Mount Music Part 3

There was one person who viewed the enthusiastic intimacy that had sprung up between the houses of Coppinger and Talbot-Lowry, with a disapproval as deep as it was prejudiced. It was a person whose opinion might, by the thoughtless, be considered unimportant, but in this the thoughtless would greatly err. Robert Evans was the butler at Mount Music. He had held that position since the year 1859, from which statement a brief and unexacting calculation will establish the fact that he had taken office when his present master was no more than twenty-one years old and, it being now 1894, he had so continued for 35 years. Possibly a vision of an adoring and devoted retainer may here present itself. If so, it must be immediately dispelled. In Mr.

Evans' opinion, such devotion and adoration as the case demanded, were owed to him by the House on which he had for so long a time bestowed the boon of his presence, and those who were privileged with his acquaintance had no uncertainty in the matter, since his age, his length of service, his fidelity, and the difficulties with which he daily contended, formed the main subjects of his conversation.

In the palmier days of the Irish gentry there were many households in which the religion of the servants was a matter of considerable importance, and those who could afford exclusiveness, were accustomed to employ only Protestants as indoor servants. This may seem like an unwarrantable invasion of the inner fortress of another individual, making his views spiritual responsible for his fortunes temporal. But in Ireland, in the earlier half of the troubled nineteenth century, such differentiation was inspired not by bigotry, but by fear. When a man's foes might be, and often were, those of his own household, that his servants should be of his own religion was almost his only safeguard against espionage. There is somewhat to be said on both sides; it will not be said here, but that there have been times in Ireland when such precautions were required, cannot be ignored.

Robert Evans was a survivor of such a period. Time was when he strutted, autocratic and imperious as a turkey-c.o.c.k, ruler of a flock of lesser fowl, all of his own superior creed; brave days when he and Mrs. Dixon, the housekeeper, herded and headed, respectively, a bevy of "decent Protestant maids" into Family Prayers every morning, and packed "the full of two covered cars" off to the Knockceoil Parish Church on Sundays. Evans rarely went to church, believing that such disciplines were superfluous for one in a state of grace, but the glory of the House of Talbot-Lowry demanded a full and rustling pew of female domestics, while the coachman, and a footman or a groom, were generally to be relied on to give a masculine stiffening to the party.

With Lady Isabel's _regime_ had come a slackening of moral fibre, a culpable setting of attainments, or of convenience, above creed, in the administration of the household. Once had Lady Isabel been actually overheard by Evans, offering to a friend, in excuse for the indifferent show made by her household in the parish church, the offensive explanation that "R.C.'s were so sympathetic, and so easy to find, while Protestants were not only scarce, but were so proud of being Protestants, and expected so much admiration"--here she had perceived the presence of Evans, and had unavailingly begun upon the weather, but Evans' deep-seated suspicions as to the laxity of the English Church had been confirmed.

It is possible that the greatest shock that Evans was capable of sustaining was administered when he heard of the secession to the enemy of Colonel Tom Coppinger. Only second to it was the discovery that Colonel Tom's poisoned offspring was to be received at Mount Music and admitted to the fellows.h.i.+p of its children.

"No!" Evans said to Mrs. Dixon, standing on the hearthrug in the sanctuary of the housekeeper's room, one wet afternoon, shortly after the Coppinger return: "I see changes here, better and worse, good and bad, but I didn't think I'd live to see what I seen to-day--the children of this house consorting with a Papist!"

"Fie!" said Mrs. Dixon, without conviction. She was fat and easy-tempered, and though ever anxious to conciliate him whom she respected and feared as "Mr. Eevans," her powers of dissimulation often failed at a pinch of this kind.

Mr. Evans looked at his table-companion with a contempt to which she had long been resigned. He was a short, thin, bald man, with a sharp nose curved like a reaping-hook, iron-grey whiskers and hair, and fierce pale blue eyes. Later on, Christian, in the pride of her first introduction to Tennyson, had been inspired by his high shoulders and black tailed coat to ent.i.tle him "The many-wintered crow," and the name was welcomed by her fellows, and registered in the repository of phrases and nicknames that exists in all well-regulated families.

"'Fie!'" he repeated after Mrs. Dixon, witheringly. "I declare before G.o.d, Mrs. Dixon, if I was to tell you the Pope o' Rome was coming to dinner next Sunday, it's all you'd say would be 'Fie!'"

Mrs. Dixon received this supposition of catastrophe with annoying calm, and even reverted to Mr. Evans' earlier statement in a manner that might have bewildered a less experienced disputant than he.

"Well, indeed, Mr. Eevans," she said, appeasingly, "I'd say he was a nice child enough, and the very dead spit of the poor Colonel. I dunno what harm he could do the children at all?"

The Prophet Samuel could scarcely have regarded Saul, when he offered those ill-fated apologies relative to King Agag, with a more sinister disfavour than did Evans view Mrs. Dixon.

"I'll say one thing to you, Mrs. Dixon," he said, moving to the door with that laborious shuffle that had inspired one of the hunted and suffering tribe of his pantry-boys to the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n: "I thank G.o.d, there's more in his boots than what's there room for!"--"and I'll say it once, and that's enough! As sure as G.o.d made little apples, trouble and disgrace will follow jumpers!"

Mrs. Dixon, no less than Evans, disapproved of those who changed their religion, but this denunciation did not seem to her to apply.

"That poor child's no jumper!" she called after her antagonist; "'twasn't his fault he was born the way he was!"

Evans slammed the door.

Mrs. Dixon dismissed the controversy from her easy mind, looked at the clock, and laid down her knitting.

"Miss Christian'll be looking for her birthday cake!" she said to herself, hoisting her large person from her chair. Even as she did so, there came a rapping, quick and urgent, at the window. "Look at that now!" said Mrs. Dixon. "I wouldn't doubt that child to be wanting the world in her pocket before it was made!"

"Dixie! Dixie! Open the window! Hurry! I want you!"

Christian's face, surmounted by a very old hunting-cap, and decorated with a corked moustache, appeared at the window.

"The Lord save us, child! What have you done to yourself? And what are you doing out there in the wet?" answered Mrs. Dixon, reprovingly; "sure the cake won't be baked for ten minutes yet."

"I don't want the cake. I only want some biscuits, _please_.

Dixie, and hurry! Amazon's bolted, and Cottingham's asked _me_ to catch her! If you _had_ a bone, Dixie, she'd simply--"

Mrs. Dixon was gone. She disapproved exceedingly of Christian's role as kennel-boy, but as, since Christian's first birthday, she had never refused her anything, she was not prepared on her tenth to break so well-established a habit.

"I dunno in the world why Mr. Cottingham should make a young lady like you do his business!" she said, putting the requisition bait into Christian's eager, up-stretched hands, "and if your Mamma could see you--"

"Oh, well done, Dixie! What a lovely bone! Oh, thank you most awfully!" interrupted Christian, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the dainties provided, and flitting away through the grey veils of the rain, a preposterous little figure, clad in a ragged kennel-coat, that had been long since discarded by the huntsman, a pair of couples slung round her neck, and a crop in her hand.

It was a chilly, wet August afternoon. It had rained for the past three days, and was, by all appearances, prepared to continue to do so for three more. Christian ran across the fields to the kennels, regardless of wet overhead or underfoot, and oblivious of the corked moustache, which ran too, almost as fast as she did. She had made a _detour_ to avoid the schoolroom windows. Her birthday party was toward, and charades (accounting for her moustache) were in full swing. But the message from Cottingham, secretly conveyed together with the couples, by the pantry boy, transcended in importance all other human affairs. She had slipped away from her fellows, and having endured the hunting cap and the kennel coat, as the wear suitable to such an occasion, she had not lost a minute in coming to the horn.

Cottingham, Major Talbot-Lowry's First Whip and kennel huntsman, a single-souled little Devons.h.i.+re man, whose dyed hair was the solitary indication of the age it was intended to conceal, awaited her outside the kennels.

"Well, Missie, I knew you'd come," he said, approvingly. "It's Amazon that's away--that little badger-pye b.i.t.c.h we got last week--I 'ad to give 'er a bit of a 'iding--she tried to run a sheep when we was walkin' out last evening--she's a revengeful sort, she is, and very artful, and when we gets near kennels, her took an' bolted past Jimmy over the 'ill, an' I says to Jimmy, 'Why you fool' I says--"

The tale continued at length, and with those repet.i.tions and recapitulations peculiar to the simple, but by no means short annals of the poor, and especially of the English poor. Yet, Christian, the impatient, the ardent, stood and listened with respectful and absorbed interest. Cottingham might be elderly, egotistic, long-winded, but at this period of her career, Christian's hot heart beat throb for throb with his, and the thought, as he said, of "that pore little b.i.t.c.h stoppin' out, and maybe spoilt, so that there'd be nothin' for us but to shoot her, through learnin' to run sheep," had precisely the same horror for her as for him.

"I couldn't, so to speak, lay me 'and on 'er now; her wouldn't let me go anear 'er, nor she wouldn't let Jimmy neither, but she ain't far away, and she'd 'ave what I might call cawnfidence in you, Missie--"

Cottingham had at length concluded: "Her's that sly we mightn't never see 'er again! But you take and go up that 'ill, Missie, that's where I seen 'er last, I'll lay you get 'er if anyone can!"

Christian, "still," as Rossetti says, "with the whole of pleasure,"

received these instructions reverently, and with the pockets of the kennel-coat further loaded with broken biscuit, "took and went"

according to instructions. She climbed the fence behind the kennels, and addressed herself lightly to the ascent of the hill. It was a long hill, that began with pasture fields, that were merged imperceptibly into moorland, heather and furze. There were sheep, and donkeys and goats on it, and a melancholy old kennel-horse or two, all feeding peacefully. Amazon could not be accused in connection with them, so Christian reflected, and prepared herself to rebut any such slander.

The rain was lighter, and the soaking mist that had all day filled the valley, was slowly thinning, and revealing the mighty scroll of silver that was the river, while the woods and hillsides came and went, illusive as the grey hints of landscape in a j.a.panese water-colour.

But at the mature age of ten years, Christian cared for none of these things. She saw the smoke from the Mount Music kitchen chimney blending bluely with the mist, and thought with a momentary pang of the birthday cake. She wondered if the Companions of Finn would so far forget honour and fidelity as to devour it without her. She thought of the ten candles that would gutter to their end, untended by the heroine of the celebration; she wondered if Cottingham would tell Papa, and if Papa would tell Mother (thus did this child of the 'eighties speak of her parents, the musical abbreviations of a later day, "Mum," and "Dad," not having penetrated the remoteness in which her home was placed); she also wondered if there would be a row about her getting wet. All these things seemed but too probable, but she was in for it now.

Near a ridge of the hill, in one of the shallow valleys that furrowed, like ploughshares, its long slant, there was a dolmen, three huge stones, with a fourth poised on it. Their grey brows rose over the billows of bracken, and briers, laden with the promise of fruit, made garlands for their ancient heads. Christian's straying advance brought her along the lip of the little valley in which they reposed, and quite suddenly there rose in her the conviction that her quest was nearing success. She was of that mysteriously-gifted company to whom the lairs of things lost are revealed. She "found things"; she was "lucky." She was regarded by the servants as one enfolded in the cloak of St. Anthony, that inestimable saint, whose mission it is to find and protect the lost. It had become a household habit to appeal to Christian when one of every day's most common losses occurred. She would hearken; her little thin body would stiffen, like a dog setting his game, a spark would light in her brown eyes, and--how led who can say?--she would fly like a wireless message to the thing sought for.

So it was now, on the furzy side of Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe; she knew that the moment had come. She sat down on a ledge of rock, and waited, throbbing with antic.i.p.ation, and had not long to wait. A brown shadow moved in the bracken near the dolmen, a brown face peered with infinite caution, round a flank of the great stones.

"Yoop! the little b.i.t.c.hie!" said Christian to the horizon. Christian was an apt scholar, and Cottingham's tone and idiom were alike accurately rendered.

The lady thus addressed gazed with a greater intensity, but did not move. Christian took a piece of dog-biscuit from the ragged pocket of the kennel-coat, and, still walking closely in Cottingham's steps, bit it, ate a part of it, and carelessly flung the remainder in the direction of the shadow. This stole forth, and, having snapped up the biscuit, sank back into the covert. Christian did not move.

"Amazon!" she crooned, in tones in which a doting wood-pigeon might apostrophise a sickly fledgling; "Amazon, my darling!"

Another piece of biscuit accompanied the apostrophe, and poor Amazon, who was indeed very lonely and very hungry, capitulated, and came sidling up to the charmer, with propitiatory smiles, and deprecating stern wagging, beneath her, and in advance of her hind legs, instead of above her and behind them.

"'Olding the buckle in the right 'and," said Christian to herself, in faithful quotation from the great ensample, as with a swiftness and decision that were creditable to her training, she put the couples on Amazon.

Then she produced the bone that had been "Dixie's" bright achievement, and it was while, in contentment and friends.h.i.+p, Amazon was crunching it, that Larry Coppinger appeared.

He rose from behind a spur of rock and furze, and came towards Christian.

"Oh, good for you!" he said, admiringly, "I was afraid to show up till you had got her."

Christian was not sure that she was pleased at this intervention.

"How did you know where I was?"

"The servants told me you had gone to the kennels, and Jimmy showed me the hill, and then I spotted your white coat--not that it's so awfully white!--I thought it was rather rotten to let you go alone."

"And why not, pray?" enquired Christian, haughtily. Male a.s.sumption of the duties of guardians.h.i.+p was a thing she found highly offensive; "I always go about alone!"

"Well, I wanted to come, anyway," said Larry, with a placating grin.

"I say, that _is_ an awful nice dog!"

"You never call foxhounds '_dogs_'!" said Christian, still with hauteur; "Larry, you _are_ an owl!"