THE HEART OF TARA
The Mistress of the Kennels held on to one of Finn's fore-paws as
though she feared he might be spirited away from the den, even
while he was being welcomed home there. The fatted calf took the
form of a dish of new milk and some sardines on toast which had
been prepared for the next morning's breakfast. But this came
later, and was polished off by Finn more by reason of its rare
daintiness and his desire to live up to what the occasion seemed to
demand of him, than because he was hungry. At an early stage in
proceedings the Master noticed, and removed, the slip-collar.
"Well, that disposes of the theory that Finn wandered away of his
own accord," said the Master. "If the police know their business
this ought to help them." Then he turned to Finn again. "You didn't
know there was a twenty-five pound reward out for you, my son, did
you? It was to have been made fifty in another day or two; though,
if you did but know it, our solvency demands rather that you should
be sold, than paid for in that fashion."
The Mistress nodded thoughtfully.
"But that's quite impossible after this," she said; "selling Finn,
I mean."
The Master smiled. "I suppose it is. That seems to be rather our
way. It's a dead sure thing there can be no selling of Tara, and--I'm
inclined to think you're right about Finn, too. Heavens! If I
could lay my hands on the man who took that chip off his muzzle, I
think I'd run to the length of a ten pounds fine for assault. I'd
get my money's worth, too. The dog has been clubbed; he has been
man-handled; I could swear he has had to fight for his freedom.
Poor old Finn! What a dog! What a Finn it is!"
While the last of these remarks was being made the Master was
carefully examining Finn all over, parting the Wolfhound's dense
hard hair over places in which the skin beneath had been broken,
and pressing his fingers along the lines of different bones and
muscles solicitously. There was a half-spoken oath on the Master's
lips when Finn winced from him as his hand passed down the ribs of
the hound's right side.
"There is a rib broken here," he said to the Mistress, "unless I am
much mistaken. When the post office opens in the morning we must
wire for Turle, the vet. Thieving's bad enough, but--there are some
stupid brutes in this world!"
The Mistress stared.
"Oh, no, I don't mean Finn; nor any of his honest four-legged kind.
I meant two-legged brutes. Finn has been handled more roughly than
an understanding man would handle a tiger. And look at his face.
Look into his eyes. Notice his keenly watchful air, even while I am
handling him. Well, Finn, my son, you have said good-bye to
puppyhood with a vengeance now. Unless I am much mistaken he has
crowded more into the last three days than all the rest of his life
till now had taught him. That dog's years older than Kathleen to-night
in some ways. Do you get the effect I mean? The youth has
gone; there is a certain new hardness. Watch his eye now as I lift
my hand!"
The Master lifted his hand with a sudden jerk, and the two who were
watching Finn's eyes saw that in them which they had never seen in
Kathleen's, nor yet even in Tara's eyes; for neither Tara nor her
daughter had ever pitted their agility against man's brutality.
They had never been clubbed or kicked; they had never seen as far
into the ugly places of human nature as Finn; and you might
brandish your arms in any way you chose before old Tara or
Kathleen, and, while the one would have blinked at you with
courteous tolerance of your foolishness, the other would have
suspected you of inventing a new game, and gambolled before you
like a huge kitten.
It was not, of course, that Finn was foolish enough to distrust the
Master, or suspect him of any hostile intention. But certain
instincts had been awakened in the young Wolfhound, and, for a long
time, at all events, and probably for the rest of his life, those
instincts would not again become latent. In some respects he may
have been the better off; certainly he was better equipped to face
the world; but the Master, naturally enough, could not withhold a
sigh for the old utter trustfulness which had held even the
instincts of self-preservation in abeyance. But, as has been said,
Finn was better equipped to face the world than either his sister,
or that gentle great lady, his mother; all his instincts were more
alert, and his senses also. His eyes moved more rapidly than their
eyes; his attitude toward life and toward men-folk was more elastic
and less absolute. Men-folk remained his superiors in Finn's eyes,
his superiors in a hundred ways, and it might be his dearly loved
friends; but they were not any more the absolute, omnipotent, and
all-perfect gods that they had been, and still were to Kathleen,
for example, who would not have felt the slightest uneasiness if
the Master had placed his heel on her throat, or touched her head
with a club, as she lay on the ground before him.
To a great extent, however, the Master's sympathetic anger over
Finn's wounds, and twinges of regret regarding the subtle changes
which he recognised in the hound he affectionately called "son,"
were out-balanced by the joy he felt at seeing Finn safe in his den
again. The loss of Finn had been hard to bear, and not the less
hard because it came immediately after the great triumph of the
Show. There were the seven prize cards adorning the wall over
Tara's great bed in the den; but their presence had been something
of a mockery in the absence of their winner. When the Master and
the Mistress finally bade Finn good night, after making him
thoroughly comfortable in his own clean, big bed, the coach-house
door was carefully padlocked.
It could not have been said a month later that Finn was physically
the worse for his adventure in the hands of Matey. His ribs were
sound once more, and all his wounds and bruises were healed, though
a light-coloured scar remained, and would remain on his muzzle,
where the dog-stealer's stick had bitten into the bone. If it had
come nine months earlier, such an experience would have been bad
indeed, for sets-back in puppyhood are hard to make up. But at
fifteen months Finn had as perfect a physical foundation to go upon
as any living creature could have. He was fortified against
physical ills as few animals can be; his system lacked nothing that
makes for resisting power; he had attained his full growth without
having known a day's illness, and his reserve strength was
enormous.
And now came a long and rather severe winter, in which no evil
thing befell Finn, and the process of "furnishing" went on in him
with never a hitch of any sort, and in circumstances that could not
possibly have been more favourable. All day long he drank in the
heartiest air in England; on every day he had ample exercise and
ample food, and when young summer of the next year brought him to
his second birthday, Finn scaled 149 lbs., and his shoulder bones
just skimmed the under side of the measuring standard at thirty-six
inches. Hard measurement brought him within an eighth of an inch of
the yard, and it was fair to say that, favourably measured,
standing well up, he did reach full thirty-six inches at the
shoulder.
Remember that, when his head was inclined upward, the tip of his
nose would be more than a foot higher than his shoulder. With all
four feet on the floor, he could rest his nose on a window-ledge
that was exactly four feet high. His eyes, and shaggy brows and
beard, like the tip of his tail, were dark as night; there were
some extra dark hairs at his hocks, fetlocks and shoulder blades;
and all the rest of Finn was of a hard, steely grey brindle colour;
the typical wolf colour of northern climes, very steely, and with
odd suggestions about it of ghostly fleetness, of great speed and
enduring strength. His fore-legs were straight as gun-barrels, his
knees flat as the palm of your hand; his feet hard, close, round,
and rather cat-like, save that his claws were more like chisels,
black, and hard, and strongly curved. His hind-legs, on the other
hand, were finely curved, with swelling rolls of muscle in the
upper thighs. The first or upper thighs were very long and strong,
curving sharply out to hocks that were well let down, and without a
hint of turn inward or outward. His loins were well arched, his
chest deep, like an Arab stallion's, his neck long, arched, and
very strong, like the massy muscles of his fore-arms. It was
difficult to say that he had grown much since his fifteenth month,
and yet he looked a very much bigger dog, and, above all, he looked
and was very much stronger. There was no longer anything immature
or unformed about Finn. During his next year he might possibly add
half a score of pounds to his already great weight; but on his
second birthday he was set and furnished, a superb specimen of pure
breeding and perfect rearing in Irish Wolfhounds.
For almost six months now Finn's only companion of his own kind had
been Tara. He had not seen Kathleen's departure from the cottage
beside the Downs, and for some days he was greatly puzzled by her
absence. He even stood by the orchard gate and growled fiercely,
with the hair on his shoulders standing almost erect, because the
thought was in his mind that Matey may have had something to do
with this disappearance. The Master saw him engaged in this way,
and was greatly puzzled by it. He said to the Mistress of the
Kennels afterwards--
"I really think old Finn must have gone mad for five minutes this
morning. I never saw a more fearsome-looking creature than he was
when he stood and growled beside the orchard gate. I assure you he
was terrible. He looked about six feet high, and as fierce as any
tiger. It made me think of his ancient godfather, or namesake, the
Finn of fifteen hundred years ago, who kept King Cormac's three
hundred Irish Wolfhounds in fighting trim, as the most awe-inspiring
and death-dealing portion of his master's army. I must
read over those 'Tales of the Cycle of Finn' again; they are fine,
stirring things. But in these worrying days I hardly seem to get
time for sleep, let alone for reading about old Finn. But I wish
you had seen Finn--our Finn--this morning. He was very terrible,
but I never saw a dog look more magnificent. Upon my word, I
believe there are very few living things that Finn could not
implant fear in, if he set his mind to it; yes, and pull down, to
boot--a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone, and teeth and
fire and spirit!"
But Finn need not have worried for Kathleen's sake. She had gone to
a good home, and lives there to-day in honoured old age. Her owner
paid a hundred guineas for her, and would not sell her for ten
times the figure. But there was no way of telling Finn these
things, for though he could understand most things that the Master
said to him, and was able to tell the Master most things that he
wanted to tell; yet the matter of buying and selling and its causes
were naturally beyond him. He had no way of telling that the Master
was in sore straits financially, though he did know that his friend
was not over and above happy. Neither could he tell that the mere
keeping of a Wolfhound like Kathleen runs away with the better part
of twenty pounds a year. Things were not prospering with the
Master, and, feeling that he could not part with Finn or Tara, he
had been absolutely obliged to sell Kathleen.
But that was by no means the end of the Master's troubles, the root
of which lay in the fact that he loved the country, and hated the
town, but was unable to earn money enough in the country to meet
the various obligations with which he saddled himself, and was
saddled by circumstances. And so it fell out that soon after Finn's
second birthday the Master began to spend a good deal of time away
from the house by the Downs. Tara liked to pass the greater part of
her time in the Master's outside den with her muzzle on his
slippers, but Finn was not like that. Tara was a matron getting on
in years, and her matronhood had cost her dear in illness from
which it had been thought she could never recover. Finn, on the
other hand, was the very personification of lusty youth and
tireless virility. The Mistress of the Kennels would take him out
behind her bicycle, while Tara lay dreaming at home, and it may be
that the Mistress fancied her gentle ten and twelve mile runs tired
Finn. She never saw him when he would set off upon his hunting
expeditions, in the course of which he covered every foot of the
Downs for a dozen miles around. He was safe enough, too, for he
would have had nothing but angry growls for any man of Matey's ilk,
charmed he never so wisely with spiced meats and the like. The
weasels and the stoats, and a score of other wild things that
roamed that country-side, could have told the Mistress of the
Kennels just why Finn did not always clear his dinner dish in these
days, and thereby saved her an addition to her many worries of that
period. She did not like to depress the Master with tales of half-eaten
meals, and she had no knowledge of the half-eaten hares and
rabbits and other wild creatures which Finn left behind him on his
hunting trails.
From one point of view, Finn suffered at this stage from the
absence of the Master's eye and hand, and so did the rabbits; but,
from another point of view, Finn gained. He became harder, more
wily, and a far more expert hunter than he would have been under a
more disciplined regime. But certainly he also became less
domesticated, and vastly less fastidious than, for example, that
exquisite great lady, his mother.
There came a certain late summer's day, with more than a hint of
autumn in the air, when something happened which Finn never quite
forgot. The Master had been away for three weeks on end, and Tara
had missed him sadly. In the evening the great bitch would often
whimper quietly as she lay outstretched, with her long, grey muzzle
resting on the slippers which the Mistress never thought of taking
from her. Of late she had cared less and less for any kind of
activity, and seemed more and more to desire the presence of the
Master. Now, in the evening of the day which brought strong hints
of coming autumn with it, Finn lay beside Tara in the outside den,
thinking lazily of an upland meadow, with a copse at its far end,
which he meant to hunt presently. Suddenly there came a sound of a
man's footfall on the gravel beyond the gateway and in front of the
house. Tara's nostrils quivered as her head rose. With one mighty
bound she was outside the den. The gates stood open. The Master, at
the garden's far end, called--
"Tara! Tara, girl! Here, girl!"
Finn was by Tara's flank, and he saw her leap forward, hurtling
through the air like an arrow from a bow. Six great bounds she
gave, while fleet Finn galloped a good twenty paces behind her, and
then Tara stopped suddenly with a strange, moaning cry, staggered
for a moment, as the Master ran towards her, and then fell
sideways, against his knee, with glazing eyes turned up for a last
glimpse of the face she loved. The Master was kneeling on the
gravel, and Tara's shoulders were in his arms; but at the end of
two long-drawn sighs, Tara was dead.
Finn was sniffing at his mother's back. He did not know just what
had happened, but he was profoundly conscious that the happening
was tragic, and that his beautiful mother was the victim. The shock
to the Master was very great; for he was already unhappy, and he
had loved this mother of heroes of his very dearly. But the shock
to Finn, though far less complex, was scarcely less great. He had
killed many scores of times, but it seemed that he had never seen
death till now. He recognized it clearly enough. He knew that Tara
was never going to move again; the instant his sensitive nostrils
touched her still, warm body he knew that. But there had been no
killing. That was what baffled Finn, and struck a kind of terror
into his heart, to lend poignancy to his sorrow. One more look he
gave at his mother's sightless face, this time where it rested on
the crook of the Master's arm, and then he sat down on his
haunches, and with muzzle raised high poured out his grief in the
long-drawn Irish Wolfhound howl; the most melancholy cry in nature.
The Master had looked careworn and weary before he called Tara to
him. It was a very grey, sad face he showed when he rose gently and
bade Finn go into the coach-house and be silent. He had known that
Tara's heart was weak, but this thing that had happened he had
never anticipated, and the nature and circumstances of Tara's death
were such as to move a man deeply. In a sense, her love of the
Master had killed this beautiful hound. Her great love had burst
her heart in sunder, and so she died, the very noble daughter of an
ancient, noble line.
[Illustration]