“A SILENCE THAT WAS THE OUTCOME PARTLY OF STUPIDITY, PARTLY OF CAUTION, AND PARTLY OF LACK OF ENGLISH SPEECH.”
“I never know if you’re speaking the truth or no,” complained Mrs. Spicer; nevertheless, she scrambled on to the car without delay. She and her brother had at least one point in common—the fanatic enthusiasm of the angler.
In the meantime, Miss Fanny Fitzroy’s negotiations were proceeding in the hotel yard. Fanny herself was standing in a stable doorway, with her hands in the pockets of her bicycle skirt. She had no hat on, and the mild breeze blew her hair about; it was light brown, with a brightness in it; her eyes also were light brown, with gleams in them like the shallow places in a Connemara trout stream. At this moment they were scanning with approval, tempered by anxiety, the muddy legs of a lean and lengthy grey filly, who was fearfully returning her gaze from between the strands of a touzled forelock. The owner of the filly, a small man, with a face like a serious elderly monkey, stood at her head in a silence that was the outcome partly of stupidity, partly of caution, and partly of lack of English speech. The conduct of the matter was in the hands of a friend, a tall young man with a black beard, nimble of tongue and gesture, profuse in courtesies.
“Well, indeed, yes, your ladyship,” he was saying glibly, “the breed of horses is greatly improving in these parts, and them hackney horses—”
“Oh,” interrupted Miss Fitzroy hastily, “I won’t have her if she’s a hackney.”
The eyes of the owner sought those of the friend in a gaze that clearly indicated the question.
“What’ll ye say to her now?”
The position of the vendors was becoming a little complicated. They had come over through the mountains, from the borders of Mayo, to sell the filly to the hotel-keeper for posting, and were primed to the lips with the tale of her hackney lineage. The hotel-keeper had unconditionally refused to trade, and here, when a heaven-sent alternative was delivered into their hands, they found themselves hampered by the coils of a cast-off lie. No shade, however, of hesitancy appeared on the open countenance of the friend. He approached Miss Fitzroy with a mincing step, a deprecating wave of the hand, and a deeply respectful ogle. He was going to adopt the desperate resource of telling the truth, but to tell the truth profitably was a part that required rather more playing than any other.
“Well, your honour’s ladyship,” he began, with a glance at the hotel ostler, who was standing near cleaning a bit in industrious and sarcastic silence, “it is a fact, no doubt, that I mentioned here this morning that this young mare was of the Government hackney stock. But, according as I understand from this poor man that owns her, he bought her in a small fair over the Tuam side, and the man that sold her could take his oath she was by the Grey Dawn—sure you’d know it out of her colour.”
“Why didn’t you say so before?” asked Miss Fitzroy, bending her straight brows in righteous severity.
“Well, that’s true indeed, your ladyship; but, after all—I declare a man couldn’t hardly live without he’d tell a lie sometimes!”
Fanny Fitz stooped, rather hurriedly, and entered upon a renewed examination of the filly’s legs. Even Rupert Gunning, after his brief and unsympathetic survey, had said she had good legs; in fact, he had only been able to crab her for the length of her back, and he, as Fanny Fitz reflected with a heat that took no heed of metaphor, was the greatest crabber that ever croaked.
“What are you asking for her?” she demanded with a sudden access of decision.
There was a pause. The owner of the filly and his friend withdrew a step or two and conferred together in Irish at lightning speed. The filly held up her head and regarded her surroundings with guileless wonderment. Fanny Fitz made a mental dive into her bankbook, and arrived at the varied conclusions that she was £30 to the good, that on that sum she had to weather out the summer and autumn, besides pacifying various cormorants (thus she designated her long-suffering tradespeople), and that every one had told her that if she only kept her eyes open in Connemara she might be able to buy something cheap and make a pot of money on it.
“This poor honest man,” said the friend, returning to the charge, “says he couldn’t part her without he’d get twenty-eight pounds for her; and, thank God, it’s little your ladyship would think of giving that!”
Fanny Fitz’s face fell.
“Twenty-eight pounds!” she echoed. “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”
The friend turned to the owner, and, with a majestic wave of the hand, signalled to him to retire. The owner, without a change of expression, coiled up the rope halter and started slowly and implacably for the gate; the friend took off his hat with wounded dignity. Every gesture implied that the whole transaction was buried in an irrevocable past.
Fanny Fitz’s eyes followed the party as they silently left the yard, the filly stalking dutifully with a long and springy step beside her master. It was a moment full of bitterness, and of a quite irrational indignation against Rupert Gunning.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” said the ostler, at her elbow, “would ye be willing to give twenty pounds for the mare, and he to give back a pound luck-penny?”
“I would!” said the impulsive Fanny Fitz, after the manner of her nation.
When the fishing party returned that afternoon Miss Fitzroy met them at the hall door.
“Well, my dear,” she said airily to Mrs. Spicer, “what sort of sport have you had? I’ve enjoyed myself immensely. I’ve bought a horse!”
Mrs. Spicer sat, paralysed, on the seat of the outside car, disregarding her brother’s outstretched hands.
“Fanny!” she exclaimed, in tones fraught with knowledge of her friend’s resources and liabilities.
“Yes, I have!” went on Fanny Fitz, undaunted. “Mr. Gunning saw her. He said she was a long-backed brute. Didn’t you, Mr. Gunning?”
Rupert Gunning lifted his small sister bodily off the car. He was a tall sallow man, with a big nose and a small, much-bitten, fair moustache.
“Yes, I believe I did,” he said shortly.
Mrs. Spicer’s blue eyes grew round with consternation.
“Then you really have bought the thing!” she cried. “Oh, Fanny, you idiot! And what on earth are you going to do with it?”
“It can sleep on the foot of my bed to-night,” returned Fanny Fitz, “and I’ll ride it into Galway to-morrow! Mr. Gunning, you can ride half-way if you like!”
But Mr. Gunning had already gone into the hotel with his rod and fishing basket. He had a gift, that he rarely lost a chance of exercising, of provoking Fanny Fitz to wrath, and the fact that he now declined her challenge may or may not be accounted for by the gloom consequent upon an empty fishing basket.
Next morning the various hangers-on in the hotel yard were provided with occupation and entertainment of the most satiating description. Fanny Fitz’s new purchase was being despatched to the nearest railway station, some fourteen miles off. It had been arranged that the ostler was to drive her there in one of the hotel cars, which should then return with a horse that was coming from Galway for the hotel owner; nothing could have fitted in better. Unfortunately the only part of the arrangement that refused to fit in was the filly. Even while Fanny Fitz was finishing her toilet, high-pitched howls of objurgation were rising, alarmingly, from the stable-yard, and on reaching the scene of action she was confronted by the spectacle of the ostler being hurtled across the yard by the filly, to whose head he was clinging, while two helpers upheld the shafts of the outside car from which she had fled. All were shouting directions and warnings at the tops of their voices, the hotel dog was barking, the filly alone was silent, but her opinions were unmistakable.
A waiter in shirt-sleeves was leaning comfortably out of a window, watching the fray and offering airy suggestion and comment.
“It’s what I’m telling them, miss,” he said easily, including Fanny Fitz in the conversation; “if they get that one into Recess to-night it’ll not be under a side-car.”
“But the man I bought her from,” said Fanny Fitz, lamentably addressing the company, “told me that he drove his mother to chapel with her last Sunday.”
“Musha then, may the divil sweep hell with him and burn the broom afther!” panted the ostler in bitter wrath, as he slewed the filly to a standstill. “I wish himself and his mother was behind her when I went putting the crupper on her! B’leeve me, they’d drop their chat!”
“Sure I knew that young Geogheghan back in Westport,” remarked the waiter, “and all the good there is about him was a little handy talk. Take the harness off her, Mick, and throw a saddle on her. It’s little I’d think meself of canthering her into Recess!”
“How handy ye are yerself with your talk!” retorted the ostler; “it’s canthering round the table ye’ll be doing, and it’s what’ll suit ye betther!”
Fanny Fitz began to laugh. “He might ride the saddle of mutton!” she said, with a levity that, under the circumstances, did her credit. “You’d better take the harness off, and you’ll have to get her to Recess for me somehow.”
The ostler took no notice of this suggestion; he was repeating to himself: “Ride the saddle o’ mutton! By dam, I never heard the like o’ that! Ride the saddle o’ mutton—!” He suddenly gave a yell of laughing, and in the next moment the startled filly dragged the reins from his hand with a tremendous plunge, and in half a dozen bounds was out of the yard gate and clattering down the road.
There was an instant of petrifaction. “Diddlety—iddlety—idlety!” chanted the waiter with far-away sweetness.
Fanny Fitz and the ostler were outside the gate simultaneously: the filly was already rounding the first turn of the road; two strides more, and she was gone as though she had never been, and “Oh, my nineteen pounds!” thought poor Fanny Fitz.
As the ostler was wont to say in subsequent repetitions of the story: “Thanks be to God, the reins was rotten!” But for this it is highly probable that Miss Fitzroy’s speculation would have collapsed abruptly with broken knees, possibly with a broken neck. Having galloped into them in the course of the first hundred yards, they fell from her as the green withes fell from Samson, one long streamer alone remaining to lash her flanks as she fled. Some five miles from the hotel she met a wedding, and therewith leaped the bog-drain by the side of the road and “took to the mountains,” as the bridegroom poetically described it to Fanny Fitz, who, with the ostler, was pursuing the fugitive on an outside car.
“If that’s the way,” said the ostler, “ye mightn’t get her again before the winther.”
Fanny Fitz left the matter, together with a further instalment of the thirty pounds, in the hands of the sergeant of police, and went home, and, improbable as it may appear, in the course of something less than ten days she received an invoice from the local railway station, Enniscar, briefly stating: “1 horse arrd. Please remove.”
Many people, most of her friends indeed, were quite unaware that Fanny Fitz possessed a home. Beyond the fact that it supplied her with a permanent address, and a place at which she was able periodically to deposit consignments of half-worn-out clothes, Fanny herself was not prone to rate the privilege very highly. Possibly, two very elderly maiden step-aunts are discouraging to the homing instinct; the fact remained that as long as the youngest Miss Fitzroy possessed the where-withal to tip a housemaid she was but rarely seen within the decorous precincts of Craffroe Lodge.
Let it not for a moment be imagined that the Connemara filly was to become a member of this household. Even Fanny Fitz, with all her optimism, knew better than to expect that William O’Loughlin, who divided his attentions between the ancient cob and the garden, and ruled the elder Misses Fitzroy with a rod of iron, would undertake the education of anything more skittish than early potatoes. It was to the stable, or rather cow-house, of one Johnny Connolly, that the new purchase was ultimately conveyed, and it was thither that Fanny Fitz, with apples in one pocket and sugar in the other, conducted her ally, Mr. Freddy Alexander, the master of the Craffroe Hounds. Fanny Fitz’s friendship with Freddy was one of long standing, and was soundly based on the fact that when she had been eighteen he had been fourteen; and though it may be admitted that this is a discrepancy that somewhat fades with time, even Freddy’s mother acquitted Fanny Fitz of any ulterior motive; and Freddy was an only son.
“She was very rejected last night afther she coming in,” said Johnny Connolly, manipulating as he spoke the length of rusty chain and bit of stick that fastened the door. “I think it was lonesome she was on the thrain.”
Fanny Fitz and Mr. Alexander peered into the dark and vasty interior of the cow-house; from a remote corner they heard a heavy breath and the jingle of a training bit, but they saw nothing.
“I have the cavesson and all on her ready for ye, and I was thinking we’d take her south into Mr. Gunning’s land. His finces is very good,” continued Johnny, going cautiously in; “wait till I pull her out.”
Johnny Connolly was a horse trainer who did a little farming, or a farmer who did a little horse training, and his management of young horses followed no known rules, and indeed knew none, but it was generally successful. He fed them by rule of thumb; he herded them in hustling, squabbling parties in pitch-dark sheds; he ploughed them at eighteen months; he beat them with a stick like dogs when they transgressed, and like dogs they loved him. He had what gardeners call “a lucky hand” with them, and they throve with him, and he had, moreover, that gift of winning their wayward hearts that comes neither by cultivation nor by knowledge, but is innate and unconscious. Already, after two days, he and the Connemara filly understood each other; she sniffed distantly and with profound suspicion at Fanny and her offerings, and entirely declined to permit Mr. Alexander to estimate her height on the questionable assumption that the point of his chin represented 15’2, but she allowed Johnny to tighten or slacken every buckle in her new and unfamiliar costume without protest.
“I think she’ll make a ripping good mare,” said the enthusiastic Freddy, as he and Fanny Fitz followed her out of the yard; “I don’t care what Rupert Gunning says, she’s any amount of quality, and I bet you’ll do well over her.”
“She’ll make a real nice fashionable mare,” remarked Johnny, opening the gate of a field and leading the filly in, “and she’s a sweet galloper, but she’s very frightful in herself. Faith, I thought she’d run up the wall from me the first time I went to feed her! Ah ha! none o’ yer thricks!” as the filly, becoming enjoyably aware of the large space of grass round her, let fling a kick of malevolent exuberance at the two fox-terriers who were trotting decorously in her rear.
It was soon found that, in the matter of “stone gaps,” the A B C of Irish jumping, Connemara had taught the grey filly all there was to learn.
“Begor, Miss Fanny, she’s as crabbed as a mule!” said her teacher approvingly. “D’ye mind the way she soaks the hind legs up into her! We’ll give her a bank now.”
At the bank, however, the trouble began. Despite the ministrations of Mr. Alexander and a long whip, despite the precept and example of Mr. Connolly, who performed prodigies of activity in running his pupil in at the bank and leaping on to it himself the filly time after time either ran her chest against it or swerved from it at the last instant with a vigour that plucked her preceptor from off it and scattered Fanny Fitz and the fox-terriers like leaves before the wind. These latter were divided between sycophantic and shrieking indignation with the filly for declining to jump, and a most wary attention to the sphere of influence of the whip. They were a mother and daughter, as conceited, as craven, and as wholly attractive as only the judiciously spoiled ladies of their race can be. Their hearts were divided between Fanny Fitz and the cook, the rest of them appertained to the Misses Harriet and Rachael Fitzroy, whom they regarded with toleration tinged with boredom.
“I tell ye now, Masther Freddy, ’tis no good for us to be goin’ on sourin’ the mare this way. ’Tis what the fince is too steep for her. Maybe she never seen the like in that backwards counthry she came from. We’ll give her the bank below with the ditch in front of it. ’Tisn’t very big at all, and she’ll be bound to lep with the sup of wather that’s in it.”
Thus Johnny Connolly, wiping a very heated brow.
The bank below was a broad and solid structure well padded with grass and bracken, and it had a sufficiently obvious ditch, of some three feet wide, on the nearer side. The grand effort was duly prepared for. The bank was solemnly exhibited to the filly; the dogs, who had with unerring instinct seated themselves on its most jumpable portion, were scattered with one threat of the whip to the horizon. Fanny tore away the last bit of bracken that might prove a discouragement, and Johnny issued his final order.
“Come inside me with the whip, sir, and give her one good belt at the last.”
No one knows exactly how it happened. There was a rush, a scramble, a backward sliding, a great deal of shouting, and the Connemara filly was couched in the narrow ditch at right angles to the fence, with the water oozing up through the weeds round her, like a wild duck on its nest; and at this moment Mr. Rupert Gunning appeared suddenly on the top of the bank and inspected the scene with an amusement that he made little attempt to conceal.
It took half an hour, and ropes, and a number of Rupert Gunning’s haymakers, to get Fanny Fitz’s speculation on to its legs again, and Mr. Gunning’s comments during the process successfully sapped Fanny Fitz’s control of her usually equable temper, “He’s a beast!” she said wrathfully to Freddy, as the party moved soberly homewards in the burning June afternoon, with the horseflies clustering round them, and the smell of new-mown grass wafting to them from where, a field or two away, came the rattle of Rupert Gunning’s mowing-machine. “A crabbing beast! It was just like my luck that he should come up at that moment and have the supreme joy of seeing Gamble—” Gamble was the filly’s rarely-used name—“wallowing in the ditch! That’s the second time he’s scored off me. I pity poor little Maudie Spicer for having such a brother!”
In spite of this discouraging début, the filly’s education went on and prospered. She marched discreetly along the roads in long reins; she champed detested mouthfuls of rusty mouthing bit in the process described by Johnny Connolly as “getting her neck broke” she trotted for treadmill half-hours in the lunge; and during and in spite of all these penances, she fattened up and thickened out until that great authority, Mr. Alexander, pronounced it would be a sin not to send her up to the Dublin Horse Show, as she was just the mare to catch an English dealer’s eye.
“But sure ye wouldn’t sell her, miss?” said her faithful nurse, “and Masther Freddy afther starting the hounds and all!”
Fanny Fitz scratched the filly softly under the jawbone, and thought of the document in her pocket—long, and blue, and inscribed with the too familiar notice in red ink: “An early settlement will oblige”.
“I must, Johnny,” she said, “worse luck!”
“Well, indeed, that’s too bad, miss,” said Johnny comprehendingly. “There was a mare I had one time, and I sold her before I went to America. God knows, afther she went from me, whenever I’d look at her winkers hanging on the wall I’d have to cry. I never seen a sight of her till three years afther that, afther I coming home. I was coming out o’ the fair at Enniscar, an’ I was talking to a man an’ we coming down Dangan Hill, and what was in it but herself coming up in a cart! “An’ I didn’t look at her, good nor bad, nor know her, but sorra bit but she knew me talking, an’ she turned in to me with the cart! Ho, ho, ho!’ says she, and she stuck her nose into me like she’d be kissing me. Be dam, but I had to cry. An’ the world wouldn’t stir her out o’ that till I’d lead her on meself. As for cow nor dog nor any other thing, there’s nothing would rise your heart like a horse!”
It was early in July, a hot and sunny morning, and Fanny Fitz, seated on the flawless grassplot in front of Craffroe Lodge hall-door, was engaged in washing the dogs. The mother, who had been the first victim, was morosely licking herself, shuddering effectively, and coldly ignoring her oppressor’s apologies. The daughter, trembling in every limb, was standing knee-deep in the bath; one paw, placed on its rim, was ready for flight if flight became practicable; her tail, rigid with anguish would have hummed like a violin-string if it were touched. Fanny, with her shirt-sleeves rolled up to her elbows, scrubbed in the soap. A clipped fuchsia hedge, the pride of William O’Loughlin’s heart, screened the little lawn and garden from the high road.
“Good morning, Miss Fanny,” said a voice over the hedge.
Fanny Fitz raised a flushed face and wiped a fleck of Naldyre off her nose with her arm.
“I’ve just been looking at your mare,” went on the voice.
“Well, I hope you liked her!” said Fanny Fitz defiantly, for the voice was the voice of Rupert Gunning, and there was that in it that in this connection acted on Miss Fitzroy as a slogan.
“Well, ‘like’ is a strong word, you know!” said Mr. Gunning, moving on and standing with his arms on the top of the white gate and meeting Fanny’s glance with provoking eyes. Then, as an after-thought, “Do you think you give her enough to eat?”
“She gets a feed of oats every Sunday, and strong tea and thistles through the week,” replied Fanny Fitz in furious sarcasm.
“Yes, that’s what she looks like,” said Rupert Gunning thoughtfully. “Connolly tells me you want to send her to the show—Barnum’s, I suppose—as the skeleton dude?”
“I believe you want to buy her yourself,” retorted Fanny, with a vicious dab of the soap in the daughter’s eye.
“Yes, she’s just about up to my weight, isn’t she? By-the-bye, you haven’t had her backed yet, I believe?”
“I’m going to try her to-day!” said Fanny with sudden resolve.
“Ride her yourself!” said Mr. Gunning, his eyebrows going up into the roots of his hair.
“Yes!” said Fanny, with calm as icy as a sudden burst of struggles on the part of the daughter would admit of.
Rupert Gunning hesitated; then he said, “Well, she ought to carry a side-saddle well. Decent shoulders, and a nice long—” Perhaps he caught Fanny Fitz’s eye; at all events, he left the commendation unfinished, and went on, “I should like to look in and see the performance, if I may? I suppose you wouldn’t let me try her first? No?”
He walked on.
“Puppy, will you stay quiet!” said Fanny Fitz very crossly. She even slapped the daughter’s soap-sud muffled person, for no reason that the daughter could see.
“Begorra, miss, I dunno,” said Johnny Connolly dubiously when the suggestion that the filly should be ridden there and then was made to him a few minutes later; “wouldn’t ye wait till I put her a few turns under the cart, or maybe threw a sack o’ oats on her back?”
But Fanny would brook no delay. Her saddle was in the harness-room: William O’Loughlin could help to put it on; she would try the filly at once.
Miss Fitzroy’s riding was of the sort that makes up in pluck what it wants in knowledge. She stuck on by sheer force of character; that she sat fairly straight, and let a horse’s head alone were gifts of Providence of which she was wholly unconscious. Riding, in her opinion, was just getting on to a saddle and staying there, and making the thing under it go as fast as possible. She had always ridden other people’s horses, and had ridden them so straight, and looked so pretty, that—other people in this connection being usually men—such trifles as riding out a hard run minus both fore shoes, or watering her mount generously during a check, were endured with a forbearance not frequent in horse owners. Hunting people, however, do not generally mount their friends, no matter how attractive, on young and valuable horses. Fanny Fitz’s riding had been matured on well-seasoned screws, and she sallied forth to the subjugation of the Connemara filly with a self-confidence formed on experience only of the old, and the kind, and the cunning.
The filly trembled and sidled away from the garden-seat up to which Johnny Connolly had manœuvred her. Johnny’s supreme familiarity with young horses had brought him to the same point of recklessness that Fanny had arrived at from the opposite extreme, but some lingering remnant of prudence had induced him to put on the cavesson headstall, with the long rope attached to it, over the filly’s bridle. The latter bore with surprising nerve Fanny’s depositing of herself in the saddle.
“I’ll keep a holt o’ the rope, Miss Fanny,” said Johnny, assiduously fondling his pupil; “it might be she’d be strange in herself for the first offer. I’ll lead her on a small piece. Come on, gerr’l! Come on now!”
The pupil, thus adjured, made a hesitating movement, and Fanny settled herself down into the saddle. It was the shifting of the weight that seemed to bring home to the grey filly the true facts of the case, and with the discovery she shot straight up into the air as if she had been fired from a mortar. The rope whistled through Johnny Connolly’s fingers, and the point of the filly’s shoulder laid him out on the ground with the precision of a prize-fighter.
“I felt, my dear,” as Fanny Fitz remarked in a letter to a friend, “as if I were in something between an earthquake and a bad dream and a churn. I just clamped my legs round the crutches, and she whirled the rest of me round her like the lash of a whip. In one of her flights she nearly went in at the hall door, and I was aware of William O’Loughlin’s snow-white face somewhere behind the geraniums in the porch. I think I was clean out of the saddle then. I remember looking up at my knees, and my left foot was nearly on the ground. Then she gave another flourish, and swung me up on top again. I was hanging on to the reins hard; in fact, I think they must have pulled me back on to the saddle, as I know at one time I was sitting in a bunch on the stirrup! Then I heard most heart-rending yells from the poor old Aunts: ‘Oh, the begonias! O Fanny, get off the grass!’ and then, suddenly, the filly and I were perfectly still, and the house and the trees were spinning round me, black, edged with green and yellow dazzles. Then I discovered that some one had got hold of the cavesson rope and had hauled us in, as if we were salmon; Johnny had grabbed me by the left leg, and was trying to drag me off the filly’s back; William O’Loughlin had broken two pots of geraniums, and was praying loudly among the fragments; and Aunt Harriet and Aunt Rachel, who don’t to this hour realise that anything unusual had happened, were reproachfully collecting the trampled remnants of the begonias.”
It was, perhaps unworthy on Fanny Fitz’s part to conceal the painful fact that it was that distinguished fisherman, Mr. Rupert Gunning, who had landed her and the Connemara filly. Freddy Alexander, however, heard the story in its integrity, and commented on it with his usual candour. “I don’t know which was the bigger fool, you or Johnny,” he said; “I think you ought to be jolly grateful to old Rupert!”
“Well, I’m not!” returned Fanny Fitz.
After this episode the training of the filly proceeded with more system and with entire success. Her nerves having been steadied by an hour in the lunge with a sack of oats strapped, Mazeppa-like, on to her back, she was mounted without difficulty, and was thereafter ridden daily. By the time Fanny’s muscles and joints had recovered from their first attempt at rough-riding, the filly was taking her place as a reasonable member of society, and her nerves, which had been as much en évidence as her bones, were, like the latter, finding their proper level, and becoming clothed with tranquillity and fat. The Dublin Horse Show drew near, and, abetted by Mr. Alexander, Fanny Fitz filled the entry forms and drew the necessary cheque, and then fell back in her chair and gazed at the attentive dogs with fateful eyes.
“Dogs!” she said, “if I don’t sell the filly I am done for!”
The mother scratched languidly behind her ear till she yawned musically, but said nothing. The daughter, who was an enthusiast, gave a sudden bound on to Miss Fitzroy’s lap, and thus it was that the cheque was countersigned with two blots and a paw mark.
None the less, the bank honoured it, being a kind bank, and not desirous to emphasise too abruptly the fact that Fanny Fitz was overdrawn.
In spite of, or rather, perhaps, in consequence of this fact, it would have been hard to find a smarter and more prosperous-looking young woman than the owner of No. 548, as she signed her name at the season-ticket turnstile and entered the wide soft aisles of the cathedral of horses at Ballsbridge. It was the first day of the show, and in token of Fanny Fitz’s enthusiasm be it recorded, it was little more than 9.30 A.M. Fanny knew the show well, but hitherto only in its more worldly and social aspects. Never before had she been of the elect who have a horse “up,” and as she hurried along, attended by Captain Spicer, at whose house she was staying, and Mr. Alexander, she felt magnificently conscious of the importance of the position.
The filly had preceded her from Craffroe by a couple of days, under the charge of Patsey Crimmeen, lent by Freddy for the occasion.
“I don’t expect a prize, you know,” Fanny had said loftily to Mr. Gunning, “but she has improved so tremendously, every one says she ought to be an easy mare to sell.”
The sun came filtering through the high roof down on to the long rows of stalls, striking electric sparks out of the stirrup-irons and bits, and adding a fresh gloss to the polish that the grooms were giving to their charges. The judging had begun in several of the rings, and every now and then a glittering exemplification of all that horse and groom could be would come with soft thunder up the tan behind Fanny and her squires.
“We’ve come up through the heavy weights,” said Captain Spicer; “the twelve-stone horses will look like rats—” He stopped.
They had arrived at the section in which figured “No. 548. Miss F. Fitzroy’s ‘Gamble,’ grey mare; 4 years, by Grey Dawn,” and opposite them was stall No. 548. In it stood the Connemara filly, or rather something that might have been her astral body. A more spectral, deplorable object could hardly be imagined. Her hind quarters had fallen in, her hips were standing out; her ribs were like the bars of a grate; her head, hung low before her, was turned so that one frightened eye scanned the passers-by, and she propped her fragile form against the partition of her stall, as though she were too weak to stand up.
To say that Fanny Fitz’s face fell is to put it mildly. As she described it to Mrs. Spicer, it fell till it was about an inch wide and five miles long. Captain Spicer was speechless. Freddy alone was equal to demanding of Patsey Crimmeen what had happened to the mare.
“Begor, Masther Freddy, it’s a wonder she’s alive at all!” replied Patsey, who was now perceived to be looking but little better than the filly. “She was middlin’ quiet in the thrain, though she went to lep out o’ the box with the first screech the engine give, but I quietened her some way, and it wasn’t till we got into the sthreets here that she went mad altogether. Faith, I thought she was into the river with me three times! ’Twas hardly I got her down the quays; and the first o’ thim alecthric thrams she seen! Look at me hands, sir! She had me swingin’ on the rope the way ye’d swing a flail. I tell you, Masther Freddy, them was the ecstasies!”
Patsey paused and gazed with a gloomy pride into the stricken faces of his audience.
“An’ as for her food,” he resumed, “she didn’t use a bit, hay, nor oats, nor bran, bad nor good, since she left Johnny Connolly’s. No, nor drink. The divil dang the bit she put in her mouth for two days, first and last. Why wouldn’t she eat is it, miss? From the fright sure! She’ll do nothing, only standing that way, and bushtin’ out sweatin’, and watching out all the time the way I wouldn’t lave her. I declare to God I’m heart-scalded with her!”
At this harrowing juncture came the order to No. 548 to go forth to Ring 3 to be judged, and further details were reserved. But Fanny Fitz had heard enough.
“Captain Spicer,” she said, as the party paced in deepest depression towards Ring 3, “if I hadn’t on a new veil I should cry!”
“Well, I haven’t,” replied Captain Spicer; “shall I do it for you? Upon my soul, I think the occasion demands it!”
“I just want to know one thing,” continued Miss Fitzroy. “When does your brother-in-law arrive?”
“Not till to-night.”
“That’s the only nice thing I’ve heard to-day,” sighed Fanny Fitz.
The judging went no better for the grey filly than might have been expected, even though she cheered up a little in the ring, and found herself equal to an invalidish but well-aimed kick at a fellow-competitor. She was ushered forth with the second batch of the rejected, her spirits sank to their former level, and Fanny’s accompanied them.
Perhaps the most trying feature of the affair was the reproving sympathy of her friends, a sympathy that was apt to break down into almost irrepressible laughter at the sight of the broken-down skeleton of whose prowess poor Fanny Fitz had so incautiously boasted.
“Y’ know, my dear child,” said one elderly M.F.H., “you had no business to send up an animal without the condition of a wire fence to the Dublin Show. Look at my horses! Fat as butter, every one of ’em!”
“So was mine, but it all melted away in the train,” protested Fanny Fitz in vain. Those of her friends who had only seen the mare in the catalogue sent dealers to buy her, and those who had seen her in the flesh—or what was left of it—sent amateurs; but all, dealers and the greenest of amateurs alike, entirely declined to think of buying her.
The weather was perfect; every one declared there never was a better show, and Fanny Fitz, in her newest and least-paid-for clothes, looked brilliantly successful, and declared to Mr. Rupert Gunning that nothing made a show so interesting as having something up for it. She even encouraged him to his accustomed jibes at her Connemara speculation, and personally conducted him to stall No. 548, and made merry over its melancholy occupant in a way that scandalised Patsey, and convinced Mrs. Spicer that Fanny’s pocket was even harder hit than she had feared.
On the second day, however, things looked a little more hopeful.
“She ate her grub last night and this morning middlin’ well, miss,” said Patsey, “and”—here he looked round stealthily and began to whisper—“when I had her in the ring, exercisin’, this morning, there was one that called me in to the rails; like a dealer he was. ‘Hi! grey mare!’ says he. I went in. ‘What’s your price?’ says he. ‘Sixty guineas, sir,’ says I. ‘Begin at the shillings and leave out the pounds!’ says he. He went away then, but I think he’s not done with me.”
“I’m sure the ring is our best chance, Patsey,” said Fanny, her voice thrilling with the ardour of conspiracy and of reawakened hope. “She doesn’t look so thin when she’s moving. I’ll go and stand by the rails, and I’ll call you in now and then just to make people look at her!”
“Sure I had Masther Freddy doing that to me yestherday,” said Patsey; but hope dies hard in an Irishman, and he saddled up with all speed.
For two long burning hours did the Connemara filly circle in Ring 3, and during all that time not once did her owner’s ears hear the longed-for summons, “Hi! grey mare!” It seemed to her that every other horse in the ring was called in to the rails, “and she doesn’t look so very thin to-day!” said Fanny indignantly to Captain Spicer, who, with Mr. Gunning, had come to take her away for lunch.
“Oh, you’ll see, you’ll sell her on the last day; she’s getting fitter every minute,” responded Captain Spicer. “What would you take for her?”
“I’m asking sixty,” said Fanny dubiously. “What would you take for her, Mr. Gunning—on the last day, you know?”
“I’d take a ticket for her,” said Rupert Gunning, “back to Craffroe—if you haven’t a return.”
The second and third days crawled by unmarked by any incident of cheer, but on the morning of the fourth, when Fanny arrived at the stall, she found that Patsey had already gone out to exercise. She hurried to the ring and signalled to him to come to her.
“There’s a fella’ afther her, miss!” said Patsey, bending very low and whispering at close and tobacco-scented range. “He came last night to buy her; a jock he was, from the Curragh, and he said for me to be in the ring this morning. He’s not come yet. He had a straw hat on him.”
Fanny sat down under the trees and waited for the jockey in the straw hat. All around were preoccupied knots of bargainers, of owners making their final arrangements, of would-be-buyers hurrying from ring to ring in search of the paragon that they had now so little time to find. But the man from the Curragh came not. Fanny sent the mare in, and sat on under the trees, sunk in depression. It seemed to her she was the only person in the show who had nothing to do, who was not clinking handfuls of money, or smoothing out banknotes, or folding up cheques and interring them in fat and greasy pocket-books. She had never known this aspect of the Horse Show before, and—so much is in the point of view—it seemed to her sordid and detestable. Prize-winners with their coloured rosettes were swaggering about everywhere. Every horse in the show seemed to have got a prize except hers, thought Fanny. And not a man in a straw hat came near Ring 3.
She went home to lunch, dead tired. The others were going to see the polo in the park.
“I must go back and sell the mare,” said Fanny valiantly, “or else take that ticket to Craffroe, Mr. Gunning!”
“Well, we’ll come down and pick you up there after the first match, you poor, miserable thing,” said Mrs. Spicer, “and I hope you’ll find that beast of a horse dead when you get there! You look half dead yourself!”
How sick Fanny was of signing her name at that turnstile! The pen was more atrocious every time. How tired her feet were! How sick she was of the whole thing, and how incredibly big a fool she had been! She was almost too tired to know what she was doing, and she had actually walked past stall No. 548 without noticing it, when she heard Patsey’s voice calling her.
“Miss Fanny! Miss Fanny! I have her sold! The mare’s sold, miss! See here! I have the money in me pocket!”
The colour flooded Fanny Fitz’s face. She stared at Patsey with eyes that more than ever suggested the Connemara trout-stream with the sun playing in it; so bright were they, so changing, and so wet. So at least thought a man, much addicted to fishing, who was regarding the scene from a little way off.
“He was a dealer, miss,” went on Patsey; “a Dublin fella’. Sixty-three sovereigns I asked him, and he offered me fifty-five, and a man that was there said we should shplit the differ, and in the latther end he gave me the sixty pounds. He wasn’t very stiff at all. I’m thinking he wasn’t buying for himself.”
The man who had noticed Fanny Fitz’s eyes moved away unostentatiously. He had seen in them as much as he wanted; for that time at least.
The grey mare who had been one of the last, if not the very last, of the sales at the Dublin Horse Show, was not at all happy in her mind.
Still less so was the dealer’s under-strapper, to whom fell the task of escorting her through the streets of Dublin. Her late owner’s groom had assured him that she would “folly him out of his hand, and that whatever she’d see she wouldn’t care for it nor ask to look at it!”
It cannot be denied, however, that when an electric tram swept past her like a terrace under weigh, closely followed by a cart laden with a clanking and horrific reaping-machine, she showed that she possessed powers of observation. The incident passed off with credit to the under-strapper, but when an animal has to be played like a salmon down the length of Lower Mount Street, and when it barn-dances obliquely along the north side of Merrion Square, the worst may be looked for in Nassau Street.
And it was indeed in Nassau Street, and, moreover, in full view of the bow window of Kildare Street Club, that the cup of the under-strapper’s misfortunes brimmed over. To be sure he could not know that the new owner of the grey mare was in that window; it was enough for him that a quiescent and unsuspected piano-organ broke with three majestic chords into Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” at his very ear, and that, without any apparent interval of time, he was surmounting a heap composed of a newspaper boy, a sandwich man, and a hospital nurse, while his hands held nothing save a red-hot memory of where the rope had been. The smashing of glass and the clatter of hoofs on the pavement filled in what space was left in his mind for other impressions.
“She’s into the hat shop!” said Mr. Rupert Gunning to himself in the window of the club, recognising his recent purchase and the full measure of the calamity in one and the same moment.
He also recognised in its perfection the fact, already suspected by him, that he had been a fool.
Upheld by this soothing reflection he went out into the street, where awaited him the privileges of proprietorship. These began with the despatching of the mare, badly cut, and apparently lame on every leg, in charge of the remains of the under-strapper, to her destination. They continued with the consolation of the hospital nurse, and embraced in varying pecuniary degrees the compensation of the sandwich man, the newspaper boy, and the proprietor of the hat shop. During all this time he enjoyed the unfaltering attention of a fair-sized crowd, liberal in comment, prolific of imbecile suggestion. And all these things were only the beginning of the trouble.
Mr. Gunning proceeded to his room and to the packing of his portmanteau for that evening’s mail-boat to Holyhead in a mood of considerable sourness. It may be conceded to him that circumstances had been of a souring character. He had bought Miss Fanny Fitzroy’s grey mare at the Horse Show for reasons of an undeniably sentimental sort. Therefore, having no good cause to show for the purchase, he had made it secretly, the sum of sixty pounds, for an animal that he had consistently crabbed, amounting in the eyes of the world in general to a rather advanced love-token, if not a formal declaration. He had planned no future for the grey mare, but he had cherished a trembling hope that some day he might be in a position to restore her to her late owner without considering the expression in any eyes save those which, a couple of hours ago, had recalled to him the play of lights in a Connemara trout stream.
Now, it appeared, this pleasing vision must go the way of many others.
The August sunlight illumined Mr. Gunning’s folly, and his bulging portmanteau, packed as brutally as only a man in a passion can pack; when he reached the hall, it also with equal inappropriateness irradiated the short figure and seedy tidiness of the dealer who had been his confederate in the purchase of the mare.
“What did the vet say, Brennan?” said Mr. Gunning, with the brevity of ill humour.
Mr. Brennan paused before replying, a pause laden with the promise of evil tidings. His short silvery hair glistened respectably in the sunshine: he had preserved unblemished from some earlier phase of his career the air of a family coachman out of place. It veiled, though it could not conceal, the dissolute twinkle in his eye as he replied:—
“He said sir, if it wasn’t that she was something out of condition, he’d recommend you to send her out to the lions at the Zoo!”
The specimen of veterinary humour had hardly the success that had been hoped for it. Rupert Gunning’s face was so remarkably void of appreciation that Mr. Brennan abruptly relapsed into gloom.
“He said he’d only be wasting his time with her, sir; he might as well go stitch a bog-hole as them wounds the window gave her; the tendon of the near fore is the same as in two halves with it, let alone the shoulder, that’s worse again with her pitching out on the point of it.”
“Was that all he had to say?” demanded the mare’s owner.
“Well, beyond those remarks he passed about the Zoo, I should say it was, sir,” admitted Mr. Brennan.
There was another pause, during which Rupert asked himself what the devil he was to do with the mare, and Mr. Brennan, thoroughly aware that he was doing so, decorously thumbed the brim of his hat.
“Maybe we might let her get the night, sir,” he said, after a respectful interval, “and you might see her yourself in the morning—”
“I don’t want to see her. I know well enough what she looks like,” interrupted his client irritably. “Anyhow, I’m crossing to England to-night, and I don’t choose to miss the boat for the fun of looking at an unfortunate brute that’s cut half to pieces!”
Mr. Brennan cleared his throat. “If you were thinking to leave her in my stables, sir,” he said firmly, “I’d sooner be quit of her. I’ve only a small place, and I’d lose too much time with her if I had to keep her the way she is. She might be on my hands three months and die at the end of it.”
The clock here struck the quarter, at which Mr. Gunning ought to start for his train at Westland Row.
“You see, sir—” recommenced Brennan. It was precisely at this point that Mr. Gunning lost his temper.
“I suppose you can find time to shoot her,” he said, with a very red face. “Kindly do so to-night!”
Mr. Brennan’s arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning’s original motive in buying the mare had been, he had during this interview yielded to treatment and followed a prepared path.
That night, in the domestic circle, he went so far as to lay the matter before Mrs. Brennan.
“He picked out a mare that was as poor as a raven—though she’s a good enough stamp if she was in condition—and tells me to buy her. ‘What price will I give, sir?’ says I. ‘Ye’ll give what they’re askin’,’ says he, ‘and that’s sixty sovereigns!’ I’m thirty years buying horses, and such a disgrace was never put on me, to be made a fool of before all Dublin! Going giving the first price for a mare that wasn’t value for the half of it! Well; he sees the mare then, cut into garters below in Nassau Street. Devil a hair he cares! Nor never came down to the stable to put an eye on her! ‘Shoot her!’ says he, leppin’ up on a car. ‘Westland Row!’ says he to the fella’. ‘Drive like blazes!’ and away with him! Well, no matter; I earned my money easy, an’ I got the mare cheap!”
Mrs. Brennan added another spoonful of brown sugar to the porter that she was mulling in a sauce-pan on the range.
“Didn’t ye say it was a young lady that owned the mare, James?” she asked in a colourless voice.
“Well, you’re the devil, Mary!” replied Mr. Brennan in sincere admiration.
The mail-boat was as crowded as is usual on the last night of the Horse Show week. Overhead flowed the smoke river from the funnels, behind flowed the foam river of wake; the Hill of Howth receded apace into the west, and its lighthouse glowed like a planet in the twilight. Men with cigars, aggressively fit and dinner-full, strode the deck in couples, and thrashed out the Horse Show and Leopardstown to their uttermost husks.
Rupert Gunning was also, but with excessive reluctance, discussing the Horse Show. As he had given himself a good deal of trouble in order to cross on this particular evening, and as any one who was even slightly acquainted with Miss Fitzroy must have been aware that she would decline to talk of anything else, sympathy for him is not altogether deserved. The boat swung softly in a trance of speed, and Miss Fitzroy, better known to a large circle of intimates as Fanny Fitz, tried to think the motion was pleasant. She had made a good many migrations to England, by various routes and classes. There had indeed been times of stress when she had crossed unostentatiously, third class, trusting that luck and a thick veil might save her from her friends, but the day after she had sold a horse for sixty pounds was not the day for a daughter of Ireland to study economics. The breeze brought warm and subtle wafts from the machinery; it also blew wisps of hair into Fanny Fitz’s eyes and over her nose, in a manner much revered in fiction, but in real life usually unbecoming and always exasperating. She leaned back on the bench and wondered whether the satisfaction of crowing over Mr. Gunning compensated her for abandoning the tranquil security of the ladies’ cabin.
Mr. Gunning, though less contradictious than his wont, was certainly one of the most deliberately unsympathetic men she knew. None the less he was a man, and some one to talk to, both points in his favour, and she stayed on.
“I just missed meeting the man who bought my mare,” she said, recurring to the subject for the fourth time; “apparently he didn’t think her ‘a leggy, long-backed brute,’ as other people did, or said they did!”
“Did many people say it?” asked Mr. Gunning, beginning to make a cigarette.
“Oh, no one whose opinion signified!” retorted Fanny Fitz, with a glance from her charming, changeful eyes that suggested that she did not always mean quite what she said. “I believe the dealer bought her for a Leicestershire man. What she really wants is a big country where she can extend herself.”
Mr. Gunning reflected that by this time the grey mare had extended herself once for all in Brennan’s back-yard: he had done nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt abjectly guilty.
“If I go with Maudie to Connemara again next year,” continued Fanny, “I must look out for another. You’ll come too, I hope? A little opposition is such a help in making up one’s mind! I don’t know what I should have done without you at Leenane last June!”
Perhaps it was the vision of early summer that the words called up; perhaps it was the smile, half-seen in the semi-dark, that curved her provoking lips; perhaps it was compunction for his share in the tragedy of the Connemara mare; but possibly without any of these explanations Rupert would have done as he did, which was to place his hand on Fanny Fitz’s as it lay on the bench beside him.
She was so amazed that for a moment she wildly thought he had mistaken it in the darkness for his tobacco pouch. Then, jumping with a shock to the conclusion that even the unsympathetic Mr. Gunning shared most men’s views about not wasting an opportunity, she removed her hand with a jerk.
“Oh! I beg your pardon!” said Rupert pusillanimously. Miss Fitzroy fell back again on the tobacco pouch theory.
At this moment the glowing end of a cigar deviated from its orbit on the deck and approached them.
“Is that you, Gunning? I thought it was your voice,” said the owner of the cigar.
“Yes, it is,” said Mr. Gunning, in a tone singularly lacking in encouragement. “Thought I saw you at dinner, but couldn’t be sure.”
As a matter of fact, no one could have been more thoroughly aware than he of Captain Carteret’s presence in the saloon.
“I thought so too!” said Fanny Fitz, from the darkness, “Captain Carteret wouldn’t look my way!”
Captain Carteret gave a somewhat exaggerated start of discovery, and threw his cigar over the side. He had evidently come to stay.
“How was it I didn’t see you at the Horse Show?” he said.
“The only people one ever sees there are the people one doesn’t want to see,” said Fanny, “I could meet no one except the auctioneer from Craffroe, and he always said the same thing. ‘Fearful sultry, Miss Fitzroy! Have ye a purchaser yet for your animal, Miss Fitzroy? Ye have not! Oh, fie, fie!’ It was rather funny at first, but it palled.”
“I was only there one day,” said Captain Carteret; “I wish I’d known you had a horse up, I might have helped you to sell.”
“Thanks! I sold all right,” said Fanny Fitz magnificently. “Did rather well too!”
“Capital!” said Captain Carteret vaguely. His acquaintance with Fanny extended over a three-day shooting party in Kildare, and a dance given by the detachment of his regiment at Enniscar, for which he had come down from the depôt. It was not sufficient to enlighten him as to what it meant to her to own and sell a horse for the first time in her life.
“By-the-bye, Gunning,” he went on, “you seemed to be having a lively time in Nassau Street yesterday! My wife and I were driving in from the polo, and we saw you in the thick of what looked like a street row. Some one in the club afterwards told me it was a horse you had only just bought at the Show that had come to grief. I hope it wasn’t much hurt?”
There was a moment of silence—astonished, inquisitive silence on the part of Miss Fitzroy temporary cessation of the faculty of speech on that of Mr. Gunning. It was the moment, as he reflected afterwards, for a clean, decisive lie, a denial of all ownership; either that, or the instant flinging of Captain Carteret overboard.
Unfortunately for him, he did neither; he lied partially, timorously, and with that clinging to the skirts of the truth that marks the novice.
“Oh, she was all right,” he said, his face purpling heavily in the kindly darkness. “What was the polo like, Carteret?”
“But I had no idea that you had bought a horse!” broke in Fanny Fitz, in high excitement. “Why didn’t you tell Maudie and me? What is it like?”
“Oh, it’s—she’s just a cob—a grey cob—I just picked her up at the end of the show.”
“What sort of a cob? Can she jump? Are you going to ride her with Freddy’s hounds?” continued the implacably interested Fanny.
“I bought her as—as a trapper, and to do a bit of carting,” replied Rupert, beginning suddenly to feel his powers of invention awakening; “she’s quite a common brute. She doesn’t jump.”
“She seems to have jumped pretty well in Nassau Street,” remarked Captain Carteret; “as well as I could see in the crowd, she didn’t strike me as if she’d take kindly to carting.”
“Well, I do think you might have told us about it!” reiterated Fanny Fitz. “Men are so ridiculously mysterious about buying or selling horses. I simply named my price and got it. I see nothing to make a mystery about in a deal; do you, Captain Carteret?”
“Well, that depends on whether you are buying or selling,” replied Captain Carteret.
But Fate, in the shape of a turning tide and a consequent roll, played for once into the hands of Rupert Gunning. The boat swayed slowly, but deeply, and a waft of steam blew across Miss Fitzroy’s face. It was not mere steam; it had been among hot oily things, stealing and giving odour. Fanny Fitz was not ill, but she knew that she had her limits, and that conversation, save of the usual rudimentary kind with the stewardess, were best abandoned.
Miss Fitzroy’s movements during the next two and a half months need not be particularly recorded. They included—
1. A week in London, during which the sixty pounds, or a great part of it, acquired by the sale of the Connemara mare, passed imperceptibly into items, none of which, on a strict survey of expenditure, appeared to exceed three shillings and nine pence.
2. A month at Southsea, with Rupert Gunning’s sister, Maudie Spicer, where she again encountered Captain Carteret, and entered aimlessly upon a semi-platonic and wholly unprofitable flirtation with him. During this epoch she wore out the remnant of her summer clothes and laid in substitutes; rather encouraged than otherwise by the fact that she had long since lost touch with the amount of her balance at the bank.
3. An expiatory and age-long sojourn of three weeks with relatives at an Essex vicarage, mitigated only by persistent bicycling with her uncle’s curate. The result, as might have been predicted by any one acquainted with Miss Fitzroy, was that the curate’s affections were diverted from the bourne long appointed for them, namely, the eldest daughter of the house, and that Fanny departed in blackest disgrace, with the single consolation of knowing that she would never be asked to the vicarage again.
Finally she returned, third-class, to her home in Ireland, with nothing to show for the expedition except a new and very smart habit, and a vague assurance that Captain Carteret would give her a mount now and then with Freddy Alexander’s hounds. Captain Carteret was to be on detachment at Enniscar.
Mr. William Fennessy, lately returned from America, at present publican in Enniscar and proprietor of a small farm on its outskirts, had taken a grey mare to the forge.
It was now November, and the mare had been out at grass for nearly three months, somewhat to the detriment of her figure, but very much to her general advantage. Even in the south-west of Ireland it is not usual to keep horses out quite so late in the year, but Mr. Fennessy, having begun his varied career as a travelling tinker, was not the man to be bound by convention. He had provided the mare with the society of a donkey and two sheep, and with the shelter of a filthy and ruinous cowshed. Taking into consideration the fact that he had only paid seven pounds ten shillings for her, he thought this accommodation was as much as she was entitled to.
She was now drooping and dozing in a dark corner of the forge, waiting her turn to be shod, while the broken spring of a car was being patched, as shaggy and as dirty a creature as had ever stood there.
“Where did you get that one?” inquired the owner of the car of Mr. Fennessy, in the course of much lengthy conversation.
“I got her from a cousin of my own that died down in the County Limerick,” said Mr. Fennessy in his most agreeable manner. “’Twas himself bred her, and she was near deshtroyed fallin’ back on a harra’ with him. It’s for postin’ I have her.”
“She’s shlack enough yet,” said the carman.
“Ah, wait awhile!” said Mr. Fennessy easily, “in a week’s time when I’ll have her clipped out, she’ll be as clean as amber.”
The conversation flowed on to other themes.
It was nearly dark when the carman took his departure, and the smith, a silent youth with sore eyes, caught hold of one of the grey mare’s fetlocks and told her to “lift!” He examined each hoof in succession by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, raked his fire together, and then, turning to Mr. Fennessy, remarked:—
“Ye’d laugh if ye were here the day I put a slipper on this one, an’ she afther comin’ out o’ the thrain—last June it was. ’Twas one Connolly back from Craffroe side was taking her from the station; him that thrained her for Miss Fitzroy. She gave him the two heels in the face.” The glow from the fire illumined the smith’s sardonic grin of remembrance. “She had a sandcrack in the near fore that time, and there’s the sign of it yet.”
The Cinderella-like episode of the slipper had naturally not entered into Mr. Fennessy’s calcula tions, but he took the unforeseen without a change of countenance.
“Well, now,” he said deliberately, “I was sayin’ to meself on the road a while ago, if there was one this side o’ the counthry would know her it’d be yerself.”
The smith took the compliment with a blink of his sore eyes.
“Annyone’d be hard set to know her now,” he said.
There was a pause, during which a leap of sparks answered each thump of the hammer on the white hot iron, and Mr. Fennessy arranged his course of action.
“Well, Larry,” he said, “I’ll tell ye now what no one in this counthry knows but meself and Patsey Crimmeen. Sure I know it’s as good to tell a thing to the ground as to tell it to yerself!”
He lowered his voice.
“’Twas Mr. Gunning of Streamstown bought that one from Miss Fitzroy at the Dublin Show, and a hundhred pound he gave for her!”
The smith mentally docked this sum by seventy pounds, but said, “By dam!” in polite convention.
“’Twasn’t a week afther that I got her for twinty-five pounds!”
The smith made a further mental deduction equally justified by the facts; the long snore and wheeze of the bellows filled the silence, and the dirty walls flushed and glowed with the steady crescendo and diminuendo of the glow.
The ex-tinker picked up the bottle with the candle. “Look at that!” he said, lowering the light and displaying a long transverse scar beginning at the mare’s knee and ending in an enlarged fetlock.
“I seen that,” said the smith.
“And look at that!” continued Mr. Fennessy, putting back the shaggy hair on her shoulder. A wide and shiny patch of black skin showed where the hatter’s plate glass had flayed the shoulder. “She played the divil goin’ through the streets, and made flitthers of herself this way, in a shop window. Gunning give the word to shoot her. The dealer’s boy told Patsey Crimmeen. ’Twas Patsey was caring her at the show for Miss Fitzroy. Shtan’ will ye!”—this to the mare, whose eyes glinted white as she flung away her head from the light of the candle.
“Whatever fright she got she didn’t forget it,” said the smith.