“Are you going to draw Clashnacrona to-morrow?” asked Muriel, the second of the gang (Lady Purcell, it should have been mentioned, had also been responsible for her daughters’ names), rising from her chair and pouring what was left of her after dinner coffee into her saucer, a proceeding which caused four pairs of lambent eyes to discover themselves in the coiled mat of red setters that occupied the drawing-room hearthrug.
“No, I am not,” said Sir Thomas, “and, what’s more, I’m coming in early. I’m a fool to go hunting at all at this time o’ year, with half the potatoes not out of the ground.” He rose, and using the toe of his boot as the coulter of a plough, made a way for himself among the dogs to the centre of the hearthrug. “Be hanged to these dogs! I declare I don’t know am I more plagued with dogs or daughters! Lucy!”
Lady Purcell dutifully disinterred her attention from a catalogue of Dutch bulbs.
“When I get in to-morrow I’ll go call on that Local Government Board Inspector who’s staying in Drinagh. They tell me he’s a very nice fellow and he’s rolling in money. I daresay I’ll ask him to dinner. He was in the army one time, I believe. They often give these jobs to soldiers. If any of you girls come across him,” he continued, bending his fierce eyebrows upon his family, “I’ll trouble you to be civil to him and show him none of your infernal airs because he happens to be an Englishman! I hear he’s bicycling all over the country and he might come out to see the hounds.”
Rosamund, the eldest, delivered herself of an almost imperceptible wink in the direction of Violet, the third of the party. Sir Thomas’s diplomacies were thoroughly appreciated by his offspring. “It’s time some of you were cleared out from under my feet!” he told them. Nevertheless when, some four or five years before, a subaltern of Engineers engaged on the Government survey of Ireland had laid his career, plus fifty pounds per annum and some impalpable expectations, at the feet of Muriel, the clearance effected by Sir Thomas had been that of Lieutenant Aubrey Hamilton. “Is it marry one of my daughters to that penniless pup!” he had said to Lady Purcell, whose sympathies had, as usual, been on the side of the detrimental. “Upon my honour, Lucy, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you—and that’s saying a good deal!”
It was near the beginning of September, and but a sleepy half dozen or so of riders had turned out to meet the hounds the following morning, at Liss Cranny Wood. There had been rain during the night and, though it had ceased, a wild wet wind was blowing hard from the north-west. The yellowing beech trees twisted and swung their grey arms in the gale. Hats flew down the wind like driven grouse; Sir Thomas’s voice, in the middle of the covert, came to the riders assembled at the cross roads on the outskirts of the wood in gusts, fitful indeed, but not so fitful that Nora, on the distrained foxy mare, was not able to gauge to a nicety the state of his temper. From the fact of her unostentatious position in the rear it might safely be concluded that it, like the wind, was still rising. The riders huddled together in the lee of the trees, their various elements fused in the crucible of Sir Thomas’s wrath into a compact and anxious mass. There had been an unusually large entry of puppies that season, and Sir Thomas’s temper, never at its best on a morning of cubbing, was making exhaustive demands on his stock of expletives. Rabbits were flying about in every direction, each with a shrieking puppy or two in its wake. Jerry, the Whip, was galloping ventre à terre along the road in the vain endeavour to overtake a couple in headlong flight to the farm where they had spent their happier earlier days. At the other side of the wood the Master was blowing himself into apoplexy in the attempt to recall half a dozen who were away in full cry after a cur-dog, and a zealous member of the hunt looked as if he were playing polo with another puppy that doubled and dodged to evade the lash and the duty of getting to covert. Hither and thither among the beech trees went that selection from the Master’s family circle, exclusive of the furtive Nora, that had on this occasion taken the field. It was a tradition in the country that there were never fewer than four Miss Purcells out, and that no individual Miss Purcell had more than three days’ hunting in the season. Whatever may have been the truth of this, the companion legend that each Miss Purcell slept with two hound puppies in her bed was plausibly upheld by the devotion with which the latter clung to the heels of their nurses.
In the midst of these scenes of disorder an old fox rightly judging that this was no place for him, slid out of the covert, and crossed the road just in front of where Nora, in a blue serge skirt and a red Tam-o’-Shanter cap, lurked on the foxy mare. Close after him came four or five couple of old hounds, and, prominent among her elders, yelped the puppy that had been Nora’s special charge. This was not cubbing, and no one knew it better than Nora; but the sight of Carnage among the prophets—Carnage, whose noblest quarry hitherto had been the Mount Purcell turkey-cock—overthrew her scruples. The foxy mare, a ponderous creature, with a mane like a Nubian lion and a mouth like steel, required nearly as much room to turn in as a man-of-war, and while Nora, by vigorous use of her heel and a reliable ash plant, was getting her head round, her sister Muriel, on a raw-boned well-bred colt—Sir Thomas, as he said, made the best of a bad job, and utilised his daughters as roughriders—shot past her down the leafy road, closely followed by a stranger on a weedy bay horse, which Nora instantly recognised as the solitary hireling of the neighbourhood.
Through the belt of wood and out into the open country went the five couple, and after them went Muriel, Nora and the strange man. There had been an instant when the colt had thought that it seemed a pity to leave the road, but, none the less, he had the next instant found himself in the air, a considerable distance above a low stone wall, with a tingling streak across his ribs, and a bewildering sensation of having been hustled. The field in which he alighted was a sloping one and he ramped down it very enjoyably to himself, with all the weight of his sixteen hands and a half concentrated in his head, when suddenly a tall grassy bank confronted him, with, as he perceived with horror, a ditch in front of it. He tried to swerve, but there seemed something irrevocable about the way in which the bank faced him, and if his method of “changing feet” was not strictly conventional, he achieved the main point and found all four safely under him when he landed, which was as much—if not more than as much—as either he or Muriel expected. The Miss Purcells were a practical people, and were thankful for minor mercies.
It was at about this point that the stranger on the hireling drew level; he had not been at the meet, and Muriel turned her head to see who it was that was kicking old McConnell’s screw along so well. He lifted his cap, but he was certainly a stranger. She saw a discreetly clipped and pointed brown beard, with a rather long and curling moustache.
“Fed on furze!” thought Muriel, with a remembrance of the foxy mare’s upper lip when she came in “off the hill”.