The bank below was a broad and solid structure well padded with grass and bracken, and it had a sufficiently obvious ditch, of some three feet wide, on the nearer side. The grand effort was duly prepared for. The bank was solemnly exhibited to the filly; the dogs, who had with unerring instinct seated themselves on its most jumpable portion, were scattered with one threat of the whip to the horizon. Fanny tore away the last bit of bracken that might prove a discouragement, and Johnny issued his final order.
“Come inside me with the whip, sir, and give her one good belt at the last.”
No one knows exactly how it happened. There was a rush, a scramble, a backward sliding, a great deal of shouting, and the Connemara filly was couched in the narrow ditch at right angles to the fence, with the water oozing up through the weeds round her, like a wild duck on its nest; and at this moment Mr. Rupert Gunning appeared suddenly on the top of the bank and inspected the scene with an amusement that he made little attempt to conceal.
It took half an hour, and ropes, and a number of Rupert Gunning’s haymakers, to get Fanny Fitz’s speculation on to its legs again, and Mr. Gunning’s comments during the process successfully sapped Fanny Fitz’s control of her usually equable temper, “He’s a beast!” she said wrathfully to Freddy, as the party moved soberly homewards in the burning June afternoon, with the horseflies clustering round them, and the smell of new-mown grass wafting to them from where, a field or two away, came the rattle of Rupert Gunning’s mowing-machine. “A crabbing beast! It was just like my luck that he should come up at that moment and have the supreme joy of seeing Gamble—” Gamble was the filly’s rarely-used name—“wallowing in the ditch! That’s the second time he’s scored off me. I pity poor little Maudie Spicer for having such a brother!”
In spite of this discouraging début, the filly’s education went on and prospered. She marched discreetly along the roads in long reins; she champed detested mouthfuls of rusty mouthing bit in the process described by Johnny Connolly as “getting her neck broke” she trotted for treadmill half-hours in the lunge; and during and in spite of all these penances, she fattened up and thickened out until that great authority, Mr. Alexander, pronounced it would be a sin not to send her up to the Dublin Horse Show, as she was just the mare to catch an English dealer’s eye.
“But sure ye wouldn’t sell her, miss?” said her faithful nurse, “and Masther Freddy afther starting the hounds and all!”
Fanny Fitz scratched the filly softly under the jawbone, and thought of the document in her pocket—long, and blue, and inscribed with the too familiar notice in red ink: “An early settlement will oblige”.
“I must, Johnny,” she said, “worse luck!”
“Well, indeed, that’s too bad, miss,” said Johnny comprehendingly. “There was a mare I had one time, and I sold her before I went to America. God knows, afther she went from me, whenever I’d look at her winkers hanging on the wall I’d have to cry. I never seen a sight of her till three years afther that, afther I coming home. I was coming out o’ the fair at Enniscar, an’ I was talking to a man an’ we coming down Dangan Hill, and what was in it but herself coming up in a cart! “An’ I didn’t look at her, good nor bad, nor know her, but sorra bit but she knew me talking, an’ she turned in to me with the cart! Ho, ho, ho!’ says she, and she stuck her nose into me like she’d be kissing me. Be dam, but I had to cry. An’ the world wouldn’t stir her out o’ that till I’d lead her on meself. As for cow nor dog nor any other thing, there’s nothing would rise your heart like a horse!”