Chapter V: Part III (1)

Dotted at intervals throughout society are the people endowed with the faculty for “getting up things”. They are dauntless people, filled with the power of driving lesser and deeper reluctant spirits before them; remorseless to the timid, carneying to the stubborn.

Of such was Mrs. Carteret, with powers matured in hill-stations in India, mellowed by much voyaging in P. and O. steamers. Not even an environment as unpromising as that of Enniscar in its winter torpor had power to dismay her. A public whose artistic tastes had hitherto been nourished upon travelling circuses, Nationalist meetings, and missionary magic lanterns in the Wesleyan schoolhouse, was, she argued, practically virgin soil, and would ecstatically respond to any form of cultivation.

“I know there’s not much talent to be had,” she said combatively to her husband, “but we’ll just black our faces, and call ourselves the Green Coons or something, and it will be all right!”

“Dashed if I’ll black my face again,” said Captain Carteret; “I call it rot trying to get up anything here. There’s no one to do anything.”

“Well, there’s ourselves and little Taylour” (“little Taylour,” it may be explained, was Captain Carteret’s subaltern), “that’s two banjoes and a bones anyhow; and Freddy Alexander, and there’s your dear friend Fanny Fitz--she’ll be home in a few days, and these two big Hamilton girls--”

“Oh, Lord!” ejaculated Captain Carteret.

“Oh, yes!” continued Mrs. Carteret, unheedingly, “and there’s Mr. Gunning; he’ll come if Fanny Fitz does.”

“He’ll not be much advantage when he does come,” said Captain Carteret spitefully.

“Oh, he sings,” said Mrs. Carteret, arranging her neat small fringe at the glass--“rather a good voice. You needn’t be afraid, my dear, I’ll arrange that the fascinating Fanny shall sit next you!”

Upon this somewhat unstable basis the formation of the troupe of Green Coons was undertaken. Mrs. Carteret took off her coat to the work, or rather, to be accurate, she put on a fur-lined one, and attended a Nationalist meeting in the Town Hall to judge for herself how the voices carried. She returned rejoicing--she had sat at the back of the hall, and had not lost a syllable of the oratory, even during sundry heated episodes, discreetly summarised by the local paper as “interruption”. The Town Hall was chartered, superficially cleansed, and in the space of a week the posters had gone forth.

By what means it was accomplished that Rupert Gunning should attend the first rehearsal he did not exactly understand; he found himself enmeshed in a promise to meet every one else at the Town Hall with tea at the Carterets’ afterwards. Up to this point the fact that he was to appear before the public with a blackened face had been diplomatically withheld from him, and an equal diplomacy was shown on his arrival in the deputing of Miss Fitzroy to break the news to him.

“Mrs. Carteret says it’s really awfully becoming,” said Fanny, breathless and brilliant from assiduous practice of a hornpipe under Captain Carteret’s tuition, “and as for trouble! We might as well make a virtue of necessity in this incredibly dirty place; my hands are black already, and I’ve only swept the stage!”

She was standing at the edge of the platform that was to serve as the stage, looking down at him, and it may be taken as a sufficient guide to his mental condition that his abhorrence of the prospect for himself was swallowed up by fury at the thought of it for her.

“Are you--do you mean to tell me you are going to dance _with a black face_?” he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.

“No, I’m going to dance with Captain Carteret!” replied Fanny frivolously, “and so can you if you like!”

She was maddeningly pretty as she smiled down at him, with her bright hair roughened, and the afterglow of the dance alight in her eyes and cheeks. Nevertheless, for one whirling moment, the old Adam, an Adam blissfully unaware of the existence of Eve, asserted himself in Rupert. He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than going home and thinking about them.

From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr. Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive manner of Captain Carteret.

The rehearsal progressed after the manner of amateur rehearsals. The troupe, with the exception of Mr. Gunning, who remained wrapped in silence, talked irrepressibly, and quite inappropriately to their rôle as Green Coons. Freddy Alexander and Mr. Taylour bear-fought untiringly for possession of the bones and the position of Corner Man; Mrs. Carteret alone had a copy of the music that was to be practised, and in consequence, the company hung heavily over her at the piano in a deafening and discordant swarm. The two tall Hamiltons, hitherto speechless by nature and by practice, became suddenly exhilarated at finding themselves in the inner circle of the soldiery, and bubbled with impotent suggestions and reverential laughter at the witticisms of Mr. Taylour. Fanny Fitz and Captain Carteret finally removed themselves to a grimy corner behind the proscenium, and there practised, _sotto voce_, the song with banjo accompaniment that was to culminate in the hornpipe. Freddy Alexander had gone forth to purchase a pack of cards, in the futile hope that he could prevail upon Mrs. Carteret to allow him to inflict conjuring tricks upon the audience.

“As if there were anything on earth that bored people as much as card tricks!” said that experienced lady to Rupert Gunning. “Look here, _would_ you mind reading over these riddles, to see which you’d like to have to answer. Now, here’s a local one. I’ll ask it--‘Why am dis room like de Enniscar Demesne?’--and then _you’ll_ say, ‘Because dere am so many pretty little deers in it’!”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that!” said Rupert hastily, alarmed as well as indignant; “I’m afraid I really must go now--”

He had to pass by Fanny Fitz on his way out of the hall. There was something vexed and forlorn about him, and, being sympathetic, she perceived it, though not its cause.

“You’re deserting us!” she said, looking up at him.

“I have an appointment,” he said stiffly, his glance evading hers, and resting on Captain Carteret’s well-clipped little black head.

Some of Fanny’s worst scrapes had been brought about by her incapacity to allow any one to part from her on bad terms, and, moreover, she liked Rupert Gunning. She cast about in her mind for something conciliatory to say to him.

“When are you going to show me the cob that you bought at the Horse Show?”

The olive branch thus confidently tendered had a somewhat withering reception.

“The cob I bought at the Horse Show?” Mr. Gunning repeated with an increase of rigidity, “Oh, yes--I got rid of it.”

He paused; the twanging of Captain Carteret’s banjo bridged the interval imperturbably.

“Why had you to get rid of it?” asked Fanny, still sympathetic.

“She was a failure!” said Rupert vindictively; “I made a fool of myself in buying her!”

Fanny looked at him sideways from under her lashes.

“And I had counted on your giving me a mount on her now and then!”

Rupert forgot his wrath, forgot even the twanging banjo.

“I’ve just got another cob,” he said quickly; “she jumps very well, and if you’d like to hunt her next Tuesday--”

“Oh, thanks awfully, but Captain Carteret has promised me a mount for next Tuesday!” said the perfidious Fanny.

Mrs. Carteret, on her knees by a refractory footlight, watched with anxiety Mr. Gunning’s abrupt departure from the room.

“Fanny!” she said severely, “what have you been doing to that man?”

“Oh, nothing!” said Fanny.

“If you’ve put him off singing I’ll never forgive you!” continued Mrs. Carteret, advancing on her knees to the next footlight.

“I tell you I’ve done nothing to him,” said Fanny Fitz guiltily.

“Give me the hammer!” said Mrs. Carteret. “Have I eyes, or have I not?”

“He’s awfully keen about her!” Mrs. Carteret said that evening to her husband. “Bad temper is one of the worst signs. Men in love are always cross.”

“Oh, he’s a rotter!” said Captain Carteret conclusively.

In the meantime the object of this condemnation was driving his ten Irish miles home, by the light of a frosty full moon. Between the shafts of his cart a trim-looking mare of about fifteen hands trotted lazily, forging, shying, and generally comporting herself in a way only possible to a grass-fed animal who has been in the hands of such as Mr. William Fennessy. The thick and dingy mane that had hung impartially on each side of her neck, now, together with the major portion of her voluminous tail, adorned the manure heap in the rear of the Fennessy public-house. The pallid fleece in which she had been muffled had given place to a polished coat of iron-grey, that looked black in the moonlight. A week of over-abundant oats had made her opinionated, but had not, so far, restored to her the fine lady nervousness that had landed her in the window of the hat shop.

Rupert laid the whip along her fat sides with bitter disfavour. She was a brute in harness, he said to himself, her blemished fetlock was uglier than he had at first thought, and even though she had yesterday schooled over two miles of country like an old stager, she was too small to carry him, and she was not, apparently, wanted to carry any one else. Here the purchase received a very disagreeable cut on the neck that interrupted her speculations as to the nature of the shadows of telegraph-posts. To have bought two useless horses in four months was pretty average bad luck. It was also pretty bad luck to have been born a fool. Reflection here became merged in the shapeless and futile fumings of a man badly in love and preposterously jealous.

Known only to the elect among entertainment promoters are the methods employed by Mrs. Carteret to float the company of The Green Coons. The fact remains that on the appointed night the chosen troupe, approximately word-perfect, and with spirits something chastened by stage fright, were assembled in the clerk’s room of the Enniscar Town Hall, round a large basin filled horribly with a compound of burnt cork and water.

“It’s not as bad as it looks!” said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands and heroically smearing her face with a mass of black oozy matter believed to be a sponge. “It’s quite becoming if you do it thoroughly. Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and the roots of your hair!”

The Hamiltons, giggling wildly, submitted themselves to the ministrations of Freddy Alexander, and Mrs. Carteret, appallingly transformed into a little West Indian coolie woman, applied the sponge to the shrinking Fanny Fitz.

“Will you do Mr. Gunning, Fanny?” she whispered into one of the ears that she had conscientiously blackened. “I think he’d bear it better from you!”

“I shall do nothing of the kind!” replied Fanny, with a dignity somewhat impaired by her ebon countenance and monstrous green turban.

“Why not?”

Mrs. Carteret’s small neat features seemed unnaturally sharpened, and her eyes and teeth glittered in her excitement.

“For goodness’ sake, take your awful little black face away, Mabel!” exclaimed Fanny hysterically. “It quite frightens me! I’m _very_ angry with Mr. Gunning! I’ll tell you why some other time.”

“Well, don’t forget you’ve got to say ‘Buck up, Sambo!’ to him after he’s sung his song, and you may fight with him as much as you like afterwards,” said Mrs. Carteret, hurrying off to paint glaring vermilion mouths upon the loudly protesting Hamiltons.

During these vicissitudes, Rupert Gunning, arrayed in a green swallow-tailed calico coat, short white cotton trousers, and a skimpy nigger wig, presented a pitiful example of the humiliations which the allied forces of love and jealousy can bring upon the just. Fanny Fitz has since admitted that, in spite of the wrath that burned within her, the sight of Mr. Gunning morosely dabbing his long nose with the repulsive sponge that was shared by the troupe, almost moved her to compassion.

A pleasing impatience was already betraying itself in cat-calls and stampings from the sixpenny places, and Mrs. Carteret, flitting like a sheep dog round her flock, arranged them in couples and drove them before her on to the stage, singing in chorus, with a fair assumption of hilarity, “As we go marching through Georgia”.

For Fanny Fitz the subsequent proceedings became merged in a nightmare of blinding heat and glare, made actual only by poignant anxiety as to the length of her green skirt. The hope that she might be unrecognisable was shattered by the yell of “More power, Miss Fanny!” that crested the thunderous encore evoked by her hornpipe with Captain Carteret, and the question of the skirt was decided by the fact that her aunts, in the front row, firmly perused their programmes from the beginning of her dance to its conclusion.

The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its kind. The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert Gunning’s song, of the truculent order dedicated to basses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences. The performance raged to its close in a “Cake Walk,” to the inspiring strains of “Razors a-flying through the air,” and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar _Independent_ described cryptically as “a _tout ensemble à la conversazione_ that was refreshingly unique”.

“Five minutes more and I should have had heat apoplexy!” said Mrs. Carteret, hurling her turban across the clerk’s room, “but it all went splendidly! Empty that basin out of the window, somebody, and give me the vaseline. The last time I blacked my face it was covered with red spots for a week afterwards because I used soap instead of vaseline!”

Rupert Gunning approached Fanny with an open note in his hand.

“I’ve had this from your aunt,” he said, handing it to her; it was decorated with sooty thumb marks, to which Fanny’s black claw contributed a fresh batch as she took it, but she read it without a smile.

It was to the effect that the heat of the room had been too much for the elder Misses Fitzroy, and they had therefore gone home, but as Mr. Gunning had to pass their gate perhaps he would be kind enough to drive their niece home.

“Oh--” said Fanny, in tones from which dismay was by no means eliminated. “How stupid of Aunt Rachel!”

“I’m afraid there seems no way out of it for you,” said Rupert offendedly.

A glimpse of their two wrathful black faces in the glass abruptly checked Fanny’s desire to say something crushing. At this juncture she would rather have died than laughed.

Burnt cork is not lightly to be removed at the first essay, and when, half an hour later, Fanny Fitz, with a pale and dirty face, stood under the dismal light of the lamp outside the Town Hall, waiting for Mr. Gunning’s trap, she had the pleasure of hearing a woman among the loiterers say compassionately:--

“God help her, the crayture! She looks like a servant that’d be bate out with work!”

Mr. Gunning’s new cob stood hearkening with flickering ears to the various commotions of the street--she understood them all perfectly well, but her soul being unlifted by reason of oats, she chose to resent them as impertinences. Having tolerated with difficulty the instalment of Miss Fitzroy in the trap, she started with a flourish, and pulled hard until clear of the town and its flaring public-houses. On the open road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the light of the rising moon, she settled down. Rupert turned to his silent companion. He had become aware during the evening that something was wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background.

“What do you think of my new buy?” he said pacifically, “she’s a good goer, isn’t she?”

“Very,” replied Fanny.

Silence again reigned. One or two further attempts at conversation met with equal discouragement. The miles passed by. At length, as the mare slackened to walk up a long hill, Rupert said with a voice that had the shake of pent-up injury:--

“I’ve been wondering what I’ve done to be put into Coventry like this!”

“I thought you probably wouldn’t care to speak to me!” was Fanny’s astonishing reply, delivered in tones of ice.

“I!” he stammered, “not care to speak to _you_! You ought to know--”

“Yes, indeed, I do know!” broke in Fanny, passing from the frigid to the torrid zone with characteristic speed, “I know what a _failure_ your horse-dealing at the Dublin Show was! I’ve heard how you bought my mare, and had her shot the same night, because you wouldn’t take the trouble even to go and look at her after the poor little thing was hurt! Oh! I can’t bear even to _think_ of it!”

Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.

“And then,” continued Fanny, whirling on to the final point of her indictment, “you pretended to Captain Carteret and me that the horse you had bought was ‘a common brute,’ _a cob for carting_, and you said the other night that you had made a fool of yourself over it! I didn’t know then all about it, but I do now. Captain Carteret heard about it from the dealer in Dublin. Even the dealer said it was a pity you hadn’t given the mare a chance!”

“It’s all perfectly true,” said Rupert, in a low voice.

A soft answer, so far from turning away wrath, frequently inflames it.

“Then I think there’s no more to be said!” said Fanny hotly.

There was silence. They had reached the top of the hill, and the grey mare began to trot.

“Well, there’s just one thing I should like to say,” said Rupert awkwardly, his breath coming very short, “I couldn’t help everything going wrong about the mare. It was just my bad luck. I only bought her to please you. They told me she couldn’t get right after the accident. What was the good of my going to look at her? I wanted to cross in the boat with you. Whatever I did I did for you. I would do anything in the world for you--”

It was at this crucial moment that there arose suddenly from the dim grey road in front of them a slightly greyer shadow, a shadow that limped amid the clanking of chains. The Connemara mare, now masquerading as a County Cork cob, asked for nothing better. If it were a ghost, she was legitimately entitled to flee from it; if, as was indeed the case, it was a donkey, she made a point of shying at donkeys. She realised that, by a singular stroke of good fortune, the reins were lying in loops on her back.

A snort, a sideways bound, a couple of gleeful kicks on the dashboard, and she was away at full gallop, with one rein under her tail, and a pleasant open road before her.

“It’s all right!” said Rupert, recovering his balance by a hair-breadth, and feeling in his heart that it was all wrong, “the Craffroe Hill will stop her. Hold on to the rail.”

Fanny said nothing. It was, indeed, all that she could do to keep her seat in the trap, with which the rushing road was playing cup and ball; she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in emergencies. When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare, is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse than useless. Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.

It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight. At its foot another road forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the grass, and the cushions slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself that they were in for a bad business.

For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare’s grasping stride. The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and Fanny Fitz was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning’s lap. Long briars and twigs struck them from either side, the trap bumped in craggy ruts and slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.

Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, Fanny found herself on her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot, having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.

Fanny was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt, but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her tightened its clasp in silence. When a man is strongly moved by tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known; he need not--it is known beyond all telling by the one other person whom it concerns. She felt suddenly that she was safe, that his heart was torn for her sake, and that the tension of the last ten minutes had been great. It went through her with a pang, and her head swayed against his arm. In a moment she felt his lips on her hair, on her temple, and the oldest, the most familiar of all words of endearment was spoken at her ear. She recovered herself, but in a new world. She tried to walk on up the lane, but stumbled in the deep ruts and found the supporting arm again ready at need. She did not resist it.

A shrill neigh arose in front of them. The mare had pulled up at a closed gate, and was apparently apostrophising some low farm buildings beyond it. A dog barked hysterically, the door of a cowshed burst open, and a man came out with a lantern.

“Oh, I know now where we are!” cried Fanny wildly, “it’s Johnny Connolly’s! Oh, Johnny, Johnny Connolly, we’ve been run away with!”

“For God’s sake!” responded Johnny Connolly, standing stock still in his amazement, “is that Miss Fanny?”

“Get hold of the mare,” shouted Rupert, “or she’ll jump the gate!”

Johnny Connolly advanced, still calling upon his God, and the mare uttered a low but vehement neigh.

“Ye’re deshtroyed, Miss Fanny! And Mr. Gunning, the Lord save us! Ye’re killed the two o’ ye! What happened ye at all? Woa, gerr’l, woa, gerrlie! Ye’d say she knew me, the crayture.”

The mare was rubbing her dripping face and neck against the farmer’s shoulder, with hoarse whispering snorts of recognition and pleasure. He held his lantern high to look at her.

“Musha, why wouldn’t she know me!” he roared, “sure it’s yer own mare, Miss Fanny! ’Tis the Connemara mare I thrained for ye! And may the divil sweep and roast thim that has it told through all the counthry that she was killed!”

A GRAND FILLY

I am an Englishman. I say this without either truculence or vainglorying, rather with humility--a mere Englishman, who submits his Plain Tale from the Western Hills with the conviction that the Kelt who may read it will think him more mere than ever.

I was in Yorkshire last season when what is trivially called “the cold snap” came upon us. I had five horses eating themselves silly all the time, and I am not going to speak of it. I don’t consider it a subject to be treated lightly. It was in about the thickest of it that I heard from a man I know in Ireland. He is a little old horse-coping sportsman with a red face and iron-grey whiskers, who has kept hounds all his life; or, rather, he has always had hounds about, on much the same conditions that other men have rats. The rats are indubitably there, and feed themselves variously, and so do old Robert Trinder’s “Rioters,” which is their _nom de guerre_ in the County Corkerry (the few who know anything of the map of Ireland may possibly identify the two counties buried in this cryptogram).

I meet old Robert most years at the Dublin Horse Show, and every now and then he has sold me a pretty good horse, so when he wrote and renewed a standing invitation, assuring me that there was open weather, and that he had a grand four-year-old filly to sell, I took him at his word, and started at once. The journey lasted for twenty-eight hours, going hard all the time, and during the last three of them there were no foot-warmers and the cushions became like stones enveloped in mustard plasters. Old Trinder had not sent to the station for me, and it was pelting rain, so I had to drive seven miles in a thing that only exists south of the Limerick Junction, and is called a “jingle”. A jingle is a square box of painted canvas with no back to it, because, as was luminously explained to me, you must have some way to get into it, and I had to sit sideways in it, with my portmanteau bucking like a three-year-old on the seat opposite to me. It fell out on the road twice going uphill. After the second fall my hair tonic slowly oozed forth from the seams, and added a fresh ingredient to the smells of the grimy cushions and the damp hay that furnished the machine. My hair tonic costs eight-and-sixpence a bottle.

There is probably not in the United Kingdom a worse-planned entrance gate than Robert Trinder’s. You come at it obliquely on the side of a crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either side of the driver’s legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly better in large red letters at the top of old Robert’s notepaper than it did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards against the flight of steps, I heard through the open door a loud and piercing yell; following on it came the thunder of many feet, and the next instant a hound bolted down the steps with a large plucked turkey in its mouth. Close in its wake fled a brace of puppies, and behind them, variously armed, pursued what appeared to be the staff of Lisangle House. They went past me in full cry, leaving a general impression of dirty aprons, flying hair, and onions, and I feel sure that there were bare feet somewhere in it. My carman leaped from his perch and joined in the chase, and the whole party swept from my astonished gaze round or into a clump of bushes. At this juncture I was not sorry to hear Robert Trinder’s voice greeting me as if nothing unusual were occurring.

“Upon me honour, it’s the Captain! You’re welcome, sir, you’re welcome! Come in, come in, don’t mind the horse at all; he’ll eat the grass there as he’s done many a time before! When the gerr’ls have old Amazon cot they’ll bring in your things.”

(Perhaps I ought to mention at once that Mr. Trinder belongs to the class who are known in Ireland as “Half-sirs”. You couldn’t say he was a gentleman, and he himself wouldn’t have tried to say so. But, as a matter of fact, I have seen worse imitations.)

Robert was delighted to see me, and I had had a whisky-and-soda and been shown two or three more hound puppies before it occurred to him to introduce me to his aunt. I had not expected an aunt, as Robert is well on the heavenward side of sixty; but there she was: she made me think of a badly preserved Egyptian mummy with a brogue. I am always a little afraid of my hostess, but there was something about Robert’s aunt that made me know I was a worm. She came down to dinner in a bonnet and black kid gloves--a circumstance that alone was awe-inspiring. She sat entrenched at the head of the table behind an enormous dish of thickly jacketed potatoes, and, though she scorned to speak to Robert or me, she kept up a sort of whispered wrangle with the parlour-maid all the time. The latter’s red hair hung down over her shoulders--and at intervals over mine also--in horrible luxuriance, and recalled the leading figure in the pursuit of Amazon; there was, moreover, something about the heavy boots in which she tramped round the table that suggested that Amazon had sought sanctuary in the cow-house. I have done some roughing it in my time, and I am not over-particular, but I admit that it was rather a shock to meet the turkey itself again, more especially as it was the sole item of the _menu_. There was no doubt of its identity, as it was short of a leg, and half the breast had been shaved away. The aunt must have read my thoughts in my face. She fixed her small implacable eyes on mine for one quelling instant, then she looked at Robert. Her nephew was obviously afraid to meet her eye; he coughed uneasily, and handed a surreptitious potato to the puppy who was sitting under his chair.

“This place is rotten with dogs,” said the aunt; with which announcement she retired from the conversation, and fell again to the slaughter of the parlour-maid. I timidly ate my portion of turkey and tried not to think about the cow-house.

It rained all night. I could hear the water hammering into something that rang like a gong; and each time I rolled over in the musty trough of my feather-bed I fractiously asked myself why the mischief they had left the tap running all night. Next morning the matter was explained when, on demanding a bath, I was told that “there wasn’t but one in the house, and ’twas undher the rain-down. But sure ye can have it,” with which it was dragged in full of dirty water and flakes of whitewash, and when I got out of it I felt as if I had been through the Bankruptcy Court.

The day was windy and misty--a combination of weather possible only in Ireland--but there was no snow, and Robert Trinder, seated at breakfast in a purple-red hunting coat, dingy drab breeches, and woollen socks, assured me that it was turning out a grand morning.

I distinctly liked the looks of my mount when Jerry the Whip pulled her out of the stable for me. She was big and brown, with hindquarters that looked like jumping; she was also very dirty and obviously underfed. None the less she was lively enough, and justified Jerry’s prediction that “she’d be apt to shake a couple or three bucks out of herself when she’d see the hounds”. Old Robert was on an ugly brute of a yellow horse, rather like a big mule, who began the day by bucking out of the yard gate as if he had been trained by Buffalo Bill. It was at this juncture that I first really respected Robert Trinder; his retention of his seat was so unstudied, and his command of appropriate epithets so complete.

Jerry and the hounds awaited us on the road, the latter as mixed a party as I have ever come across. There were about fourteen couple in all, and they ranged in style from a short-legged black-and-tan harrier, who had undoubtedly had an uncle who was a dachshund, to a thing with a head like a greyhound, a snow-white body, and a feathered stern that would have been a credit to a setter. In between these extremes came several broken-haired Welshmen, some dilapidated 24-inch foxhounds, and a lot of pale-coloured hounds, whose general effect was that of the tablecloth on which we had eaten our breakfast that morning, being dirty white, covered with stains that looked like either tea or egg, or both.

“Them’s the old Irish breed,” said Robert, as the yellow horse voluntarily stopped short to avoid stepping on one of them; “there’s no better. That Gaylass there would take a line up Patrick Street on a fair day, and you’d live and die seeing her kill rats.”

I am bound to say I thought it more likely that I should live to see her and some of her relations killing sheep, judging by their manners along the road; but we got to Letter cross-roads at last with no more than an old hen and a wandering cur dog on our collective consciences. The road and its adjacent fences were thronged with foot people, mostly strapping young men and boys, in the white flannel coats and slouched felt hats that strike a stranger with their unusualness and picturesqueness.

“Do you ever have a row with Land Leaguers?” I asked, noting their sticks, while the warnings of a sentimental Radical friend as to the danger of encountering an infuriated Irish peasantry suddenly assumed plausibility.

“Land League? The dear help ye! Who’d be bothered with the Land League here?” said Robert, shoving the yellow horse into the crowd; “let the hounds through, boys, can’t ye? No, Captain, but ’tis Saint November’s Day, as they call it, a great holiday, and there isn’t a ruffian in the country but has come out with his blagyard dog to head the fox!”

A grin of guilt passed over the faces of the audience.

“There’s plinty foxes in the hill, Mr. Thrinder,” shouted one of them; “Dan Murphy says there isn’t a morning but he’d see six or eight o’ them hoppin’ there.”

“Faith, ’tis thrue for you,” corroborated Dan Murphy. “If ye had thim gethered in a quarther of ground and dhropped a pin from th’ elements, ‘twould reach one o’ thim!”

(As a matter of fact, I haven’t a notion what Mr. Murphy meant, but that is what he said, so I faithfully record it.)

The riders were farmers and men of Robert’s own undetermined class, and there was hardly a horse out who was more than four years old, saving two or three who were nineteen. Robert pushed through them and turned up a bohireen--_i.e._, a narrow and incredibly badly made lane--and I presently heard him cheering the hounds into covert. As to that covert, imagine a hill that in any civilised country would be called a mountain: its nearer side a cliff, with just enough slope to give root-hold to giant furze bushes, its summit a series of rocky and boggy terraces, trending down at one end into a ravine, and at the other becoming merged in the depths of an aboriginal wood of low scrubby oak trees. It seemed as feasible to ride a horse over it as over the roof of York Minster. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to do or where to go, and I clave to Jerry the Whip.

The hounds were scrambling like monkeys along the side of the hill; so were the country boys with their curs; old Trinder moved parallel with them along its base. Jerry galloped away to the ravine, and there dismounting, struggled up by zig-zag cattle paths to the comparative levels of the summit. I did the same, and was pretty well blown by the time I got to the top, as the filly scorned the zigzags, and hauled me up as straight as she could go over the rocks and furze bushes. A few other fellows had followed us, and we all pursued on along the top of the hill.

Suddenly Jerry stopped short and held up his hand. A hound spoke below us, then another, and then came a halloa from Jerry that made the filly quiver all over. The fox had come up over the low fence that edged the cliff, and was running along the terrace in front of us. Old Robert below us--I could almost have chucked a stone on to him--gave an answering screech, and one by one the hounds fought their way up over the fence and went away on the line, throwing their tongues in a style that did one good to hear. Our only way ahead lay along a species of trench between the hill, on whose steep side we were standing, and the cliff fence. Jerry kicked the spurs into his good ugly little horse, and making him jump down into the trench, squeezed along it after the hounds. But the delay of waiting for them had got the filly’s temper up. When I faced her at the trench she reared, and whirled round, and pranced backwards in, considering the circumstances, a highly discomposing way. The rest of the field crowded through the furze past me and down into the trench, and twice I thought the mare would land herself and me on top of one of them. I don’t wonder she was frightened. I know I was. There was nothing between us and a hundred-foot drop but this narrow trench and a low, rotten fence, and the fool behaved as though she wanted to jump it all. I hope no one will ever erect an equestrian statue in my honour; now that I have experienced the sensation of ramping over nothing, I find I dislike it. I believe I might have been there now, but just then a couple of hounds came up, and before I knew what she was at, the filly had jumped down after them into the trench as if she had been doing it all her life. I was not long about picking the others up; the filly could gallop anyhow, and we thundered on over ground where, had I been on foot, I should have liked a guide and an alpenstock. At intervals we jumped things made of sharp stones, and slates, and mud; I don’t know whether they were banks or walls. Sometimes the horses changed feet on them, sometimes they flew the whole affair, according to their individual judgment. Sometimes we were splashing over sedgy patches that looked and felt like buttered toast, sometimes floundering through stuff resembling an ill-made chocolate soufflé, whether intended for a ploughed field or a partially drained bog-hole I could not determine, and all was fenced as carefully as cricket-pitches. Presently the hounds took a swing to the left and over the edge of the hill again, and our leader Jerry turned sharp off after them, down a track that seemed to have been dug out of the face of the hill. I should have liked to get off and lead, but they did not give me time, and we suddenly found ourselves joined to Robert Trinder and his company of infantry, all going hard for the oak wood that I mentioned before.

It was pretty to see the yellow horse jump. Nothing came amiss to him, and he didn’t seem able to make a mistake. There was a stone stile out of a bohireen that stopped every one, and he changed feet on the flag on top and went down by the steps on the other side. No one need believe this unless they like, but I saw him do it. The country boys were most exhilarating. How they got there I don’t know, but they seemed to spring up before us wherever we went. They cheered every jump, they pulled away the astounding obstacles that served as gates (such as the end of an iron bedstead, a broken harrow, or a couple of cartwheels), and their power of seeing the fox through a stone wall or a hill could only be equalled by the Röntgen rays. We fought our way through the oak wood, and out over a boggy bounds ditch into open country at last. The Rioters had come out of the wood on a screaming scent, and big and little were running together in a compact body, followed, like the tail of a kite, by a string of yapping country curs. The country was all grass, enchantingly green and springy; the jumps were big, yet not too big, and there were no two alike; the filly pulled hard, but not too hard, and she was jumping like a deer; I felt that all I had heard of Irish hunting had not been overstated.

We had been running for half an hour when we checked at a farmhouse; the yellow horse had been leading the hunt all the time, making a noise like a steam-engine, but perfectly undefeated, and our numbers were reduced to five. An old woman and a girl rushed out of the yard to meet us, screaming like sea-gulls.

“He’s gone south this five minutes! I was out spreadin’ clothes, and I seen him circling round the Kerry cow, and he as big as a man!” screamed the girl.

“He was, the thief!” yelled the old woman. “I seen him firsht on the hill, cringeing behind a rock, and he hardly able to thrail the tail afther him!”

“Run now, like a good girl, and show me where did he cross the fence,” said old Robert, puffing and blowing, as with a purple face he hurried into the yard to collect the hounds, who, like practised foragers, had already overrun the farmhouse, as was evidenced by an indignant and shrieking flight of fowls through the open door.

The girl ran, snatching off her red plaid shawl as she went.

“Here’s the shpot now!” she called out, flinging the shawl down on the fence; “here’s the very way just that he wint! Go south to the gap; I’ll pull the pole out for ye--this is a cross place.”

The hunt gratefully accepted her good offices. She tore the monstrous shaft of a cart out of a place that with it was impossible, and without it was a boggy scramble, and as we began to gallop again, I began to think there was a good deal to be said in favour of the New Woman.

I suppose we had had another quarter of an hour, when the mist, that had been hanging about all day, came down on us, and it was difficult to see more than a field ahead. We had got down on to lower ground, and we were in a sort of marshy hollow when we were confronted by the most serious obstacle of the day: a tall and obviously rotten bank clothed in briars, with sharp stones along its top, a wide ditch in front of it, and a disgustingly squashy take-off. Robert Trinder and the yellow horse held their course undaunted: the rest of the field turned as one man, and went for another way round--I, in my arrogance, followed the Master. The yellow horse rose out of the soft ground with quiet, indescribable ease, got a foothold on the side of the bank for his hind legs, and was away into the next field without pause or mistake.

“Go round, Captain!” shouted Trinder; “it’s a bad place!”

I hardly heard him; I was already putting the filly at it for the second time. It took about three minutes for her to convince me that she and Robert were right, and I was wrong, and by that time everybody was out of sight, swallowed up in the mist. I tried round after the others, and found their footmarks up a lane and across a field; a loose stone wall confronted me, and I rode at it confidently; but the filly, soured by our recent encounter, reared and would have none of it. I tried yet another way round, and put her at a moderate and seemingly innocuous bank, at which, with the contrariety of her sex, she rushed at a thousand miles an hour. It looked somehow as if there might be a bit of a drop, but the filly had got her beastly blood up, and I have been in a better temper myself.

She rose to the jump when she was a good six feet from it. I knew she would not put an iron on it, and I sat down for the drop. It came with a vengeance. I had a glimpse of a thatched roof below me, and the next instant we were on it or in it--I don’t know which. It gave way with a crash of rafters, the mare’s forelegs went in, and I was shot over her head, rolled over the edge of the roof, and fell on my face into a manure heap. A yell and a pig burst simultaneously from the door, a calf followed, and while I struggled up out of my oozy resting-place, I was aware of the filly’s wild face staring from the door of the shed in which she so unexpectedly found herself. The broken reins trailed round her legs, she was panting and shivering, and blood was trickling down the white blaze on her nose. I got her out through the low doorway with a little coaxing, and for a moment hardly dared to examine as to the amount of damage done. She was covered with cobwebs and dirt out of the roof, and, as I led her forward, she went lame on one foreleg; but beyond this, and a good many scratches, there was nothing wrong. My own appearance need not here be dilated upon. I was cleaning off what they call in Ireland “the biggest of the filth” with a bunch of heather, when from a cottage a little bit down the lane in which I was standing a small barelegged child emerged. It saw me, uttered one desperate howl, and fled back into the house. I abandoned my toilet and led the mare to the cottage door.

“Is any one in?” I said to the house at large.

A fresh outburst of yells was the sole response; there was a pattering of bare feet, and somewhere in the smoky gloom a door slammed. It was clearly a case of “Not at Home” in its conventional sense. I scribbled Robert Trinder’s name on one of my visiting cards, laid it and half a sovereign on a table by the door, and started to make my way home.

The south of Ireland is singularly full of people. I do not believe you can go a quarter of a mile on any given road without meeting some one, and that some one is sure to be conversationally disposed and glad of the chance of answering questions. By dint of asking a good many, I eventually found myself on the high road, with five miles between me and Lisangle. The mare’s lameness had nearly worn off, and she walked beside me like a dog. After all, I thought, I had had the best of the day, had come safely out of what might have been a nasty business, and was supplied with a story on which to dine out for the rest of my life. My only anxiety was as to whether I could hope for a bath when I got in--a luxury that had been hideously converted by the _locale_ of my fall into a necessity. I led the filly in the twilight down the dark Lisangle drive, feeling all the complacency of a man who knows he has gone well in a strange country, and was just at the turn to the yard when I came upon an extraordinary group. All the women of the household were there, gathered in a tight circle round some absorbing central fact; all were shrieking at the tops of their voices, and the turkey cock in the yard gobbled in response to each shriek.

“Ma’am, ma’am!” I heard, “ye’ll pull the tail off him!”

“Twisht the tink-an now, Bridgie! Twisht it!”

“Holy Biddy! the masther’ll kill us!”

What the deuce were they at? and what was a “tink-an”? I dragged the filly nearer, and discovered that a hound puppy was the central point of the tumult, and was being contended for, like the body of Moses, by Miss Trinder and Bridgie the parlour-maid. Both were seated on the ground pulling at the puppy for all they were worth; Miss Trinder had him by the back of his neck and his tail, while Bridgie was dragging--what _was_ she dragging at? Then I saw that the puppy’s head was jammed in a narrow-necked tin milk-can, and that, as things were going, he would wear it, like the Man in the Iron Mask, for the rest of his life.

The small, grim face of Robert’s aunt was scarlet with exertion; her black bonnet had slipped off her head, and the thin grey hair that was ordinarily wound round her little skull as tightly as cotton on a reel, was hanging in scanty wisps from its central knot; nevertheless, she was, metaphorically speaking, pulling Bridgie across the line every time. I gave the filly to one of the audience, and took Bridgie’s place at the “tink-an”. Miss Trinder and I put our backs into it, and suddenly I found myself flat on mine, with the “tink-an” grasped in both hands above my head.

A composite whoop of triumph rose from the spectators, and the filly rose with it. She went straight up on her hind legs, and the next instant she was away across the drive and into the adjoining field, and, considering all things, I don’t blame her. We all ran after her. I led, and the various female retainers strung out after me like a flight of wild-duck, uttering cries of various encouragement and consternation. Miss Trinder followed, silent and indomitable, at the heel of the hunt, and the released puppy, who had also harked in, could be heard throwing his tongue in the dusky shrubbery ahead of us. It was all exasperatingly absurd, as things seem to have a habit of being in Ireland. I never felt more like a fool in my life, and the bitterest part of it was that it was all I could do to keep ahead of Bridgie. As for the filly, she waited till we got near her, and then she jumped a five-foot coped wall into the road, fell, picked herself up, and clattered away into darkness. At this point I heard Robert’s horn, and sundry confused shouts and sounds informed me that the filly had run into the hounds.

She was found next day on the farm where she was bred, fifteen miles away. The farmer brought her back to Lisangle. She had injured three hounds, upset two old women and a donkey-cart, broken a gate, and finally, on arriving at the place of her birth, had, according to the farmer, “fired the divil’s pelt of a kick into her own mother’s stomach”. Moreover, she “hadn’t as much sound skin on her as would bait a rat-trap”--I here quote Mr. Trinder--and she had fever in all her feet.

Of course I bought her. I could hardly do less. I told Robert he might give her to the hounds, but he sent her over to me in a couple of months as good as new, and I won the regimental steeplechase cup with her last April.

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE