Bloodstock and Other Stories
By
Margaret Irwin
Contents
STORIES FROM IRELAND
COURAGE
THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
THE DOCTOR
BLOODSTOCK
THE COLLAR
UNCANNY STORIES
THE BOOK
MONSIEUR SEEKS A WIFE
MISTLETOE
THE EARLIER SERVICE
MRS. OLIVER CROMWELL
and WHERE BEAUTY LIES
MRS. OLIVER CROMWELL
WHERE BEAUTY LIES
Stories from Ireland
All these stories from Ireland are based on fact. That of “The Country Gentleman” was told for three centuries as a family tradition at Isercleran (or Saint Clerans as it came to be called in the eighteenth century) in County Galway; and it received startling confirmation some years ago, when the headless body of a Cromwellian soldier was discovered in the bog, his clothes preserved by the mummifying properties of the bog water.
MARGARET IRWIN
Courage
“Now I shall know,” said Magdalen to herself, as she looked across the table at Dick. The periwigged faces on the wall looked down on her, sallow, solemn, remote. The room hung around her, a shadowy globed space, the curved windows at its end glimmering with reflections against the night outside. Four shaded candles stood on the dining-table and made a shining centre of polished wood and silver, flecked with the white gleams of linen and lace mats and napkins, and Dick’s shirt front and cuffs. The cuffs were suddenly still, his long hands lay on the table, brown and hard; in this same instant they would leap into life; “and then I shall know,” thought Magdalen.
This table was a make-believe island, its pretence at modern civilization casting its reflection for only a few yards round it. There within a few yards were the curved windows of old glass, with the great curtains drawn back from them; there beyond the windows, spread over the unseen demesne, was the vast, seeing night.
Dick Darcy would not have the curtains drawn over the windows; his father had sat at this table so, and his fathers before him, with it exposed to “the length and breadth of Ireland,” as they had proudly boasted; to begin to draw the curtains now would be to show that he was afraid of being shot at by some gun fired from behind the shrubs and trees near the house, into that small bright scene that made so easy a mark in the surrounding darkness.
“But that is what I am afraid of,” Magdalen had said, “so why not draw the curtains?”
He had told her why. It was not mere bravado. An admission of fear might bring about the very thing feared.
“So we must sit here in a lighted circle, while death is waiting out there in the dark?”
“Death is waiting for everyone,” he had answered; “does it matter how it comes? A shot in the dark,—a motor accident or a flying crash,—worst of all, slow disease. What’s the odds?”
And he had bent that small erect head and looked down into her eyes and laughed, with that fierce blue flash in his own which had gone through her and over her the first time they met, so that her heart had changed its beat ever since to one more quick and anxious. She had looked into “the bright eyes of danger” and found in them a jewel too bright for her to bear. Possession of him had made a coward of her, for what was possession but the terror of loss? His gaiety, his gallantry, that high head, the long thin muscular legs, bowed a little at the knees, the legs of a good horseman; above all, the blue eyes in his dark face that had never seen anything that could daunt or dull them,—all these had made him such a man as the gods love, and those whom the gods love die young.
And as with gods, so with women, her true sense told her, for that very quality of high and careless courage that had won her to him was what she was now trying to stifle with her fears, her caution, her desperate longing to hold it safe to herself for ever.
She used not to be a coward. Like most young growing things, she used to picture herself riding out to meet adventure (when adventure had worn a cocked hat or a cavalier’s) as gay and fearless as when she rode on the high branch of the pear tree in the garden at home and shouted her defiance at the wind that rushed all round her, tossing her perch, trying to tear her off.
“As brave as a boy,” they had said of her then, to her fury. Why shouldn’t a girl be as brave as a boy? She knew now. A girl could be as brave as a boy for just as long as she loved no one any more than a boy might love, careless and irresponsible. But now she loved Dick, and Dick’s children—a boy already old enough to ride to hounds (and that had come so quickly that it had seemed almost as soon as he could walk) and a girl who already said, “Why shouldn’t I, if Johnny does?” But above all, Dick.
He had come through the war of 1914–1918 safely by a miracle—by a dozen miracles, said those who knew his record. Magdalen might thank her stars she had not been married to him all through those years. But that agony of anxiety would then at least have been communal, shared by all, and by so much the easier to bear. Now it seemed to her that all other women led safe, easy, comfortable lives because they were not married to Long Dick Darcy.
Her friends in London, what cause had they for worry?—Molly, fretting lest she had lost her looks and her husband’s interest; Jean, always bothering about the money for the children’s schooling; Veronica, with so few troubles that she had to make them with a succession of illnesses and doctors.
Dick was M.F.H. for the Torey hounds, which he hunted from his own place, Killevarrega, and he was a furious rider in a country of stone walls and high gates, bogs and sudden cliffs, that had killed more than one member of his family in the days of peace. But that was only the extra spice of danger, for now there was little peace in Ireland; England had recognized the Free State, but the Free State was still fighting its own rebels, the Republicans, who refused to recognize the Treaty with England, and carried on a casual guerilla warfare from the hills and bogs. The two big houses nearest Killevarrega had been burnt down. And when Magdalen heard Dick and his friends talking these days she was apt to hear the like:
“Have you seen anything of Big Murphy lately?”
“Didn’t you hear? They got him on the way to Dublin.”
“Shot, poor devil?”
“If so, he was lucky. He was suspected of giving information.”
When they rode in their ramshackle car she always sat in front beside Dick with one of the children wedged in between them, for, she thought, they would not be so likely to shoot at him with his wife and child beside him. But one day when they were going through a “bad part,” Dick guessed her intention and swung round on her with that laugh in his eyes and said, “You’re rating their chivalry mighty high.”
She flew out at that.
“And your chivalry? It’s nothing to you, I suppose, if we’re all wiped out together!”
“Easy, my girl, easy. Could you bear it if I put you at the back?”
She could not, and she was glad he knew enough of her to know that. Their devoted cook had done her best to make him realize it when she had blazed out at him, in the worst of the bad times, that they were all growing sick and tired of waiting for the Master to be shot.
There was no need to be here, no real need—only the need to protect the old house at Killevarrega and preserve it intact for Johnny and Johnny’s sons. To Dick that seemed a thing of infinitely more importance than his own life; while to Magdalen the care for an insensate piece of property was a sentiment as barbaric and outworn as the clinging of a fanatic to his holy relic. They had their pretty little house in London, let to friends who would give it up at any moment, and Dick could ride with his small son in Richmond Park, and Gillian could play in
Kensington Gardens with other little girls and go to Peter Pan at Christmas and work off her energy in dancing-classes instead of climbing high, dangerous trees. And at that Magdalen caught her breath and wondered what had happened to her that she should have grown afraid even of high trees.
No, she used not to be a coward, but now she was, there was no doubt about it, and it was Dick’s high careless courage that had made her so,—and so here she sat in this huge room with the shadows pressing in all round her from outside, that black outside into which she could not look, but where faces could look in on her, watching her, watching Dick, waiting for the moment when they would shoot him——
“And then I shall know,” she said to herself, though she did not know what that would be. Peace, perhaps, at last, the long quiet of caring and fearing for nothing overmuch, the death that is the only complete possession.
This summer, when the evenings were still light and the candles were not lit for dinner, she had seen Dick leap from his chair and through the door-windows and run down over the lawns to the long stretch of pasture-land below them. There had been no sound, but, straining her eyes at the windows, she saw two figures in the distance moving across the field carrying guns, and these two began to run as Dick ran towards them, and disappeared into the woods, and he ran after them.
She waited at the window, and the whole wide green scene remained still and empty, there was no sound of a shot, however distant. At last he came back, laughing about the couple of damned poachers he had chased, hoping to give them a lesson, but could not catch them, they had disappeared in the woods. And if they had shot him there, nobody would have told who did it—many a private grudge had been paid off under cover of the public “troubles.”
She tried to reproach him, she could not, he was back safe, that was all that mattered; time had not stopped it, had stretched out again, going on again, going on and on through the summer and the early autumn, and here they were sitting again at the table, in candlelight now and the darkness of night and heavy rain outside the windows,—when once again time stopped.
She had heard a squelching sound just outside, and prayed Dick would not hear it, would not go to the windows, but before she knew if he had heard it, there came a low thudding noise out in the hall, on the front door; somebody was knocking, but softly, without using the knocker.
And the long hands that were moving knife and fork in front of her in this encircling candlelight lay still on the table, brown and hard; in that same instant they leaped into life, “and now I shall know,” thought Magdalen.
Dick had sprung to his feet. “I’ll just see what that is,” he said, in so casual and good-humoured a voice that she did not need to turn her head to see Danny the old butler cowering back into the corner away from the door. A month ago old General Callaghan had gone to his front door, to be shot dead by the men to whom he opened.
“I’ll come too,” she said, getting up, and her voice too sounded pleasant and natural.
“No, just wait a minute.”
He was out of the room. Danny’s face swam like a full moon behind the vast silver curve of the dish-cover in his hands; “and his face was as white as a bloody sheet’—Danny’s own words flew into her mind as she looked at him, and behind them a question that warned her how near she was to breaking-point: “What is the moon doing in this room?”
This room was a bubble floating in space, a transparent bubble through which the moon could look in, together with a hundred other white sickly faces, the faces of men about to kill. Now the bubble would burst, and they would crash through space: there was no longer even that thin transparency between them and eternity.
Dick came back into the room.
“It’s only some poor devils on the run,” he said, “four of them. We must give them shelter for the night. They can shake down in the kitchen, and will be gone before we’re down tomorrow morning. Magdalen, my darling, has it given you a fright?”
Johnny had a temperature that night. It went up to 101. He had caught a chill playing in the wet orchard, said Nanny. The little beggar had been eating unripe plums there, said his father. Magdalen wondered if she were responsible, if her terror had been so great as to bring fever on her child—for Johnny was apt to know what she was feeling, Johnny said sometimes, apropos of nothing, “Never mind, Mummy, it’s all right.” A child ought not to get inside another person’s mind like that, and if he did, the mind should be better fit to receive it, it ought not to be a chaos of conflicting fears.
Their advantage was that one fear drove out another; by breakfast-time next day Johnny’s temperature was 102, and Magdalen had forgotten all about the men hiding in the kitchen. She sent James, the factor, in the car for the doctor. The doctor had gone to do an operation in the town, Tillaloe, fifteen miles off, and James had to follow him there and leave a message for him to come out to Killevarrega as soon as he had finished. Johnny’s temperature went up to 103, and Magdalen scarcely listened when Dick told her that the four men were still in the kitchen, for it was raining so hard they couldn’t face the woods in this weather.
“One of them’s got a cough like a sawmill,” he said; “you might look out something for it.”
“He’d better see Dr. Regan when he comes.”
“He’d better not. Regan’s always in and out of Tillaloe.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“We don’t want him telling the Free State soldiers there that there are men in hiding here.”
A new fear came pushing up in Magdalen’s mind, vague, unwieldy, she did not quite know as yet what it was.
“James was in Tillaloe today,” she said, “he went there after Dr. Regan.”
“James is all right. He’s got a brother on the run himself.”
Johnny’s temperature went well down, as is the way of temperatures, just before the doctor came. Magdalen hurried Dr. Regan out of the house with guilty haste; he remarked that he did not see what he had been sent for at all, and in weather that would drown a salmon. His car splashed and screeched its way round the house. Magdalen waited a little and then went into the kitchen.
The four men were sitting round the fire, peeling boiled potatoes for the cook. They got up respectfully, each pulling in turn at his “glib,” the long lock of hair that hung over their foreheads. Three of them she did not know, but one was Michael, the son of the blacksmith at their village, Ardmore, three miles off.
“Why, Michael,” she said as she shook hands with him, “I didn’t know you were in this. I thought you were going to be the new Whipper-in.”
“Ah, so I will,” said Michael in a pleasant social voice, “for there’s nothing in the world I care about like a hound.”
“Well, you’ll have to get out of this first, Michael, and soon, for the hunt needs its new Whipper-in by Christmas.”
“Indeed and the war may be over by then,” said Michael, with all the well-bred detachment of an elderly gentleman discussing the political situation in the Far East from his armchair at the Club.
His ruddy freckled face looked with pleasure and interest at her round cheeks and clear grave eyes. “The mistress” had never looked a day older since she had first come to Killevarrega and he as a small boy had held her stirrup for her. He had seen a good deal of her in the hunting-field, had opened gates for her, and more than once pulled stones from a wall that had proved too high for her horse to jump. She could not remember a hunt at which she had not caught a glimpse of Michael’s red head and wide grin at some time in the proceedings, and generally at the death, for he was the keenest and quickest-footed of all the country lads who followed the hounds on foot, with a knowledge of the line the foxes would take that the hardest riding huntsman could not surpass. So great was Michael’s passion for the hounds that he had satisfied it at the cost of countless beatings for playing truant from school and then from work.
Even now, when he and his companions were themselves being hunted for their lives through the dripping woods, he
had questions only for the hounds: Was it true that they were meeting here at the house tomorrow morning? Did they mean to draw the Knocknamara covert? Were Tripe’s puppies, that he had been walking last spring, going out with them for the first time?
The “cough like a sawmill” rasped through these politely eager enquiries. Magdalen became conscious of the lowered heads, the anxious eyes of the three stranger lads who were regarding her with the suspicious stare of angry bullocks.
“That car gave us a fright,” said the man who was coughing. “What was it?”
“The doctor for my little boy,” said Magdalen.
“So they said.”
She wanted to say, “Then why did you ask?” but it struck her that a very rudimentary trap had been laid for her.
“He went off mighty quick,” said another.
“There wasn’t much the matter with him after all.” She wished she had not said that, but it was out now. She went on hastily, turning back to the man who had spoken first: “Your cough’s bad. If you’re staying here this night too, you’d best rub your chest with this camphorated oil—but not if you’re going out in the cold just after it.”
“Who said we were staying here the night?”
“We’d best be off,” said another, shifting uneasily on his feet.
She looked down at them. Their boots were almost worn through, and outside the rain was sheeting across the fields. Their eyes moved from her to each other, eyes that had stared week after week in dread for what she too had dreaded to see. Only Michael’s nerve was unshaken—“he’s a grand lad,” she remembered Dick saying of him, and the thrill of envy the praise had given her. So far was she from being a grand lad herself that even these poor frightened fugitives had the power to frighten her; she saw they doubted her, and felt sick at heart; nothing she could say or do would make them trust her. She handed the camphorated oil to Michael,
“Rub it on his chest if you stay,” she said, “but don’t if you go tonight.”
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