They went back to the Sale ring, but not inside; they stood near the entrance archway and watched a dainty filly step out with coquettish pride, unaware that she had been knocked down for fifteen pounds on account of her fetlocks.
“Are all these horses going for nothing?” asked Kay, her teeth chattering with nervous excitement. She was told, Ah, not at all, she had just missed the best sale they expected to get to-day, and that was Lady Senseless out of Senses by Matchmaker, who went for 875 guineas.
“And is that the best they expect to get? You must raise Con a deal higher than that, Mr. Doran.”
“Where’ll I back out?”
“Not a penny less than a thousand.”
Here was another horse, led up by the groom. From behind the sheltering mass of Mr. Doran, Kay could not resist peeping in after them round the corner of the archway into the Sale ring. She looked up at tier after tier of watchful, calculating faces, the faces of people who were to decide Con’s fate and the fate of Sir Murrough O’fflaherty and Baranemona, perhaps also of herself.
They were not reassuring. She felt she was looking into a Rowlandson caricature come to life. The gross yet secretive faces of the horse-dealers under their billycock hats above their check tweeds and square-tailed coats made a painful contrast to the innocent, startled looks of the horses, led round and round before them to show off their paces, arching and stretching their gallant necks against their halters. “Swift must have seen the Horse Show when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels,’ thought Kay in sudden agreement that horses should be the ruling class and mankind the Yahoos their servants. Loudly, too, each horse agreed in turn, neighing in shrill protest against the indignity of this silly walk round and round in a circle while the monotonous voice of the auctioneer chanted in rivalry.
“Con. Bay mare three years by Ridiculous dam Connemara Pride by Conachur (sire of Connecticut’s dam) Connemara Pride own sister to Prudence and Purse Proud, winner of over £5,000.”
The voice had pounded on thus far before Kay realized that here was Con herself, stepping superbly round and round the circle. She saw her aunts” faces, as intent as if their overdrafts would ever let them bid; she saw a white tight face with a tragic likeness to Murrough O’fflaherty’s normally cheerful countenance.
She saw, among some shabby country-tailored squireens, a man of such chill sophistication, from the cut of his grey tweeds to the eyeglass that was no blanker in expression than the thinly chiselled features surrounding it, that he gave to his provincial neighbours the air of one of those groups of sporting gentlemen in the Tatler whose names when read carefully from left to right prove so illustrious that they should be worth the trouble of reading even from right to left. He gave less sign of life than any being has a right to show and yet be called human; only a spasmodic twitch of his catalogue told Kay’s instinct rather than her reason that he was bidding.
And only now, as the meaning of that minute mechanical jerk stole into her brain, did she realize that the auctioneer’s rhythmic boom was now expressing itself in numbers—“85 guineas, 90, 95.” But there it stuck, the auctioneer repeating himself lamentably, and Con rearing up as if to demand a better price for herself. Kay, who had slipped back behind the formless bulk of Hyacinth, with difficulty refrained from pinching him. “Why don’t you begin bidding?” she whispered fiercely. “She’ll go at 95 if you don’t look out.”
“She will not,” replied Hyacinth imperturbably, and sure enough a cadaverous face under a square-topped billycock of early Victorian cut nodded very slightly in answer to the auctioneer.
“100 guineas, 110, 120, 130—” That tireless voice was forging ahead again now, ten guineas at a time. It reached 500, and still Mr. Doran had not joined in. The Perfect Sportsman and the Cadaver had it mostly between them, twitching and nodding in turn and as imperceptibly as possible, like two well-bred victims of St. Vitus” Dance.
But at 550 the Cadaver gave out, and Hyacinth lounged just into view of the auctioneer and gave an upward flick of his little pig’s eyes. The numbers rose merrily again, now 25 at a time, cleared 600, 700. Cheered onward by an erratic bidder who had backed out appalled in the three hundreds and now improvidently rushed in again in the seven hundreds, they approached 900, and here again slackened to a long pause between each bid.
At 975 Mr. Doran looked back to the girl behind him. “Will I leave him with it now?”
“No,” whispered Kay fiercely.
She knew she was being reckless, the mare’s owner had said he could manage if he got a thousand for her, and this was only twenty-five off. “Could manage’—with borrowing, though; he should have a clear start if she could get it. And once again Hyacinth lifted those ponderous rolls of flesh that were his chin.
“One thousand guineas from you in the archway,” boomed out the impersonal voice of Fate with the hammer. Would she be left with it? Would her father pay all that? Could you, after all, repudiate a minor’s debts? And the numbers after a thousand must now rise by fifty.
An immense gap opened in time, no one was ever going to bid again, the auctioneer repeated his number over and over, began to repeat Con’s pedigree, and Con, ineffably bored, replied with contemptuous comments of such a piercing quality that they drowned the auctioneers’.
Not for some time did Kay realize that he was no longer repeating “One thousand guineas,” but “One thousand and fifty.”
Hyacinth Doran lightly touched his forehead with fingers that came away very damp. A lesser man would have mopped it frankly with his handkerchief; but no less than the English exquisite inside the circle must Hyacinth achieve that perfect concealment of his feelings that proclaimed a man fit to deal with horses.
But madness had entered into Kay.
“He’ll never leave it at that now he’s gone so far,” she whispered. “Bid again.”
“I’ll not. He’s tiring. He’ll never rise to eleven fifty.”
Eleven hundred and fifty guineas. The Vet’s practice bought at Baranemona, and fifty in hand to start with! The prospect was too dazzling to resist.
“He’ll do it,” she urged. “He’ll not tire till he gets it now. Bid again, I tell you, or I’ll come in on it myself.”
“Eleven hundred from the archway,” intoned the auctioneer. “Any advance on eleven hundred, you on the left? Going—going—eleven hundred guineas for Con, bay mare by Ridiculous, dam Connemara Pride, winner at Punches-town of—”
The voice pounded on, the auctioneer’s head turned right and left, the hammer itself was raised now.
“Any advance on eleven hundred guineas? Going, going, going—”
“Going to faint,” thought Kay—if only she were not sick first! “Going, going, going—”
But the voice was going on: “Eleven fifty” it was saying, and Kay, outside the archway, sat down suddenly.
“Begob, that’s better luck than you were asking!” said Hyacinth’s voice over her. From inside came the thud of the hammer on the auctioneer’s desk.
“I wonder might we have raised him another hundred?” said Kay’s exhausted whisper.
Out came Con, rejoicing at the top of her voice, and the next horse led in past her made polite replies. Her previous owner came down the steps and was going past them when he saw Kay, swung round, seized her arm and hurried her along with him, saying very fast, “Come and have a look at her. Hullo, Doran, you made a grand running for her. Another fifty and she’d have been yours for certain.”
“It’s what I’m thinking, Sir Murrough.”
“It’s a pity for you, and for the mare too, to waste her on a poor tame sweep of country like Leicestershire when you think of the stone walls in Galway spoiling for a horse that can jump like that.”
He might have been a colt himself, whinnying his triumph. He went on talking with Kay, quite regardless of Mr. Doran, who was following their rapid stride to the stall in a series of little breathless trots. But mostly Sir Murrough’s love-making was a pæan of praise for his mare. “
She’s done the trick for us,” he said again and again.
“For us! You’ve not even troubled to ask me to marry you yet.”
“No trouble at all, my darling. I’ll do it as often as you like.”
“You know nothing whatever about me.”
“I know that you sat on my saddle and neither squealed nor chattered all through the night. That you looked me square in the face when you thought I was going to fire the house, and told me what you thought of it. That you laugh when I want to laugh, that you—have I said anything yet about those little yellow flecks in your eyes? Now tell me anything that’s more important than all that.”
He plunged into the stall and was suddenly silent as he put up his hand to Con’s neck. Mr. Doran’s panting breath came up behind them.
“A nice beast,” he said, stooping like an elephant about to kneel in his survey of the mare’s pasterns, “but she’d have stuck round the six hundreds if it hadn’t been for this young lady’s nudges behind. ’Twas herself got you your price, Sir Murrough.”
The stall had darkened as he spoke; before he had finished, a voice as crisp as the snapping of icicles cut across his benevolent blurring brogue.
“What the devil are you doing here, Kay?”
Con’s purchaser stood in the opening, a neat outline against the light outside, flanked by two raggedly exotic shapes which might have been cut from a magazine of 1905.
“So you’re here already,” said Aunt Eily’s soft voice. “What a hurry we’re all in to see the new mare! Why, we’ve not even had time yet to tell your father you’re staying with us!”
“Dear Aunt Eily!” gasped Kay.
Her father had cut across Hyacinth’s revelations too sharply to have noticed them. And Murrough, amazed and open-mouthed in the very act of receiving them, was too quick to refer to them.
“You never told me you were a niece of the Miss McCauslands,” he said reproachfully to Kay, and came forward to shake hands with gay respect. “I often heard of you from my father—Sir Standish O’fflaherty, you know.”
“You’ve no need to tell us who you are, young man,” said Aunt Grace’s affable croak. “We’d have known that the moment you took your first jump. And when are you going to take on the Blazers in your turn?”
“I may get my chance in time—if they’ll ever have a vet for M.F.H.” Turning to Mr. Gunne-Smith, he said, “I have to thank you for that, sir. The price you’ve given for the mare will buy me my practice at Baranemona.”
It all sounded as harmonious as if wedding-bells were already chiming, despite certain silent repercussions at the word “vet.” Mr. Gunne-Smith could only express his pleasure at having been of service, and defer his questions to his daughter till later. A chorus of critical admiration of Con’s various points began to round off the conversation nicely.
But into this polite assembly there exploded a bombshell of a voice, strident with fury, and outside in the sunlight there scintillated a figure in artificial silk like some monstrous avenging angel.
“Is that Hyacinth Doran in there?” it proclaimed. “And the dirty little sweep of a girl who’s cudgelled him into buying her a horse?”
“Would I cudgel Mr. Doran?” whispered Kay, aghast, but Murrough shot back, “It’s “cajoled” she means,” and cruelly pushed Hyacinth forward to receive the brunt of his stepmother’s wrath.
“I did not buy her a horse, Emily Maud,” pleaded Doran, “it’s her father here, a gentleman from England, bought the mare.”
“After you’d run her up to eleven hundred and fifty guineas. Do you think nobody watched you or knew about it? And all for a slob of a girl who has not a farthing, as I knew very well—”
“There is some mistake,” said Mr. Gunne-Smith’s impersonal tones. “I was bidding against this dealer, not my daughter.”
“Your daughter, is it? Then your daughter was behind the dealer, you poor—” but here Mr. Gunne-Smith’s eyeglass, clear testimony in her eyes of the true Quality, awed Lady O’fflaherty into a momentary pause in which she had time to observe the perfect justice done by his tailor to his figure. “And isn’t it a crying shame,” she declared in swift change to sympathy, “that a fine sportsman like yourself should be run up into four figures by your own unnatural child?”
Lightning flashed through the eyeglass.
“Do you mean to say,” blazed the unfortunate man to Mr. Doran, “that you were bidding for my daughter? And what money would she have had to pay for the mare if she’d won it?”
“Sure, she gave me to understand that yourself would be answerable.”
Mr. Gunne-Smith opened his mouth—and shut it.
Through the blasphemous silence came a hoot like a hunting owl from the irrepressible Aunt Grace.
Kay suddenly flamed into a rage that made her father’s stiff anger curiously unimpressive.
“What have I done more than make you buy a horse you wanted anyhow? But you sold Killarae—it would have been mine in another year—and you sold it over my head without asking me.”
All the veils and laces of her aunts rustled and quivered to her attack; even Mr. Gunne-Smith was shaken into speech by the necessity to change to a position of defence.
“A dilapidated place,” he said. “I only kept it up for your mother’s sake.”
Aunt Eily slid gently into the discussion: “You kept up some very nice fishing and shooting there for your own sake, George. It’s only now you’ve got so rich you’ve bought a place in Leicestershire that you are too poor to keep up Killarae.”
Lady O’fflaherty, still brooding on her own wrongs, burst forth on a renewed wave of indignation.
“Well, anyhow, the young lady stole my seals!”
“Do you keep seals?” asked Aunt Grace with polite interest. “What do you feed them on?”
Lady O’fflaherty wheeled a blank uncomprehending eye upon her, but her stepson broke in before the mystery could be cleared.
“It was I stole the seals, my own property! This young lady is going to be my wife and we are going to live at Baranemona, and when you’ve made Mr. Hyacinth Doran my step-step-father, I hope he’ll do me the favour to look over my stables now and then.”
“I will so, Sir Murrough,” said Mr. Doran, and turned with camaraderie to Mr. Gunne-Smith: “You and me, sir, must do what we can for them. I can put the young fellow in the way of work as well as any man in Ireland—and wouldn’t it be a pretty thought now if you were to give them the mare as a wedding present?”
The stony stare of the eyeglass never swerved. It was looking defeat in the face.
The Collar
The cornfield on the top of the hill called “Lisdoonara” was like a golden crown. It was a round patch of rich soil that had been scraped together from among the encircling rocks. It was no bigger than a tennis-court, but bigger than many other neighbouring fields, for this was on the north-west coast of Ireland, where a living has to be torn in shreds and patches out of the harsh ground.
Dan was cutting the corn with a sickle in long sweeping strokes; the western sun was slanting into his eyes, and he could see nothing but the dazzle of evening light on the pale stalks and on the deep red-gold of the shaking ears of corn as they fell with a long swishing sigh before him. Beyond them was the brilliant yellow-gold of the ragwort growing all over the rocks, and the big round yellow-petalled daisies. It was thick gold all round him, and the scattered gold of the flowers beyond, speckled with blue scabious and harebells and the crimson-purple of the tall loosestrife and shadowed with deep pools under the sparkling rocks. Beyond it all was the glitter of the sea.
The sun burned the back of Dan’s neck, and the sweat ran down into his eyes so that the drops hung on his thick light eyelashes, and when he looked up he caught a glimpse of rainbows in them from the low rays of the sun. He brushed them away with his left hand, standing an instant to straighten his back. In that instant his bowed urgent body became that of a fine young man over six feet high, with a proudly shaped head on his
broad shoulders, and the yellow hair curling crisply over it. Then he swooped to his work again, tearing out a thick stem of ragwort with his left hand. That was the bad stuff to get in here, souring the land. He swung his sickle again, and it struck against something hard, some piece of metal sticking up out of the ground that he had loosened by pulling up the ragwort.
He peered down among the corn-stalks and saw a black thing sticking up from under the earth. He pulled at it, but it would not come; he loosened the earth still more with his sickle, then began to dig with his fingers. A magpie flew up over the end of the field and he had to touch the curl that fell over his forehead, out of respect to the drop of devil’s blood that there is in every magpie.
“One for sorrow,” bad luck to it; no, here were more, a little flock—five, or six was it?
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret
That must never be told.
There were six of them. “For gold then, and don’t I wish I may see it!” chuckled Dan, tugging out the black thing from the earth.
It was a thin piece of iron, or tin maybe, much battered, but the shape was roughly that of a half-moon about nine inches at its widest, tapering to the two horns, where there were two round, rough excrescences like the buckles on a horse’s blinkers. Dan turned it round, and held it this way and that way, but could not see what the thing was nor what it had been meant for. He flung it aside and went on cutting.
When it was nearly dark, he picked up the piece of metal and went back to his home and his tea. His home was in a little white house with a black felt roof, and it stood at the side of the cornfield. Inside there was a red glowing light from the fire of peat turfs lying on the hearth, and a smell of hot bread from the flat loaf his mother was just after taking from the lid of the round black pot that hung from a chain over the fire. There was, too, the sound of his sister’s melodion from the shadow of the settle squeaking out a lot of gay notes from the tune of a jig and leaving one out every now and then, for the melodion was old and faulty.
Bloodstock and Other Stories Page 8
