by Saki
THE BROGUE
The hunting season had come to an end, and the Mullets had not succeededin selling the Brogue. There had been a kind of tradition in the familyfor the past three or four years, a sort of fatalistic hope, that theBrogue would find a purchaser before the hunting was over; but seasonscame and went without anything happening to justify such ill-foundedoptimism. The animal had been named Berserker in the earlier stages ofits career; it had been rechristened the Brogue later on, in recognitionof the fact that, once acquired, it was extremely difficult to get ridof. The unkinder wits of the neighbourhood had been known to suggestthat the first letter of its name was superfluous. The Brogue had beenvariously described in sale catalogues as a light-weight hunter, a lady’shack, and, more simply, but still with a touch of imagination, as auseful brown gelding, standing 15.1. Toby Mullet had ridden him for fourseasons with the West Wessex; you can ride almost any sort of horse withthe West Wessex as long as it is an animal that knows the country. TheBrogue knew the country intimately, having personally created most of thegaps that were to be met with in banks and hedges for many miles round.His manners and characteristics were not ideal in the hunting field, buthe was probably rather safer to ride to hounds than he was as a hack oncountry roads. According to the Mullet family, he was not reallyroad-shy, but there were one or two objects of dislike that brought onsudden attacks of what Toby called the swerving sickness. Motors andcycles he treated with tolerant disregard, but pigs, wheelbarrows, pilesof stones by the roadside, perambulators in a village street, gatespainted too aggressively white, and sometimes, but not always, the newerkind of beehives, turned him aside from his tracks in vivid imitation ofthe zigzag course of forked lightning. If a pheasant rose noisily fromthe other side of a hedgerow the Brogue would spring into the air at thesame moment, but this may have been due to a desire to be companionable.The Mullet family contradicted the widely prevalent report that the horsewas a confirmed crib-biter.
It was about the third week in May that Mrs. Mullet, relict of the lateSylvester Mullet, and mother of Toby and a bunch of daughters, assailedClovis Sangrail on the outskirts of the village with a breathlesscatalogue of local happenings.
“You know our new neighbour, Mr. Penricarde?” she vociferated; “awfullyrich, owns tin mines in Cornwall, middle-aged and rather quiet. He’staken the Red House on a long lease and spent a lot of money onalterations and improvements. Well, Toby’s sold him the Brogue!”
Clovis spent a moment or two in assimilating the astonishing news; thenhe broke out into unstinted congratulation. If he had belonged to a moreemotional race he would probably have kissed Mrs. Mullet.
“How wonderfully lucky to have pulled it off at last! Now you can buy adecent animal. I’ve always said that Toby was clever. Ever so manycongratulations.”
“Don’t congratulate me. It’s the most unfortunate thing that could havehappened!” said Mrs. Mullet dramatically.
Clovis stared at her in amazement.
“Mr. Penricarde,” said Mrs. Mullet, sinking her voice to what sheimagined to be an impressive whisper, though it rather resembled ahoarse, excited squeak, “Mr. Penricarde has just begun to pay attentionsto Jessie. Slight at first, but now unmistakable. I was a fool not tohave seen it sooner. Yesterday, at the Rectory garden party, he askedher what her favourite flowers were, and she told him carnations, andto-day a whole stack of carnations has arrived, clove and malmaison andlovely dark red ones, regular exhibition blooms, and a box of chocolatesthat he must have got on purpose from London. And he’s asked her to goround the links with him to-morrow. And now, just at this criticalmoment, Toby has sold him that animal. It’s a calamity!”
“But you’ve been trying to get the horse off your hands for years,” saidClovis.
“I’ve got a houseful of daughters,” said Mrs. Mullet, “and I’ve beentrying—well, not to get them off my hands, of course, but a husband ortwo wouldn’t be amiss among the lot of them; there are six of them, youknow.”
“I don’t know,” said Clovis, “I’ve never counted, but I expect you’reright as to the number; mothers generally know these things.”
“And now,” continued Mrs. Mullet, in her tragic whisper, “when there’s arich husband-in-prospect imminent on the horizon Toby goes and sells himthat miserable animal. It will probably kill him if he tries to ride it;anyway it will kill any affection he might have felt towards any memberof our family. What is to be done? We can’t very well ask to have thehorse back; you see, we praised it up like anything when we thought therewas a chance of his buying it, and said it was just the animal to suithim.”
“Couldn’t you steal it out of his stable and send it to grass at somefarm miles away?” suggested Clovis; “write ‘Votes for Women’ on thestable door, and the thing would pass for a Suffragette outrage. No onewho knew the horse could possibly suspect you of wanting to get it backagain.”
“Every newspaper in the country would ring with the affair,” said Mrs.Mullet; “can’t you imagine the headline, ‘Valuable Hunter Stolen bySuffragettes’? The police would scour the countryside till they foundthe animal.”
“Well, Jessie must try and get it back from Penricarde on the plea thatit’s an old favourite. She can say it was only sold because the stablehad to be pulled down under the terms of an old repairing lease, and thatnow it has been arranged that the stable is to stand for a couple ofyears longer.”
“It sounds a queer proceeding to ask for a horse back when you’ve justsold him,” said Mrs. Mullet, “but something must be done, and done atonce. The man is not used to horses, and I believe I told him it was asquiet as a lamb. After all, lambs go kicking and twisting about as ifthey were demented, don’t they?”
“The lamb has an entirely unmerited character for sedateness,” agreedClovis.
Jessie came back from the golf links next day in a state of mingledelation and concern.
“It’s all right about the proposal,” she announced; “he came out with itat the sixth hole. I said I must have time to think it over. I acceptedhim at the seventh.”
“My dear,” said her mother, “I think a little more maidenly reserve andhesitation would have been advisable, as you’ve known him so short atime. You might have waited till the ninth hole.”
“The seventh is a very long hole,” said Jessie; “besides, the tension wasputting us both off our game. By the time we’d got to the ninth holewe’d settled lots of things. The honeymoon is to be spent in Corsica,with perhaps a flying visit to Naples if we feel like it, and a week inLondon to wind up with. Two of his nieces are to be asked to bebridesmaids, so with our lot there will be seven, which is rather a luckynumber. You are to wear your pearl grey, with any amount of Honiton lacejabbed into it. By the way, he’s coming over this evening to ask yourconsent to the whole affair. So far all’s well, but about the Brogueit’s a different matter. I told him the legend about the stable, and howkeen we were about buying the horse back, but he seems equally keen onkeeping it. He said he must have horse exercise now that he’s living inthe country, and he’s going to start riding to-morrow. He’s ridden a fewtimes in the Row, on an animal that was accustomed to carry octogenariansand people undergoing rest cures, and that’s about all his experience inthe saddle—oh, and he rode a pony once in Norfolk, when he was fifteenand the pony twenty-four; and to-morrow he’s going to ride the Brogue! Ishall be a widow before I’m married, and I do so want to see whatCorsica’s like; it looks so silly on the map.”
Clovis was sent for in haste, and the developments of the situation putbefore him.
“Nobody can ride that animal with any safety,” said Mrs. Mullet, “exceptToby, and he knows by long experience what it is going to shy at, andmanages to swerve at the same time.”
“I did hint to Mr. Penricarde—to Vincent, I should say—that the Broguedidn’t like white gates,” said Jessie.
“White gates!” exclaimed Mrs. Mullet; “did you mention what effect a pighas on him? He’ll ha
ve to go past Lockyer’s farm to get to the highroad, and there’s sure to be a pig or two grunting about in the lane.”
“He’s taken rather a dislike to turkeys lately,” said Toby.
“It’s obvious that Penricarde mustn’t be allowed to go out on thatanimal,” said Clovis, “at least not till Jessie has married him, andtired of him. I tell you what: ask him to a picnic to-morrow, startingat an early hour; he’s not the sort to go out for a ride beforebreakfast. The day after I’ll get the rector to drive him over toCrowleigh before lunch, to see the new cottage hospital they’re buildingthere. The Brogue will be standing idle in the stable and Toby can offerto exercise it; then it can pick up a stone or something of the sort andgo conveniently lame. If you hurry on the wedding a bit the lamenessfiction can be kept up till the ceremony is safely over.”
Mrs. Mullet belonged to an emotional race, and she kissed Clovis.
It was nobody’s fault that the rain came down in torrents the nextmorning, making a picnic a fantastic impossibility. It was also nobody’sfault, but sheer ill-luck, that the weather cleared up sufficiently inthe afternoon to tempt Mr. Penricarde to make his first essay with theBrogue. They did not get as far as the pigs at Lockyer’s farm; therectory gate was painted a dull unobtrusive green, but it had been whitea year or two ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in thehabit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a swerve at thisparticular point of the road. Subsequently, there being apparently nofurther call on his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard,where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to the orchardfound the coop almost intact, but very little left of the turkey.
Mr. Penricarde, a little stunned and shaken, and suffering from a bruisedknee and some minor damages, good-naturedly ascribed the accident to hisown inexperience with horses and country roads, and allowed Jessie tonurse him back into complete recovery and golf-fitness within somethingless than a week.
In the list of wedding presents which the local newspaper published afortnight or so later appeared the following item:
“Brown saddle-horse, ‘The Brogue,’ bridegroom’s gift to bride.”
“Which shows,” said Toby Mullet, “that he knew nothing.”
“Or else,” said Clovis, “that he has a very pleasing wit.”