All on the Irish Shore Part 10

"I!" he stammered, "not care to speak to _you_! You ought to know--"

"Yes, indeed, I do know!" broke in f.a.n.n.y, pa.s.sing from the frigid to the torrid zone with characteristic speed, "I know what a _failure_ your horse-dealing at the Dublin Show was! I've heard how you bought my mare, and had her shot the same night, because you wouldn't take the trouble even to go and look at her after the poor little thing was hurt! Oh! I can't bear even to _think_ of it!"

Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.

"And then," continued f.a.n.n.y, whirling on to the final point of her indictment, "you pretended to Captain Carteret and me that the horse you had bought was 'a common brute,' _a cob for carting_, and you said the other night that you had made a fool of yourself over it! I didn't know then all about it, but I do now. Captain Carteret heard about it from the dealer in Dublin. Even the dealer said it was a pity you hadn't given the mare a chance!"

"It's all perfectly true," said Rupert, in a low voice.

A soft answer, so far from turning away wrath, frequently inflames it.

"Then I think there's no more to be said!" said f.a.n.n.y hotly.

There was silence. They had reached the top of the hill, and the grey mare began to trot.

"Well, there's just one thing I should like to say," said Rupert awkwardly, his breath coming very short, "I couldn't help everything going wrong about the mare. It was just my bad luck. I only bought her to please you. They told me she couldn't get right after the accident.

What was the good of my going to look at her? I wanted to cross in the boat with you. Whatever I did I did for you. I would do anything in the world for you--"

It was at this crucial moment that there arose suddenly from the dim grey road in front of them a slightly greyer shadow, a shadow that limped amid the clanking of chains. The Connemara mare, now masquerading as a County Cork cob, asked for nothing better. If it were a ghost, she was legitimately ent.i.tled to flee from it; if, as was indeed the case, it was a donkey, she made a point of shying at donkeys. She realised that, by a singular stroke of good fortune, the reins were lying in loops on her back.

A snort, a sideways bound, a couple of gleeful kicks on the dashboard, and she was away at full gallop, with one rein under her tail, and a pleasant open road before her.

"It's all right!" said Rupert, recovering his balance by a hair-breadth, and feeling in his heart that it was all wrong, "the Craffroe Hill will stop her. Hold on to the rail."

f.a.n.n.y said nothing. It was, indeed, all that she could do to keep her seat in the trap, with which the rus.h.i.+ng road was playing cup and ball; she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in emergencies. When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare, is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse than useless. Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.

It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight. At its foot another road forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the gra.s.s, and the cus.h.i.+ons slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself that they were in for a bad business.

For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare's grasping stride. The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and f.a.n.n.y Fitz was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning's lap. Long briars and twigs struck them from either side, the trap b.u.mped in craggy ruts and slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.

Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, f.a.n.n.y found herself on her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot, having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.

f.a.n.n.y was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt, but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her tightened its clasp in silence. When a man is strongly moved by tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known; he need not--it is known beyond all telling by the one other person whom it concerns. She felt suddenly that she was safe, that his heart was torn for her sake, and that the tension of the last ten minutes had been great. It went through her with a pang, and her head swayed against his arm. In a moment she felt his lips on her hair, on her temple, and the oldest, the most familiar of all words of endearment was spoken at her ear. She recovered herself, but in a new world. She tried to walk on up the lane, but stumbled in the deep ruts and found the supporting arm again ready at need. She did not resist it.

A shrill neigh arose in front of them. The mare had pulled up at a closed gate, and was apparently apostrophising some low farm buildings beyond it. A dog barked hysterically, the door of a cowshed burst open, and a man came out with a lantern.

"Oh, I know now where we are!" cried f.a.n.n.y wildly, "it's Johnny Connolly's! Oh, Johnny, Johnny Connolly, we've been run away with!"

"For G.o.d's sake!" responded Johnny Connolly, standing stock still in his amazement, "is that Miss f.a.n.n.y?"

"Get hold of the mare," shouted Rupert, "or she'll jump the gate!"

Johnny Connolly advanced, still calling upon his G.o.d, and the mare uttered a low but vehement neigh.

"Ye're deshtroyed, Miss f.a.n.n.y! And Mr. Gunning, the Lord save us! Ye're killed the two o' ye! What happened ye at all? Woa, gerr'l, woa, gerrlie! Ye'd say she knew me, the crayture."

The mare was rubbing her dripping face and neck against the farmer's shoulder, with hoa.r.s.e whispering snorts of recognition and pleasure. He held his lantern high to look at her.

"Musha, why wouldn't she know me!" he roared, "sure it's yer own mare, Miss f.a.n.n.y! 'Tis the Connemara mare I thrained for ye! And may the divil sweep and roast thim that has it told through all the counthry that she was killed!"

A GRAND FILLY

I am an Englishman. I say this without either truculence or vainglorying, rather with humility--a mere Englishman, who submits his Plain Tale from the Western Hills with the conviction that the Kelt who may read it will think him more mere than ever.

I was in Yorks.h.i.+re last season when what is trivially called "the cold snap" came upon us. I had five horses eating themselves silly all the time, and I am not going to speak of it. I don't consider it a subject to be treated lightly. It was in about the thickest of it that I heard from a man I know in Ireland. He is a little old horse-coping sportsman with a red face and iron-grey whiskers, who has kept hounds all his life; or, rather, he has always had hounds about, on much the same conditions that other men have rats. The rats are indubitably there, and feed themselves variously, and so do old Robert Trinder's "Rioters,"

which is their _nom de guerre_ in the County Corkerry (the few who know anything of the map of Ireland may possibly identify the two counties buried in this cryptogram).

I meet old Robert most years at the Dublin Horse Show, and every now and then he has sold me a pretty good horse, so when he wrote and renewed a standing invitation, a.s.suring me that there was open weather, and that he had a grand four-year-old filly to sell, I took him at his word, and started at once. The journey lasted for twenty-eight hours, going hard all the time, and during the last three of them there were no foot-warmers and the cus.h.i.+ons became like stones enveloped in mustard plasters. Old Trinder had not sent to the station for me, and it was pelting rain, so I had to drive seven miles in a thing that only exists south of the Limerick Junction, and is called a "jingle". A jingle is a square box of painted canvas with no back to it, because, as was luminously explained to me, you must have some way to get into it, and I had to sit sideways in it, with my portmanteau bucking like a three-year-old on the seat opposite to me. It fell out on the road twice going uphill. After the second fall my hair tonic slowly oozed forth from the seams, and added a fresh ingredient to the smells of the grimy cus.h.i.+ons and the damp hay that furnished the machine. My hair tonic costs eight-and-sixpence a bottle.

There is probably not in the United Kingdom a worse-planned entrance gate than Robert Trinder's. You come at it obliquely on the side of a crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either side of the driver's legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly better in large red letters at the top of old Robert's notepaper than it did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards against the flight of steps, I heard through the open door a loud and piercing yell; following on it came the thunder of many feet, and the next instant a hound bolted down the steps with a large plucked turkey in its mouth.

Close in its wake fled a brace of puppies, and behind them, variously armed, pursued what appeared to be the staff of Lisangle House. They went past me in full cry, leaving a general impression of dirty ap.r.o.ns, flying hair, and onions, and I feel sure that there were bare feet somewhere in it. My carman leaped from his perch and joined in the chase, and the whole party swept from my astonished gaze round or into a clump of bushes. At this juncture I was not sorry to hear Robert Trinder's voice greeting me as if nothing unusual were occurring.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT'S AUNT]

"Upon me honour, it's the Captain! You're welcome, sir, you're welcome!

Come in, come in, don't mind the horse at all; he'll eat the gra.s.s there as he's done many a time before! When the gerr'ls have old Amazon cot they'll bring in your things."

(Perhaps I ought to mention at once that Mr. Trinder belongs to the cla.s.s who are known in Ireland as "Half-sirs". You couldn't say he was a gentleman, and he himself wouldn't have tried to say so. But, as a matter of fact, I have seen worse imitations.)

Robert was delighted to see me, and I had had a whisky-and-soda and been shown two or three more hound puppies before it occurred to him to introduce me to his aunt. I had not expected an aunt, as Robert is well on the heavenward side of sixty; but there she was: she made me think of a badly preserved Egyptian mummy with a brogue. I am always a little afraid of my hostess, but there was something about Robert's aunt that made me know I was a worm. She came down to dinner in a bonnet and black kid gloves--a circ.u.mstance that alone was awe-inspiring. She sat entrenched at the head of the table behind an enormous dish of thickly jacketed potatoes, and, though she scorned to speak to Robert or me, she kept up a sort of whispered wrangle with the parlour-maid all the time.

The latter's red hair hung down over her shoulders--and at intervals over mine also--in horrible luxuriance, and recalled the leading figure in the pursuit of Amazon; there was, moreover, something about the heavy boots in which she tramped round the table that suggested that Amazon had sought sanctuary in the cow-house. I have done some roughing it in my time, and I am not over-particular, but I admit that it was rather a shock to meet the turkey itself again, more especially as it was the sole item of the _menu_. There was no doubt of its ident.i.ty, as it was short of a leg, and half the breast had been shaved away. The aunt must have read my thoughts in my face. She fixed her small implacable eyes on mine for one quelling instant, then she looked at Robert. Her nephew was obviously afraid to meet her eye; he coughed uneasily, and handed a surrept.i.tious potato to the puppy who was sitting under his chair.

"This place is rotten with dogs," said the aunt; with which announcement she retired from the conversation, and fell again to the slaughter of the parlour-maid. I timidly ate my portion of turkey and tried not to think about the cow-house.

It rained all night. I could hear the water hammering into something that rang like a gong; and each time I rolled over in the musty trough of my feather-bed I fractiously asked myself why the mischief they had left the tap running all night. Next morning the matter was explained when, on demanding a bath, I was told that "there wasn't but one in the house, and 'twas undher the rain-down. But sure ye can have it," with which it was dragged in full of dirty water and flakes of whitewash, and when I got out of it I felt as if I had been through the Bankruptcy Court.

The day was windy and misty--a combination of weather possible only in Ireland--but there was no snow, and Robert Trinder, seated at breakfast in a purple-red hunting coat, dingy drab breeches, and woollen socks, a.s.sured me that it was turning out a grand morning.

I distinctly liked the looks of my mount when Jerry the Whip pulled her out of the stable for me. She was big and brown, with hindquarters that looked like jumping; she was also very dirty and obviously underfed.

None the less she was lively enough, and justified Jerry's prediction that "she'd be apt to shake a couple or three bucks out of herself when she'd see the hounds". Old Robert was on an ugly brute of a yellow horse, rather like a big mule, who began the day by bucking out of the yard gate as if he had been trained by Buffalo Bill. It was at this juncture that I first really respected Robert Trinder; his retention of his seat was so unstudied, and his command of appropriate epithets so complete.

Jerry and the hounds awaited us on the road, the latter as mixed a party as I have ever come across. There were about fourteen couple in all, and they ranged in style from a short-legged black-and-tan harrier, who had undoubtedly had an uncle who was a dachshund, to a thing with a head like a greyhound, a snow-white body, and a feathered stern that would have been a credit to a setter. In between these extremes came several broken-haired Welshmen, some dilapidated 24-inch foxhounds, and a lot of pale-coloured hounds, whose general effect was that of the tablecloth on which we had eaten our breakfast that morning, being dirty white, covered with stains that looked like either tea or egg, or both.

"Them's the old Irish breed," said Robert, as the yellow horse voluntarily stopped short to avoid stepping on one of them; "there's no better. That Gayla.s.s there would take a line up Patrick Street on a fair day, and you'd live and die seeing her kill rats."

I am bound to say I thought it more likely that I should live to see her and some of her relations killing sheep, judging by their manners along the road; but we got to Letter cross-roads at last with no more than an old hen and a wandering cur dog on our collective consciences. The road and its adjacent fences were thronged with foot people, mostly strapping young men and boys, in the white flannel coats and slouched felt hats that strike a stranger with their unusualness and picturesqueness.

"Do you ever have a row with Land Leaguers?" I asked, noting their sticks, while the warnings of a sentimental Radical friend as to the danger of encountering an infuriated Irish peasantry suddenly a.s.sumed plausibility.

"Land League? The dear help ye! Who'd be bothered with the Land League here?" said Robert, shoving the yellow horse into the crowd; "let the hounds through, boys, can't ye? No, Captain, but 'tis Saint November's Day, as they call it, a great holiday, and there isn't a ruffian in the country but has come out with his blagyard dog to head the fox!"

A grin of guilt pa.s.sed over the faces of the audience.

"There's plinty foxes in the hill, Mr. Thrinder," shouted one of them; "Dan Murphy says there isn't a morning but he'd see six or eight o' them hoppin' there."