Part II
Perhaps it was the clinging memory of the fried pork, perhaps it was because all my favourite brushes were standing in a mug of soft soap on my washing stand, or because Robert had in his flight forgotten to replenish his cigarette case, but there was no doubt but that the expedition languished.
There was no fault to be found with the setting. The pool in which the river coiled itself under the pine-trees was black and brimming, the fish were rising at the flies that wrought above it, like a spotted net veil in hysterics, the distant hills lay in sleepy undulations of every shade of blue, the grass was warm, and not unduly peopled with ants. But some impalpable blight was upon us. I ranged like a lost soul along the banks of the river—a lost soul that is condemned to bear a burden of some two stone of sketching materials, and a sketching umbrella with a defective joint—in search of a point of view that for ever eluded me. Robert cast his choicest flies, with delicate quiverings, with coquettish withdrawals; had they been cannon-balls they could hardly have had a more intimidating effect upon the trout. Where Robert fished a Sabbath stillness reigned, beyond that charmed area they rose like notes of exclamation in a French novel. I was on the whole inclined to trace these things back to the influence of the pork, working on systems weakened by shock; but Robert was not in the mood to trace them to anything. Unsuccessful fishermen are not fond of introspective suggestions. The member of the expedition who enjoyed himself beyond any question was Mrs. Coolahan’s car-horse. Having been taken out of the shafts on the road above the river, he had with his harness on his back, like Horatius, unhesitatingly lumbered over a respectable bank and ditch in the wake of Croppy, who had preceded him with the reins. He was now grazing luxuriously along the river’s edge, while his driver smoked, no less luxuriously, in the background.
“Will I carry the box for ye, Miss?” Croppy inquired compassionately, stuffing his lighted pipe into his pocket, as I drifted desolately past him. “Sure you’re killed with the load you have! This is a rough owld place for a lady to be walkin’. Sit down, Miss. God knows you have a right to be tired.”
It seemed that with Croppy also the day was dragging, doubtless he too had lunched on Mrs. Coolahan’s pork. He planted my camp-stool and I sank upon it.
“Well, now, for all it’s so throublesome,” he resumed, “I’d say painting was a nice thrade. There was a gintleman here one time that was a painther—I used to be dhrivin’ him. Faith! there wasn’t a place in the counthry but he had it pathrolled. He seen me mother one day—cleaning fish, I b’lieve she was, below on the quay—an’ nothing would howld him but he should dhraw out her picture!” Croppy laughed unfilially. “Well, me mother was mad. ‘To the divil I pitch him!’ says she; ‘if I wants me photograph drew out I’m liable to pay for it,’ says she, ‘an’ not to be stuck up before the ginthry to be ped for the like o’ that!’ ’Tis for; you bein’ so handsome!’ says I to her. She was black mad altogether then. ‘If that’s the way,’ says she, ‘it’s a wondher he wouldn’t ax yerself, ye rotten little rat,’ says she, ‘in place of thrying could he make a show of yer poor little ugly little cock-nosed mother!’ ‘Faith!’ says I to her, ‘I wouldn’t care if the divil himself axed it, if he give me a half-crown and nothing to do but to be sittin’ down!’”
The tale may or may not have been intended to have a personal application, but Croppy’s fat scarlet face and yellow moustache, bristling beneath a nose which he must have inherited from his mother, did not lend themselves to a landscape background, and I fell to fugitive pencil sketches of the old white car-horse as he grazed round us. It was thus that I first came to notice a fact whose bearing upon our fortunes I was far from suspecting. The old horse’s harness was of dingy brown leather, with dingier brass mountings; it had been frequently mended, in varying shades of brown, and, in remarkable contrast to the rest of the outfit, the breeching was of solid and well-polished black leather, with silver buckles. It was not so much the discrepancy of the breeching as its respectability that jarred upon me; finally I commented upon it to Croppy.
His cap was tilted over the maternal nose, he glanced at me sideways from under its peak.
“Sure the other breechin’ was broke, and if that owld shkin was to go the lin’th of himself without a breechin’ on him he’d break all before him! There was some fellas took him to a funeral one time without a breechin’ on him, an’ when he seen the hearse what did he do but to rise up in the sky.”
Wherein lay the moral support of a breeching in such a contingency it is hard to say. I accepted the fact without comment, and expressed a regret that we had not been indulged with the entire set of black harness.
Croppy measured me with his eye, grinned bashfully, and said:—
“Sure it’s the Dane’s breechin’ we have, Miss! I daresay he’d hardly get home at all if we took any more from him!”
The Dean’s breeching! For an instant a wild confusion of ideas deprived me of the power of speech. I could only hope that Croppy had left him his gaiters! Then I pulled myself together.
“Croppy,” I said in consternation, “how did you get it? Did you borrow it from the coachman?”
“Is it the coachman!” said Croppy tranquilly. “I did not, Miss. Sure he was asleep in the snug.”
“But can they get home without it?”
A sudden alarm chilled me to the marrow.
“Arrah, why not, Miss? That black horse of the Dane’s wouldn’t care if there was nothing at all on him!”
I heard Robert reeling in his line—had he a fish? Or, better still, had he made up his mind to go home?
As a matter of fact, neither was the case; Robert was merely fractious, and in that particular mood when he wished to have his mind imperceptibly made up for him, while prepared to combat any direct suggestion. From what quarter the ignoble proposition that we should go home arose is immaterial. It is enough to say that Robert believed it to be his own, and that, before he had time to reconsider the question, the tactful Croppy had crammed the old white horse into the shafts of the car.
It was by this time past five o’clock, and a threatening range of clouds was rising from seaward across the west. Things had been against us from the first, and if the last stone in the sling of Fate was that we were to be wet through before we got home, it would be no more than I expected. The old horse, however, addressed himself to the eight Irish miles that lay between him and home with unexpected vivacity. We swung in the ruts, we shook like jellies on the merciless patches of broken stones, and Croppy stimulated the pace with weird whistlings through his teeth, and heavy prods with the butt of his whip in the region of the borrowed breeching.
Now that the expedition had been shaken off and cast behind us, the humbler possibilities of the day began to stretch out alluring hands. There was the new box from the library; there was the afternoon post; there was a belated tea, with a peaceful fatigue to endear all. We reached at last the welcome turn that brought us into the coast road. We were but three miles now from that happy home from which we had been driven forth, years ago as it seemed, at such desperate hazard. We drove pleasantly along the road at the top of the cliffs. The wind was behind us; a rising tide plunged and splashed far below. It was already raining a little, enough to justify our sagacity in leaving the river, enough to lend a touch of passion to the thought of home and Julia.
The grey horse began to lean back against the borrowed breeching, the chains of the traces clanked loosely. We had begun the long zig-zag slant down to the village. We swung gallantly round the sharp turn half-way down the hill.
And there, not fifty yards away, was the Dean’s inside car, labouring slowly, inevitably, up to meet us. Even in that stupefying moment I was aware that the silver-banded hat was at a most uncanonical angle. Behind me on the car was stowed my sketching umbrella; I tore it from the retaining embrace of the camp-stool, and unfurled its unwieldy tent with a speed that I have never since achieved. Robert, on the far side of the car, was reasonably safe. The inestimable Croppy quickened up. Cowering beneath the umbrella, I awaited the crucial moment at which to shift its protection from the side to the back. The sound of the approaching wheels told me that it had almost arrived, and then, suddenly, without a note of warning, there came a scurry of hoofs, a grinding of wheels, and a confused outcry of voices. A violent jerk nearly pitched me off the car, as Croppy dragged the white horse into the opposite bank; the umbrella flew from my hand and revealed to me the Dean’s bearded coachman sitting on the road scarcely a yard from my feet, uttering large and drunken shouts, while the covered car hurried back towards the village with the unforgettable yell of Miss McEvoy bursting from its curtained rear. The black horse was not absolutely running away, but he was obviously alarmed, and with the long hill before him anything might happen.
“They’re dead! They’re dead!” said Croppy, with philosophic calm; “’twas the parasol started him.”
As he spoke, the black horse stumbled, the laden car ran on top of him like a landslip, and, with an abortive flounder, he collapsed beneath it. Once down, he lay, after the manner of his kind, like a dead thing, and the covered car, propped on its shafts, presented its open mouth to the heavens. Even as I sped headlong to the rescue in the wake of Robert and Croppy, I fore-knew that Fate had after all been too many for us, and when, an instant later, I seated myself in the orthodox manner upon the black horse’s winker, and perceived that one of the shafts was broken, I was already, in spirit, making up beds with Julia for the reception of the party.
To this mental picture the howls of Miss McEvoy during the process of extraction from the covered car lent a pleasing reality.
Only those who have been in a covered car under similar circumstances can at all appreciate the difficulty of getting out of it. It has once, in the streets of Cork, happened to me, and I can best compare it to escaping from the cabin of a yacht without the aid of a companion ladder. From Robert I can only collect the facts that the door jammed, and that, at a critical juncture, Miss McEvoy had put her arms round his neck.
The programme that Fate had ordained was carried out to its ultimate item. The party from the Deanery of Glengad spent the night at Wavecrest Cottage, attired by subscription, like the converts of a Mission; I spent it in the attic, among trunks of Aunt Dora’s old clothes, and rats; Robert, who throughout had played an unworthy part, in the night mail to Dublin, called away for twenty-four hours on a pretext that would not have deceived an infant a week old.
Croppy was firm and circumstantial in laying the blame on me and the sketching umbrella.
“Sure, I seen the horse wondhering at it an’ he comin’ up the hill to us. ’Twas that turned him.”
The dissertation in which the Dean’s venerable coachman made the entire disaster hinge upon the theft of the breeching was able, but cannot conveniently be here set down.
For my part, I hold with Julia.
“’Twas Helayna gave the dhrink to the Dane’s coachman! The low curséd thing! There isn’t another one in the place that’d do it! I’m told the priest was near breaking his umbrella on her over it.”