"Walkin' Aisy."
In answer to enquiries, he mused, with his apostolic countenance bent upon the ground; after a period of profound meditation, he asked me why wouldn't I get one of the big fellas out from the town? I have never known Walkin' Aisy to accept a job without suggesting that some one else could do it better than he (in which he was probably quite right). This may have been humility, due to the fact that his father had been that despised thing, "a dry-wall builder"; it may have been from coquetry, but I am inclined to think it was due to a mixture of other-worldliness and sloth.
On pressure he said that he had still a small pieceen of work to finish, but he might be able to come down to-morrow to travel the roof and see what would be wanting to us, and on Monday week, with the help of God, he would come in it. His blue eyes wavered towards the horizon. The interview closed.
"'Fair and young were they when in hope they began that long journey,'" cooed Philippa, as we moved away. The quotation did not, as I well knew, refer to our visit to the Knoxes.
At Aussolas I aired my project to my landlord. Flurry is not a person to whom it is agreeable to air a project.
"Rebuild the chimneys, is it? Oh, with all my heart. Is there anything the matter with them?"
Andrew explained the imminence of our peril, and Flurry listened to him with his inscrutable eye on me.
"Well, it'll be some fun for you during the winter, Major, but be careful when you're cutting the ivy!"
I was betrayed into asking why.
"Because there's only it and the weather-slating keeping the walls standing."
"If I may presume to contradict one so much younger than myself," said old Mrs. Knox, "Shreelane is as well built a house as there is in the county." Her voice was, as ever, reminiscent of a bygone century and society; it was also keen-edged, as became a weapon of many wars, ancient and modern. She turned to me. "In the storm of '39 I remember that my father said that if Shreelane fell not a house in Ireland would stand. Every one in the house spent that night in the kitchen."
"May be that was nothing new to them," suggested Flurry.
Mrs. Knox regarded her grandson steadfastly and continued her story. It has already been noted that when he and she were of the same company they considered no other antagonist worthy of their steel.
"It was my great-grandfather who built Shreelane in honour of his marriage," she went on. "He married a Riggs of Castle Riggs, a cousin of the celebrated Major Apollo—and thereby hangs a tale!" She blinked her eyes like an old rat, and looked round at each of us in turn. I felt as if I were being regarded through a telescope, from the standpoint of a distant century.
"They knew how to build in those days," she began again. "The basement story of Shreelane is all vaulted."
"I daresay the kitchen would make a nice vault," said Flurry.
His grandmother looked hard at him, and was silent, which seemed to me a rather remarkable occurrence.
On the following day, Andrew and Walkin' Aisy "travelled the roof," and I accompanied them—that is to say, I sat on the warm lead, with my back against the sunny side of a chimney, and smoked torpidly, while Andrew preached, firmly and distinctly, from the top of a ladder. Walkin' Aisy stood at the foot of the ladder, submissive, with folded hands, and upturned bearded face, looking like an elderly saint in the lower corner of a stained-glass window. At the conclusion of the lecture he said that surely the chimneys might fall any minute, but, for all, they might stand a hundred years; a criticism almost stupefying in its width of outlook.
The following day Captain Larpent departed to the Curragh, and, as is often the way of human beings with regard to their guests, we partly breathed more freely, and partly regretted him. On the whole it was restful.
A fortnight passed, and I had almost forgotten about the chimneys; I was in the act of making an early start for an absence of a couple of days at the farther side of my district, when I encountered Walkin' Aisy at the hall door.
"I'm here since six o'clock this morning, but I had no one to tend me," he began.
I was familiar with this plaint, and proffered him the yard boy.
"The young fella's too wake," replied Walkin' Aisy, in his slow and dreamy voice, "and they takes him from me." His mild eyes rested upon me in saddened reverie. "And there should be morthar mixed," he resumed slowly, "and there's not a pick of gravel in the yard."
I said, as I pulled on my gloves, that he could have Johnny Brien from the garden to minister to him, and that there was no hurry about the mortar.
"Well, it's what I was saying to the gardener," returned Walkin' Aisy very slowly, "I have no business coming here at all till those chimneys is taken down. The sahmint that's on them is very strong. It's what the gardener said, that quarry-men would be wanting."
"Why the devil didn't you say this at first?" I demanded, not without heat. "You and Captain Larpent told me that the old cement had no more hold than the sugar on a cake."
"Well, the Captain knows best," replied Walkin' Aisy gently, "we should do what he says."
"Well, get the chimneys down; I don't care who does it."
I drove away, and from the turn of the drive saw Walkin' Aisy, in motionless trance, looking after the car as if it were a chariot of fire.
The well-known routine followed; the long and airless day in the Court-house, the roar of battle of the rival solicitors, the wearisome iteration of drunks and trespasses, the intricacies of family feuds; the stodgy and solitary dinner at the hotel, followed by the evening in the arid smoking-room, the stale politics of its habitués, the stagnant pessimism of the proprietor, the same thing over again next day and the day after.
It was not until the afternoon of the third day that I found myself serenely gliding homeward, with the wind behind me, and before me the prospect of that idleness that, like the only thirst worth having, has been earned. I was in the straight for the hall door, when I saw my wife dart from the house, gesticulating, and waving her handkerchief as if to check my approach. She was followed, at no great interval, by an avalanche of rubble and bricks from the roof, that fell like a portent from heaven, and joined itself to a considerable heap by the steps.
"You never know when it's coming!" she cried breathlessly. "I've been watching for you. It's impossible to make them hear from below, and I can't find any of the men—they're all on the roof."
The restoration had begun, but that fact might not have occurred to a stranger. Next day, and for many days—six weeks, to be exact—the house shook as from the blows of a battering-ram, in response to the efforts of the quarrymen to remove from the chimneys the cement that had no more hold on them than the sugar on a cake, and at frequent and uncertain intervals various debris rumbled down the roof and fell heavily below. There were days when it fell in front of the house, there were days when it fell in the flower garden; where it fell, there it lay, because there was no one to take it away; all were absorbed in tending Walkin' Aisy, and the murmurs of their inexhaustible conversation came to us down the chimneys like the hoarse cooing of wood pigeons. There were also days when by reason of storms and rain nothing was done, and black and evil floods descended into the rooms down the ruins of the chimneys, and through the slates, broken by the feet of the quarrymen. At Christmas the kitchen chimney alone remained in action, and we ate our Christmas dinner in fur coats and a fireless dining-room. Philippa refrained from any allusion to the quotation from Longfellow that she had made after that first interview with Walkin' Aisy. She even denied herself the gratification of adding its context:
"Faded and old were they when in disappointment it ended," but I knew that she was thinking it.
PART II
It was somewhere towards the end of March that one chimney stack re-entered the list of combatants, trim in new cement, and crowned with tall and hideous chimney-pots. They all smoked, a thing that had never occurred before, but Walkin' Aisy said that the chimneys were cold, and that they wouldn't do it when they'd come to themselves; and (this was a little later on) that any chimney would smoke in an east wind. It was true that a period of east wind and drought had set in. The pump in the yard went dry; carts had to be sent half a mile for water, and it was reported to me that the masons had as much water put astray, mixing mortar and all sorts, as would drown a herring.
Other unpleasant things occurred. The housemaid gave half-an-hour's warning, and married one of the quarry men, and Mrs. Cadogan then revealed that it wasn't once nor twice during the winter that she had given that particular quarryman the full of the poker, to put him out from under her feet when she'd be dishing up the dinner. Shreelane was twice drawn blank by Flurry Knox's hounds, and their master said that as long as I had every idle blackguard in the country tending Walkin' Aisy, and making short cuts through the covert, how would I have foxes there? I ignored the conundrum, and hoped that the quarryman's yellow dog would remain where I had last seen him, in the ashpit, till Flurry had left the premises.
It was some little time after this that Captain Larpent advanced upon us on a week's leave from the Curragh; he wrote to say that I evidently wanted a Clerk of the Works, and that he would see if he couldn't get a move on Shanahan. I was away when he arrived, and on my return Philippa met me in the hall.
"Meg Longmuir is here!" she said, not without a touch of defiance. "Doctor Catherine had to go to Scotland, so I asked Meg here for a few days. She'll play duets with Andrew. She's up on the roof with him now."
"Better have a string band up there at once," I said, "and open it as a public recreation ground."
"And the Flurry Knoxes and Bernard Shute are coming to dinner," continued my wife, ignoring this jeu d'esprit; "the smoking-room chimney is all right, and we can have the oil stove and some music in the drawing-room."
With this agreeable prospect in store, we sat down to dinner. We were too many for general conversation, and the table was round, which is unfavourable for tête-à-têtes. Yet it was not round enough to frustrate Miss Meg Longmuir's peculiar gift for duets, and I was presently aware that she was unwarrantably devoting herself to Bernard Shute, leaving Captain Larpent derelict, and that the latter was, after the manner of derelicts, becoming a danger to navigation, and was laying down laws and arguing about them acridly with Mr. Knox. I realised too late that there should have been champagne. Whisky and soda is all very well, but it will not warm wet blankets.
Meg Longmuir, however, was doing remarkably well without either; she wore something intricate that was either green or blue or both, and glittered. I recognised it as the panoply of war, and knew that the tomahawk was concealed in its folds. So also was Andrew's scalp; I don't know why I felt some pleasure in remembering that it had a bald patch on it.
After the ladies had gone, Bernard, to whose head Miss Longmuir had mounted as effectively as if she had been the missing champagne, rejoined the lesser world of men by asking Flurry why he had shut up the season so early, and suggested a by-day, if only for the sake of giving the horses something to do.
Flurry put the end of his cigarette into his finger-glass, and lit another at the flaming tongue of my tame Chinese dragon.
"I didn't know you had one that would carry a lady?" he said.
"Oh rot!" said Bernard helplessly.
"I haven't one that will carry myself," went on Flurry. "There's five lame legs among three of them this minute. Anyway the hounds are in sulphur."
The discussion progressed with the prolixity proper to such themes; I think it was Andrew who suggested the paper-chase. He had, he said, ridden in paper-chases in Egypt, and he gave us details of the stark mud walls and fathomless water-courses that were common-places of these events. We were left with the impression that none of us had ever seen obstacles so intimidating, and, more than that, if we had seen them we should have gone home in tears.
"I think we'd better make a hare of you," said Flurry, fixing expressionless eyes upon Captain Larpent. "It mightn't be hard."
The double edge of this suggestion was lost upon Andrew, who accepted it as a tribute, but said he was afraid he didn't know the country well enough.
"That's your Egyptian darkness," said Flurry with unexpected erudition.
Andrew glanced sideways and suspiciously at him over the bridge of his sunburnt nose, and said rather defiantly that if he could get hold of a decent horse he wouldn't mind having a try.
"I suppose you ride about 11.6?" asked Flurry, after a moment or two of silence. His manner had softened; I thought I knew what was coming. "I've a little horse that I was thinking of parting..." he began.
A yell, sharp and sudden as a flash of lightning, was uttered outside the door, followed by a sliding crash of crockery, and more yells. We plunged into the hall, and saw Julia, the elderly parlourmaid, struggling on the floor amid ruins of coffee cups and their adjuncts.
"The rat! He went in under me foot!" she shrieked. "He's in under me this minute!"
Here the rat emerged from the ruins. Simultaneously the drawing-room door burst open, and the streaming shrieks of Minx and her son and daughter were added to those of the still prostrate Julia.
The chase swept down the passage to the kitchen stairs, the pack augmented by Bob, the red setter, and closely followed by the dinner party. A rat is a poor performer on a staircase, and, at the door leading into the turf-house, the dogs seemed to be on top of him. The bolt-hole under the door, that his own teeth had prepared, gave him an instant of advantage; Flurry had the door open in a second, someone snatched the passage lamp from the wall, but it was obviously six to four on the rat.
The turf-house was a large space at the very root of the house, vaulted and mysterious, bearing Shreelane on its back like the tortoise that supports the world. Barrels draped with cobwebs stood along one wall, but the rat was not behind them, and Minx and her family drove like hawks into a corner, in which, beneath a chaotic heap of broken furniture and household debris, the rat had gone to ground. We followed, treading softly in the turf-mould of unnumbered winters. We tore out the furniture, which yielded itself in fragments; the delirium of the terriers mounting with each crash, and being, if possible, enhanced by the well-meant but intolerable efforts of the red setter to assist them. Finally we worked down to an old door, lying on its face on something that raised it a few inches from the ground.
"Now! Mind yourselves!" said Flurry, heaving up the door and flinging it back against the wall.
The rat bolted gallantly, and darted into an old box, of singular shape, that lay, half open, among the debris, and there, in a storm of tattered paper, met his fate. Minx jumped out of the box very deliberately, with the rat across her jaws, and a scarlet bite in her white muzzle. With frozen calm, and a menacing eye directed at the red setter, she laid it on the turf mould, and stiffly withdrew. Her son and daughter advanced in turn, smelt it respectfully and retired. There was no swagger; all complied with the ritual of fox-terrier form laid down for such occasions.
I was then for the first time aware that the ladies, in all the glitter and glory of their evening dresses, had each mounted herself upon a barrel; in the theatrical gloom of the vaulted turf-house, they suggested the resurrection of Ali Baba's Forty Thieves.
"Look where he had his nest in among the old letters!" said Flurry to Philippa, as she descended from her barrel to felicitate Minx and to condole with the rat. "That box came out of the rumble of an old coach, the Lord knows when!"
"There's some sort of a ring in the floor here," said Andrew, who was rooting with a rusty crowbar in the turf-mould where the door had lain. "Bring the light, someone——"
The lamp revealed a large iron ring which was fixed in a flat stone; we scraped away the turf-mould and found that the stone was fastened down with an iron bar, passing through a staple at either end, and padlocked.
"As long as I'm in this place," said Flurry, "I never saw this outfit before."
"There's a seal over the keyhole," said Andrew, turning over the padlock.
"That means it was not intended it should be opened," said Meg Longmuir quickly.
I looked round, and, bad as the light was, I thought her face looked pale.
Andrew did not answer her. He poised the crowbar scientifically, and drove it at the padlock. It broke at the second blow, releasing the bar.
"No trouble about that!" he said, addressing himself to the gallery, and not looking at Miss Longmuir. "Now, then, shall we have the flag up?"
There were only two dissentients; one was Flurry, who put his hands in his pockets, and said he wasn't going to destroy his best evening pants; the other was Miss Longmuir, who said that to break an old seal like that was to break luck. She also looked at Andrew in a way that should have gone far to redress the injuries inflicted during dinner. Apparently it did not suffice. Captain Larpent firmly inserted the end of the bar under the edge of the flag. Bernard Shute took hold of the ring.
"All together!" said Andrew.
There was a moment of effort, the flag came up abruptly, and, as abruptly, Bernard sat down in the turf-mould with the flag between his legs. The crowbar slipped forward, and vanished with a hollow-sounding splash down a black chasm; Andrew, thrown off his balance, also slipped forward, and would have followed it, head first, had not Flurry and I caught him.
The chasm was a well, nearly full; the water twinkled at us, impenetrably black; it made me think of the ink in the hollowed palm of a native who had told my fortune, up at Peshawur.
"That was about as near as makes no difference!" said Bernard. "You've cut your cheek, Larpent."
"Have I?" said Andrew vaguely, putting up a rather shaky hand to his face. "I think my head took the edge of the well."
We covered the hole with the old door, and Andrew was taken away to have his wound attended to. It was not a severe wound, but the process was lengthy, and involved the collaboration of all the ladies. It seemed to the three neglected males, waiting for a fourth to play bridge, that this mobilisation of ministering angels was somewhat overdone.
Andrew came down to breakfast next morning with a headache, and said he had slept badly. Had he discovered the source of the Nile in the turf-house the night before, my wife and Miss Longmuir could not have been more adulatory and sympathetic, nor could the projects, based upon the discovery, have been more ambitious. I went forth to my work and to my labour without so much as a dog to wave me farewell; all were in the turf-house, surrounded by visionary force-pumps, bath-rooms, and even by miraged fountains in the garden.
When I drove the car into the yard on my return that afternoon, I was confronted by a long chestnut face with a white blaze, looking at me out of the spare loose-box—the face, in fact, of "the little horse" of whom Flurry had spoken to Andrew. There was also, added to the more familiar heaps of mortar, gravel, and stones, a considerable deposit of black and evil-smelling sludge. It seemed, as was not uncommonly the case, that a good many things had been happening during my absence. The stone floor of the hall was stencilled with an intricate pattern of black paw-marks, and was further decorated with scraps of torn paper; a cold stench pervaded the smoking-room (which was situated above the turf-house); far away, a sound as of a gramophone in the next world indicated that Captain Andrew's affaire de coeur was finding an outlet in song.
I followed the sounds to the drawing-room, and found Andrew and Miss Longmuir at the piano, in a harmony obviously world-forgetting, though not likely to be by the world forgot. Philippa was sitting by the oil stove, and was, I hope, deriving some satisfaction from inhaling its fumes, its effect upon the temperature being negligible.
Andrew's song was a Hungarian ditty, truculent and amorous, and very loud; under cover of it my wife told me that he, assisted by Walkin' Aisy and the quarrymen, and attended by Miss Longmuir, had baled out the newly discovered well, and that the quarrymen had exacted whisky to sustain them during the later stages of the process, and that the sludge would be ideal for the roses. They believed the well was filling again beautifully, but they had to leave it because Flurry came over with the horse for Andrew for the paper-chase, and Andrew and Meg went out schooling.
"What paper-chase?" I interpolated coldly.
"Oh, they've got one up for Monday," said Philippa airily. "The children have been tearing up paper all day. I found—rather with horror—that Flurry had given them those old letters out of the turf-house to tear up—I said you and I would ride, of course"—she looked at me with apprehension veiled by defiance, and I said it was thoughtful of her.—"But I want to tell you about old Mrs. Knox," she said, hurrying on. "She told Flurry that the well had never been used since the time of the Famine, when they got up a soup-kitchen here, and the day after they opened the well she said the servants flew in a body out of the house, like wild geese!"
"I don't wonder, if it smelt as it does now," I said. "Was that why they flew?"
"Flurry said he didn't know what lifted them. But Flurry never says he doesn't know unless he does know and doesn't want to tell!"
The following day was Saturday, and for the first time for many weeks a Sabbath stillness prevailed on the roof. Walkin' Aisy was absent; no explanation was forthcoming, and I diagnosed a funeral in the neighbourhood. It was on Sunday afternoon that I was roused from my usual meditation—consequent upon Sunday roast beef—by the intelligence that Mrs. William Shanahan wanted to speak to me. Mrs. Shanahan was a fair freckled woman, with a loud voice and a red face and the reputation of ruling Walkin' Aisy with a rod of iron. It appeared that Walkin' Aisy was confined to his bed; that he had had a reel in his head after getting home on Friday, and that whatever work it was that young gentleman gave him to do, he wasn't the better of it.
"And he was as wake in himself and as troubled in his mind as that he couldn't walk to Mass. I told him he should mind the chickens while I'd be out, and when I came in the dog had three of me chickens dead on the floor, and where was himself, only back in the room, and he kneeling there with the two hands up, sayin' his prayers! 'What ails ye?' says I, 'ye old gommoch, that ye'd let the dog kill me chickens?' 'Sure, I was sayin' me prayers,' says he; 'That the Lord mightn't hear your prayers!' says I. God forgive me, I had to say it!"
I recalled her to the question of the chimneys, pointing out that the gable chimney was half down, and could not be left as it was.
To this Mrs. Walkin' Aisy replied at great length that William's father had given him an advice not to go in it, and that the father was dark these scores of years, and it was what he blamed for it was the work he done in Shreelane House in the time of the Famine. It was after that the sight went bandy with him.
She declined to offer any opinion as to when Walkin' Aisy would return to work, and withdrew, leaving me to consider my position under the Employers' Liability Act in the event of her husband's demise, and to wish, not for the first time, that Andrew (now strolling at his ease with Miss Longmuir, reviewing a course for the paper-chase), had been at Jericho, or any other resort of the superfluous, before he interfered with the tranquil progress of the chimneys towards dissolution.
There were strange lapses at dinner,—delays, omissions, disasters, and Julia the parlourmaid had a trembling hand and a general suggestion of nerve-storm. After dinner it was reported to Philippa that Anthony was not well, and after a prolonged absence she returned with the information that he had had a nightmare, and that there was a rumour in the house that all the servants were going to give warning the following morning. Their reason for this was obscure, but was somehow connected with Mrs. Walkin' Aisy's visit, and the fact that the swing-door leading to the turf-house had opened and shut twice, of its own volition. We did not mention these matters to our guests, and retired to rest in perturbation. I admit that at some time during the night, which was a still one, I heard the turf-house door groan on its hinges, and slam. I went downstairs and found nothing; it was certainly unusual, however, that Bob, the red setter, had abandoned his lair in the smoking-room, and was spending the night on the mat outside my dressing-room door.
Next morning Philippa, considering that a thrust was better than a parry, held a court of enquiry in the lower regions, and, according to her own report, spoke seriously on the grave responsibility incurred by those who frightened other people about nonsense. Julia's version of the proceedings, I heard at a later date. She said that "the Misthress spoke to us lovely, and the Priest couldn't speak better than her. She told us that the divils in hell wasn't worse than us."
PART III
It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that the impossible invariably occurs. When on Monday morning I learned that Flurry was to be one of the hares, and beheld him mounted on his best horse, as covered with bags as a postman on Christmas Day, I recalled the epigram. Another confirmation of the law of the unexpected was the fact that Meg Longmuir, on the "maroan" pony, was his fellow hare, very smart, much elated, and quite unaware that she had been substituted for Sally Knox at the last moment, in order that she might be as a millstone hung round the neck of Flurry. That this arrangement was not what Captain Larpent had desired was sufficiently apparent to the naked eye: why Flurry submitted to it was less obvious.
About a dozen riders had been whipped up to take part in this preposterous affair, and were standing about on the grass in front of Shreelane, cutting up the turf as much as the hardness of the ground would permit, and making as much noise as a pack of hounds at feeding time. The April sun glared hot, the better part of a north-easterly gale was blowing, the horses had over-eaten themselves with the bread of idleness, and were fat and frisky.
"Is he any good?" said Flurry to me in a low voice, with his eye on Andrew, who was sitting, shrouded in gloom and remoteness, on the chestnut horse.
"Ask Miss Longmuir," I said. "She was schooling with him on Saturday."
"I'll have plenty to do minding her, without asking her questions that she couldn't answer," returned Flurry. He resumed his survey of Andrew. "I wonder will he be able to hold that horse in a snaffle? He catches hold an odd time."
"Stand by!" said Doctor Hickey, his watch in his hand. "Fifteen seconds more before the hares start!"
"Well, if Larpent goes as big as he talks, he'll do," said Flurry, gathering up his reins.
The ten minutes of grace ebbed slowly away, and preposterous though I still held the affair to be, I do not deny that I was aware of an inward simmering of impatience.
"I'll have the face worn off my watch looking at it if you don't let us start soon!" said Miss Larkie McRory to Hickey.
She was mounted on a long-legged animal that had been summarised by Flurry as "the latter end of a car-horse," and was certainly in need of all the time it could get.
"Don't excite yourself now, or I'll be having to order you a cooling draught!" returned the Doctor, but I perceived that he, in common with everyone else, was edging his horse towards the point of departure.
"Go!"
In the riot of the break-away, I was able to think of nothing but of keeping Daniel from bucking me over his head, but during the hustle at the avenue gates I observed Andrew riding off Bernard, and getting to the front with pale and ferocious determination. The "scent" took us along the road; we followed it over a stony bank and across two fields, at steeplechase pace, and then it ceased. By this time any lingering sense of absurdity had ceased also. We cast ourselves feverishly, like hounds; we galloped great circles; someone found the paper again, and yelled like a maniac. We all yelled in response, a variety of yells, from "Tally Ho" to "Cooee," as, like Bedlam let loose, we rushed to the discoverer. We were up on high land now, and the wind was whirling in our ears, snatching our voices away to infinity, and blowing up the temperatures of horses and riders like a bellows. It had caught away the torn paper and flung it to leeward, into furze brakes, against the sides of the banks, and checks were many, and the horses, convinced that the hounds were somewhere ahead, pulled double. In the bare fields, with their scanty April grass, everything showed up; we were deceived by white stones, by daisies, by dandelion puff-balls, by goose-feathers; most of all we were deceived by country-people, whom, I have no doubt, Flurry had instructed to mislead us.
We had had a long check, consequent on a false trail, when, three fields away, Andrew held up his hat.
"Look at him now, running mute!" giggled Sally Knox in my ear, as we battered down a road. "He's too cross to shout. He's frantic because he's not the hare, and Meg Longmuir was sent with Flurry! And poor Flurry, who's going such a nice safe line!"
"I suppose we may thank Miss Longmuir for the safe line?" I responded with some difficulty, because Daniel was enjoying himself on the road, according to the idiotic manner of horses.
"No! You may thank the chestnut horse!" ejaculated Flurry Knox's wife, as she hoisted out of the road over a loose wall.
Remembering that Andrew was intended to buy the chestnut horse, the deduction was a simple one. It was also quite clear that, disappointing as it might be, and contrary to the most cherished convention, Andrew was going as big as he talked, and even bigger.
"'Them that's in love is like no one'!" I quoted to Mrs. Flurry, as Captain Larpent, taking the shortest way to a drift of paper on a hillside, charged a tall, furze-tufted fence, and got over with a scramble. We followed, less heroically, by a gap, and ascended the hill, with the torn paper scurrying in front of us in the gusty wind. We had now been going for thirty-five minutes, and were all, horses and riders, something blown; Miss Larkie's car-horse could have been heard down-wind for half a mile, and I would have backed Daniel to out-roar any lion in the den.
Nothing but the checks held us together. Doctor Hickey, and Irving, the District Inspector, were taking the matter seriously, and were riding hard to catch Andrew, for the honour of the country. Bernard Shute and two or three other heavy-weights were afoot, dragging their dripping horses over a bank with an up-hill take off; Miss McRory and the car-horse were making an extremely gradual progress in the rear, and Philippa had pulled back to give her leads, with an unselfishness that was not only futile, but was also a reproach to me and my fellow-men.
We had been going in a big ring, and from the top of the hill we could again see Shreelane, below us among its trees. It was there also that we caught the first sight of the hares, now heading for home and safety. The wind had strengthened to half a gale, and the wild and composite yell with which the hounds viewed their quarry was blown back into their throats. The maroan pony had fulfilled her mission as a handicap; twice we saw Flurry dismount and pull down a gap; once, at a bank, he got behind her and whipped her over like a peg-top. Another field took them to the high road. A puff of white paper fluttered out, and Miss Longmuir looked back and flourished a defiant whip; they turned, and galloped in a cloud of dust along the road for Shreelane.
It was not a nice hill to get down in a hurry, and I should think the chestnut horse dreams of it now, somewhere in the level English Midlands, after he has over-eaten himself on fat English oats. For my part, I remembered a humble but useful path, that links a little group of cottages with the rest of the world.
The paper lay thick on the road in the shelter of the fences; everyone began to ride for a finish, and after a quarter of a mile of pounding in the dust at the heel of the hunt, I considered that Daniel and I had satisfied the demands of honour, and ignobly turned in at the back way to the stable yard, permitting the chase to sweep on to the front gates without me.
In the stable yard I found several objects of interest. The hares were there, dismounted, very hot, and uncaptured; Mrs. Knox was there, seated in her phaeton; there was a cluster of servants at the back door; there were McRorys, leaning on bicycles; there was Cecilia Shute, in her motor, with unknown rank and fashion billowing in motor veils beside her.
All were gazing at a mass of sooty bricks and shattered chimney-pots that lay, scattered wide, in and about the black dredgings of the turf-house well.
"That's the gable chimney," said Flurry coolly; "it got tired of waiting for Walkin' Aisy. We heard the roar of it as we came in the front gate!" He turned his mail-bag upside down so that its ultimate dregs were blown far and wide. "How did the chestnut horse go with——?"
As if in reply, hoofs clattered outside the yard, and the white nose of the chestnut shot into the opening of the yard gate. He plunged past me, with Andrew lying back and tugging at the snaffle. The Shreelane yard was fairly spacious, but I began to think that the thing wasn't as funny as it looked. The horse swerved at Mrs. Knox's phaeton, swerved again as Flurry turned him from his stable door with a flourish of the mail-bag. Andrew wrenched his head straight for the open back gate, and might have got him out without disaster, had not the widespread ruin of the chimney intervened. The chestnut once more tried to swerve, his legs went from under him, and he fell, striking fire from the cobble stones of the yard. Andrew stuck to him to the last instant, but was shot clear, and was flung, head first, into the heap of stones and black mud.
It seemed long, long hours between this catastrophe, and a sufficient subsidence of things in general, for me to be able, without inhumanity, to envisage a whisky and soda. Old Mrs. Knox watched me with approval.
"I'm tired of looking at young men drinking tea," she commented. (It was Mrs. Knox's pleasing idiosyncrasy to look upon me as a young man.) "They were like a pack of curates at a school-feast! Not that I was ever at a school-feast, thank God!" she added, with an abandoned chuckle.
We were sitting in a corner of the dining-room, surrounded by empty cups and crumby plates; tides of tea and of talkers had ebbed and flowed, but Mrs. Knox had sat on—to hear my personal report of Andrew, she said.
"Upon my honour, he escaped very well! A dislocated shoulder is nothing, and the young lady is there to 'tend the wounded Deloraine!'"
She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the prompter. "How does it go? 'She thought some spirit of the sky had done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'"
She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her spectacles, and made them impenetrable.
"Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!' says Major Yeates, R.M.!"
I protested that I had said nothing of the kind. She prodded me in the knee with a goblin finger.
"Close that well! Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!" She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain. "Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the time of the Famine!"
I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would be interesting to know why.
Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace. It was a cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold smooth from age.
"I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs? He drove up to this house one fine day in a coach-and-four. Next day the coach-and-four drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!"
"He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested.
"Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox portentously.
"A duel?" I asked.
"He was never seen again, my dear!" replied Mrs. Knox. (There are moments, in Ireland, when this term of affection is used not so much affectionately as confidentially.)
At this point the door opened. Mrs. Knox put the goblin finger on her lips, as Philippa, still in her habit, slid into the room.
"The patient and Meg are extremely self-sufficing," she said, dropping into a chair. "His face is turning all colours of the rainbow, and one eye has disappeared, but the other is full of expression and is fixed on Meg!"
"There's not much colour about you," I said. "You ought to have a whisky and soda."
"Nonsense!" said Philippa, waving me away; "we've got most of the black stuff out of his hair; even his waistcoat pocket was full of it! And bits of the torn paper had stuck to it, like confetti."
"That suggests a wedding," I observed.
"Quite," said Philippa. "But the absurd thing was that one of the confetti—obviously a bit of those old letters that the children tore up—had the word 'Apollo' on it! It was stuck on to him like a label."
Mrs. Knox clasped her hands, and lay back in her chair.
"I said it was, of course, a tribute to his beauty, but Meg was not at all amused. She thought it was 'lèse majesté.'"
"She'll get over that in time," I said, putting the seal in my pocket.
VII
WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY
There was a wonderful chandelier in the hotel dining-room. Fine bronze it was made of, with mermaids, and Tritons, and dolphins flourishing their tails up towards the dingy ceiling-paper, and beaked galleys, on whose prows sat six small lamps, with white china receptacles for paraffin, and smoky brown chimneys. Gone were the brave days when each prow had borne a galaxy of tall wax candles; the chandelier might consider itself lucky in that it had even the paraffin lamps to justify its existence, and that it still hung from a ceiling, instead of sharing the last resting-place of its twin brother, in the bed of the tidal river under the hotel windows.
James, the hotel waiter, knew the family history of the chandelier, as he knew that of most people and things in the county. I commented upon it to a young gentleman with a pointed beard, who sat next to me at dinner, and said that it looked to me like Renaissance. The young gentleman suggested, alternatively, that it looked more like bronze. I did not dispute the point, but I think he found the subject precarious, as he turned to the young lady on his left, and I heard him embark upon a new theme.
