ ketching a hold of her, she’d have cracked her head on the

range, the crayture!”

Here Barnet smiled with ineffable contempt.

“What I’m tellin’ them is,” continued Mrs. Griffen, warming with her

subject, “maybe that thing was a pairson that’s dead, an’ might be owin’

a pound to another one, or has something that way on his soul, an’ it’s

in the want o’ some one that’ll ax it what’s throublin’ it. The like o’

thim couldn’t spake till ye’ll spake to thim first. But, sure, gerrls

has no courage--”

Barnet’s smile was again one of wintry superiority.

“Willy Fennessy and Patsey Crimmeen was afther seein’ it too last

night,” went on Mrs. Griffen, “an’ poor Willy was as much frightened! He

said surely ’twas a ghost. On the back avenue it was, an’ one minute

’twas as big as an ass, an’ another minute it’d be no bigger than a

bonnive--”

“Oh, the Lord save us!” wailed the kitchen-maid irrepressibly from the

scullery.

“I shall speak to Fennessy myself about this,” said Mrs. Alexander,

making for the door with concentrated purpose, “and in the meantime I

wish to hear no more of this rubbish.”

“I’m sure Fennessy wishes to hear no more of it,” said Barnet acridly to

Mrs. Griffen, when Mrs. Alexander had passed swiftly out of hearing,

“after the way those girls have been worryin’ on at him about it all the

morning. Such a set out!”

Mrs. Griffen groaned in a polite and general way, and behind Barnet’s

back put her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and winked at the

kitchen-maid.

Mrs. Alexander found her conversation with Willy Fennessy less

satisfactory than usual. He could not give any definite account of what

he and Patsey had seen: maybe they’d seen nothing at all; maybe--as an

obvious impromptu--it was the calf of the Kerry cow; whatever was in it,

it was little he’d mind it, and, in easy dismissal of the subject, would

the misthress be against his building a bit of a coal-shed at the back

of the lodge while she was away?

That evening a new terror was added to the situation. Jimmy the

boot-boy, on his return from taking the letters to the evening post,

fled in panic into the kitchen, and having complied with the etiquette

invariable in such cases by having “a wakeness,” he described to a

deeply sympathetic audience how he had seen something that was like a

woman in the avenue, and he had called to it and it returned him no

answer, and how he had then asked it three times in the name o’ God what

was it, and it soaked away into the trees from him, and then there came

something rushing in on him and grunting at him to bite him, and he was

full sure it was the Fairy Pig from Lough Clure.

Day by day the legend grew, thickened by tales of lights that had been

seen moving mysteriously in the woods of Craffroe. Even the hounds were

subpoenaed as witnesses; Patsey Crimmeen’s mother stating that for three

nights after Patsey had seen that Thing they were singing and screeching

to each other all night.

Had Mrs. Crimmeen used the verb scratch instead of screech she would

have been nearer the mark. The puppies, Ruby and Remus, had, after the

manner of the young, human and canine, not failed to distribute their

malady among their elders, and the pack, straitly coupled, went for

dismal constitutionals, and the kennels reeked to heaven of remedies,

and Freddy’s new hunter, Mayboy, from shortness of work, smashed the

partition of the loose box and kicked his neighbour, Mrs. Alexander’s

cob, in the knee.

“The worst of it is,” said Freddy confidentially to his ally and

adviser, the junior subaltern of the detachment at Enniscar, who had

come over to see the hounds, “that I’m afraid Patsey Crimmeen--the boy

whom I’m training to whip to me, you know”--(as a matter of fact, the

Whip was a year older than the Master)--“is beginning to drink a bit.

When I came down here before breakfast this mornin’”--when Freddy was

feeling more acutely than usual his position as an M.F.H., he cut his

g’s and talked slightly through his nose, even, on occasion, going so

far as to omit the aspirate in talking of his hounds--“there wasn’t a

sign of him--kennel door not open or anything. I let the poor brutes out

into the run. I tell you, what with the paraffin and the carbolic and

everything the kennel was pretty high--”

“It’s pretty thick now,” said his friend, lighting a cigarette.

“Well, I went into the boiler-house,” continued Freddy impressively,

“and there he was, asleep on the floor, with his beastly head on my

kennel coat, and one leg in the feeding trough!”

Mr. Taylour made a suitable ejaculation.

“I jolly soon kicked him on to his legs,” went on Freddy, “not that they

were much use to him--he must have been on the booze all night. After

that I went on to the stable yard, and if you’ll believe me, the two

chaps there had never turned up at all--at half-past eight, mind

you!--and there was Fennessy doing up the horses. He said he believed

that there’d been a wake down at Enniscar last night. I thought it was

rather decent of him doing their work for them.”

“You’ll sack ’em, I suppose?” remarked Mr. Taylour, with martial

severity.

“Oh well, I don’t know,” said Mr. Alexander evasively, “I’ll see.

Anyhow, don’t say anything to my mother about it; a drunken man is like

a red rag to a bull to her.”

Taking this peculiarity of Mrs. Alexander into consideration, it was

perhaps as well that she left Craffroe a few days afterwards to stay

with her brother. The evening before she left both the Fairy Pig and the

Ghost Woman were seen again on the avenue, this time by the coachman,

who came into the kitchen considerably the worse for liquor and

announced the fact, and that night the household duties were performed

by the maids in pairs, and even, when possible, in trios.

As Mrs. Alexander said at dinner to Sir George, on the evening of her

arrival, she was thankful to have abandoned the office of Ghostly

Comforter to her domestics. Only for Barnet she couldn’t have left poor

Freddy to the mercy of that pack of fools; in fact, even with Barnet to

look after them, it was impossible to tell what imbecility they were not

capable of.

“Well, if you like,” said Sir George, “I might run you over there on the

motor car some day to see how they’re all getting on. If Freddy is going

to hunt on Friday, we might go on to Craffroe after seeing the fun.”

The topic of Barnet was here shelved in favour of automobiles. Mrs.

Alexander’s brother was also a person of enthusiasms.

But what were these enthusiasms compared to the deep-seated ecstasy of

Freddy Alexander as in his new pink coat he rode down the main street

of Enniscar, Patsey in equal splendour bringing up the rear, unspeakably

conscious of the jibes of his relatives and friends. There was a select

field, consisting of Mr. Taylour, four farmers, some young ladies on

bicycles, and about two dozen young men and boys on foot, who, in order

to be prepared for all contingencies, had provided themselves with five

dogs, two horns, and a ferret. It is, after all, impossible to please

everybody, and from the cyclists’ and foot people’s point of view the

weather left nothing to be desired. The sun shone like a glistering

shield in the light blue November sky, the roads were like iron, the

wind, what there was of it, like steel. There was a line of white on the

northerly side of the fences, that yielded grudgingly and inch by inch

before the march of the pale sunshine: the new pack could hardly have

had a more unfavourable day for their _début_.

The new Master was, however, wholly undaunted by such crumples in the

rose-leaf. He was riding Mayboy, a big trustworthy horse, whose love of

jumping had survived a month of incessant and arbitrary schooling, and

he left the road as soon as was decently possible, and made a line

across country for the covert that involved as much jumping as could

reasonably be hoped for in half a mile. At the second fence Patsey

Crimmeen’s black mare put her nose in the air and swung round; Patsey’s

hands seemed to be at their worst this morning, and what their worst

felt like the black mare alone knew. Mr. Taylour, as Deputy Whip,

waltzed erratically round the nine couple on a very flippant polo pony;

and the four farmers, who had wisely adhered to the road, reached the

covert sufficiently in advance of the hunt to frustrate Lily’s project

of running sheep in a neighbouring field.

The covert was a large, circular enclosure, crammed to the very top of

its girdling bank with furze-bushes, bracken, low hazel, and stunted

Scotch firs. Its primary idea was woodcock, its second rabbits; beaters

were in the habit of getting through it somehow, but a ride feasible for

fox hunters had never so much as occurred to it. Into this, with

practical assistance from the country boys, the deeply reluctant hounds

were pitched and flogged; Freddy very nervously uplifted his voice in

falsetto encouragement, feeling much as if he were starting the solo of

an anthem; and Mr. Taylour and Patsey, the latter having made it up with

the black mare, galloped away with professional ardour to watch

different sides of the covert. This, during the next hour, they had

ample opportunities for doing. After the first outburst of joy from the

hounds on discovering that there were rabbits in the covert, and after

the retirement of the rabbits to their burrows on the companion

discovery that there were hounds in it, a silence, broken only by the

far-away prattle of the lady bicyclists on the road, fell round Freddy

Alexander. He bore it as long as he could, cheering with faltering

whoops the invisible and unresponsive pack, and wondering what on earth

huntsmen were expected to do on such occasions; then, filled with that

horrid conviction which assails the lonely watcher, that the hounds have

slipped away at the far side, he put spurs to Mayboy, and cantered down

the long flank of the covert to find some one or something. Nothing had

happened on the north side, at all events, for there was the faithful

Taylour, pirouetting on his hill-top in the eye of the wind. Two fields

more (in one of which he caught his first sight of any of the hounds, in

the shape of Ruby, carefully rolling on a dead crow), and then, under

the lee of a high bank, he came upon Patsey Crimmeen, the farmers, and

the country boys, absorbed in the contemplation of a fight between

Tiger, the butcher’s brindled cur, and Watty, the kennel terrier.

The manner in which Mr. Alexander dispersed this entertainment showed

that he was already equipped with one important qualification of a

Master of Hounds--a temper laid on like gas, ready to blaze at a

moment’s notice. He pitched himself off his horse and scrambled over the

bank into the covert in search of his hounds. He pushed his way through

briars and furze-bushes, and suddenly, near the middle of the wood, he

caught sight of them. They were in a small group, they were very quiet

and very busy. As a matter of fact they were engaged in eating a dead

sheep.

After this episode, there ensued a long and disconsolate period of

wandering from one bleak hillside to another, at the bidding of various

informants, in search of apocryphal foxes, slaughterers of flocks of

equally apocryphal geese and turkeys--such a day as is discreetly

ignored in all hunting annals, and, like the easterly wind that is its

parent, is neither good for man nor beast.

By half-past three hope had died, even in the sanguine bosoms of the

Master and Mr. Taylour. Two of the farmers had disappeared, and the lady

bicyclists, with faces lavender blue from waiting at various windy cross

roads, had long since fled away to lunch. Two of the hounds were

limping; all, judging by their expressions, were on the verge of tears.

Patsey’s black mare had lost two shoes; Mr. Taylour’s pony had ceased to

pull, and was too dispirited even to try to kick the hounds, and the

country boys had dwindled to four. There had come a time when Mr.

Taylour had sunk so low as to suggest that a drag should be run with

the assistance of the ferret’s bag, a scheme only frustrated by the

regrettable fact that the ferret and its owner had gone home.

“Well we had a nice bit of schooling, anyhow, and, it’s been a real

educational day for the hounds,” said Freddy, turning in his saddle to

look at the fires of the frosty sunset. “I’m glad they had it. I think

we’re in for a go of hard weather. I don’t know what I should have done

only for you, old chap. Patsey’s gone all to pieces: it’s my belief he’s

been on the drink this whole week, and where he gets it--”

“Hullo! Hold hard!” interrupted Mr. Taylour. “What’s Governor after?”

They were riding along a grass-grown farm road outside the Craffroe

demesne; the grey wall made a sharp bend to the right, and just at the

corner Governor had begun to gallop, with his nose to the ground and his

stern up. The rest of the pack joined him in an instant, and all swung

round the corner and were lost to sight.

“It’s a fox!” exclaimed Freddy, snatching up his reins; “they always

cross into the demesne just here!”

By the time he and Mr. Taylour were round the corner the hounds had

checked fifty yards ahead, and were eagerly hunting to and fro for the

lost scent, and a little further down the old road they saw a woman

running away from them.

“Hi, ma’am!” bellowed Freddy, “did you see the fox?”

The woman made no answer.

“Did you see the fox?” reiterated Freddy in still more stentorian tones.

“Can’t you answer me?”

The woman continued to run without even looking behind her.

The laughter of Mr. Taylour added fuel to the fire of Freddy’s wrath: he

put the spurs into Mayboy, dashed after the woman, pulled his horse

across the road in front of her, and shouted his question point-blank at

her, coupled with a warm inquiry as to whether she had a tongue in her

head.

The woman jumped backwards as if she were shot, staring in horror at

Freddy’s furious little face, then touched her mouth and ears and began

to jabber inarticulately and talk on her fingers.

The laughter of Mr. Taylour was again plainly audible.

“Sure that’s a dummy woman, sir,” explained the butcher’s nephew,

hurrying up. “I think she’s one of them tinkers that’s outside the

town.” Then with a long screech, “Look! Look over! Tiger, have it!

Hulla, hulla, hulla!”

Tiger was already over the wall and into the demesne, neck and neck with

Fly, the smith’s half-bred greyhound; and in the wake of these champions

clambered the Craffroe Pack, with strangled yelps of ardour, striving

and squealing and fighting horribly in the endeavour to scramble up the

tall smooth face of the wall.

“The gate! The gate further on!” yelled Freddy, thundering down the

turfy road, with the earth flying up in lumps from his horse’s hoofs.

Mr. Taylour’s pony gave two most uncomfortable bucks and ran away; even

Patsey Crimmeen and the black mare shared an unequal thrill of

enthusiasm, as the latter, wholly out of hand, bucketed after the pony.

* * * * *

The afternoon was very cold, a fact thoroughly realised by Mrs.

Alexander, on the front seat of Sir George’s motor-car, in spite of

enveloping furs, and of Bismarck, curled like a fried whiting, in her

lap. The grey road rushed smoothly backwards under the broad tyres;

golden and green plover whistled in the quiet fields, starlings and huge

missel thrushes burst from the wayside trees as the “Bollée,” uttering

that hungry whine that indicates the desire of such creatures to devour

space, tore past. Mrs. Alexander wondered if birds’ beaks felt as cold

as her nose after they had been cleaving the air for an afternoon; at

all events, she reflected, they had not the consolation of tea to look

forward to. Barnet was sure to have some of her best hot cakes ready

for Freddy when he came home from hunting. Mrs. Alexander and Sir

George had been scouring the roads since a very early lunch in search of

the hounds, and her mind reposed on the thought of the hot cakes.

The front lodge gates stood wide open, the motor-car curved its flight

and skimmed through. Half-way up the avenue they whizzed past three

policemen, one of whom was carrying on his back a strange and wormlike

thing.

“Janet,” called out Sir George, “you’ve been caught making potheen!

They’ve got the worm of a still there.”

“They’re only making a short cut through the place from the bog; I’m

delighted they’ve found it!” screamed back Mrs. Alexander.

The “Bollée” was at the hall door in another minute, and the mistress of

the house pulled the bell with numbed fingers. There was no response.

“Better go round to the kitchen,” suggested her brother. “You’ll find

they’re talking too hard to hear the bell.”

His sister took the advice, and a few minutes afterwards she opened the

hall door with an extremely perturbed countenance.

“I can’t find a creature anywhere,” she said, “either upstairs or

down--I can’t understand Barnet leaving the house empty--”

“Listen!” interrupted Sir George, “isn’t that the hounds?”

They listened.

“They’re hunting down by the back avenue! come on, Janet!”

The motor-car took to flight again; it sped, soft-footed, through the

twilight gloom of the back avenue, while a disjointed, travelling

clamour of hounds came nearer and nearer through the woods. The

motor-car was within a hundred yards of the back lodge, when out of the

rhododendron-bush burst a spectral black-and-white dog, with floating

fringes of ragged wool and hideous bald patches on its back.

“Fennessy’s dog!” ejaculated Mrs. Alexander, falling back in her seat.

Probably Bismarck never enjoyed anything in his life as much as the all

too brief moment in which, leaning from his mistress’s lap in the prow

of the flying “Bollée,” he barked hysterically in the wake of the

piebald dog, who, in all its dolorous career had never before had the

awful experience of being chased by a motor-car. It darted in at the

open door of the lodge; the pursuers pulled up outside. There were

paraffin lamps in the windows, the open door was garlanded with

evergreens; from it proceeded loud and hilarious voices and the jerky

strains of a concertina. Mrs. Alexander, with all her most cherished

convictions toppling on their pedestals, stood in the open doorway and

stared, unable to believe the testimony of her own eyes. Was that the

immaculate Barnet seated at the head of a crowded table, in her--Mrs.

Alexander’s--very best bonnet and velvet cape, with a glass of steaming

potheen punch in her hand, and Willy Fennessy’s arm round her waist?

The glass sank from the paragon’s lips, the arm of Mr. Fennessy fell

from her waist; the circle of servants, tinkers, and country people

vainly tried to efface themselves behind each other.

“Barnet!” said Mrs. Alexander in an awful voice, and even in that moment

she appreciated with an added pang the feathery beauty of a slice of

Barnet’s sponge-cake in the grimy fist of a tinker.

“Mrs. Fennessy, m’m, if you please,” replied Barnet, with a dignity

that, considering the bonnet and cape, was highly creditable to her

strength of character.

At this point a hand dragged Mrs. Alexander backwards from the doorway,

a barefooted woman hustled past her into the house, slammed the door in

her face, and Mrs. Alexander found herself in the middle of the hounds.

“We’d give you the brush, Mrs. Alexander,” said Mr. Taylour, as he

flogged solidly all round him in the dusk, “but as the other lady seems

to have gone to ground with the fox I suppose she’ll take it!”

* * * * *

Mrs. Fennessy paid out of her own ample savings the fines inflicted upon

her husband for potheen-making and selling drink in the Craffroe gate

lodge without a licence, and she shortly afterwards took him to America.

Mrs. Alexander’s friends professed themselves as being not in the least

surprised to hear that she had installed the afflicted Miss Fennessy

(sister to the late occupant) and her scarcely less afflicted companion,

the Fairy Pig, in her back lodge. Miss Fennessy, being deaf and dumb, is

not perhaps a paragon lodge-keeper, but having, like her brother, been

brought up in a work-house kitchen, she has taught Patsey Crimmeen how

to boil stirabout _à merveille_.

FANNY FITZ’S GAMBLE

“Where’s Fanny Fitz?” said Captain Spicer to his wife.

They were leaning over the sea-wall in front of a little fishing hotel

in Connemara, idling away the interval usually vouchsafed by the Irish

car-driver between the hour at which he is ordered to be ready and that

at which he appears. It was a misty morning in early June, the time of

all times for Connemara, did the tourist only know it. The mountains

towered green and grey above the palely shining sea in which they stood;

the air was full of the sound of streams and the scent of wild flowers;

the thin mist had in it something of the dazzle of the sunlight that was

close behind it. Little Mrs. Spicer pulled down her veil: even after a

fortnight’s fly-fishing she still retained some regard for her

complexion.

“She says she can’t come,” she responded; “she has letters to write or

something--and this is our last day!”

Mrs. Spicer evidently found the fact provoking.

“On this information the favourite receded 33 to 1,” remarked Captain

Spicer. “I think you may as well chuck it, my dear.”

“I should like to beat them both!” said his wife, flinging a pebble into

the rising tide that was very softly mouthing the seaweedy rocks below

them.

“Well, here’s Rupert; you can begin on him.”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure!” said Rupert’s sister

vindictively. “A great teasing, squabbling baby! Oh, how I hate fools!

and they are _both_ fools!--Oh, there you are, Rupert,” a well-simulated

blandness invading her voice; “and what’s Fanny Fitz doing?”

“She’s trying to do a Mayo man over a horse-deal,” replied Mr. Rupert

Gunning.

“A horse-deal!” repeated Mrs. Spicer incredulously. “Fanny buying a

horse! Oh, impossible!”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Mr. Gunning, “she’s trying pretty

hard. I gave her my opinion--”

“I’ll take my oath you did,” observed Captain Spicer.

“--And as she didn’t seem to want it, I came away,” continued Mr.

Gunning imperturbably. “Be calm, Maudie; it takes two days and two

nights to buy a horse in these parts; you’ll be home in plenty of time

to interfere, and here’s the car. Don’t waste the morning.”

[Illustration: “A SILENCE THAT WAS THE OUTCOME PARTLY OF STUPIDITY,

PARTLY OF CAUTION, AND PARTLY OF LACK OF ENGLISH SPEECH.”]

“I never know if you’re speaking the truth or no,” complained Mrs.

Spicer; nevertheless, she scrambled on to the car without delay. She and

her brother had at least one point in common--the fanatic enthusiasm of

the angler.

In the meantime, Miss Fanny Fitzroy’s negotiations were proceeding in

the hotel yard. Fanny herself was standing in a stable doorway, with her

hands in the pockets of her bicycle skirt. She had no hat on, and the

mild breeze blew her hair about; it was light brown, with a brightness

in it; her eyes also were light brown, with gleams in them like the

shallow places in a Connemara trout stream. At this moment they were

scanning with approval, tempered by anxiety, the muddy legs of a lean

and lengthy grey filly, who was fearfully returning her gaze from

between the strands of a touzled forelock. The owner of the filly, a

small man, with a face like a serious elderly monkey, stood at her head

in a silence that was the outcome partly of stupidity, partly of

caution, and partly of lack of English speech. The conduct of the matter

was in the hands of a friend, a tall young man with a black beard,

nimble of tongue and gesture, profuse in courtesies.

“Well, indeed, yes, your ladyship,” he was saying glibly, “the breed of

horses is greatly improving in these parts, and them hackney horses--”

“Oh,” interrupted Miss Fitzroy hastily, “I won’t have her if she’s a

hackney.”

The eyes of the owner sought those of the friend in a gaze that clearly

indicated the question.

“What’ll ye say to her now?”

The position of the vendors was becoming a little complicated. They had

come over through the mountains, from the borders of Mayo, to sell the

filly to the hotel-keeper for posting, and were primed to the lips with

the tale of her hackney lineage. The hotel-keeper had unconditionally

refused to trade, and here, when a heaven-sent alternative was delivered

into their hands, they found themselves hampered by the coils of a

cast-off lie. No shade, however, of hesitancy appeared on the open

countenance of the friend. He approached Miss Fitzroy with a mincing

step, a deprecating wave of the hand, and a deeply respectful ogle. He

was going to adopt the desperate resource of telling the truth, but to

tell the truth profitably was a part that required rather more playing

than any other.

“Well, your honour’s ladyship,” he began, with a glance at the hotel

ostler, who was standing near cleaning a bit in industrious and

sarcastic silence, “it is a fact, no doubt, that I mentioned here this

morning that this young mare was of the Government hackney stock. But,

according as I understand from this poor man that owns her, he bought

her in a small fair over the Tuam side, and the man that sold her could

take his oath she was by the Grey Dawn--sure you’d know it out of her

colour.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?” asked Miss Fitzroy, bending her straight

brows in righteous severity.

“Well, that’s true indeed, your ladyship; but, after all--I declare a

man couldn’t hardly live without he’d tell a lie sometimes!”

Fanny Fitz stooped, rather hurriedly, and entered upon a renewed

examination of the filly’s legs. Even Rupert Gunning, after his brief

and unsympathetic survey, had said she had good legs; in fact, he had

only been able to crab her for the length of her back, and he, as Fanny

Fitz reflected with a heat that took no heed of metaphor, was the

greatest crabber that ever croaked.

“What are you asking for her?” she demanded with a sudden access of

decision.

There was a pause. The owner of the filly and his friend withdrew a step

or two and conferred together in Irish at lightning speed. The filly

held up her head and regarded her surroundings with guileless

wonderment. Fanny Fitz made a mental dive into her bankbook, and arrived

at the varied conclusions that she was £30 to the good, that on that sum

she had to weather out the summer and autumn, besides pacifying various

cormorants (thus she designated her long-suffering tradespeople), and

that every one had told her that if she only kept her eyes open in

Connemara she might be able to buy something cheap and make a pot of

money on it.

“This poor honest man,” said the friend, returning to the charge, “says

he couldn’t part her without he’d get twenty-eight pounds for her; and,

thank God, it’s little your ladyship would think of giving that!”

Fanny Fitz’s face fell.

“Twenty-eight pounds!” she echoed. “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”

The friend turned to the owner, and, with a majestic wave of the hand,

signalled to him to retire. The owner, without a change of expression,

coiled up the rope halter and started slowly and implacably for the

gate; the friend took off his hat with wounded dignity. Every gesture

implied that the whole transaction was buried in an irrevocable past.

Fanny Fitz’s eyes followed the party as they silently left the yard, the

filly stalking dutifully with a long and springy step beside her master.

It was a moment full of bitterness, and of a quite irrational

indignation against Rupert Gunning.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” said the ostler, at her elbow, “would ye be

willing to give twenty pounds for the mare, and he to give back a pound

luck-penny?”

“I would!” said the impulsive Fanny Fitz, after the manner of her

nation.

When the fishing party returned that afternoon Miss Fitzroy met them at

the hall door.

“Well, my dear,” she said airily to Mrs. Spicer, “what sort of sport

have you had? I’ve enjoyed myself immensely. I’ve bought a horse!”

Mrs. Spicer sat, paralysed, on the seat of the outside car, disregarding

her brother’s outstretched hands.

“Fanny!” she exclaimed, in tones fraught with knowledge of her friend’s

resources and liabilities.

“Yes, I have!” went on Fanny Fitz, undaunted. “Mr. Gunning saw her. He

said she was a long-backed brute. Didn’t you, Mr. Gunning?”

Rupert Gunning lifted his small sister bodily off the car. He was a tall

sallow man, with a big nose and a small, much-bitten, fair moustache.

“Yes, I believe I did,” he said shortly.

Mrs. Spicer’s blue eyes grew round with consternation.

“Then you really have bought the thing!” she cried. “Oh, Fanny, you

idiot! And what on earth are you going to do with it?”

“It can sleep on the foot of my bed to-night,” returned Fanny Fitz, “and

I’ll ride it into Galway to-morrow! Mr. Gunning, you can ride half-way

if you like!”

But Mr. Gunning had already gone into the hotel with his rod and fishing

basket. He had a gift, that he rarely lost a chance of exercising, of

provoking Fanny Fitz to wrath, and the fact that he now declined her

challenge may or may not be accounted for by the gloom consequent upon

an empty fishing basket.

Next morning the various hangers-on in the hotel yard were provided with

occupation and entertainment of the most satiating description. Fanny

Fitz’s new purchase was being despatched to the nearest railway station,

some fourteen miles off. It had been arranged that the ostler was to

drive her there in one of the hotel cars, which should then return with

a horse that was coming from Galway for the hotel owner; nothing could

have fitted in better. Unfortunately the only part of the arrangement

that refused to fit in was the filly. Even while Fanny Fitz was

finishing her toilet, high-pitched howls of objurgation were rising,

alarmingly, from the stable-yard, and on reaching the scene of action

she was confronted by the spectacle of the ostler being hurtled across

the yard by the filly, to whose head he was clinging, while two helpers

upheld the shafts of the outside car from which she had fled. All were

shouting directions and warnings at the tops of their voices, the hotel

dog was barking, the filly alone was silent, but her opinions were

unmistakable.

A waiter in shirt-sleeves was leaning comfortably out of a window,

watching the fray and offering airy suggestion and comment.

“It’s what I’m telling them, miss,” he said easily, including Fanny Fitz

in the conversation; “if they get that one into Recess to-night it’ll

not be under a side-car.”

“But the man I bought her from,” said Fanny Fitz, lamentably addressing

the company, “told me that he drove his mother to chapel with her last

Sunday.”

“Musha then, may the divil sweep hell with him and burn the broom

afther!” panted the ostler in bitter wrath, as he slewed the filly to a

standstill. “I wish himself and his mother was behind her when I went

putting the crupper on her! B’leeve me, they’d drop their chat!”

“Sure I knew that young Geogheghan back in Westport,” remarked the

waiter, “and all the good there is about him was a little handy talk.

Take the harness off her, Mick, and throw a saddle on her. It’s little

I’d think meself of canthering her into Recess!”

“How handy ye are yerself with your talk!” retorted the ostler; “it’s

canthering round the table ye’ll be doing, and it’s what’ll suit ye

betther!”

Fanny Fitz began to laugh. “He might ride the saddle of mutton!” she

said, with a levity that, under the circumstances, did her credit.

“You’d better take the harness off, and you’ll have to get her to Recess

for me somehow.”

The ostler took no notice of this suggestion; he was repeating to

himself: “Ride the saddle o’ mutton! By dam, I never heard the like o’

that! Ride the saddle o’ mutton--!” He suddenly gave a yell of laughing,

and in the next moment the startled filly dragged the reins from his

hand with a tremendous plunge, and in half a dozen bounds was out of the

yard gate and clattering down the road.

There was an instant of petrifaction. “Diddlety--iddlety--idlety!”

chanted the waiter with far-away sweetness.

Fanny Fitz and the ostler were outside the gate simultaneously: the

filly was already rounding the first turn of the road; two strides more,

and she was gone as though she had never been, and “Oh, my nineteen

pounds!” thought poor Fanny Fitz.

As the ostler was wont to say in subsequent repetitions of the story:

“Thanks be to God, the reins was rotten!” But for this it is highly

probable that Miss Fitzroy’s speculation would have collapsed abruptly

with broken knees, possibly with a broken neck. Having galloped into

them in the course of the first hundred yards, they fell from her as

the green withes fell from Samson, one long streamer alone remaining to

lash her flanks as she fled. Some five miles from the hotel she met a

wedding, and therewith leaped the bog-drain by the side of the road and

“took to the mountains,” as the bridegroom poetically described it to

Fanny Fitz, who, with the ostler, was pursuing the fugitive on an

outside car.

“If that’s the way,” said the ostler, “ye mightn’t get her again before

the winther.”

Fanny Fitz left the matter, together with a further instalment of the

thirty pounds, in the hands of the sergeant of police, and went home,

and, improbable as it may appear, in the course of something less than

ten days she received an invoice from the local railway station,

Enniscar, briefly stating: “1 horse arrd. Please remove.”

Many people, most of her friends indeed, were quite unaware that Fanny

Fitz possessed a home. Beyond the fact that it supplied her with a

permanent address, and a place at which she was able periodically to

deposit consignments of half-worn-out clothes, Fanny herself was not

prone to rate the privilege very highly. Possibly, two very elderly

maiden step-aunts are discouraging to the homing instinct; the fact

remained that as long as the youngest Miss Fitzroy possessed the

wherewithal to tip a housemaid she was but rarely seen within the

decorous precincts of Craffroe Lodge.

Let it not for a moment be imagined that the Connemara filly was to

become a member of this household. Even Fanny Fitz, with all her

optimism, knew better than to expect that William O’Loughlin, who

divided his attentions between the ancient cob and the garden, and ruled

the elder Misses Fitzroy with a rod of iron, would undertake the

education of anything more skittish than early potatoes. It was to the

stable, or rather cow-house, of one Johnny Connolly, that the new

purchase was ultimately conveyed, and it was thither that Fanny Fitz,

with apples in one pocket and sugar in the other, conducted her ally,

Mr. Freddy Alexander, the master of the Craffroe Hounds. Fanny Fitz’s

friendship with Freddy was one of long standing, and was soundly based

on the fact that when she had been eighteen he had been fourteen; and

though it may be admitted that this is a discrepancy that somewhat fades

with time, even Freddy’s mother acquitted Fanny Fitz of any ulterior

motive; and Freddy was an only son.

“She was very rejected last night afther she coming in,” said Johnny

Connolly, manipulating as he spoke the length of rusty chain and bit of

stick that fastened the door. “I think it was lonesome she was on the

thrain.”

Fanny Fitz and Mr. Alexander peered into the dark and vasty interior of

the cow-house; from a remote corner they heard a heavy breath and the

jingle of a training bit, but they saw nothing.

“I have the cavesson and all on her ready for ye, and I was thinking

we’d take her south into Mr. Gunning’s land. His finces is very good,”

continued Johnny, going cautiously in; “wait till I pull her out.”

Johnny Connolly was a horse trainer who did a little farming, or a

farmer who did a little horse training, and his management of young

horses followed no known rules, and indeed knew none, but it was

generally successful. He fed them by rule of thumb; he herded them in

hustling, squabbling parties in pitch-dark sheds; he ploughed them at

eighteen months; he beat them with a stick like dogs when they

transgressed, and like dogs they loved him. He had what gardeners call

“a lucky hand” with them, and they throve with him, and he had,

moreover, that gift of winning their wayward hearts that comes neither

by cultivation nor by knowledge, but is innate and unconscious. Already,

after two days, he and the Connemara filly understood each other; she

sniffed distantly and with profound suspicion at Fanny and her

offerings, and entirely declined to permit Mr. Alexander to estimate her

height on the questionable assumption that the point of his chin

represented 15’2, but she allowed Johnny to tighten or slacken every

buckle in her new and unfamiliar costume without protest.

“I think she’ll make a ripping good mare,” said the enthusiastic Freddy,

as he and Fanny Fitz followed her out of the yard; “I don’t care what

Rupert Gunning says, she’s any amount of quality, and I bet you’ll do

well over her.”

“She’ll make a real nice fashionable mare,” remarked Johnny, opening the

gate of a field and leading the filly in, “and she’s a sweet galloper,

but she’s very frightful in herself. Faith, I thought she’d run up the

wall from me the first time I went to feed her! Ah ha! none o’ yer

thricks!” as the filly, becoming enjoyably aware of the large space of

grass round her, let fling a kick of malevolent exuberance at the two

fox-terriers who were trotting decorously in her rear.

It was soon found that, in the matter of “stone gaps,” the A B C of

Irish jumping, Connemara had taught the grey filly all there was to

learn.

“Begor, Miss Fanny, she’s as crabbed as a mule!” said her teacher

approvingly. “D’ye mind the way she soaks the hind legs up into her!

We’ll give her a bank now.”

At the bank, however, the trouble began. Despite the ministrations of

Mr. Alexander and a long whip, despite the precept and example of Mr.

Connolly, who performed prodigies of activity in running his pupil in at

the bank and leaping on to it himself the filly time after time either

ran her chest against it or swerved from it at the last instant with a

vigour that plucked her preceptor from off it and scattered Fanny Fitz

and the fox-terriers like leaves before the wind. These latter were

divided between sycophantic and shrieking indignation with the filly for

declining to jump, and a most wary attention to the sphere of influence

of the whip. They were a mother and daughter, as conceited, as craven,

and as wholly attractive as only the judiciously spoiled ladies of their

race can be. Their hearts were divided between Fanny Fitz and the cook,

the rest of them appertained to the Misses Harriet and Rachael Fitzroy,

whom they regarded with toleration tinged with boredom.

“I tell ye now, Masther Freddy, ’tis no good for us to be goin’ on

sourin’ the mare this way. ’Tis what the fince is too steep for her.

Maybe she never seen the like in that backwards counthry she came from.

We’ll give her the bank below with the ditch in front of it. ’Tisn’t

very big at all, and she’ll be bound to lep with the sup of wather

that’s in it.”

Thus Johnny Connolly, wiping a very heated brow.

The bank below was a broad and solid structure well padded with grass

and bracken, and it had a sufficiently obvious ditch, of some three feet

wide, on the nearer side. The grand effort was duly prepared for. The

bank was solemnly exhibited to the filly; the dogs, who had with

unerring instinct seated themselves on its most jumpable portion, were

scattered with one threat of the whip to the horizon. Fanny tore away

the last bit of bracken that might prove a discouragement, and Johnny

issued his final order.

“Come inside me with the whip, sir, and give her one good belt at the

last.”

No one knows exactly how it happened. There was a rush, a scramble, a

backward sliding, a great deal of shouting, and the Connemara filly was

couched in the narrow ditch at right angles to the fence, with the water

oozing up through the weeds round her, like a wild duck on its nest; and

at this moment Mr. Rupert Gunning appeared suddenly on the top of the

bank and inspected the scene with an amusement that he made little

attempt to conceal.

It took half an hour, and ropes, and a number of Rupert Gunning’s

haymakers, to get Fanny Fitz’s speculation on to its legs again, and Mr.

Gunning’s comments during the process successfully sapped Fanny Fitz’s

control of her usually equable temper, “He’s a beast!” she said

wrathfully to Freddy, as the party moved soberly homewards in the

burning June afternoon, with the horseflies clustering round them, and

the smell of new-mown grass wafting to them from where, a field or two

away, came the rattle of Rupert Gunning’s mowing-machine. “A crabbing

beast! It was just like my luck that he should come up at that moment

and have the supreme joy of seeing Gamble--” Gamble was the filly’s

rarely-used name--“wallowing in the ditch! That’s the second time he’s

scored off me. I _pity_ poor little Maudie Spicer for having such a

brother!”

In spite of this discouraging _début_, the filly’s education went on and

prospered. She marched discreetly along the roads in long reins; she

champed detested mouthfuls of rusty mouthing bit in the process

described by Johnny Connolly as “getting her neck broke”; she trotted

for treadmill half-hours in the lunge; and during and in spite of all

these penances, she fattened up and thickened out until that great

authority, Mr. Alexander, pronounced it would be a sin not to send her

up to the Dublin Horse Show, as she was just the mare to catch an

English dealer’s eye.

“But sure ye wouldn’t sell her, miss?” said her faithful nurse, “and

Masther Freddy afther starting the hounds and all!”

Fanny Fitz scratched the filly softly under the jawbone, and thought of

the document in her pocket--long, and blue, and inscribed with the too

familiar notice in red ink: “An early settlement will oblige”.

“I must, Johnny,” she said, “worse luck!”

“Well, indeed, that’s too bad, miss,” said Johnny comprehendingly.

“There was a mare I had one time, and I sold her before I went to

America. God knows, afther she went from me, whenever I’d look at her

winkers hanging on the wall I’d have to cry. I never seen a sight of her

till three years afther that, afther I coming home. I was coming out o’

the fair at Enniscar, an’ I was talking to a man an’ we coming down

Dangan Hill, and what was in it but herself coming up in a cart! “An’ I

didn’t look at her, good nor bad, nor know her, but sorra bit but she

knew me talking, an’ she turned in to me with the cart! Ho, ho, ho!’

says she, and she stuck her nose into me like she’d be kissing me. Be

dam, but I had to cry. An’ the world wouldn’t stir her out o’ that till

I’d lead her on meself. As for cow nor dog nor any other thing, there’s

nothing would rise your heart like a horse!”

* * * * *

It was early in July, a hot and sunny morning, and Fanny Fitz, seated on

the flawless grassplot in front of Craffroe Lodge hall-door, was engaged

in washing the dogs. The mother, who had been the first victim, was

morosely licking herself, shuddering effectively, and coldly ignoring

her oppressor’s apologies. The daughter, trembling in every limb, was

standing knee-deep in the bath; one paw, placed on its rim, was ready

for flight if flight became practicable; her tail, rigid with anguish

would have hummed like a violin-string if it were touched. Fanny, with

her shirt-sleeves rolled up to her elbows, scrubbed in the soap. A

clipped fuchsia hedge, the pride of William O’Loughlin’s heart, screened

the little lawn and garden from the high road.

“Good morning, Miss Fanny,” said a voice over the hedge.

Fanny Fitz raised a flushed face and wiped a fleck of Naldyre off her

nose with her arm.

“I’ve just been looking at your mare,” went on the voice.

“Well, I hope you liked her!” said Fanny Fitz defiantly, for the voice

was the voice of Rupert Gunning, and there was that in it that in this

connection acted on Miss Fitzroy as a slogan.

“Well, ‘like’ is a strong word, you know!” said Mr. Gunning, moving on

and standing with his arms on the top of the white gate and meeting

Fanny’s glance with provoking eyes. Then, as an after-thought, “Do you

think you give her enough to eat?”

“She gets a feed of oats every Sunday, and strong tea and thistles

through the week,” replied Fanny Fitz in furious sarcasm.

“Yes, that’s what she looks like,” said Rupert Gunning thoughtfully.

“Connolly tells me you want to send her to the show--Barnum’s, I

suppose--as the skeleton dude?”

“I believe you want to buy her yourself,” retorted Fanny, with a vicious

dab of the soap in the daughter’s eye.

“Yes, she’s just about up to my weight, isn’t she? By-the-bye, you

haven’t had her backed yet, I believe?”

“I’m going to try her to-day!” said Fanny with sudden resolve.

“Ride her yourself!” said Mr. Gunning, his eyebrows going up into the

roots of his hair.

“Yes!” said Fanny, with calm as icy as a sudden burst of struggles on

the part of the daughter would admit of.

Rupert Gunning hesitated; then he said, “Well, she ought to carry a

side-saddle well. Decent shoulders, and a nice long--” Perhaps he caught

Fanny Fitz’s eye; at all events, he left the commendation unfinished,

and went on, “I should like to look in and see the performance, if I

may? I suppose you wouldn’t let me try her first? No?”

He walked on.

“Puppy, _will_ you stay quiet!” said Fanny Fitz very crossly. She even

slapped the daughter’s soap-sud muffled person, for no reason that the

daughter could see.

“Begorra, miss, I dunno,” said Johnny Connolly dubiously when the

suggestion that the filly should be ridden there and then was made to

him a few minutes later; “wouldn’t ye wait till I put her a few turns

under the cart, or maybe threw a sack o’ oats on her back?”

But Fanny would brook no delay. Her saddle was in the harness-room:

William O’Loughlin could help to put it on; she would try the filly at

once.

Miss Fitzroy’s riding was of the sort that makes up in pluck what it

wants in knowledge. She stuck on by sheer force of character; that she

sat fairly straight, and let a horse’s head alone were gifts of

Providence of which she was wholly unconscious. Riding, in her opinion,

was just getting on to a saddle and staying there, and making the thing

under it go as fast as possible. She had always ridden other people’s

horses, and had ridden them so straight, and looked so pretty,

that--other people in this connection being usually men--such trifles as

riding out a hard run minus both fore shoes, or watering her mount

generously during a check, were endured with a forbearance not frequent

in horse owners. Hunting people, however, do not generally mount their

friends, no matter how attractive, on young and valuable horses. Fanny

Fitz’s riding had been matured on well-seasoned screws, and she sallied

forth to the subjugation of the Connemara filly with a self-confidence

formed on experience only of the old, and the kind, and the cunning.

The filly trembled and sidled away from the garden-seat up to which

Johnny Connolly had manoeuvred her. Johnny’s supreme familiarity with

young horses had brought him to the same point of recklessness that

Fanny had arrived at from the opposite extreme, but some lingering

remnant of prudence had induced him to put on the cavesson headstall,

with the long rope attached to it, over the filly’s bridle. The latter

bore with surprising nerve Fanny’s depositing of herself in the saddle.

“I’ll keep a holt o’ the rope, Miss Fanny,” said Johnny, assiduously

fondling his pupil; “it might be she’d be strange in herself for the

first offer. I’ll lead her on a small piece. Come on, gerr’l! Come on

now!”

The pupil, thus adjured, made a hesitating movement, and Fanny settled

herself down into the saddle. It was the shifting of the weight that

seemed to bring home to the grey filly the true facts of the case, and

with the discovery she shot straight up into the air as if she had been

fired from a mortar. The rope whistled through Johnny Connolly’s

fingers, and the point of the filly’s shoulder laid him out on the

ground with the precision of a prize-fighter.

“I felt, my dear,” as Fanny Fitz remarked in a letter to a friend, “as

if I were in something between an earthquake and a bad dream and a

churn. I just _clamped_ my legs round the crutches, and she whirled the

rest of me round her like the lash of a whip. In one of her flights she

nearly went in at the hall door, and I was aware of William O’Loughlin’s

snow-white face somewhere behind the geraniums in the porch. I think I

was clean out of the saddle then. I remember looking up at my knees, and

my left foot was nearly on the ground. Then she gave another flourish,

and swung me up on top again. I was hanging on to the reins hard; in

fact, I think they must have pulled me back on to the saddle, as I

_know_ at one time I was sitting in a bunch on the stirrup! Then I heard

most heart-rending yells from the poor old Aunts: ‘Oh, the begonias! O

Fanny, get off the grass!’ and then, suddenly, the filly and I were

perfectly still, and the house and the trees were spinning round me,

black, edged with green and yellow dazzles. Then I discovered that some

one had got hold of the cavesson rope and had hauled us in, as if we

were salmon; Johnny had grabbed me by the left leg, and was trying to

drag me off the filly’s back; William O’Loughlin had broken two pots of

geraniums, and was praying loudly among the fragments; and Aunt Harriet

and Aunt Rachel, who don’t to this hour realise that anything unusual

had happened, were reproachfully collecting the trampled remnants of the

begonias.”

It was, perhaps unworthy on Fanny Fitz’s part to conceal the painful

fact that it was that distinguished fisherman, Mr. Rupert Gunning, who

had landed her and the Connemara filly. Freddy Alexander, however, heard

the story in its integrity, and commented on it with his usual candour.

“I don’t know which was the bigger fool, you or Johnny,” he said; “I

think you ought to be jolly grateful to old Rupert!”

“Well, I’m not!” returned Fanny Fitz.

After this episode the training of the filly proceeded with more system

and with entire success. Her nerves having been steadied by an hour in

the lunge with a sack of oats strapped, Mazeppa-like, on to her back,

she was mounted without difficulty, and was thereafter ridden daily. By

the time Fanny’s muscles and joints had recovered from their first

attempt at rough-riding, the filly was taking her place as a reasonable

member of society, and her nerves, which had been as much _en évidence_

as her bones, were, like the latter, finding their proper level, and

becoming clothed with tranquillity and fat. The Dublin Horse Show drew

near, and, abetted by Mr. Alexander, Fanny Fitz filled the entry forms

and drew the necessary cheque, and then fell back in her chair and gazed

at the attentive dogs with fateful eyes.

“Dogs!” she said, “if I don’t sell the filly I am done for!”

The mother scratched languidly behind her ear till she yawned musically,

but said nothing. The daughter, who was an enthusiast, gave a sudden

bound on to Miss Fitzroy’s lap, and thus it was that the cheque was

countersigned with two blots and a paw mark.

None the less, the bank honoured it, being a kind bank, and not desirous

to emphasise too abruptly the fact that Fanny Fitz was overdrawn.

In spite of, or rather, perhaps, in consequence of this fact, it would

have been hard to find a smarter and more prosperous-looking young woman

than the owner of No. 548, as she signed her name at the season-ticket

turnstile and entered the wide soft aisles of the cathedral of horses at

Ballsbridge. It was the first day of the show, and in token of Fanny

Fitz’s enthusiasm be it recorded, it was little more than 9.30 A.M.

Fanny knew the show well, but hitherto only in its more worldly and

social aspects. Never before had she been of the elect who have a horse

“up,” and as she hurried along, attended by Captain Spicer, at whose

house she was staying, and Mr. Alexander, she felt magnificently

conscious of the importance of the position.

The filly had preceded her from Craffroe by a couple of days, under the

charge of Patsey Crimmeen, lent by Freddy for the occasion.

“I don’t expect a prize, you know,” Fanny had said loftily to Mr.

Gunning, “but she has improved so tremendously, every one says she ought

to be an easy mare to sell.”

The sun came filtering through the high roof down on to the long rows of

stalls, striking electric sparks out of the stirrup-irons and bits, and

adding a fresh gloss to the polish that the grooms were giving to their

charges. The judging had begun in several of the rings, and every now

and then a glittering exemplification of all that horse and groom could

be would come with soft thunder up the tan behind Fanny and her squires.

“We’ve come up through the heavy weights,” said Captain Spicer; “the

twelve-stone horses will look like rats--” He stopped.

They had arrived at the section in which figured “No. 548. Miss F.

Fitzroy’s ‘Gamble,’ grey mare; 4 years, by Grey Dawn,” and opposite

them was stall No. 548. In it stood the Connemara filly, or rather

something that might have been her astral body. A more spectral,

deplorable object could hardly be imagined. Her hind quarters had fallen

in, her hips were standing out; her ribs were like the bars of a grate;

her head, hung low before her, was turned so that one frightened eye

scanned the passers-by, and she propped her fragile form against the

partition of her stall, as though she were too weak to stand up.

To say that Fanny Fitz’s face fell is to put it mildly. As she described

it to Mrs. Spicer, it fell till it was about an inch wide and five miles

long. Captain Spicer was speechless. Freddy alone was equal to demanding

of Patsey Crimmeen what had happened to the mare.

“Begor, Masther Freddy, it’s a wonder she’s alive at all!” replied

Patsey, who was now perceived to be looking but little better than the

filly. “She was middlin’ quiet in the thrain, though she went to lep out

o’ the box with the first screech the engine give, but I quietened her

some way, and it wasn’t till we got into the sthreets here that she went

mad altogether. Faith, I thought she was into the river with me three

times! ’Twas hardly I got her down the quays; and the first o’ thim

alecthric thrams she seen! Look at me hands, sir! She had me swingin’

on the rope the way ye’d swing a flail. I tell you, Masther Freddy, them

was the ecstasies!”

Patsey paused and gazed with a gloomy pride into the stricken faces of

his audience.

“An’ as for her food,” he resumed, “she didn’t use a bit, hay, nor oats,

nor bran, bad nor good, since she left Johnny Connolly’s. No, nor drink.

The divil dang the bit she put in her mouth for two days, first and

last. Why wouldn’t she eat is it, miss? From the fright sure! She’ll do

nothing, only standing that way, and bushtin’ out sweatin’, and watching

out all the time the way I wouldn’t lave her. I declare to God I’m

heart-scalded with her!”

At this harrowing juncture came the order to No. 548 to go forth to Ring

3 to be judged, and further details were reserved. But Fanny Fitz had

heard enough.

“Captain Spicer,” she said, as the party paced in deepest depression

towards Ring 3, “if I hadn’t on a new veil I should cry!”

“Well, I haven’t,” replied Captain Spicer; “shall I do it for you? Upon

my soul, I think the occasion demands it!”

“I just want to know one thing,” continued Miss Fitzroy. “When does your

brother-in-law arrive?”

“Not till to-night.”

“That’s the only nice thing I’ve heard to-day,” sighed Fanny Fitz.

The judging went no better for the grey filly than might have been

expected, even though she cheered up a little in the ring, and found

herself equal to an invalidish but well-aimed kick at a

fellow-competitor. She was ushered forth with the second batch of the

rejected, her spirits sank to their former level, and Fanny’s

accompanied them.

Perhaps the most trying feature of the affair was the reproving sympathy

of her friends, a sympathy that was apt to break down into almost

irrepressible laughter at the sight of the broken-down skeleton of whose

prowess poor Fanny Fitz had so incautiously boasted.

“Y’ know, my dear child,” said one elderly M.F.H., “you had no business

to send up an animal without the condition of a wire fence to the Dublin

Show. Look at my horses! Fat as butter, every one of ’em!”

“So was mine, but it all melted away in the train,” protested Fanny Fitz

in vain. Those of her friends who had only seen the mare in the

catalogue sent dealers to buy her, and those who had seen her in the

flesh--or what was left of it--sent amateurs; but all, dealers and the

greenest of amateurs alike, entirely declined to think of buying her.

The weather was perfect; every one declared there never was a better

show, and Fanny Fitz, in her newest and least-paid-for clothes, looked

brilliantly successful, and declared to Mr. Rupert Gunning that nothing

made a show so interesting as having something up for it. She even

encouraged him to his accustomed jibes at her Connemara speculation, and

personally conducted him to stall No. 548, and made merry over its

melancholy occupant in a way that scandalised Patsey, and convinced Mrs.

Spicer that Fanny’s pocket was even harder hit than she had feared.

On the second day, however, things looked a little more hopeful.

“She ate her grub last night and this morning middlin’ well, miss,” said

Patsey, “and”--here he looked round stealthily and began to

whisper--“when I had her in the ring, exercisin’, this morning, there

was one that called me in to the rails; like a dealer he was. ‘Hi! grey

mare!’ says he. I went in. ‘What’s your price?’ says he. ‘Sixty guineas,

sir,’ says I. ‘Begin at the shillings and leave out the pounds!’ says

he. He went away then, but I think he’s not done with me.”

“I’m sure the ring is our best chance, Patsey,” said Fanny, her voice

thrilling with the ardour of conspiracy and of reawakened hope. “She

doesn’t look so thin when she’s moving. I’ll go and stand by the rails,

and I’ll call you in now and then just to make people look at her!”

“Sure I had Masther Freddy doing that to me yestherday,” said Patsey;

but hope dies hard in an Irishman, and he saddled up with all speed.

For two long burning hours did the Connemara filly circle in Ring 3, and

during all that time not once did her owner’s ears hear the longed-for

summons, “Hi! grey mare!” It seemed to her that every other horse in the

ring was called in to the rails, “and she doesn’t look so very thin

to-day!” said Fanny indignantly to Captain Spicer, who, with Mr.

Gunning, had come to take her away for lunch.

“Oh, you’ll see, you’ll sell her on the last day; she’s getting fitter

every minute,” responded Captain Spicer. “What would you take for her?”

“I’m asking sixty,” said Fanny dubiously. “What would _you_ take for

her, Mr. Gunning--on the last day, you know?”

“I’d take a ticket for her,” said Rupert Gunning, “back to Craffroe--if

you haven’t a return.”

The second and third days crawled by unmarked by any incident of cheer,

but on the morning of the fourth, when Fanny arrived at the stall, she

found that Patsey had already gone out to exercise. She hurried to the

ring and signalled to him to come to her.

“There’s a fella’ afther her, miss!” said Patsey, bending very low and

whispering at close and tobacco-scented range. “He came last night to

buy her; a jock he was, from the Curragh, and he said for me to be in

the ring this morning. He’s not come yet. He had a straw hat on him.”

Fanny sat down under the trees and waited for the jockey in the straw

hat. All around were preoccupied knots of bargainers, of owners making

their final arrangements, of would-be-buyers hurrying from ring to ring

in search of the paragon that they had now so little time to find. But

the man from the Curragh came not. Fanny sent the mare in, and sat on

under the trees, sunk in depression. It seemed to her she was the only

person in the show who had nothing to do, who was not clinking handfuls

of money, or smoothing out banknotes, or folding up cheques and

interring them in fat and greasy pocket-books. She had never known this

aspect of the Horse Show before, and--so much is in the point of

view--it seemed to her sordid and detestable. Prize-winners with their

coloured rosettes were swaggering about everywhere. Every horse in the

show seemed to have got a prize except hers, thought Fanny. And not a

man in a straw hat came near Ring 3.

She went home to lunch, dead tired. The others were going to see the

polo in the park.

“I must go back and sell the mare,” said Fanny valiantly, “or else take

that ticket to Craffroe, Mr. Gunning!”

“Well, we’ll come down and pick you up there after the first match, you

poor, miserable thing,” said Mrs. Spicer, “and I hope you’ll find that

beast of a horse dead when you get there! You look half dead yourself!”

How sick Fanny was of signing her name at that turnstile! The pen was

more atrocious every time. How tired her feet were! How sick she was of

the whole thing, and how incredibly big a fool she had been! She was

almost too tired to know what she was doing, and she had actually walked

past stall No. 548 without noticing it, when she heard Patsey’s voice

calling her.

“Miss Fanny! Miss Fanny! I have her sold! The mare’s sold, miss! See

here! I have the money in me pocket!”

The colour flooded Fanny Fitz’s face. She stared at Patsey with eyes

that more than ever suggested the Connemara trout-stream with the sun

playing in it; so bright were they, so changing, and so wet. So at least

thought a man, much addicted to fishing, who was regarding the scene

from a little way off.

“He was a dealer, miss,” went on Patsey; “a Dublin fella’. Sixty-three

sovereigns I asked him, and he offered me fifty-five, and a man that was

there said we should shplit the differ, and in the latther end he gave

me the sixty pounds. He wasn’t very stiff at all. I’m thinking he wasn’t

buying for himself.”

The man who had noticed Fanny Fitz’s eyes moved away unostentatiously.

He had seen in them as much as he wanted; for that time at least.

THE CONNEMARA MARE

PART I

The grey mare who had been one of the last, if not the very last, of the

sales at the Dublin Horse Show, was not at all happy in her mind.

Still less so was the dealer’s under-strapper, to whom fell the task of

escorting her through the streets of Dublin. Her late owner’s groom had

assured him that she would “folly him out of his hand, and that whatever

she’d see she wouldn’t care for it nor ask to look at it!”

It cannot be denied, however, that when an electric tram swept past her

like a terrace under weigh, closely followed by a cart laden with a

clanking and horrific reaping-machine, she showed that she possessed

powers of observation. The incident passed off with credit to the

under-strapper, but when an animal has to be played like a salmon down

the length of Lower Mount Street, and when it barn-dances obliquely

along the north side of Merrion Square, the worst may be looked for in

Nassau Street.

And it was indeed in Nassau Street, and, moreover, in full view of the

bow window of Kildare Street Club, that the cup of the under-strapper’s

misfortunes brimmed over. To be sure he could not know that the new

owner of the grey mare was in that window; it was enough for him that a

quiescent and unsuspected piano-organ broke with three majestic chords

into Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” at his very ear, and that, without any

apparent interval of time, he was surmounting a heap composed of a

newspaper boy, a sandwich man, and a hospital nurse, while his hands

held nothing save a red-hot memory of where the rope had been. The

smashing of glass and the clatter of hoofs on the pavement filled in

what space was left in his mind for other impressions.

“She’s into the hat shop!” said Mr. Rupert Gunning to himself in the

window of the club, recognising his recent purchase and the full measure

of the calamity in one and the same moment.

He also recognised in its perfection the fact, already suspected by him,

that he had been a fool.

Upheld by this soothing reflection he went out into the street, where

awaited him the privileges of proprietorship. These began with the

despatching of the mare, badly cut, and apparently lame on every leg, in

charge of the remains of the under-strapper, to her destination. They

continued with the consolation of the hospital nurse, and embraced in

varying pecuniary degrees the compensation of the sandwich man, the

newspaper boy, and the proprietor of the hat shop. During all this time

he enjoyed the unfaltering attention of a fair-sized crowd, liberal in

comment, prolific of imbecile suggestion. And all these things were only

the beginning of the trouble.

Mr. Gunning proceeded to his room and to the packing of his portmanteau

for that evening’s mail-boat to Holyhead in a mood of considerable

sourness. It may be conceded to him that circumstances had been of a

souring character. He had bought Miss Fanny Fitzroy’s grey mare at the

Horse Show for reasons of an undeniably sentimental sort. Therefore,

having no good cause to show for the purchase, he had made it secretly,

the sum of sixty pounds, for an animal that he had consistently crabbed,

amounting in the eyes of the world in general to a rather advanced

love-token, if not a formal declaration. He had planned no future for

the grey mare, but he had cherished a trembling hope that some day he

might be in a position to restore her to her late owner without

considering the expression in any eyes save those which, a couple of

hours ago, had recalled to him the play of lights in a Connemara trout

stream.

Now, it appeared, this pleasing vision must go the way of many others.

The August sunlight illumined Mr. Gunning’s folly, and his bulging

portmanteau, packed as brutally as only a man in a passion can pack;

when he reached the hall, it also with equal inappropriateness

irradiated the short figure and seedy tidiness of the dealer who had

been his confederate in the purchase of the mare.

“What did the vet say, Brennan?” said Mr. Gunning, with the brevity of

ill humour.

Mr. Brennan paused before replying, a pause laden with the promise of

evil tidings. His short silvery hair glistened respectably in the

sunshine: he had preserved unblemished from some earlier phase of his

career the air of a family coachman out of place. It veiled, though it

could not conceal, the dissolute twinkle in his eye as he replied:--

“He said sir, if it wasn’t that she was something out of condition, he’d

recommend you to send her out to the lions at the Zoo!”

The specimen of veterinary humour had hardly the success that had been

hoped for it. Rupert Gunning’s face was so remarkably void of

appreciation that Mr. Brennan abruptly relapsed into gloom.

“He said he’d only be wasting his time with her, sir; he might as well

go stitch a bog-hole as them wounds the window gave her; the tendon of

the near fore is the same as in two halves with it, let alone the

shoulder, that’s worse again with her pitching out on the point of it.”

“Was that all he had to say?” demanded the mare’s owner.

“Well, beyond those remarks he passed about the Zoo, I should say it

was, sir,” admitted Mr. Brennan.

There was another pause, during which Rupert asked himself what the

devil he was to do with the mare, and Mr. Brennan, thoroughly aware that

he was doing so, decorously thumbed the brim of his hat.

“Maybe we might let her get the night, sir,” he said, after a respectful

interval, “and you might see her yourself in the morning--”

“I don’t want to see her. I know well enough what she looks like,”

interrupted his client irritably. “Anyhow, I’m crossing to England

to-night, and I don’t choose to miss the boat for the fun of looking at

an unfortunate brute that’s cut half to pieces!”

Mr. Brennan cleared his throat. “If you were thinking to leave her in my

stables, sir,” he said firmly, “I’d sooner be quit of her. I’ve only a

small place, and I’d lose too much time with her if I had to keep her

the way she is. She might be on my hands three months and die at the end

of it.”

The clock here struck the quarter, at which Mr. Gunning ought to start

for his train at Westland Row.

“You see, sir--” recommenced Brennan. It was precisely at this point

that Mr. Gunning lost his temper.

“I suppose you can find time to shoot her,” he said, with a very red

face. “Kindly do so to-night!”

Mr. Brennan’s arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to

understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood

themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning’s original motive in

buying the mare had been, he had during this interview yielded to

treatment and followed a prepared path.

That night, in the domestic circle, he went so far as to lay the matter

before Mrs. Brennan.

“He picked out a mare that was as poor as a raven--though she’s a good

enough stamp if she was in condition--and tells me to buy her. ‘What

price will I give, sir?’ says I. ‘Ye’ll give what they’re askin’,’ says

he, ‘and that’s sixty sovereigns!’ I’m thirty years buying horses, and

such a disgrace was never put on me, to be made a fool of before all

Dublin! Going giving the first price for a mare that wasn’t value for

the half of it! Well; he sees the mare then, cut into garters below in

Nassau Street. Devil a hair he cares! Nor never came down to the stable

to put an eye on her! ‘Shoot her!’ says he, leppin’ up on a car.

‘Westland Row!’ says he to the fella’. ‘Drive like blazes!’ and away

with him! Well, no matter; I earned my money easy, an’ I got the mare

cheap!”

Mrs. Brennan added another spoonful of brown sugar to the porter that

she was mulling in a sauce-pan on the range.

“Didn’t ye say it was a young lady that owned the mare, James?” she

asked in a colourless voice.

“Well, you’re the devil, Mary!” replied Mr. Brennan in sincere

admiration.

The mail-boat was as crowded as is usual on the last night of the Horse

Show week. Overhead flowed the smoke river from the funnels, behind

flowed the foam river of wake; the Hill of Howth receded apace into the

west, and its lighthouse glowed like a planet in the twilight. Men with

cigars, aggressively fit and dinner-full, strode the deck in couples,

and thrashed out the Horse Show and Leopardstown to their uttermost

husks.

Rupert Gunning was also, but with excessive reluctance, discussing the

Horse Show. As he had given himself a good deal of trouble in order to

cross on this particular evening, and as any one who was even slightly

acquainted with Miss Fitzroy must have been aware that she would decline

to talk of anything else, sympathy for him is not altogether deserved.

The boat swung softly in a trance of speed, and Miss Fitzroy, better

known to a large circle of intimates as Fanny Fitz, tried to think the

motion was pleasant. She had made a good many migrations to England, by

various routes and classes. There had indeed been times of stress when

she had crossed unostentatiously, third class, trusting that luck and a

thick veil might save her from her friends, but the day after she had

sold a horse for sixty pounds was not the day for a daughter of Ireland

to study economics. The breeze brought warm and subtle wafts from the

machinery; it also blew wisps of hair into Fanny Fitz’s eyes and over

her nose, in a manner much revered in fiction, but in real life usually

unbecoming and always exasperating. She leaned back on the bench and

wondered whether the satisfaction of crowing over Mr. Gunning

compensated her for abandoning the tranquil security of the ladies’

cabin.

Mr. Gunning, though less contradictious than his wont, was certainly one

of the most deliberately unsympathetic men she knew. None the less he

was a man, and some one to talk to, both points in his favour, and she

stayed on.

“I just missed meeting the man who bought my mare,” she said, recurring

to the subject for the fourth time; “apparently _he_ didn’t think her ‘a

leggy, long-backed brute,’ as other people did, or said they did!”

“Did many people say it?” asked Mr. Gunning, beginning to make a

cigarette.

“Oh, no one whose opinion signified!” retorted Fanny Fitz, with a glance

from her charming, changeful eyes that suggested that she did not always

mean quite what she said. “I believe the dealer bought her for a

Leicestershire man. What she really wants is a big country where she can

extend herself.”

Mr. Gunning reflected that by this time the grey mare had extended

herself once for all in Brennan’s back-yard: he had done nothing to be

ashamed of, but he felt abjectly guilty.

“If I go with Maudie to Connemara again next year,” continued Fanny, “I

must look out for another. You’ll come too, I hope? A little opposition

is such a help in making up one’s mind! I don’t know what I should have

done without you at Leenane last June!”

Perhaps it was the vision of early summer that the words called up;

perhaps it was the smile, half-seen in the semi-dark, that curved her

provoking lips; perhaps it was compunction for his share in the tragedy

of the Connemara mare; but possibly without any of these explanations

Rupert would have done as he did, which was to place his hand on Fanny

Fitz’s as it lay on the bench beside him.

She was so amazed that for a moment she wildly thought he had mistaken

it in the darkness for his tobacco pouch. Then, jumping with a shock to

the conclusion that even the unsympathetic Mr. Gunning shared most men’s

views about not wasting an opportunity, she removed her hand with a

jerk.

“Oh! I beg your pardon!” said Rupert pusillanimously. Miss Fitzroy fell

back again on the tobacco pouch theory.

At this moment the glowing end of a cigar deviated from its orbit on the

deck and approached them.

“Is that you, Gunning? I thought it was your voice,” said the owner of

the cigar.

“Yes, it is,” said Mr. Gunning, in a tone singularly lacking in

encouragement. “Thought I saw you at dinner, but couldn’t be sure.”

As a matter of fact, no one could have been more thoroughly aware than

he of Captain Carteret’s presence in the saloon.

“I thought so too!” said Fanny Fitz, from the darkness, “Captain

Carteret wouldn’t look my way!”

Captain Carteret gave a somewhat exaggerated start of discovery, and

threw his cigar over the side. He had evidently come to stay.

“How was it I didn’t see you at the Horse Show?” he said.

“The only people one ever sees there are the people one doesn’t want to

see,” said Fanny, “I could meet no one except the auctioneer from

Craffroe, and he always said the same thing. ‘Fearful sultry, Miss

Fitzroy! Have ye a purchaser yet for your animal, Miss Fitzroy? Ye have

not! Oh, fie, fie!’ It was rather funny at first, but it palled.”

“I was only there one day,” said Captain Carteret; “I wish I’d known you

had a horse up, I might have helped you to sell.”

“Thanks! I sold all right,” said Fanny Fitz magnificently. “Did rather

well too!”

“Capital!” said Captain Carteret vaguely. His acquaintance with Fanny

extended over a three-day shooting party in Kildare, and a dance given

by the detachment of his regiment at Enniscar, for which he had come

down from the depôt. It was not sufficient to enlighten him as to what

it meant to her to own and sell a horse for the first time in her life.

“By-the-bye, Gunning,” he went on, “you seemed to be having a lively

time in Nassau Street yesterday! My wife and I were driving in from the

polo, and we saw you in the thick of what looked like a street row. Some

one in the club afterwards told me it was a horse you had only just

bought at the Show that had come to grief. I hope it wasn’t much hurt?”

There was a moment of silence--astonished, inquisitive silence on the

part of Miss Fitzroy temporary cessation of the faculty of speech on

that of Mr. Gunning. It was the moment, as he reflected afterwards, for

a clean, decisive lie, a denial of all ownership; either that, or the

instant flinging of Captain Carteret overboard.

Unfortunately for him, he did neither; he lied partially, timorously,

and with that clinging to the skirts of the truth that marks the novice.

“Oh, she was all right,” he said, his face purpling heavily in the

kindly darkness. “What was the polo like, Carteret?”

“But I had no idea that you had bought a horse!” broke in Fanny Fitz, in

high excitement. “Why didn’t you tell Maudie and me? What is it like?”

“Oh, it’s--she’s just a cob--a grey cob--I just picked her up at the end

of the show.”

“What sort of a cob? Can she jump? Are you going to ride her with

Freddy’s hounds?” continued the implacably interested Fanny.

“I bought her as--as a trapper, and to do a bit of carting,” replied

Rupert, beginning suddenly to feel his powers of invention awakening;

“she’s quite a common brute. She doesn’t jump.”

“She seems to have jumped pretty well in Nassau Street,” remarked

Captain Carteret; “as well as I could see in the crowd, she didn’t

strike me as if she’d take kindly to carting.”

“Well, I do think you might have told us about it!” reiterated Fanny

Fitz. “Men are so ridiculously mysterious about buying or selling

horses. I simply named my price and got it. _I_ see nothing to make a

mystery about in a deal; do you, Captain Carteret?”

“Well, that depends on whether you are buying or selling,” replied

Captain Carteret.

But Fate, in the shape of a turning tide and a consequent roll, played

for once into the hands of Rupert Gunning. The boat swayed slowly, but

deeply, and a waft of steam blew across Miss Fitzroy’s face. It was not

mere steam; it had been among hot oily things, stealing and giving

odour. Fanny Fitz was not ill, but she knew that she had her limits, and

that conversation, save of the usual rudimentary kind with the

stewardess, were best abandoned.

Miss Fitzroy’s movements during the next two and a half months need not

be particularly recorded. They included--

1. A week in London, during which the sixty pounds, or a great part of

it, acquired by the sale of the Connemara mare, passed imperceptibly

into items, none of which, on a strict survey of expenditure, appeared

to exceed three shillings and nine pence.

2. A month at Southsea, with Rupert Gunning’s sister, Maudie Spicer,

where she again encountered Captain Carteret, and entered aimlessly upon

a semi-platonic and wholly unprofitable flirtation with him. During this

epoch she wore out the remnant of her summer clothes and laid in

substitutes; rather encouraged than otherwise by the fact that she had

long since lost touch with the amount of her balance at the bank.

3. An expiatory and age-long sojourn of three weeks with relatives at an

Essex vicarage, mitigated only by persistent bicycling with her uncle’s

curate. The result, as might have been predicted by any one acquainted

with Miss Fitzroy, was that the curate’s affections were diverted from

the bourne long appointed for them, namely, the eldest daughter of the

house, and that Fanny departed in blackest disgrace, with the single

consolation of knowing that she would never be asked to the vicarage

again.

Finally she returned, third-class, to her home in Ireland, with nothing

to show for the expedition except a new and very smart habit, and a

vague assurance that Captain Carteret would give her a mount now and

then with Freddy Alexander’s hounds. Captain Carteret was to be on

detachment at Enniscar.