In Mr. Knox's Country Part 3

"I will, ma'am," murmured the being, advancing with an apologetic eye upon me, and an undulating gait suggestive of a succession of incipient curtsies.

She was carrying an armful of logs, and, having stacked them on the fire in a heap calculated to set alight any chimney less roomy than the Severn Tunnel, she retired by way of the open hall door with the same deferential stealth with which she had entered.

"The hen-woman," explained Mrs. Knox casually, "the only person in this place who knows a dry log from a wet one."

Like all successful rulers, Mrs. Knox had the power of divining in her underlings their special gifts, and of wresting them to the sphere in which they shone, no matter what their normal functions might be. She herself pervaded all spheres.

"There's no pie but my grandmother has a finger in it," was Flurry Knox's epitome of these high qualities; a sour tribute from one freebooter to another.

"If the Mistress want a thing she mus' have it!" was the comment of John Kane, the gamekeeper, as he threw down the spade with which he was digging out a ferret, and armed himself with a holly-bush wherewith to sweep the drawing-room chimney.

As Mrs. Knox and I sat by the hen-woman's n.o.ble fire, and gossiped, the cook panted in with the tea-tray; the butler, it appeared, had gone out to shoot a rabbit for dinner. All these things pointed to the fact that Mrs. Knox's granddaughter-in-law, Mrs. Flurry, was not, at the moment, in residence at Aussolas. The Jungle was creeping in; Sally Knox, by virtue, I suppose, of her English mother, spasmodically endeavoured to keep it out, but with her departure the Wild triumphed.

It was an October afternoon, grey and still; the hall door stood open, as indeed it always did at Aussolas, and on the topmost of the broad limestone steps Mrs. Knox's white woolly dog sat, and magisterially regarded lake and wood and lawn. The tawny bracken flowed like a sea to the palings that bounded the lawn; along its verge squatted the rabbits, motionless for the most part, sometimes languidly changing their ground, with hops like the dying efforts of a mechanical toy.

The woolly dog had evidently learned in many fruitless charges the futility of frontal attack; a close and menacing supervision from the alt.i.tude of the steps was all that was consistent with dignity, but an occasional strong shudder betrayed his emotion. The open door framed also a pleasing view of my new car, standing in beautiful repose at the foot of the steps, splashed with the mud of a twenty-mile run from an outlying Petty Sessions Court; her presence added, for me, the touch of romance.

It was twilight in the back of the hall by the fireplace; the flames of the logs, branching like antlers, made a courteous and not too searching inquisition into dark corners, and lighted with a very suitable evasiveness Mrs. Knox's Witch of Endor profile. She wore her usual velvet bonnet; the rest of her attire recalled to my memory the summary of it by her kinswoman, Lady Knox, "A rag bag held together by diamond brooches." Yet, according to her wont, her personality was the only thing that counted; it reduced all externals to a proper insignificance.

The object of my visit had ostensibly been to see her grandson, but Flurry was away for the night.

"He's sleeping at Tory Lodge," said Mrs. Knox. "He's cubbing at Drumvoortneen, and he has to start early. He tried to torment me into allowing him to keep the hounds in the yard here this season, but I had the pleasure of telling him that old as I might be, I still retained possession of my hearing, my sense of smell, and, to a certain extent, of my wits."

"I should have thought," I said discreetly, "that Tory Lodge was more in the middle of his country."

"Undoubtedly," replied Flurry's grandmother; "but it is not in the middle of my straw, my meal, my b.u.t.termilk, my firewood, and anything else of mine that can be pilfered for the uses of a kennel!" She concluded with a chuckle that might have been uttered by a scald-crow.

I was pondering a diplomatic reply, when the quiet evening was rent by a shrill challenge from the woolly dog.

"Thy sentinel am I!" he vociferated, barking himself backwards into the hall, in proper strategic retreat upon his base.

A slow foot ascended the steps, and the twilight in the hall deepened as a man's figure appeared in the doorway; a middle-aged man, with his hat in one hand, and in the other a thick stick, with which he was making respectfully intimidating demonstrations to the woolly dog.

"Who are you?" called out Mrs. Knox from her big chair.

"I'm Casey, your ladyship," replied the visitor in a deplorable voice, "from Killoge."

"Cornelius Casey?" queried Mrs. Knox.

"No, but his son, your honour ma'am, Stephen Casey, one of the tenants."

"Well, come in, Stephen," said Mrs. Knox affably, supplementing her spectacles with a gold-rimmed single eye-gla.s.s, and looking at him with interest. "I knew your father well in old times, when he used to stop the earths in Killoge Wood for the Colonel. They tell me that's all cut down now?"

"There's not the boiling of a kettle left in it afther Goggin, my lady!" said Casey eagerly. Mrs. Knox cut him short.

"Many a good hunt the Colonel had out of Killoge, and I too, for the matter of that!" she added, turning to me; "my cousin Bessie Hamilton and I were the only huntresses in the country in those days, and people thought us shocking tomboys, I believe. Now, what with driving motors and riding astride, the gentlemen are all ladies, and the ladies are gentlemen!" With another scald-crow chuckle she turned to Casey. "Did your father ever tell you of the great hunt out of Killoge into the Fanaghy cliffs?"

"He did, your ladyship, he did!" responded Casey, with a touch of life in his lamentable voice. "Often he told me that it knocked fire from his eyes to see yourself facing in at the Killoge river."

"I was riding Bijou, the grandmother of old Trinket, in that run," said Mrs. Knox, leaning back in her chair, with a smile that had something of the light of other days in it.

I remembered the story that Colonel Knox had run away with her after a hunt, and wondered if that had been the occasion when she had knocked fire from the eyes of Cornelius Casey.

Her thin old hand drooped in momentary languor over the arm of her chair; and the woolly dog thrust his nose under it, with a beady eye fixed upon the hot cakes.

"Here!" said Mrs. Knox, sitting up, and throwing a b.u.t.tery bun on the floor. "Be off with you! Well, Casey," she went on, "what is it you want with me?"

"Great trouble I got, Mrs. Knox, your honour ma'am," replied Casey from the door-mat, "great trouble entirely." He came a step or two nearer.

He had a long, clean-shaved face, with mournful eyes, like a sick bloodhound, and the enviable, countryman's thatch of thick, strong hair, with scarcely a touch of grey in it.

"That Goggin, that has the shop at Killoge Cross, has me processed.

I'm pairsecuted with him; and the few little bastes I has, and me donkey and all--" his voice thinned to a whimper, "he's to drive them to-morrow----"

"I suppose that's Goggin, the Gombeen?" said Mrs. Knox; "how were you fool enough to get into dealings with him?"

The statement of Casey's wrongs occupied quite ten minutes, and was generous in detail. His land was bad, ever and always. The gra.s.s that was in it was as bare as that you could pick pins in it. He had no pushing land at all for cattle. Didn't he buy a heifer at Scabawn fair and the praisings she got was beyant all raves, and he had her one month, and kinder company he never had, and she giving seven pints at every meal, and wasn't that the divil's own produce? One month, indeed, was all he had her till she got a dropsy, and the dropsy supported her for a while, and when it left her she faded away. And didn't his wife lose all her hens in one week? "They fell dead on her, like hailstones!" He ceased, and a tear wandered down the channels in his long cheek.

"How much do you owe Goggin?" asked Mrs. Knox sharply.

What Casey owed to Goggin had, as might have been expected, but a remote relation to the sum that Goggin was now endeavouring to extract from Casey. At the heart of the transaction was a shop account, complicated by loans of single pounds (and in my mind's eye I could see, and with my mind's nose I could smell, the dirty crumpled notes).

It was further entangled by per-contra accounts of cribs of turf, scores of eggs, and a day's work now and again. I had, from the judgment seat, listened to many such recitals, so, apparently, had Mrs.

Knox, judging by the ease with which she straightened Casey's devious narrative at critical points, and shepherded him to his facts, like a cunning old collie steering a sheep to its pen. The conclusion of the matter was that Goggin was, on the morrow, to take possession of Casey's remaining stock, consisting of three calves, a donkey, and a couple of goats, in liquidation of a debt of 15, and that he, Stephen Casey, knew that Mrs. Knox would never be satisfied to see one of her own tenants wronged.

"I have no tenants," replied Mrs. Knox tartly; "the Government is your landlord now, and I wish you joy of each other!"

"Then I wish to G.o.d it was yourself we had in it again!" lamented Stephen Casey; "it was better for us when the gentry was managing their own business. They'd give patience, and they'd have patience."

"Well, that will do now," said Mrs. Knox; "go round to the servants'

hall and have your tea. I'll see what I can do."

There was silence while Stephen Casey withdrew. As the sound of his hobnailed tread died away the woolly dog advanced very stiffly to the hall door, and, with his eyes fixed on the departing visitor, licked his lips hungrily.

"When those rascals in Parliament took our land from us," said Mrs.

Knox, flinging a sod of turf on to the huge fire with practised aim, "we thought we should have some peace, now we're both beggared and bothered!" She turned upon me a countenance like that of an ancient and spectacled falcon. "Major Yeates! You have often offered me a drive in your motor-car. Will you take me to Killoge to-morrow morning?"

It was a brisk and windy morning, with the sharpness of 9 A.M. in it, when Mullins, Mrs. Knox's tirewoman, met me at the hall door of Aussolas with her arms full of shawls, and a countenance dark with doom and wrath. She informed me that it was a shame for me to be enticing the Mistress out of her bed at this hour of the morning, and that she would get her death out of it. I was repudiating this soft impeachment (which had indeed some flavour of the Restoration drama about it), when the companion of my flight appeared.

"How would anyone know the minute--" continued Mullins, addressing the universe, "that this what's-this-I'll-call-it wouldn't turn into a bog-hole?" She put this conundrum while fiercely swaddling her mistress in cloak upon cloak. I attempted no reply, and Mrs. Knox, winking both eyes at me over the rim of the topmost shawl, was hoisted into the back of the car; as we glided away I had, at all events, the consolation of knowing that, in the event of an accident, Mrs. Knox in her cloaks would float from the car as softly and bulkily as a b.u.mble bee.

As we ran out of the gates on to the high road I remembered that my pa.s.senger's age was variously reckoned at from ninety to a hundred, and thought it well to ask her if fifteen miles an hour would be too fast for pleasure.

"You can't go too fast to please me," replied Mrs. Knox, through the meshes of a Shetland shawl. "When I was a girl I rode a fourteen-hand pony to the fourteenth milestone on the Cork road in a minute under the hour! I think you should be able to double that!"

I replied to this challenge with twenty miles an hour, which, with a head wind and a bad road, I considered to be fast enough for any old lady. As a matter of fact it was too fast for her costume. We had run some eight or nine miles before, looking back, I noticed that a change of some sort had occurred.

"Oh, the red one blew away long ago!" screamed Mrs. Knox against the wind; "it doesn't matter, I shall get it back--I'll ask Father Scanlan to speak about it at Ma.s.s next Sunday. There's a veil gone too--how frantic Mullins will be!"

A skirl of laughter came from the recesses of the remaining shawls.

We were running now on a level road under the lee of a long line of hills; a strip of plantation, gay with the yellows and greens of autumn, clung to a steep slope ahead of us, and, at the top of it, some ragged pines looked like blots against the sky. As we neared it, a faint and long-drawn call came from the height; presently among the tree-trunks we saw hounds, like creatures in a tapestry hunting scene, working up and up through the brown undergrowth. I slackened speed.