“Mmmmmmm,” said Kay in what she hoped to be an assenting and mollifying tone.
“It’s all right,” said the voice. “I’ll not hurt you if you keep mum.”
“Mmmmmmmm.”
There it was, it had happened, she was up against a gunman. She looked up into a shapeless grey face without any features, and was again just going to scream in horror at the unnatural sight, when fortunately his free hand shot up to rub violently at his nose under the piece of ragged cloth that served as a mask.
“It tickles,” he said apologetically.
“Why don’t you take it off? The odds are all against my knowing you.”
“Who the devil are you?”
“The governess.”
“Here?’
“One must be somewhere,” said Kay, apologetic in her turn, and astonished to hear herself speak so calmly. But his grasp was having an oddly soothing, almost hypnotic effect upon her; the instinctive resistance of her flesh was first mastered and then lulled—and yet she could not stop her teeth from chattering; it was silly, for she had stopped feeling frightened and tried to tell him so, but dry gasping sobs like laughter interrupted her speech. He let go her arm and lit a candle on the table, whisked off his cloth mask, then poured some whisky into a tumbler and made her drink it neat. Her teeth knocked against the glass as she sipped the raw liquid fire, watching him apprehensively as he swung round from her and locked the door, saying casually, “No more interruptions.”
What was it she had interrupted? Was the candle really a signal to confederates outside? Were they going to burn down the house? She put down her glass. She held on to the side of the table, and said, “If you burn this house you’ll be a murderer. If you’d ever had a house like this, you’d know.”
“Have you ever had a house like this?” he asked, staring at her.
“My mother had, and now she’s dead, and my father’s sold it.”
“Many have had to do that as they get poorer.” There was a surprising gentleness in his voice. It broke through what defences had been left her after her terror, broke also through the smouldering indignation of all these silent weeks among strangers, so that at last she could speak of it.
“My father wasn’t poorer, he was richer, that was why. He was a stockbroker and used to hunt from London with the Garth and the H.H., but now he’s retired and has bought a place in the Shires, a beast of a place with stables like a sanatorium, and everybody looking down their noses at somebody or other. The horses aren’t animals, they’re snob-stuff. And not even sporting snobbery, but just money. The cut of your saddle or breeches matters as much as the way you take a jump. And my father sold Killarae and its stables like Hampton Court, for that.’
“So you walked out on him. But why here?”
“I wanted to get back to Ireland. And this was easy, as she didn’t want references or college or anything.”
“I’ll bet she didn’t.”
“The place reminded me of Killarae,” she began, and stopped, for Killerae was lost, but only to her, and here was this place, Baranemona, as lovely and as helpless, and was that to be destroyed, not only for her but for all who might come after?
She looked at the face of the man before her; its rather odd slanting lines made him look as though he were smiling even while he was listening with grave intentness. Not a bad face, she had begun to think, and it should have been the face of a gentleman, she had known that instinctively from the first sound of his voice.
But it was his hands that were specially remarkable. Except for the moment when they had first gripped her, he had not hurt her at all though she had not been able to stir. Their strength and gentleness showed in their shape as well as their touch; she had only once seen hands like them, and they had been those of a famous surgeon. She stood staring at them now as she said in a tone of wonder, “You’ll not burn it, will you? You could not be so stupid.”
“What has this house to do with you?” he asked.
The cool amusement in his voice exasperated her to fury. “It’s the most living thing round here, a lot more living than that blowsy woman who’s by way of owning it. Leave it alone, and it will come through these bad times, as it has through others.”
“Aren’t you getting a bit mixed in your bad times? You’re out of date, you know. The burnings were over some years ago.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Just a simple matter of burglary.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the first thing you’d have thought if you’d been in England.”
“I’m not in England, and you’re not a burglar.”
“No? Well, look.” He turned to the window, quite off his guard with her by now. He pulled out the shutter and disclosed a small cupboard that had been hidden behind it.
“I never knew that was there,” she said.
“Nor what it was there for, I’ll be bound.”
“And what was that?”
“For a handy piece of bedroom furniture in the days when the men would drink deep into the night round this table and no man would be bothered to leave the room—the indecent ruffians! There’s another romance of the old house for you!”
He was looking over his shoulder, laughing at her, while he pulled out a square leather-covered box from the receptacle behind the shutter. It was true, then, he was a burglar, unashamedly rifling the box in front of her, pulling out a heavy bunch of old seals and putting them in his pocket, and then replacing the box and closing the cupboard.
“I have been told I can get twenty pounds for these,” he said airily.
“How did you know they were there?” she asked in tones sullen with disappointment.
“Because I put them there. They’re mine, and so is this house you were so stout in defending, but I’ll not dispute anything with that hag upstairs yet. I’m Murrough O’fflaherty, and don’t you tell me you knew it all along, for you’ve been calling me a thief to yourself for the last two minutes.”
“You’re telling me, Sir Murrough,” said Kay demurely. “And now that you’ve shown how you have to climb into your own house like a thief in the night to get your own property, you’ll understand how it is I have to climb out of it and run away without a farthing of my wages and no money for my journey, rather than face another scene with your stepmother.”
“Wages—phoo—you’d be lucky! But what about your luggage?”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s only a little of it, and it was got specially. The one thing I want now is to get up to Dublin.”
“Of course. Can’t miss the Show.”
“Is that the Horse Show?”
“Is it the Horse Show! What else would you be going to Dublin for, when all the world is going, even my stepmother to meet her horse-dealer?”
“I didn’t know she had a horse-dealer.”
“Nor did he, but he knows now, poor devil, and God help Hyacinth Doran,” he added piously.
“I’ve never seen the Horse Show.”
“Well, you’ll see the finest that ever you didn’t see, for I’m showing a little beauty, my mare, Con, and riding her myself in the jumping trials. That’s what I want £20 for, to see me through the next week.”
“And so you are going to sell the seals belonging to this house.”
“God help you, woman, what’s taken you about this house? But you’re right, it’s worth the keeping, and that’s why I’ll sell the seals. Let’s be off now out of this. I’ll take you on the back of my motor-bike and we’ll be in Dublin before breakfast.”
No, he had not drunk any of the whisky he had handed to her. His eyes were blazing, but not with drink, and his voice, taut and thrilled as it was, never rose above its carefully lowered tones. Some purpose beyond his immediate act of piracy on his own possessions was holding him tense and urgent, and now swept her up with it, unquestioning, so that when she climbed out of the window and ran silently with him along the shadow of the house, she forgot even t
o tell herself that here at last in her mapped and carefully apportioned life was an adventure.
The shadow of the house lay black upon the moon-lit lawns and melted into the curved shadows of trees, then came the black-and-white squares of the stable courtyards and the jagged outline of the Norman tower, the last relic of the ruined castle that had stood here long before the house was built, towering over the countryside that had prayed to be delivered from “the fury of the O’fflahertys.”
They were in the drive now, walking fast into the blackest night under these mighty trees, his hand again on her arm to guide her, and the squelching sound of his footsteps in the wet leaves and mud beside her, and the chuckling whisper of the little streams running hidden through the wood.
He had left his motor-bicycle in the ditch by the open road, and there the ride began, all through the night and across the great Bog of Allen that is spread over the breadth of Ireland. Endless grey land in the moonlight, flat and wide as the sea, stretched for ever before them; little grey towns, little white cottages with thatched roofs shot past them; their passage shattered the silence, roared through the tunnels of the narrow streets, awakened long-drawn-out echoes from terrified dogs and hens and the derisive cackle of geese.
The dawn came up red, then turned pale and grey, spitting thin showers; and the fugitive buccaneers of the enchanted night took leave of each other on a damp doorstep in Fitzwilliam Square. The square was empty except for milk cans. He did not kiss her.
“Doesn’t he want to, or is he merely Irish?” she wondered, and, more urgently, “Is my nose as red as it feels?”
He was asking her to look out for him in the jumping. He would be riding for Ireland in the International Contest on the first day. He hoped he’d get a prize, but Italy had sent a couple of superb riders this year. “What is your name?” he finished hurriedly, as a maid, sleepily fastening different buttons about her person, at last opened the door.
“Kay for Killarae,” she answered softly, and slipped inside.
“You’re terrible early, miss,” said the maid, shutting the door.
“The boat from Liverpool always is early,” replied Kay.
“Is your luggage coming later, miss?”
“It may, or it may not. It’s got left behind.”
“The mistresses didn’t say you were coming, miss.”
“I wonder now—didn’t they get my letter?”
How easy it was all being! As each cue presented itself she saw what line she could follow. A head, flowering into filmy lace like a branch of autumnal Old Man’s Beard, was thrust over the banisters.
“What in the name of God is that?” it demanded.
“Miss Kay, ma’am,” said the maid.
“Didn’t you get my letter, Aunt Eily?” enquired Miss Kay in distressed tones. “I want you and Aunt Grace to put me up for the Horse Show.”
“She’s lost all her luggage, ma’am,” said the maid.
“And it’s sure to take weeks getting through the customs, so I’ll have to borrow from you and get some things here,” chimed in Kay.
“What is all that part-singing going on in the hall?” said a shriller voice above, and a severe beaked profile appeared beside the frills. But Kay knew her part now too well to need another rehearsal. She marched into new and true ground.
“I’m dying for breakfast,” she said, and now all the voices rose in unison.
“Breakfast. Eggs. Is any porridge made ready? Has the cream come yet? Our tea is just made this minute. Have a cup of that, and then—”
And then eat. And then sleep. And sleep. And then, after a day or two, the Horse Show. Kay went upstairs, stopping at every step to see here a print and there an etching of pictures that had been at Killarae.
In the great main hall at Ballsbridge many females in rather bright coats and skirts, dressy hats and sensible shoes, stood vaguely staring at homespuns, handmade lace, horsey handkerchiefs and other examples of Industrial Irish art. Not for sport were these spectators here, but for fashion, “and the dowdier a woman is, the keener she is on dress,” thought Kay, exasperated by the endless bovine gaze surrounding the glass cases.
“That’s a sweet blue crochet—don’t you think that very choice?”
“Ah, not with your pink tweed—too like the caps on the corner boys.”
“Guff! you’re full of flattery! Look, there’s a smart girl now, from London I’ll swear, you can see it all over her.”
“I cannot. I saw that turn-out all over Switzer’s last week.”
Kay blushed guiltily at the dispute she had caused as she edged through the crowd, and longed to turn and say, “You are both right. I am from London, and this suit was in Switzer’s last week.”
Her grand-aunts cleared a ruthless passage through the feminine host, so reminiscent, at an ocean’s remove, of the religiously processional crawl outside the shop windows of Kensington High Street. The aunts themselves, despite their unswerving course towards the horses, were rustling and rattling with femininity, having apparently draped themselves in the drawing-room curtains for this occasion.
Secure in their splendour of lace parasols and flowered toques and heavy Victorian jewellery that clanked against their skinny bosoms, they bowed and beckoned to cronies whose friendship dated from the “nineties, and crackled with criticisms on the newer generations in linen tweed and hopsack who did not know what it was to Dress for the Horse Show. They marched with a predatory air from paddock to paddock, leaned on the white rails, and stanched their ever-unassuaged hunger to buy a hunter by making shrill comments on the beasts” hocks and hindquarters and forelegs and fetlocks, more destructive even than those on “this slapdash, slack-bodied crowd.”
Their footsore and starving niece, trailing after her indefatigable elders, took the last remark to apply to a very fat man who was sitting like a spilt sack upon a wooden box. His chins billowed out in folds below purple lips; immobile, expressionless, he wore that air of ineffable knowledge and secrecy that is given only to the statues of Buddha and to horse-dealers.
“Is it Hyacinth Doran you’re talking of?” asked Aunt Eily in reply to her niece’s question. “Oh, but he’s a grand rascal, the trickiest horse-coper in Dublin—but your Aunt Grace got the better of him once over a ginger gelding.”
Coy as the dainty two-year-old now sidling round the paddock, Aunt Grace looked down and plucked at her flounced gloves. “Poor Hyacinth, he’s easy prey for the women,” she softly said, and then—oh blessed words—“Well, we’d better snatch some luncheon.” But Aunt Eily clouded the glorious news with the suggestion that, as it was now nearly half-past two, they would probably miss the first round of the jumping.
At once Kay’s ravenous pangs were forgotten, she cared nothing for those frail old ladies, all she wanted was to get to her seat in the Grand Stand in time for the first round. Luckily, their own enthusiasm could see nothing surprising in her sudden emotion, though they insisted on some scraps of food, unfinished, before they cantered to their places up the high wooden steps, and Kay buried her nose in the catalogue.
Yes, there was the name in cold black print, Sir Murrough O’fflaherty—and that extraordinary scene with a masked man in a whisky-stale dining-room, that ride across Ireland in silence through a whole night long, had not been a dream. Reading the name over and over again as though it were an incantation, she heard little of her grand-aunts” laments for the shorn glories of the Horse Show.
What was the Vice-Regal box to look at now that there was no longer a Lord-Lieutenant to drive down to it in his Vice-Regal carriage with his escort of hussars? People were saying the Show this year was gayer and more crowded than ever since the War, that Dublin was so full you couldn’t wedge another man on the billiard-tables that were serving as beds in the hotels, that at last the swagger cavalry officers of France and Italy and Germany were finding they could no longer maintain their prestige without the true Irish hunters in their stables, and were coming over to buy them again as in the o
ld days when young men in beautiful grey cloaks clicked their heels and kissed your hand and explained that they were here to buy hunters for the Kaiser’s stud.
“Ah, my dear, it was worth while to be a girl in Dublin in those days.”
“Don’t discourage me. Perhaps I’ll get off with your Hyacinthine horse-coper.”
“Young girls have grown terribly coarse. Tell me, dear, how do you support living in England? Don’t they tell you of their operations and their love troubles all the time? Don’t they—what is the nasty word?—unbosom themselves?”
“Well, I am English. Have I——?”
“No, you certainly have not. But you’re only English through your father, poor man.”
Aunt Grace was peering into the catalogue.
“Why aren’t the German officers paired to ride with the French as usual?” Aunt Grace demanded as if of the League of Nations.
“Sh-sh,” said her sister. “They’re scratched in compliment to Hindenburg’s funeral today.”
“And a poor compliment then to a fine sportsmanlike young man like himself—no one who’d better appreciate his officers jumping over his grave in the funeral games.”
“Oh, Aunt Grace, did you ever meet Hindenburg?”
“It was some time ago,” admitted Aunt Grace. “What on earth are we all standing up for? Oh that!’ in utter contempt, clutching her belongings to her and ducking forward in a belated effort to follow the example of her neighbours, who were standing up for the Irish National Anthem.
“Quit talking now and take off your billycock!” said a sternly patriotic voice behind Mr. Hyacinth Doran, who was standing with Lady O’fflaherty in the path by the rails of the course.
“I’m bothered if I can ever tell that tune from any other,” he complained, turning his brown bowler round and round in his hands, and then began to put it on again as the tune turned into something else,—but no, there were people uncovering their heads, though a bit uncertainly, all over again,—“and what in the name of God is it now, for it’s not “God Save the King,” I can tell that still, whatever the years since they’ve dared to play it here.”
Bloodstock and Other Stories Page 6