[Ill.u.s.tration: "THAT'S A GREAT SIGN OF FINE WEATHER WHEN A HORSE WILL LIE DOWN IN WATHER THAT WAY"]

I turned upon my consoler, and saw a young countryman with a fur-lined coat hanging upon his arm.

"I got this thrown in the bohireen above," he said, "the other gentleman, that's follying the bay horse, stripped it off him, and G.o.d knows it's itself that's weighty!"

"My dear Major!" began Looshy, addressing me agitatedly from the bank, as a hen might address a refractory duckling, "there has been a most unfortunate mistake."

"There has! There has! It's all Flurry's fault!" gasped Philippa, staggering towards me like a drunken woman.

"I fear the General is terribly annoyed," continued Looshy, wiping his grey beard and mopping his collar to remove the muddy imprint of Philippa's arm; "he rushed into Garden Mount in search of his horses when he found they were not at the meet nor at the station--he left Lady Porteous with my sisters and took me to identify you; I mentioned your name, but he did not seem to grasp it--indeed his language was--er--was such that I thought it unwise to press the point."

I dropped the reins and began, slowly, to wade out of the pool.

"I understand he has but just paid 300 for these horses--it was an unpardonable mistake of Flurry's," went on Looshy, "he found the General's horses at the station and thought that they were Flavin's."

"Dear Flurry!" sobbed Philippa, shamelessly, reeling against me and clutching my arm.

"Begor' he have the horse!" said the young countryman, looking up the hill.

A stout figure in a red coat and tall hat was approaching by way of the bohireen, followed by a man leading a limping horse.

"I think," said Looshy nervously, "that Mrs. Yeates had better have my seat in the motor-car and hurry home. I will walk--I should really prefer it. The General will be quite happy now that he has found his horses and his old friend."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I WILL WALK--I SHOULD REALLY PREFER IT"]

The chauffeur, plying a long-necked oil-can, smiled sardonically.

X

SHARPER THAN A FERRET'S TOOTH

"My dear Philippa," said Miss Shute gloomily, "I have about as much chance of spending next winter in Florence as I have of spending it in the moon. I despair of ever getting Bernard married. I look upon him as hopeless."

"I don't agree with you at all," replied Philippa, "don't you remember how demented he was about Sally Knox? And when we all thought he was on the verge of suicide, we discovered that he was deep in a flirtation with that American girl. It seems to me he's ready to be devoted to any one who takes him in hand. He has none of that deadly helpless fidelity about him."

"I ought never to have allowed him to take up gardening," said Miss Shute, despondently pursuing her own line of thought, "it only promotes intimacies with dowagers."

"Yes, and it makes men elderly, and contented, and stay-at-home,"

agreed Philippa; "it's one of the worst signs! But I can easily make Sybil Hervey think she's a gardener. She's a thoroughly nice, coercible girl. Alice has always been so particular about her girls.

Of course with their money they've been run after a good deal, but they're not in the least spoilt."

"I don't think," I murmured privately to Maria, who was trying to hypnotise me into letting her crawl on to the sofa beside me, "that we'll borrow half-a-crown to get drunk with her."

Maria wagged her tail in servile acquiescence.

"Nonsense!" said my wife largely.

A month from the date of this conversation, Sybil Hervey, my wife's pretty, young, and well-dowered niece, was staying beneath our roof. I had not changed my mind about the half-crown, though Maria, perfidious as ever, feigned for her the impa.s.sioned affection that had so often imposed upon the guileless guest within my gates.

"Why, this dog has taken the most extraordinary fancy to me!" Sybil Hervey (who was really a very amiable girl) would say, and Maria, with a furtive eye upon her owners, would softly draw the guest's third piece of cake into the brown velvet bag that she called her mouth.

This was all very well from Maria's point of view, but a friendship with Maria had not been the object of Miss Hervey's importation. I evade, by main strength, the quotation from Burns proper to this state of affairs, and proceed to say that the matrimonial scheme laid by my wife and Miss Shute was not prospering. Sybil Hervey, the coercible, the thoroughly nice, shied persistently at the instructive pages of Robinson's "English Flower Garden," and stuck in her toes and refused point blank to weed seedlings for her Aunt Philippa. Nor was a comprehensive garden party at Clountiss attended with any success; far otherwise. Miss Shute unfortunately thought it inc.u.mbent on her to trawl in deep waters, and to invite even the McRory family to her entertainment, with the result that her brother, Bernard--I quote my wife verbatim--made a ridiculous spectacle of himself by walking about all the afternoon with a fluffy-haired, certainly-rather-pretty, little abomination, a creature who was staying with the McRorys. Worse even than this, Sybil had disappointed, if not disgraced, her backers, by vanishing from the ken of un-gentle men with Mr. De Lacy McRory, known to his friends as "Curly."

I have before now dealt, superficially, and quite inadequately, with the McRorys. It may even be permitted to me to recall again the generic description of each young male McRory. "A bit of a lad, but nothing at all to the next youngest." Since that time the family had worn its way, unequally and in patches, into the tolerance of the neighbourhood. It was said, apologetically, that the daughters danced, and played tennis and golf so well, and the sons did the same and were such excellent shots, and that Mrs. McRory bought, uncomplainingly, all that was offered to her at bazaars, and could always be counted on for a whole row of seats at local concerts. As for old McRory, people said that he was certainly rather awful, but that he was better than his family in that he knew that he was awful, and kept out of the way. As a matter of history, there were not many functions where a McRory of some kind, in accordance with its special accomplishment, did not find, at all events, standing room; fewer still where they did not form a valued topic of conversation.

Curly McRory was, perhaps, the pioneer of his family in their advance to cross what has been usefully called "the bounder-y line." He played all games well, and he was indisputably good-looking, he knew how to be discreetly silent; he also, apparently, knew how to talk to Sybil what time her accredited chaperon, oblivious of her position, played two engrossing sets of tennis.

After this fiasco came a period of stagnation, during which Mr. De Lacy McRory honoured us with his first visit to Shreelane, bicycling over to see me, on business connected with the golf club; in my regretted absence he asked for Mrs. Yeates, and stayed for tea. Following upon this Sybil took to saying, "I will," in what she believed to be a brogue, instead of "yes," and was detected in fruitless search for the McRorys of Temple Braney in the pages of Burke's Irish Landed Gentry.

It was at this unsatisfactory juncture that Mrs. Flurry Knox entered into the affair with an invitation to us to spend three days at Aussolas Castle, one of which was to be devoted to the destruction of a pack of grouse, fabled by John Kane, the keeper, to frequent a mountain back of Aussolas: the Shutes were also to be of the party. I seemed to detect in the arrangement a hand more diplomatic than that of Providence, but I said nothing.

The Flurry Knoxes were, for the moment, in residence at Aussolas, while old Mrs. Knox made her annual pilgrimage to Buxton. They were sent there to keep the servants from fighting, and because John Kane had said that there was no such enemies to pigs as servants on board wages.

(A dark saying, bearing indirectly on the plenishing of pig-buckets.)

Between servants and pigs, as indeed in most affairs of life, little Mrs. Flurry held the scales of justice with a remarkably steady hand, and under her regime one could at all events be reasonably sure of having one's boots cleaned, and of getting a hot bath in the morning.

We went to Aussolas, and Flurry and Bernard Shute and I put in a blazing September day on the mountain, wading knee deep in matted heather and furze, in pursuit of the mythical grouse, and brought home two hares and a headache (the latter being my contribution to the bag).

The ladies met us with tea; Sybil, in Harris tweed and admirable boots, looked, I must admit, uncommonly smart. Even Flurry was impressed, and it was palpable to the most superficial observer that Bernard was at length beginning, like a baby, to "take notice." After tea he and she moved away in sweet accord to wash teacups in a bog-hole, from whence their prattle came prosperously to the ears of the three diplomatists, seated, like the witches in Macbeth, upon the heath, and, like them, arranging futures for other people. Bearing in mind that one of the witches had (in a previous incarnation as Miss Sally Knox) held Bernard in her thrall, and still retained him in a platonic sphere of influence, any person of experience would have said that the odds were greatly against Mr. Shute.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FLURRY AND I PUT IN A BLAZING SEPTEMBER DAY ON THE MOUNTAIN]

The hot bath that was the _fine fleur_ of Mrs. Flurry's regime at Aussolas failed conspicuously next morning. It was the precursor of a general slump. When, at a liberal 9.30, I arrived in the dining-room, of neither host, hostess, nor breakfast was there any sign. The host, it appeared, had gone to a fair; having waited for a hungry half-hour we were coming to the conclusion that the hostess had gone with him, when the door opened and Mrs. Flurry came swiftly into the room. Her face was as a book, where men might read strange matters; it was also of a hue that suggested the ardent climate of the kitchen; in her hand she carried a toast-rack, and following hard on her heels came three maids, also heavily flushed, bearing various foods, and all, apparently, on the verge of tears. This cortege having retired, Mrs.

Flurry proceeded to explain. The butler, Johnny, a dingy young man, once Mrs. Knox's bathchair-attendant, had departed at 8 A.M., accompanied by Michael the pantry boy, to dig a grave for a cousin. To those acquainted with Aussolas there was nothing remarkable in this, but Sybil Hervey's china-blue eyes opened wide, and I heard her ask Bernard in a low voice if he thought it was anything agrarian. The annoyance of the cook at the defection of the butler and pantry boy was so acute that she had retired to her room and refused to send in breakfast.

"That was no more than I should have expected from the servants here,"

said Mrs. Flurry vindictively, "but what was just a little too much was finding the yard-boy cramming the toast into the toast-rack with his fingers."

At this my wife's niece uttered the loud yell which all young women with any pretension to smartness have by them for use on emergencies, and exclaimed--

"Oh, _don't_!"

"You needn't be frightened," said Mrs. Flurry, giving Miss Hervey the eighth part of a glance of her greeny-grey eyes; "I made this stuff myself, and you may all think yourselves lucky to get anything," she went on, "as one of the herd of incapables downstairs said, 'to get as much milk as'd do the tea itself, that was the stratagem'!"

Hard on the heels of the quotation there came a rushing sound in the hall without, a furious grappling with the door-handle, and the cook herself, or rather the Tragic Muse in person, burst into the room. Her tawny hair hung loose about her head; her yellow-brown eyes blazed in an ashen and extremely handsome face; she shook a pair of freckled fists at the universe. I cannot pretend to do more than indicate the drift of her denunciation. Brunhilde, ascending the funeral pyre, with full orchestral accompaniment, could not more fully and deafeningly have held her audience, and the theme might have been taken out of the darkest corner of any of the Sagas.

The burying-ground of her clan was--so she had been informed by a swift runner--even now being broken into by the butler and the pantry boy, and the graves of her ancestors were being thrown open to the Four Winds of the World, to make room for the Scuff of the Country (whatever that might mean). Here followed the most capable and comprehensive cursings of the butler and the pantry boy that it has ever been my lot to admire, delivered at lightning speed, and with gestures worthy of the highest traditions of cla.s.sic drama, the whole ending with the statement that she was on her way to the graveyard now to drink their blood.

"I trust you will, Kate," cordially responded Mrs. Flurry, "don't wait a moment!"

The Tragic Muse, startled into an instant of silence, stared wildly at Mrs. Flurry, seemed to scent afar off the possibility that she was not being taken seriously, and whirled from the room, a Vampire on the warpath.

"I meant every word I said to her!" said Sally, looking round upon us defiantly, "I was very near offering her your motor, Mr. Shute! The sooner she kills Johnny and Michael the better pleased I shall be! And I may tell you all," she added, "that we shall have no luncheon to-day, and most probably no dinner!"

"Oh, that's all right!" said Philippa, seeing her chance, and hammering in her wedge with all speed, "now there's nothing for it but sandwiches and a picnic!"

The lake at Aussolas was one of a winding chain of three, connected by narrow channels cut through the bog for the pa.s.sage of boats that carried turf to the lake-side dwellers. The end one of these, known as Braney's Lake, was a recognised place for picnics; a ruined oratory on a wooded point supplying the pretext, and a reliable spring well completing the equipment. The weather was of the variety specially a.s.sociated in my mind with Philippa's picnics, brilliantly fine, with a falling gla.s.s, and 12 o'clock saw us shoving out from the Aussolas turf quay, through the reeds and the rocks.