Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  “We’ll not be going tonight,” said Michael easily.

  “We’ll wait till after the meet tomorrow.”

  The rain had cleared off by the time the hounds met. The sky was washed blue, with only a few white clouds as big as castles, and the woods were spattered with thin gold. Johnny’s temperature had not lifted its head again, and he was clamouring to go hunting too. Magdalen had stopped that, but Nanny had declared there was no sense in keeping him in bed now he was as right as rain, and there he was, dancing up and down the steps of the house, shouting, “Why shouldn’t I ride to hounds? I’m right as rain! Nanny says so!”

  “Stop him! Do stop him saying that!” Magdalen begged Dick, pressing her chestnut cob close to his big grey.

  “Why shouldn’t he say it?”

  “Because they’ll think we had the doctor for nothing, for a blind—”

  “A blind for what? Who’ll think? Good God, Magdalen, do leave the cob alone, you’re fidgeting her.”

  “The men,” she said low, though she felt that she was shrieking.

  “They’re in the kitchen anyway.”

  “They’re not. I’ve just seen Michael’s head dodging out from behind the stables.”

  “The rascal!” said Dick indulgently. “He’d follow a hunt if the devil himself were after him.”

  He called to the Whip. The hunt began to move away down the side drive through the woods. But those in front checked their horses, they were speaking to someone; then they made way, drawing their mounts to the side of the drive, as a company of men in green uniform marched up to the house.

  “What do you want?” asked Dick, pulling in the grey.

  “I have orders to search this house, sir, for four men in hiding from the Free State army.”

  “You’re on the wrong tack. There’s nobody here.”

  “We have received information to the contrary,” said the officer in a very grand voice. “We must carry out our orders.”

  He gave a word or two of command, surrounded the house with his men, and then marched inside with about a dozen of them. The search did not take long. In less than a quarter of an hour they came out again with the three men who were strangers at Killevarrega, their hands bound, led as prisoners between guards.

  “Where’s the fourth?” asked the officer as he came up.

  “How the hell should I know?” asked Dick. “Killevarrega’s a rabbit-warren. I never know how many are in the back parts.”

  “Wouldn’t the mistress know?” asked the officer.

  “I do not, and I’m damned if I’d tell you if I did,” replied Magdalen. “Why can’t you let these men go? You were fighting by their sides, most likely, a year or two ago.”

  She did not feel afraid of the soldiers. They were established now, and recognized, a part of the forces of law and order; she felt, though wrongly, that she could rate them almost as freely as if they were English policemen.

  Dick watched her angry flush with pleased amusement. That was the stuff to give the troops. Mag might fancy herself a timid little thing like other women, but you could always depend on her to rise to the occasion—and like a bird she was rising now, treating these fellows as they should be treated, regardless of any possible consequences.

  His look sent the blood tingling through her veins in a way she had not known for a long time. Ah, but this was life,—not to be watching her step, hearing her words before she said them, watching for shadows, listening for echoes, questioning, fearing,—but to blaze out when she felt like it, to enjoy her anger, and Dick’s admiration, and the smell of horses rising in the sharp air, and the flicker of the hounds” tails in the sunlight, and all the bright colour and reckless movement of life,—and at that her eyes fell on the tired faces of the three men about to die.

  Dick was speaking to the guards with the easy affability that had got him and others out of many tight places.

  “She’s right there,” he said, “and it’s a grand day. Come and see us rout out an old dog fox in the Knocknamara covert.”

  He signed to the new English parlour-maid who was standing by on the steps with a tray of glasses, and with an air of exquisite disdain she offered whisky to the officer and his subordinates. They accepted the offer, but with an expression of more-than-English rigidity.

  “We thank your honour kindly, but we must be moving,” the leader told Dick; “the fourth man must be about here.”

  More than half the hunt had seen Michael’s red head and knew that better than he, but all appeared mildly amused.

  “Would there be a man come out of the house this hour gone, and we not seen him?” asked the Whip, with more truth than sincerity.

  “We can’t go on with the hunt till—till we know,” Magdalen whispered feverishly to Dick.

  “We must go on,” he answered as low, “it’s his best chance if we don’t show anything.”

  They went on with it, they routed out the dog fox in Knocknamara and killed in Torey woods. They did not get back to Killevarrega till five o’clock, and the women said they were starving for tea. There was no sign in the grounds of the Free State soldiers. They had marched away with the prisoners about an hour after the hunt had gone, the servants told Magdalen, and that hour they had spent searching for Michael, but they had not found him.

  Master Johnny had got so excited that Nanny had suspected a rise in temperature again and sent him back to bed, and the new English parlour-maid had kindly gone upstairs to put a hot bottle in it, and came down in raving hysterics, for what was there in Master Johnny’s cot but three loaded revolvers?

  “How do you know they were loaded?” Magdalen enquired dully.

  Well, they knew that, because Danny had examined and unloaded them and told the parlour-maid to quit howling and bawling, for it was only the men on the run had hidden them in the children’s cots for safety when they were being chased over the house by the Free State soldiers. A man could not be put to death for carrying arms against the Free State if he had no arms on him when he was caught.

  “Couldn’t he?” asked Magdalen.

  She was right to doubt. By the evening they heard that the three men had been shot just outside the grounds of Killevarrega—outside, because of the soldiers” respect to the owner who had sheltered them.

  And now she would never know if the men they had sheltered had thought that she had betrayed them to the soldiers when she sent that message to the doctor at Tillaloe. And if their friends, who survived, were still thinking it—if Michael were thinking it——

  Michael might be “a grand lad,” but one knew nothing of these people. They were charming to you to your face and shot you in the back. You could not trust them like English people.

  (“Have you seen anything of Long Dick Darcy lately?”

  “Haven’t you heard? They got him on the way to Dublin.”

  “Shot, poor devil?”

  “If so, he was lucky. He was suspected of giving information.’)

  “Is that how it will be?” Magdalen asked herself.

  She would never know now how it might be.

  And all her fears before became one tiny pinprick of anxiety in comparison with the nameless horror that now filled her, waking and sleeping.

  “There’s a man at the back door wants to speak to you, ma’am,” said the English parlour-maid one night, with her most aloof air.

  “What kind of a man, Evelyn?”

  “I couldn’t say at all, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Evelyn.”

  Thank God, Dick was not back yet. Whatever threat or warning, perhaps execution, had come to them, it was she who would take it. She went down the uneven stone stairs that led to the regions of the “back parts’; she went along the cold passage, touching the stone walls as she passed, feeling how they sweated in the damp air, never reached by the sun.

  In the open black mouth of the doorway stood the shape of a man.

  “Now I shall know,” she said aloud, and then, “Tell me now.”


  “It’s this, ma’am,” said Michael’s voice. “We knew you didn’t send a message to the soldiers. We all of us know it. There will be no harm nor hurt coming to you or the Master by reason of the three men they caught in Killevarrega.”

  “Michael!” she breathed. “Have you come back to tell me that?”

  “I have, ma’am.”

  “But your home is here. They’re watching all round it, and here, for you. And you’ve risked your life all over again, to come back here—”

  “Ah well,’—Michael’s voice was a little uncomfortable, like Dick’s when Magdalen got agitated,—“a man can’t breathe without he’d take a risk sometimes.”

  No, that was true, and she would remember it. Dick couldn’t breathe comfortably if he didn’t take risks. Michael had taken a risk to look at the hounds again—and thereby escaped, while his comrades perished for their caution.

  He had saved his life by enjoying it, for its own sake, and not just as a negation of death. She had been so busy thinking of death that she had given herself no time to notice the bright moments of life passing her by, the games with Johnny and Gillian, the rides across country in sun and wind, the wild moments of love and laughter when Dick caught her in his arms. “How shall I keep him?” she had thought desperately, when he was there, at one with her, and not death itself could take that moment away. Her life with him was full and perfect; her only complaint against it was that at any moment it might end.

  “And it isn’t even to save our lives that you’ve risked yours,” she whispered. “You’ve come back only to reassure us.”

  There was an instant’s silence. Against the black dark his face was nothing but a grey smear, she could scarcely see even the pits that were his eyes. Yet she could feel that he was looking at her, seeing more of her than she had ever dreamed he could see, and knew that what he saw there he had seen before many a time when she had ridden to hounds and he had followed on foot. He had known, always, that deep in her heart she was afraid.

  His voice came at last, slowly, through the dark. “I thought maybe,” he said, “that it would give you courage.”

  She caught at his hands and held them. “It will, Michael. It will give me courage for the rest of my life.”

  The Country Gentleman

  Captain John Nehemiah Strike-and-Spare-not Elworthy rode up the avenue at Craigeneven. His first and last names had been settled for him by his parents, the intermediate ones he had chosen himself as an aid to his military profession. But Captain Elworthy was glad to think that he could now drop the Nehemiah Strike-and-Spare-Not, for now he would no longer be a soldier of the Lord, but “just a plain country gentleman,” and with exquisite savour he repeated the falsely modest little phrase over and over to himself.

  Here he was, just thirty, faced with the miracle he had always dreamed of; he was in a country where not a soul knew him for John Elworthy the prentice lad behind the counter at Dan Tebbit’s the chandler in Cheapside; and he was riding to take possession of a great estate owned by a family that had come to Ireland under Strongbow three centuries ago. It was hard on the owner, poor devil, but his race must long since have degenerated from contact with the mere Irish. Besides, Elworthy could not help himself, he was only acting under orders from General Cromwell, who had settled the Irish question, and his own debts, by giving two-thirds of the country to his English followers. Captain Elworthy congratulated himself on his truly gentlemanly tact in having sent on his little troop of horse in advance to give the orders to Mr. Craig and thus allow him to get over his first shock before he was confronted with his supplanter.

  The new owner was a sturdy well-set-up fellow with a face almost as round and fresh-coloured as when he had first tramped out of the little cobbled yard in Cheapside ten years ago, with his master’s fat nasal voice calling after him to be a good lad and come back to his work the minute the war was over. And Mrs. Tebbit had kissed him good-bye on both his chubby red cheeks, for though her husband said it was only a holiday picnic for the lad, yet he was sadly young to be going to the wars, and she waved her handkerchief after him along with all the other shopkeepers” wives who had helped pack cart after cart with mutton pies and loaves of bread and great flagons of ale and red wine, all for the brave lads going to defend their city from that bloodthirsty foreigner Prince Rupert. And John Elworthy fell into line with London’s trained band of prentices and marched down the west road to Hammersmith.

  He had been marching west ever since. At Turnham Green he had been with Brooke’s regiment when they succeeded in checking the Royalist advance; he had marched across Cotswold under Waller and helped bear the brunt of Prince Rupert’s charge at Newbury; his pluck and resource had helped him to transfer to a small troop of horse under the coming man, Cromwell, whom Elworthy finally followed in his Irish campaign. And now here he was to settle at last in the extreme west of this western island.

  Though the outlines of his face had not changed much from that day, a whole network of little lines and furrows had since been added like a map to show how far he had tramped. No raw young cub this, but an experienced soldier, self-made, eager to learn how to be a country gentleman.

  His ten years” campaigning had proved a perverse but useful part of that education. In the lax discipline of Brooke’s regiment in that first year of the war, poaching had largely helped to provision the troops; and as one of Cromwell’s troopers his intelligent passion for horseflesh had helped him more than anything else with his commander. For Colonel Cromwell had a very pretty taste for horseflesh, a tender and thoughtful hand for it, and a keen eye to see where it could be got without troublesome bargaining. Horse-thieving was as much a part of a soldier’s job as poaching, and Elworthy’s proficiency in it first caught Cromwell’s pleased attention.

  “That’s a nice bit of blood you’ve got under you, Elworthy; who was it under last, but we’ll not ask that too closely, hey?” and the Colonel’s huge guffaw made the young trooper’s ears burn pink with pleasure. Like many others, he worshipped this brand-new officer, thick-set and middle-aged, who had owned broad lands in Huntingdon before he took up soldiering for the Parliament, and cared more for them than for any honour he might win.

  It was all very well for Colonel Cromwell to say in public that he did not care a straw for the name of gentleman, and even to prove it now and then by making an officer of a drayman or a cobbler. But Elworthy had once heard him at the beginning of the campaign give his true opinion to his cousin Mr. Hampden after their men had been routed in a skirmish and run like rabbits. “We shall always be beaten,” he had cried, “until we get men of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go.”

  Well, he had got them, or inspired his spirit into them, and with them he had won the war, beheaded the King and made his army the only ruler in England. Yet Captain Elworthy had never lost the envious desire bequeathed him by his commander’s words. “To go on as far as gentlemen will go’—how far was that, and where would it lead him?

  It had led him through ragged country where the rock came through the thin soil like the bones of some vast skeleton, and now through rusty bog-land, its flat waste broken only here and there by a starved-looking tree. Human beings were as rare and gaunt as the trees, they ran out from a cluster of tiny hovels to stare at him, their great eyes gaping under shocks of rough hair. He tried to ask the way, they knew no word of English, but beckoned him on at the name Craigeneven, and indeed there was no other course but to follow this track through the bog, until he came to woods and the beginnings of a rough stone wall that was being built round them intermittently for miles, and then at last to a stone gateway that opened into the mouth of a deep green tunnel.

  He rode into the tunnel, through undergrowth that had never been disturbed since all this part of Ireland was one vast forest. His horse’s hoofs squelching on the mud sounded unnaturally loud, a steady suction as of some unresisting object being dragged down, down into wet bog.

  But here and there th
rough the surrounding silence came the whisper and chuckle of little streams, running hidden through that primeval green. He looked up into the branches, layer upon layer they were spread above him, with no end nor summit to them, and suddenly he felt very small, lost and bewildered, like an ant clambering among the bracken.

  As an ant would he seem to anyone large enough to look down through these trees, as he had looked down through the bracken—but only God would be large enough to do that, and God would never smash him. His mercy was infinite.

  But was it? Did Cromwell’s victims find it so at Drogheda when they were trapped like ants in a bonfire in that church which Cromwell ordered to be fired? “God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn!” one of them had shrieked as he clambered up the blazing steeple.

  It had been the end of soldiering for Captain Elworthy, the end of his hero-worship for his commander. He had been on the verge of telling his commander then and there that he resigned his commission under him, but it had been no easy thing to do when confronted by those heavy furious eyes, those lips compressed and bitten so that the blood ran unheeded down his chin. The man was mad for the moment, and why should he throw away all his chances for the sake of telling a madman he was in the wrong? He was rewarded for his discretion; Oliver Cromwell had ceased to be the ideal country gentleman, but John Elworthy would now be one for the rest of his life.

  Like his own hopes, a clear white light now shone ahead of him; there came the sparkle of sunshine on wet grass, and then the woods opened out into an expanse of pasture land, green, flat and vast as the sea on a smooth summer day. Cattle and sheep browsed here and there over it, horses stood in the shade of a clump of trees and lazily flicked the flies away with their long tails—and such horses! as Captain Elworthy saw as he rode nearer. His road stretched away before him through this lovely smiling land and over a little bridge and up to a square modern comfortable-looking house that stood near the edge of the woods.

  At this sight Captain Elworthy’s heart gave a great leap—here would he live for the rest of his life, marry, bear children who would never know what it was to be anything but the gentry, found a family whose roots should be deep in the soil of this fair country.