Emmanuel Ibbetson had built the bungalow and stables in a moment of enthusiasm about racing. It was certainly an ideal spot for training. Just here the Downs are level as heart of man could wish. A great sweep of turf, a tableland where nothing moves but the grazing sheep and the shadow of the bird and cloud, extends from the stables due south, ending in an outcrop of chalk and a rise leading to the higher Downs and the sea. The higher Downs shelter it in winter from the wind.
There was stabling for half a dozen horses; everything about the place was of the best, from the tiles to the roof, from the patent manger to the patent latch of the doors. There was a patent arrangement with a prong for conducting the hay from the loft above to the manger below. This nearly stabbed Garryowen in his suddenly upflung nose, and Moriarty, who had a contempt for everything patent, including medicine, broke it—but this in parenthesis.
The bungalow, where the human beings were stabled, was a much less elaborate affair in its way. Built for a bachelor and his friends, it just held the Frenches, leaving a spare room over for Mr. Dashwood.
This is a vague sketch of the buildings and premises called The Martens—Heaven knows why—and situated like a marten-box on the eminence above Crowsnest, that highly respectable residential neighbourhood where residents knew nothing yet of the fact that the place had been let—or, rather, borrowed—and nothing yet of the nature of the borrower.
CHAPTER XVI
"My dear," wrote Miss Grimshaw in another letter to that lady friend, "here we are at last. We arrived the day before yesterday evening, horses and all, including the servants. I once heard an old lady in the States giving good advice to a young woman just married. One sentence clung to me, and will, I think, by its truth, cling to me for ever. 'Never move servants.'
"We took with us from Ireland Mrs. Driscoll, the cook, and Norah, the parlour-maid, besides the menservants. I am not referring to the men when I repeat that axiom, 'Never move servants,' but to the womenfolk.
"We had not started from Holyhead when Mrs. Driscoll broke down. She weighs fourteen stone, and does everything in a large way. She broke down from homesickness. She had travelled well up to that. The crossing had been smooth, and she had not made a single complaint, fighting bravely, I suppose, all the time, against the growing nostalgia. Then on the platform at Holyhead, before the waiting Irish mail, it all came out at once. It sounds absurd, but really the thing was tragic. Real grief is always tragic, even the grief of a child over a broken toy, and this was real grief, and it taught me more in five minutes about Ireland and why the Irish in America hate England than I learned from all my months spent in the country itself.
"It did not seem grief for a lost country so much as for a lost father or mother, and, mind you, she was with people she knew, and she was only being 'expatriated' for a few months. What must they have suffered in the old days, those people driven from their homes and holdings to a country three thousand miles away, never to come back?"
Miss Grimshaw, in her letter, continued:
"Mr. French got Mrs. Driscoll brandy from the refreshment-room, and we took her in the first-class carriage with us, but all her cry was to go back, and what lent a grim humour to the situation was the fact that none of us can go back to Ireland from this expedition into England till a certain something has been accomplished.
"There seems something mysterious and sinister in that statement, but there is really nothing sinister in the situation. Only a horse. However, to return to the servants. Mrs. D. has recovered somewhat, but Norah, the parlour-maid, has now broken down. She is a pretty girl with black hair, grey eyes, and beautiful teeth, and she is sitting at the moment in the kitchen, with her apron over her head, 'eating her heart out,' to use Mrs. Driscoll's expression. The curious thing is that both these women have no relations of any account to tie them to Ireland. It's just Ireland itself they want—and it seems to me they won't be happy till they get it.
"The woman from Crowsnest, whom Mr. Dashwood got to tidy the place up and light the fires and have supper for us the evening we came, has left. She did not get on with the others; and now this place is all Irish with the exception of me—a bit of the west coast planted above a most staid and respectable English village. I wonder what the result will be as far as intercommunication goes?
"No one has called yet; but, of course, it is too soon. But I hope they will stay away. I have several reasons.—Yours ever, Violet."