Tails to Wag (21 page)

“Did ye see the fox, boys?” shouted Flurry, addressing the group.

“We did! we did!” cried my wife and her friends in chorus; “he ran up the road!”

“We'd be badly off without Mrs. Yeates!” said Flurry, as he whirled his mare round and clattered up the road with a hustle of hounds after him.

It occurred to me as forcibly as any mere earthly thing can occur to those who are wrapped in the sublimities of a run, that, for a young woman who had never before seen a fox out of a cage at the Zoo, Philippa was taking to hunting very kindly. Her cheeks were a most brilliant pink, her blue eyes shone.

“Oh, Sinclair!” she exclaimed, “they say he's going to Aussolas, and there's a road I can ride all the way!”

“Ye can, Miss! Sure we'll show you!” chorused her cortège.

Her foot was on the pedal ready to mount. Decidedly my wife was in no need of assistance from me.

Up the road a hound gave a yelp of discovery, and flung himself over a stile into the fields; the rest of the pack went squealing and jostling after him, and I followed Flurry over one of those infinitely varied erections, pleasantly termed “gaps” in Ireland. On this occasion the gap was made of three razor-edged slabs of slate leaning against an iron bar, and Sorcerer conveyed to me his thorough knowledge of the matter by a lift of his hind-quarters that made me feel as if I were being skillfully kicked down-stairs. To what extent I looked it, I can not say, nor providentially can Philippa, as she had already started. I only know that undeserved good luck restored to me my stirrup before Sorcerer got away with me in the next field.

What followed was, I am told, a very fast fifteen minutes; for me time was not; the empty fields rushed past uncounted, fences came and went in a flash, while the wind sang in my ears, and the dazzle of the early sun was in my eyes. I saw the hounds occasionally, sometimes pouring over a green bank, as the charging breaker lifts and flings itself, sometimes driving across a field, as the white tongues of foam slide racing over the sand; and always ahead of me was Flurry Knox, going as a man goes who knows his country, who knows his horse, and whose heart is wholly and absolutely in the right place.

Do what I would, Sorcerer's implacable stride carried me closer and closer to the brown mare, till, as I thundered down the slope of a long field, I was not twenty yards behind Flurry. Sorcerer had stiffened his neck to iron, and to slow him down was beyond me; but I fought his head away to the right, and found myself coming hard and steady at a stone-faced bank with broken ground in front of it. Flurry bore away to the left, shouting something that I did not understand. That Sorcerer shortened his stride at the right moment was entirely due to his own judgment; standing well away from the hump, he rose like a stag out of the tussocky ground, and as he swung my twelve-stone six into the air the obstacle revealed itself to him and me as consisting not of one bank but of two, and between the two lay a deep grassy lane, half choked with furze. I have often been asked to state the width of the bohereen, and can only reply that in my opinion it was at least eighteen feet; Flurry Knox and Dr. Hickey, who did not jump it, say that it is not more than five. What Sorcerer did with it, I cannot say; the sensation was of a towering flight with a kick back in it, a biggish drop, and a landing on cee-springs, still on the down-hill grade. That was how one of the best horses in Ireland took one of Ireland's most ignorant riders over a very nasty place.

A somber line of fir-wood lay ahead, rimmed with a gray wall, and in another couple of minutes we had pulled up on the Aussolas road, and were watching the hounds struggling over the wall into Aussolas demesne.

“No hurry now,” said Flurry, turning in his saddle to watch the Cockatoo jump into the road; “he's to ground in the big earth inside. Well, Major, it's well for you that's a big-jumped horse. I thought you were a dead man a while ago when you faced him at the bohereen!”

I was disclaiming intention in the matter when Lady Knox and the others joined us.

“I thought you told me your wife was no sportswoman,” she said to me, critically scanning Sorcerer's legs for cuts the while, “but when I saw her a minute ago she had abandoned her bicycle and was running across country like—”

“Look at her now!” interrupted Miss Sally. “Oh!—oh!” In the interval between these exclamations my incredulous eyes beheld my wife in mid-air, hand in hand with a couple of stalwart country boys, with whom she was leaping in unison from the top of a bank on to the road.

Everyone, even the saturnine Dr. Hickey, began to laugh; I rode back to Philippa, who was ex­changing compliments and congratulations with her escort.

“Oh, Sinclair!” she cried, “wasn't it splendid? I saw you jumping, and everything! Where are they going now?”

“My dear girl,” I said, with marital disapproval, “you're killing yourself. Where's your bicycle?

“Oh, it's punctured in a sort of lane, back there. It's all right; and then they”—she breathlessly waved her hand at her attendants—“they showed me the way.”

“Begor! you proved very good, Miss!” said a grinning cavalier.

“Faith she did!” said another, polishing his shining brow with his white-flannel coat-sleeve, “she lepped like a haarse!”

“And may I ask how you propose to go home?” said I.

“I don't know and I don't care! I'm not going home!” She cast an entirely disobedient eye at me. “And your eye-glass is hanging down your back and your tie is bulging out over your waistcoat!”

The little group of riders had begun to move away.

“We're going on into Aussolas,” called out Flurry; “come on, and make my grandmother give you some breakfast, Mrs. Yeates; she always has it at eight o'clock.”

The front gates were close at hand, and we turned in under the tall beech-trees, with the unswept leaves rustling round the horses' feet, and the lovely blue of the October morning sky filling the spaces between smooth gray branches and golden leaves. The woods rang with the voices of the hounds, enjoying an untrammeled rabbit hunt, while the Master and the Whip, both on foot, strolled along unconcernedly with their bridles over their arms, making themselves agreeable to my wife, an occasional touch of Flurry's horn, or a crack of Dr. Hickey's whip, just indicating to the pack that the authorities still took a friendly interest in their doings.

Down a grassy glade in the wood a party of old Mrs. Knox's young horses suddenly swept into view, headed by an old mare, who, with her tail over her back, stampeded ponderously past our cavalcade, shaking and swinging her handsome old head, while her youthful friends bucked and kicked and snapped at each other round her with the ferocious humor of their kind.

“Here, Jerome, take the horn,” said Flurry to Dr. Hickey; “I'm going to see Mrs. Yeates up to the house, that way these tomfools won't gallop on top of her.”

From this point it seems to me that Philippa's adventures are more worthy of record than mine, and as she has favored me with a full account of them, I venture to think my version may be relied on.

Mrs. Knox was already at breakfast when Philippa was led, quaking, into her formidable presence. My wife's acquaintance with Mrs. Knox was, so far, limited to a state visit on either side, and she found but little comfort in Flurry's assurances that his grandmother wouldn't mind if he brought all the hounds in to breakfast, coupled with the statement that she would put her eyes on sticks for the Major.

Whatever the truth of this may have been, Mrs. Knox received her guest with an equanimity quite unshaken by the fact that her boots were in the fender instead of on her feet, and that a couple

of shawls of varying dimensions and degrees of age did not conceal the inner presence of a magenta flannel dressing-jacket. She installed Philippa at the table and plied her with food, oblivious as

to whether the needful implements with which to eat it were forthcoming or no. She told Flurry where a vixen had reared her family, and she watched him ride away, with some biting comments on his mare's hocks screamed after him from the window.

The dining-room at Aussolas Castle is one of the many rooms in Ireland in which Cromwell is said to have stabled his horse (and probably no one would have objected less than Mrs. Knox had she been consulted in the matter). Philippa questions if the room had ever been tidied up since, and she indorses Flurry's observation that “there wasn't a day in the year you wouldn't get feeding for a hen and chickens on the floor.” Opposite to Philippa, on a Louis Quinze chair, sat Mrs. Knox's wooly dog, its suspicious little eyes peering at her out of their setting of pink lids and dirty white wool. A couple of young horses outside the windows tore at the matted creepers on the walls, or thrust faces that were half-shy, half-impudent, into the room. Portly pigeons waddled to and fro on the broad window-sill, sometimes flying in to perch on the picture-frames, while they kept up incessantly a hoarse and pompous cooing.

Animals and children are, as a rule, alike destructive to conversation; but Mrs. Knox, when she chose, bien entendu, could have made herself agreeable in a Noah's ark, and Philippa has a gift of sympathetic attention that personal experience has taught me to regard with distrust as well as respect, while it has often made me realize the worldly wisdom of Kingsley's injunction:

 

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

 

Family prayers, declaimed by Mrs. Knox with alarming austerity, followed close on breakfast, Philippa and a vinegar-faced henchwoman forming the family. The prayers were long, and through the open window as they progressed came distantly a whoop or two; the declamatory tones staggered a little, and then continued at a distinctly higher rate of speed.

“Ma'am! Ma'am!” whispered a small voice at the window.

Mrs. Knox made a repressive gesture and held on her way. A sudden outcry of hounds followed, and the owner of the whisper, a small boy with a face freckled like a turkey's egg, darted from the window and dragged a donkey and bath-chair into view. Philippa admits to having lost the thread of the discourse, but she thinks that the “Amen” that immediately ensued can hardly have come in its usual place. Mrs. Knox shut the book abruptly, scrambled up from her knees, and said, “They've found!”

In a surprisingly short space of time she had added to her attire her boots, a fur cape, and a garden hat, and was in the bath-chair, the small boy stimulating the donkey with the success peculiar to his class, while Philippa hung on behind.

The woods of Aussolas are hilly and extensive, and on that particular morning it seemed that they held as many foxes as hounds. In vain was the horn blown and the whips cracked, small rejoicing parties of hounds, each with a fox of its own, scoured to and fro: every laborer in the vicinity had left his work, and was sedulously heading every fox with yells that would have befitted a tiger hunt, and sticks and stones when occasion served.

“Will I pull out as far as the big rosy-dandhrum, ma'am?” inquired the small boy; “I see three of the dogs go in it, and they yowling.”

“You will,” said Mrs. Knox, thumping the donkey on the back with her umbrella; “here! Jeremiah Regan! Come down out of that with that pitchfork! Do you want to kill the fox, you fool?”

“I do not, your honor, ma'am,” responded Jeremiah Regan, a tall young countryman, emerging from a bramble brake.

“Did you see him?” said Mrs. Knox eagerly.

“I seen himself and his ten pups drinking below at the lake ere yestherday, your honor, ma'am, and he as big as a chestnut horse!” said Jeremiah.

“Faugh! Yesterday!” snorted Mrs. Knox; “go on to the rhododendrons, Johnny!”

The party, reenforced by Jeremiah and the pitchfork, progressed at a high rate of speed along the shrubbery path, encountering
en route
Lady Knox, stooping on to her horse's neck under the sweeping branches of the laurels.

“Your horse is too high for my coverts, Lady Knox,” said the Lady of the Manor, with a malicious eye at Lady Knox's flushed face and dinged hat; “I'm afraid you will be left behind like Absalom when the hounds go away!”

“As they never do anything here but hunt rabbits,” retorted her ladyship, “I don't think that's likely.”

Mrs. Knox gave her donkey another whack, and passed on.

“Rabbits, my dear!” she said scornfully to Philippa. “That's all she knows about it. I declare, it disgusts me to see a woman of that age making such a Judy of herself! Rabbits indeed!”

Down in the thicket of rhododendron everything was very quiet for a time. Philippa strained her eyes in vain to see any of the riders; the horn blowing and the whip cracking passed on almost out of hearing. Once or twice a hound worked through the rhododendrons, glanced at the party, and hurried on, immersed in business. All at once Johnny, the donkey-boy, whispered excitedly:

“Look at he! Loot at he!” and pointed to a boulder of gray rock that stood out among the dark evergreens. A big yellow cub was crouching on it; he instantly slid into the shelter of the bushes, and the irrepressible Jeremiah, uttering a rending shriek, plunged into the thicket after him. Two or three hounds came rushing at the sound, and after this Philippa says she finds some difficulty in recalling the proper order of events; chiefly, she confesses, because of the wholly ridiculous tears of excitement that blurred her eyes.

“We ran,” she said, “we simply tore, and the donkey galloped, and as for that old Mrs. Knox, she was giving cracked screams to the hounds all the time, and they were screaming too; and then somehow we were all out on the road!”

What seems to have occurred was that three couple of hounds, Jeremiah Regan, and Mrs. Knox's equipage, among them somehow hustled the cub out of Aussolas demesne and up on to a hill on the farther side of the road. Jeremiah was sent back by this mistress to fetch Flurry, and the rest of the party pursued a thrilling course along the road, parallel with that of the hounds, who were hunting slowly through the gorse on the hillside.