In Mr. Knox's Country

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

It was a tribute to Mrs. Knox's character that her grandson treated her as a combatant in his own class, and did not for an instant consider himself bound to allow her weight for either age or sex.

At dinner that night Mrs. Knox was as favourable to me as usual; yet it was pointed out to me by Mrs. Flurry that she was wearing two shawls instead of one, always an indication to be noted as a portent of storm. At bridge she played a very sharp-edged game, in grimness scarcely mitigated by two well-brought-off revokes on the part of Philippa, who was playing with Flurry; a gross and unprincipled piece of chivalry on my wife's part that was justly resented by Mr. Knox.

Next morning the lady of the house was invisible, and Mullins, her maid, was heard to lament to an unknown sympathiser on the back stairs that the divil in the wild woods wouldn't content her.

In the grove at Aussolas, on a height behind the castle, romantically named Mount Ida, there is a half-circle of laurels that screens, with pleasing severity, an ancient bench and table of stone. The spot commands a fair and far prospect of Aussolas Lake, and, nearer at hand, it permitted a useful outlook upon the kitchen garden and its affairs. When old Mrs. Knox first led me thither to admire the view, she mentioned that it was a place to which she often repaired when the cook was on her trail with enquiries as to what the servants were to have for dinner.

Since our expedition to Fanaghy the glory of the weather had remained unshaken, and each day there was a shade of added warmth in the sunshine and a more caressing quality in the wind. Flurry and I went to Petty Sessions in the morning, and returned to find that Mrs. Knox was still in her room, and that our respective wives were awaiting us with a tea-basket in the classic shades of Mount Ida. Mrs. Knox had that mysterious quality of attraction given to some persons, and some dogs, of forming a social vortex into which lesser beings inevitably swim; yet I cannot deny that her absence induced a sneaking sensation of holiday. Had she been there, for example, Mrs. Flurry would scarcely have indicated, with a free gesture, the luxuriance of the asparagus beds in the kitchen garden below, nor promised to have a bundle of it cut for us before we went home; still less would she and Philippa have smoked cigarettes, a practice considered by Mrs. Knox to be, in women, several degrees worse than drinking.

To us there, through the green light of young beech leaves and the upstriking azure glare of myriads of bluebells, came the solid presence of John Kane. It would be hard to define John Kane's exact status at Aussolas; Flurry had once said that, whether it was the house, or the garden, or the stables, whatever it'd be that you wanted to do, John Kane'd be in it before you to hinder you; but that had been in a moment of excusable irritation, when John Kane had put a padlock on the oat loft, and had given the key to Mrs. Knox.

John Kane now ascended to us, and came to a standstill, with his soft black hat in his hands; it was dusty, so were his boots, and the pockets of his coat bulked large. Among the green drifts and flakes of the pale young beech leaves his bushy beard looked as red as a squirrel's tail.

"I have the commands here, Master Flurry," he began, "and it's to yourself I'd sooner give them. As for them ger'rls that's inside in the kitchen, they have every pup in the place in a thrain at the back door, and, if your tobacco went asthray, it's me that would be blemt."

"The commands"—i.e. some small parcels—were laid on the stone table, minor pockets yielded an assortment of small moneys that were each in turn counted and placed in heaps by their consort parcels.

"And as for the bottle, the misthress wrote down for me," said John Kane, his eye rounding up his audience like a sheep-dog, "I got me 'nough with the same bottle. But sure them's the stupidest people in Hennessy's! 'Twas to Hennessy himself I gave the misthress's paper, and he was there looking at it for a while. 'What have she in it?' says he to me. 'How would I know,' says I, 'me that have no learning?' He got the spy-glass to it then, and 'twas shortly till all was in the shop was gethered in it looking at it. 'Twould take an expairt to read it!' says one fella——"