Further Experiences of an Irish R.M Part 8

"What has happened? Are you hurt?" she panted, speeding to me.

"I am; very much hurt," I said, with what was, I think, justifiable ill-temper, as I got gingerly on to my feet, almost annoyed to find that my leg was not broken.

"But, dearest Sinclair, _has_ he shot you? I got so frightened about you that I bicycled over to-- Ugh! Good gracious!"--as she trod on and into a mound of rabbits--"what are you doing with all these horrible things?"

I looked back in the direction from which I had come, and saw Mrs. Knox advancing along the causeway arm-in-arm with the now inevitable Sullivan (who, it may not be out of place to remind the reader, had come to Aussolas early in the morning, with the pure and single intention of buying apples). In Mrs. Knox's disengaged arm was something that I discerned to be the bottle of potheen, and I instantly resolved to minimise the extent of my injuries. Flurry, and various items of the shooting party, were converging upon us from the wood by as many and various short cuts. "I don't quite know what I am doing with the rabbits," I replied, "but I rather think I'm giving them away."

As I spoke something darted past Mrs. Knox, something that looked like a bundle of rags in a cyclone, but was, as a matter of fact, my faithful water-spaniel, Maria. She came on in zig-zag bounds, in short maniac rushes. Twice she flung herself by the roadside and rolled, driving her snout into the ground like the coulter of a plough. Her eyes were starting from her head, her tail was tucked between her legs.

She bit, and tore frantically with her claws at the solid ice of a puddle.

"She's mad! She's gone mad!" exclaimed Philippa, s.n.a.t.c.hing up as a weapon something that looked like a frying-pan, but was, I believe, the step of the phaeton.

Maria was by this time near enough for me to discern a canary-coloured substance masking her muzzle.

"Yes, she's quite mad," I replied, possessed by a spirit of divination.

"She's been eating the rabbit curry."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chapter IV tailpiece]

V

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

It has not often been my lot to be a.s.sociated with a being of so profound and rooted a pessimism as Michael Leary, Huntsman and Kennelman to Mr. Flurry Knox's Fox-hounds. His att.i.tude was that of the one and only righteous man in a perfidious and dissolute world.

With, perhaps, the exception of Flurry Knox, he believed in no one save himself. I was thoroughly aware of my inadequacy as Deputy-Master, and cherished only a hope that Michael might look upon me as a kind of Parsifal, a fool perhaps, yet at least a "blameless fool"; but during my time of office there were many distressing moments in which I was made to feel not only incapable, but culpable.

Michael was small, sandy, green-eyed, freckled, and, I believe, considerably junior to myself; he neither drank nor smoked, and he had a blistering tongue. I have never tried more sincerely to earn any one's good opinion.

It was a pleasant afternoon towards the middle of December, and I was paying my customary Sunday visit to the kennels to see the hounds fed.

What Michael called "the Throch" was nearly empty; the greedier of the hounds were flitting from place to place in the line, in the undying belief that others were better off than they. I was studying the row of parti-coloured backs, and trying for the fiftieth time to fit each with its name, when I was aware of a most respectable face, with grey whiskers, regarding me from between the bars of the kennel door.

With an effort not inferior to that with which I had just discriminated between Guardsman and General, I recognised my visitor as Mr. Jeremiah Flynn, a farmer, and a cattle dealer on a large scale, with whom I had occasionally done business in a humble way. He was a District Councillor, and a man of substance; he lived twenty miles away, at a place on the coast called Knockeenbwee, in a flat-faced, two-storeyed house of the usual type of hideousness. Once, when an unkind fate had sent me to that region, I had heard the incongruous tinkle of a piano proceeding from Mr. Flynn's mansion, as I drove past fighting an umbrella against the wet wind that swept in from the Atlantic.

"I beg your pardon, Major Yeates," began Mr. Flynn, with an agreeable smile, which I saw in sections between the bars; "I had a little business over this side of the country, and I took the liberty of taking a stroll around to the kennels to see the hounds."

I made haste to extend the hospitality of the feeding-yard to my visitor, who accepted it with equal alacrity, and went on to remark that it was wonderful weather for the time of year. Having obeyed this primary instinct of mankind, Mr. Flynn embarked upon large yet able compliments on the appearance of the hounds. His manners were excellent; sufficiently robust to accord with his grey frieze coat and flat-topped felt hat, and with just the extra touch of deference that expressed his respect for my high qualities and position.

"Ye have them in great form, Michael," he remarked, surveying the hounds' bloated sides with a knowledgeable eye; "and upon me word, there's our own poor Playboy! and a fine dog he is too!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "YE HAVE THEM IN GREAT FORM, MICHAEL"]

"He is; and a fine dog to hunt rabbits!" said Michael, without a relaxation of his drab countenance.

"I daresay, Major, you didn't know that it was in my place that fellow was rared?" continued Mr. Flynn.

Owing to his providentially distinctive colouring of lemon and white, Playboy was one of the hounds about whose ident.i.ty I was never in doubt. I was able to bestow a suitable glance upon him, and to recall the fact of his having come from a trencher-fed pack, of which Mr.

Flynn was the ruling spirit, kept by the farmers in the wildernesses beyond and around Knockeenbwee.

"Ah! Mr. Knox was too smart for us over that hound!" pursued Mr. Flynn pleasantly; "there was a small difference between himself and meself in a matter of a few heifers I was buying off him--a thrifle of fifteen shillings it was, I believe----"

"Five and thirty," said Michael to the lash of his thong, in which he was making a knot.

"And I had to give him the pup before we could come to terms," ended my visitor.

Whether at fifteen or thirty-five shillings Playboy had been a cheap hound. Brief, and chiefly ornamental, as my term of office had been, I had learnt to know his voice in covert, and had learned also to act upon it in moments of solitary and helpless ignorance as to what was happening. This, however, was not the moment to sing his praises; I preserved a careful silence.

"I rared himself and his sister," said Mr. Flynn, patting Playboy heavily, "but the sister died on me. I think 'twas from all she fretted after the brother when he went, and 'twas a pity. Those two had the old Irish breed in them; sure you'd know it by the colour, and there's no more of them now in the country only the mother, and she had a right to be shot this long time."

"Come hounds," said Michael, interrupting this rhapsody, "open the door, Bat."

The pack swept out of the feeding-yard and were away on their wonted const.i.tutional in half a minute.

"Grand training, grand training!" said Mr. Flynn admiringly, "they're a credit to you, Major! It's impossible to have hounds anyway disciplined running wild through the country the way our little pack is. Indeed it came into my mind on the way here to try could I coax you to come over and give us a day's hunting. We're destroyed with foxes. Such marauding I never saw! As for turkeys and fowl, they're tired of them, and it's my lambs they'll be after next!"

The moment of large and general acquiescence in Mr. Flynn's proposal narrowed itself by imperceptible degrees to the moment, not properly realised till it arrived, the horrid moment of getting up at a quarter to seven on a December morning, in order to catch the early train for Knockeenbwee.

In the belief that I was acting in the interest of sport I had announced at the last meet that there was to be a by-day at Knockeenbwee. To say that the fact was received without enthusiasm is to put it mildly. I was a.s.sured by one authority that I should have to hunt the hounds from a steam launch; another, more sympathetic, promised a drag, but tempered the encouragement by saying that the walls there were all made of slates, and that by the end of the run the skin would be hanging off the horses' legs like the skins of bananas.

Nothing short of a heart-to-heart appeal to my Whip, Dr. Jerome Hickey, induced him to promise his support. Michael, from first to last, remained an impenetrable thunder-cloud. The die, however, was cast, and the hospitality of Mr. Flynn accepted. The eve of the by-day arrived, and the Thundercloud and the hounds were sent on by road to Knockeenbwee, accompanied by my ancient ally Slipper, who led my mare, and rode Philippa's pony, which had been commandeered for the occasion.

Next morning at 9.45 A.M. the train stopped by signal at the flag-station of Moyny, a cheerless strip of platform, from which a dead straight road retreated to infinity across a bog. An out side car was being backed hard into the wall of the road by a long, scared rag of a chestnut horse as Dr. Hickey and I emerged from the station, and its driver was composing its anxieties as to the nature of trains by beating it in the face with his whip. This, we were informed, was Mr.

Flynn's equipage, and, at a favourable moment in the conflict, Dr.

Hickey and I mounted it.

"It's seldom the thrain stands here," said the driver apologetically, as we started at a strong canter, "and this one's very frightful always."

The bog ditches fleeted by at some twelve miles an hour; they were the softest, blackest, and deepest that I have ever seen, and I thanked heaven that I was not in my red coat.

"I suppose you never met the Miss Flynns?" murmured Dr. Hickey to me across the well of the car.

I replied in the negative.

"Oh, they're very grand," went on my companion, with a wary eye on the humped back of the driver, "I believe they never put their foot outside the door unless they're going to Paris. Their father told me last week that lords in the streets of Cork were asking who they were."

"I suppose that was on their way to Paris," I suggested.

"It was not," said the driver, with stunning unexpectedness, "'twas when they went up on th'excursion last month for to have their teeth pulled. G'wout o' that!" This to the horse, who had shied heavily at a goat.

Dr. Hickey and I sank into a stricken silence, five minutes of which, at the pace we were travelling, sufficed to bring us to a little plantation, shorn and bent by the Atlantic wind, low whitewashed walls, an economical sweep of gravel, and an entrance gate constructed to fit an outside car to an inch. From the moment that these came within the range of vision the driver beat the horse with the handle of his whip, a prelude, as we discovered, to the fact that a minor gate, obviously and invitingly leading to the yard, lolled open on one hinge at the outset of the plantation. There was a brief dissension, followed by a hand gallop to the more fitting entrance; that we should find it too fitting was a foregone conclusion, and Dr. Hickey whirled his legs on to the seat at the moment when impact between his side of the car and the gate post became inevitable. The bang that followed was a hearty one, and the driver transmitted it to me in great perfection with his elbow as he lurched on to me; there was a second and hollower bang as the well of the car, detached by the shock, dropped on the axle and turned over, flinging from it in its somersault a harlequinade a.s.sortment of herrings, loaves of bread, and a band box. It was, I think, a loaf of bread that hit the horse on the hocks, but under all the circ.u.mstances even a herring would have been ample excuse for the two sledge hammer kicks which he instantly administered to the foot-board. While the car still hung in the gateway, a donkey, with a boy sitting on the far end of its back, was suddenly mingled with the episode. The boy was off the donkey's back and the driver was off mine at apparently one and the same moment, and the car was somehow backed off the pillar; as we sc.r.a.ped through the boy said something to the driver in a brogue that was a shade more sophisticated than the peasant tune. It seemed to me to convey the facts that Miss Lynie was waiting for her hat, and that Maggie Kane was dancing mad for the soft sugar.

We proceeded to the house, leaving the ground strewn with what appeared to be the elemental stage of a picnic.

"I suppose you're getting him into form for the hunt, Eugene?" said Dr.

Hickey, as the lathered and panting chestnut came to a stand some ten yards beyond the hall door.

"Well, indeed, we thought it no harm to loosen him under the car before Master Eddy went riding him," replied Eugene, "and begannies I'm not done with him yet! I have to be before the masther at the next thrain."