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.
“Upon my honor and word, Mrs. Yeates, my dear, we have the hunt to ourselves!” said Mrs. Knox to the panting Philippa, as they pounded along the road. “Johnny, d’ye see the fox?”
“I do, ma’am!” shrieked Johnny, who possessed the usual field-glass vision bestowed upon his kind. “Look at him over-right us on the hill above! Hi! The spotty dog have him! No, he’s gone from him! Givar out o’ that!” This to the donkey, with blows that sounded like the beating of carpets, and produced rather more dust.
They had left Aussolas some half a mile behind, when, from a strip of wood on their right, the fox suddenly slipped over the bank on to the road just ahead of them, ran up it for a few yards and whisked in at a small entrance gate, with the three couple of hounds yelling on a red-hot scent, not thirty yards behind. The bath-chair party whirled in at their heels, Philippa and the donkey considerably blown, Johnny scarlet through his freckles, but as fresh as paint, the old lady blind and deaf to all things save the chase. The hounds went raging through the shrubs beside the drive, and away down a grassy slope toward a shallow glen, in the bottom of which ran a little stream, and after them over the grass bumped the bath-chair. At the stream they turned sharply and ran up the glen toward the avenue, which crossed it by means of a rough stone viaduct.
“’Pon me conscience, he’s into the old culvert!” exclaimed Mrs. Knox; “there was one of my hounds choked there once, long ago! Beat on the donkey, Johnny!”
At this juncture Philippa’s narrative again becomes incoherent, not to say breathless. She is, however, positive that it was somewhere about here that the upset of the bath-chair occurred, but she cannot be clear as to whether she picked up the donkey or Mrs. Knox, or whether she herself was picked up by Johnny while Mrs. Knox picked up the donkey. From my knowledge of Mrs. Knox I should say she picked up herself and no one else. At all events, the next salient point is the palpitating moment when Mrs. Knox, Johnny, and Philippa successively applying an eye to the opening of the culvert by which the stream trickled under the viaduct, while five dripping hounds bayed and leaped around them, discovered by more senses than that of sight that the fox was in it, and furthermore that one of the hounds was in it, too.
“There’s a sthrong grating before him at the far end,” said Johnny, his head in at the mouth of the hole, his voice sounding as if he were talking into a jug, “the two of them’s fighting in it; they’ll be choked surely!”
“Then don’t stand gabbling there, you little fool, but get in and pull the hound out!” exclaimed Mrs. Knox, who was balancing herself on a stone in the stream.
“I’d be in dread, ma’am,” whined Johnny.
“Balderdash!” said the implacable Mrs. Knox. “In with you!”
I understand that Philippa assisted Johnny into the culvert, and presume it was in so doing that she acquired the two Robinson Crusoe bare footprints which decorated her jacket when I next met her.
“Have you go hold of him yet, Johnny?” cried Mrs. Knox up the culvert.
“I have, ma’am, by the tail,” responded Johnny’s voice, sepulchral in the depths.
“Can you stir him, Johnny?”
“I cannot, ma’am, and the wather is rising in it.”
“Well, please God, they’ll not open the mill dam!” remarked Mrs. Knox philosophically to Philippa, as she caught hold of Johnny’s dirty ankles. “Hold on to the tail, Johnny!”
She hauled, with, as might be expected, no appreciable result. “Run, my dear, and look for somebody, and we’ll have that fox yet!”
Philippa ran, whither she knew not, pursued by fearful visions of bursting mill dams, and maddened foxes at bay. As she sped up the avenue she heard voices, robust male voices, in a shrubbery, and made for them. Advancing along an embowered walk toward her was what she took for one wild instant to be a funeral; a second glance showed her that it was a party of clergymen of all ages, walking by twos and threes in the dappled shade of the over-arching trees. Obviously she had intruded her sacrilegious presence into a Clerical Meeting. She acknowledges that at this awe-inspiring spectacle she faltered, but the thought of Johnny, the hound, and the fox, suffocating, possibly drowning together in the culvert, nerved her. She does not remember what she said or how she said it, but I fancy she must have conveyed to them the impression that old Mrs. Knox was being drowned, as she immediately found herself heading a charge of the Irish Church toward the scene of disaster.
Fate has not always used me well, but on this occasion it was mercifully decreed that I and the other members of the hunt should be privileged to arrive in time to see my wife and her rescue party precipitating themselves down the glen.
“Holy Biddy!” ejaculated Flurry, “is she running a paper-chase with all the parsons? But look! For pity’s sake will you look at my grandmother and my Uncle Eustace?”
Mrs. Knox and her sworn enemy the old clergyman, whom I had met at dinner the night before, were standing, apparently in the stream, tugging at two bare legs that projected from a hole in the viaduct, and arguing at the top of their voices. The bath-chair lay on its side with the donkey grazing beside it, on the bank a stout Archdeacon was tendering advice, and the hounds danced and howled round the entire group.
“I tell you, Eliza, you had better let the Archdeacon try,” thundered Mr. Hamilton.
“Then I tell you I will not!
” vociferated Mrs. Knox, with a tug at the end of the sentence that elicited a subterranean lament from Johnny. “Now who was right about the second grating? I told you so twenty years ago!”
Exactly as Philippa and her rescue party arrived, the efforts of Mrs. Knox and her brother-in-law triumphed. The struggling, sopping form of Johnny was slowly drawn from the hole, drenched, speechless, but clinging to the stern of a hound, who, in its turn, had its jaws fast in the hindquarters of a limp, yellow cub.
“Oh, it’s dead!” wailed Philippa, “I did think I should have been in time to save it!”
“Well, if that doesn’t beat all!” said Dr. Hickey.
Bob, Son of Battle
Alfred Ollivant
I
The sun was hiding behind the Pike. Over the lowlands the feathery breath of night hovered still. And the hillside was shivering in the chillness of dawn.
Down on the silvery sward beside the Stony Bottom there lay the ruffled body of a dead sheep. All about the victim the dewy ground was dark and patchy like disheveled velvet; bracken trampled down; stones displaced as though by straggling feet; and the whole spotted with the all-pervading red.
A score yards up the hill, in a writhing confusion of red and gray, two dogs at death-grips. While yet higher, a pack of wild-eyed hill-sheep watched, fascinated, the bloody drama.
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