The bride elect, with a shriek of disgust, and without an instant of hesitation, hurled it at her nearest neighbour, the head bridesmaid.

The head bridesmaid, with an answering shriek, sprang to one side, and the parcel that I had cherished with a mother's care across two countries and a stormy channel, fell, with a crash, on the flagged floor.

_Why did it crash?_

"A salmon!" screamed Philippa, gazing at the parcel, round which a pool was already forming, "why that's whisky! Can't you smell it?"

The footman here respectfully interposed, and kneeling down, cautiously extracted from folds of brown paper a straw bottle-cover full of broken gla.s.s and dripping with whisky.

"I'm afraid the other things are rather spoiled, sir," he said seriously, and drew forth, successively, a very large pair of high-low shoes, two long grey worsted stockings, and a pair of gra.s.s-green breeches.

They brought the house down, in a manner doubtless familiar to them when they shared the triumphs of Mr. Jimmy Durkan, but they left Alice Hervey distinctly cold.

"You know, darling," she said to Philippa afterwards, "I don't think it was very clever of dear Sinclair to take the wrong parcel. I _had_ counted on that salmon."

IV

"THE MAN THAT CAME TO BUY APPLES"

It had been freezing hard all the way home, and the Quaker skated perilously once or twice on the northerly stretches. As I pa.s.sed the forge near my gate I issued an order for frost-nails, and while I did so the stars were kindling like diamonds over the black ridge of Shreelane Hill.

The overture to the Frost Symphony had begun, with its usual beauties and difficulties, and its leading theme was given forth in a missive from Flurry Knox, that awaited me on the hall table. Flurry's handwriting was an unattractive blend of the laundress's bill, and the rambling zigzags of the temperature chart, but he exhibited no more of it than was strictly necessary in getting to the point. Would I shoot at Aussolas the following day? There were a lot of c.o.c.k in, and he had whipped up four guns in a hurry. There was a postscript, "Bernard Shute is coming. Tell Mrs. Yeates he didn't kill any one yet this season."

Since his marriage Flurry had been promoted to the position of agent to his grandmother, old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas, and through the unfathomable mazes of their dealings and fights with each other, the fact remained that he had secured to himself the Aussolas shooting at about half its market value. So Mrs. Knox said. Her grandson, on the other hand, had often informed me that the privilege "had him beggared, what with beaters and all sorts, and his grandmother's cattle turned into the woods destroying all the covert--let alone her poaching."

Into the differences of such skilled combatants the prudent did not intrude themselves, but they accepted without loss of time such invitations to shoot at Aussolas as came their way. Notwithstanding the buccaneerings of Flurry's grandmother, the woods of Aussolas, in decent weather, were usually good for fifteen to twenty couple of c.o.c.k.

I sent my acceptance before mentioning to Philippa that Bernard Shute was to be of the party. It was impossible to make Philippa understand that those who shot Bernard's pheasants at Clountiss, could hardly do less than retaliate when occasion served. I had once, in a moment of regrettable expansion, entertained my wife with an account of how an entire shooting party had successively cast themselves upon their faces, while the muzzle of Bernard's gun had followed, half way round the compa.s.s, a rabbit that had broken back. No damage had ensued, not even to the rabbit, but I had supplied Philippa with a fact that was an unfortunate combination of a thorn in her pillow and a stone in her sling.

The frost held; it did more than hold, it gripped. As I drove to Aussolas the fields lay rigid in the constraining cold; the trees were as dead as the telegraph poles, and the whistle of the train came thin and ghostly across four miles of silent country. Everything was half alive, with the single exception of the pony, which, filled with the idiotic exaltation that frost imparts to its race, danced upon its frost-nails, shied with untiring inventiveness, and made three several and well-conceived attempts to bolt. Maria, with her nose upon my gaiter, shuddered uninterruptedly throughout the drive, partly because of the pinching air, partly in honour of the sovereign presence of the gun-case.

Old Mrs. Knox was standing on the steps as I walked round to the hall door of Aussolas Castle. She held a silver bowl in her hand; on her head, presumably as a protection against the cold, was a table-napkin; round her feet a throng of hens and pigeons squabbled for the bits that she flung to them from the bowl, and a furtive and distrustful peac.o.c.k darted a blue neck in among them from the outskirts.

"'Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham,'" was Mrs. Knox's singular greeting, "'a good soft pillow for that good grey head were better than a churlish turf of France'!"

My friendship with Mrs. Knox was now of several years' standing, and I knew enough of her to gather that I stood rebuked for being late.

"Flurry arrived only half-an-hour ago! my first intimation of a shooting party," she continued, in the dictatorial voice that was always a shock when taken in connection with her beggar woman's costume, "a nice time of day to begin to look for beaters! And the other feather-bed sportsmen haven't arrived yet. In old times they would have had ten couple by this time, and then Mr. Flurry complains of the shooting!"

She was here interrupted by the twitching of the table-napkin from her head by her body-woman, who had advanced upon her from the rear, with the reigning member of the dynasty of purple velvet bonnets in her hand. The bonnet was subst.i.tuted for the table-napkin, much as a stage property is shoved on from the wings, and two bony hands, advancing from behind, tied the strings under Mrs. Knox's chin, while she uninterruptedly fed the hens, and denounced the effeteness of modern c.o.c.k-shooters. The hands descended and fixed a large pin in the uppermost of her mistress' shawls.

"Mullins, have done!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox, suddenly tearing herself from her captor, "you're an intolerable nuisance!"

"Oh, very well, ma'am, maybe you'd sooner go out with your head naked and soak the cold!" returned Mullins, retiring with the honours of war and the table-napkin.

"Mullins and I get on famously," observed Mrs. Knox, crushing an empty egg-sh.e.l.l with her yellow diamonded fingers and returning it to its original donors, "we're both mad, you know!"

Comment on this might have been difficult, but I was preserved from it by the approach across the frozen gravel of a short, red-bearded man, Mrs. Knox's gardener, wood-ranger, and ruling counsellor, John Kane.

He held in his hands two large apples of a.r.s.enical hue, and, taking off his hat to me with much dignity, addressed himself to the lady of the house.

"He says he'd sooner walk barefoot to Cork than to give three and fippence for the likes of them!"

"I'm sure I've no objection if he does," responded Mrs. Knox, turning the silver bowl upside down over the scrimmaging hens and pigeons, "I daresay it would be no novelty to him."

"And isn't that what I told him!" said John Kane, his voice at once ascending to the concert pitch of altercation, "I said to him if the Lord Left'nant and the Pope was follying me around the yard of Aussolas offering three and a penny for them apples they'd not get them! Sure the nuns gave us that much for windfalls that was only fit to be making cherubs with!"

I might have been struck by the fitness, as well as the ingenuity, of this industry, but in some remote byway of my brain the remembrance woke of a "black-currant cherub" prescribed by Mrs. Cadogan for sore throats, and divined by Philippa to be a syrup. I turned away and lit a cigarette in order to conceal my feelings from John Kane, round whose red beard the smoke of battle hung almost palpably.

"What's between you?" asked his mistress sharply.

"Three and a penny he's offering, ma'am!" declaimed her deputy, "for sheeps' noses that there isn't one in the country has but yourself!

And not a brown farthing more would he give!--the consecrated blagyard!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "AND NOT A BROWN FARTHING MORE WOULD HE GIVE"]

Anything less like a sheep's nose than Mrs. Knox's hooked beak, as she received this information, could hardly be imagined.

"You're half a fool, John Kane!" she snapped, "and the other half's not sensible! Go back and tell him Major Yeates is here and wants to buy every apple I have!" She dealt me a wink that was the next thing to a dig in the ribs. As she spoke a cart drawn by a cheerful-looking grey pony, and conducted by a tall, thin man, came into view from the direction of the yard. It rattled emptily, and proclaimed, as was intended, the rupture of all business relations.

"See here, sir," said John Kane to me in one hoa.r.s.e breath, "when he's over-right the door I'll ask him the three and fippence again, and when he refuses, your Honour will say we should split the difference----"

The cart advanced, it pa.s.sed the hall door with a dignity but little impaired by the pony's apprehensive interest in the peac.o.c.k, and the tall man took off his hat to Mrs. Knox with as gloomy a respect as if she had been a funeral.

John Kane permitted to the salutation the full time due to it, in the manner of one who counts a semibreve rest, while the cart moved implacably onwards. The exact, the psychic instant arrived.

"HONOMAUNDHIAOUL! SULLIVAN!" he shouted, with a full-blown burst of ferocity, hurtling down the steps in pursuit, "will ye take them or lave them?"

To manifest, no doubt, her complete indifference to the issue, Mrs.

Knox turned and went into the house, followed by the majority of the hens, and left me to await my cue. The play was played out with infinite credit to both artists, and at the full stretch of their lungs; at the preordained moment I intervened with the conventional impromptu, and suggested that the difference should be split. The curtain immediately fell, and somewhere in the deep of the hall a glimpse of the purple bonnet told me that Mrs. Knox was in the auditorium.

When I rejoined her I found Flurry with her, and something in the atmosphere told that here also was storm.

"Well, take them! Take them all!" Mrs. Knox was saying in high indignation. "Take Mullins and the maids if you like! I daresay they might be more use than the men!"

"They'll make more row, anyhow," said Flurry sourly. "I wonder is it them that put down all the rabbit-traps I'm after seeing in the coach-house this minute!"

"It may be _they_, but it certainly is not _them_," retorted Mrs. Knox, hitting flagrantly below the belt; "and if you want beaters found for you, you should give me more than five minutes' warning----" She turned with the last word, and moved towards the staircase.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said John Kane, very respectfully, from the hall door, "that Sullivan brought this down for your Honour."

He placed on the table a bottle imperfectly wrapped in newspaper.

"Tell Sullivan," said Flurry, without an instant's hesitation, "that he makes the worst potheen in the country, and I'll prosecute him for bringing it here, unless he comes out to beat with the rest of you."

Remembering my official position, I discreetly examined the barrels of my gun.

"You'll give him no such message!" screamed Mrs. Knox over the dark rail of the staircase. "Let him take himself and his apples off out of this!" Then, in the same breath, and almost the same key, "Major Yeates, which do you prefer, curry, or Irish stew?"