I
THE PUG-NOSED FOX
"5 Turkies and their Mother 5 Ducks and the Drake 5 Hins and the Cock CATHARINE O'DONOVAN, Skeagh."
A leaf from a copy-book, with these words written on it, was placed inmy hand as I was in the act of dragging on a new pair of gloves in thestableyard. There was something rhythmic in the category, suggestiveof burnt-offerings and incantations; some touch of pathos, pointing totragedy; something, finally, that in the light of previous eventsrecalled to me suddenly and unpleasantly my new-born position of DeputyM.F.H.
Not, indeed, that I was in need at that moment of circumstances toremind me of it. A new hunting-cap, pressing implacably upon myforehead, an equally new red coat, heavy as a coat of mail, aglittering horn, red hot from the makers, and so far totallyunresponsive to my apoplectic wooings; these things in themselves,without the addition of a poultry bill, were sufficient to bring hometo me my amazing folly in having succumbed to the wiles of Mr. FlorenceMcCarthy Knox, and accepted the charge of his hounds, during hisabsence with the Irish Yeomanry at the South African war.
I had yielded in a burst of patriotic emotion to the spirit ofvolunteering that was in the air. It would be, Flurry had assured me,a purely nominal position.
"They'll only go out one day a week, and Jerome Hickey and Michael'lldo all the work. I do secretary for myself, but that'll be no troubleto you. There's nothing at all to do but to send out the cards of themeets. It'll be a comfort to me to think you were running the show."
I suggested other names that seemed to me infinitely more comfortable,but found them blocked by intricate and insuperable objections, andwhen I became aware that Mr. Knox had so engineered his case as to getmy wife on his side it seemed simpler to give in.
A week afterwards I saw Flurry off at the station. His last words tome were:
"Well, good-bye, Major. Be fighting my grandmother for hersubscription, and whatever you do, don't give more than half-a-crownfor a donkey. There's no meat on them."
Upon this touching farewell the train steamed out, and left mestanding, shelterless, a reluctant and incapable Master of Hounds.
Exhaustive as Flurry's instructions had been on the subject of thecuisine and other details of kennel management, he had not even hintedat the difficulties that are usually composed by means of a fowl fund.My first experience of these had taken place but a week ago, when fromthe breakfast-table I had perceived a donkey and cart rambling,unattended, in the shrubberies, among the young hydrangeas and azaleas.The owner, a most respectable looking old man, explained that he hadleft it there because he was "dilicate" to bring it up to the house,and added that he had come for compensation for "a beautiful milkinggoat" that the hounds had eaten last March, "and she having two kidsthat died afther her."
I asked why he had not long since been to Mr. Knox about it, and wasfavoured with an interminable history of the claimant's ill-healthduring the summer, consequent on his fretting after the goat; of how hehad been anointed four times, and of how the donkey was lame this longwhile where a branch bet her in the thigh one day she ran into the woodfrom the hounds. Fearing that the donkey was about to be included inthe bill, I made haste to settle for the goat and her offspring, amatter of fifteen shillings.
Next day two women took up a position on the steps at luncheon time, acourse which experience has taught me indicates affairs too exalted andtoo personal to be transmitted _via_ the kitchen. They were, accordingto their own showing, ruined proprietors of poultry yards, in proof ofwhich they pointed to a row of decapitated hens, laid forth on thegrass like the bag at a fashionable shoot. I was irritably aware oftheir triumph in the trophy.
"Sure he didn't make off with anny of them only three, but he snappedthe heads off all that was in it, and faith, if Masther Flurry was athome, he'd give us the blood of his arm before he'd see our little hinsdesthroyed on us this way."
I gave them thirty-two and sixpence as an alternative compensation,not, I admit, without an uneasy sense of something unusual in PeterCadogan's expression, as he assiduously raked the gravel hard by.
It was Michael Leary, Flurry's Michael, who placed the matter of a fowlfund upon a basis. Catharine O'Donovan and her list of casualties hadbeen dismissed at a cost of ten shillings, a price so inadequate, andso cheerfully accepted, as to confirm my dawning suspicions.
"Is it what would they get from Mr. Flurry?" replied Michael when I putthe matter to him; "it isn't ten shillings, no, nor thirty-twoshillings that they'd get from him, but a pelt of a curse after theirheels! Why wouldn't they keep their hens inside in the house withthemselves at night, the same as annyone that'd have sense, and not toleave them out enticing the fox this way."
Michael was in a bad temper, and so, for the matter of that, was I,quite irrespective of dealings in poultry. Our red coats, our horses,and the presence of the hounds, did not betoken the chase, they merelyindicated that the Hunt was about to be photographed. The localphotographer, backed by Mrs. Sinclair Yeates, had extorted from me theprivilege of "a sitting," a figurative expression, involving a ride offive miles to a covert, selected by my wife as being typical of thecountry, accompanied by the fourteen and a-half couple of half-bredharriers who figured in Hound Lists as "Mr. Knox's Fox-hounds."
It was a blazing day in late August, following on forty-eight hours ofblanketing sea-fog; a day for flannels and a languid game of croquet.Lady Jane, the grey mare lent to me by Flurry, had been demoralised byher summer at grass, and was in that peculiarly loathsome frame of mindthat is a blend of laziness and bumptiousness. If I left her to herown devices she drowsed, stumbling, through the dust; if I correctedher, she pranced and pulled, and kicked up behind like a donkey. Myhuntsman, Doctor Jerome Hickey, who was to have been in the forefrontof the photograph, was twenty miles off in an open boat, on his way toan island at the far end of his dispensary district, with fifteen casesof measles ahead of him. I envied him; measles or no, he had on aturned down collar. As a result of his absence I rode in solitarydignity at the head of the pack, or, to speak more correctly, Ipreceded Michael by some thirty yards of unoccupied road, while thepack, callous to flogging, and disdainful of my cajoleries, clave tothe heels of Michael's horse.
In this order, we arrived at the tryst, a heathery hill side, flankedby a dense and rambling wood. A sea-gull scream from the hill-sideannounced the presence of my wife, and summoned me to join her and thephotographer at the spot where they were encamped. I put the mare at asuitable place in the wall by the roadside. She refused it, which wasno more than I had expected. I sampled my new spurs on her fat sides,with the result that she charged the wall, slantways, at the exact spotwhere Philippa had placed her bicycle against it, missed the bicycle bya hair's-breadth, landed in the field with a thump, on all four feet,and ended with two most distressing bucks. It was a consolation to me,when I came in touch again with the saddle, to find that one of the newspurs had ploughed a long furrow in her shoulder.
The photographer was a young man from Belfast, a new comer to theneighbourhood; Philippa is also a photographer, a fact that did nottend as much as might have been expected to the harmony of the occasion.
"Mrs. Yeates has selected this hillock," said Mr. McOstrich, in tonesof acrid resignation, indicating as he spoke a sugar-loaf shaped knoll,thickly matted with furze and heather. "She considers the backgroundcharacteristic. My own suggestion would have been the grass-fieldyonder."
It is an ancient contention of my wife that I, in common with all othermen, in any dispute between a female relative and a tradesman, sidewith the tradesman, partly from fear, partly from masculineclannishness, and most of all from a desire to stand well with thetradesman. Nothing but the remembrance of this preposterous reproachkept me from accepting Mr. McOstrich's point of view, and, while Ihesitated, Michael was already taking up his position on the hillock,perhaps in obedience to some signal from Philippa, perhaps because hehad realised the excellent concealment afforded by the deep heather tohis horse's fe
tlocks, whose outline was of a somewhat gouty type. Itwas part of Flurry Knox's demoniac gift for horseflesh that he shouldbe able to buy screws and make them serve his exacting purposes.Michael's horse, Moses, had, at a distance, the appearance of standingupon four champagne bottles, but he none the less did the work of twosound horses and did it well.
I goaded Lady Jane through the furze, and established myself besideMichael on the sugarloaf, the hounds disposed themselves in an intervalof bracken below, and Mr. McOstrich directed his camera upon us from anopposite slope.
"Show your teeth, please," said Mr. McOstrich to Michael. Michael,already simmering with indignation at the senseless frivolity of theproceedings, glowered at his knuckles, evidently suspicious of anill-timed pleasantry.
SUSPICIOUS OF AN ILL-TIMED PLEASANTRY]
"Do you hear, Whip?" repeated Mr. McOstrich, raising his bleak northernvoice, "show your teeth, please!"
"He only wants to focus us," said I, foreseeing trouble, and hurriedlydisplaying my own new front row in a galvanic smile.
Michael murmured to Moses' withers something that sounded like apromise to hocus Mr. McOstrich when occasion should serve, and Ireflected on the hardship of having to feel apologetic towards bothMichael and the photographer.
Only those who have participated in "Hunt Groups" can realise thecombined tediousness and tension of the moments that followed. To keepthirty hounds headed for the camera, to ensure that your horse has notclosed its eyes and hung its head in a doze of boredom, to preserve foryourself that alert and workmanlike aspect that becomes a sportsman,and then, when these things have been achieved and maintained for whatfeels like a month, to see the tripod move in spider strides to a freshposition and know that all has to be begun over again. After severalof these tentative selections of a site, the moment came when Mr.McOstrich swung his black velvet pall in the air and buried his headunder its portentous folds. The hounds, though uneasy, had hithertobeen comparatively calm, but at this manifestation their nerve broke,and they unanimously charged the glaring monster in the black hood withloud and hysterical cries.
Had not Michael perceived their intention while there was time awfulthings might have happened. As it was, the leaders were flogged offwith ignominy, and the ruffled artist returned from the rock to whichhe had fled. Michael and I arranged ourselves afresh upon the hillock;I squared my shoulders, and felt my wonted photographic expression ofhang-dog desperation settle down upon me.
"The dogs are not in the picture, Whip!" said Mr. McOstrich in thechill tone of outraged dignity.
I perceived that the hounds, much demoralised, had melted away from theslope in front of us, and were huddling in a wisp in the interveninghollow. Blandishments were of no avail; they wagged and beamedapologetically, but remained in the hollow. Michael, in whosesensitive bosom the term "Whip" evidently rankled, became scarlet inthe face and avalanched from the hill top upon his flock with a furythat was instantly recognised by them. They broke in panic, and theastute and elderly Venus, followed by two of the young entry, boltedfor the road. They were there met by Mr. McOstrich's carman, who mostcreditably headed the puppies with yells and his driving-whip, but wasout-played by Venus, who, dodging like a football professional, doubledunder the car horse, and fled irrevocably. Philippa, who had beenflitting from rock to rock with her kodak, and unnerving me withinjunctions as to the angle of my cap, here entered the lists with apacket of sandwiches, with which, in spite of the mustard, she restoreda certain confidence to the agitated pack, a proceeding observed fromafar with trembling indignation by Minx, her fox-terrier. By recklessexpenditure of sandwich the hounds were tempted to their properposition below the horses, but, unfortunately, with their sterns to thecamera, and their eyes fastened on Philippa.
"Retire, Madam!" said Mr. McOstrich, very severely, "_I_ will attractthe dogs!"
Thus rebuked, Madam scrambled hastily over the crest of the hillock andsank in unseemly laughter into the deep heather behind it.
"Now, very quiet, please," continued Mr. McOstrich, and thenunexpectedly uttered the words, "Pop! Pop! Pop!" in a high soprano.
Michael clapped his hand over his mouth, the superseded siren in theheather behind me wallowed in fresh convulsions; the hounds remainedunattracted.
Then arose, almost at the same moment, a voice from the wood behind us,the voice of yet a third siren, more potent than that of either of herpredecessors, the voice of Venus hunting a line. For the space of abreath the hounds hung on the eager hacking yelps, in the next breaththey were gone.
Matters now began to move on a serious scale, and with a speed thatcould not have been foreseen. The wood was but fifty yards from oursugar-loaf. Before Michael had got out his horn, the hounds were overthe wall, before the last stern had disappeared the leaders had brokeninto full cry.
"Please God it might be a rabbit!" exclaimed Michael, putting spurs tohis horse and bucketing down through the furze towards the wood, withblasts of the horn that were fraught with indignation and rebuke.
An instant later, from my point of vantage on the sugar-loaf, I saw abig and very yellow fox cross an open space of heather high up on thehill above the covert. He passed and vanished; in half-a-dozen secondsVenus, plunging through the heather, came shrieking across the openspace and also vanished. Another all too brief an interval, and theremainder of the pack had stormed through the wood and were away in theopen after Venus, and Michael, who had pulled up short on the hitherside of the covert wall, had started up the open hill side to catchthem.
The characteristic background chosen by Philippa, however admirable ina photograph, afforded one of the most diabolic rides of my experience.Uphill, over courses of rock masked in furze bushes, round the head ofa boggy lake, uphill again through deep and purple heather, over ahorrid wall of long slabs half buried in it; past a ruined cabin, withthorn bushes crowding low over the only feasible place in the bank, andat last, the top of the hill, and Michael pulling up to takeobservations.
The best pack in the kingdom, schoolmastered by a regiment of whips,could not have precipitated themselves out of covert with more academicprecision than had been shown by Flurry Knox's irregulars. They hadalready crossed the valley below us, and were running up a long hill asif under the conventional tablecloth; their cry, floating up to us,held all the immemorial romance of the chase.
Michael regarded me with a wild eye; he looked as hot as I felt, whichwas saying a good deal, and both horses were puffing.
"He's all the ways for Temple Braney!" he said. "Sure I know himwell--that's the pug-nosed fox that's in it these last three seasons,and it's what I wish----"
(I regret that I cannot transcribe Michael's wish in its own terms, butI may baldly summarise it as a desire minutely and anatomicallyspecified that the hounds were eating Mr. McOstrich.)
Here the spurs were once more applied to Moses' reeking sides, and westarted again, battering down the twists of a rocky lane into thesteaming, stuffy valley. I felt as guilty and as responsible for thewhole affair as Michael intended that I should feel; I knew that heeven laid to my charge the disastrous appearance of the pug-nosedTemple Braney fox. (Whether this remarkable feature was a freak ofnature, or of Michael's lurid fancy, I have never been able toascertain.)
The valley was boggy, as well as hot, and the deep and sinuous ditchthat by courtesy was supposed to drain it, was blind with rushes andtall fronds of Osmunda Regalis fern. Where the landing was tolerable,the take-off was a swamp, where the take-off was sound the landing wasfeasible only for a frog: we lost five panting minutes, closelyattended by horse-flies, before we somehow floundered across and beganthe ascent of the second hill. To face tall banks, uphill, is at notime agreeable, especially when they are enveloped in a jungle ofbriars, bracken, and waving grass, but a merciful dispensation ofcow-gaps revealed itself; it was one of the few streaks of luck in aday not conspicuous for such.
At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded to us afine view of the Atlantic, als
o of the surrounding country and all thatwas therein, with, however, the single unfortunate exception of thehounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of areaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and thegrowl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing,ghostlike, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man in astraw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock with a woodenrake, while a black and white cur slept in the young after-grass besidehim. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity with a heated demandwhether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill clamour from the dogwas at first the only reply; its owner took off his hat, wiped hisforehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.
"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to lookus up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more thanbefore, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the heat of asummer's day.
"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut upbeside him.
"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain doesbe whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the sayfrom it."
"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round, "an'stop in it! Whisht! Look over, sir! Look over!"
He pointed with his whip along the green slopes. I saw, about half amile away, two boys standing on a fence, and beyond them some cattlegalloping in a field: three or four miles farther on the woods ofTemple Braney were a purple smear in the hazy heat of the landscape.My heart sank; it was obvious even to my limited capacities that thepug-nosed fox was making good his line with a straightness not to beexpected from one of his personal peculiarity, and that the hounds werestill running as hard as ever on a scent as steamingly hot as theweather. I wildly thought of removing my coat and leaving it in chargeof the man with neuralgia, but was restrained by the reflection that hemight look upon it as a gift, flung to him in a burst of compassion, amisunderstanding that, in view of his affliction, it would beimpossible to rectify.
I picked up my lathered reins and followed Michael at a gloomy trot inthe direction of the galloping cattle. After a few fields a roadpresented itself, and was eagerly accepted by the grey mare, on whomthe unbridled gluttonies of a summer's grass were beginning to tell.
"She's bet up, sir," said Michael, dragging down a rickety gate withthe handle of his whip. "Folly on the road, there's a near way to thewood from the cross."
Moses here walked cautiously over the prostrate gate.
"I'm afraid you'll kill Moses," said I, by no means pleased at theprospect of being separated from my Intelligence Department.
"Is it him?" replied Michael, scanning the country ahead of him withhawk eyes. "Sure he's as hardy as a throut!"
The last I saw of the trout was his bottle fetlocks disappearing nimblyin bracken as he dropped down the far side of a bank.
I "follied on the road" for two stifling miles. The heavy air was pentbetween high hedges hung with wisps of hay from passing carts;(hay-carrying in the south-west of Ireland conforms to the leisure ofthe farmer rather than to the accident of season;) phalanxes of fliesarose as if at the approach of royalty, and accompanied my progress ata hunting jog, which, as interpreted by Lady Jane, was an effectiveblend of a Turkish bath and a churn.
The "near way" from the cross-roads opened seductively with a laneleading to a farmhouse, and presently degenerated into an unfenced butplausible cart track through the fields. Breaches had been made in thebanks for its accommodation, and I advanced successfully towards thelong woods of Temple Braney, endeavouring, less successfully, to repelthe attentions of two young horses, who galloped, squealed, and buckedround me and Lady Jane with the imbecile pleasantry of their kind. Themoment when I at length slammed in their faces the gate of the wood,was one of sorely needed solace.
Then came the sudden bath of coolness and shade, and the gradualrealisation that I did not in the least know what to do next. The airwas full of the deeply preoccupied hum of insects, and the interminablemonologue of a wood pigeon; I felt as if I ought to apologise for myintrusion. None the less I pursued a ride that crossed the wood,making persevering efforts to blow my horn, and producing nothing butgramaphonic whispers, fragmentary groans, and a headache. I was nearthe farther side of the wood when I saw fresh hoof-tracks on a paththat joined the ride; they preceded me to a singularly untempting bank,with a branch hanging over it and a potato-field beyond it. A clod hadbeen newly kicked out of the top of it; I could not evade theconviction that Michael had gone that way. The grey mare knew it too,and bundled on to and over the bank with surprising celerity, anddropped skilfully just short of where the potato beds began. An oldwoman was digging at the other side of the field, and I steered forher, making a long tack down a deep furrow between the "lazy-beds."
"Did you see the hounds, ma'am?" I called out across the interveningjungle of potato stalks.
"Sir!"
She at all events was not deaf. I amended my inquiry.
"Did you see any dogs, or a man in a red coat?"
"Musha, bad cess to them, then I did!" bawled the old woman, "look atthe thrack o' their legs down thro' me little pratie garden! 'Twasn'tbut a whileen ago that they come leppin' out o' the wood to me, anddidn't I think 'twas the Divil and all his young ones, an' I thrunmeself down in the thrinch the way they wouldn't see me, the Lord saveus!"
My heart warmed to her; I also would gladly have laid down among theumbrageous stalks of the potatoes, and concealed myself for ever fromMichael and the hounds.
"What way did they go?" I asked, regretfully dismissing the vision, andfeeling in my pocket for a shilling.
"They went wesht the road, your Honour, an' they screeching always;they crossed out the field below over-right the white pony, and faithye couldn't hardly see Michael Leary for the shweat! God help yeasthore, yourself is getting hardship from them as well as another!"
The shilling here sank into her earthy palm, on which she prayedpassionately that the saints might be surprised at my success. I feltthat as far as I was concerned the surprise would be mutual; I had hadnothing but misfortune since ten o'clock that morning, and there seemedno reason to believe that the tide had turned.
The pony proved to be a white mule, a spectral creature, standing inmalign meditation trace-high in bracken; I proceeded in its directionat a trot, through clumps of bracken and coarse grass, and as I drewnear it uttered a strangled and heart-broken cry of greeting. At thesame moment Lady Jane fell headlong on to her nose and the point of herright shoulder. It is almost superfluous to observe that I did thesame thing. As I rolled on my face in the bracken, something like asnake uncoiled itself beneath me and became taut; I clutched at it,believing it to be the reins, and found I was being hung up, likeclothes on a line, upon the mule's tethering rope. Lady Jane had gotit well round her legs, and had already fallen twice in her efforts toget up, while the mule, round whose neck the tether rope had beenknotted, was backing hard, like a dog trying to pull its head throughits collar.
In sunstroke heat I got out my knife, and having cut the rope in twoplaces, an operation accomplished in the depths of a swarm of flies andmidges, I pulled the mare on to her legs. She was lame on the offfore, and the rope had skinned her shins in several places; my ownshoulder and arm were bruised, and I had broken a stirrup leather.Philippa and the photographer had certainly provided me with a day ofvaried entertainment, and I could not be sure that I had even yetdrained the cup of pleasure to the dregs.
I led Lady Jane out into the road, and considered the position. Wewere about nine miles from home, and at least five from any place whereI could hire a car. To walk, and lead the mare, was an alternativethat, powerless as events had proved me to be in the hands ofmisfortune, I still refused to consider. It was then given me toremember old McRory.
My acquaintance with old McRory was of the slightest. He was, it wasunderstood, a retired Dublin coal merchant, with an enormous family,and a reputation for great riches. He had,
within the last year or so,taken the derelict house of Temple Braney, and having by strenuousefforts attained that dubious honour, the Commission of the Peace, ithad happened to me to sit on the Bench with him on one or twooccasions. Of his family I knew little, save that whenever I saw anunknown young man buying cigarettes at Mr. Dannaher's in Skebawn, I wasinformed that it was one of the young McRorys, a medical student, and"a bit of a lad, but nothing at all to the next youngest." The MissesMcRory were only occasionally viewed, whirling in large companies onglittering bicycles, and the legend respectfully ran that they hadforty blouses apiece. Perhaps the most definite information about themwas supplied by our cook, Mrs. Cadogan, who assured Philippa that WildPigs in America wouldn't be treated worse than what Mrs. McRory treatedher servants. All these things together made an unpromising aggregate,but the fact remained that Temple Braney House was within a quarter ofa mile of me, and its charity my only hope.
The lodge gates of Temple Braney were wide open, so was the door of thelodge; the weedy drive was scored with fresh wheel-tracks, as also, forthe matter of that, was the grass on either side. I followed it for ashort distance, in the roomy shade of splendid beech-trees, servants ofthe old regime, preserving their dignity through the vicissitudes ofthe new. Near the house was a second open gate, and on a species ofarch over it I was amazingly greeted by the word "Welcome" in whiteletters on a blazing strip of Turkey-red. This was an attention that Ihad not anticipated; did it mean a school-feast?
I made a cautious survey, but saw nobody, and nerved by the increasinglameness of Lady Jane, I went on to the house and rang the bell. Therewas no response; the hall-door was wide open, and from an inner halltwo lanky red setter puppies advanced with their tails between theirlegs, barking uncertainly, and acutely conscious of the fact that uponthe collar of each was fastened a flaunting though much chewed bow ofwhite satin ribbon. Full of foreboding I rang again. The bell tinkledvigorously in some fastness of the house, but nothing else happened. Idecided to try the stable-yard, and, attended by the decorated puppies,set forth to find it.
It was a large quadrangle, of which one side was formed by a wing ofthe house; had there been a few more panes of glass in the windows andslates in the roof it might have been imposing. A cavernous coachhousestood open, empty save for the wheelless body of an outside car thatwas seated on the floor, with wings outspread like a hatching hen.Every stable-door gaped wide. Odds and ends of harness lay about, butneither horse nor human being was visible. A turkey-cock, intransports of wrath, stormed to and fro in front of his household, andto some extent dispelled the sentiment of desertion and stampede thatpervaded the place. I led the limping mare into a stable wherein weretwo loose-boxes. A sickly smell greeted me, and I perceived that inone of the boxes was a long low cage, alive with the red-currant-jellyeyes and pink noses of a colony of ferrets, and in the other was a pileof empty wine-boxes and several bicycles. Lady Jane snorted heavily,and I sought elsewhere for a refuge for her. I found it at length in along stable with six empty stalls, and proceeded to tie her up in oneof them.
It was while I was thus engaged that a strange succession of soundsbegan overhead, heavy, shapeless sounds in which were blended thesuggestions of shove and thump. There was a brief interval of silence,during which Lady Jane and I listened with equal intentness; thenfollowed a hoarse bellow, which resolved itself into the enquiry,
"Is there any one there?"
Here was the princess of the enchanted palace waking up with avengeance. More and angrier bellows followed; I went stealthily outinto the yard, and took stock of the windows above the stable. One ofthem was open, and it was from it that the voice issued, loudlydemanding release. It roared a string of Christian names, which Isupposed to be those of the McRory family, it used most unchristianlanguage, and it finally settled down into shouts for help, andasseverations that it was smothering. I admit that my first and almostoverwhelming impulse was to steal a bicycle and wing my way to myfar-away and peaceful home, leaving Michael, the hounds, and thesmothering gentleman to work out their own salvation. Unfortunatelyfor me, the voice of conscience prevailed. There was a ladder near athand leaning against the wall, and I put it to the window, and went upit as fast as my top boots would allow me, with a vision before me ofold McRory in apoplexy as the probable reward of my labours. I thrustmy head in, blocking the light in so doing; the shouting ceasedabruptly, and after the glare of sunshine outside I could at first seenothing. Then was revealed to me a long and darksome room, once,probably, a loft, filled with broken chairs and varieties of primevallumber. In the middle of the floor lay an immense feather bed, and mybewildered eyes discovered, at one end of it, a crimson face, the face,not of old McRory, but that of a young gentleman of my acquaintance,one Mr. Tomsy Flood of Curranhilty. The mysteries were deepening. Istraddled the window-sash, and arrived in the room with athree-cornered tear in the shoulder of my coat, inflicted by a nail inthe frame, and one spur draped with ancestral cobweb.
"Take me out of this!" howled Mr. Flood hysterically, accepting mypantomime entrance without question. "Can't you see I'm smothering inthis damned thing?"
"TAKE ME OUT OF THIS!"]
Fluff hung from his black moustache and clung to his eyebrows, his hairwas full of feathers; earthquake throes convulsed the feather-bed, andthe fact was suddenly revealed to me that Mr. Flood was not under it,as I had at first imagined, but in it, stitched in, up to the chin.The weaned child, or any other conventional innocent, could not havefailed for an instant to recognise the handiwork of practical humoristsof a high order. I asked no questions, but got out my knife once more,and beginning with due precaution somewhere near Mr. Flood's jugularvein, proceeded to slit open the end of the "tick." The stitches werelong and strong, and as each one yielded, the feathers burst forth instifling puffs, and Tomsy Flood's allusions to the young McRorys weremercifully merged in sputtering. I did not laugh, not at least till Ifound that I had to drag him out like a mummy, accompanied by half thecontents of the bed, and perceived that he was in full evening clothes,and that he was incapable of helping himself because the legs of histrousers were sewn together and his coat-sleeves sewn to his sides;even then, I only gave way in painful secrecy behind the mighty calvesof his legs as I cut the stitches out. Tomsy Flood walked aboutfifteen stone and was not in a mood to be trifled with, still less tosee the humour of the position. The medical students had done theirwork with a surgical finish, and by the time that I had restored toTomsy the use of his legs and arms, the feathers had permeated to everyrecess of my being, and I was sneezing as if I had hay fever.
Having at length, and with considerable difficulty, got Mr. Flood on tohis legs, I ventured, with the tact demanded by the situation, aquestion as to whether he had been dining at Temple Braney.
"Dining?" queried Mr. Flood, with an obvious effort of memory. "Yes, Iwas, to be sure! Amn't I staying in the house?" Then, with an equallyobvious shock of recollection, "Sure I'm Best Man at the weddingto-day!"
The scattered elements of the situation began to fall symmetricallyinto line, from the open gates to the white bows on the puppies'collars. My chief concern, however, bearing in mind Tomsy Flood'srecent potations and provocations, was to let him down as easily aspossible, and, reserving my conclusions to myself, to escape, swiftlyand silently, while yet there was time. There was always thatstall-full of bicycles; I could borrow clothes from Tomsy, and leavethis accursed tom-foolery of hunting kit to be fetched with the mare, Icould write a beautifully explanatory note when I got home----
"Hadn't you better get out of your evening things as quickly as youcan?" I suggested.
Mr. Flood regarded me with heavy and bloodshot eyes of imperfectintelligence.
"Oh! I've time enough. Ye wouldn't get a pick of breakfast herebefore ten o'clock in the day. Now that I come to look into you," hecontinued, "you're as big a show as myself! Is it for the wedding thatyou have the red coat on you?"
I do not now remember with what lies
I composed Tomsy Flood, but I gothim out of the room at last by a door into a passage of seeminglyinterminable length; he took my arm, he treated me as his only friend,he expressed his full confidence that I would see fair play when he gota hold of Stanley McRory. He also gave it as his private opinion thathis cousin, Harry Flood, was making a hare of himself marrying thatimpudent little Pinkie McRory, that was as vulgar as a bag ofstraddles, in spite of the money. Indeed, the whole family had toomany airs about them for his fancy. "They take the English _Times_, ifyou please, and they all dress for dinner--every night I tell ye! Icall that rot, y'know!"
We were all this time traversing the house by labyrinthine passages,flights of stairs, and strange empty lobbies; we progressedconversationally and with maddening slowness, followed by a fleecytrain of feathers that floated from us as we went. And all the time Iwas trying to remember how long it took to get married. In my own caseit seemed as if I had been in the church for two hours at least.
A swing-door suddenly admitted us to the hall, and Tomsy stood still tocollect his faculties.
"My room's up there," he began, pointing vaguely up the staircase.
At this identical moment there was a loud and composite crash frombehind a closed door on our right, followed by minor crashes, andnoises as of chairs falling about.
"That's the boys!" said Tomsy, a sudden spark kindling in his eye;"they're breakfasting early, I suppose."
He dropped my arm unexpectedly, and flung the door open with a yell.
The first object that met my eyes was the original sinner, Venus,mounted on a long and highly-adorned luncheon table, cranching andgulping cold chicken as fast as she could get it down; on the floorhalf-a-dozen of her brethren tore at a round of beef amid the debris ofcrockery and glass that had been involved in its overthrow. A cataractof cream was pouring down the table-cloth, and making a lake on thecarpet for the benefit of some others; and President, the patriarch ofthe pack, was apparently seated on the wedding-cake, while hedemolished a cold salmon. I had left my whip in the stable, but evenhad this paralysing sight left me the force to use it, its serviceswould not have been needed. The leaders of the revel leaped from thetable, mowing down colonies of wine-glasses in the act, and fledthrough the open window, followed by the rest of the party, with aprecipitancy that showed their full consciousness of sin--the lastscramblers over the sill yelping in agonised foretaste of the thongthat they believed was overtaking them.
At such a moment of catastrophe the craving for human sympathy isparamount.
I turned even to the fuddled and feathered Tomsy Flood as to a man anda brother, and was confronted in the doorway by the Bride andBridegroom.
Behind them, the hall was filling, with the swiftness of an evil dream,with glowing faces and wedding bonnets; there was a turmoil of wheelsand hoofs at the door, and through it all, like "horns of Elflandfaintly blowing," Michael's blasts of summons to his pirates. Finally,the towering mauve bonnet and equally towering wrath of Mrs. McRory, asshe advanced upon me and Tomsy Flood. I thought of the Wild Pigs inAmerica, and wished I were with them.
Lest I should find myself the object of a sympathy more acute than Ideserve, it may be well to transcribe portion of a paragraph from the_Curranhilty Herald_ of the following week:--
"... After the ceremony a reception was held at Temple Braney House,where a sumptuous collation had been provided by the hospitable Mr. andMrs. McRory. The health of the Happy Pair having been drunk, that ofthe Bridesmaids was proposed, and Mr. T. Flood, who had been preventedby a slight indisposition from filling the office of Best Man, washappily sufficiently recovered to return thanks for them in his usualsprightly vein. Major Sinclair Yeates, R.M., M.F.H., who, in honour ofthe festive occasion had donned sporting attire, proposed the health ofthe Bride's Mother in felicitous terms...."
Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. Page 2
