All on the Irish Shore Part 21

"Sure the other breechin' was broke, and if that owld shkin was to go the lin'th of himself without a breechin' on him he'd break all before him! There was some fellas took him to a funeral one time without a breechin' on him, an' when he seen the hea.r.s.e what did he do but to rise up in the sky."

Wherein lay the moral support of a breeching in such a contingency it is hard to say. I accepted the fact without comment, and expressed a regret that we had not been indulged with the entire set of black harness.

Croppy measured me with his eye, grinned bashfully, and said:--

"Sure it's the Dane's breechin' we have, Miss! I daresay he'd hardly get home at all if we took any more from him!"

The Dean's breeching! For an instant a wild confusion of ideas deprived me of the power of speech. I could only hope that Croppy had left him his gaiters! Then I pulled myself together.

"Croppy," I said in consternation, "how did you get it? Did you borrow it from the coachman?"

"Is it the coachman!" said Croppy tranquilly. "I did not, Miss. Sure he was asleep in the snug."

"But can they get home without it?"

A sudden alarm chilled me to the marrow.

"Arrah, why not, Miss? That black horse of the Dane's wouldn't care if there was nothing at all on him!"

I heard Robert reeling in his line--had he a fish? Or, better still, had he made up his mind to go home?

As a matter of fact, neither was the case; Robert was merely fractious, and in that particular mood when he wished to have his mind imperceptibly made up for him, while prepared to combat any direct suggestion. From what quarter the ign.o.ble proposition that we should go home arose is immaterial. It is enough to say that Robert believed it to be his own, and that, before he had time to reconsider the question, the tactful Croppy had crammed the old white horse into the shafts of the car.

It was by this time past five o'clock, and a threatening range of clouds was rising from seaward across the west. Things had been against us from the first, and if the last stone in the sling of Fate was that we were to be wet through before we got home, it would be no more than I expected. The old horse, however, addressed himself to the eight Irish miles that lay between him and home with unexpected vivacity. We swung in the ruts, we shook like jellies on the merciless patches of broken stones, and Croppy stimulated the pace with weird whistlings through his teeth, and heavy prods with the b.u.t.t of his whip in the region of the borrowed breeching.

Now that the expedition had been shaken off and cast behind us, the humbler possibilities of the day began to stretch out alluring hands.

There was the new box from the library; there was the afternoon post; there was a belated tea, with a peaceful fatigue to endear all. We reached at last the welcome turn that brought us into the coast road. We were but three miles now from that happy home from which we had been driven forth, years ago as it seemed, at such desperate hazard. We drove pleasantly along the road at the top of the cliffs. The wind was behind us; a rising tide plunged and splashed far below. It was already raining a little, enough to justify our sagacity in leaving the river, enough to lend a touch of pa.s.sion to the thought of home and Julia.

The grey horse began to lean back against the borrowed breeching, the chains of the traces clanked loosely. We had begun the long zig-zag slant down to the village. We swung gallantly round the sharp turn half-way down the hill.

And there, not fifty yards away, was the Dean's inside car, labouring slowly, inevitably, up to meet us. Even in that stupefying moment I was aware that the silver-banded hat was at a most uncanonical angle.

Behind me on the car was stowed my sketching umbrella; I tore it from the retaining embrace of the camp-stool, and unfurled its unwieldy tent with a speed that I have never since achieved. Robert, on the far side of the car, was reasonably safe. The inestimable Croppy quickened up.

Cowering beneath the umbrella, I awaited the crucial moment at which to s.h.i.+ft its protection from the side to the back. The sound of the approaching wheels told me that it had almost arrived, and then, suddenly, without a note of warning, there came a scurry of hoofs, a grinding of wheels, and a confused outcry of voices. A violent jerk nearly pitched me off the car, as Croppy dragged the white horse into the opposite bank; the umbrella flew from my hand and revealed to me the Dean's bearded coachman sitting on the road scarcely a yard from my feet, uttering large and drunken shouts, while the covered car hurried back towards the village with the unforgettable yell of Miss McEvoy bursting from its curtained rear. The black horse was not absolutely running away, but he was obviously alarmed, and with the long hill before him anything might happen.

"They're dead! They're dead!" said Croppy, with philosophic calm; "'twas the parasol started him."

As he spoke, the black horse stumbled, the laden car ran on top of him like a landslip, and, with an abortive flounder, he collapsed beneath it. Once down, he lay, after the manner of his kind, like a dead thing, and the covered car, propped on its shafts, presented its open mouth to the heavens. Even as I sped headlong to the rescue in the wake of Robert and Croppy, I fore-knew that Fate had after all been too many for us, and when, an instant later, I seated myself in the orthodox manner upon the black horse's winker, and perceived that one of the shafts was broken, I was already, in spirit, making up beds with Julia for the reception of the party.

To this mental picture the howls of Miss McEvoy during the process of extraction from the covered car lent a pleasing reality.

Only those who have been in a covered car under similar circ.u.mstances can at all appreciate the difficulty of getting out of it. It has once, in the streets of Cork, happened to me, and I can best compare it to escaping from the cabin of a yacht without the aid of a companion ladder. From Robert I can only collect the facts that the door jammed, and that, at a critical juncture, Miss McEvoy had put her arms round his neck.

The programme that Fate had ordained was carried out to its ultimate item. The party from the Deanery of Glengad spent the night at Wavecrest Cottage, attired by subscription, like the converts of a Mission; I spent it in the attic, among trunks of Aunt Dora's old clothes, and rats; Robert, who throughout had played an unworthy part, in the night mail to Dublin, called away for twenty-four hours on a pretext that would not have deceived an infant a week old.

Croppy was firm and circ.u.mstantial in laying the blame on me and the sketching umbrella.

"Sure, I seen the horse wondhering at it an' he comin' up the hill to us. 'Twas that turned him."

The dissertation in which the Dean's venerable coachman made the entire disaster hinge upon the theft of the breeching was able, but cannot conveniently be here set down.

For my part, I hold with Julia.

"'Twas Helayna gave the dhrink to the Dane's coachman! The low cursed thing! There isn't another one in the place that'd do it! I'm told the priest was near breaking his umbrella on her over it."

"MATCHBOX"

It was the event of Mr. John Denny's life that he valued highest. It is twenty years now since it took place, and many other things have happened to him, such as going to England to give evidence in the Parnell Commission, and matrimony, and taking the second prize in the Lightweight Hunter Cla.s.s at the Dublin Horse Show. But none of them, not even the trip to London, possesses quite the same fortunate blend of the sublime and the ridiculous that gives this incident such a perennial success at the Hunt and Agricultural Show dinners which are the dazzling breaks in the monotony of Mr. Denny's life, and he prized it accordingly.

Mr. Johnny Denny--or Dinny Johnny as he was known to his wittier friends--was a young man of the straightest sect of the Cork buckeens, a body whose importance justifies perhaps a particular description of one of their number. His profession was something imperceptibly connected with the County Grand Jury Office, and was quite over-shadowed in winter by the gravities of hunting, and in summer by the gallantries of the Militia training; for, like many of his cla.s.s, he was a captain in the Militia. He was always neatly dressed; his large moustache looked as if it shared with his boots the attention of the blacking brush. No cavalry sergeant in Ballincollig had a more delicately bowed leg, nor any creature, except, perhaps, a fox-terrier interviewing a rival, a more consummate swagger. He knew every horse and groom in all the leading livery stables, and, in moments of expansion, would volunteer to name the price at which any given animal could be safeguarded from any given veterinary criticism. With all these not specially attractive qualities, however, Dinny Johnny was, and is, a good fellow in his way. His temper was excellent, his courage indisputable; he has never been known to give any horse--not even a hireling--less than fair play, and a tendency to ride too close to hounds has waned since time, like an Irish elector, has taken to emphasising himself by throwing stones, and Dinny Johnny, once ten stone, now admits to riding 13.7.

In those days, before the inertia that creeps like mildew over country householders had begun to form, Mr. Denny was in the habit of making occasional excursions into remote parts of the County Cork in search of those flowers of pony perfection that are supposed to blush unseen in any sufficiently mountainous and unknown country, and the belief in which is the touch of wild poetry that keeps alive the soul of the amateur horse coper. He had never met the pony of his dreams, but he had not lost faith in it, and though he would range through the Bantry fair with a sour eye, behind the sourness there was ever a kindling spark of hope.

Towards the end of October, in the year '83, Mr. Denny received an invitation from an old friend to go down to "the West"--thus are those regions east of the moon, and west of the sun, and south-west of Drimoleague Junction, designated in the tongue of Cork civilisation--to "look at a colt," and with a saddle and bridle in the netting and a tooth-brush in his pocket he set his face for the wilderness. I have no time to linger over the circ.u.mstances of the deal. Suffice it to say that, after an arduous haggle, Mr. Denny bought the colt, and set forth the same day to ride him by easy stages to his future home.

It was a wet day, wet with the solid determination of a western day, and the loaded clouds were flinging their burden down on the furze, and the rocks, and the steep, narrow road, with vindictive ecstacy. They also flung it upon Mr. Denny, and both he and his new purchase were glad to find a temporary shelter in one of the many public-houses of a village on the line of march. He was sitting warming himself at an indifferent turf fire, and drinking a tumbler of hot punch, when the sound of loud voices outside drew him to the window. In front of a semi-circle of blue frieze coats, brown frieze trousers and slouched black felt hats, stood a dejected grey pony, with a woman at its head and a lanky young man on its back; and it was obvious to Mr. Denny that a transaction, of an even more fervid sort than that in which he had recently engaged, was toward.

"Fifteen pound!" screamed the woman, darting a black head on the end of a skinny neck out of the projecting hood of her cloak with the swiftness of a lizard; "fifteen pound, James Hallahane, and the divil burn the ha'penny less that I'll take for her!"

The elderly man to whom this was addressed continued to gaze steadily at the ground, and turning his head slightly away, spat unostentatiously.

The other men moved a little, vaguely, and one said in a tone of remote soliloquy:--

"She wouldn't go tin pound in Banthry fair."

"Tin pound!" echoed the pony's owner shrilly. "Ah, G.o.d help ye, poor man! Here, Patsey, away home wid ye out o' this. It'll be night, and dark night itself before--"

"I'll give ye eleven pounds," said James Hallahane, addressing the toes of his boots. The young man on the pony turned a questioning eye towards his mother, but her sole response was a drag at the pony's head to set it going; swinging her cloak about her, she paddled through the slush towards the gate, supremely disregarding the fact that a gander, having nerved himself and his harem to the charge, had caught the ragged skirt of her dress in his beak, and being too angry to let go, was being whirled out of the yard in her train.

Dinny Johnny ran to the door, moved by an impulse for which I think the hot whisky and water must have been responsible.

"I'll give you twelve pounds for the pony, ma'am!" he called out.

A quarter of an hour later, when he and the publican were tying a tow-rope round the pony's lean neck, Mr. Denny was aware of a sinking of the heart as he surveyed his bargain. It looked, and was, an utterly degraded little object, as it stood with its tail tucked in between its drooping hindquarters, and the rain running in brown streams down its legs. Its lips were decorated with the absurd, the almost incredible moustache that is the consequence among Irish horses of a furze diet (I would hesitatingly direct the attention of the male youth of Britain to this singular but undoubted fact), and although the hot whisky and water had not exaggerated the excellence of its shoulder and the iron soundness of its legs, it had certainly reversed the curve of its neck and levelled the corrugations of its ribs.

"You could strike a bally match on her, this minute, if it wasn't so wet!" thought Mr. Denny, and with the simple humour that endeared him to his friends he christened the pony "Matchbox" on the spot.

"And it's to make a hunther of her ye'd do?" said the publican, pulling hard at the knot of the tow-rope. "Begor', I know that one. If there was forty men and their wives, and they after her wid sticks, she wouldn't lep a sod o' turf. Well, safe home, sir, safe home, and mind out she wouldn't kick ye. She's a cross thief," and with this valediction Dinny Johnny went on his way.

There was no disputing the fact of the pony's crossness.

"She's sourish-like in her timper," Jimmy, Mr. Denny's head man, observed to his subordinate not long after the arrival, and the subordinate, tenderly stroking a bruised knee, replied:--

"Sour! I niver see the like of her! Be gannies, the divil's always busy with her!"