In Mr. Knox's Country Part 28

It was warm and sunny in the shelter of the wood. Although the time was November there were still green leaves on some of the trees; it was a steamy day after a wet night, and I thought to myself that if the hounds _did_ run--Here came a challenge from the wood, answered mult.i.tudinously, and the next minute they were driving through the laurels towards the entrance gates, with a cry that stimulated even the many-wintered Daniel to capers quite unbefitting his time of life, or mine. The Castle Knox demesne is a large one, and being surrounded by a prohibitively high and coped wall, it is easier to find a fox there than to get away with one. Mighty galloping on the avenues followed, with interludes in the big demesne fields, where every gate had been considerately left open, and in which every horse with any pretensions to _savoir faire_ stiffened his neck, and put up his back, and pulled.

The hounds, a choir invisible, carried their music on through the plantations, with whimpering, scurrying pauses, with strophe and anti-strophe of soprano and ba.s.s. Sometimes the cry bore away to the demesne wall, and some one would shout "They're away!" and the question of the Front Gate versus the Western Gate would divide us like a sword.

Twice, in the undergrowth, above the sunk fence that separated us from the wood, the quick, composed face of the fox showed itself; at last, when things were getting too hot in the covert, he sprang like a cat over the ditch, and flitted across the park with that gliding gait that dissimulates its own speed, while I and my fellows offered a painful example of the discordance of the human voice when compared with that of the hound, and five or six couple pitched themselves out of the wood and stretched away over the gra.s.s.

It was fortunate for the Comte de Pralines that his entirely British view-holloa was projected for the most part into my ear (the drum of which it nearly split) and was merged in the general enthusiasm as we let ourselves go.

"For G.o.d's sake, Major Yeates!" said Michael, the Second Whip, thundering up beside me as we neared the covert on the further side of the park, "come into the wood with me and turn them hounds! Mr.

Flurry's back on another fox with the body of the pack, and he's very near his curse!"

I followed Michael into the covert, and was myself followed by a section of the Field, who might, with great advantage, have remained outside. In the twinkling of an eye Michael was absorbed into the depths of the wood; so also were the six couple, but not so my retinue, who pursued me like sleuth-hounds, as I traversed the covert at such speed as the narrow rides permitted. I made at length the negative discovery that it contained nothing save myself and my followers, a select party, consisting of the Comte de Pralines, Miss McRory, Miss Bobbie Bennett, Lady Knox's coachman on a three-year-old, and a little boy in knickerbockers, on a midget pony with the bearing of a war-horse and a soul to match. We had come to a baffled pause at the cross-ways, when faint and far away, an indisputable holloa was borne to us.

"They've gone out the West Gate," said the coachman, from among the tree-trunks into which he had considerately manoeuvred the kicking end of the three-year-old. "It must be they ran him straight out into the country----"

We made for the West Gate, reached it without sight or sound of Flurry or anyone else, and, on the farm road outside it, pulled up to listen.

The holloa was repeated; half a mile ahead a gesticulating figure signalled to us to come on. I wish to put it on record that I said I could not hear the hounds. The Comte de Pralines (excitable, like all Frenchmen) spurred his hireling at the opposite bank, saying, as he shot past me:

"It's no d.a.m.ned use humbugging here any longer!"

As I turned Daniel to follow him, my eyes met those of Miss Larkie McRory, alight with infernal intelligence; they challenged, but at the same time they offered confederacy. I jumped into the field after the Count; Miss McRory followed.

"I'll tell Lady Knox on you!" she murmured, as she pounded beside me on the long-legged spectre, who, it may be remembered, had been described as "the latther end of a car-horse."

The holloa had come to us from the side of a smooth green hill, and between us and it was a shallow valley, neatly fenced with banks that did credit to Sir Valentine Knox's farming. The horses were fresh, the valley smiled in the conventional way, and spread sleek pastures before us; we took the down grade at a cheerful pace, and the banks a shade faster than was orthodox, and the coachman's three-year-old made up in enthusiasm what he lacked in skill, and the pony, who from the first was running away, got over everything by methods known only to itself.

The Comte de Pralines held an undeviating line for the spot whence the holloa had proceeded; when we reached it there was no one to be seen, but there was another holloa further on. The pursuit of this took us on to a road, and here the Castle Knox coachman, who had scouted on ahead, yelled something to the effect that he saw a rider out before him, accompanying the statement by an application of the spurs to the dripping but undaunted three-year-old. A stretching gallop up the road ensued, headed by the little boy and the coachman, who had both secured a commanding lead. The pace held for about a hundred yards, when the road bent sharply to the left, more sharply indeed than was antic.i.p.ated by the leaders, who, as their mounts skidded as it were on one wheel round the corner, sailed from their saddles with singular unanimity and landed in the ditch. At the same moment the rider we had been following came into view; he was a priest, in immaculate black coat and top-hat, seated on a tall chestnut horse, and proceeding at a tranquil footpace on his own affairs.

He had seen the fox, he admitted (I am inclined to think he had headed him), and he had heard a man shouting, but no hounds had come his way.

He was entirely sympathetic, and, warm as I was at the moment, a chill apprehension warned me that we might presently need sympathy.

"It's my belief," said Miss Bennett, voicing that which I had not put into words, "we've been riding after the fox, and the hounds didn't leave the covert at all!"

An elaborate French oath from the Count fell, theatrical as a drop-scene, on the close of the first act. Miss Larkie McRory looked at him admiringly, and allowed just the last rays of her glance to include me.

It was when we had retraced our steps to the bend of the road that we had a full view of the Castle Knox coverts, crowning in gold and brown those pleasant green slopes, easy as the descent to Avernus, down which we had galloped with such generous ardour some fifteen minutes ago.

Outside the West Gate, through which we had emerged from the demesne, were three motionless figures in scarlet; Lady Knox and her grey horse were also recognisable; a few hounds were straying undecidedly in the first of the gra.s.s fields that we had traversed.

A note of the horn leaped to us across the valley, an angry and peremptory note. One of the scarlet figures started at a canter and turned the hounds. Another and longer blast followed. As if in obedience to its summoning, the coachman's three-year-old came ramping, riderless, down the road; he pa.s.sed us with his head high in air and his flas.h.i.+ng eye fixed upon the distant group, and, with a long shrill neigh, put his tail over his back and directed his flight for his owner and her grey horse.

"G.o.d help poor Tierney!" said Miss Bennett, in a stricken voice, "and ourselves too! I believe they saw us all the time, and we galloping away on the line of the fox!"

"I'm going home," I said. "Will you kindly make my apologies to the Master?"

"I'll kindly do no such thing," replied Miss Bennett. "I'll let Flurry Knox cool off a bit before I meet him again, and that won't be this side of Christmas, if _I_ can help it! Good-bye, dear friends!"

She turned her mare, and set her face for her own country.

There now remained only the Count, Miss McRory, and myself, and to remove ourselves from the field of vision of the party at the gate was our first care. We had, no doubt, been thoroughly identified, nevertheless the immediate sensation of getting a furzy hill between us and Flurry was akin to that of escaping from the rays of a burning-gla.s.s. In shelter we paused and surveyed each other.

The Comte de Pralines, with his s.h.i.+ny hat very much on the back of his head, put down his reins, shoved his crop under his knee, and got out his cigarette case.

"Well," he began philosophically, striking a match, "our luck ain't in----!"

He broke off, the match went out, and a lively glow suffused his unsheltered countenance.

"_Vous voyez mon cher--_" he resumed, very rapidly. "_J'ai appris quelques pet.i.ts mots----_"

"What a lovely English accent he has!" interrupted Miss McRory rapturously; "it's a lot nicer than his French one. To look at him you'd never think he was so clever. It's a pity he wouldn't try to pick up a little more."

"Now, that's. .h.i.tting a man when he's down," said the Comte de Pralines.

"I want some one to be kind to me. I've had a poor day of it; no one would talk to me. I stampeded them wherever I went."

"I didn't notice Miss McRory stampeding to any great extent," I said.

"Wait awhile!" rejoined Miss McRory. "Maybe the stampeding will be going the other way when you and he meet Lady Knox!"

"I shan't wait an instant," said the Comte de Pralines, "you and Major Yeates will explain."

The horses had been moving on, and the covert was again in sight, about a quarter of a mile away on our left. There was nothing to be seen, but hounds were hunting again in the demesne; their cry drove on through the woods inside the grey demesne wall; they were hunting in a body, and they were hunting hard.

At each moment the cry was becoming more remote, but it was still travelling on inside the wall. The fear of Flurry fell from us as a garment, and the only question that presented itself was whether to return to the West Gate or to hold on outside. It was a long-accepted theory at Castle Knox that the demesne wall was not negotiable, and that the foxes always used the gates, like Christians; bearing this in mind, I counselled the Front Gate and the outside of the wall. A couple of lanes favoured us; we presently found ourselves in a series of marshy fields, moving along abreast of the invisible hounds in the wood. They were in the thickest and least accessible part of it, and Flurry's voice and horn came faintly as from a distance.

I explained that it was impossible to ride that part of the wood, but that, if they held on as they were going, the Front Gate would make it all right for us, and of course Flurry would----

"Oh! look, look, look!" shrieked Miss McRory, s.n.a.t.c.hing at my arm and pointing with her whip.

A short way ahead of us a huge elm tree had fallen upon the wall; the greenish-yellow leaves still clinging to its branches showed that the catastrophe was recent. It had broken down the wall to within five or six feet of the ground, and was reclining in the breach that it had made, with its branches sprawling in the field. I followed the line of Miss Larkie's whip, and was just in time to see a fox float like a red leaf from one of these to the ground, and glide straight across our front. He pa.s.sed out of sight over a bank, and the Count stood up in his stirrups, put his finger in his ear, and screamed in a way that must have been heard in the next county. I contributed a not ineffective bellow, and Miss McRory decorated the occasion with long thin squeals.

The hounds, inside the wall, answered in an agony that was only allayed by the discovery that the trunk of the tree formed as handy a bridge for them as for the fox. They came dropping like ripe fruit through the branches, and, under our rejoicing eyes, swarmed to the fox's line, and flung on, in the fullest of full-cry, over the bank on which we had last seen him. I have not failed to a.s.sure Flurry Knox that anything less suggestive of "sneaking away with the hounds" than the manner of our departure could hardly be conceived, but Mr. Knox has not withdrawn the phrase.

It may be conceded that Flurry had grounds for annoyance. Had I had the fox in one hand and the Ordnance Map in the other, I could hardly have improved on the course steered by our pilot. Up hill for a bit, when the horses were fresh, with gradients just steep enough to temper Daniel's well-sustained tug of war, yet not so steep as to make a three-foot bank look like a house, or to guarantee a big knee at each "stone gap." Then high and dry country, with sheep huddled in defensive positions in the corners of the fields, and gra.s.s like a series of putting-greens, minus the holes, and fat, comely banks, and thin walls, from which the small round stones rattled harmlessly as Miss McRory's car-horse swept through them. Down into a long valley, with little sky-blue lakes, set in yellow sedge; and there was a helpful bog road there, that nicked nicely with the bending line of the hounds through the accompanying bog, and allayed a spasm of acute anxiety as to whether we should ever get near them again. Then upwards once more, deviously, through rougher going, with patches of low-growing furze sprouting from blackened tracts where the hillside had been set on fire, with the hounds coming to their noses among brakes of briars and bracken; finally, in the wind and sun of the hill-top, a well-timed check.

We looked back for the first time, half in fear that we might find Flurry hot on our track, half in hope that he and his horn were coming to our help; but neither in the green country nor in the brown valley was there any sign or sound of him. There was nothing to be seen but a couple of men standing on a fence to watch us, nothing to be heard except cur dogs vociferating at every cottage.

"Fifteen couple on," said the Count professionally. "How many does Knox usually have out?"

"All he's got," I said, mopping my brow.

"I don't see the two that have no hair on their backs," said Miss McRory, whose eyes, much enhanced by the radiant carmine of her cheeks, beamed at us through wisps and loops of hair. "I know them, they're always scratching, the poor things!"

That Miss McRory and her steed kept, as they did, their place in what is known to history as the Great Castle Knox Run, is a matter that I do not pretend to explain. Some antiquarian has unearthed the fact that the car-horse had three strains of breeding, and had twice been second in a Point-to-Point; but I maintain that credit must be ascribed to Miss Larkie, about whom there is something inevitable; some street-boy quality of being in the movement.

We were now on a heathery table-land, with patches of splashy, rushy ground, from which the snipe flickered out as the hounds cast themselves through it. Presently, on the top of a hard, peaty bank, a hound spoke, hesitatingly, yet hopefully, and plunged down on the other side; the pack crowded over, and drove on through the heather. Daniel changed feet on a mat of ling with a large stone in it, and therefrom ramped carefully out over a deep cut in the peat, unforeseen, and masked by tufts of heather. The hireling of the Comte de Pralines had, up to this, done his work blamelessly, if without originality; he had an anxiousness to oblige that had been matured during a dread winter when he had been the joint property of three subalterns, but he reserved to himself a determination to drop economically off his banks, and boggy slits were not in his list of possibilities.

How the matter occurred I do not know, but, when I looked round, his head alone was visible, and the Count was standing on his in the heather. Miss McRory's car-horse, who had pulled up in the act of following the Count, with a suddenness acquired, no doubt, in the shafts of a Cork covered-car, was viewing the scene with horror from the summit of the bank. The hounds were by this time clear of the heather, and were beginning to run hard; it was not until I was on the further side of the next bank that I cast another fleeting look back; this time the Count was standing on his feet, but the hireling was still engulfed, and Miss McRory was still on the wrong side of the slit. After that I forgot them, wholly and heartlessly, as is invariable in such cases.

As a matter of fact, I had no attention to spare for anyone but myself, even though we went, for the first twenty minutes or so, as on rubber tyres, through bland dairy farms wherein the sweet influences of the dairy-cow had induced gaps in every fence, and gates into every road.

The scent, mercifully for Daniel, was not quite what it had been; the fox had run through cattle, and also through goats (a small and odorous party, on whose behalf, indeed, some slight intervention on my part was required), and it was here, when crossing a road, that a donkey and her foal, moved by some mysterious attraction akin to love at first sight, attached themselves to me. Undeterred by the fact that the mother's foreleg was fettered to her hind, the pair sped from field to field in my wake; at the checks, which just then were frequent, they brayed enthusiastically. I thought to elude them at a steep drop into a road, but they toboganned down it without an effort; when they overtook me the fetter-chain was broken, and clanked from the mother's hind-leg as if she were a family ghost.

There came at length a moment, outside a farm-house, when it seemed as if the fox had beaten us. Here, on the farther side of Castle Knox, I was well out of my own country, and what the fox's point might be was represented by the letter X. Nevertheless it was here that I lifted the hounds and brought off the cast of a life-time; I am inclined to think that he had lain down under a hayrick and was warned of our approach by the voices of my attendant jacka.s.ses; my cast was probably not much more of a fluke than such inspirations usually are, but the luck was with me. Old Playboy, sole relic of my deputy Masters.h.i.+p, lifted his white head and endorsed my suggestion with a single ba.s.s note; Rally, Philippa's prize puppy, uttered a soprano cadenza, and the pack suddenly slid away over the pasture fields, with the smoothness and unanimity of the _Pet.i.ts Chevaux_ over their green cloth.