Chapter VII: Part II (1)

A quarter of an hour later Philippa and I stood in the high road, with the sense of deliverance throbbing in every grateful nerve, and viewed the car, with the job-cook and the policeman, swing heavily away towards the railway station.

Mine was the strategy that had brought about our escape, mine were the attractions that had lured the cook to mount the policeman's car with me, and still more inalienably mine was the searing moment when, still arm-in-arm with the cook, we drove away from the deeply appreciative party on the doorsteps. Philippa and a policeman were on the opposite side of the car; the second policeman, very considerately, walked.

We were close to the station, the cook had sung herself to sleep, and Philippa and I had relapsed into the depths of abysmal despondency, when our incredulous eyes beheld the Butler-Knoxes' coachman coming towards us at a trot, riding a bay horse and leading a grey, on which was a side-saddle. Flavin, the horse dealer, had, after all, been as good as Flurry's word--the hirelings were here, and all was right with the world.

The car slackened to a walk, we slid from it silently, and it and its burden passed into that place of shadows to which all extraneous affairs of life betake themselves on a hunting morning, when the hour is come, and the horse.

Looshy's coachman delivered to me the bay horse, a large and notable-looking animal, with a Roman nose adorned with a crooked blaze, a tranquil eye, and two white stockings. In his left hand he held a compact iron-grey mare, hogged and docked, who came up to the bank by the roadside, to be mounted, as neatly as a man-o'-war boat comes alongside. Hirelings of so superior a class it had never before been my privilege to meet, and I made up my mind that they were either incurably vicious or broken winded.

"It's easy known that this mare's carried a lady before, sir," said the coachman, a young man with a soul for higher things than driving the Butler-Knox covered car, "and the big horse is the best I ever seen come out of Flavin's! He's in grand condition, he's as slick as a mouse! Only for Mr. Flurry being there we'd hardly have got them," he continued, while he lengthened my stirrup-leathers, "the chap Flavin sent with them had drink taken, and the porters had the box shunted and himself in it, stretched, and the bottle of whisky with him!"

Flavin's man and his bottle of whisky were now negligible incidents for me. Philippa was already under way, and the time was short. The bay horse, arching his neck and reaching pleasantly at his bit, went away at a rhythmic and easy trot, the grey mare flitted beside him with equal precision; it was, perhaps, rather fast for riding to a meet, but we were late, and were they not hirelings?

We followed our guides, the telegraph posts, for some four miles of level road; they dropped down a deepening valley to a grey and brimming river, and presently came slate roofs and white-washed houses, staring at each other across an empty village street. We had arrived at Kilbarron, the scene of the meet, and the meet was not.

"They've gone on! they've gone on!" screamed an old woman from a doorway, "away up over the hill!"

Evidently every other live thing had followed the hunt, and we did not spare Mr. Flavin's horses in doing the same. We reached the top of the long hill in a remarkably brief space of time, and, having done so, realised that we were not too late. A couple of fields away a row of figures, standing like palings along the top of a bank, with their backs to us, told that the hounds were still in view; even as we sighted them, the palings plunged _en masse_ from their standpoint with that composite yell that in Ireland denotes the breaking (and frequently the heading) of a fox, and vanished. Whatever was happening, it was not coming our way. I turned my hireling at the bank by the roadside, he came round with a responsive swing, and in two large and orderly bounds he was over. Before I had time to look round, the grey mare, with the faintest hint of a buck, galloped emulously past me.

"Perfection!" panted Philippa, putting her hat straight.

As we came up on to the next bank, recently vacated by its human palisade, we found that fortune had smiled upon us. Just below, on our right, was a long strip of gorse covert; three big fields beyond it, gliding from us like a flock of seagulls, were the clamouring hounds, and in the space between us and them bucketed the hunt, in the first fine frenzy of getting away. Flavin's bay immediately caught hold, not implacably, but with the firmness of superior knowledge; the grey mare, having ascertained that Philippa was not going to interfere, thought better of going on alone, and took the time from her stable companion. The field was already sorting itself into the usual divisions of the forward, the cunning, and the useless; our luck stood to us; the forward division, carried away by the enthusiasm of a good start and a sympathetic fall of ground, succeeded in less than a quarter of a mile in hustling the hounds over the line, and brought about a check. We joined the rearguard, and worked our way towards the front, unobtrusively, because Sir Thomas Purcell's comments on the situation were circling like a stock-whip among the guilty, and were not sparing the innocent. At this moment we found Flurry Knox beside us.

"Sir Thomas is giving the soldiers their tea in a mug!" he said; "and they were in the want of it! How are those horses doing with you?" he went on, looking our steeds up and down. "They look up to your weights, anyhow! I suppose you didn't see your friend, the General? He was at the meet in a motor."

"In a motor!" repeated Philippa. "I thought he was such a wonderful rider."

"He knows how to get a motor along, anyhow," replied Flurry, his attentive eyes following the operations of the hounds; "maybe he has the gout. You'd say he had by the colour of his face. Hullo! Boys! They're away again! Come on, Mrs. Yeates! Knock your two guineas' worth out of Flavin!"

Short as it was, the burst had been long enough to tranquillise my anxieties as to our hirelings' wind, and when we started again we found them almost excessively ready for the stone-faced bank that confronted us at the end of the field. Some twenty of us, including the chidden, but wholly unabashed soldiers, went at it in line, and, after the manner of stone-faced banks, it grew very tall as we approached it. Flavin's bay strode unfalteringly over it; it was as though he grasped it and flung it behind him. The grey mare, full of jealousy and vain-glory, had a hard try to fly the whole thing, but retained sufficient self-control to change feet at the last possible instant; with or without a scramble or a peck, we all arrived somehow in the next field, and saw, topping the succeeding fence, the bulky chestnut quarters of Sir Thomas Purcell's horse and the square scarlet back of Sir Thomas. Away to the left, on an assortment of astute crocks, three of the Misses Purcell followed the First Whip, at as considerable a distance from their parent as was consistent with a good place. Their voices came confusedly to us; apparently each was telling the others to get out of her way.

For a quarter of an hour the hounds ran hard over the clean pasture-land, whose curves rose before us and glided astern like the long rollers under an Atlantic liner. Innocent of rocks or pitfalls, unimpeachable as to surface, it was a page of fair print as compared with the black letter manuscript to which the country of Mr. Flurry Knox's hounds might be likened. Never before have I crossed fences as sound, as seductive, it was like jumping large and well-upholstered Chesterfield sofas; Chesterfieldian also were the manners of Flavin's bay. I found myself in the magnificent position of giving a lead to Flurry and the Dodger, of giving several leads to the soldiery; once, when a wide and boggy stream occurred, the Misses Purcell and the crocks looked to me as their pioneer. The hustle and the hurry never relaxed; the hounds had fastened on the line and were running it as though it were a footpath; but for the check at the start, no fox could have held his lead for so long at such a pace, and whatever the pace, the tails of the horses of Sir Thomas and the First Whip never failed to disappear over the bank just ahead.

For me, in the unwonted glory of heading the desperadoes of the first flight, life and the future were contained in the question of how much longer I could count on my hireling. I was just able to spare a hasty thought or two to Philippa and the grey, and I remember that it was after a heavy drop into a road that I noticed, with the just and impotent wrath of a husband, that her hair was beginning to come down.

It was just then that I first saw the motor. The fox had run the road for some little distance; we clattered and splashed along it, until an intimidating roar from Sir Thomas and the sight of his right arm in the air, brought us, bumping and tugging, to a standstill. The hounds were for a moment at fault, swarming, with their heads down, over every inch of the road, and beyond them, about a hundred yards from us, was a resplendent scarlet motor, whose nearer approach was summarily interdicted by the First Whip. I am short-sighted, but I caught an impression of two elderly gentlemen, one of whom, wearing a white moustache and a tall hat, was responding warmly to the fulminations of Sir Thomas. If this were my ancient brother-in-arms, Jimmy Porteous, following hounds in a motor, times were indeed changed. I dismissed the possibility from my mind. Just then I caught sight of Flurry's face; it had in it the fearful joy of a schoolboy who has seen a squib put into the tail pocket of the schoolmaster, and awaits the result. Mrs. Flurry, in the heroic act of plucking a hairpin from her own unshaken golden-red plaits, and yielding it to Philippa, met his eye with a glance that was so expressionless as to amount to a danger signal.

At this moment the hounds jostled over the wall with a clatter of falling stones; they spread themselves in the field like the opening of a fan, they narrowed to the recovered line like the closing of one; Sir Thomas's chestnut hoisted himself and his fifteen-stone burden out of the road with the heave of an earthquake. The riders shoved after him, and we were swept again into the current of the hunt.

As we thundered away up the field threatening shouts from the checked motorists followed us; apparently, after the manner of their kind, they had not a moment to spare, and the delay had annoyed them. The next fence arrived, and they, and all else, were forgotten.

There was a wood ahead of us, cresting a long upland, and for it the hounds were making, at a pace that brutally ignored the rise of ground, and the fact that in these higher levels the fields were smaller, and the fences had to be faced up a hill that momently grew steeper.

"Hold on, Mrs. Yeates, till I take down that pole for you!" Flurry's voice followed us up the hill, and there was that in it that told he was making heavy weather of it. He was leading the dripping Dodger, and I have seldom seen a redder face than his as he laboured past Philippa and dragged away the shaft of a cart that barred a gap. "Bad luck to this for a close country!" he puffed. "You're not off one fence before you're on top of the next!" Flavin's horses were certainly lathering pretty freely, but were otherwise making no remark on the situation, and neither of them had so far made a mistake of any kind. I saw the First Whip regard the bay with obvious respect, and turn with a confidential comment to the nearest Miss Purcell. It hall-marked my achievements.

Philippa and I were among the first into the wood; even Flurry had been left three fields behind, and the glory of our position radiated from us, as we stood at the end of the main ride, sublimely surveying the arrival of the rest of the streaming hunt. Sir Thomas and the hounds had dived out of sight into the recesses of the wood; a period of inaction ensued, and for a few balmy minutes peace with honour was ours.

Balmy, however, as were the minutes, there crept into them an anxiety as to what the hounds were doing. A great and complete silence had fallen as far as they and Sir Thomas were concerned, and Philippa and I, conscious of our high estate as leaders of the hunt, melted away from the crowd to investigate matters. We followed a path that took us across the wood, and the deeper we went the deeper was the silence, and the more acute became our fears that we had been left behind. Sir Thomas had an evil reputation for slipping his field and getting away alone.

"There's the horn!" cried Philippa. "It's outside the wood! They _have_ gone away. Hurry!"

We were squeezing along the farther edge of the covert, looking for a way out, and I, too, heard the note, faint, yet commanding. I hurried. That is to say, with my hat over my eyes, and my cheek laid against the bay's neck, I followed my wife up an alley that was barely wide enough for a woodcock.

On our left was an impassable hedge of small trees, crowning a heavy drop into the field outside the wood; our faces were rowelled by the branches of young spruce firs. It was all very well for Philippa, riding nearly two hands lower than I, to twist her way in and out through them like a squirrel, but for me, on a 16.2 horse, resolved on following his stable companion through a keyhole if necessary, it was anything but well. My eyes were tightly shut, my arm was in front of them, and my eye-glass was hanging down my back, when I felt the bay stop.

"Here's a way out," said my wife's voice, apparently from the middle of a fir tree, "there's a sort of a cattle track here."

There followed a scramble and a slide, then Philippa's voice again, enjoining me to keep to the right.

She has since explained that she really meant the left, and that, in any case, I might have known that she always said right when she meant left; be that as it may, when the bay and I had committed ourselves to the steep descent--half water-course, half cattle track--I was smitten in the face by a holly branch. Before I had recovered from its impact, a stout beechen bough, that it had masked, met me violently across the waistcoat and held me in mid-air, as the gorilla is reputed to grasp and hold the traveller, while my horse moved firmly downward from beneath me. After a moment of suspense, mental and physical, I fell to earth, like the arrow in the song, I knew not where, and tobogganed painfully down something steep and stony, with briers in it.

As I rose to my feet, the mellow note of the horn that had beguiled us from the wood, again sounded; nearer now, and with a harsher cadence, and I perceived, at the farther end of the field in which I had arrived, a bullock, with his head over a gate, sending a long and lamentable bugle note to the companions from whom he had been separated. Simultaneously the hounds opened far back in the wood behind me, and I knew that the flood-tide of luck had turned against us.

Flavin's bay had not waited for me. He was already well away, going with head and tail high held, a gentleman at large, seeking for entertainment at a lively and irresponsible trot. Pursuing him, with more zeal than discretion, was Philippa on the grey mare; he broke into a canter, and I had the pleasure of seeing them both swing through a gateway and proceed at a round gallop across the next field. I followed them at the best imitation of the same pace that my boots permitted, and squelched through the mire of the gateway in time to see the bay horse jump a tall bank, and drop with a clatter into a road. At the same moment the drumming and hooting of a motor-car broke upon my ear, and three heads, one of them wearing a tall hat, slid at high speed along the line of the fence. At sight of this apparition the bay horse gave a massive buck, and fled at full speed up a lane. To my surprise and gratification, the motor-car instantly stopped, and one of its occupants--the wearer of the tall hat--sprang out and gave chase to my horse.

My attention was here abruptly transferred to my wife, who, having followed the chase, whether by her own wish or that of the grey mare I have never been able to discover, was now combating the desire of the latter to jump the bank at the exact spot calculated to land them both in the lap of the motor-car. The dispute ended in a slanting and crab-like rush at a place twenty yards lower down, and it was then that the figure of our host, Mr. Lucius Butler-Knox, rose, amazingly, in the motor-car, making semaphore gestures of warning.

The mare jumped crookedly on to the bank, hung there for half a second, and launched herself into space, the launch being followed, appropriately, by a mighty splash. Neither she nor Philippa reappeared.

Throughout these events I had not ceased to run, and the next thing I can distinctly recall is scrambling, thoroughly blown, on to the fence, whence a moving scene presented itself to me. The grey mare and Philippa had, with singular ingenuity, selected between them the one place in the fence where disaster was inevitable; and I now beheld my wife prone in two feet of yellow water, the overflow of a flooded ditch that had turned a hollow by the roadside into a sufficiently imposing pond. Mr. Butler-Knox and the chauffeur were already rendering all the assistance possible, short of wetting their feet, and were hauling her ashore; while the grey mare, recumbent in deeper water, surveyed the operation with composure, and made no attempt to move. When I joined the party--a process involving a wide circuit of the flood--Philippa had sunk, dripping, upon a heap of stones by the roadside, in laughter as inexplicable as it was unsuitable. There was, at all events, no need to ask if she were hurt.

"The most appalling thing that you ever knew in your life has happened!" she wailed, and instantly fell again into unseemly convulsions.

Whatever the jest might be, it did not appeal to the chauffeur, who withdrew in silence to his motor, coldly wiping the vicarious duckweed from his knees with a silk pocket-handkerchief. Still less did it appeal to me. Any fair-minded person will admit that I had cause to be excessively angry with Philippa. That a grown woman, the mother of two children, should mistake the bellow of a bullock for the note of a horn was bad enough; but that when, having caused a serious accident by not knowing her right hand from her left, and having, by further insanities, driven one valuable horse adrift into the country, probably broken the back of another, laid the seeds of heart disease in her husband from shock and over-exertion, and of rheumatic fever in herself; when, I repeat, after all these outrages, she should sit in a soaking heap by the roadside, laughing like a maniac, I feel that the sympathy of the public will not be withheld from me.

The mystery of Mr. Butler-Knox's appearance in the motor-car passed by me like a feather in a whirlwind; I strode without a word into the yellow flood in which the mare was lying, and got hold of her reins with the handle of my crop; I might as well have tried to draw out Behemoth with a hook. Her hind-quarters were well fixed in the hidden ditch, she made not the slightest effort to stir, and continued to recline, contentedly, not to say defiantly.

"That's a great sign of fine weather," said a voice behind me in affable comment, "when a horse will lie down in wather that way."

I turned upon my consoler, and saw a young countryman with a fur-lined coat hanging upon his arm.

"I got this thrown in the _bohireen_ above," he said, "the other gentleman, that's follying the bay horse, stripped it off him, and God knows it's itself that's weighty!"

"My dear Major!" began Looshy, addressing me agitatedly from the bank, as a hen might address a refractory duckling, "there has been a most unfortunate mistake."

"There has! There has! It's all Flurry's fault!" gasped Philippa, staggering towards me like a drunken woman.

"I fear the General is terribly annoyed," continued Looshy, wiping his grey beard and mopping his collar to remove the muddy imprint of Philippa's arm; "he rushed into Garden Mount in search of his horses when he found they were not at the meet nor at the station--he left Lady Porteous with my sisters and took me to identify you; I mentioned your name, but he did not seem to grasp it--indeed his language was--er--was such that I thought it unwise to press the point."

I dropped the reins and began, slowly, to wade out of the pool.

"I understand he has but just paid £300 for these horses--it was an unpardonable mistake of Flurry's," went on Looshy, "he found the General's horses at the station and thought that they were Flavin's."

"Dear Flurry!" sobbed Philippa, shamelessly, reeling against me and clutching my arm.

"Begor' he have the horse!" said the young countryman, looking up the hill.

A stout figure in a red coat and tall hat was approaching by way of the _bohireen_, followed by a man leading a limping horse.

"I think," said Looshy nervously, "that Mrs. Yeates had better have my seat in the motor-car and hurry home. I will walk--I should really prefer it. The General will be quite happy now that he has found his horses and his old friend."

The chauffeur, plying a long-necked oil-can, smiled sardonically.

X

SHARPER THAN A FERRET'S TOOTH

"My dear Philippa," said Miss Shute gloomily, "I have about as much chance of spending next winter in Florence as I have of spending it in the moon. I despair of ever getting Bernard married. I look upon him as hopeless."

"I don't agree with you at all," replied Philippa, "don't you remember how demented he was about Sally Knox? And when we all thought he was on the verge of suicide, we discovered that he was deep in a flirtation with that American girl. It seems to me he's ready to be devoted to any one who takes him in hand. He has none of that deadly helpless fidelity about him."

"I ought never to have allowed him to take up gardening," said Miss Shute, despondently pursuing her own line of thought, "it only promotes intimacies with dowagers."

"Yes, and it makes men elderly, and contented, and stay-at-home," agreed Philippa; "it's one of the worst signs! But I can easily make Sybil Hervey think she's a gardener. She's a thoroughly nice, coercible girl. Alice has always been so particular about her girls. Of course with their money they've been run after a good deal, but they're not in the least spoilt."

"I don't think," I murmured privately to Maria, who was trying to hypnotise me into letting her crawl on to the sofa beside me, "that we'll borrow half-a-crown to get drunk with her."

Maria wagged her tail in servile acquiescence.

"Nonsense!" said my wife largely.

A month from the date of this conversation, Sybil Hervey, my wife's pretty, young, and well-dowered niece, was staying beneath our roof. I had not changed my mind about the half-crown, though Maria, perfidious as ever, feigned for her the impassioned affection that had so often imposed upon the guileless guest within my gates.

"Why, this dog has taken the most extraordinary fancy to me!" Sybil Hervey (who was really a very amiable girl) would say, and Maria, with a furtive eye upon her owners, would softly draw the guest's third piece of cake into the brown velvet bag that she called her mouth.

This was all very well from Maria's point of view, but a friendship with Maria had not been the object of Miss Hervey's importation. I evade, by main strength, the quotation from Burns proper to this state of affairs, and proceed to say that the matrimonial scheme laid by my wife and Miss Shute was not prospering. Sybil Hervey, the coercible, the thoroughly nice, shied persistently at the instructive pages of Robinson's "English Flower Garden," and stuck in her toes and refused point blank to weed seedlings for her Aunt Philippa. Nor was a comprehensive garden party at Clountiss attended with any success; far otherwise. Miss Shute unfortunately thought it incumbent on her to trawl in deep waters, and to invite even the McRory family to her entertainment, with the result that her brother, Bernard--I quote my wife verbatim--made a ridiculous spectacle of himself by walking about all the afternoon with a fluffy-haired, certainly-rather-pretty, little abomination, a creature who was staying with the McRorys. Worse even than this, Sybil had disappointed, if not disgraced, her backers, by vanishing from the ken of un-gentle men with Mr. De Lacy McRory, known to his friends as "Curly."

I have before now dealt, superficially, and quite inadequately, with the McRorys. It may even be permitted to me to recall again the generic description of each young male McRory. "A bit of a lad, but nothing at all to the next youngest." Since that time the family had worn its way, unequally and in patches, into the tolerance of the neighbourhood. It was said, apologetically, that the daughters danced, and played tennis and golf so well, and the sons did the same and were such excellent shots, and that Mrs. McRory bought, uncomplainingly, all that was offered to her at bazaars, and could always be counted on for a whole row of seats at local concerts. As for old McRory, people said that he was certainly rather awful, but that he was better than his family in that he knew that he was awful, and kept out of the way. As a matter of history, there were not many functions where a McRory of some kind, in accordance with its special accomplishment, did not find, at all events, standing room; fewer still where they did not form a valued topic of conversation.

Curly McRory was, perhaps, the pioneer of his family in their advance to cross what has been usefully called "the bounder-y line." He played all games well, and he was indisputably good-looking, he knew how to be discreetly silent; he also, apparently, knew how to talk to Sybil what time her accredited chaperon, oblivious of her position, played two engrossing sets of tennis.

After this fiasco came a period of stagnation, during which Mr. De Lacy McRory honoured us with his first visit to Shreelane, bicycling over to see me, on business connected with the golf club; in my regretted absence he asked for Mrs. Yeates, and stayed for tea. Following upon this Sybil took to saying, "I will," in what she believed to be a brogue, instead of "yes," and was detected in fruitless search for the McRorys of Temple Braney in the pages of Burke's Irish Landed Gentry.

It was at this unsatisfactory juncture that Mrs. Flurry Knox entered into the affair with an invitation to us to spend three days at Aussolas Castle, one of which was to be devoted to the destruction of a pack of grouse, fabled by John Kane, the keeper, to frequent a mountain back of Aussolas: the Shutes were also to be of the party. I seemed to detect in the arrangement a hand more diplomatic than that of Providence, but I said nothing.

The Flurry Knoxes were, for the moment, in residence at Aussolas, while old Mrs. Knox made her annual pilgrimage to Buxton. They were sent there to keep the servants from fighting, and because John Kane had said that there was no such enemies to pigs as servants on board wages. (A dark saying, bearing indirectly on the plenishing of pig-buckets.)

Between servants and pigs, as indeed in most affairs of life, little Mrs. Flurry held the scales of justice with a remarkably steady hand, and under her régime one could at all events be reasonably sure of having one's boots cleaned, and of getting a hot bath in the morning. We went to Aussolas, and Flurry and Bernard Shute and I put in a blazing September day on the mountain, wading knee deep in matted heather and furze, in pursuit of the mythical grouse, and brought home two hares and a headache (the latter being my contribution to the bag). The ladies met us with tea; Sybil, in Harris tweed and admirable boots, looked, I must admit, uncommonly smart. Even Flurry was impressed, and it was palpable to the most superficial observer that Bernard was at length beginning, like a baby, to "take notice." After tea he and she moved away in sweet accord to wash teacups in a bog-hole, from whence their prattle came prosperously to the ears of the three diplomatists, seated, like the witches in Macbeth, upon the heath, and, like them, arranging futures for other people. Bearing in mind that one of the witches had (in a previous incarnation as Miss Sally Knox) held Bernard in her thrall, and still retained him in a platonic sphere of influence, any person of experience would have said that the odds were greatly against Mr. Shute.

The hot bath that was the _fine fleur_ of Mrs. Flurry's régime at Aussolas failed conspicuously next morning. It was the precursor of a general slump. When, at a liberal 9.30, I arrived in the dining-room, of neither host, hostess, nor breakfast was there any sign. The host, it appeared, had gone to a fair; having waited for a hungry half-hour we were coming to the conclusion that the hostess had gone with him, when the door opened and Mrs. Flurry came swiftly into the room. Her face was as a book, where men might read strange matters; it was also of a hue that suggested the ardent climate of the kitchen; in her hand she carried a toast-rack, and following hard on her heels came three maids, also heavily flushed, bearing various foods, and all, apparently, on the verge of tears. This cortège having retired, Mrs. Flurry proceeded to explain. The butler, Johnny, a dingy young man, once Mrs. Knox's bathchair-attendant, had departed at 8 A.M., accompanied by Michael the pantry boy, to dig a grave for a cousin. To those acquainted with Aussolas there was nothing remarkable in this, but Sybil Hervey's china-blue eyes opened wide, and I heard her ask Bernard in a low voice if he thought it was anything agrarian. The annoyance of the cook at the defection of the butler and pantry boy was so acute that she had retired to her room and refused to send in breakfast.

"That was no more than I should have expected from the servants here," said Mrs. Flurry vindictively, "but what was just a little too much was finding the yard-boy cramming the toast into the toast-rack with his fingers."

At this my wife's niece uttered the loud yell which all young women with any pretension to smartness have by them for use on emergencies, and exclaimed--

"Oh, _don't_!"

"You needn't be frightened," said Mrs. Flurry, giving Miss Hervey the eighth part of a glance of her greeny-grey eyes; "I made this stuff myself, and you may all think yourselves lucky to get anything," she went on, "as one of the herd of incapables downstairs said, 'to get as much milk as'd do the tea itself, that was the stratagem'!"

Hard on the heels of the quotation there came a rushing sound in the hall without, a furious grappling with the door-handle, and the cook herself, or rather the Tragic Muse in person, burst into the room. Her tawny hair hung loose about her head; her yellow-brown eyes blazed in an ashen and extremely handsome face; she shook a pair of freckled fists at the universe. I cannot pretend to do more than indicate the drift of her denunciation. Brunhilde, ascending the funeral pyre, with full orchestral accompaniment, could not more fully and deafeningly have held her audience, and the theme might have been taken out of the darkest corner of any of the Sagas.

The burying-ground of her clan was--so she had been informed by a swift runner--even now being broken into by the butler and the pantry boy, and the graves of her ancestors were being thrown open to the Four Winds of the World, to make room for the Scuff of the Country (whatever that might mean). Here followed the most capable and comprehensive cursings of the butler and the pantry boy that it has ever been my lot to admire, delivered at lightning speed, and with gestures worthy of the highest traditions of classic drama, the whole ending with the statement that she was on her way to the graveyard now to drink their blood.

"I trust you will, Kate," cordially responded Mrs. Flurry, "don't wait a moment!"

The Tragic Muse, startled into an instant of silence, stared wildly at Mrs. Flurry, seemed to scent afar off the possibility that she was not being taken seriously, and whirled from the room, a Vampire on the warpath.

"I meant every word I said to her!" said Sally, looking round upon us defiantly, "I was very near offering her your motor, Mr. Shute! The sooner she kills Johnny and Michael the better pleased I shall be! And I may tell you all," she added, "that we shall have no luncheon to-day, and most probably no dinner!"

"Oh, that's all right!" said Philippa, seeing her chance, and hammering in her wedge with all speed, "now there's nothing for it but sandwiches and a picnic!"

The lake at Aussolas was one of a winding chain of three, connected by narrow channels cut through the bog for the passage of boats that carried turf to the lake-side dwellers. The end one of these, known as Braney's Lake, was a recognised place for picnics; a ruined oratory on a wooded point supplying the pretext, and a reliable spring well completing the equipment. The weather was of the variety specially associated in my mind with Philippa's picnics, brilliantly fine, with a falling glass, and 12 o'clock saw us shoving out from the Aussolas turf quay, through the reeds and the rocks.

We were a party of six, in two boats; diplomacy, whose I know not, had so disposed matters that Bernard Shute and Sybil Hervey were despatched together in a dapper punt, and I, realising to the full the insignificance of my position as a married man, found myself tugging at a tough and ponderous oar, in a species of barge, known to history as "The-Yallow-Boat-that-was-painted-black." My wife and Mrs. Flurry took turns in assisting my labours by paddling with a scull in the bow, while Miss Shute languidly pulled the wrong string at intervals, in the stern. Why, I grumbled contentiously, should, as it were, fish be made of Bernard and flesh be made of me (which was a highly figurative way of describing a performance that would take a stone off my weight ere all was done). Why, I repeated, should not Bernard put his broad back into it in the heavy boat with me, and leave the punt for the ladies? My wife tore herself from _sotto voce_ gabblings with Sally in the bow to tell me that I was thoroughly unsympathetic, what time she dealt me an unintentional but none the less disabling blow in the spine, in her effort to fall again into stroke. Mrs. Flurry, in order to take turns at the oar with Philippa, had seated herself on the luncheon basket in the bow, thereby sinking the old tub by the head, and, as we afterwards found, causing her to leak in the sun-dried upper seams. To us travelled the voice of Bernard, lightly propelling his skiff over the ruffled and sparkling blue water.

"He's telling her about all the alterations he's going to make at Clountiss!" hissed Sally down the back of Philippa's neck.

"Almost actionable!" responded my wife, and in her enthusiasm her oar again took me heavily between the shoulder blades.

We laboured out of the Aussolas lake, and poled down the narrow channel into the middle lake, where shallows, and a heavy summer's growth of reeds, did not facilitate our advance. The day began to cloud over; as we wobbled out of the second channel into Braney's lake the sun went in, a sharp shower began to whip the water, and simultaneously Miss Shute announced that her feet were wet, and that she thought the boat must be leaking. I then perceived that the water was up to the bottom boards, and was coming in faster than I could have wished. A baler was required, and I proceeded with confidence to search for the rusty mustard tin, or cracked jam-crock, that fills that office. There was nothing to be found.

"There are plenty of cups in the luncheon basket," said Sally, tranquilly; "Flurry once had to bale this old boat out with one of his grandmother's galoshes."

Philippa and I began to row with some vigour, while Sally wrestled with the fastening of the luncheon basket in the bow. The lid opened with a jerk and a crack. There was one long and speechless moment, and then Sally said in a very gentle voice:

"They've sent the washing-basket, with all the clean clothes!"

Of the general bearings of this catastrophe there was no time to think; its most pressing feature was the fact that there were no cups with which to bale the boat. I looked over my shoulder and saw Bernard dragging the punt ashore under the ruined oratory, a quarter of a mile away; there was nothing for it but to turn and make for the shore on our right at the best pace attainable. Sally and Philippa double-banked the bow oar, and the old boat, leaking harder at each moment, wallowed on towards a landing stage that suddenly became visible amid the reeds--the bottom boards were by this time awash, and Miss Shute's complexion and that of her holland dress matched to a shade.

"Could you throw the washing overboard?" I suggested over my shoulder, labouring the while at my massy oar.

"My--new--nightgowns!" panted Mrs. Flurry, "never!"

Just then big rocks began to show yellow in the depths, the next moment the boat scraped over one, and, almost immediately afterwards, settled down quietly and with dignity in some three feet of brown water and mud.

Only those who have tried to get out of a submerged boat, can form any idea of what then befell. Our feet and legs turned to lead, the water to glue, all that was floatable in the boat rose to the surface, and lay about there impeding our every movement. We had foundered in sight of port and were not half-a-dozen yards from the landing stage, but to drag myself and three women, all up to our waists in water, and the ladies hopelessly handicapped by their petticoats, over the gunwale of a sunken boat, and to flounder ashore with them in mud, over unsteady rocks, and through the ever-hampering reeds, was infinitely more difficult and exhausting than it may seem.

Clasping a slimy post to my bosom with one arm, I was in the act of shoving Miss Shute up on to the landing stage, when I heard the unmistakeable Dublin light tenor voice of a McRory hail me, announcing that he was coming to our rescue. More distant shouts, and the rapid creaking of hard-pulled oars told that Bernard and Sybil were also speeding to our aid. The three diplomates, dripping on the end of the pier, looked at each other bodefully, and Philippa murmured:

"The worst has happened!"

After that the worst continued to happen, and at a pace that overbore all resistance. Mr. De Lacy McRory, tall and beautiful, in lily-white flannels, took the lead into his own hands and played his game faultlessly. Philippa was the object of his chief solicitude, Sally and Miss Shute had their share of a manly tenderness that resolutely ignored the degrading absurdity of their appearance; his father's house, and all that was therein was laid at our feet. Captive and helpless, we slopped and squelched beside him through the shrubberies of Temple Braney House, with the shower, now matured into a heavy down-pour, completing our saturation, too spiritless to resent the heavy pleasantries of Bernard, the giggling condolences of Sybil.

We have never been able to decide at which moment the knife of humiliation cut deepest, whether it was when we stood and dripped on the steps, while Curly McRory summoned in trumpet tones his women-kind, or when, still dripping, we stood in the hall and were presented to Mrs. McRory and a troop of young men and maidens, vociferous in sympathy and hospitality; or when, having progressed like water carts through the house, we found ourselves installed, like the Plague of Frogs, in the bedchambers of the McRorys, face to face with the supreme embarrassment of either going to bed, or of arraying ourselves in the all too gorgeous garments that were flung before us with a generous abandon worthy of Sir Walter Raleigh.

I chose the latter course, and, in process of time, found myself immaculately clothed in what is, I believe, known to tailors as "a Lounge Suit," though not for untold gold would I have lounged, or by any carelessness endangered the perfection of the creases of its dark grey trousers.

The luncheon gong sounded, and, like the leading gentleman in any drawing-room drama, I put forth from my dressing-room, and at the head of the stairs met my wife and Miss Shute. They were, if possible, grander than I, and looked as if they were going to a wedding.

"We had the choice of about eighty silk blouses," breathed Philippa, gathering up a long and silken train, "Sally has to wear Madame's clothes, nothing else were short enough. We're in for it, you know," she added, "a luncheon is inevitable, and goodness knows when we can get away, especially if this rain lasts--" her voice broke hysterically; I turned and saw Mrs. Flurry shuffling towards us in velvet slippers, holding up with both hands a flowing purple brocade skirt. I pointed repressively downwards, to where, in the window seat of the hall below, were visible the crispéd golden curls of Mr. De Lacy McRory, and the shining rolls and undulations of Miss Sybil Hervey's _chevelure_. Their heads were in close proximity, and their voices were low and confidential.

"This must be put a stop to!" said Philippa, rustling swiftly downstairs.

We all moved processionally in to lunch, arm in arm with the McRorys. To Philippa had fallen old McRory, who was the best of the party (in being so awful that he knew he was awful). He maintained an unbroken silence throughout the meal, but whistled jigs secretly through his teeth, a method of keeping up his courage of which I believe he was quite unconscious. Of the brilliance of the part that I played with Mrs. McRory it would ill become me to speak; what is more worthy of record is the rapid and Upas-like growth of intimacy between Curly McRory and my wife's niece. She had probably never before encountered a young man so anxious to be agreeable, so skilled in achieving that end. The fact that he was Irish accounted, no doubt, in her eyes, for all that was unusual in his voice and manners, and his long eyelashes did the rest. Sybil grew momently pinker and prettier as the long, extraordinary meal marched on.

Of its component parts I can only remember that there was a soup tureen full of custard, a mountainous dish of trifle, in whose veins ran honey, instead of jam, and to whose enlivenment a bottle at least of whisky had been dedicated; certainly, at one period, Philippa had on one side of her plate a cup of soup, and on the other a cup of tea. Cecilia Shute was perhaps the member of our party who took it all hardest. Pale and implacable, attired in a brilliant blue garment that was an outrage alike to her convictions and her complexion, she sat between two young McRorys, who understood no more of her language than she did of theirs, and was obliged to view with the frigid tranquillity boasted of by Doctor Johnson, the spectacle of her brother devoting himself enthusiastically to that McRory cousin whom Philippa had described as a fluffy-haired abomination. Everything, in fact, was occurring that was least desired by the ladies of my party, with the single exception of my niece by marriage; and the glowing satisfaction of the McRory family was not hid from us, and did not ameliorate the position.

When luncheon was at length brought to a close nothing could well have been blacker than the outlook. The rain, and the splendour of our borrowed plumes, put a return by boat out of the question. It was a good seven miles round by road, and the McRory family, fleet and tireless bicyclists, had but one horse, which was lame. A telegram to Aussolas had been despatched an hour ago, but as Mrs. Flurry was gloomily certain that every servant there had gone to the funeral, the time of our release was unknown.

I do not now distinctly remember what occurred immediately after lunch, but I know there came a period when I found myself alone in the hall, turning over the pages of a dreary comic paper, uncertain what to do, but determined on one point, that neither principalities nor powers should force me into the drawing-room, where sat the three unhappy women of my party, being entertained within an inch of their lives by Mrs. McRory. Sybil and Bernard and their boon companions had betaken themselves to that distant and dilapidated wing of the house in which I had once unearthed Tomsy Flood, there to play squash racquets in one of the empty rooms. I was consequently enacting the part laid down for me by my lounge suit; I was lounging, as a gentleman should, without for an instant disturbing the creases of my trousers.

At times I was aware of the silent and respectful surveillance of Mr. McRory in the inner hall, but I thought it best for us both to feign unconsciousness of his presence. Through a swing door that, true to its definition, swung wheezily to the cabbage-laden draughts from the lower regions, I could hear the tide of battle rolling through the disused wing. The squash racquets seemed to be of a most pervading character; the thunder of rushing feet, blent with the long, progressive shriek of an express train, would at intervals approach almost to the swing door, but I remained unmolested. I had entered upon my second cigarette, and a period of comparative peace, when I heard a stealing foot, and found at my elbow a female McRory of about twelve as years go, but dowered with the accumulated experience of six elder sisters.

"Did Pinkie and Mr. Shute come in this way to hide?" she began, looking at me as if "Pinkie," whoever she might be, was in my pocket. "We're playing hide'n-go-seek, and we can't find them."

I said I knew nothing of them.

The McRory child looked at me with supernal intelligence from under the wing of dark hair that was tied over one ear.

"They're not playing fair anyhow, and there's Curly and Miss Hervey that wouldn't play at all!" She eyed me again. "He took her out to show her the ferrets and they never came back. I was watching them; she said one of the ferrets bit her finger, and Curly kissed it!"

"I suppose you mean he kissed the ferret," I said repressively, while I thought of Alice Hervey, mother of Sybil, and trembled.

"Ah, go on! what a fool you're letting on to be!" replied the McRory child, with elegant sarcasm. She swung round on her heel and sped away again upon the trail, cannoning against old McRory in the back hall.

"I tell you, that's the lady!" soliloquised old McRory, from the deep of the back hall. I gathered that he was referring to the social capacity of his youngest daughter and thought he was probably right.

It was at this moment that deliverance broke like a sunburst upon us; I saw through the windows of the hall a dogcart and an outside car whirl past the door and onwards to the yard. The former was driven by Flurry Knox, the car by Michael the Aussolas pantry boy, apparently none the worse for his encounter with the vampire cook. I snatched an umbrella, and, regardless of the lounge suit, followed with all speed the golden path of the sunburst.

Flurry, clad in glistening yellow oilskins, met me in the yard, wearing an expression of ill-concealed exultation worthy of Job's comforters at their brightest.

"D'ye know who opened your wire?" he began, regarding me with an all observant eye from under his sou-wester, while the rain drops ran down his nose. "I can tell you there's the Old Gentleman to pay at Aussolas--or the old lady, and that's worse! That's a nice suit--you ought to buy that from Curly."

"Who opened my telegram?" I said. I was not at all amused.

"'When she got there, the cupboard was bare,'" returned Flurry. "'Not a servant in the house, not a bit in the larder!' If it wasn't that by the mercy of providence I found the picnic basket that you bright boys had left after you, she'd have torn the house down!"

"I suppose you mean that your grandmother has come back," I said stonily.

"She fought with her unfortunate devil of a doctor at Buxton," said Flurry, permitting himself a grin of remembrance, "he told her she was too old to eat late dinner, and she told him she wasn't going to be a slave to her stomach or to him either, and she'd eat her dinner when she pleased, and she landed in at Aussolas by the mid-day train without a word."

"What did she say when she opened my telegram?" I faltered.

"She said 'Thank God I'm not a fool!'" replied her grandson.

The proposition was unanswerable, and I took it, so to speak, lying down.

"Here!" said Flurry, summoning the pantry boy. "These horses must go in out of the rain. I'll look over there for some place I can put them."

"I see Michael got back from the funeral," I said, following Flurry across the wide and wet expanse of the yard, "I suppose the cook killed Johnny?"

"Ah, not at all," said Flurry, "anyway, my grandmother had the two of them up unpacking her trunks when I left. Here, this place looks like a stable----"

He opened a door, in front of which a cascade from a broken water-shoot was splashing noisily. The potent smell of ferrets greeted us.

Seated on the ferrets' box were Mr. De Lacy McRory, and Sybil, daughter of Alice Hervey. Apparently she had again been bitten by the ferret, but this time the bite was not on her finger.

XI

OWENEEN THE SPRAT

I was labouring under the slough of Christmas letters and bills, when my wife came in and asked me if I would take her to the Workhouse.

"My dear," I replied, ponderously, but, I think, excusably, "you have, as usual, anticipated my intention, but I think we can hold out until after Christmas."

Philippa declined to pay the jest the respect to which its age entitled it, and replied inconsequently that I knew perfectly well that she could not drive the outside car with the children and the Christmas tree. I assented that they would make an awkward team, and offered, as a substitute for my services, those of Denis, the stopgap.