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E. Somerville and Martin Ross - All on the Irish Shore

E >> E. Somerville and Martin Ross >> All on the Irish Shore



[Illustration: "ROBERT TRINDER, ESQ., M.F.H." _A Grand Filly._]




All on the Irish Shore

Irish Sketches

By

E.OE. Somerville and Martin Ross

Authors of

"Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.," "The Real Charlotte" "The Silver
Fox," "A Patrick's Day Hunt" etc., etc.

With Illustrations by E.OE. Somerville


_SECOND IMPRESSION_


Longmans, Green, and Co.

39 Paternoster Row, London

New York and Bombay

1903




CONTENTS.


THE TINKER'S DOG

FANNY FITZ'S GAMBLE

THE CONNEMARA MARE

A GRAND FILLY

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE

HIGH TEA AT MCKEOWN'S

THE BAGMAN'S PONY

AN IRISH PROBLEM

THE DANE'S BREECHIN'

"MATCHBOX"

"AS I WAS GOING TO BANDON FAIR"




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

"ROBERT TRINDER, ESQ., M.F.H."

"A SILENCE THAT WAS THE OUTCOME PARTLY OF STUPIDITY, PARTLY OF CAUTION,
AND PARTLY OF LACK OF ENGLISH SPEECH"

"MR. GUNNING WAS LOOKIN' OUT FOR A COB"

ROBERT'S AUNT

THE BLOOD-HEALER

"THE GREY-HAIRED KITCHEN-MAID"

SWEENY

"MUSHA! MUSHA!"

"CROPPY"

A HIERARCH OF HORSE-DEALING




THE TINKER'S DOG


"Can't you head 'em off, Patsey? Run, you fool! _run_, can't you?"

Sounds followed that suggested the intemperate use of Mr. Freddy
Alexander's pocket-handkerchief, but that were, in effect, produced by
his struggle with a brand new hunting-horn. To this demonstration about
as much attention was paid by the nine couple of buccaneers whom he was
now exercising for the first time as might have been expected, and it
was brought to abrupt conclusion by the sudden charge of two of them
from the rear. Being coupled, they mowed his legs from under him as
irresistibly as chain shot and being puppies, and of an imbecile
friendliness they remained to lick his face and generally make merry
over him as he struggled to his feet.

By this time the leaders of the pack were well away up a ploughed field,
over a fence and into a furze brake, from which their rejoicing yelps
streamed back on the damp breeze. The Master of the Craffroe Hounds
picked himself up, and sprinted up the hill after the Whip and Kennel
Huntsman--a composite official recently promoted from the stable
yard--in a way that showed that his failure in horn-blowing was not the
fault of his lungs. His feet were held by the heavy soil, he tripped in
the muddy ridges; none the less he and Patsey plunged together over the
stony rampart of the field in time to see Negress and Lily springing
through the furze in kangaroo leaps, while they uttered long squeals of
ecstasy. The rest of the pack, with a confidence gained in many a
successful riot, got to them as promptly as if six Whips were behind
them, and the whole faction plunged into a little wood on the top of
what was evidently a burning scent.

"Was it a fox, Patsey?" said the Master excitedly.

"I dunno, Master Freddy: it might be 'twas a hare," returned Patsey,
taking in a hurried reef in the strap that was responsible for the
support of his trousers.

Freddy was small and light, and four short years before had been a
renowned hare in his school paper-chases: he went through the wood at a
pace that gave Patsey and the puppies all they could do to keep with
him, and dropped into a road just in time to see the pack streaming up a
narrow lane near the end of the wood. At this point they were reinforced
by a yellow dachshund who, with wildly flapping ears, and at that
caricature of a gallop peculiar to his kind, joined himself to the
hunters.

"Glory be to Mercy!" exclaimed Patsey, "the misthress's dog!"

Almost simultaneously the pack precipitated themselves into a ruined
cabin at the end of the lane; instantly from within arose an uproar of
sounds--crashes of an ironmongery sort, yells of dogs, raucous human
curses; then the ruin exuded hounds, hens and turkeys at every one of
the gaps in its walls, and there issued from what had been the doorway a
tall man with a red beard, armed with a large frying-pan, with which he
rained blows on the fleeing Craffroe Pack. It must be admitted that the
speed with which these abandoned their prey, whatever it was, suggested
a very intimate acquaintance with the wrath of cooks and the perils of
resistance.

Before their lawful custodians had recovered from this spectacle, a tall
lady in black was suddenly merged in the _melee_, alternately calling
loudly and incongruously for "Bismarck," and blowing shrill blasts on a
whistle.

"If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress's dog, the
Lord help him!" said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail
tucked in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself
swiftly from the scene of action.

Mrs. Alexander shoved her way into the cabin, through a filthy group of
gabbling male and female tinkers, and found herself involved in a wreck
of branches and ragged tarpaulin that had once formed a kind of tent,
but was now strewn on the floor by the incursion and excursion of the
chase. Earthquake throes were convulsing the tarpaulin; a tinker woman,
full of zeal, dashed at it and flung it back, revealing, amongst other
_debris_, an old wooden bedstead heaped with rags. On either side of one
of its legs protruded the passion-fraught faces of the coupled
hound-puppies, who, still linked together, had passed through the period
of unavailing struggle into a state of paralysed insanity of terror.
Muffled squeals and tinny crashes told that conflict was still raging
beneath the bed; the tinker women screamed abuse and complaint; and
suddenly the dachshund's long yellow nose, streaming with blood, worked
its way out of the folds. His mistress snatched at his collar and
dragged him forth, and at his heels followed an infuriated tom cat,
which, with its tail as thick as a muff, went like a streak through the
confusion, and was lost in the dark ruin of the chimney.

Mrs. Alexander stayed for no explanations: she extricated herself from
the tinker party, and, filled with a righteous wrath, went forth to look
for her son. From a plantation three fields away came the asphyxiated
bleats of the horn and the desolate bawls of Patsey Crimmeen. Mrs.
Alexander decided that it was better for the present to leave the
_personnel_ of the Craffroe Hunt to their own devices.

It was but three days before these occurrences that Mr. Freddy Alexander
had stood on the platform of the Craffroe Station, with a throbbing
heart, and a very dirty paper in his hand containing a list of eighteen
names, that ranged alphabetically from "Batchellor" to "Warior." At his
elbow stood a small man with a large moustache, and the thinnest legs
that were ever buttoned into gaiters, who was assuring him that to no
other man in Ireland would he have sold those hounds at such a price; a
statement that was probably unimpeachable.

"The only reason I'm parting them is I'm giving up me drag, and selling
me stock, and going into partnership with a veterinary surgeon in Rugby.
You've some of the best blood in Ireland in those hounds."

"Is it blood?" chimed in an old man who was standing, slightly drunk, at
Mr. Alexander's other elbow. "The most of them hounds is by the Kerry
Rapparee, and he was the last of the old Moynalty Baygles. Black dogs
they were, with red eyes! Every one o' them as big as a yearling calf,
and they'd hunt anything that'd roar before them!" He steadied himself
on the new Master's arm. "I have them gethered in the ladies'
waiting-room, sir, the way ye'll have no throuble. 'Twould be as good
for ye to lave the muzzles on them till ye'll be through the town."

Freddy Alexander cannot to this hour decide what was the worst incident
of that homeward journey; on the whole, perhaps, the most serious was
the escape of Governess, who subsequently ravaged the country for two
days, and was at length captured in the act of killing Mrs. Alexander's
white Leghorn cock. For a young gentleman whose experience of hounds
consisted in having learned at Cambridge to some slight and painful
extent that if he rode too near them he got sworn at, the purchaser of
the Kerry Rapparee's descendants had undertaken no mean task.

On the morning following on the first run of the Craffroe Hounds, Mrs.
Alexander was sitting at her escritoire, making up her weekly accounts
and entering in her poultry-book the untimely demise of the Leghorn
cock. She was a lady of secret enthusiasms which sheltered themselves
behind habits of the most business-like severity. Her books were models
of order, and as she neatly inscribed the Leghorn cock's epitaph,
"Killed by hounds," she could not repress the compensating thought that
she had never seen Freddy's dark eyes and olive complexion look so well
as when he had tried on his new pink coat.

At this point she heard a step on the gravel outside; Bismarck uttered a
bloodhound bay and got under the sofa. It was a sunny morning in late
October, and the French window was open; outside it, ragged as a Russian
poodle and nearly as black, stood the tinker who had the day before
wielded the frying-pan with such effect.

"Me lady," began the tinker, "I ax yer ladyship's pardon, but me little
dog is dead."

"Well?" said Mrs. Alexander, fixing a gaze of clear grey rectitude upon
him.

"Me lady," continued the tinker, reverentially but firmly, "'twas afther
he was run by thim dogs yestherday, and 'twas your ladyship's dog that
finished him. He tore the throat out of him under the bed!" He pointed
an accusing forefinger at Bismarck, whose lambent eyes of terror glowed
from beneath the valance of the sofa.

"Nonsense! I saw your dog; he was twice my dog's size," said Bismarck's
mistress decidedly, not, however, without a remembrance of the blood on
Bismarck's nose. She adored courage, and had always cherished a belief
that Bismarck's sharklike jaws implied the possession of latent
ferocity.

"Ah, but he was very wake, ma'am, afther he bein' hunted," urged the
tinker. "I never slep' a wink the whole night, but keepin' sups o' milk
to him and all sorts. Ah, ma'am, ye wouldn't like to be lookin' at him!"

The tinker was a very good-looking young man, almost apostolic in type,
with a golden red aureole of hair and beard and candid blue eyes. These
latter filled with tears as their owner continued:--

"He was like a brother for me; sure he follied me from home. 'Twas he
was dam wise! Sure at home all me mother'd say to him was, "Where's the
ducks, Captain?" an' he wouldn't lave wather nor bog-hole round the
counthry but he'd have them walked and the ducks gethered. The pigs
could be in their choice place, wherever they'd be he'd go around them.
If ye'd tell him to put back the childhren from the fire, he'd ketch
them by the sleeve and dhrag them."

The requiem ceased, and the tinker looked grievingly into his hat.

"What is your name?" asked Mrs. Alexander sternly. "How long is it since
you left home?"

Had the tinker been as well acquainted with her as he was afterwards
destined to become, he would have been aware that when she was most
judicial she was frequently least certain of what her verdict was going
to be.

"Me name's Willy Fennessy, me lady," replied the tinker, "an' I'm goin'
the roads no more than three months. Indeed, me lady, I think the time
too long that I'm with these blagyard thravellers. All the friends I
have was poor Captain, and he's gone from me."

"Go round to the kitchen," said Mrs. Alexander.

The results of Willy Fennessy's going round to the kitchen were
far-reaching. Its most immediate consequences were that (1) he mended
the ventilator of the kitchen range; (2) he skinned a brace of rabbits
for Miss Barnet, the cook; (3) he arranged to come next day and repair
the clandestine devastations of the maids among the china.

He was pronounced to be a very agreeable young man.

Before luncheon (of which meal he partook in the kitchen) he had been
consulted by Patsey Crimmeen about the chimney of the kennel boiler, had
single-handed reduced it to submission, and had, in addition, boiled the
meal for the hounds with a knowledge of proportion and an untiring
devotion to the use of the potstick which produced "stirabout" of a
smoothness and excellence that Miss Barnet herself might have been proud
of.

"You know, mother," said Freddy that evening, "you do want another chap
in the garden badly."

"Well it's not so much the garden," said Mrs. Alexander with alacrity,
"but I think he might be very useful to you, dear, and it's such a
great matter his being a teetotaler, and he seems so fond of animals. I
really feel we ought to try and make up to him somehow for the loss of
his dog; though, indeed, a more deplorable object than that poor mangy
dog I never saw!"

"All right: we'll put him in the back lodge, and we'll give him Bizzy as
a watch dog. Won't we, Bizzy?" replied Freddy, dragging the somnolent
Bismarck from out of the heart of the hearthrug, and accepting without
repugnance the comprehensive lick that enveloped his chin.

From which it may be gathered that Mrs. Alexander and her son had
fallen, like their household, under the fatal spell of the fascinating
tinker.

At about the time that this conversation was taking place, Mr. Fennessy,
having spent an evening of valedictory carouse with his tribe in the
ruined cottage, was walking, somewhat unsteadily, towards the wood,
dragging after him by a rope a large dog. He did not notice that he was
being followed by a barefooted woman, but the dog did, and, being an
intelligent dog, was in some degree reassured. In the wood the tinker
spent some time in selecting a tree with a projecting branch suitable to
his purpose, and having found one he proceeded to hang the dog. Even in
his cups Mr. Fennessy made sentiment subservient to common sense.

It is hardly too much to say that in a week the tinker had taken up a
position in the Craffroe household only comparable to that of Ygdrasil,
who in Norse mythology forms the ultimate support of all things. Save
for the incessant demands upon his skill in the matter of solder and
stitches, his recent tinkerhood was politely ignored, or treated as an
escapade excusable in a youth of spirit. Had not his father owned a farm
and seven cows in the county Limerick, and had not he himself three
times returned the price of his ticket to America to a circle of adoring
and wealthy relatives in Boston? His position in the kitchen and yard
became speedily assured. Under his _regime_ the hounds were valeted as
they had never been before. Lily herself (newly washed, with "blue" in
the water) was scarcely more white than the concrete floor of the kennel
yard, and the puppies, Ruby and Remus, who had unaccountably developed a
virulent form of mange, were immediately taken in hand by the
all-accomplished tinker, and anointed with a mixture whose very
noisomeness was to Patsey Crimmeen a sufficient guarantee of its
efficacy, and was impressive even to the Master, fresh from much anxious
study of veterinary lore.

"He's the best man we've got!" said Freddy proudly to a dubious uncle,
"there isn't a mortal thing he can't put his hand to."

"Or lay his hands on," suggested the dubious uncle. "May I ask if his
colleagues are still within a mile of the place?"

"Oh, he hates the very sight of 'em!" said Freddy hastily, "cuts 'em
dead whenever he sees 'em."

"It's no use your crabbing him, George," broke in Mrs. Alexander, "we
won't give him up to you! Wait till you see how he has mended the lock
of the hall door!"

"I should recommend you to buy a new one at once," said Sir George Ker,
in a way that was singularly exasperating to the paragon's proprietors.

Mrs. Alexander was, or so her friends said, somewhat given to vaunting
herself of her paragons, under which heading, it may be admitted,
practically all her household were included. She was, indeed, one of
those persons who may or may not be heroes to their valets, but whose
valets are almost invariably heroes to them. It was, therefore,
excessively discomposing to her that, during the following week, in the
very height of apparently cloudless domestic tranquillity, the housemaid
and the parlour-maid should in one black hour successively demand an
audience, and successively, in the floods of tears proper to such
occasions, give warning. Inquiry as to their reasons was fruitless. They
were unhappy: one said she wouldn't get her appetite, and that her
mother was sick; the other said she wouldn't get her sleep in it, and
there was things--sob--going on--sob.

Mrs. Alexander concluded the interview abruptly, and descended to the
kitchen to interview her queen paragon, Barnet, on the crisis.

Miss Barnet was a stout and comely English lady, of that liberal forty
that frankly admits itself in advertisements to be twenty-eight. It was
understood that she had only accepted office in Ireland because, in the
first place, the butler to whom she had long been affianced had married
another, and because, in the second place, she had a brother buried in
Belfast. She was, perhaps, the one person in the world whose opinion
about poultry Mrs. Alexander ranked higher than her own. She now allowed
a restrained acidity to mingle with her dignity of manner, scarcely more
than the calculated lemon essence in her faultless castle puddings, but
enough to indicate that she, too, had grievances. _She_ didn't know why
they were leaving. She had heard some talk about a fairy or something,
but she didn't hold with such nonsense.

"Gerrls is very frightful!" broke in an unexpected voice; "owld
standards like meself maybe wouldn't feel it!"

A large basket of linen had suddenly blocked the scullery door, and
from beneath it a little woman, like an Australian aborigine, delivered
herself of this dark saying.

"What are you talking about, Mrs. Griffen?" demanded Mrs. Alexander,
turning in vexed bewilderment to her laundress, "what does all this
mean?"

"The Lord save us, ma'am, there's some says it means a death in the
house!" replied Mrs. Griffen with unabated cheerfulness, "an' indeed
'twas no blame for the little gerrls to be frightened an' they meetin'
it in the passages--"

"Meeting _what_?" interrupted her mistress. Mrs. Griffen was an old and
privileged retainer, but there were limits even for Mrs. Griffen.

"Sure, ma'am, there's no one knows what was in it," returned Mrs.
Griffen, "but whatever it was they heard it goin' on before them always
in the panthry passage, an' it walkin' as sthrong as a man. It whipped
away up the stairs, and they seen the big snout snorting out at them
through the banisters, and a bare back on it the same as a pig; and the
two cheeks on it as white as yer own, and away with it! And with that
Mary Anne got a wakeness, and only for Willy Fennessy bein' in the
kitchen an' ketching a hold of her, she'd have cracked her head on the
range, the crayture!"

Here Barnet smiled with ineffable contempt.

"What I'm tellin' them is," continued Mrs. Griffen, warming with her
subject, "maybe that thing was a pairson that's dead, an' might be owin'
a pound to another one, or has something that way on his soul, an' it's
in the want o' some one that'll ax it what's throublin' it. The like o'
thim couldn't spake till ye'll spake to thim first. But, sure, gerrls
has no courage--"

Barnet's smile was again one of wintry superiority.

"Willy Fennessy and Patsey Crimmeen was afther seein' it too last
night," went on Mrs. Griffen, "an' poor Willy was as much frightened! He
said surely 'twas a ghost. On the back avenue it was, an' one minute
'twas as big as an ass, an' another minute it'd be no bigger than a
bonnive--"

"Oh, the Lord save us!" wailed the kitchen-maid irrepressibly from the
scullery.

"I shall speak to Fennessy myself about this," said Mrs. Alexander,
making for the door with concentrated purpose, "and in the meantime I
wish to hear no more of this rubbish."

"I'm sure Fennessy wishes to hear no more of it," said Barnet acridly to
Mrs. Griffen, when Mrs. Alexander had passed swiftly out of hearing,
"after the way those girls have been worryin' on at him about it all the
morning. Such a set out!"

Mrs. Griffen groaned in a polite and general way, and behind Barnet's
back put her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and winked at the
kitchen-maid.

Mrs. Alexander found her conversation with Willy Fennessy less
satisfactory than usual. He could not give any definite account of what
he and Patsey had seen: maybe they'd seen nothing at all; maybe--as an
obvious impromptu--it was the calf of the Kerry cow; whatever was in it,
it was little he'd mind it, and, in easy dismissal of the subject, would
the misthress be against his building a bit of a coal-shed at the back
of the lodge while she was away?

That evening a new terror was added to the situation. Jimmy the
boot-boy, on his return from taking the letters to the evening post,
fled in panic into the kitchen, and having complied with the etiquette
invariable in such cases by having "a wakeness," he described to a
deeply sympathetic audience how he had seen something that was like a
woman in the avenue, and he had called to it and it returned him no
answer, and how he had then asked it three times in the name o' God what
was it, and it soaked away into the trees from him, and then there came
something rushing in on him and grunting at him to bite him, and he was
full sure it was the Fairy Pig from Lough Clure.

Day by day the legend grew, thickened by tales of lights that had been
seen moving mysteriously in the woods of Craffroe. Even the hounds were
subpoenaed as witnesses; Patsey Crimmeen's mother stating that for three
nights after Patsey had seen that Thing they were singing and screeching
to each other all night.

Had Mrs. Crimmeen used the verb scratch instead of screech she would
have been nearer the mark. The puppies, Ruby and Remus, had, after the
manner of the young, human and canine, not failed to distribute their
malady among their elders, and the pack, straitly coupled, went for
dismal constitutionals, and the kennels reeked to heaven of remedies,
and Freddy's new hunter, Mayboy, from shortness of work, smashed the
partition of the loose box and kicked his neighbour, Mrs. Alexander's
cob, in the knee.

"The worst of it is," said Freddy confidentially to his ally and
adviser, the junior subaltern of the detachment at Enniscar, who had
come over to see the hounds, "that I'm afraid Patsey Crimmeen--the boy
whom I'm training to whip to me, you know"--(as a matter of fact, the
Whip was a year older than the Master)--"is beginning to drink a bit.
When I came down here before breakfast this mornin'"--when Freddy was
feeling more acutely than usual his position as an M.F.H., he cut his
g's and talked slightly through his nose, even, on occasion, going so
far as to omit the aspirate in talking of his hounds--"there wasn't a
sign of him--kennel door not open or anything. I let the poor brutes out
into the run. I tell you, what with the paraffin and the carbolic and
everything the kennel was pretty high--"

"It's pretty thick now," said his friend, lighting a cigarette.

"Well, I went into the boiler-house," continued Freddy impressively,
"and there he was, asleep on the floor, with his beastly head on my
kennel coat, and one leg in the feeding trough!"

Mr. Taylour made a suitable ejaculation.

"I jolly soon kicked him on to his legs," went on Freddy, "not that they
were much use to him--he must have been on the booze all night. After
that I went on to the stable yard, and if you'll believe me, the two
chaps there had never turned up at all--at half-past eight, mind
you!--and there was Fennessy doing up the horses. He said he believed
that there'd been a wake down at Enniscar last night. I thought it was
rather decent of him doing their work for them."

"You'll sack 'em, I suppose?" remarked Mr. Taylour, with martial
severity.

"Oh well, I don't know," said Mr. Alexander evasively, "I'll see.
Anyhow, don't say anything to my mother about it; a drunken man is like
a red rag to a bull to her."

Taking this peculiarity of Mrs. Alexander into consideration, it was
perhaps as well that she left Craffroe a few days afterwards to stay
with her brother. The evening before she left both the Fairy Pig and the
Ghost Woman were seen again on the avenue, this time by the coachman,
who came into the kitchen considerably the worse for liquor and
announced the fact, and that night the household duties were performed
by the maids in pairs, and even, when possible, in trios.

As Mrs. Alexander said at dinner to Sir George, on the evening of her
arrival, she was thankful to have abandoned the office of Ghostly
Comforter to her domestics. Only for Barnet she couldn't have left poor
Freddy to the mercy of that pack of fools; in fact, even with Barnet to
look after them, it was impossible to tell what imbecility they were not
capable of.

"Well, if you like," said Sir George, "I might run you over there on the
motor car some day to see how they're all getting on. If Freddy is going
to hunt on Friday, we might go on to Craffroe after seeing the fun."

The topic of Barnet was here shelved in favour of automobiles. Mrs.
Alexander's brother was also a person of enthusiasms.

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