In Mr. Knox's Country

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

Miss Cooney O'Rattigan.

I said that the soda-water bottles had probably prepared him for the ostrich eggs, and Miss Bennett asked me if it were true that I had once found a nest of young mice in the foot of my bed at Aussolas, because that was the story she had heard. I was able to assure her that, on the contrary, it had been kittens, and passing from these pleasing reminiscences I asked her to come forth and smoke a cigarette in the hall with me, as a preliminary to a farther advance in the direction of the motor. I have a sincere regard for Miss Bennett, but her dancing is a serious matter, with a Cromwellian quality in it, suggestive of jack boots and the march of great events.

The cigarettes were consolatory, and the two basket-chairs by the fire in the back-hall were sufficiently comfortable; but the prospect of home burned like a beacon before me. The clock struck eleven.

"They're only beginning now!" said Miss Bennett, interpreting without resentment my glance at it. "Last night it was near one o'clock in the morning when they had high tea, and then they took to singing songs, and playing 'Are you there, Mike?' and cock-fighting."

I rose hastily, and began to search for my overcoat and cap, prepared to plunge into the frosty night, when Miss Bennett offered to show me a short way through the house to the stableyard, where I had left the car.

"I slipped out that way after dinner," she said, picking up a fur-lined cloak and wrapping it about her. "I wanted to make sure the mare had a second rug on her this cold night."

I followed Miss Bennett through a wheezy swing-door; a flagged passage stretched like a tunnel before us, lighted by a solitary candle planted in its own grease in a window. A long battle-line of bicycles occupied one side of the passage; there were doors, padlocked and cobwebbed, on the other. A ragged baize door at the end of the tunnel opened into darkness that smelt of rat-holes, and was patched by a square or two of moonlight.

"This is a sort of a lobby," said Miss Bennett. "Mind! There's a mangle there—and there are oars on the floor somewhere——"

As she spoke I was aware of a distant humming noise, like bees in a chimney.

"That sounds uncommonly like a motor," I said.

"That's only the boiler," replied Miss Bennett; "we're at the back of the kitchen here."

She advanced with confidence, and flung open a door. A most startling vista was revealed, of a lighted room with several beds in it. Children's faces, swelled and scarlet, loomed at us from the pillows, and an old woman, with bare feet and a shawl over her head, stood transfixed, with a kettle in one hand and a tumbler in the other.

Miss Bennett swiftly closed the door upon the vision.

"My gracious heavens!" she whispered, "what on earth children are those? I'm sure it's mumps they have, whoever they are. And how secret the McRorys kept it!—and did you see it was punch the old woman was giving them?"

"We might have asked her the way to the yard," I said, inwardly resolving to tell Philippa it was scarlatina; "and she might have given us a light."

"It was this door I should have tried," said my guide, opening another with considerable circumspection.

Sounds of hilarity immediately travelled to us along a passage; I followed Miss Bennett, feeling much as if I were being led by a detective into Chinatown, San Francisco. A square of light in the wall indicated one of those inner windows that are supposed to give light mutually to room and passage, and are, as a matter of fact, an architect's confession of defeat. Farther on a door was open, and screams of laughter and singing proceeded from it. I admit, without hesitation, that we looked in at the window, and thus obtained a full and sufficient view of the vie intime of the Temple Braney kitchen. A fat female, obviously the cook, was seated in the midst of a remarkably lively crowd of fellow-retainers and camp-followers, thumping with massive knuckles on a frying-pan, as though it were a banjo, and squalling to it something in an unknown tongue.

"She's taking off Miss Cooney O'Rattigan!" hissed Miss Bennett, in ecstasy. "She's singing Italian, by way of! And look at those two brats of boys, Vincent and Harold, that should have been in their beds two hours ago!"

Masters Vincent and Harold McRory were having the time of their lives. One of them, seated on the table, was shovelling tipsy-cake into his ample mouth with a kitchen spoon; the other was smoking a cigarette, and capering to the squalls of the cook.

As noiselessly as two bats Miss Bennett and I flitted past the open door, but a silence fell with a unanimity that would have done credit to any orchestra.

"They saw us," said Miss Bennett, scudding on, "but we'll not tell on them—the creatures!"

An icy draught apprised us of an open door, and through it we escaped at length from the nightmare purlieus of the house into the yard, an immense quadrangle, where moonlight and black shadows opposed one another in a silence that was as severe as they. Temple Braney House and its yard dated from what may be called the Stone Age in Ireland, about the middle of the eighteenth century, when money was plenty and labour cheap, and the Barons of Temple Braney, now existent only in guidebooks, built, as they lived, on the generous scale.

We crossed the yard to the coach-house in which I had left my motor: its tall arched doorway was like the mouth of a cave, and I struck a match. It illuminated a mowing-machine, a motor-bicycle, and a flying cat. But not my car. The first moment of bewilderment was closed by the burning of my fingers by the match.

"Are you sure it was here you left it?" said Miss Bennett, with a fatuity of which I had not believed her capable.

The presence of a lady was no doubt a salutary restraint, but as I went forth into the yard again, I felt as though the things I had to leave unsaid would break out all over me like prickly heat.

"It's the medical student one," said Miss Bennett with certainty, "the one that owns the motor-bike."

The yard and the moonlight did not receive this statement with a more profound silence than I.

"I'm sure he won't do it any harm," she went on, making the elementary mistake of applying superficial salves to a wound whose depths she was incapable of estimating. "He's very good about machinery—maybe it's only round to the front door he took it."

As Miss Bennett offered these consolations I saw two small figures creep from the shadows of the house. Their white collars shone in the moonlight, and, recognising them as the youngest members of the inveterate clan of McRory, I hailed them in a roar that revealed very effectively the extent of my indignation. It did not surprise me that the pair, in response to this, darted out of the yard gate with the speed of a pair of minnows in a stream.

I pursued, not with any hope of overtaking them, but because they were the only clue available, and in my wake, over the frosty ground, in her satin shoes, followed that sound sportswoman, Miss Bennett.

The route from the stable-yard to the front of Temple Braney House is a long and circuitous one, that skirts a plantation of evergreens. At the first bend the moonlight displayed the track of a tyre in the grass; at the next bend, where the edge was higher, a similar economy of curve had been effected, and that the incident had been of a fairly momentous nature was suggested by the circumstance that the tail lamp was lying in the middle of the drive. It was as I picked it up that I heard a familiar humming in the vicinity of the hall door.

"He didn't go so far, after all," said Miss Bennett, somewhat blown, but holding her own, in spite of the satin shoes.

I turned the last corner at a high rate of speed, and saw the dignified Georgian façade of the house, pale and placid in the moonlight; through the open hall door a shaft of yellow light fell on the ground. The car was nowhere to be seen, yet somewhere, close at hand, the engine throbbed and drummed to me,—a cri de coeur, as I felt it, calling to me through the accursed jingle of the piano that proceeded from the open door.

"Where the devil——?" I began.

Even as I spoke I descried the car. It was engaged, apparently, in forcing its way into the shrubbery that screened one end of the house. The bonnet was buried in a holly bush, the engine was working, slowly but industriously. The lamps were not lighted, and there was no one in it.

"Those two imps made good use of their legs, never fear them!" puffed Miss Bennett; "the 'cuteness of them—cutting away to warn the brother!"

"What's this confounded thing?" I said fiercely, snatching at something that was caught in the handle of the brake.

Miss Bennett snatched it in her turn, and held it up in the moonlight, while I stilled the fever of the engine.

"Dublin for ever!" she exclaimed. "What is it but the streamers of Miss Cooney's mandoline! There's the spoils of war for you! And it's all the spoils you'll get—the whole pack of them's hid in the house by now!"

From an unlighted window over the hall door a voice added itself to the conversation.

"God help the house that holds them!" it said, addressing the universe.

The window was closed.

"That's old McRory!" said Miss Bennett in a horrified whisper.

Again I thought of Chinatown, sleepless, incalculable, with its infinite capacity for sheltering the criminal.

"—But, darling," said Philippa, some quarter of an hour later, as we proceeded down the avenue in the vaulted darkness of the beech-trees (and I at once realised that she had undertaken the case for the defence), "you've no reason to suppose that they took the car any farther than the hall door."

"It is the last time that it will be taken to that hall door," I replied, going dead slow, with my head over the side of the car, listening to unfamiliar sounds in its interior—sounds that did not suggest health. "I should like to know how many of your young friends went on the trip——"

"My dear boy," said Philippa pityingly, "I ask you if it is likely that there would have been more than two, when one of them was the lady with the mandoline! And," she proceeded with cat-like sweetness, "I did not perceive that you took a party with you when you retired to the hall with your old friend Miss Bennett, and left me to cope single-handed with the mob for about an hour!"

"Whether there were two or twenty-two of them in the car," I said, treating this red herring with suitable contempt, "I've done with your McRorys."

I was, very appropriately, in the act of passing through the Temple Braney entrance gates as I made this pronouncement, and it was the climax of many outrages that the steering-gear, shaken by heaven knows what impacts and brutalities, should suddenly have played me false. The car swerved in her course—fortunately a slow one—and laid her bonnet impulsively against the Temple Braney gate pillar, as against a loved one's shoulder.

As we regained our composure, two tall forms appeared in the light of the head lamps, and one of them held up his hand. I recognised a police patrol.

"That's the car right enough," said one of them. He advanced to my side. "I want your name, please. I summons you for furious driving on the high road, without lights, a while ago, and refusing to stop when called on to do so. Go round and take the number, M'Caffery."

When, a few days later, the story flowed over and ran about the country, some things that were both new and interesting came to my ears.

Flurry Knox said that Bobby Bennett had sold me her old mare by moonlight in the Temple Braney yard, and it was a great credit to old McRory's champagne.

Mrs. Knox, of Aussolas, was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run in the car at one o'clock in the morning, and on hearing it said "De gustibus non est disputandum."

Some one, unknown, repeated this to Mrs. McRory, and told her that it meant "You cannot touch pitch without being disgusted."

Mrs. Cadogan, my cook, reported to Philippa that the boy who drove the bread-cart said that it was what the people on the roads were saying that the Major was to be fined ten pounds; to which Mrs. Cadogan had replied that it was a pity the Major ever stood in Temple Braney, but she supposed that was laid out for him by the Lord.

IX

PUT DOWN ONE AND CARRY TWO

The promise of that still and moonlit December night, wherein we had bean-feasted with the McRorys, was shamelessly broken.

The weather next morning was a welter of wind and mist, with rain flung in at intervals. The golden fox on the stable weathercock was not at peace for a moment, facing all the southern points of the compass as if they were hounds that held it at bay. For my part, I do not know why people go out hunting on such days, unless it be for the reason that many people go to church, to set an example to others.

Philippa said she went because she had done her hair for riding before she could see out of the window—a fiction beneath the notice of any intelligent husband. I went because I had told my new groom, Wilson (an English disciplinarian), that I was going, and I was therefore caught in the cogs of the inexorable wheel of stable routine. I also went because I nourished a faint hope that I might be able to place before the general public, and especially before Flurry Knox, an authentic first version of the McRory episode. Moreover, I had a headache; but this I was not going to mention, knowing that the sun never sets upon the jests consecrated to after-dinner headaches.

As we rode away from Shreelane, and felt the thick small rain in our faces, and saw the spray blown off the puddles by the wind, and heard the sea-gulls, five miles inland, squealing in the mist overhead, I said that it was preposterous to think of hunting at Lonen Hill in such weather, and that I was going home. Philippa said that we might as well go on to the meet, to exercise the horses, and that we could then come straight home. (I have a sister who has said that I am a lath painted to look like iron, and that Philippa is iron painted to look like a lath.)

The meet was in shelter, the generous shelter of Lonen Hill, which interposed itself between us and the weather. There is just space for the road, between the shore of Lough Lonen and the southern face of the hill, that runs precipitously up into the sky for some six hundred feet, dark with fir-trees, and heather, and furze, fortified with rock—a place renowned as a fastness for foxes and woodcock (whose fancies as to desirable winter residences generally coincide). One would have thought that only a pack of monkeys could deal with such a covert, but hounds went through it, and so did beaters—or said they did.

We found the hounds waiting in an old quarry under the side of the hill, and, a little farther on, a very small and select company of waterproofs was huddled under the branches of a fir-tree that hung over the road. As we neared them I recognised Miss Bennett's firm and capable back: she was riding the black mare that she had come over to "pass on" to old McRory. It was Philippa who pointed out that she was accompanied by Miss Larkie McRory, seated on a stout and shaggy animal, whose grey hindquarters were draped by the folds of its rider's voluminous black macintosh, in a manner that recalled the historic statue of the Iron Duke. Farther on, Mrs. Flurry and her mother, the redoubtable Lady Knox, were getting out of a motor and getting themselves on to their horses.

"There's room under the umbrella for Mrs. Yeates!" called out Miss Bennett hospitably, "but the Major must find one for himself, and a very big one, too!"

"We could make room for him here," said Miss Larkie McRory, "if he liked to come."

I maintained, I hope, an imperturbable demeanour, and passed on.

"Who is that?" said Lady Knox, approaching me, on her large and competent iron grey.

I informed her, briefly, and without prejudice.

"Oh, one of that crew," said Lady Knox, without further comment.

Lady Knox is not noted for receptive sympathy, yet this simple statement indicated so pleasingly our oneness of soul in the matter of the McRorys, that I was on the verge of flinging overboard the gentlemanlike scruples proper to a guest, and giving her the full details of last night's revel. At this moment, however, her son-in-law came forth from the quarry with his hounds, and his coadjutors, Dr. Hickey and Michael, and moved past us.

"Yeates!" he called out, "I'd be obliged to you if you'd take that point up on the hill, on the down-wind side, where he often breaks." He looked at me with a serious, friendly face. "He won't break down, you know—it's only motors do that."

This witticism, concocted, no doubt, in the seclusion of the quarry, called for no reply on my part—(or, to be accurate, no suitable reply presented itself). There was an undoubted titter among the waterproofs; I moved away upon my mission at a dignified trot: a trot is seldom dignified, but Daniel has dignity enough for himself and his rider.

Daniel stands sixteen hands two inches in his stockings, of which he wears one white one, the rest of his enormous body being of that unlovely bluish-dun colour to which a dark bay horse turns when clipped. His best friend could not deny that he "made a noise"; his worst enemy was fain to admit that he was glad to hear it in front of him at a nasty place. Some one said that he was like a Settled Religious Faith, and no lesser simile conveys the restful certainty imparted by him. It was annoying, no doubt, to hear people say, after I had accomplished feats of considerable valour, that that horse couldn't make a mistake, and a baby could ride him; but these were mere chastenings, negligible to the possessor of a Settled Religious Faith.

I trotted on through the rain, up a steep road seamed with watercourses, with Lonen Hill towering on my left, and a lesser hill on my right. Looking back, I saw Flurry dismount, give his horse to a boy, and clamber on to the wall of the road: he dropped into the wood, and the hounds swarmed over after him, looking like midgets beside the tremendous citadel that they were to attack. Hickey and Michael, equally dwarfed by the immensities of the position, were already betaking themselves through the mist to their allotted outposts in space. Five-and-twenty couple of hounds would have been little enough for that great hill-side; Flurry had fifteen, and with them he began his tough struggle through the covert, a solitary spot of red among pine-stems, and heather, and rocks, cheering his fifteen couple with horn and voice, while he climbed up and up by devious ways, seemingly as marvellously endowed with wind as the day itself. I cantered on till, at the point where the wood ended, it became my melancholy duty to leave the road and enter upon the assault of the hill. I turned in at a gap beside the guardian thorn-bush of a holy well, on whose branches votive rags fluttered in the wind, and addressed Daniel to his task of carrying thirteen stone up an incline approximating to a rise of one in three.

A path with the angles of a flash of lightning indicated the views of the local cow as to the best method of dealing with the situation. Daniel and I accepted this, as we had done more than once before, and we laboured upwards, parallel with the covert, while the wind, heavy with mist, came down to meet us, and shoved against us like a living thing. We gained at length a shelf on the hill-side, and halting there in the shelter of a furzy hummock, I applied myself to my job. From the shelf I commanded a long stretch of the boundary wall of the wood, including a certain gap which was always worthy of special attention, and for a quarter of an hour I bent a zealous and travelling gaze upon the wall, with the concentration of a professor of a Higher Thought Society.

As is not unusual in such cases, nothing happened. At rare intervals a hint of the cry of hounds was carried in the wind, evanescent as a whiff from a summer garden. Once or twice it seemed to swing towards me, and at such moments the concentration of my eyeglass upon the gap was of such intensity that had the fox appeared I am confident that he would instantly have fallen into a hypnotic trance. As time wore on I arrived at the stage of obsession, when the music of the hounds and the touches of the horn seemed to be in everything, the wind, the streams, the tree branches, and I could almost have sworn hounds were away and running hard, until some vagrant voice in the wood would dispel the mirage of sound. This was followed by the reactionary period of pessimism, when I seemed to myself merely an imbecile, sitting in heavy rain, staring at a stone wall. Half an hour, or more, passed.

"I'm going out of this," I said to myself defiantly; "there's reason in the roasting of eggs."

It seemed, however, my duty to go up rather than down, and I coerced Daniel into the bed of a stream, as offering the best going available. It led me into a cleft between the hill-side and the wall of the covert, which latter was, like a thing in a fairy tale, changing very gradually from a wall into a bank. I ascended the cleft, and presently found that it, too, was changing its nature, and becoming a flight of stairs. Daniel clattered slowly and carefully up them, basing his feet, like Sir Bedivere, on "juts of slippery crag that rang sharp-smitten with the dint of arméd heels."

We had reached the top in safety when I heard a thin and wavering squeal behind me, and looking back saw Miss Larkie McRory ascending the rocky staircase on the grey cob, at a speed that had obviously, and legitimately, drawn forth the squeal.

"Oh, gracious! The brute! I can't stop him!" she cried as she rushed upon me.

The grey cob here bumped into Daniel's massive stern, rebounded, and subsided, for the excellent reason that no other course was open to it. Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the Order of the Medjidie: her hat was hanging down her back, and there was a picturesqueness about her hair that promised disaster later on. Her hazel eyes shone, and her complexion glowed like a rose in rain.

"Mr. Irving's fit to be tied!" she continued. "His horse jumped about like a mad thing when he saw those awful steps——!"

Sounds of conflict and clattering came from below. I splashed onwards in the trough between the hill and the fence, and had emerged into a comparatively open space with my closely attendant McRory, when the impassioned face of Mr. Irving's Meath mare shot into view at the top of the steps. The water in the trough was apparently for her the limit of what should or could be endured. She made a crooked spring at the hill-side, slipped, and, recognising the bank as the one civilised feature in a barbarous country, bounced sideways on to the top of it, pivoted there, and sat down backwards into a thicket of young ash and hazel trees. A succession of short yells from Miss McRory acclaimed each phase of the incident; Mr. Irving's face, as he settled down amongst the branches, was as a book where men might read strange matters, not of an improving nature.

It was probably the reception accorded to the bay mare by the branches and briars in which she had seated herself that caused her to return to the top of the bank in a kangaroo-bound, as active as it was unexpected. Horses can do these things when they choose, but they seldom choose. From the top of the bank she dropped into the trough, and joined us, with her nerves still in a state of acute indignation, and less of her rider in the saddle than is conventional, but a dinge in his pot-hat appeared to be the extent of the damage. Miss McRory's eye travelled from it to me, but she abstained from comment. It was the eye of a villain and a conspirator. I had by no means forgotten the injuries inflicted on me by her brothers, nor did I forget that Flurry had said that there wasn't one of the family but was as clever as the devil and four times as unscrupulous. Yet, taken in conjunction with the genuineness of her complexion, and with the fact that Irving was probably twenty years my junior, "I couldn't"—as the song says—"help smiling at McRory O'More" (behind the back of young Mr. Irving, D.I.).

It transpired that Irving, from some point of vantage below, shared, it would appear, with Miss McRory, had seen the hounds running out of the top of the wood, and had elected to follow me. He did not know where any one was, had not heard a sound of the horn, and gave it as his opinion that Flurry was dead, and that trying to hunt in this country was simply farcical. He bellowed these things at me in his consequential voice as we struggled up the hill against the immense weight of wind, in all the fuss, anxiety, and uncertainty out of which the joys of hunting are born. It was as we topped the ultimate ridge that, through the deafening declamations of the wind, I heard, faint as a bar of fairy music, distant harmonies as of hounds running.

The wind blew a hole in the mist, and we had a bird's-eye view of a few pale-green fields far below: across one of them some pigmy forms were moving; they passed over a dark line that represented a fence, and proceeded into the heart of a cloud.

"That's about the limit," shouted Irving, dragging at his mare's mouth, as she swerved from a hole in the track. "It's only in this God-forsaken country that a fox'd go away in the teeth of a storm like this!"

To justify to Mr. Irving the disregard of the Lonen Hill foxes for the laws of the game was not my affair. It seemed to me that in piloting him and Miss McRory I was doing rather more than humanity had any right to expect. I have descended Lonen Hill on various occasions, none of them agreeable, but never before with an avalanche travelling hard on my heels—a composite avalanche that slid, and rushed, and dropped its hind-legs over the edge at bad corners, and was throughout vocal with squeals, exclamations, inquiries as to facts of which Providence could alone be cognisant, and thunderous with objurgations. The hill-side merged at length into upland pasture, strange little fields, composed partly of velvet patches, like putting-greens, predominantly of nightmare bunkers of rocks and furze. We rushed downwards through these, at a pace much accelerated by the prevalence of cattle gaps; the bay mare, with her head in the air, zigzagging in bounds as incalculable as those of a grasshopper; the grey cob, taking sole charge of Miss McRory, tobogganing with her hind feet, propping with her fore, and tempering her enthusiasm with profound understanding of the matter. Finally, a telegraph-post loomed through the fog upon us, and a gate discovered itself, through which we banged in a bunch on to the high road. A cottage faced us, with a couple of women and an old man standing outside it.

To them we put the usual question, with the usual vehemence (always suggestive of the King's Troopers in romance, hotly demanding information about a flying rebel).

"I didn't see a fox this long while," replied the old man deliberately, "but there was a few jocks went west the road a while ago."

The King's Troopers, not specially enlightened, turned their steeds and went in pursuit of the jocks. A stone gap, flung in ruins among black hoof-marks, soon gave a more precise indication, and we left the road, with profound dubiety on my part as to where we were going and how we were going to get there. The first fence decided the matter for Irving, D.I. It was a bank on which slices of slatey stone had been laid, much as in Germany slabs of cold sausage are laid upon bread. The Meath mare looked at it but once, and fled from it at a tangent; the grey pony, without looking at it, followed her. Daniel selected an interval between the slabs, and took me over without comment. Filled by a radiant hope that I had shaken off both my companions, I was advancing in the line of the hoof-tracks, when once more I heard behind me on the wind cries as of a storm-driven sea-gull, and the grey cob came up under my stirrup, like a runaway steam pinnace laying itself beside a man-o'-war. Miss McRory was still in the saddle, but minus reins and stirrup; the wind had again removed her hat, which was following her at full stretch of its string, like a kite. Had it not been for her cries I should have said, judging by her face, that she was thoroughly enjoying herself.

Having achieved Daniel's society the cob pulled up, and her rider, not without assistance from me, restored her hat, reins, and stirrup to their proper spheres. I looked back, and saw Irving's mare, still on the farther side of the fence, her nose pointing to the sky, as if invoking the protection of heaven, and I knew that for better for worse Miss McRory was mine until we reached the high road. No doubt the thing was to be: as one of our own poets has sung of Emer and Cuchulain, "all who read my name in Erin's story would find its loving letters linked with" those of McRory. The paraphrase even rhymed—another finger-mark of Fate. Yet it was hard that, out of all the possible, and doubtless eager, squires of the hunting-field I should have been chosen.

The hoof-tracks bent through a long succession of open gaps to a farmyard, and there were swallowed in the mire of a lane. I worked the lane out for every inch it was worth, with the misty rain pricking my face as it were with needles, and the intention to go home at the earliest possible opportunity perfecting itself in my heart. But the lane, instead of conducting us to the high road, melted disastrously into a turf bog. I pulled up, and the long steady booming of the sea upon the rocks made a deep undertone to the wind. There was no voice of hound or horn, and I was on the point of returning to the farmhouse when the mist, in its stagey, purposeful way, again lifted, and laid bare the sky-line of a low hill on our left. A riderless horse was limping very slowly along it, led by something that seemed no higher than a toadstool. Obviously we were on the line of the hunt, and obviously, also, it was my duty to enquire into the matter of the horse. I turned aside over a low bank, hotly followed by the grey cob, and the wail to which I was now becoming inured. As Miss McRory arrived abruptly at my side, she cried that she would have been off that time only for the grab she got of his hair. (By which I believe she meant the mare's mane.)

Fortune favoured us with broken-down fences; we overtook the horse, and found it was Flurry Knox's brown mare, hobbling meekly in tow of a very small boy. In one of her hind fetlocks there was a clean, sharp cut that might have been done with a knife.

In answer to my questions the small boy pointed ahead. I polished my eyeglass, and, with eyes narrowed against the wind, looked into the south-west, and there saw, unexpectedly, even awfully near, the Atlantic Ocean, dingy and angry, with a long line, as of battle-smoke, marking its assault upon the cliffs. Between the cliffs and the hill on which we were standing a dark plateau, striped with pale grey walls, stretched away into the mist.

"There's the huntsman for ye," squeaked the little boy, who looked about six years old.

I descried at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile a figure in a red coat, on foot, in the act of surmounting one of the walls, accompanied by a hovering flock of country boys.

"The dogs is out before him," pursued the little boy at the full pitch of his lungs. "I seen the fox, too. I'll go bail he has himself housed in the Coosheen Grohogue by now."

"Gracious!" said Miss McRory.

I said he probably had a simpler telegraphic address, and that, no matter where he was, it was now my duty to overtake Mr. Knox and offer him my horse; "and you," I added, "had better get this little boy to show you the way to the road."

Miss McRory replied confidently that she'd sooner stay with me.

I said, as well as I remember, that her preference was highly flattering, but that she might live to regret it.

Miss McRory answered that she wished I wouldn't be spying at her through that old glass of mine; she knew well enough she was a show, and her hair was coming down, and she'd as soon trust herself to the cat as to that little urchin.

As I made my way downwards over the knife-edged ridges of rock and along their intervening boggy furrows, I should myself have been grateful for the guidance of the cat. Even the grey cob accepted the matter as serious, and kept the brake hard on, accomplishing the last horrid incident of the descent—a leap from the slant of the hill on to the summit of a heathery bank—without frivolity, even with anxiety. We had now arrived at the plateau above the cliffs—a place of brown, low-growing ling, complicated by boggy runnels, and heavily sprinkled with round stones. The mist was blowing in thicker than ever, Flurry and his retinue were lost as though they had never been, and the near thunder of the breakers, combined with the wind, made an impenetrable din round me and Miss McRory.

After perhaps a mile, in the course of which I got off several times to pull down loose walls for the benefit of my companion, I discovered the rudiments of a lane, which gradually developed into a narrow but indubitable road. The rain had gone down the back of my neck and into my boots: I determined that if Flurry had to finish the run on all-fours, I would stick to the lane until it took me to a road. What it took me to was, as might have been foreseen in any County Cork bohireen, a pole jammed across it from wall to wall and reinforced by furze-bushes—not a very high pole, but not one easy to remove. I pulled up and looked dubiously from it to Miss McRory.

"D'ye dare me?" she said.

"I bet you sixpence you take a toss if you do," I replied firmly, preparing to dismount.

"Done with you!" said Miss McRory, suddenly smiting the grey cob with a venomous little cutting whip (one that probably dated from the sixties, and had for a handle an ivory greyhound's head with a plaited silver collar round its neck).

I have seldom seen a pole better and more liberally dealt with, as far as the grey cob's share of the transaction went, and seldom, indeed, have I seen a rider sail more freely from a saddle than Miss McRory sailed. She alighted on her hands and knees, and the cob, with the sting of the whip still enlivening her movements, galloped on up the lane and was lost in the mist.

"Well, you won your sixpence," said Miss McRory dauntlessly, as I joined her. "I suppose you're delighted."

I assured her with entire sincerity that I was very much the reverse, and proceeded at high speed in pursuit of the cob. The result of this excursion—a fairly prolonged one—was the discovery that the lane led into a road, and that it was impossible to decide in which direction the fugitive had gone. I returned in profound gloom to my young lady, and found her rubbing herself down with a bunch of heather.

"So you couldn't ketch her!" she called out as I approached. "What'll we do now?" She was evidently highly amused. "I'll tell the Peeler it was your fault. You dared me!"

My reply need not be recorded: I only know it was by no means up to the standard to which Miss McRory was accustomed.

I took what seemed to be the only possible course, and established her seated sideways on my saddle, with her foot—and it is but fair to say, a very small foot—in the leather instead of the stirrup, and her right hand knotted in Daniel's mane. I held the off stirrup, and splashed beside her in the ruts and mud. The mist was thicker than ever, the wind was pushing it in from the sea in great masses, and Miss McRory and I progressed onward in a magic circle of some twenty yards in diameter, occupied only by herself and me, with Daniel thrown in as chaperon.

On arriving at the road I relied on the wind for guidance, and turning to the right, let it blow us in what was, I trusted, our course. It was by this time past three o'clock, we were at least nine or ten miles from home, and one of my boots had begun to rub my heel. There was nothing for it but to keep on as we were going, until we met something, or some one, or died.

It is worthy of record that in these afflicting circumstances Miss Larkie McRory showed a staying power, attained, probably, in the long and hungry bicycle picnics of her tribe, that was altogether commendable. Not for an instant did she fail to maintain in me the belief that she found me one of the most agreeable people she had ever met, a little older, perhaps, than Irving, D.I., but on that very account the more to be confided in. It was not until the pangs of hunger recalled to me the existence of my sandwiches that I discovered she had no food with her, nor, as far as could be gathered, had she had any breakfast.

"Sure they were all snoring asleep when I started. I just got a cup o' tea in the kitchen——"

This, I suppose, was a point at which I might suitably have said something incisive about the feats of her brethren on the previous night, but with deplorable weakness I merely offered her my sandwiches. Miss McRory replied that she'd fall off in a minute if she were to let go the mane, and why wouldn't I eat them myself? I said if there were any shelter left in Ireland I would wait till I got there, and we could then decide who should eat them.

Æons of mist and solitude ensued. I must have walked for an hour or more, without meeting anyone except one old woman, who could only speak Irish, and I had begun to feel as if my spur were inside my boot instead of outside, when I became aware of something familiar about the look of the fences. It was not, however, until I felt shelter rising blessedly about us, and saw the thorn bush with the rags hanging from it, that I realised that our luck had turned, and we had blundered our way back to the holy well under the side of Lonen Hill. The well was like a tiny dripping cave, about as big as a beehive, with a few inches of water in it; a great boulder stood guard over it, and above it stooped the ancient and twisted thorn bush. It seemed indicated as a place of rest, none the less that my heel was by this time considerably galled by my boot.

Miss McRory glissaded from my saddle into my arms, and was assisted by me to deposit herself on a flat stone beside the well, stiff, wet, but still undefeated. We shared my sandwiches, we drank whisky mixed with the water of the holy well, and Miss McRory dried her face with her handkerchief, and her complexion looked better than ever. Daniel, slowly and deliberately, ate the rags off the thorn bush. I have been at many picnics that I have enjoyed less.

By the time we had got to the gingerbread biscuits I had discovered that Mr. Irving thought she had talked too much to me after dinner last night, and that it was a wonder to her how men could be so cross about nothing. I said I was sorry she called it nothing, at which she looked up at me and down again at the gingerbread, and did not reply. After this I felt emboldened to ask her why she had been called so inappropriate a name as "Larkie."

Miss McRory agreed that it was indeed a silly old name, and that it was a friend of one of her brothers, a Mr. Mulcahy, who had said that she and her sisters were "'Lorky little gurls with lorge dork eyes.' He had that way of speaking," she added, "because he thought it was grand, and he always kept his watch at English time. He said he ran over to London so often it wasn't worth while to change it."

She herself had never been out of Ireland, and she supposed she'd never get the chance.

I said that when she married Mr. Mulcahy she could keep her watch at Irish time, so as to equalise things.

Miss McRory suggested that I should give her a watch as a wedding present, and that, English or Irish time, it would be all hours of the night before we were home.

I realised with a slight shock that the position had indeed become inverted when one of the House of McRory had to remind me, after about four hours in her undiluted society, of the flight of time. It was now past four, which was bad enough, and a still greater shock awaited me in the discovery that I was dead lame, the interval of repose having been fatal to my damaged heel.

I have always asserted, and shall continue to do so to my dying day, that the way out of the difficulty was suggested by Miss McRory. I mounted Daniel, Miss McRory ascended the boulder by the holy well, announcing that she was as stiff as fifty crutches, and that once she got up she'd be there for life. The thing was done somehow, thanks to the incomparable forbearance of Daniel, and with Miss McRory seated behind me on his broad back, and her arms clasped round my waist, I once more, and very cautiously, took the road.

Daniel continued to conduct himself like a gentleman, but considering how precarious was the position of Miss McRory, it was unnerving to feel her shaken by silent and secret laughter.

"You'll fall off," I warned her.

She replied by a further paroxysm, and asked me what size I took in stays—she supposed about forty inches.

Dusk was now an accomplished fact: thickened with fog and rain, it was even turning to darkness as we descended the long hill. But, humanly speaking, the end was in sight. There was, I knew, a public-house a couple of miles farther on, where a car might be hired, and there I proposed to bid a long farewell to Miss Larkie McRory, and to send her home by herself, to have rheumatic fever, as I assured her.

We moved on and on, at a careful foot-pace: we were out in the wind again, and it was very cold. It was also quite dark. Silence fell upon us, and, after a time, the sustained pressure of Miss McRory's hat-brim against my shoulder suggested that it was the silence of exhaustion, if not of sleep. I thought of her with compassion. I believe I formulated her to myself as a poor little girl, and found myself asserting with defiance to imaginary detractors that no one could say she hadn't pluck, and that, in spite of her family, she really had a soul to be saved.

Again we found ourselves in shelter, and a greater darkness in the darkness told that we were in the lee of a wooded hill. I knew where I was now, and I said to Miss McRory that the pub was just round the corner, and she replied at once that that was where they always were, in Dublin anyway. She also said she thought she heard horses' hoofs coming up behind us. I pushed on.

We turned the corner, and were immediately struck blind by the twin glare of the lamps of a motor, that lay motionless, as in ambush, at the side of the road. Even the equanimity of Daniel was shattered; he swung to one side, he drifted like a blown leaf, and Miss McRory clung to me like a knapsack. As we curveted in the full glare of the limelight, I was aware of a figure in a pot-hat and a vast fur coat standing near the motor. Even as I recognised Lady Knox three or four muddy hounds trailed wearily into the glare, and a voice behind me shouted, "'Ware horse!"

Flurry came on into the light: there was just room in me for a sub-conscious recognition of the fact that he was riding the missing grey cob, and that this was a typical thing, and one that might have been expected.

At the hunt dinner that took place soon afterwards some one sang a song, one that I have ceased to find amusing. The first verse runs as follows:

"Throttin' to the Fair,
Me and Moll Moloney,
Sittin', I declare,
On a single pony——"

By a singular coincidence, the faces of all those present turned towards me.

X

THE COMTE DE PRALINES

"I had forgotten how nice London is!" purred Philippa, as we moved beautifully across the threshold of Bill Cunningham's club, and were conducted to the lift with a tender deference that was no more than was due to our best clothes.

The Ladies' Tea-room at Bill's club was a pleasant place, looking forth, high above the noise, upon trees that were yellow in the hazy October afternoon. In a very agreeable bow-window were Lady Derryclare and the tea-table, and with her were her son, and a small and ornamental young man, who was introduced to us as Mr. Simpson-Hodges.

"Front name John, known to a large circle of admirers as 'Mossoo,'" supplemented Bill, whose hands were so clean that I found it difficult to recognise him.

"So called because of the incredible circumstance that he can speak French, in spite of the best Public School education," said Lady Derryclare. "When I think of the money that has been wasted on you! You good for nothing creature!"

"It's more his looks," pursued Bill, "his dark foreign beauty——"

"These humorists!" said Mr. Simpson-Hodges indulgently, showing a set of white teeth under a diminutive black moustache. "Please, Lady Derryclare, let's talk of something pleasant."

"Ask him about the chickens you made him get from the Chicken Farmers for the dance his regiment gave," said Bill to his mother.

"Oh, that was rather a bad business," said Mr. Simpson-Hodges apologetically, with an eye on Philippa, who, in a new hat, was looking about five-and-twenty. "I'm sure no one wants to hear about it."

"Mossoo ran the supper and he ordered three brace," said Bill, "but they never turned up till the week after the show! The postman was viewed coming up to the Mess towing something after him on a long painter. The painter was superfluous. The chickens would have followed him at a trot if he had been kind to them. They kept them for the drag, I believe. Didn't you, Mossoo? He's one of the Whips, you know."

"They'd have been quite useful," admitted Mr. Simpson-Hodges.

"How interesting to be a Whip!" said Philippa, looking at him with egregious respect.

"Rather too interesting, sometimes," replied Simpson-Hodges, expanding to the glance in a way not unfamiliar to me. "Last time we were out the fellow with the drag started from the cross-roads where we were going to meet, and was asinine enough to take it a bit down the road before he went into the country, and, as it happened, we were bringing the hounds up to the meet by that particular road. They simply put down their heads and ran it heel for all they were worth! The First Whip and I galloped our best, but we couldn't get to their heads, and we all charged into the middle of the meet full-cry!"

"Oh! I wish I had been there!" said Philippa ardently.

"We wished we were anywhere else," replied Mr. Simpson-Hodges; "the Brigadier was there, and everybody. We heard all about it afterwards, I can tell you!"

"That ought to have happened in Mr. Knox's country, Major Yeates!" said Lady Derryclare, whose interest in fox-hunting was more sympathetic than technical.

"We don't run drags, Lady Derryclare," I said reproachfully, but Lady Derryclare had already entered upon another topic.

Simpson-Hodges, however, did not end there.

A week afterwards Philippa and I crept home, third class, with full trunks and empty pockets, sustained only by the aphorism, evolved by my wife, that economies, and not extravagances, are what one really regrets. It was approaching the end of November before we next heard of Simpson-Hodges. The Derryclares had come down for their first woodcock shoot, and Bill swooped over one morning in the big Daimler and whirled us back with him over the forty intervening miles of bog and mountain, to shoot, and to dance on the carpet after dinner, and to act charades; to further, in short, the various devices for exercising and disciplining a house party. Mr. John Simpson-Hodges was there, no less ornamental than in London, and as useful as he was ornamental. He shot well, he danced beautifully, and he made of the part of a French Count in a charade so surprising a work of art that people said—as is the habit of people—that he ought to be making a hundred a week on the stage.

Before we left the Derryclares Philippa told me that she had arranged with "those boys"—by which she referred to Mr. Cunningham and the French Count—to come over next week and have a hunt with Flurry Knox's hounds. Something whispered to me that there was more in this than met the eye, but as they were to provide their own mounts the position was unassailable, and I contented myself with telling her that a predilection for the society of the young was one of the surest signs of old age.

It was not till we were all seated at breakfast on the morning of the meet (which was to be at Castle Knox), that it was suggested, with all the spontaneity of a happy thought, by Bill, that "Mossoo" should be introduced to the members of the Hunt as a Frenchman who was unable to speak English.

"Call him the Comte de Pralines," said Philippa, with suspicious promptitude.

"You can call him Napoleon Buonaparte if you like," I said defiantly, "I shall stay at home!"

"All the Curranhilty people will be there," said Philippa softly.

The thought of introducing the Comte de Pralines to Miss Bobbie Bennett was certainly attractive.

"I refuse to introduce him to Lady Knox," I said with determination, and knew that I had yielded.

A meet at Castle Knox always brought out a crowd; there were generally foxes, and always luncheon, and there was a touch of the G.O.C. about Lady Knox that added a pleasing edge of anxiety, and raised the meet to something of the nature of a full-dress parade. I held to my point about Lady Knox, and did nothing more compromising than tremble in the background, while Bill Cunningham presented the Comte de Pralines to the lady of the house, supplementing the presentation with the statements that this was his first visit to Ireland, and that he spoke no English.

The Comte de Pralines, in the newest of pink coats, and the whitest of breeches, and the most glittering of boots and spurs, stood on the step below Lady Knox, with the bridle of his hireling over his arm, and his shining silk hat in his hand. Still with his hat in his hand, and looking, as Miss Larkie McRory whispered to me, "as pretty as a Christmas card," the Count rippled forth a stream of mellifluous French, commenting upon the beauty of the day, of the place, of the scene.

Lady Knox's face deepened to so apoplectic a crimson, and her eyes became so fixed that I, watching the scene apprehensively, doubted if it were not my duty to rush at her and cut open her hunting-stock. When the Count ceased, having, as far as I could gather, enquired as to when she had last been to Auteuil, and if she had ever hunted in France, Lady Knox paused, and said very slowly:

"Er—j'espère que nous aurons un bon jour aujourdhui." Then, rapidly, to me, "Take your friend in for a drink, Major Yeates."

My heart bled for her, and also quaked for myself, but I was into it now, up to my chin.

During the next ten minutes Bill Cunningham, feebly abetted by me, played the game remorselessly, sparing neither age nor sex. In the hall, amidst the sloe-gins and the whiskies and sodas (to which the Count, for a foreigner, took remarkably kindly), introductions slipped between cup and lip, poisoning the former and paralysing the latter. The victims took it variously; some sought refuge in bright smiles and large foreign gestures; some, in complete mental overthrow, replied in broken English to Mossoo's sugared periods; all were alike in one point, they moved as swiftly as might be, and as far as possible, out of the immediate neighbourhood of the Comte de Pralines. Philippa, who, without any solid attainment, can put up a very good bluff in French, joined spasmodically in these encounters, alternately goading Mossoo to fresh outrages, and backing out when the situation became too acute. I found her, affecting to put her sandwiches into the case on her saddle, and giving way to her feelings, with her face pressed against her mare's shoulder.

"I introduced him to Bobbie Bennett," she said brokenly; "and he asked her if she spoke French. She looked at me as if she were drowning, and said, 'Seulement très petit'!"

I said, repressively, that Lady Knox could see her, and that people would think, firstly, that she was crying, and secondly, that she was mad.

"But I am mad, darling!" replied my wife, turning a streaming face to me.

I informed her of my contempt for her, and, removing myself from her vicinity, collected myself for the introduction of the Count to Flurry Knox and Dr. Hickey. By this time most of the Field were mounted, and the Comte de Pralines bent to his horse's mane as he uncovered with grave courtesy on his presentation to the Master and the First Whip, and proceeded to express the profundity of his gratification at meeting an Irish Master of Hounds. The objects of the attention were palpably discomposed by it; Flurry put a finger to his cap, with a look at me expressive of No Surrender; Dr. Hickey, in unconscious imitation of the Count, bowed low, but forgot about his cap.

"He has no English, I'm told," said Flurry, eyeing the Count suspiciously.

I stopped myself on the verge of bowing assent, so infectious was the grace of the Pralines manner.

"Is he come to buy horses for the German Army?" went on Flurry. (It need hardly be said that this occurred before the War.)

I explained that he was French.

"You wouldn't know what these foreigners might be up to," returned Mr. Knox, quite unconvinced. "I'm going on now——"

He too moved expeditiously out of the danger zone.

The Field straggled down the avenue, and progressed over tracts of tussocky grass in the wake of the hounds, towards the plantation that was the first draw. The Keeper was outside the wood, with the assurance that there was a score of foxes in it, and that they had the country ate.

"Maybe they'll eat the hounds, so," said Flurry. "Let you all stay outside. You can be talking French now for a bit——"

I looked round to see who were availing themselves of this permission. The Count had by this time been introduced to Miss Larkie McRory; Philippa was apparently acting as interpreter, and Miss McRory was showing no disposition to close the interview. The Field had withdrawn, and had formed itself into a committee-meeting on the Count.