The colour flooded f.a.n.n.y Fitz's face. She stared at Patsey with eyes that more than ever suggested the Connemara trout-stream with the sun playing in it; so bright were they, so changing, and so wet. So at least thought a man, much addicted to fishing, who was regarding the scene from a little way off.

"He was a dealer, miss," went on Patsey; "a Dublin fella'. Sixty-three sovereigns I asked him, and he offered me fifty-five, and a man that was there said we should shplit the differ, and in the latther end he gave me the sixty pounds. He wasn't very stiff at all. I'm thinking he wasn't buying for himself."

The man who had noticed f.a.n.n.y Fitz's eyes moved away unostentatiously.

He had seen in them as much as he wanted; for that time at least.

THE CONNEMARA MARE

PART I

The grey mare who had been one of the last, if not the very last, of the sales at the Dublin Horse Show, was not at all happy in her mind.

Still less so was the dealer's under-strapper, to whom fell the task of escorting her through the streets of Dublin. Her late owner's groom had a.s.sured him that she would "folly him out of his hand, and that whatever she'd see she wouldn't care for it nor ask to look at it!"

It cannot be denied, however, that when an electric tram swept past her like a terrace under weigh, closely followed by a cart laden with a clanking and horrific reaping-machine, she showed that she possessed powers of observation. The incident pa.s.sed off with credit to the under-strapper, but when an animal has to be played like a salmon down the length of Lower Mount Street, and when it barn-dances obliquely along the north side of Merrion Square, the worst may be looked for in Na.s.sau Street.

And it was indeed in Na.s.sau Street, and, moreover, in full view of the bow window of Kildare Street Club, that the cup of the under-strapper's misfortunes brimmed over. To be sure he could not know that the new owner of the grey mare was in that window; it was enough for him that a quiescent and unsuspected piano-organ broke with three majestic chords into Mascagni's "Intermezzo" at his very ear, and that, without any apparent interval of time, he was surmounting a heap composed of a newspaper boy, a sandwich man, and a hospital nurse, while his hands held nothing save a red-hot memory of where the rope had been. The smashing of gla.s.s and the clatter of hoofs on the pavement filled in what s.p.a.ce was left in his mind for other impressions.

"She's into the hat shop!" said Mr. Rupert Gunning to himself in the window of the club, recognising his recent purchase and the full measure of the calamity in one and the same moment.

He also recognised in its perfection the fact, already suspected by him, that he had been a fool.

Upheld by this soothing reflection he went out into the street, where awaited him the privileges of proprietorship. These began with the despatching of the mare, badly cut, and apparently lame on every leg, in charge of the remains of the under-strapper, to her destination. They continued with the consolation of the hospital nurse, and embraced in varying pecuniary degrees the compensation of the sandwich man, the newspaper boy, and the proprietor of the hat shop. During all this time he enjoyed the unfaltering attention of a fair-sized crowd, liberal in comment, prolific of imbecile suggestion. And all these things were only the beginning of the trouble.

Mr. Gunning proceeded to his room and to the packing of his portmanteau for that evening's mail-boat to Holyhead in a mood of considerable sourness. It may be conceded to him that circ.u.mstances had been of a souring character. He had bought Miss f.a.n.n.y Fitzroy's grey mare at the Horse Show for reasons of an undeniably sentimental sort. Therefore, having no good cause to show for the purchase, he had made it secretly, the sum of sixty pounds, for an animal that he had consistently crabbed, amounting in the eyes of the world in general to a rather advanced love-token, if not a formal declaration. He had planned no future for the grey mare, but he had cherished a trembling hope that some day he might be in a position to restore her to her late owner without considering the expression in any eyes save those which, a couple of hours ago, had recalled to him the play of lights in a Connemara trout stream.

Now, it appeared, this pleasing vision must go the way of many others.

The August sunlight illumined Mr. Gunning's folly, and his bulging portmanteau, packed as brutally as only a man in a pa.s.sion can pack; when he reached the hall, it also with equal inappropriateness irradiated the short figure and seedy tidiness of the dealer who had been his confederate in the purchase of the mare.

"What did the vet say, Brennan?" said Mr. Gunning, with the brevity of ill humour.

Mr. Brennan paused before replying, a pause laden with the promise of evil tidings. His short silvery hair glistened respectably in the sunshine: he had preserved unblemished from some earlier phase of his career the air of a family coachman out of place. It veiled, though it could not conceal, the dissolute twinkle in his eye as he replied:--

"He said sir, if it wasn't that she was something out of condition, he'd recommend you to send her out to the lions at the Zoo!"

The specimen of veterinary humour had hardly the success that had been hoped for it. Rupert Gunning's face was so remarkably void of appreciation that Mr. Brennan abruptly relapsed into gloom.

"He said he'd only be wasting his time with her, sir; he might as well go st.i.tch a bog-hole as them wounds the window gave her; the tendon of the near fore is the same as in two halves with it, let alone the shoulder, that's worse again with her pitching out on the point of it."

"Was that all he had to say?" demanded the mare's owner.

"Well, beyond those remarks he pa.s.sed about the Zoo, I should say it was, sir," admitted Mr. Brennan.

There was another pause, during which Rupert asked himself what the devil he was to do with the mare, and Mr. Brennan, thoroughly aware that he was doing so, decorously thumbed the brim of his hat.

"Maybe we might let her get the night, sir," he said, after a respectful interval, "and you might see her yourself in the morning--"

"I don't want to see her. I know well enough what she looks like,"

interrupted his client irritably. "Anyhow, I'm crossing to England to-night, and I don't choose to miss the boat for the fun of looking at an unfortunate brute that's cut half to pieces!"

Mr. Brennan cleared his throat. "If you were thinking to leave her in my stables, sir," he said firmly, "I'd sooner be quit of her. I've only a small place, and I'd lose too much time with her if I had to keep her the way she is. She might be on my hands three months and die at the end of it."

The clock here struck the quarter, at which Mr. Gunning ought to start for his train at Westland Row.

"You see, sir--" recommenced Brennan. It was precisely at this point that Mr. Gunning lost his temper.

"I suppose you can find time to shoot her," he said, with a very red face. "Kindly do so to-night!"

Mr. Brennan's arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning's original motive in buying the mare had been, he had during this interview yielded to treatment and followed a prepared path.

That night, in the domestic circle, he went so far as to lay the matter before Mrs. Brennan.

"He picked out a mare that was as poor as a raven--though she's a good enough stamp if she was in condition--and tells me to buy her. 'What price will I give, sir?' says I. 'Ye'll give what they're askin',' says he, 'and that's sixty sovereigns!' I'm thirty years buying horses, and such a disgrace was never put on me, to be made a fool of before all Dublin! Going giving the first price for a mare that wasn't value for the half of it! Well; he sees the mare then, cut into garters below in Na.s.sau Street. Devil a hair he cares! Nor never came down to the stable to put an eye on her! 'Shoot her!' says he, leppin' up on a car.

'Westland Row!' says he to the fella'. 'Drive like blazes!' and away with him! Well, no matter; I earned my money easy, an' I got the mare cheap!"

Mrs. Brennan added another spoonful of brown sugar to the porter that she was mulling in a sauce-pan on the range.

"Didn't ye say it was a young lady that owned the mare, James?" she asked in a colourless voice.

"Well, you're the devil, Mary!" replied Mr. Brennan in sincere admiration.

The mail-boat was as crowded as is usual on the last night of the Horse Show week. Overhead flowed the smoke river from the funnels, behind flowed the foam river of wake; the Hill of Howth receded apace into the west, and its lighthouse glowed like a planet in the twilight. Men with cigars, aggressively fit and dinner-full, strode the deck in couples, and thrashed out the Horse Show and Leopardstown to their uttermost husks.

Rupert Gunning was also, but with excessive reluctance, discussing the Horse Show. As he had given himself a good deal of trouble in order to cross on this particular evening, and as any one who was even slightly acquainted with Miss Fitzroy must have been aware that she would decline to talk of anything else, sympathy for him is not altogether deserved.

The boat swung softly in a trance of speed, and Miss Fitzroy, better known to a large circle of intimates as f.a.n.n.y Fitz, tried to think the motion was pleasant. She had made a good many migrations to England, by various routes and cla.s.ses. There had indeed been times of stress when she had crossed unostentatiously, third cla.s.s, trusting that luck and a thick veil might save her from her friends, but the day after she had sold a horse for sixty pounds was not the day for a daughter of Ireland to study economics. The breeze brought warm and subtle wafts from the machinery; it also blew wisps of hair into f.a.n.n.y Fitz's eyes and over her nose, in a manner much revered in fiction, but in real life usually unbecoming and always exasperating. She leaned back on the bench and wondered whether the satisfaction of crowing over Mr. Gunning compensated her for abandoning the tranquil security of the ladies'

cabin.

Mr. Gunning, though less contradictious than his wont, was certainly one of the most deliberately unsympathetic men she knew. None the less he was a man, and some one to talk to, both points in his favour, and she stayed on.

"I just missed meeting the man who bought my mare," she said, recurring to the subject for the fourth time; "apparently _he_ didn't think her 'a leggy, long-backed brute,' as other people did, or said they did!"

"Did many people say it?" asked Mr. Gunning, beginning to make a cigarette.

"Oh, no one whose opinion signified!" retorted f.a.n.n.y Fitz, with a glance from her charming, changeful eyes that suggested that she did not always mean quite what she said. "I believe the dealer bought her for a Leicestershire man. What she really wants is a big country where she can extend herself."

Mr. Gunning reflected that by this time the grey mare had extended herself once for all in Brennan's back-yard: he had done nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt abjectly guilty.

"If I go with Maudie to Connemara again next year," continued f.a.n.n.y, "I must look out for another. You'll come too, I hope? A little opposition is such a help in making up one's mind! I don't know what I should have done without you at Leenane last June!"

Perhaps it was the vision of early summer that the words called up; perhaps it was the smile, half-seen in the semi-dark, that curved her provoking lips; perhaps it was compunction for his share in the tragedy of the Connemara mare; but possibly without any of these explanations Rupert would have done as he did, which was to place his hand on f.a.n.n.y Fitz's as it lay on the bench beside him.

She was so amazed that for a moment she wildly thought he had mistaken it in the darkness for his tobacco pouch. Then, jumping with a shock to the conclusion that even the unsympathetic Mr. Gunning shared most men's views about not wasting an opportunity, she removed her hand with a jerk.

"Oh! I beg your pardon!" said Rupert pusillanimously. Miss Fitzroy fell back again on the tobacco pouch theory.