In Mr. Knox's Country Part 4

"'Pon my honour, we've hit off the Hunt!" exclaimed Mrs. Knox.

As she spoke there was a responsive yelp from a tract of briars in the lower part of the wood; two or three couples jostled downwards to their comrade, and a full chorus, led by the soprano squeals of the Hunt terrier, arose and streamed along the wood above the road. I came to a full stop, and, just in front of us, a rabbit emerged very quietly from the fence of the wood, crept along in the ditch, and disappeared in a hole in the bank. The hounds still uttered the cla.s.sic paeans of the Chase; hoofs clattered in a steep lane on the hill-side, and Flurry Knox charged on to the road a little ahead of us.

"Forrad, forrad, forrad!" he shouted as he came.

"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" cackled his grandmother at him in malevolent imitation.

I let the car go, and as we flew past him he asked me, sideways out of a very red face, what the devil I was doing there. It was evident that Mrs. Knox's observation had been accepted in the spirit in which it was offered.

"That will do my young gentleman no harm!" said Mrs. Knox complacently, as we became a speck in the distance.

It was about ten o'clock when we ran down a valley between steep hills to Killoge cross-roads. The hill-sides were set thick with tree stumps, like the crowded headstones of a cemetery, with coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and briars filling the s.p.a.ces between them. Here and there a slender, orphaned ash sapling, spared because despised, stood among the havoc, and showed with its handful of yellow leaves what the autumn colours might once have been here. A starkly new, cemented public-house, with "J. Goggin" on the name board, stood at the fork of the roads.

Doubtless into it had flowed the blood-money of the wood; it represented the alternative offered to the community by Mr. Goggin. I slowed up and looked about me.

"I suppose this is--or was--Killoge Wood?" I said to my pa.s.senger.

Mrs. Knox was staring through her spectacles at the devastated hill-side.

"Ichabod, Ichabod!" she murmured, and leaned back in her place.

A man got up from a heap of stones by the roadside and came slowly towards the car.

"Well, Stephen," began Mrs. Knox irritably, "what about the cattle? He looks as if he were walking behind his own coffin!" she continued in a loud aside to me.

Stephen Casey removed his hat, and with it indicated a group composed of three calves--and nothing can look as dejected as an ill-fed, under-bred calf--two goats, and a donkey, attended by a boy with a stick, and a couple of cur dogs.

"Himself and the sheriff's man is after driving them, my lady," replied their proprietor, and proceeded to envelop the name of Goggin in a flowing mantle of curses.

"There, that will do for the present," said Mrs. Knox peremptorily, as Casey, with tears streaming down his face, paused to catch his wind.

"Where's Goggin?"

"The two of them is inside in the shop," answered the miserable Casey, still weeping copiously.

I drove over to the public-house, thinking that if Casey could not put up a better fight than this it would be difficult to do much for him.

The door of the pub was already filled by the large and decent figure of Mr. Goggin, who advanced to meet us, taking off his hat reverentially; I remembered at once his pale and pimpled face, his pink nose, his shabby grey and yellow beard. He had been before me in a matter of selling drink on Sunday, and had sailed out of court in stainless triumph, on sworn evidence that he was merely extending hospitality to some friends that had come to make a match for a niece of his own, and were tired after walking the land and putting a price on the cattle.

"Well, Goggin," said Mrs. Knox, waving towards the hill-side a tiny hand in a mouldy old black kid glove, "you've done a great work here!

You've destroyed in six months what it took the Colonel and the Lord Almighty eighty years to make. That's something to be proud of!"

Goggin, again, and with even deeper reverence, removed his hat, and murmured something about being a poor man.

"It was your own grandfather that planted those trees for the Colonel,"

continued Mrs. Knox, diving, as it were, into an ancient armoury and s.n.a.t.c.hing a rusty weapon from the wall.

"That's the case, ma'am," replied Mr. Goggin solemnly. "The Lord have mercy on his soul!"

"You'll be wanting mercy on your own soul in the next world, if you meet the Colonel there!" said Mrs. Knox unhesitatingly.

"I mightn't have the honour of meeting the Colonel there, ma'am!"

t.i.ttered Goggin sycophantically.

"You might not indeed," responded Mrs. Knox, "but you might find your grandfather making up a good fire for you with the logs out of Killoge Wood!"

"Ha, ha! That's good, faith!" said a fat voice from the porter-flavoured depths of the pub. I recognised among other half-seen faces the round cheeks and bristling moustache of little M'Sweeny, the sheriff's officer, at Goggin's elbow.

"And what's this I hear about Stephen Casey?" went on Mrs. Knox, in shrill and trenchant tones, delivering her real attack now that she had breached the wall. "You lent him five pounds two years ago, and now you're driving all his stock off! What do you call that, I'd thank you to tell me?"

In the discussion that followed I could almost have been sorry for Goggin, so entirely over-weighted was he by Mrs. Knox's traditional prestige, by my official position, by knowledge of the unseen audience in the pub, and by the inherent rottenness of his case. Nevertheless, the defence put forward by him was a very creditable work of art. The whole affair had its foundation in a foolish philanthropy, the outcome of generous instincts exploited to their utmost, only, indeed, kept within bounds by Mr. Goggin's own financial embarra.s.sments. These he primarily referred back to the excessive price extorted from him by Mrs. Knox's agent for the purchase of his land under the Act; and secondarily to the bad debts with which Stephen Casey and other customers had loaded him in their dealings with his little shop. There were moments when I almost had to accept Mr. Goggin's point of view, so well-ordered and so mildly stated were his facts. But Mrs. Knox's convictions were beyond and above any possibility of being shaken by mere evidence; she has often said to me that if all justice magistrates were deaf there would be more done. She herself was not in the least deaf, but she knew Mr. Goggin, which did as well.

"Fifteen pounds worth of stock to pay a debt that was never more than 7! What do you call that, Major Yeates?"

She darted the question at me.

I had, some little time before, felt my last moment of sympathy with Goggin expire, and I replied with considerable heat that, if Mrs. Knox would forgive my saying so, I called it d.a.m.ned usury.

From this point the Affaire Casey went out swiftly on an ebb tide. It was insinuated by someone, M'Sweeny, I think, that an instalment of five pounds might be accepted, and the eyes of Goggin turned, tentatively, to Mrs. Knox. It has always been said of that venerable warrior that if there were a job to be done for a friend she would work her fingers to the bone, but she would never put them in her pocket. I observed that the eye of Goggin, having failed in its quest of hers, was concentrating itself upon me. The two walls of a corner seemed to rise mysteriously on either side of me; I suddenly, and without premeditation, found myself promising to be responsible for the five pounds.

Before the glow of this impulse had time to be succeeded by its too familiar reaction, the broken, yet persistent cry of hounds came to my ear. It advanced swiftly, coming, seemingly, from higher levels, into the desolated s.p.a.ces that had once been Killoge Wood. From the inner depths of Mrs. Knox's wrappings the face of the woolly dog amazingly presented itself; from the companion depths of the public-house an equally unexpected party of _convives_ burst forth and stood at gaze.

Mrs. Knox tried to stand up, was borne down by the sheer weight of rugs and the woolly dog, glared at me for a tense moment, and hissed, "They're coming this way! Try to get a view!"

Before the words had pa.s.sed her lips someone in the group at the door vociferated, "Look at him above! Look at him!"

I looked "above," but could see nothing. Not so the rest of the group.

"Now! look at him going west the rock! Now! He's pa.s.sing the little holly-tree--he's over the fence----"

I bore, as I have so often borne, the exasperation of, as it were, hearing instead of seeing a cinematograph, but I saw no reason why I should submit to the presence of Mr. M'Sweeny, who had sociably sprung into the motor beside me in order to obtain a better view.

"Look at him over the wall!" howled the cinematograph. "Look at the size he is! Isn't he the divil of a sheep!"

It was at this moment that I first caught sight of the fox, about fifty yards on the farther side of Casey's a.s.sortment of live stock and their guardian cur dogs, gliding over the wall like a cat, and slipping away up the road. At this point Mr. M'Sweeny, finding the disadvantage of his want of stature, bounded on to the seat beside me and uttered a long yell.

"Hi! At him! Tiger, good dog! Hi! Rosy!"

I cannot now say whether I smote M'Sweeny in the legs before he jumped, or if I merely accelerated the act; he appeared to be running before he touched the ground, and he probably took it as a send-off, administered in irrepressible fellow-feeling.

Tiger and Rosy were already laying themselves out down the road, and their yelps streamed back from them like the sparks from an engine.

The party at the door was suddenly in full flight after them with a swiftness and unanimity that again recalled the cinematograph. They caught away with them Stephen Casey and his animals; and I had an enlivening glimpse of the donkey at the top of the hunt, braying as it went; of Goggin trying in vain to stem the companion flight of the calves. The bend of the road hid them all from us; the thumping of heavy feet, the sobbing bray of the donkey, pa.s.sed rapidly into remoteness, and Mrs. Knox and I were left with nothing remaining to us of the situation save the well-defined footmarks of M'Sweeny on the seat beside me (indelible, as I afterwards discovered).

"Get on, Major Yeates!" screamed Mrs. Knox, above the barking of the woolly dog. "We must see it out!"

I started the car, and just before we in our turn rounded the corner I looked back, and saw the leading hounds coming down the hill-side. I slackened and saw them drop into the road and there remain, mystified, no doubt, by the astonis.h.i.+ng variety of scents, from goat to gombeen man, that presented themselves. Of Flurry and his followers there was no sign.

"Get on, get on," reiterated Mrs. Knox, divining, no doubt, my feelings; "we shall do no more harm than the rest!"

I gave the car her head, knowing that whatever I did Flurry would have my blood. In less than two minutes we were all but into Stephen Casey's goats, who, being yoked together in body but not in spirit, required the full width of the road for their argument. We pa.s.sed Stephen Casey and the gombeen man cornering the disputed calves in the sympathetic accord that such an operation demands. As we neared M'Sweeny, who brought up the rear, the body of the hunt, still headed by the donkey, swept into a field on the left of the road. The fox, as might have been expected, had pa.s.sed from the ken of the cur dogs, and these, intoxicated by the incitements of their owners, now flung themselves, with the adaptability of their kind, into the pursuit of the donkey.

I stopped and looked back. The leading hounds were galloping behind the car; I recognised at their heads Rattler and Roman, the puppies I had walked, and for a moment was touched by this mark of affection.