Fanny Fitz and Mr. Alexander peered into the dark and vasty interior of the cow-house; from a remote corner they heard a heavy breath and the jingle of a training bit, but they saw nothing.
“I have the cavesson and all on her ready for ye, and I was thinking we’d take her south into Mr. Gunning’s land. His finces is very good,” continued Johnny, going cautiously in; “wait till I pull her out.”
Johnny Connolly was a horse trainer who did a little farming, or a farmer who did a little horse training, and his management of young horses followed no known rules, and indeed knew none, but it was generally successful. He fed them by rule of thumb; he herded them in hustling, squabbling parties in pitch-dark sheds; he ploughed them at eighteen months; he beat them with a stick like dogs when they transgressed, and like dogs they loved him. He had what gardeners call “a lucky hand” with them, and they throve with him, and he had, moreover, that gift of winning their wayward hearts that comes neither by cultivation nor by knowledge, but is innate and unconscious. Already, after two days, he and the Connemara filly understood each other; she sniffed distantly and with profound suspicion at Fanny and her offerings, and entirely declined to permit Mr. Alexander to estimate her height on the questionable assumption that the point of his chin represented 15’2, but she allowed Johnny to tighten or slacken every buckle in her new and unfamiliar costume without protest.
“I think she’ll make a ripping good mare,” said the enthusiastic Freddy, as he and Fanny Fitz followed her out of the yard; “I don’t care what Rupert Gunning says, she’s any amount of quality, and I bet you’ll do well over her.”
“She’ll make a real nice fashionable mare,” remarked Johnny, opening the gate of a field and leading the filly in, “and she’s a sweet galloper, but she’s very frightful in herself. Faith, I thought she’d run up the wall from me the first time I went to feed her! Ah ha! none o’ yer thricks!” as the filly, becoming enjoyably aware of the large space of grass round her, let fling a kick of malevolent exuberance at the two fox-terriers who were trotting decorously in her rear.
It was soon found that, in the matter of “stone gaps,” the A B C of Irish jumping, Connemara had taught the grey filly all there was to learn.
“Begor, Miss Fanny, she’s as crabbed as a mule!” said her teacher approvingly. “D’ye mind the way she soaks the hind legs up into her! We’ll give her a bank now.”
At the bank, however, the trouble began. Despite the ministrations of Mr. Alexander and a long whip, despite the precept and example of Mr. Connolly, who performed prodigies of activity in running his pupil in at the bank and leaping on to it himself the filly time after time either ran her chest against it or swerved from it at the last instant with a vigour that plucked her preceptor from off it and scattered Fanny Fitz and the fox-terriers like leaves before the wind. These latter were divided between sycophantic and shrieking indignation with the filly for declining to jump, and a most wary attention to the sphere of influence of the whip. They were a mother and daughter, as conceited, as craven, and as wholly attractive as only the judiciously spoiled ladies of their race can be. Their hearts were divided between Fanny Fitz and the cook, the rest of them appertained to the Misses Harriet and Rachael Fitzroy, whom they regarded with toleration tinged with boredom.
“I tell ye now, Masther Freddy, ’tis no good for us to be goin’ on sourin’ the mare this way. ’Tis what the fince is too steep for her. Maybe she never seen the like in that backwards counthry she came from. We’ll give her the bank below with the ditch in front of it. ’Tisn’t very big at all, and she’ll be bound to lep with the sup of wather that’s in it.”
Thus Johnny Connolly, wiping a very heated brow.