"And now, sir, what do ye say to Pether Cadogan!" she began, launching the enigma into s.p.a.ce from the obscurity of the deep doorway. "What do ye say to him now? The raving scamp!"

I replied that I had a great deal to say to him, and that if I might so far trespa.s.s on his leisure as to request his presence in the hall, I would say it.

"Hall is it!" echoed Peter's aunt in bitter wrath. "It's my heart's grief that he ever stood in Shreelane hall to dhraw disgrace on me and on yer Honour! G.o.d forgive me, when I heard it I had to spit! Himself and Bridget Brickley got married in Skebawn this evening and the two o'

them is gone to Ameriky on the thrain to-night, and it's all I'll say for her, whatever sort of a thrash she is, she's good enough for him!"

There was a pause while one might pant twice.

"I'll tell ye no lie. If I had a gun in me hand, I'd shoot him like a bird! I'd down the brat!"

The avenging deity retired.

What part the Widower proposed to play in the day's proceedings will never be clearly known. He was picked up next day in Hare Island Sound, drifting seaward in the boat whose "share" had formed the marriage portion of Mrs. Peter Cadogan. Both oars were gone; there remained to him an empty bottle of "potheen," and a bucket. He was rowing the boat with the bucket.

VIII

"A HORSE! A HORSE!"

PART I

"Old Jimmy Porteous!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, while a glow of the ancient enthusiasm irradiated my bosom, "Philippa, I say! Do you see this?

Jimmy Porteous is to command this District!"

"No, darling, _not_ with an egg!" replied Philippa, removing the honey spoon from the grasp of her youngest child, just too late to avert disaster, "we _don't_ eat honey with eggs."

The heavy hand of experience has taught me that at moments such as these the only possible course is to lie to, head to wind, till the squall pa.s.ses, and then begin from the beginning again. I readdressed myself to my newspaper, while the incident went, like a successful burlesque, with a roar, sustained from the foot of the stairs to the point when the nursery door slammed upon it.

Philippa resumed her seat at the breakfast table.

"Yes, dear, what were you saying?" she said, yielding me the laborious but vague attention that is the best any husband can expect from any wife on such occasions.

I repeated my statement, and was scandalised to find that Philippa had but the most shadowy remembrance of Jimmy Porteous, who, in the days when I first joined my regiment had been its senior subaltern, and, for me and my fellows, one of the most revered of its law-givers. As a captain he left us, and proceeded to do something brilliant on somebody's staff, and, what time I got my company, had moved on in radiance into a lofty existence in the War Office and newspaper paragraphs.

I recalled these things to my wife, coupling them with the information that she would have to call on Lady Porteous, when the door opened, and the face of Flurry Knox, unshaven and blue, with the miserable mother-o'-pearl blueness of fair people in cold weather, appeared in the opening.

He had looked in, he said, on his way home from the fair, to try would we give him a cup of tea, and he went on to remark that the wind was cold enough to cut the horns off a cow.

I asked him if he had seen my beasts there, and if they had been sold.

"Oh, they were, they were," he said tolerantly; "it was a wonderful good fair. The dealers were buying all before them. There was a man said to me, 'If you had a little dog there, and he to be a calf, you'd have sold him.'"

It was one of Flurry Knox's ruling principles in life to disparage the live stock of his friends; it was always within the bounds of possibility that the moment might arrive when he would wish to buy them.

"I met a man from Sir Thomas Purcell's country yesterday," said Flurry presently; "he says there's been the father and mother of a row down there between old Sir Thomas and Hackett, that's the man has the harriers. Sir Thomas is wild because they say the soldiers are giving Hackett as good a subscription as himself, and he says Hackett has all the foxes killed."

"But surely--harriers don't hunt foxes?" said Philippa ingenuously.

Flurry looked at her for a moment in silence. "Is it Hackett's harriers!" he said compa.s.sionately; "sure he flogs them off hares."

"Talking of soldiers, they've just sent a man who used to be in my regiment to command this district," I said, plucking my own topic from the tangle of inter-hunt squabbles; "a great man to hounds he used to be, too."

"Would he buy the Dodger?" asked Flurry swiftly. "Would he give a price?"

"I daresay he would if he liked the horse. If I got a chance I might tell him," I said, magnanimously.

"I tell you what, Major," said Flurry, with an eye on his ally, Philippa, "you and me and Mrs. Yeates will go up and have a day with Sir Thomas's hounds, and you'll say the word for me to the General!"

Looking back at it all now, I recognise that here was the moment for firmness. I let the moment slip, and became immersed in tracking General Sir James Porteous, K.C.B., through the pages of an elderly Army List. By the time I had located him in three separate columns, I found that Philippa and Flurry had arranged unalterably the details of what my wife is pleased to call a ramp--_i.e._ an expedition that, as its name implies, suggests a raid made by tramps.

"--Why, my gracious! aren't they cousins of my own? They'll be only delighted! Sure, Sally had measles there three years ago, and 'twas as good as a play for them!--Put us up, is it? Of course they will! The whole lot of us. D'ye think Sally'd stay at home?--No, you'll not take your own horses at all. Hire from Flavin; I'll see he does you well."

"And you know, Sinclair"--thus the other conspirator--"it would be an excellent chance for you to meet your beloved Jimmy Porteous!"

It was not Mr. Knox's habit to let the gra.s.s grow under his feet.

Before I had at all grasped the realities of the project, my wife heard from Mrs. Sally Knox to say that she had arranged it all with the Butler-Knoxes, and that we were to stay on for a second night in order to go to a dance at which we should meet the General. At intervals during the following week I said to Philippa that it was preposterous and monstrous to dump ourselves upon the Butler-Knoxes, unknown people whom we had but once met at a function at the Bishop's. My remembrance of them, though something blurred by throngs of the clergy and their wives, did not suggest the type of person who might be expected to keep open house for stray fox-hunters. I said all this to Philippa, who entirely agreed with me, and continued her preparations, after the manner of experienced wives.

It was raining hard one afternoon in the following week when a four-wheeled inside car--an admirable vehicle, which I wish in no way to disparage--disgorged its burden at the door of Garden Mount House.

One item of the burden was experiencing a sensation only too familiar, such a sensation as a respectable seaman might feel on being pressed into a crew of buccaneers. The house loomed over us, large, square, and serious, in the wet moonlight of the January evening; the husky, over-fed bark of an elderly dog was incessant in the hall. If by laying hold of the coat-tails of the leading pirate, as he got out to ring the bell, I could then and there have brought the expedition to a close, I would thankfully have done so.

The door was opened by a melancholy old gentleman with a grey moustache and whiskers; he might have been Colonel Newcome in his decadence, but from the fact that he wore an evening coat and grey trousers, I gathered that he was the butler, and for any one skilled in Irish households, he at once placed the establishment--rich, G.o.dly, low church, and consistently and contentedly dull. As we entered the hall there arose from some fastness in the house a shrill clamour that resolved itself into the first line of a hymn.

Flurry dug me in the ribs with his elbow. "They've found!" he whispered, "you needn't look so frightened. It's only Lucy and Louisa having the choir practice!"

To these strains Colonel Newcome ushered us into the drawing-room.

There was no one in it. It was a large double drawing-room, and nothing but heavy maroon curtains now separated us from the choir practice. The hymn continued, a loud and long-drawn proclamation, and, pending its conclusion, my wife and Mrs. Flurry Knox swiftly and stealthily circ.u.mnavigated the room, and appraised all its contents, from a priceless Battersea basket filled with dusty bulbs, to a Chippendale card-table with a sewing machine clamped on to it, while Flurry, in a stage whisper, dilated to me upon the superfluous wealth that Providence had seen fit to waste upon the Butler-Knoxes. The household, as I had gradually learnt, consisted of an elderly bachelor, Mr. Lucius Butler-Knox (commonly known as "Looshy "), his unmarried sister, Miss Louisa, his widowed sister, Mrs. Hodnett, and a corpulent, grey-muzzled black-and-tan terrier. Their occupations were gardening, and going to what they called "the city," _i.e._ the neighbouring county town, to attend charitable committee meetings; they kept a species of philanthropic registry office for servants; their foible was hospitality, disastrously coupled with the fact that they dined at half-past six. It was one of the mysteries of kinship that Flurry Knox and our host and hostess should possess a nearer relative in common than Adam. That he should have established their respectable home as his hostelry and house of call was one of the mysteries of Flurry Knox.

The hymn ceased, the raiders hastily formed into line, the maroon drapery parted, and the ladies of the house, flushed with song, and importing with them a potent sample of the atmosphere of the back drawing-room, were upon us, loud in hospitable apologies, instant in offers of tea; the situation opened and swallowed us up.

The half-past six o'clock dinner came all too swiftly. Glared upon by an unshaded lamp that sat like a ball of fire in the centre of the table, we laboured in the trough of a sea of the thickest ox-tail soup; a large salmon followed; with the edge of dubious appet.i.te already turned, we saw the succeeding items of the menu spread forth on the table like a dummy hand at bridge. The boiled turkey, with its satellite ham, the roast saddle of mutton, with its stable companion the stack of cutlets; the succeeding course, where a team of four wild duck struggled for the lead with an open tart and a sago pudding. Like Agag, we went delicately, and, like Agag, it availed us nothing.

I watched my _vis-a-vis_, little Mrs. Flurry, furtively burying a slab of turkey beneath mashed potatoes as neatly as a little dog buries a bone; her green kitten's eyes met mine without a change of expression, and turned to her gla.s.s, which Colonel Newcome had filled with claret.

"The beaded bubbles, winking at the brim," had a greyish tinge.

"Cousin Lucius!" observed Mrs. Flurry, in a silence that presently happened to fall, "can you remember who painted that picture of our great-grandfather--the one over the door I mean?"

Mr. Butler-Knox, a small, grey-bearded, elderly gentleman, wholly, up to the present, immersed in carving, removed the steam of the ducks from his eye-gla.s.ses, and concentrated them upon the picture.

"It's by Maclise, isn't it?" went on Sally, leaning forward to get a nearer view.

In that moment, when all heads turned to the picture, I plainly saw her draw the gla.s.s of claret to the verge of the table, it disappeared beneath it and returned to its place empty. Almost simultaneously, the black-and-tan terrier sprang from a lair near my feet, and hurried from the room, shaking his ears vigorously. Mrs. Flurry's eyes wavered from the portrait to mine, and her face became slowly and evenly pink, like an afterglow.

It was but one of the many shameless acts of my party during the age-long evening. At ten o'clock we retired to rest, for my own part, thoroughly overfed, not in the least sleepy, worn with conversation, and oppressed by the consciousness of flippant, even brutal, ingrat.i.tude.

The weather had cleared next morning to mild greyness, that softened even the asperity of half-past eight breakfast. I lumbered stiffly downstairs in a pair of new butcher boots, and found with thankfulness that our hosts, exhausted possibly by their efforts, had kept their rooms.

Marshalled in order upon the sideboard stood the remains of all the more enduring items of last night's dinner, cold indeed, but firm and undefeated; hot dishes of ancient silver roasted before the n.o.ble bra.s.s-mounted fireplace; there were vats of lethargic cream, a clutch of new-laid eggs, a heap of hot scones.