The Project Gutenberg eBook, Garryowen, by H. De Vere (Henry De Vere) Stacpoole

GARRYOWEN

GARRYOWEN

BY

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

Author of "The Blue Lagoon," "The Crimson Azaleas," etc.

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1909

Copyright, 1909
By DUFFIELD & COMPANY

This book is dedicated to
My little dog "Whisky,"
A thorough sportsman and a faithful friend

GARRYOWEN

CONTENTS

GARRYOWEN

CHAPTER I

The great old house of Drumgool, ugly as a barn, with a triton dressed in moss and blowing a conch shell before the front door, stands literally in the roar of the sea.

From the top front windows you can see the Atlantic, blue in summer, grey in winter, tremendous in calm or storm; and the eternal roar of the league-long waves comes over the stunted fir trees sheltering the house front, a lullaby or menace just as your fancy wills.

Everything around Drumgool is on a vast and splendid scale. To the east, beyond Drumboyne, beyond the golden gorse, the mournful black bogs, and the flushes of purple heather, the sun, with one sweep of his brush paints thirty miles of hills.

Vast hills ever changing, and always beautiful, gone now in the driving mist and rain, now unwreathing themselves of cloud and disclosing sunlit crag and purple glen outlined against the far-off blue, and magical with the desolate beauty of distance.

The golden eagle still haunts these hills, and lying upon the moors of a summer's day you may see the peregrine falcon hanging in the air above and watch him vanish to the cry of the grouse he has struck down, whose head he will tear off amidst the gorse.

Out here on the moors, under the sun on a day like this, you are in the pleasant company of Laziness and Loneliness and Distance and Summer. The scent of the gorse is mixed with the scent of the sea, and the silence of the far-off hills with the sound of the billows booming amidst the coves of the coast.

Except for the sea and the sigh of the wind amidst the heather bells there is not a sound nor token of man except a pale wreath of peat smoke away there six miles towards the hills where lies the village of Drumboyne, and that building away to the west towards the sea, which is Drumgool House.

The railway stops at Coyne, fifteen miles to the east, as though civilisation were afraid of venturing further.

Now if you stand up and shade your eyes and look over there to the north and beyond Drumgool House, you will notice a change in the land. There is the beginning of the four-mile track—four miles of velvety turf such as you will get nowhere else in the whole wide world; the finest training ground in existence.

The Frenches of Drumgool (no relation of any other Frenches) have trained many a winner on the four-mile track. Once upon a time those big stables there at the back of Drumgool House were filled with horses. "Once upon a time"—is not that the sorrowful motto of Ireland?

This morning, as beautiful a September morning as one could wish to see, a bath-chair drawn by a spirited-looking donkey stood at the front steps of Drumgool House.

By the donkey's head, Moriarty, a long, foxy, evil-looking personage in leggings, stood with a blackthorn stick in his hand and a straw in his mouth. He was holding the donkey by the bridle, while Miss French was being assisted into the bath-chair by Mrs. Driscoll, the cook and general factotum of the French household.

Miss French had on a huge black felt hat adorned with a dilapidated ostrich feather. Her pale, inconsiderable face and large dark eyes had a decidedly elfish look seen under this structure. She had also on a cloak, fastened at the neck by a Tara brooch, and Mrs. Driscoll was wrapping a grebe boa round her neck, though the day was warm enough in all conscience.

Miss French had a weakness of the spine which affected her legs. The doctors had given this condition a long Latin name, but the country people knew what was wrong with the child much better than the doctors. She was a changeling. Had Miss French been born of poor folk a hundred years ago she would have undoubtedly met with a warm reception in this world, for she would have been put out on a hot shovel for the fairies to take back. She was a changeling, and she looked it as she sat in the bath-chair, "all eyes, like an owl," while Mrs. Driscoll put the boa round her throat.

"Now keep the boa round you, Miss Effie," said Mrs. Driscoll; "and don't be gettin' on the cliffs, Moriarty, but keep in the shelter of the trees, and go aisy with her. Be sure, whatever you do, to keep clear of them cliffs."

Moriarty hit the donkey a blow on the ribs with his blackthorn stick just as a drummer strikes a drum, with somewhat of the same result as to sound, and the vehicle started.

Mr. French had trained a good many winners, and Moriarty was Mr. French's factotum in stable matters; what Moriarty did not know about horses would be scarcely worth mentioning.

Very few men know the true inwardness of a horse—what he can do under these circumstances and under those, his spirit, his reserve force, his genius.

A horse is much more than an animal on four legs. Legs are the least things that win a race, though essential enough, no doubt. It is the soul and spirit of the beast that brings the winner along the last laps of the Rowley Mile, that strews the field behind at Tattenham Corner, that, with one supreme effort, gains victory at the winning-post by a neck.

It is this intuitive knowledge of the psychology of a horse that makes a great trainer or a great jockey.

Moriarty was possessed of this knowledge, but he was possessed of many other qualities as well. He could turn his hand to anything—rabbit catching, rearing pheasants, snaring birds, doctoring dogs, carpentry.

"Moriarty!" said Miss French, when they were out of earshot of the house.

"Yes, miss," said Moriarty.

"Drive me to the cliffs!"

Moriarty made no reply, but struck the donkey another drum-sounding blow on the ribs, and, pulling at its bridle, turned the vehicle in the direction indicated.

"You'll be afther loosin' thim things," said Moriarty, without turning his head, as he toiled beside the donkey up the steep cliff path.

"I don't care if I do," said Miss French. "Besides, we can pick them up as we go back. Come off!"

She was apostrophising the boa. The big hat, the flap of which, falling on the ground, had drawn Moriarty's attention, was now followed by the boa, and Miss French, free of her lendings all but the cloak, sat up, a much more presentable and childlike figure, the wind blowing amid her curls, and her brown, seaweed-coloured eyes full of light and mischief.

"Now, Moriarty," said Miss French, when she had cleared herself sufficiently for action, "gimme the reins."

Moriarty unwisped the reins from the saddle of the harness and placed them in the small hands of his mistress, who, as an afterthought, had unlatched the Tara brooch and slipped off the cloak.

"Arrah! what have yiz been afther?" said Moriarty, looking back at the strewn garments as though he had only just discovered what the child had been doing. "Glory be to God! if you haven't left the half of yourself behint you on the road. Sure, what way is that to be behavin'? Now, look here, and I'll tell you for onct and for good, if you let another stitch off you, back yiz'll go, donkey and all, and its Mrs. Driscoll will give you the dhressin'. Musha! but you're more thrubble than all me money. Let up wid thim reins and don't be jibbin' the donkey's mouth!"

The last sentence was given in a shout as he ran to the donkey's head just in time to avert disaster.

Moriarty sometimes spoke to Miss French as though she were a dog, sometimes as though she were a horse, sometimes as though she were his young mistress. Never disrespectfully. It is only an Irish servant that can talk to a superior like this and in so many ways.

"I'm not jibbing his mouth," replied Miss French. "Think I can't drive! You can hold on to the reins if you like, though, and, see here, you can smoke if you want to."

"It's not you I'd be axin' if I wanted to," replied Moriarty, halting the donkey on a part of the path that was fairly level, so as to get a light for his pipe before they emerged into the sea breeze on the cliff top.

Miss French watched the operation critically, she did not in the least resent the tone of the last few words.

Moriarty was a character. In other words, he had a character. Moriarty would not have given the wall to the Lord Lieutenant himself. Moriarty was not a servant, but a retainer. He received wages, it is true, but he did not work for them; he just worked for the interests of the Frenches.

He had a huge capacity for doing the right thing, and a knack of doing everything well.

The latter he proved just now by lighting his pipe with a single match, though the sea breeze, despite the shelter of the cliff top, was gusting and eddying around him.

The pipe alight, he set the donkey going, and the next minute they were on the cliff top.

CHAPTER II

The sea lay below, far below, and stretching like a sapphire meadow to the rim of the world.

You could hear the song of the breakers in the cave and on the sand and the cry of the seagulls from the cliff and rock, and the breeze amid the cliff grass, but these sounds only emphasised the silence of the great sunlit sapphire sea.

The sea is a very silent thing. Three thousand miles of pampas grass would emit more sound under the lash of the wind than the whole Atlantic Ocean, and a swallow in its flight makes more sound than the forty-foot wave, that can wreck a pier or break a ship, makes in its passage towards the shore.

Up here, far above the shore, the faint, sonorous tune of wave upon wave breaking upon the sands below served only to accentuate the essential silence of the sea.

Through this sound could be distinguished another, immense, faint, dream-like—the breathing of leagues of coast; a sound made up of the boom of billows in the sea caves, and the bursting of waves on rock and strand, but so indefinite, so vague, that, listening, one sometimes fancied it to be the wind in the bent grass, or a whisper from the stunted firs on the landward side of the cliff.

Away out on the sparkling blue, the brown sails of fisher boats bound for Bellturbet filled to the light wind, and a mile out from shore, and stretching south-westward, the Seven Sisters rocks broke from the sea. That was all. But it was immensely beautiful.

Nowhere else perhaps can you get such loneliness as here, on the west coast of Ireland—loneliness without utter desolation. The vast shore, left just as the gods hewed it in the making of the world, lies facing the immense sea. They tell each other things. You can hear the billow talking to the cave, and the cave to the billow, and the wind to the cliff, and the wave to the rock, and the gulls lamenting. And you know that it was all like this a thousand years and more ago, when Machdum set his sails to the wind and headed his ship for the island.

Moriarty, leaving the donkey to nibble at the scant grass on the cliff top, took his seat on the ground and began to cut a split out of the blackthorn stick, while Miss French, with the reins in her hands, looked about her and over the sea.

She could see a white ring round the base of each of the Seven Sisters rocks; it was a ring of foam, for, placid though the sea looked from these heights, a dangerous swell was running. Now and then, like a puff of smoke, a ring of seagulls would burst out from the rocks, contract, dissolve, and vanish. Now and then a great cormorant would pass the cliff edge, sailing along without a movement of the wings, and sinking from sight with a cry.

The sea breeze blew, bringing with it the crowning delight of the cliff-top—the smell of the sea; the smell of a thousand leagues of waves, the smell of seaweed from the shore, the smell that men knew and loved a thousand years ago, the smell which is freedom distilled into perfume and the remembrance of which makes us turn each year from the land and seek the sea.

"Moriarty," said the child, "where are those ships going to?"

"Which ships?" asked Moriarty.

"Those ships with the brown sails to them."

"Limerick," replied Moriarty, without raising an eye from the job he was on, or knowing in the least which way the ships were going, or whether Limerick was by the sea or inland. Moriarty had a theory that one answer was as good as another for a child as long as you satisfied it, and the easiest answer was the best, because it gave you the least trouble. Moriarty was not an educationist; indeed, his own education was of the slightest.

"Why are they going to Limerick?" demanded Miss French.

"Why are they goin' to where?" asked Moriarty, speaking like a man in a reverie and whittling away with his knife at the stick.

"Limerick."

"Sure, what else would they be goin' for but to buy cods' heads?"

"Why?" asked Miss French, who felt this answer to be both bizarre and unsatisfactory.

"I dunno. I've never axed them."

This brought the subject to a cul-de-sac and brick wall.

And if you will examine Moriarty's answers you will find that he had constructed an impregnable position, a glacis across which no child would get a "why?"

Miss French ruminated on this for a moment, while Moriarty, having finished his operations on the stick, tapped the dottle out of his pipe, refilled it, and lit it.

Then, leaning on his elbow, he lay watching the ships going to Limerick, and thinking about stable matters and Garryowen, the latest addition to Mr. French's stable, in particular.

Moriarty had spotted Garryowen. It was by his advice that Mr. French had bought the colt, and it was in his hands that the colt was turning into one of the fleetest that ever put hoof to turf. Miss French watched her companion, and they sat like this for a long, long time, while the wind blew, and the sea boomed, and the gulls passed overhead, honey-coloured where the sunlight pierced the snow of their wings.

"Moriarty," said the child at last, "how would you like to have a governess?"

This question brought Moriarty back from his reverie, and he rose to his feet.

"Come along," said he, taking the donkey's reins, "it's moidhered you'll be gettin' with the sun on your head and you without a hat."

"I'm going to have a governess," said the child; "she's coming this day week, and she's forty years old. What'll she be like, do you think, Moriarty?"

"Faith!" said the evader of questions, "it's I that am thinkin' she won't be like a rosebud."

Miss French drew a letter from the pocket of her skirt as Moriarty led the donkey towards the path. It was a letter written purposely in a large, round hand that a child could easily read; each character was neatly printed, and though the contents were simple enough, the thing spoke volumes about the good heart of the sender.

Mr. French was in Dublin, but every day during his absence he wrote his little daughter a letter like this—a pleasant trait in a man living in a world the keynote of which is forgetfulness of the absent. The child read out the letter as Moriarty guided the donkey down the steep hill path.

It was a funny letter. It began as though Mr. French were writing to a child; it went on as though he were writing to an adult, and it finished as though the age of his correspondent had just occurred to him. It told of what he was doing in town—of a visit to Mr. Legge, the family solicitor, and of bother about money matters.

"However," said Mr. French in one passage, "Garryowen will put that all right."

As Miss French read this aloud Moriarty emphasised his opinion on the matter by striking a drum note on the donkey's ribs with the butt of his stick.

"I've got a governess for you at last," said Mr. French. "She's forty, and wears spectacles. I haven't seen her, but I gather so from her letter. She's coming from England this day week. I'll be back to-morrow by the 5.30 train."

"That's to-day," said Miss French.

"I know," replied Moriarty. "Mrs. Driscoll had a postcard. I'm to meet the train wid the car. Now, Miss Effie, here's your cloak, and on you put it."

"Bother," said Miss French as Moriarty picked up the discarded cloak from the ground.

She put it on, and they resumed their way, till they reached the boa.

This, too, was grumblingly put on, and they resumed their way till they came on the great hat lying on the ground.

Moriarty placed the elastic of this under the child's chin and gave the crown a slight twitch to put it straight.

With the putting on of the hat Miss French's light-hearted look and gaiety, which had dwindled on the assumption of the cloak and boa, completely vanished, like a candle-flame under an extinguisher.

Mrs. Driscoll met them at the door.

"That's right, Moriarty," said she. "You haven't let the hat off her, have you?"

"She tuck it off," said Moriarty, "and I put it on her head again wid me own hands. What's that you say? Have I kep' her out of the wind? Which wind d'y mane, or what are you talkin' about? Here you are, take her into the house, for I have me stables to look afther, and it's close on wan."

Mrs. Driscoll disappeared into the house, bearing in her arms the last of the Frenches. Poor child! If anyone ever stood a chance of being killed by kindness, it was she.

Muffled to death!

Many an invalid has gone through that martyrdom and sure process of extinction.

CHAPTER III

Drumgool was a bachelor's, or, rather, a widower's, household. The dining-room, where dead-and-gone Frenches looked at one another from dusty canvases, was rarely used; the drawing-room never. Guns and fishing-rods found their way into the sitting-room, which had once been the library, and still held books enough to lend a perfume of mildew and leather to the place—a perfume that mixed not unpleasantly with the smell of cigar-smoke and the scent of the sea.

The house hummed with the sound of the sea. Fling a window open, and the roar of it came in, and the smell of it better than the smell of roses.

Room after room of Drumgool, had you knocked at the doors of them, would have answered you only with echoes.

"Here there was laughter of old;

There was weeping——"

Laughter there was none now, nor weeping—just silence, dust; old furniture, so used by the sea air that a broker's man would scarcely have taken the trouble to take possession of it.

In the sitting-room, on the morning of the day on which the governess was expected to arrive, Mr. French was talking to his cousin, Mr. Giveen, who, with his hat by his side, was seated on the sofa glancing over a newspaper.

The breakfast things were still on the table, the window was open to let in the glorious autumn day, and a blue haze of cigar-smoke hung in the air, created by the cigar of Mr. French.

Mr. Giveen did not smoke; his head would not stand it. Neither did he drink, and for the same reason.

He looked quite a young man when he had his hat on, but he was not; his head was absolutely bald.

He was dressed in well-worn grey tweed, and his collar was of the Gladstone type. Cruikshank's picture of Mr. Dick in "David Copperfield" might have been inspired by Mr. Giveen.

This gentleman, who carried about with him a faint atmosphere of madness, was not in the least mad in a great many ways; in some other ways he was—well, peculiar.

He inhabited a bungalow half way between Drumgool House and Drumboyne, and he had a small income, the exact extent of which he kept hidden. He had no profession, occupation, or trade, no family—French was his nearest relation, and continually wishing himself further away—no troubles, no cares. He neither read, smoked, drank, played billiards, cards, nor games of any description; all these methods of amusement were too much for Mr. Giveen's head. He had, however, two pastimes that kept his own and his neighbours hands full. Collecting news and distributing it was one of these pastimes; making love was the other.

Small as was Drumboyne, and few as were the gentry distributed around, Mr. Giveen's gossiping propensities had already created much mischief, and there was not a girl or unmarried woman within a range of fifteen miles that Mr. Giveen had not either made eyes at or love to.

The strange thing is that he could have been married several times. There were girls in Drumboyne who would have swallowed Mr. Giveen for the sake of the bungalow and the small income, which popular report made big, but he was not a marrying man. On the other hand he was a most moral man. He made love just for the sake of making love. It is an Irish habit. The question of bringing a governess to Drumgool House had been held in abeyance for some time on account of Mr. Giveen.

Mr. French knew quite well that anything with petticoats on it and in the way of a lady would cause his cousin to infest the house. However, Effie's education had to be considered.

"Sure," said Mr. French to himself, "it'll be all right if I get one old enough."

It was only this morning that he broke the news.

"Dick," said Mr. French. "There's a governess coming for Effie."

"A what did you say?" asked Mr. Giveen, looking up from the newspaper, the advertisement page of which he had been reading upside down. One of his not altogether sane habits was to sit and stare at a paper and pretend to be reading it, so that his thoughts might wander unperceived. "A what did you say?"

"A governess is coming for Effie."

"Oh," said Mr. Giveen, and relapsed into the study of the newspaper.

Now, this appearance of indifference was a very ominous sign. The news that a new servant was coming would have caused this inveterate tattler to break into a volley of questions, questions of the most minute and intimate description as to the name, age, colour, looks, height, and native place of the newcomer; yet this important information left him dumb, but it was a speechlessness that only affected the tongue. If you had watched him closely you would have noticed that his eyes were travelling rapidly up and down the columns of the paper, that his hand was tremulous.

Mr. French, who was not an observer, went on to talk of other matters, when suddenly Mr. Giveen dropped his paper.

"What's she like?" said he.

"What's who like?" replied Mr. French, who at the moment was discussing turnips.

"The governess."

"I haven't seen her yet," said Mr. French, "but her name is Grimshaw, and she's over forty."

At this news Mr. Giveen clapped his hat on his head and made for the open French window. "I'll see you to-morrow," he cried back as he disappeared amidst the rose trees.

Mr. French chuckled.

Then through the same window he passed into the garden, and thence to the stable-yard, where he found Moriarty, who was standing at the harness-room door engaged in cleaning a bit.

"Moriarty," said Mr. French, "you'll take the car to the station to meet the half-past five train."

"Yes, sir," said Moriarty. "Any luggage?"

"Oh! I shouldn't think much," replied Mr. French. "You're to meet the lady that's coming as governess for Miss Effie. You're sure to recognise her—she's elderly. If she has more than one trunk you can tell Doyle to bring it on in the morning."

As he went back to the house he took the letter he had received a week before from Miss Grimshaw from his pocket and reread it.

"The question of salary," said Miss Grimshaw, "does not weigh particularly with me, as I am possessed of a small income of my own, to which I can, if I choose, add considerably with my pen. I am very much interested in the study of Ireland and the Irish, and would like to become more intimate at first-hand with your charming country, so I think we will waive the question of pounds, shillings, and pence. Any instruction I can give your little daughter will be amply repaid by your hospitality."

A nice letter written in a nice firm, sensible woman's hand.

Miss Grimshaw had referred Mr. French to several highly respectable people, but Mr. French, with that splendid indifference to detail which was part of his nature, had not troubled to take Miss Grimshaw's character up.

"Oh, bother her character," said he. "No woman has any character worth troubling about over forty."

CHAPTER IV

"Porter, porter! does this train stop at Tullagh?"

"You're in the wrong thrain, mum; this thrain stops nowhere; this is the ixpress all the way to Cloyne. Out you get, for we want to be goin' on. Right, Larry!"

Miss Grimshaw, dusty and tired, seated in the corner of a first-class carriage, heard the foregoing dialogue, and smiled.

It came to her with a puff of gorse-scented air through the open window of the railway carriage.

"Now," said Miss Grimshaw to herself, "I really believe I am in Ireland."

Up to this, at Kingstown, in her passage through Dublin, and during the long, dusty, dull journey that followed, she had come across nothing especially national. It is not in the grooves of travel that you come across the spirit of Ireland.

Davy Stevens, selling his newspapers on the Carlisle pier at Kingstown, had struck her fancy, but nothing followed him up. The jarvey who drove her from station to station in Dublin was surly and so speechless that he might have been English. The streets were like English streets, the people like English people, the rain like English rain, only worse.

But it was not raining here. Here in the west, the train seemed drawing out of civilisation, into a new world—vast hills and purple moors, great spaces of golden afternoon, unspoiled by city or town, far mountain tops breaking to view and veiled in the loveliness of distance.

"And people go to Switzerland with this at their elbow," said Miss Grimshaw, leaning her chin upon her palm and gazing upon the view.

She was alone in the carriage, and so could place her feet on the opposite cushions. Very pretty little feet they were, too.

V. Grimshaw was dressed with plainness and distinction in a Norfolk jacket and skirt of Harris tweed, a brown Homburg hat, and youth. She did not look more than eighteen, though she was, in fact, twenty-two. Her face, lit by the warm afternoon light, was both practical and pretty; her hair was dark and seemed abundant. Beside her on the cushions of the carriage lay several newspapers—the Athenæum among others—and a book, "Tartarin of Tarascon," in the original French.

This was the personage who had replied to Mr. French's advertisement. There was no deception. She had stated her age plainly as twenty-two in her first letter to him; the mistake was on his part. In reading the hundred-and-fifty or so replies to his advertisement he had got mixed somehow, and had got some other lady's age in his head attached to the name of Grimshaw.

As for the spectacles, he had drawn in his imagination the portrait of a governess of forty-four named Grimshaw, and the portrait wore spectacles.

Miss Grimshaw didn't. Those clear, grey eyes would not require the aid of glasses for many a year to come.

American by birth, born in the State of Massachusetts, twenty-two years ago, Miss Grimshaw's people had "gone bust" in the railway collapse that followed the shooting of Garfield. Miss Grimshaw's father, a speculator by nature and profession, had been one of the chief "bulls" in Wall Street.

He had piled together a colossal fortune during the steady inflation of railway stock that preceded the death of Garfield. The pistol of Guiteau was the signal for the bottom to fall out of everything, and on that terrible Saturday afternoon when Wabash stock fell sixteen points without recovery, Curtis Grimshaw shot himself in his office, and V. Grimshaw, a tiny tot, was left in the world without father or mother, sister or brother, or any relations save an uncle in the dry-goods trade.

He had taken care of her and educated her at the best school he could find. Four years ago he had died, and V. Grimshaw at eighteen found herself again on the world, this time most forlorn. The happy condition remained, however, that Simon Gretry, the dry-goods uncle, had settled a thousand (dollars) a year on his niece, this small income being derived from real estate in New York city.

Miss Grimshaw emigrated to Europe, not to find a husband, but to study art in Paris. Six months' study told her, however, that art was not her walk in life, and being eminently practical, she cast aside her palette and took up with writing and literary work generally, working for Hardmuth's Press Syndicate and tiring of the work in a year.

Just after she had dropped Hardmuth's, Miss Grimshaw came upon Mr. French's advertisement in a lady's paper. Its ingenuousness entirely fascinated her.

"He's not literary, anyhow," she said. "It's the clearest bit of writing I've come across for many a day. Might try it. I've long been wanting to go to Ireland, and if I don't like it—why, I'm not tied to them."

Mr. French's reply to her application decided her, and so she came.

The train was now passing through a glen where the bracken leaped six feet high—a glen dim and dream-like, a vast glen, echo-haunted, and peopled with waterfalls, pines, and ferns that grow nowhere else as they grow here.

It is the glen of a thousand echoes. Call here, and Echo replies, and replies, and replies; and you hear your commonplace voice—the voice that you ordered a beefsteak with yesterday—chasing itself past fern and pine and fading away in Fairyland.

A tunnel took the train, and then out of the roaring darkness it swept into sunlight again, and great plains of bracken and heather.

Miss Grimshaw undid the strap of her rug and packed her newspapers and book inside. The train was slowing. By the time she had got all her things together it was drawing up at a long platform, whose notice-board read:—

CLOYNE

The girl opened the door of the carriage and stepped on to the platform and into a world of sunlight, silence, and breeze.

The air was like wine.

There were few people on the platform; a woman in a red cloak, a priest who had stepped out of the train, a couple of farmers, and several porters busily engaged in taking some baskets of live fowl (to judge by the sound) out of the guard's van, and a seedy-looking individual in a tall hat and frock-coat, who looked strangely out of keeping with his surroundings.

"Is there not a porter to take luggage out of the train?" asked Miss Grimshaw of a long, squint-eyed, foxy-looking man, half-groom, half-gamekeeper, who was walking along the train length peeping into each carriage as if in search of something.

"Porthers, miss," replied the foxy person. "Thim things that's gettin' the chickens out of the van calls themselves porthers, I b'lave."

Without another word he stepped into the carriage and whipped the travelling-bag, the bundle of rugs, and other small articles on to the platform.

"You didn't happen to see an ouldish lady in the thrain anywhere between here and Dublin, miss?" said Moriarty—for Moriarty it was—as he deposited the last of the bundles.

"No," said Miss Grimshaw, "I didn't."

"Begorra, then," said Moriarty, "she's either missed the train or tumbled out of it. Billy!"—to a porter who was coming leisurely up—"when you've done thinkin' over that prize you tuk in the beauty show, maybe you'll attind to the company's business and lift the young lady's luggage."

"I expected a trap to meet me from Mr. French, of Drumgool," said Miss Grimshaw as Billy took the luggage.

"Mr. Frinch, did you say, miss?" said Moriarty.

"Yes. Mr. French, of Drumgool House; he expected me by this train."

Moriarty broke into a grin that broadened and spread over his ugly face like the ripple on a pond.

"Faith, thin," said he, "it's Mr. Frinch will have a most agrayable surprise. 'Moriarty,' says he to me, 'take the car and meet the lady that's comin' by the ha'f-pas' five thrain. You can't mistake her,' he says, 'for she's an ouldish lady in spicticles.'"

Miss Grimshaw laughed. "Well," she said, "it was Mr. French's mistake. Let us find the car. I suppose you are going to drive me?"

"It's fifteen miles to Drumgool, miss," said Moriarty. "Mr. Frinch tould me to say you were to be sure and have some tay at the hotel here afther your journey; it's only across the road."

"Thanks," said Miss Grimshaw.

She followed Moriarty and the porter to the station gate. An outside car, varnished, silver-plated as to fittings, and very up to date stood near the wicket. A big roan mare with a temper was in the shafts, and a barefooted gossoon was holding on to the bridle.

The station inn across the road flung its creaking sign to the wind from the moors, seeming to beckon, and Miss Grimshaw came.

The front door was open, and a dirty child was playing in the passage. Miss Grimshaw passed the child, knocked at a door on the left of the passage, and, receiving no answer, opened it, to find a bar-room, smelling vilely of bad tobacco and spirits. She closed the door and opened one on the right of the passage, to find a stuffy sitting room with a stuffed dog under a glass case for its presiding genius.

Two clocks stood on the mantelpiece, one pointing to three, the other to twelve, neither of them going; a sofa covered with American cloth, chairs to match, a picture of the Day of Judgment, some dusty seashells, and a drugget carpet completed the furniture of the place. Miss Grimshaw was looking around her for a bell when the following dialogue between Moriarty and some female unknown struck her ears.

"Mrs. Sheelan," came Moriarty's voice, evidently from the backyard.

"What do you want?" came the reply, evidently from an upper room.

"What are you doin'?"

"I'm clanin' meself."

"Well, hurry up clanin' yourself and put the kittle on the fire, for there's a young lady wants some tay."

"Oh, glory be to God! Moriarty!"

"Well?"

"Shout for Biddy; she's beyant there in the cowhouse. Tell her the kittle's on, and to stir the fire and make the tay. I'll be wid you in wan minit."

Miss Grimshaw took her seat and waited, listening to the stumping noise upstairs that told of speed, and wondering what Mrs. Sheelan would be like when she was cleaned.

Almost immediately Biddy, fresh from the cowhouse, a girl with apple-red cheeks, entered the room, whisked the stuffed dog on to a side table, dumped down a dirty table-cloth which she had brought in rolled up under her arm, dragged out the drawer of a cupboard, and from the drawer knives, forks, spoons, a salt-cellar, and a pepper caster of pewter.

"You needn't lay all those things for me," said the traveller. "I only want tea."

"Oh, it's no thrubble, miss," replied Biddy with an expansive smile. She finished laying the cloth, and then hung at the door.

"Well?" asked Miss Grimshaw.

"I thought, miss," said Biddy in a difficult voice, "you might be wantin' to—change your hat afther the journey."

As Miss Grimshaw was sitting at her tea some ten minutes later a knock came to the door. It was Moriarty who entered on the knock and stood hat in hand.

"I'm sendin' your thrunk by Doyle, the carrier, miss," said Moriarty, "and I'm takin' your small thraps on the car."

"Thank you."

"If you plaze, miss," said Moriarty, "did you see a man step out of the thrain wid a long black coat on him and a face like an undertaker's?"

"I did," said Miss Grimshaw, "if you mean a man in a tall hat."

"That's him," said Moriarty. "Bad luck to him! I knew what he was afther when I set me eyes on him, and when I was puttin' your bag on the car he ups and axes me if I knew of a Mr. Frinch living here away. 'Which Mr. Frinch?' says I. 'Mr. Michael Frinch,' says he. 'Do I know where he lives?' says I. 'Sure, what do you take me for—me, that's Mr. Frinch's own man?' 'How far is it away?' says he. 'How far is what?' says I. 'Mr. Frinch's house,' says he. 'A matter of fifteen miles,' says I. 'Bad luck to it!' says he, 'I'll have to walk it.' 'Up you get on the car,' says I, 'and sure I'll drive you,' and up he gets, and there he's sitting now, waitin' to be druv. Bad cess to him!"

"But who is he?" asked the girl, not quite comprehending the gist of this flood of information.

Moriarty lowered his voice half a tone. "He's a bailiff, miss, come down to arrist the horses."

"Arrest the horses!"

"It's this way, miss. Mr. Frinch had some dalin's wid a Jew money-lender in Dublin be the name of Harrison, and only this mornin' he said to me, 'Moriarty,' he says, 'keep your eye out at the station, for it's I that am afraid this black baste of a Harrison would play us some trick, for them money-lenders has ears that would reach from here to Clontarf,' says he, 'and it's quite on the cards he's heard from his agent I've sold Nip and Tuck, and if he has,' he says, 'it's sure as a gun he'll have a bailiff in before I can get them off the primises.'"

"Are Nip and Tuck horses?" asked Miss Grimshaw, who was beginning to find a subtle interest in Moriarty's conversation.

"Yes, miss, as clane a pair of hunters as you'd find in Galway."

"Yes, go on."

"Well, miss, the horses were due to be taken off be the nine train to-night. Major Sherbourne has bought thim and paid for thim, and now if this chap nails thim, Mr. Frinch will have to refund the money, and, sure, wouldn't that be a black shame?"

"And this man has come down to arrest the horses?" said Miss Grimshaw.

"Yes, miss, and that's why I've come to ax you to let him drive with us. For I'm going to play him a trick, miss, with your leave and licence, and that's why I've got him on the car."

Miss Grimshaw laughed.

"I'm no friend of money-lenders," said she.

"Sure, I could tell that be your face, miss."

"But I do not wish to see the man injured or hurt."

"Hurt, miss!" cried Moriarty in a virtuous voice. "Sure, where would be the good of hurtin' him, unless he was kilt outright? You lave it to me, miss, and I'll trate him as tender as an infant. I've tould him I'll drive him to Mr. Frinch's house, and I will; but he won't get Nip nor Tuck."

"Very well," said Miss Grimshaw. "As long as you don't hurt him I don't care."

Moriarty withdrew, and Mrs. Sheelan appeared. The cleaning process was evident in the polish of her face. She would take nothing for the tea; it was to go down to Mr. French's account, by his own express orders.

Having bestowed a shilling upon Biddy, the traveller left the inn.

The seedy personage in the tall hat was comfortably seated on the outside car reading a day-before-yesterday's Freeman's Journal, and a new gossoon was holding the mare's head vice the old gossoon, who had been sent on horseback hot foot to Drumgool to give warning to Mr. French.

Miss Grimshaw got on the side of the car opposite to the bailiff, Moriarty seized the reins, the gossoon sprang away, and the mare rose on end.

"Fresh?" said the man in the tall hat.

"Faith, she'll be stale enough when I've finished with her," said Moriarty. "Now then, now then, what are yiz afther? Did you never see a barra of luggage before? Is it a mothor-car you're takin' yourself to be, or what ails you, at all, at all? Jay up, y' divil!"

The Dancing Mistress—such was her ominous name—having performed the cake walk to her own satisfaction, turned her attention to a mixture of the "Washington Post" and the two-step.

"Hit her with the whip," said Miss Grimshaw.

"Hit her with the whip!" replied Moriarty. "Sure, it's kicked to matches we'd be if she heard me draa it from the socket. Now then, now then, now then!"

"That's better," said Miss Grimshaw.

"Yes, miss," replied Moriarty. "Once she's started nothin' will stay her, but it's the startin' is the divil."

It was getting towards sunset now, and in the east the ghost of a great moon was rising pale as a cloud in the amethyst sky.

The moors swept away for ever on either side of the road, moor and black bog desolate and silent but for the wind and the cry of the plover. Vast mountains and kingly crags thronged the east, purple in the level light of evening and peaceful with the peace of a million years; away to the west, beyond the smoke wreaths from the chimneys of Cloyne, the invisible sea was thundering against rock and cliff, and the gulls and terns, the guillemots and cormorants, were wheeling and crying, answering with their voices the deep boom of the sea caves.

Miss Grimshaw tried to imagine what life would be like here, fifteen miles from a railway station. Despite the beauty of the scenery there was over all, or rather in it all, a touch of darkness, desolation, and poverty, a sombre note rising from the black bog patches, the wretched cabins by the way, the stone walls, the barren hills.

But the freshness of the air, the newness of it all, made up to the girl for the desolation. It was different from Fleet-street, and anything that is different from Fleet-street must have a certain beauty of its own.

She tried to imagine what trick Moriarty was going to play on the gentleman whose tall hat was so extremely out of keeping with the surroundings. That person, who had left the refreshments of the inn untried, had not come unprovided; he produced a flask from his pocket at times, fouling the air with the smell of bad brandy, but not a word did he speak as mile after mile slipped by and the sun sank and vanished and the moon glowed out, making wonderland of the world around them.

"We're more than ten miles on our road now, miss," said Moriarty, speaking across the car to Miss Grimshaw. "Do you see that crucked tree beyant on the right be the bog patch?"

"Yes."

"It was half-way betune that and thim bushes they shot ould Mr. Moriarty two years ago come next June."

"Shot him?"

"Faith, they filled him so full of bullets that the family had to put a sintry over the grave for fear the bhoys would dig him up to shtrip him of his lead."

"But who shot him?"

"That's what the jury said, miss, when they brought it in 'Not guilty' against Billy the Rafter, Long Sheelan, and Mick Mulcahy, and they taken with the guns smokin' in their hands—the blackgyards."

"Good heavens! but why did they shoot him?"

"Well, he'd got himself disliked, miss. For more than five years the bhoys had been warning him; sure they sent him enough pictures of coffins and skulls to paper a wall with, and he, he'd light his pipe with them. Little he cared for skulls or crossbones. 'To blazes with them!' he'd say. 'All right,' says the bhoys, 'we'll give you one warnin' more.' 'Warn away,' says he, and they warned. Two nights after they laid him out. Do you see away beyant those trees, miss, thim towers—there, you see them poppin' up?"

"Yes."

"That's Mr. Frinch's house."

"Why, it's a castle."

"Yes, miss, I b'lave they called it that in the old days."

At a gateway, where the gate was flung wide open, Moriarty drew up.

"Now," said he to the person in the tall hat, "that's your way to the back primises; down with you and in with you, and sarve your writ, for it's a writ you've come to sarve, and you needn't be hidin' it in your pocket, for it's stickin' out of your face. Round with you to the back primises and give me compliments to the cook, and say I'll be in for me supper when I've left this lady at the hall dure."

The man in possession, standing now in the road under the moonlight, examined the car and the horse that had brought him.

"The horse and car are Mr. French's?" he asked.

"They are."

"Well, when you've put 'em in the stables," said he, "mind and don't you move 'em out again. All the movables and live stock are to be left in statu quo till my business is settled."

"Right y' are, sorr," replied Moriarty cheerfully, and the man in the tall hat strode away through the gate and vanished in the direction of the back premises.

Miss Grimshaw felt rather disgusted at this spiritless fiasco. She was quite without knowledge, however, of Moriarty's thorough methods and far-reaching ways.

"I thought you were going to play him a trick," said she.

Moriarty, who had got down for a moment to look at the mare's off-fore shoe, sprang on to the car again, turned the car, touched the mare with the whip, and turned to the astonished Miss Grimshaw.

"This isn't Mr. Frinch's house at all, miss."

"Why, you said it was."

"It's his house, right enough," said Moriarty, "but it hasn't been lived in for a hundred and tin years; it's got nuthin' inside it but thistles and bats. He axed me for Mr. Frinch's house; well, I've driv him to Mr. Frinch's house, him and his ow-de-cologne bottle, but Mr. Frinch doesn't live here; he lives at Drumgool."

"How far is Drumgool from here?"

"It's fifteen miles from here to Cloyne, miss, and fifteen from Cloyne to Drumgool."

"Oh, good heavens!" said Miss Grimshaw, "thirty miles from here?"

"There or thereabouts, miss; we'll have to get a new horse at Cloyne; the ould mare is nearly done, and she'd be finished entirely, only I gave her a two hours' rest before I take you up at the station."

"Look!" groaned the girl.

Far away behind them on the moonlit road a figure had appeared; it was running and shouting and waving its arms.

"That's him," said Moriarty. "Faith, he looks as if he had seen the Banshee! Look, miss, there's his hat tumbled off."

Running was evidently not the bailiff's forte, but he continued the exercise manfully for a quarter of a mile or so, hat in hand, before giving up. When he disappeared from view Miss Grimshaw felt what we may suppose the more tender-hearted of Alexander Selkirk's marooners felt when Tristan d'Acunha sank from sight beyond the horizon.

"What will he do with himself?" asked she, her own grievance forgotten for a moment, veiled by the woes of the other one.

"Faith, I don't know, miss," replied Moriarty; "he can do what he plazes, for what I care. But there's one thing he won't do, and that's lay finger on the horses; and it's sorry I am, miss, to have dhriven you out of your way. But, sure, wouldn't you have done it yourself if I'd been you and you'd been me, and that black baste of a chap puttin' his ugly foot in the master's business?"

Miss Grimshaw laughed in a rather dreary manner.

"But it isn't his fault."

"Whose fault, miss?"

"That man's; he was only doing his duty."

"Faith, and that's the thruth," said Moriarty, "and more's the pity of it, as Con Meehan said when he was diggin' in his pitata garden and the pleeceman came to arrist him. I'm disremembrin' what it was he'd done—chickens I think it was he'd stole—but the pleeceman says to him, 'Come off wid you to gaol,' says he; 'it's sorry I am to have to take you,' says he, 'but it's me painful duty.' 'The more's the pity it gives you such pain,' says Con, 'and where does it hurt you most, may I ax?' 'In me feelin's,' replies him. 'Faith, I'll aise you,' says Con, and wid that he knocks him sinsless with the flat of the spade."

"That was one way of relieving him of his painful duty."

"Yes, miss," said Moriarty, and they drove on in silence for a while, Miss Grimshaw trying to imagine how the case of Con Meehan bore extenuation to the case of the bailiff and failing.

A long hill brought them to a walk, and Moriarty got down and walked beside the mare to "aise" her.

Half-way up the hill a man tramping on ahead halted, turned, and stood waiting for them to come up. He had a fishing-rod under his arm, and Miss Grimshaw, wondering what new surprise was in store for her, found it in the voice of the stranger, which was cultivated.

"Can you tell me where I am?" asked the stranger.

"Yes, sorr," said Moriarty, halting the mare. "You're eleven miles and a bit from Cloyne, if you're going that way."

"Good heavens!" said the stranger, half beneath his breath; then aloud: "Eleven Irish miles?"

"Yes, sorr; there aren't any English miles in these parts. Were you going to Cloyne, sorr?"

"Yes; I'm staying at the inn there, and I came out to-day to fish a stream over there between those two hills; and the fool of a fellow I took with me got lost—at least, he went off and never came back; and I'll break his neck when I catch him."

"Was it Billy Sheelan, of the inn, be any chance, sorr?"

"Yes, I believe that was his name."

"Then he hasn't got lost, sorr; he's got dhrunk. This is Mr. Frinch's car, and if you'll step on to it I'll drive you back to Cloyne, if the young lady has no objection."

"Not in the least," said Miss Grimshaw.

The stranger raised his cap. He was a good-looking youth, well dressed, and his voice had a lot of character of a sort. It was a good-humoured, easy-going, happy-go-lucky voice, and it matched his face, or as much of his face as could be seen in the moonlight.

"It's awfully good of you," he said. "I'm dead beat, been on my legs since six, had good luck, too, only I lost all my fish tumbling into one of those bog holes. Just escaped with my life and my rod." He mounted on the same side of the car as the girl and continued to address his remarks to her as Moriarty drove on. "I believe I ought to introduce myself. Dashwood is my name. I came over for some fishing, and the more I see of Ireland, the more I like it. Your country——"

Miss Grimshaw laughed.

"It's not my country—I'm American."

"Are you?" said Mr. Dashwood in a relieved voice. "How jolly! I thought you might be Irish. I say," in a confidential tone of voice, "isn't it a beastly hole?"

"Which?"

"Ireland."

"Why, I thought you said you liked it!"

"I thought you were Irish. I do like it in a way. The mountains and the whisky aren't bad, and the people are jolly enough if they'd only wash themselves, but the hotels—oh, my!"

"You're staying at the inn near the railway station at Cloyne?"

"I am," said Mr. Dashwood.

"Then you know Biddy and the stuffed dog?"

"Intimately—have you stayed there?"

"I had tea there this afternoon."

"You live near here?"

"I believe I am going to live for a while near here. I only arrived this afternoon."

"Only this afternoon. Excuse me for being so inquisitive, but when did you arrive at—I mean——"

"Cloyne."

"But you're driving to Cloyne now."

"I know. I've been driving all over the country. We had to leave a gentleman at a castle, and now we are going back to Cloyne. Then I have to go on to a place called Drumgool, which is fifteen miles from Cloyne."

"To-night?" said Mr. Dashwood, looking in astonishment at the wanderer.

"I don't know," said the girl, with a touch of hopelessness in her voice. "I expect they'll have to tie me on to the car, for I feel like dropping off now. No, thanks; I can manage to hold on by myself, I was speaking metaphorically."

Mr. Dashwood said nothing for a few minutes. There was a mystery about Miss Grimshaw that he could not unravel, and which she could not explain.

Then he said: "We've both been travelling round the country, seems to me, and we're both pretty tired and we've met like this. Funny, isn't it?"

"Awfully," said Miss Grimshaw, trying to stifle a yawn.

"Do I bore you talking?"

"Not a bit."

"That's all right. I know you must be tired, but then, you see, you can't go to sleep on an outside car, so one may as well talk. How far are we from Cloyne now?"—to Moriarty.

"Nine miles, sorr."

"Good! I say, you said this car belonged to a Mr. French. I met a Mr. French six months ago in London—a Mr. Michael French."

"That's him, sorr."

"Well, that's funny," said Mr. Dashwood. "I met him at my club, and he told me he lived somewhere in Ireland—a big man, very big man—goes in for horses."

"That's him, sorr."

"Awfully rummy coincidence," said Mr. Dashwood, turning to his companion. "I lost two ponies to him over the Gatwick Selling Plate."

"That's him, sorr," said Moriarty with conviction.

"Awfully funny; do you know him?"

"No," replied Miss Grimshaw. "At least only by writing to him. I'm going there for a while to act as governess," she explained.

"And of course I'll call there to-morrow and look him up; well, it's extraordinary, really. Joke if we met someone else going to see him that had been lost and wandering about all day; sort of Canterbury pilgrimage, you know. And we could all sit round the fire at the inn and tell tales."

"I hope not," said Miss Grimshaw devoutly, thinking of the gentleman they had left at the old castle and the tale he'd have to tell.

Moriarty was now talking to the Dancing Mistress, telling her of the feed of corn waiting for her at the inn, and they jogged along rapidly, the sinking moon at their back, till presently a few glow-worm sparks before them indicated the lights of Cloyne.

"How long will you be getting the other horse?" asked Miss Grimshaw of Moriarty as they drew up at the inn, which was still open.

"I don't know, miss. I'll ax," replied Moriarty.

Mr. Dashwood helped his companion down, and she followed him into the passage, and from there to the sitting-room.

A bright turf fire was burning, and the table was still laid, and almost immediately Biddy appeared to say that Mr. French had sent word that the lady was to stay at the inn and make herself comfortable for the night and to come on to Drumgool in the morning, and to say he was sorry that she should have been put to any inconvenience on account of the horses, all of which seemed as wonderful as wireless telegraphy to Miss Grimshaw, inasmuch as she knew nothing of the gossoon Moriarty had despatched to his master earlier in the evening, with a succinct message stating his plan against the bailiff, and the absolute necessity of taking the governess along, lest the said bailiff, seeing the governess and luggage left behind at the inn, might smell a rat.

"And what'll you be plazed to have for supper, miss?" asked Biddy.

"What can you give us?" asked Mr. Dashwood.

"Anything you like, sorr."

"Well, get us a cold roast chicken and some ham. I'm sure you'd like chicken, wouldn't you?" turning to the girl.

"Yes," said she, "as long as they haven't to cook it. I'm famished."

Biddy retired. There was no cold chicken and there was no ham on the premises; but the spirit of hospitality demanded that ten minutes should be spent in pretending to look for them.

They had fried rashers of bacon—there were no eggs—and tea, and when Miss Grimshaw retired for the night to a stuffy bedroom ornamented with a stuffed cat, she could hear the deep tones of Moriarty's voice colloguing with Mrs. Sheelan, telling her most likely of the trick he had played on the bailiff man.

She wondered how far that benighted individual had wandered by this time on his road to Cloyne, and what he would say to Moriarty, and what Moriarty would say to him, when they met.

She could not but perceive that the commercial morality of the house she was going to was of an old-fashioned type, dating from somewhere in the times of the buccaneers, and she felt keenly interested in the probable personality of Mr. French.

Moriarty she liked unreservedly; and in Mr. Dashwood, her fellow-stranger in this unknown land, she felt an interest which he was returning as he lay in bed, pipe in mouth, and his head on a pillow stuffed presumably with brickbats.

CHAPTER V

Andy Meehan was a jockey who had already won Mr. French three races. He was a product of the estate, and a prodigy, though by no means an infant.

Nobody knew his age exactly. Under five feet, composed mostly of bone with a little skin stretched tightly over it, with a face that his cap nearly obliterated, Andy presented a problem in physiology very difficult of solution. That is to say, in Mr. French's words, the more he ate the lighter he grew. In the old days, before Mr. French took him into his stable as helper, when food was scarce and Andy half-starved, he was comparatively fat. Housed and fed well, he waxed thin, and kicked. Kicked for a better job, and got it. He was a Heaven-born jockey. He possessed hands, knees, and head. He was made to go on a horse just as a limpet is made to go on a rock. Nothing on the ground, he was everything when mounted. He was insight, dexterity, coolness, courage, and judgment.

Several owners had tried to lure Andy away from his master. Prospects of good pay and advancement, however, had no charm for Andy. French was his master, and to all alien offers Andy had only one reply. "To h—l wid them." I doubt if Andy's vocabulary had more than two hundred words. Except to Mr. French or Moriarty he was very speechless. "Yes" and "No" for ordinary purposes, and when he was vexed, "To h—l wid you," served his almost everyday needs.

Last night he had single-handed taken Nip and Tuck to the station, and entrained them, returning on foot, and this morning he was mending an old saddle in the sunshine of the stableyard when Mr. French appeared at the gate. Mr. French had come out of the house without his hat. He had a cigar in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets. He gave some directions to Andy to be handed on to Moriarty when that personage arrived, and then with his own hand opened the upper door of a loose-box.

A lovely head was thrust out. It was Garryowen's. The eye so full of kindliness and fire, the mobile nostrils telling of delicate sensibilities and fine feeling, the nobility and intelligence that spoke in every line of that delicately-cut head—these had to be seen to be understood.

Garryowen was more than a horse to Mr. French. He was a friend, and more even than that. Garryowen was to pull the family fortunes out of the mire, to raise the family name, to crown his master with laurels.

Garryowen was French's last card on which he was about to speculate his last penny. In simpler language, he was to run in the City and Suburban in the ensuing year and to win it. I dare say you have already gathered the fact that Mr. French's financial affairs were rather involved. The Nip and Tuck incident, however, was only a straw showing the direction of the wind, which threatened in a few months to strengthen into a gale. Only an incident—for the debt to Harrison was not considerable, and it would not require more than a week or so to collect the money to satisfy it.

The bother to Mr. French was that in the spring of next year he would have to find fifteen hundred pounds to satisfy the claims of a gentleman named Lewis, and how he was to do this and at the same time bear the expense of getting the horse to England and running him was a question quite beyond solution at present.

Not only had the horse to be run, but he had to be backed.

French had decided to win the City and Suburban. He wished sometimes now that he had made Punchestown the limit of his desires; but having come to a decision, this gentleman never went back on it. Besides, he would never have so good a chance again of winning a big English race and a fortune at the same time, for Garryowen was a dark horse, if ever a horse was dark, and a flyer, if ever a creature without wings deserved the title.

"Oh, bother the money! We'll get it somehow," French would say, closing his bank-book and tearing up the sheet of note-paper on which he had been making figures. He calculated that, gathering together all his resources, he would have enough to run the horse and back him for a thousand. To do this he would have to perform the most intricate evolutions in the borrowing line. It could be done, however, if Lewis were left out of the calculation.

The fifteen hundred owing to Lewis was a debt which would have to be paid by the third of March, and the City and Suburban is run in April. If it were not paid then Lewis would seize Garryowen with the rest of Mr. French's goods, and that unfortunate gentleman would be stranded so high and dry that he would never swim again.

The one bright spot in his affairs was the fact that Effie had two hundred and fifty a year, settled on her so tightly by a prescient grandfather that no art or artifice could unsettle it or fling it into the melting-pot.

This was French's pet grievance, and by a man's pet grievance you may generally know him.

Garryowen blew into his master's waistcoat, allowed his ears to be stroked, nibbled a lump of sugar, and replied to some confidential remarks of his owner by a subdued, flickering whinny. Then Mr. French barred the door, and, leaving the stableyard, came out into the kitchen-garden, whence a good view could be had of the road.

The adventure of the governess on the preceding night had greatly tickled his fancy. The idea of a sedate, elderly lady assisting, even unwillingly, in the marooning of the bailiff, had amused him, but that was nothing to the fact that Moriarty had used her for bait.

This morning, however, the amusement had worn off, and he was reckoning uncomfortably on an interview with an outraged elderly female, who would possibly carry her resentment to the point of renouncing her situation and returning home.

He looked at his watch. It pointed to half-past ten. He looked at the road winding away, a white streak utterly destitute of life or sign of Moriarty, the car, or the dreaded governess. The fine weather still held, and the distant hills stood out grand in the brave morning light.

The gossoon sent by Moriarty the previous day had announced that Moriarty was going to drive the bailiff to the "ould castle" and drop him there, at the same time giving full details of the plan. The arrival of the outraged bailiff had to be counted on later in the day, and would, no doubt, form a counterpart to the arrival of the outraged governess.

To a man of French's philosophical nature, however, these things were, to quote Sophocles, "in the future," non-existent at present and not worth bothering about till they materialised themselves.

As he stood, casting a leisurely glance over the great sweep of country that lay before him, a black, moving speck far away on the road caught his eye. He watched it as it drew nearer and developed. It was the car. He shaded his eyes as it approached. Three people were on it—Moriarty and two others, a woman and a man.

The idea that the bailiff and the governess were arriving together, allied forces prepared to attack him, crossed his brain for one wild instant. Then he dismissed it. Moriarty was much too clever a diplomat to allow such a thing as that.

Then as the car came up the drive he saw that the woman was a young and pretty girl, and the man youthful and well dressed, and, concluding that the governess had vanished into thin air, and that these were visitors of some sort, he hurried back to the house and shouted for Norah, the parlour-maid.

"Open the drawing-room and pull up the blinds," cried Mr. French. "There's visitors coming. Let them in, and tell them I'll be down in a minute."

He ran upstairs to make himself tidy, being at the moment attired in a shocking old shooting-coat gone at the elbows, and as to his feet, in a pair of carpet slippers.

As he changed he heard the visitors being admitted, and then Norah came tumbling up the stairs and thumped at his door.

"They're in the draaing-room, sir!"

"All right," said Mr. French. "I'll be down in a minute."

Mr. Dashwood and his companion had breakfasted together at the inn. The double Freemasonry of youth and health had made the meal a happy affair, despite the teapot with a broken spout, the bad, sad, salt bacon, and the tea that tasted like a decoction of mahogany shavings.

It was Miss Grimshaw who proposed that, as Mr. Dashwood was going to see his friend, and as she was bound on the same errand, they might use the same car.

Moriarty, who was consulted, consented with alacrity.

"He's not turned up yet, miss," said Moriarty, as he held the horse while Miss Grimshaw got on the car.

"I wonder what's become of him?" said the girl, settling the rug on her knees.

"Faith, and I expect he's wonderin' that himself," said Moriarty, taking the reins; "unless he's tuck a short cut across the country and landed in a bog-hole." All of which was Greek to Mr. Dashwood.

In the drawing-room of Drumgool House they were now awaiting the arrival of Mr. French.

"I say," said Mr. Dashwood. "I hope he is the man I met in London."

"I hope so, too," said the girl, looking round the quaint old room, with its potpourri vases, its antimacassars, its furniture of a distant day. The place smelt like an old valentine with a tinge of musk clinging to it. Pretty women had once sat here, had played on that rosewood piano whose voice was like the voice of a harp in the bass, like a banjo in the treble; had woven antimacassars, had read the romances of Mr. Richardson, had waited for the gentlemen after dinner, the claret-flushed gentlemen whose cheery voices would be heard no more.

"I hope so, too," said Miss Grimshaw. "I'm all right, for I'm the governess, you know. If he isn't, it will look very strange us arriving together, so you must explain, please. Are you good at explaining things?"

"Rather! I say, is he a family man? I mean, are there a lot of children?"

"No. Mr. French has only one little daughter, an invalid. I'm not a real governess. I don't take a salary, and all that. I've just come over to—— Well, I want a home for a while, and I want to see Ireland."

"Strikes me you'll see a lot of it here," said Mr. Dashwood, looking out at the vast solitudes to the east, where the hills stood ranged like armed men guarding a country where the bird shadow and the cloud shadow were the only moving things.

"Yes," said Miss Grimshaw, and yawned. She liked Mr. Dashwood, but his light-hearted conversation just now rather palled upon her.

"And won't you catch it in the winter here?" said he, as he watched Croag Mahon, a giant monolith, sunlit a moment ago, and now wreathing itself with mist just as a lady wreathes herself with a filmy scarf. "What on earth will you do with yourself when it rains?"

"I don't know," replied Miss Grimshaw. "Don't be gloomy. Ah!"

The door opened, and Mr. French entered the room—a gentleman that Bobby Dashwood had never seen in his life before.

CHAPTER VI

The master of Drumgool, genial and cosey, and the very personification of welcome, had scarcely taken in with a glance the two pleasant-looking young people who had invaded his drawing-room when the explainer of situations rushed into the breach.

"I'm awfully sorry," said he, "but I've made a mistake. I met this young lady at the inn at Cloyne, and as she was coming here I came on the same car, for I thought you were a Mr. Michael French I'd met in London. I've been fishing down here."

"You expected me last night," said Miss Grimshaw. "My name is Grimshaw."

"Faith," said Mr. French, "this is a pleasant surprise. Sit down, sit down."

"I ought to say my name is Dashwood," put in the explainer.

"Sit down, sit down. I'm delighted to see you both. Staying at the inn, are you? And how do you like Mrs. Sheelan? And you met at the inn? Of course you did. Miss Grimshaw, I don't know how, in the name of wonder, I'm going to apologise to you for driving you all over the country. Is that chair easy? No, it's not—take this one. Look at it before you sit in it. Dan O'Connell took his seat in that chair when he was here for the elections, in my grandfather's time, and I have the bed upstairs he slept in. Which Michael French, I wonder, was it you met? Was it a man with a big, black beard?"

"Yes," replied Mr. Dashwood.

"And gold-rimmed spectacles?"

"Yes."

"Did he bawl like a bull?"

"He had rather a loud voice."

"That's him. He's my cousin, bad luck to him! No matter. I'll be even with him some day yet. He's the biggest black—I mean, we have never been friends; but that's always the way between relations. And that reminds me—I've never bid you welcome to Drumgool, Miss Grimshaw. Welcome you are to the house and all it holds, and make yourself at home! And here we are sitting in the old drawing-room that's only used for company once in a twelvemonth. Come down to the sitting-room, both of you. There's a fire there, and Effie will be in in a minute. She's out driving in the donkey-carriage. This isn't a bad bit of an old hall, is it?" continued he as they passed through the hall. "It's the oldest part of the house. Do you see that split in the panelling up there? That's where a bullet went in the duel between Counsellor Kinsella and Colonel White. 'Black White' was his nickname, and well he deserved it. They fought here, for it was snowing so thick outside you couldn't see a man at ten paces. Eighteen hundred and one, that was, and they in their graves all these years! No, no one was killed. Only a tenant that had come in to see the fun, and he got in the line of fire. He recovered, I believe, though they say he carried the bullet in his head to the end of his days. This is the sitting-room. It's the warmest room in winter. The old house is as full of holes as a colander, but you'll never get a draught here. Norah!"—putting his head out of the door.

"Yes, sir."

"Bring the decanters. You don't mind smoking, Miss Grimshaw? That's a good job. Are you fond of horses, Mr. Dashwood?"

"Rather."

"Well, there's the hoof of the Shaughraun. He carried everything before him in Ireland. He was my grandfather's, and he was entered for the Derby, and some blackguards poisoned him. It would be before your time, and his death made more stir than the death of anything that ever went on four legs, except, maybe, old Nebuchadnezzar. They made songs about it, and I have a ballad upstairs in my desk a yard long my father bought from an old woman in Abbey-street. Here's the whisky. Sure, Norah, what have you been dreaming about, and why didn't you bring the wine for the young lady? Not drink wine! Well, now, just say the word, and I'll get you some tea. Or would you like coffee? Well, well. Say 'when,' Mr. Dashwood."

"I like this room," said Miss Grimshaw, looking round at the books and the oak panelling. "It's so cosey, and yet so ghosty. Have you a ghost?"

"A which? I beg your pardon," said Mr. French, pausing in his operations with a soda-water siphon.

"A ghost."

"I believe there's an old woman without a head walks in the top corridor by the servants' bedrooms. At least, that's the story; but it's all nonsense, though it does to frighten the girls with, and get them to bed early. Who's that?"

"If you plaze, sir," said Norah, speaking through the half-open door, "Miss Effie's back from her drive and upstairs, and she's wild to see the young lady."

"That's me, I suppose," said Miss Grimshaw. "I'll go up, if I may."

"Sure, with pleasure," said Mr. French, holding the door open for her with all the grace of a Brummell, while the girl passed out.

Then he closed the door, waited till she was well out of earshot, and then, sitting down in an armchair, he "rocked and roared" with laughter.

"Don't speak to me," said he, though Mr. Dashwood had not said a word. "Did you ever see me trying to keep my face? Sure, man, she's the governess, and I thought it was an old lady in spectacles that would be coming. Faith, and I'll have to get a chaperon. You might have blown me away with a fan when she said who she was. But I didn't let on, did I? I didn't show the start she's given me? Are you sure?"

Assured on this point, Mr. French poured himself out another glass of whisky. He explained that he'd got Miss Grimshaw "out of an advertisement." Then, much to the edification of Mr. Dashwood, he went into the bailiff business, the beauty of Nip and Tuck, the price Colonel Sherbourne had paid, explaining that it was not the money he cared about so much as the injury it would have done him in Sherbourne's estimation if the horses had not been delivered.

It was an adventure after the heart of Bobby Dashwood, who, in his short life, had dealt freely and been dealt with by money-lenders. Mr. Dashwood was what women call a "nice-looking boy," but he was not particularly intellectual when you got him off the subjects he had made particularly his own. He had failed for Sandhurst. If a proficiency in cricket and fives had been allowed to count, he would have got high marks; but they wanted mathematics, and Mr. Dashwood could not supply this requirement; in French, too, he was singularly deficient. The deficiencies of Mr. Dashwood would have furnished out half a dozen young men well equipped for failure in business, and that is why, I suppose, he managed to make such a success of life.

The joy Mr. Dashwood managed to extract from that usually unjoyful thing called life hinted at alchemy rather than chemistry. Joy, too, without any by-products in the way of headaches or heartaches. Utterly irresponsible, but without a serious vice, always bright, clean, and healthy, and alert for any sort of sport as a terrier, he was as good to meet and have around one as a spring morning—that is to say, when one was in tune for him.

He had five hundred a year of his own, with prospects of great wealth on the death of an uncle, and even out of this poverty he managed to extract pleasure of a sort in the excitement of settling with creditors and trying to make both ends meet—which they never did.

"What a joke!" said Mr. Dashwood. "And she never split. She said she'd been leaving a gentleman at an old castle—and she never grumbled, though she was nearly dropping off the car. I say, isn't she a ripper?"

"Here's to her," said French. "And now, come out and have a look at the stables and grounds. Lunch is at one, and we have an hour."

The youth and prettiness of Miss Grimshaw after the first pleasing shock did not trouble him in the least. A straight-minded man and a soul of honour in everything not appertaining to bill discounters, the propriety or impropriety of the situation did not cause him a moment's thought. The only thing that worried him for a second or two was the remembrance of Mr. Giveen. How would that gentleman act under the intoxication sure to be produced by the newcomer's youth and prettiness?

"She'd have been down herself to see you, miss," said Norah as she led the way upstairs, "only she's gone in the legs. This way, miss, along the passidge; this is the door."

A scuffling noise made itself evident as Norah turned the door-handle, and Miss Grimshaw, entering a brightly and pleasantly furnished room, found herself face to face with Miss French, who was sitting up on a sofa, flushed and bright-eyed and with the appearance of having suddenly returned to her invalidhood and position on the couch after an excursion about the apartment.

"Hullo!" said the child.

"Hullo!" said Miss Grimshaw.

"Oh, will you look at her?" cried Norah. "And the rug I put round her legs all over the place! You've been off the couch, Miss Effie!"

"I only put my feet on the ground," protested the child. "You needn't be going on at me. Bother my old legs! I wish they was cut off!"

"And so you are Effie?" said Miss Grimshaw, taking her seat on the edge of the couch. "Do you know who I am?"

"Rather," replied Miss French. "You're Miss Grimshaw."

There was a subdued chuckle in the tone of her voice, as though Miss Grimshaw was a joke that had just come off, rather than a governess who had just arrived—a chuckle hinting at the fact that Miss Grimshaw had been the subject of humorous discussion and speculation in the French household for some time past.

"You'll ring, miss, when you want me to show you your room?" said Norah. Then she withdrew, and Miss Grimshaw found herself alone with her charge.

The room was half nursery, half sitting-room, papered with a sprightly green-sprigged and rose-patterned paper. Pictures from Christmas numbers of the Graphic and pictures of cats by Louis Wain adorned the walls; there were a number of yellow-backed books on the book-shelf, and in one corner a pile of old comic papers—Punches, Judys, and Funs—all of an ancient date.

All the light literature in Drumgool House found its way here—and remained. The yellow-backed books were the works of Arthur Sketchley, a most pleasing humourist whose name has faded almost from our memories. "Mrs. Brown's 'Oliday Outings," "Mrs. Brown in Paris," "Mrs. Brown at the Seaside"—all were here. They had been bought by some member of the French family with a taste for humour, as had also the comic papers.

To Miss French in her captivity the dead-and-gone artists, the dead-and-gone jokes, the fashions and manners of the eighties, which are as Thebes to us, were fresh and vigorous. Up-to-date papers and books came little in her way, for French was not a reading man.

CHAPTER VII

"Where's your spectacles?" asked Effie, after they had conversed for a while, tucking the rug round herself and speaking with the jocularity and familiarity which generally is associated with long acquaintanceship.

"I beg your pardon," said Miss Grimshaw.

"Father said you'd be in spectacles."

"Oh, my spectacles—they are coming by the next train. Also my snuffbox and a birch-rod."

"Get out with you!" said Miss French, moving under the rug, as if someone had tickled her. "Your snuffbox and your birch-rod! Get out with you!"

It was the first time that Miss Grimshaw had come across a child brought up almost entirely by servants—and Irish servants at that—but there was an entire good humour about the product that made it not displeasing.

"So that's how you welcome me, telling me to get out almost as soon as I have come! Very well, I am going."

"Off with you, then!" replied the other, falling into the vein of badinage as easily as a billiard ball into a pocket. "Patwallop, along with you. I don't care. Hi! come back."

"What is it?" inquired Miss Grimshaw, now at the door, with her hand on the door handle.

"I want to tell you somethin'."

"Well?"

"I want to whisper it."

Miss Grimshaw came to the couch.

"Bend down closer."

She bent. Two small arms flung themselves tentaclewise round her neck, and she was nearly deafened by a "Boo!" in her ear, followed and apologised for by a moist and warm-hearted kiss.

* * * * *

Extract from a letter addressed by Miss V. Grimshaw to a friend:

"Since I last wrote to you, young Mr. Dashwood has left. He stayed three days. Mr. French insisted on his staying, sent for his luggage to the inn at Cloyne, put him up in the best bedroom, where I believe Dan O'Connell once slept, and kept him up till all hours of the morning, drinking far more whisky than was good for his constitution, I am sure.

"We had an awfully good time while he was here, and the house seems a little dull now that he is gone. He asked me before he left if he might write to me and tell me how he was getting on. But he hasn't written yet. He was a nice boy, but irresponsible. And, talking of irresponsibility, the word does not even vaguely describe the affairs of this household.

"I told you of the bailiff man. Well, he arrived in a closed carriage from Cloyne next day, and has been in bed ever since with influenza, caught by exposure on the moors. He is convalescent now, and I met him in the garden this morning, 'taking the air on a stick,' to use Mr. French's expression. I believe the debt is paid to Mr. Harrison, but the bailiff is staying on as a guest. Mr. French gets me at night sometimes to help him in his accounts. He tells me all his affairs and money worries. His affairs are simply appalling, and he has a mad scheme for running a horse next spring in a big English race, the Suburban something or other, by which he hopes to make a fortune. When I point out the impossibility of the thing, he closes up his account-books and says there is no use in meeting troubles half-way.

"Effie is a bright little thing, but there is something about her I can't quite understand. She has a secret, which she tells me she is going to tell me some day, but what it is I can't make out. Now I must stop. Oh, but I forgot. How shall I say it? How shall I tell it? I have an admirer. He is a little mad, a cousin of Mr. French's. You remember those pictures of Sunny Jim we used to admire on the posters? Well, he is not like that; much stouter and more serious looking, and yet there is a family resemblance. He has taken to haunting me.

"Mr. French has warned me not to mind him. He says he is sure to propose to me, but that I'm not to be offended, as it's a disease 'the poor creature is afflicted with, just as if he had epileptic fits,' and that he would make eyes at a broomstick with a skirt on it if he could get nothing else; all of which is interesting, but scarcely complimentary. Things are so dull just at present that I really think I must lead him on. I am sure when he does do it it will be awfully funny. His name is Giveen. Everything is queer about him.

"It rained yesterday and the day before, but to-day is simply glorious. And now I must stop in earnest.—Ever yours lovingly,

Violet."

Miss Grimshaw had been writing her letter at the writing-table in the sitting-room window. The sitting-room was on the ground floor, and as she looked up from addressing the envelope, Mr. Giveen, at the window and backed by the glorious September afternoon, met her gaze.

He was looking in at her. How long he had been standing at the window gazing upon her it would be impossible to say. Irritated at having been spied upon, Miss Grimshaw frowned at Mr. Giveen, who smiled in return, at the same time motioning her to open the window.

"Well?" said Miss Grimshaw, putting up the sash.

"Come out with me," said Mr. Giveen. "Michael is off at Drumboyne, and there's no one to know. Put on your hat and come out with me."

"Go out with you? Where?"

"I'll get the boat and take you to see the seals on the Seven Sisters Rocks. The sea is as smooth as a—smooth as a—smooth as a what's-its-name. I'll be thinking of it in a minit. Stick on your hat and come out with me."

"Some other day, when Mr. French is at home. I don't understand your meaning at all when you talk about nobody knowing. I never do things that I want to hide."

"Sure, that was only my joke," grinned Mr. Giveen; "and if you don't come to-day you'll never come at all, for it's the end of the season, and it's a hundred to one you won't find another day fit to go till next summer; and I'll show you the big sea cave," finished he, "for the tide will be out by the time we've had a look at the seals. It's not foolin' you I am. The boat's on the beach, and it won't take ten minutes to get there."

"I'll come down and look at the sea," said Miss Grimshaw, who could not resist the appeal of the lovely afternoon, "if you'll wait five seconds till I get my hat."

"Sure, I'd wait five hundred years," replied the cousin of Mr. French, propping himself against the house wall, where he stood whistling softly and breaking off every now and then to chuckle to himself, after the fashion of a person who has thought of a good joke or has got the better of another in a deal.

Five minutes later, hearing the girl leaving the house by the front door, he came round and met her.

"This way," said Mr. Giveen, taking a path that led through the kitchen-garden and so round a clump of stunted fir trees to the break in the cliffs that gave passage to the strand. "Now, down by these rocks. It's a powerfully rough road, and I've told Michael time out of mind he ought to have it levelled, but much use there is in talking to him, and him with his head full of horses. Will you take a hold of my arm?"

"No, thanks. I can get on quite well alone."

"Well, step careful. Musha, but I was nearly down then myself. Do you know the name they give this crack in the cliffs?"

"No."

"It's the Devil's Keyhole."

"Why do they call it that?"

"Why, faith, you'll know that when you hear the wind blowing through it in winter. It screeches so you can hear it at Drumboyne. Do you know that I live at Drumboyne?"

"That's the village between here and Cloyne is it not?"

"That's it. But do you know where I live in Drumboyne?"

"No."

"Well, now, by any chance, did you see a bungalow on the right after you left Drumboyne, as you were driving here that day on the car with the young chap—Mr. What's-his-name?"

"Dashwood. Yes, I did see a bungalow."

"That's mine," said Mr. Giveen with a sigh. "As nice a house as there is in the country, if it wasn't that I was all alone in it."

"Don't you keep a servant?"

"A servant! Sure, of course I keep a servant—two. But it wasn't a servant I was meaning. Shall I tell you what I was meaning?"

"I'm not much interested in other people's affairs," said Miss Grimshaw hurriedly. "Ah! there's the sea at last."

A turn of the cleft had suddenly disclosed the great Atlantic Ocean.

Blue and smooth as satin, it came glassing in, breaking gently over and around the rocks—huge, black rocks, shaggy with seaweed, holding among them pools where at low tides you would find rock bass, lobsters, and crabs.

In winter, during the storms, this place was tremendous and white with flying foam, the waves bursting to the very cliff's base, the echoes shouting back the roar of the breakers, the breakers thundering and storming at the echoes, and over all the wind making a bugle of the Devil's Keyhole; but to-day nothing could be more peaceful, and the whisper of the low tide waves seething in amidst the rocks was a lullaby to rock a babe to sleep.

Just here, protected by the rocks, lay a tiny cove where French kept his boat, which he used for fishing and seal shooting. And here to-day, on a rock beside the boat, which was half water-borne, they found Doolan, the man who looked after the garden and hens and did odd jobs, among which was the duty of keeping the boat in order and looking after the fishing tackle.

"What a jolly little boat!" said the girl, resting her hand on the thwart of the sturdy little white-painted dinghy. "Do you go fishing in this?"

"Michael does," replied Mr. Giveen, "but I'm no fisherman. Doolan, isn't the sea smooth enough to take the young lady for a row?"

He shouted the words into the ear of the old weatherbeaten man, who was as deaf as a post.

"Say smooth enough to take the young lady for a row?" replied Doolan in a creaky voice that seemed to come from a distance. "And what smoother would you want it, Mr. Dick? Say smooth enough to take the young lady for a row? Sure, it's more like ile than say water, it is to-day. Is this the young lady you tould me you were going to take to say the sales?"

"I don't want to see any seals," cut in Miss Grimshaw. "I only came down to look at the sea."

"There you are!" burst out Mr. Giveen, like a child in a temper. "After I get the boat ready for you, thinking to give you a bit of pleasure, and take Doolan away from his work and all, and now you won't go!"

"But I said I wouldn't go!" said Miss Grimshaw.

"You didn't."

"I did"—searching her memory—"at least, I didn't say I would go."

"Well, say you will go now, and into the boat with you."

"I won't!"

"Well, then, all the fun's spoiled," said Mr. Giveen, "and it's a fool you've been making of me. Sure, it's hundreds of girls I've taken out to see the caves, and never one of them afraid but you."

"I'm not afraid," said Miss Grimshaw, beginning to waver, "and I don't want to spoil your fun. How long would it take us to see the caves?"

"Not more than an hour or two—less maybe."

"Well," said the girl, suddenly making up her mind, "I'll come."

It was a momentous decision, with far-reaching effects destined to touch all sorts of people and things, from Mr. French to Garryowen, a decision which, in the ensuing April, might have changed the course of racing events profoundly.

So slender and magical are the threads of cause that the fortunes of thousands of clerks with an instinct for racing, thousands of sportsmen, and innumerable "bookies," all were swept suddenly that afternoon into the control of an event so simple as a boating excursion on the west coast of Ireland.

She stepped into the boat, and took her seat in the stern. Mr. Giveen and Doolan pushed the little craft off, and just as she was water borne Mr. Giveen tumbled in over the bow, seized a scull, and pulled her into deep water.

The rocks made a tiny natural harbour, where the dinghy floated with scarcely a movement while the oarsman got out both sculls.

"Isn't he coming with us?" asked Miss Grimshaw.

"Who?"

"The old man—Doolan—what's his name?"

"Sure, what would we be bothered taking him for?" replied the other, turning the boat's nose and sculling her with a few powerful strokes to the creek's mouth, where the incoming swell lifted her with a buoyant and balloon-like motion that brought a sickening sense of insecurity to the heart of the girl.

"Well, I thought he was coming with us, or I would not have got in."

"Well, you're in now," said Mr. Giveen, "and there's no use crying over spilt milk."

He had taken his hat off, and his bald head shone in the sun. Snow-white gulls were flying in the blue overhead, the profound and glassy swell, which was scarcely noticeable from the shore, out here made vales and hills of water, long green slopes in which the seaweed floated like mermaids' hair.

Far out now the loveliness of the scene around her made the girl forget for a moment her sense of insecurity. The whole beauty and warmth of summer seemed gathered into that September afternoon, and the coast showed itself league upon league, vast cliff and silent strand, snowed with seagulls, terns, guillemots, and fading away twenty miles to the north and twenty miles to the south in the haze and the blueness of the summer sky.

The great silence, the vast distances, the happy blue of sea and sky, the voicelessness of that tremendous coast—all these cast the mind of the gazer into a trance in which the soul responded for a moment to that mystery of mysteries, the call of distance.

"There's the Seven Sisters," said Mr. Giveen, resting his oars and pointing away to the north, where the peaked rocks stood from the sea, cutting the sky with their sharp angles and making froth of the swell with their spurs.

Broad ledges of rock occurred here and there at their base, and on these ledges the seals on an afternoon like this would be sunning themselves, watching with liquid human eyes the surging froth, and ready to dive fathoms deep at the approach of man.

Miss Grimshaw, coming back from her reverie, heard borne on the breeze, which was blowing from the north, the faint crying of the gulls round the rocks. It was the voices of the Seven Sisters for ever lamenting, blue weather or grey, calm or storm.

"Where are you going to?" asked she.

"Wherever you please," said he. "If we were to go on as we're going now, do you know where we'd land?"

"No."

"America. How'd you like to go to America with me? Say the word now," went on Mr. Giveen, with a jocularity that was quite lost on his companion. "Say the word, and on we'll go."

"Turn the boat round," said Miss Grimshaw, suddenly and with decision. "We are too far out. Row back. I want to go home."

"And how about the seals?"

"I don't want to see them. Go back!"

"Well now, listen to me. Do you see over there, behind us, that black hole in the cliffs, about a quarter of a mile, or maybe less, from the Devil's Keyhole?"

"Which? Where? Oh, that! Yes."

"Well, that's the big sea cave that everyone goes to see. Sure, you haven't seen Ireland at all till you've been in the Devil's Kitchen—that's the name of it. Shall I row you there?"

"Yes, anywhere, so long as we get close to the shore. It frightens me out here."

"Sure, what call have you to be afraid when I'm with you?" asked Mr. Giveen in a tender tone of voice, turning the boat's head and making for the desired shore.

"I don't know. Let us talk of something else. Why do they call it the Devil's Kitchen?"

"Faith, you wouldn't ask that if you heard the hullabaloo that comes out of it in the big storms. You'd think, by the frying and the boiling, it was elephants and whales they were cooking. But in summer it's as calm as a—calm as a—what's-its-name. Musha, I'll be remembering it in a minit."

Mr. Giveen grumbled to himself in thought as he lay to his oars. Sometimes the brogue of the common people with whom he had collogued from boyhood, and which underlay his cultivated speech as a stratum of rock underlies arable land, would crop up thick and strong, especially when he was communing with himself, as now, hunting for a metaphor to express the sea's calmness.

Miss Grimshaw, passionately anxious to be on land again, was not the less so as she watched him muttering and mouthing and talking to himself. She had now been contemplating him at close quarters in the open light of day for a considerable time, and her study of him did not improve her opinion of him, in fact, she was beginning to perceive that in Mr. Giveen there was something more than a harmless gentleman rather soft and with a passion for flirtation.

She saw, or thought she could see, behind the Sunny Jim expression, behind the jocularity and buffoonery and soft stupidity which made him sometimes mildly amusing and sometimes acutely irritating, a malignant something, a spirit vicious and little, a spirit that would do a nasty turn for a man rather than a nice one, and perhaps even a cruel act on occasion. Whatever this spirit might be, it was little—a thing more to dislike than fear.

They were now in close to the cliffs, and the entrance to the Devil's Kitchen loomed large—a semicircular arch beneath which the green water flooded, washing the basalt pillars with a whispering sound which came distinctly to the boat. The cliff above stretched up, immense, and the crying of the cormorants filled the air and filled the echoes.

Wheeling about the rocks away up, where in the breeding season they had their nests, they seemed to resent the approach of the boat. On a ledge of rock near the cove mouth something dark moved swiftly and then splashed into the sea and was free.

It was a seal.

"I'll take you into the cave to have a look at it," cried Mr. Giveen, raising his voice to outshout the cormorants. "You needn't be a bit afraid. The devil's not here to-day—it's too fine weather for him."

"Don't go far in," cried Miss Grimshaw, and as she spoke the words the boat, urged by the rower, passed into the gloom beneath the archway.

She saw the bottle-green water of the rising and falling swell washing the pillars and the walls from which the seaweed hung in fathom-long ribbons; then they were in almost darkness, and as Mr. Giveen rested on his oars, she could hear the water slobbering against the walls, and from far away in the gloom, every now and then, a bursting sound as the swell filled some hole or shaft and was spat out again.

After a moment or two, her eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, the vast size of the place became apparent. Far greater than the inside of a cathedral, given over to darkness and the sea, the Devil's Kitchen was certainly a place to make one pause.

In the storms of winter, when, like the great mouth of some giant fighting the waves, it roared and stormed and spat out volumes of water, filled now almost to its roof, now blowing the sea out in showers of spray, the horror of it would be for a bold imagination to conceive.

Even to-day, in its best mood, it was not a place to linger in.

"Now I've brought you in," said Mr. Giveen, his voice finding echoes in the darkness, "and what will you give me to bring you out?"

"Nothing. Turn the boat. I don't like the place. Turn the boat, I say!"

She stamped on the bottom boards, and her voice came back to her ears with a horrible cavernous sound, as did the laughter of Mr. Giveen.

He turned the boat so that she was fronting the arch of light at the entrance, but he did not row towards it. Instead, he began rocking the boat from side to side in a boyish and larky way that literally brought the heart of Miss Grimshaw into her mouth.

"Stop it!" she cried. "We'll be upset. Oh, I'll tell Mr. French. Stop it! Do, please—please stop it."

"Well, what will you give me if I stop it? Come, now, don't be shy. You know what I mean. What will you give me?"

"Anything you like."

"Then we'll make it a kiss?"

"Yes, anything! Only take me out of this."

"Two kisses?" asked Mr. Giveen, pulling in his oars and making to come aft.

"Twenty. Only not here. You'll upset the boat. Don't stand up. You'll upset us."

"Well, when we get back, then?" said the amorous one.

"Yes."

"And you won't tell Michael?"

"No, no, no!"

"On your word of honour?"

"Yes."

"Swear by all's blue."

"Yes."

"But that's not swearing."

"I don't know what all's blue is. Ouch!"

The boat, drifting, had drifted up against the wall of the cave, and the swell, which had a rise and fall of eighteen inches or more, was grinding the starboard thwart lovingly against the seaweed and rock.

"I swear by all's blue," shrieked the girl. "Anything! Quick! Push her off, or we'll be over."

"Faith, and that was a near shave," said Mr. Giveen, shoving the boat off with an oar.

He got the sculls in the rowlocks, and a few strokes brought them out under the arch into daylight again.

"Mind, you've sworn," said Mr. Giveen, who evidently had a very present and wholesome dread of his cousin, Michael French.

"Don't speak to me," replied his charge, whose lips were dry, but whose terror had now, on finding herself in comparative safety, turned into burning wrath. "Don't speak to me, you coward! You—you beast—or I'll hit you with this."

A boat-hook of ash and phosphor-bronze lay at her feet, and she seized it.

Mr. Giveen eyed the boat-hook. It did not promise kisses on landing, but it was a very efficient persuader, in its way, to a swift return.

* * * * * * *

Now, Mr. French, that day after luncheon, had ridden into Drumboyne about some pigs he was anxious to sell. He had failed to come to terms with the pig merchant, and had returned out of temper.

In the stableyard he met Moriarty.

"If you plaze, sorr," said Moriarty, "I've just heard from Doolan that Mr. Giveen has taken the young lady out in the boat."

The contempt which Moriarty had for Mr. Giveen and the dislike were fully expressed in the tone of his words.

"D'you mean to say that idiotic fool has taken Miss Grimshaw out in the dinghy?" cried Michael French, letting himself down from the saddle.

"Yes, sorr."

"To blazes with Doolan! What the—what the—what the—did he mean not telling me!"

"I don't know, sorr. Here he is himself. Micky, come here! The master wants to speak wid you."

Mr. Doolan, who was passing across the yard with a tin basin of fowls' food—it had a wooden handle, and he was holding it by the handle—approached, deaf to what Moriarty said, but answering his gesture.

"What did you mean by letting Mr. Giveen take the young lady out in the dinghy without telling me, you old fool?" asked his master.

"Sure, he tould me not to tell you, sorr," creaked Micky.

"To the devil with you!" cried Mr. French, giving the tin basin a kick that sent the contents flying into Micky's face, spattering it with meal and soaked bread and finely chopped bits of meat till it looked like a new form of pudding. "Off with you, and clean your face, and not another word out of you, or I'll send you flying after the basin. Come on with me, Moriarty, down to the cove, till we see if we can get sight of them."

"Think of the fool letting the girl go out with that egg-headed ass of a Dick!" grumbled French, half to himself and half to Moriarty, as he made down the Devil's Keyhole, followed by the other. "He's been hanging after her for the last week, popping in at all hours of the day, and as sure as he gets a girl into the boat close with him, he's sure to be making a fool of himself, and maybe upsetting her, and the both of them drowned. Not that he'd matter; not that he'd drown, either, for that bladder of a head of his would keep him afloat. Do you see any sight of them, Moriarty?"

They had reached the shore, and Moriarty, standing on a rock and shading his eyes, was looking over the sea.

"No, sorr."

"Come on to the cove. He's sure to come back there, if he ever comes back. If you can't see them from there, they must have gone down the coast to the caves. I tell you what it is, Moriarty, relations or no relations, I'm not going to have that chap hanging round the premises any longer. He comes to Drumgool, and he sits and reads a newspaper, and he pretends to be a fool, and all the time he's taking everything in, and he goes off and talks about everything he sees, and I believe it's him and his talk that's knocked my bargain with old Shoveler over those pigs. He heard me say I'd take two pounds less than I was asking Shoveler, and to-day the old chap was 'stiff as a rock.'"

"I don't think he's any good about the place, sorr," said Moriarty. "Yesterday, when Andy was giving Garryowen his exercise on the four-mile track, there he was, pottin' about with his eye on the horse. You know, sorr, Andy has no likin' for him, and as Andy was passin' the big scrub, there was Misther Giveen, and he up and calls to Andy, 'That's a likely colt,' says he, 'and is me cousin thinkin' of runnin' him next year?' he says."

"Good heavens!" said Garryowen's owner, taking his seat on a rock. "I hope Andy didn't split?"

"Split, sorr! 'To h—— wid you,' says Andy and on he goes, and Buck Slane, who was up on the Cat, and be the same token, sorr, Garryowen can give the Cat two furlongs in a mile and lather him. Buck says the black blood come in his face, and he shuck the stick he was holdin' in his hand after Andy and the colt as if he'd like to lay it on thim."

"Well, I'll lay a stick on him," said French, "if he comes round asking his questions. Moriarty, only you and me and the young lady—she's safe—and Buck Slane—and he's safe—know what we're going to do with Garryowen, and where we're going to run him. If we want to keep him dark, we mustn't have fellows poking their noses about the place."

"That young gintleman from over the wather, sorr, is he safe?"

"Mr. Dashwood? Yes, he's a gentleman. Even so, I did not tell him anything about it. He saw the colt, and, by gad! didn't he admire him. But I said nothing of what I was going to do with him."

"Here they are, sorr," cried Moriarty, who was standing up, and so had a better view of the sea.

Mr. French rose to his feet.

The dinghy was rounding the rocks. Mr. Giveen, at the sculls, was evidently remonstrating with the girl, who, seeing help at hand, and vengeance in the forms of the two men on the beach, was standing up in the stern of the boat—at least, half standing up—now almost erect, now crouched and clutching the thwart, she seemed ready to jump on the rocks they were passing—to jump anywhere so long as she got free of the boat and her companion.

One might have thought that fear was impelling her. It was not fear, however, but anger and irritation.

French and Moriarty rushed into the water up to their knees, seized the dinghy on either side of the bow, and ran her up on the sand, while Mr. Giveen, with his coat in his hand and his hat on the back of his head, tumbled over the side and made as if to make off.

"Stop him!" cried the girl. "He's insulted me! He has nearly drowned me! He frightened me into swearing I wouldn't tell!"

"I didn't," cried Mr. Giveen, now in the powerful grasp of his cousin. "It wasn't my fault. Let loose of me. Let up, or I'll have the law of you!"

"Didn't you?" replied French, who had caught his kinsman by the scruff of his neck and was holding him from behind, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, "we'll soon see that. Moriarty, run for a policeman. Take a horse and go for a constable at Drumboyne. Well, then, what do you mean, eh?—what do you mean, eh?—you blackguard, with your philandering? You bubble-headed, chuckle-headed son of a black sweep, you! Call yourself an Irish gentleman! Insulting a lady! Miss Grimshaw, say the word, and I'll stick the ugly head of him in the water and drown him!"

"No, no!" cried the girl, taking the words literally. "Perhaps he didn't mean it. I don't think he is quite right. He only wanted to kiss me. He rocked the boat. Perhaps it was only in fun."

"Now listen to me," cried French, accentuating every second word with a shake, "if I ever catch you within five miles of Drumgool again I'll give you a lambasting you won't get over in a month. That's my last word to you. Off you go!"

The last words were followed by a most explicit kick that sent Mr. Giveen racing and running across the bit of sand till he reached the rocks, over which he scrambled, making record time to the mouth of the Devil's Keyhole. Near that spot he turned and shook his fist at his kinsman.

"I'll be even with you yet, Mick French!" cried Mr. Giveen.

"Away with you!" replied the threatened one, making as if to run after him, at which the figure of Mr. Giveen vanished into the Devil's Keyhole as a rat vanishes up a drain.

French burst into a laugh, in which Miss Grimshaw joined.

"Now he'll be your enemy," said the girl as Moriarty flung the sculls over his shoulder and they prepared to return to the house.

"Much I care!" replied the owner of Garryowen.

CHAPTER VIII

The first and most pressing necessity of a woman's life is—what? Love? No, a home. A home implies love and everything in life worth having.

A girl without a home and without relations is the loneliest thing on earth, simply because she is a woman, and nothing has such a capacity for loneliness as a woman.

Give her anything in the way of a tie, and she will crystallise on to it and take it to heart, just as the sugar in a solution of barley-sugar takes the string.

So it came about that Violet Grimshaw found herself, in less than three weeks after her arrival at Drumgool, not only acclimatised to her new surroundings, but literally one of the family. She had caught on to them, and they had caught on to her. French, with that charming easiness which one finds rarely nowadays, except in that fast vanishing individual, the real old Irish gentleman, had from the first treated her as though he had known her for years. Guessing, with the sure intuition of the irresponsible, the level-headedness and worth behind her prettiness, he now talked to her about his most intimate affairs, both financial and family.

In him and in the other denizens of Drumgool was brought home to her the power of the Celtic nature to imagine things and take them for granted.

"Now, where's me colander?" Mrs. Driscoll would say (as, for instance, in a dialogue which reached the girl one afternoon with a whiff of kitchen-scented air through a swing-door left open). "Where's me colander? It's that black baste of a Doolan. I b'lave he's taken it to feed the chickens. I'll tie a dish-cloth to his tail if he comes into me kitchen takin' me colanders! Doolan! Foolan! Come here wid ye, and bring me me colander. I'll tell the masther on you for takin' me things. You haven't got it? May Heaven forgive you, but I saw you with the two eyes in me head, and it in your hand! It's forenint me nose? Which nose? Oh, glory be to Heaven! so it is. Now, out of me kitchen wid you, and don't be littherin' me floor with your dirty boots!"

The connection of Doolan with the missing colander was based on a pure assumption.

Just so French had adorned the portrait of Miss Grimshaw, which he had painted in his own mind, with spectacles. And he would have sworn to those spectacles in a court of law.

Just so, by extension, he saw Garryowen passing the winning-post despite all the obstacles in his path. But it was the case of Effie that brought home to Miss Grimshaw this trait with full force.

"Mr. French," said she one morning, entering the sitting-room where he was writing letters, "do you know Effie can walk?"

"I beg your pardon—what did you say?" asked Mr. French, dropping his pen and turning in his chair.

"The child's not a cripple at all. She can walk as well as I can."

"Walk! Why, she's been a cripple for years! Walk! Why, Mrs. Driscoll never lets her on her feet by any chance!"

"Yes, but when she's alone she runs about the room, and she's as sound on her legs as I am."

"But Dr. O'Malley said with his own mouth she was a cripple for life!"

"How long ago was that?"

"Four years."

"Has he seen her lately?"

"Seen her lately? Why, he's been in his coffin three years come next October!"

"Have you had no other doctor to see her?"

"Sure, there's no one else but Rafferty at Cloyne, and he's a fool—and she won't see doctors; she says they are no use to her."

"Well, all I can say is that I've seen her walking. She can run, and she tells me she has been able to for years, only no one will believe her. Whenever they see her on her feet she says they pop her back on the couch. The poor child seems to have become so hopeless of making any one believe her that she has submitted to her fate. I believe she half believes herself that she oughtn't to walk, that it's a sort of sin; she does it more out of perversity than anything else. She's been coddled into invalidhood, and I'm going to coddle her out of it," said Miss Grimshaw. "And if you will come upstairs with me now, I'll show you that she's as firm on her legs as you are yourself."

They went upstairs. As Miss Grimshaw turned the handle of the door of Effie's room a scuffling noise was heard, and when they entered, the child was sitting up on the couch, flushed and bright-eyed.

"Why, what's all this, Effie?" cried her father. "What's all this I've been hearing about your running about the room? Stick your legs out, and let me see you do it."

Effie grinned.

"I will," said she, "if you promise not to tell Mrs. Driscoll."

For three years the unfortunate child had been suffering from no other disease but Mrs. Driscoll's vivid imagination and the firm belief held by her that the child's back would "snap in two" if she stood on her legs. Vivid and vital, this belief, like some people's faith, refused to listen to suggestion or criticism.

"I won't tell," said Effie's father. "Up with you and let's see you on your pins."

"Now," said Miss Grimshaw, when the evolutions were over, and Miss French had demonstrated her soundness in wind and limb to the full satisfaction of her sire, "what do you think of that?"

"But how did you find it out?" asked the astonished man.

"She told me it as a secret."

"But why didn't she tell anyone else, with a whole houseful of people to tell, this three years and more?"

"She did, but no one would believe her—would they, Effie?"

"No," replied Effie.

"You told Mrs. Driscoll over and over again you could walk, and what did she say to you?"

"She told me to 'hold my whisht and not to be talking nonsense.' She said she'd give me to the black man that lives in the oven if I put a foot to the ground, and I told papa I was all right, and could walk, if they'd let me, and he only laughed and told me not to be getting ideas in my head."

"Faith, and that's the truth," said her papa. "I thought it was only her fancies."

"Well," said Miss Grimshaw, "I examined her back this morning, and there is nothing wrong with it. Her legs are all right. She's in good health. Well, where's your invalid?"

"Faith, I don't know," said French. "This beats Bannagher."

He went to the bell and pulled it.

"Send up Mrs. Driscoll," said the master of Drumgool. "Send up Mrs. Driscoll. And what are you standing there with your mouth hanging open for?"

"Sure, Miss Effie, and what are you doin' off the couch?" cried Norah, shaken out of her respect for her master by the sight of Effie on her legs.

"Doing off the couch? Away with you down, and send up Mrs. Driscoll. You and your couch! You've been murdering the child between you for the last three years with your couches and your coddling. Off with you!"

"Don't be harsh to them," said Effie's saviour, as Norah departed in search of the housekeeper. "They did it for the best."

Half-an-hour later, Mrs. Driscoll, with her pet illusion still perfectly unshattered, returned to her kitchen to conduct the preparations for dinner, while Effie, freed for ever from her bonds, sat on a stool before the nursery fire, reading Mrs. Brown's adventures in Paris.

Miss Grimshaw, coming down a little later, found three letters that had just come by post awaiting her. One was from Mr. Dashwood.

It was a short and rather gloomy letter. He had asked permission to write to her, and she had been looking forward to a letter from him, for she liked him, and his recollection formed a picture in her mind pleasant to contemplate; but this short and rather gloomy screed was so unlike him that she at once guessed something wrong in his affairs.

Womanlike, she was not over pleased that he should permit his private worries to take the edge off his pen when he was writing to her, and she determined to leave the letter unanswered.

CHAPTER IX

It was November, and it had been raining for a week.

The sun had vanished, the hills had vanished, the land had all but vanished—nothing remained but the wind and the rain, the rain and the wind.

Effie's short lessons only consumed a couple of hours of each rain-soaked, wind-blown day. No one ever came to Drumgool except, maybe, a farmer now and then to see Mr. French; and the long-drawn "hoo-hoo" of the wind through the Devil's Keyhole, the rattling of windows fighting with the wind, and the tune of wastepipes emptying into over-full waterbutts were beginning to prey upon Miss Grimshaw's nerves.

Even Mr. Giveen would have been a distraction these times; but Mr. Giveen was now at open enmity with his kinsman, and spoiling with all the bitterness of his petty nature to do him an injury.

And Giveen was not French's only enemy just now. The United Irish League was against him. He had let farms on the eleven months' system, and he had let farms for grazing, two high offences in the eyes of the league.

"The time has come to put an end to the big grazing ranches and to plant the people on the soil," says the league, as though the people were seed potatoes. "You mustn't take a farm on an eleven-month agreement," goes on this Areopagus of plunderers and short-sighted patriots. "For," continues the league, "if you do, we'll drive the cattle off your land with hazel sticks, and on you we will commit every dirty outrage that the black heart of a low-down Irishman can invint, Begob!" And they do.

The law of the league is the law of the west of Ireland. King Edward does not reign there in the least.

"Come down here," cried Mr. French one morning, standing in the hall and calling up the stairs, where he had caught the flutter of Miss Grimshaw's skirt. "Come down here till I show you something you've never seen before. Come in here."

He led the way into a small room, where he received farmers and tenants, and there, sitting on a chair, was an old man with a face furrowed like a ploughed field. His battered old hat was on the floor, and he held in his hand two cows' tails, and there he sat, purblind, and twisting the tails in his hands, a living picture of age and poverty and affliction.

"Don't get up, Ryan. Sit you down where you are," said French, "and tell the young lady what you have in your hands."

"Sure, they're me cows' tails," piped the old fellow, like a child saying a lesson. "Me beautiful cows' tails, that the blackguards chopped off wid a knife—divil mend them!—and I lyin' in bed in the grey of the marnin'. 'Listen,' I says to me wife. 'What ails the crathurs and they boohooin' like that?' 'Get up an' see,' she says. And up I gets, and slips on me breeches and coat, and out I goes, and finds thim hangin' over the rail, dhrippin' wid blood, and they cut off wid a knife. Oh, the blackguards, to chop their knives into the poor innocent crathurs, and lave me widout a cow, and the rint comin' due, and me wife sick in her bed, and all. Sure, what way is that to be thratin' a man just bekase I niver answered their divil's notice to quit?"

"Cut off his cows' tails?" cried the girl in horror. "Were they alive?"

"Yes," said French. "It's little those ruffians care for an animal—or a man either."

"Oh, but what a cruel, sneaking thing to do! Why did they do it?"

"Because he would not give up his bit of a farm. And they call themselves Irishmen; and the worst of the business is, they are. Well, Ryan, keep your seat, and I'll send you in a drop of whisky. And don't bother about the rent—I expect the next thing will be they'll visit me. Faith, and they'll get a warm reception if they do!"

Mr. French left the room, followed by the girl. "That's the sort of thing that's been the ruin of Ireland," said he, as he pulled the sitting-room bell for Norah. "Talk of landlords! Good heavens! when was there ever a landlord would cut a cow's tail off? When was there ever a landlord would mutilate horses? Did ye ever hear of a landlord firing a gun through the window of a house where a lonely old woman was and nearly blow the roof off her skull, all because her son refused to 'strip his farm,' as they call it? And that was done ten miles from here a month before you came. Norah, get the whisky and give old Ryan a glassful and a bite to eat. He's sitting in there in the little study, with his two cow's tails, those blackguards have cut off, in his hand. Take him into the kitchen and dry him, and let him sit by the fire; and tell Mrs. Driscoll to give him something for his old wife, for she's sick in bed.

"Yes, that's what Ireland has come to. A lot of poor, ignorant people like Ryan, ruled by a syndicate of ruffians, that make their own laws and don't care a button for the law of God or the law of the land. It's unbelievable, but there it is. And now they'll be going for me. I've had several anonymous letters in the last month, threatening boycotting or worse, if I don't amend my ways. Much I care for them! Look, the rain's cleared off. I'm going to the meet of the hounds at Drumboyne. Would you care to drive with me? If you had a riding habit, we might have ridden."

"But I have a riding habit. It's pretty old, but——"

"Up with you and put it on, then," said Mr. French; "and I'll tell Moriarty to saddle the grey mare for you. She'll be round at the door in ten minutes."

Twenty minutes later, Miss Grimshaw, in a riding habit and covert coat, relic of her money-making days with Hardmuth, was accompanying Mr. French down the drive, she on the grey mare, he on a raw-boned hunter with a head which had suggestions about it of a fiddle and the devil.

She was a good horsewoman. In London, her only extravagance had been an early morning canter in the Park on a hired hack. It was for this she had bought the habit.

They struck the road. It was twenty minutes past nine, and as the meet was at half-past ten, they had plenty of time.

The clouds had ceased raining, had risen to an immense height, and there, under the influence of some wind of the upper atmosphere, had become mackerelled—a grey, peaceful sky, showing here and there through a rift the faintest tinge of blue.

The air smelt of the rain and the rain-wet earth, and the hills lay distinct, grey, peaceful, wonderfully clear.

Nowhere else in the world but in Ireland do you get such weather as this.

Hennessy, the master of the hounds, lived at a place called Barrington Court, seven miles south of Drumboyne. He was a young man, a bachelor, and a pretty fast liver; he owned a good bit of land, and, like every other landowner in the county, was pretty much under the thumb of the league. But he was, unlike French, a diplomat.

"That's Hennessy," said Mr. French, when the turning of the road suddenly showed them the long, straggling street of Drumboyne, the market cross, the hounds, the master and the whips, and about two dozen horsemen, mounted on all sorts and conditions of nags, all congregated about the cross. "We're just in time. The first meet of the season, too, and a grand day for the scent."

Violet Grimshaw, who had never until this seen a meet of the hounds except in the illustrated papers, looked before her with interest not unmixed with amusement at the crowd surrounding the cross.

All sorts of rabble had gathered from north, south, east, and west. Gossoons without a shoe to their feet; chaps from "over beyant the big bog," in knee-breeches and armed with shillelaghs; dirty little girls dragging younger sisters by the hand to have a look at the "houn's"; Father Roche, from Cloyne, who had stopped to say a cheery word to Hennessy; Long Doolan, the rat catcher, in an old red waistcoat; Billy Sheelan, of the Station Inn, the same who had directed Mr. Dashwood on his fishing expedition, and who, by popular report, was ruining his mother and "drinking the inn dry"—all these and a lot more were chattering and laughing, shouting one to the other, and giving advice to the whips, when French and his companion, rounding the turn of the road, made their appearance.

The effect was magical. The talking and the laughing ceased. Men fell away from one another, and as French rode up to the master, three farmers who had been talking to him turned their horses so that their backs were presented to the newcomers.

By the inn door, which was directly opposite the cross, French perceived Mr. Giveen. Mr. Giveen vanished into the inn, but a moment later his face appeared at the barroom window, and remained there during all that followed.

"Well, Hennessy," said the master of Drumgool, appearing to take no notice of the coldness of his reception, "you've a fine day for the first meet. Allow me to introduce you to a young lady who is staying with me. Mr. Hennessy—Miss Grimshaw. And where are you going to draw?"

"Barrington Scrub, I believe," replied Hennessy, saluting the girl. "Yes, it's not a bad day. Do you intend to follow?"

"No. We'll go to see you draw the scrub, that's all. Why, there's Father Roche! And how are you to-day? Faith, it's younger you're looking every time I meet you. And why haven't I seen you at Drumgool these months?" As he turned to talk to the priest several of the hunt drew close to Hennessy and spoke to him in a low tone, but so vehemently that Violet, observing everything, overheard several of their remarks.

"Not a fut does he follow the houn's. What do I care about him? Sure, Giveen said he swore he'd fling the whole of the Castle French property into grazing land to spite the league. Listen now, and it's the last time I'll say it. If he goes, we stay."

"French!" said the master, detaching himself from the group.

"Hullo!" replied Mr. French.

"Just a word with you."

He drew him aside.

"There's a lot of bad blood here. It's not my fault, but you know these chaps, and they have a down on you, every one of them, and they say if you follow to the scrub, they'll all stay behind. Now, don't get waxy. You know it's not my fault, but there it is."

French's eyes blazed.

"Follow you to the scrub!" said he in a loud, ringing voice. "Thank you for the hint, Dick Hennessy. Follow you with that pack of half-mounted rat-catchers! I was going to ride to the scrub to see if there was ever a fox white-livered enough to turn its tail on them, and, sure, if he did, he couldn't run for laughing. And, talking of tails," said Mr. French, turning from the master and addressing the market-place, "if the gentleman who cut off the tails of old Ryan's cows will only step forward, I'll accommodate him with my opinion of him here and now. And it's not the whip-end of my hunting-crop I'll do it with, either."

No gentleman present was at all desirous of being accommodated, for French turned the scale at fourteen stone, all muscle, and he was a match for any two men present.

He waited a moment. Then he took off his hat to Miss Grimshaw.

"I must apologise to you," he said, "for losing my temper. Let us on to Cloyne, for this is no place for a lady to be, at all."

He touched the fiddle-headed devil he was riding with the spur, making him plunge and scatter the ragamuffins who were hanging on the scene with open mouths, and, cannoning against and nearly unseating one of the "half-mounted rat-catchers," he took the road to Cloyne, followed by the girl.

It was the first time he had come in clash with his countrymen; the storm had been brewing a long time, but it had burst at last. To think that he, Michael French, in his own county, had been ordered not to follow the hounds by a herd of dirty-fisted petty farmers was a thought to make his blood boil. Petty spite, needle-sharp—that was the weapon the league were using against Michael French by day. In their own disgusting language, he was a "first offender." Even yet, if he chose to give in and eat humble pie out of the grimy hands of the men who would be his masters, he might find forgiveness. If not, boycotting would follow, and who knows what else?

He knew this, and he knew that he had no hope of help from the law. The police might arrest his tormenters if they were caught trying to do him an injury; but the jury, if they were tried, would be pretty sure to let the offenders slip. And it was a hundred to one they would never be caught, for these people are trained sneaks; no area sneak is more soft-footed or cunning than the gentleman with the black cloth mask and the knife, who comes like a thief in the night to work brutal mutilation on cattle.

Garryowen was the only thing he was afraid of; but in Moriarty he had a rock of strength to depend upon.

"Did you see Dick Giveen?" said he, as the girl ranged alongside of him. "He's had a finger in this pie. Did you see him at the inn window with his nose to the pane? He knew I'd come to the meet, and he came to see those chaps get the better of me."

"They didn't get that," said Violet. "They looked like whipped puppies when you were talking to them. Yes, I'm sure that man has been doing you injury. I heard one of the farmers say to Mr. Hennessy that Giveen had said you would do your best to spite the league. I wish I hadn't gone with him in the boat that day. If I hadn't, this would not have occurred."

"I don't care for those chaps so much as for Dick Giveen," said he. "He's a bad man to vex. These fools always are. He'll be on my tracks now like a stoat trying to do me some dirty trick. He'll watch and wait. I know him. But if he comes within five miles of Drumgool, I'll put a bullet in him, or my name's not Michael French."

They rode on through the grey, still day. Now and again a whiff of turf smoke from a cabin by the way made the air delicious. Over the black bog pitches and wild, broken land a soft wind had risen, blowing from the south, and bringing with it the scent of the earth, and far ahead of them a trace of smoke from the chimneys of Cloyne went up against the background of hills.

Mr. French and Miss Grimshaw stopped at the Station Inn at Cloyne, and put the horses up. French ordered some bread and cheese. "And now," said he, "while they're getting it ready, would you like to see a real old Irish cabin? I'll take you to see old Mrs. Moriarty down the road, and you can amuse yourself talking to her for a minute, while I run in and see Janes, my agent. Mrs. Moriarty is a witch, so they say, but she's true to the Frenches. She was a kitchen-maid at Drumgool in my grandfather's time. She believes in fairies and leprechauns, and all that nonsense. Here we are."

He stopped at the door of a cabin a hundred yards away from the inn and knocked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he lifted the latch and opened the door.

"Are you there, Kate?" cried he into the dark interior of the place.

"Sure, and where else would I be?" replied a wheezy voice. "Who are you, lettin' the draught in on me? Oh! glory be to Heaven! it's Mr. Michael himself."

"Come in," said French, and the girl followed him into the one room where Mrs. Moriarty kept herself and her hens—two of them were roosting on the rafters—and where she was sitting now over a bit of fire, with her bonnet on to keep the "cowld" from her head, and a short black pipe between her teeth. It was an appalling place considered as a human dwelling. The floor was of clay, the window had only one practicable pane, the rest were broken and stuffed with rags. A heap of rags in the corner did duty for a bed. By the fire and beside the old lady, who was sitting on a stool, a bantam hen brooding in the warmth cocked one bloodshot eye up at the visitors.

"I've brought a young lady to see you, Kate," said Mr. French. "Talk to her and tell her of the fairies, for I'm going down the road to see Mr. Janes, and I won't be a minute, and I'll send you a drop of whisky from the inn to warm your gizzard when I get back."

"Sure, it's welcome she is," said the old woman. "But it isn't a seat I have to ask her to sit on, and I stuck to this ould stool wid the rheumatiz in me legs. Get out wid you, Norah," making a dive with a bit of stick at the bantam, which, taking the hint, fluttered into a corner, "and make way for the young lady. You'll excuse her, miss; she's the only one of siven I brought up wid me own hand. Sure, it's not from anywhere in these parts you've come from?"

She was peering up from under her bonnet at the girl's face, and Violet, fascinated by that terrible purblind gaze, thought that she had never seen tragedy written on a human countenance so plainly as on the stone-like mask which the red glimmer of the turf fire showed up to her beneath the bonnet of the old woman.

"No," said she; "I come from America."

"Ochone!" cried Mrs. Moriarty. "Sure, it's there me boy Mike went forty years ago—forty years ago!—and niver a word or a letther from him for twenty long years. Maybe you never chanced to hear of him, miss? He was in the bricklayin'. Six-fut-six he stood widout his brogues, and the lovely red hair on the head of him was curly as a rethraver's back. And, sure, what am I talkin' about? It's grey he'd be now. Ochone! afther all thim years!"

"No," said the girl, "I never heard of him; but America is a big place. Cheer up. You may hear of him yet, and here's something that may bring you luck!"

She took a shilling from the pocket of her covert coat and put it in the hand of the old woman, who took it and blessed her, and wrapped it in a scrap of paper.

"The blessin's of God on you, and may the divil bile his pot wid the man that desaves you! Oh! sure, it's the face of a shillin' I haven't seen for more than a twel'month, and I afeared to say a word, for the guardians do be strugglin' to get me into the House. Half-a-crown a week and a bandage for me poor leg is all I've had out of the blackgyards, and they sittin' on the poor wid one hand and fillin' their bellies wid the other. Atin' and dhrinkin' and havin' the hoight of fine times they do be wid the money of the parish. May it stick in their livers till the divil chokes their black mouths with burnin' turves an' bastes them wid the bilin' tears of the poor they do be defraudin'! And they're all up against Mr. Michael. Whisht! now, and I'll tell you somethin'. Shusey Gallagher, she's servant beyant over there at Blood, the farrier's; she tould me to kape it saycret they was going to play their tricks on Mr. Michael's horses if he went on lettin' his land to the graziers. She said they was going to——"

At this moment the cabin door was flung open and a ragged urchin popped his head in, shouted, "Boo!" and clapped the door to again. It was a favourite pastime with the Cloyne children to shout through old Mrs. Moriarty's door, and then watch her raging through the window.

"Away wid yiz!" yelled Mrs. Moriarty, forgetting Violet, Mr. French's enemies, and everything else in her excitement, turning to the window, where she knew her tormenter would be, and shaking her fist at the grinning face peeping in at her. "Away wid yiz, or I'll cut your lights out, comin' shoutin' through me dure, you divil's baboon, wid your ugly gob stuck at me window there! Gr-r-r! Out wid you, you baste, you, or I'll lay you flat so your mother won't know you wid a sod of turf! Off wid you and ax your father what he meant gettin' such a monkey-faced parrit and lettin' it loose on the parish widout a chain to it, you cross-eyed son of a blackgyard, you!"

All of which was better than pearls to the one at the window.

Horrified at the language, and fearing a stroke for Mrs. Moriarty, the girl ran to the door and opened it, only to see a small gossoon, bare-legged and bare-footed, vanishing round the corner.

Then she came back, anxious to get out of Mrs. Moriarty more information concerning the plans against French, but the source had dried up. The old lady declared herself to be moidhered, and her wits to be all astray.

"Well, listen to me," said Violet. "If you hear any more of those men going to harm Mr. French or his horses let me know, and I'll give you a silver five-shilling piece for yourself."

Mrs. Moriarty understood that.

At this moment the door opened, and Mr. French appeared, and, leaving the old lady to her pipe and the prospect of a glass of whisky, they went back to the inn for luncheon.

The hideous, old-fashioned Irish custom of dinner at four o'clock had been put aside on account of Miss Grimshaw. Seven o'clock was the dinner hour at Drumgool now, and after dinner that night, Effie having departed for bed in charge of Norah, Violet, with a ball of red wool and two long knitting-needles, took her seat at a corner of the fireplace in the sitting-room. The idea of a red knitted petticoat for old Mrs. Moriarty had occurred to her on the way home, and she was putting it now into practice.

French had been rather gloomy on the way home, and at dinner. It was evident that the incident at the meet had hit him hard. Money worries could not depress the light-hearted, easy-going gentleman, who had a soul above money and the small affairs of life. It was the feeling of enmity against himself that cast him out of spirits for the first time in years. For the first time in life he felt the presence, and the influence against him, of the thing we call Fate.

His whole soul, heart, and mind were centred on Garryowen. In Garryowen he felt he had the instrument which would bring him name and fame and fortune. It was no fanciful belief. He knew horses profoundly; here was the thing he had been waiting for all his life, and everything was conspiring to prevent him using it.

First, there was Lewis and his debt—that was bad enough. Second, was the fact that he would have to complete the training of the horse in a hostile country, and that country the Ireland of to-day, a place where law is not and where petty ruffianism has been cultivated as a fine art. With Giveen for a spy on his movements, with a hundred scoundrels ready to do him an injury, and with Lewis only waiting to put out his hand and seize the horse, he was, it must be admitted, in a pretty bad way to the attainment of his desires.

But he had a friend, and as long as a man has a friend, however humble, he is not altogether in the hands of Fate. The girl sitting by the fire, knitting a red petticoat for old Mrs. Moriarty, had been exercising her busy mind for the past few days on the seeming hopelessness of the problem presented to her in French and his affairs. She had inherited a good deal of her father's business sharpness. She was not the niece of Simon Gretry for nothing, and a way out of the difficulty had presented itself before her; at least, she fancied it was a way.

At nine o'clock, after a look round the stables, Mr. French came in, and, sitting down in the arm-chair opposite the girl, opened the Irish Times and began to read it, listlessly skimming the columns without finding anything of interest, moving restlessly in his chair, lighting his pipe and letting it go out again. Miss Grimshaw, without pausing in her rapid knitting or dropping a stitch, watched him.

Then she said, "Do you know I've been thinking?"

"What have you been thinking?"

"That I've found a way out of your difficulty about Garryowen."

"And what's that?" asked French, who, since the affair of Effie, had conceived a deep respect for Miss Grimshaw's cleverness and perspicuity.

"Well, it's this way," said she. "That man Lewis is your stumbling-block."

"Call him my halter," said the owner of Garryowen, "for if ever a man had a blind horse in a halter, it's me and him."

"No, I will not call him any such thing. He's only a moneylender. You owe him the money. Garryowen will belong to him after the third of April. Well, let him have Garryowen."

"Faith, there's no letting about it."

"Let him have Garryowen, I say, but not until after the race."

"Why—what do you mean?"

"I mean this. Would it not be possible to take Garryowen away from here secretly? He does not belong to Mr. Lewis yet. Take him away to some lonely place, train him there, and run him for the race. If he wins, you will make money, won't you? And if he loses, why, he will belong to Mr. Lewis."

French rose up and paced the floor.

"That's not a bad idea," said he. "By George! it's good, if we could do it. Only, could we keep it hid?"

"Does Mr. Lewis know you are running him for the race?"

"No. He doesn't know I've got him, and the debt's not due till a fortnight before the event. And, by Jove! if he does see my name in the racing lists, he'll put it down as my cousin, Michael French's—the one Mr. Dashwood met—for Michael runs horses in England every day in the week, and his name's as well known as the Monument. Faith! and it's a bright idea, for I'd get rid of all this crew here at one sweep."

Mr. French went to the door, opened it, and called:

"Norah!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Bring the whisky!"

"But," continued Mr. French, "the only question is where could I take the horse? Faith! and I have it. Todd Mead—he's a man you've never heard of—has an old shanty down in Sligo. He uses it for breeding polo ponies, and there's a hundred square mile of heath that you could train a dromedary on and not a soul to see. He lives in Dublin, and keeps a manager there, and he'd give me stabling there, maybe, for nothing, for he has more room than he wants. It's a big streeling barn of a place."

"You say the debt to Mr. Lewis only comes due a few weeks before the race?" asked Miss Grimshaw.

"Yes."

"Will he seize your things immediately the debt is due, or might he give you a few weeks' grace?"

"Not an hour's. I borrowed the money, giving him the house and live-stock as security, and the bit of land that's unmortgaged, and he'll clap a man in ten minutes after the clock strikes on the day the money is due."

"But if you have borrowed the money on the live stock, surely, since Garryowen is part of the live stock, it would be unlawful to remove him?"

"Listen to me," said Mr. French. "I borrowed the money before I owned Garryowen. Sure, the main reason I borrowed it was to buy him. He's not part of the security."

"Well, then, Mr. Lewis can't touch him."

"Yes, maybe, by law. But how long does it take to prove a thing by law? Suppose he puts a man in. Well, the man will seize the colt with everything else; then the lawyers will go to work to prove the colt's not part of the security and they'll prove it, maybe, about next June twelvemonth, and by that time two City and Suburbans will have been run, and Garryowen will be good for nothing but to make glue of. Besides, these blackguards here may do him an injury. No, the plan is to slip out by the back door. Major Lawson, an old friend of mine, has a stable at Epsom. We can bring the colt there two days before the race. I'm beginning to see clear before me and, faith, it's through your eyes I'm seeing."

"You are sure Mr. Lewis can't come down on you before April?"

"No. I paid him his half-year's interest last month. I paid him close on two hundred pounds."

"Well, if you paid him his interest next April, wouldn't he be satisfied?"

"Of course he'd be satisfied, but how am I to pay it? I tell you, it will take me every penny I have for the expenses. There's no margin for paying moneylenders.

"I've made my calculations. By scraping and screwing, with some money I've hid away, I can just manage to run the colt, pay expenses, and back him for a thousand—and that's all."

"But, see here. Why not back him for only eight hundred, and pay Mr. Lewis his two hundred?"

"Now, there you are," said French. "And that shows you haven't grasped the big thing I'm after. Suppose I pay Lewis his two hundred, and only back the colt for eight hundred, do you know what that would make me lose if he starts at, say, a hundred to one, and wins? I'd lose twenty thousand pounds. It's on the cards that for every hundred pounds I lay on Garryowen I'll win ten thousand."

"So that, if he wins, and you have the full thousand on him?"

"I'll win a hundred thousand."

"And if he loses?"

"Faith, I'll be stripped as naked as Bryan O'Lynn."

There was a fine sporting flavour in this deal with fortune that pleased Miss Grimshaw somehow.

"There is one more thing," said she. "Please excuse me for asking you the question, but if you lose the thousand, it will be all right, I suppose? I mean, you will be able to meet your liabilities?"

"Sure, you do not take me for a blackleg? Of course, I'll be able to pay. Isn't it a debt of honour?"

"Good. Then go in and win. Isn't that what the boys say when they are fighting? I'll help as far as my power will allow me. Will you write to Mr. Todd—what's his name?"

"No," said Mr. French. "I'll go to Dublin to-morrow and see him."

CHAPTER X

"Vilits, vilits, vilits, your arner!"

"Oh, bother violets!" said Mr. French. He had just come down the steps of the Kildare Street Club, he had lost five pounds at cards, the afternoon was drizzling, and he was being pestered to buy violets.

The violet vendor, a fantastical, filthy old woman in a poke bonnet, heedless of the rebuke, pursued her avocation and Mr. French, trotting like a dog behind him, chanting her wares, her misfortunes, his good looks.

"Sure, they're only a penny the bunch; sure, they're only a penny the bunch. Oh, bless your han'some face! Sure, you wouldn't be walkin' the shtreets widout a flower in yer coat. Let your hand drap into your pocket and find a penny, and it's the blessin's of Heaven will be pourin' on you before the night's out. Sure, it's a bunch I'll be givin' you for nothin' at all, but just the pleasure of fixin' it in your coat, an' they as big as cabbiges and on'y a penny the bunch."

It was a kind of song, a recitative, and invocation.

"I tell you I have no change," flashed the flowerless one. "I tell you I have no change."

The priestess of Flora halted and sniffed.

"Change!" said she. "No, nor nothin' to change."

Mr. French laughed as he opened his umbrella and hailed a passing outside car. "Faith," said he, as he mounted on the side of the car, "she's about hit the bull's-eye."

"Did you spake, sir?" said the jarvey.

"No, I was only thinking. Drive me to 32 Leeson Street. And where on earth did you pick up this old rattletrap of a horse from?"

"Pick him up!" said the jarvey with a grin. "Faith, the last time I picked him up was when he tumbled down in Dame Street yesterday afternoon, wid a carload of luggudge dhrivin' to Westland Row."

"You seem to have a talent for picking up rubbish, then?" said Mr. French.

"It's the fault of the p'leece," replied the other with an extension of the grin that nature, whisky, and the profession of car-driving had fixed upon his face. "It's the fault of the p'leece, bad 'cess to them!"

"And how's that?" asked Mr. French incautiously.

"Sure, they forbids me to refuse a fare. Jay up, y' divil! What are yiz shyin' at? Did y' never see a barra of greens before? Now thin, now thin, what are you takin' yourself to be, or what ails you, at all, at all?"

The car stopped at 32 Leeson Street. Mr. French descended, gave the jarvey a shilling for his fare and sixpence for a drink, and knocked at the hall door.

Mr. Mead was in, and the old butler, who opened the door, showed the visitor straight into the library—a comfortable, old-fashioned room, where, before a bright fire, Mr. Mead, a small, bright-eyed, apple-cheeked, youthful-looking person of eighty or so, was seated in an armchair reading Jorrocks' "Jaunts and Jollities."

"Why, there you are!" cried Mead, jumping up.

"And there you are!" said Mr. French, clasping the old fellow's hand. "Why, it's younger you're growing every time I see you! Did you get my wire? Oh! you did, did you? Two o'clock! The scoundrels! I sent it off from the Shelbourne at twelve. No matter. And how's the family?"

"All right," replied Mead, putting Jorrocks on the mantelshelf and ringing the bell. "Billy married last winter. You remember I wrote to you? And Kate's engaged—James, a bottle of the blue-seal port!—and what's the news?"

"News!" said French with a short laugh. "What news do you expect from the West of Ireland except news of men being plundered and cattle maimed? News! I'm leaving the place; and that's why I wanted to see you. See here, Mead."

Mead, who was opening a bottle of the blue-seal port—an operation which he always conducted with his own hands—listened while French poured into his attentive ears the tale of his woes.

"The blackguards!" said the old man when French had finished. "And do you mean to say you've gone off and left the horse behind you for these chaps to maim? Maybe——"

"Oh! Moriarty is there," replied French. "He's sleeping in the stable, and Andy is sleeping in the loft. But it's on my mind that some dirty trick will be played before we get the colt to England, and that's why I've called to see you. Look here; you've got that place for your polo ponies down in Sligo. Will you let me take Garryowen over there and finish his training?"

"You mean my place at Ballyhinton?"

"Yes."

"Sure, I've sold it. Didn't you know?"

"Sold it!"

"Eight months ago."

"Good heavens!" said French. "That does me. And I've come all the way to Dublin to see you about it. Was there ever such luck!"

"You see," said Mead, "I'm not as young as I was. Bryan—the chap I had there—was swindling me right and left, so I sold off, lock, stock, and barrel. I'm sorry."

"Faith, and so am I," said French.

The big man, for the first time in his life, felt knocked out. Never for a moment did he dream of giving in, but he was winded. Besides all the worries we know of, a number of small things had declared against him, culminating in his loss at cards. He felt that he was in a vein of bad luck, under a cloud, and that until the cloud lifted and the luck changed it was hopeless for him to make plans or do anything.

He took leave of Mead and returned to the Shelbourne on foot. The rain had ceased, and as he drew near the hotel the sun broke through the clouds.

As he entered the hotel he ran almost into the arms of a young man dressed in a fawn-coloured overcoat, who, with his hat on the back of his head, was standing in the hall, a cigarette between his lips and a matchbox in his hand.

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. French; then, starting back, "Why, sure to goodness, if it isn't Mr. Dashwood!"

CHAPTER XI

"Come into the smoking-room," said Mr. Dashwood when they had shaken hands. "This is luck! I only came over by the morning boat. I'm coming down west. Oh, I'll tell you all about it in a minute. Come on into the smoking-room and have a drink."

Mr. Dashwood seemed in the highest of good spirits. He led the way into the smoking-room, rang the bell, ordered two whiskies and an Apollinaris and cigars, chaffed the Hibernian waiter, who was a "character," and then, comfortably seated, began his conversation with French.

"Here's luck!" said Mr. Dashwood.

"Luck!" responded French, taking a sip of his drink.

"This is the first drink I've had to-day," said Mr. Dashwood. "I've felt as seedy as an owl. It was an awfully rough crossing, but I didn't touch anything. I tell you what, French, since I saw you last I've been going it hard, but I've pulled up. You see," said Mr. Dashwood, "I'm not a drinking man, and when a fellow of that sort goes on the jag, he makes a worse jag of it than one of your old seasoned topers."

"That's so," said French. "And if you start to try to match one of those chaps, it's like matching yourself against a rum barrel. What drove you to it?"

"A woman," said Mr. Dashwood.

Mr. French laughed.

"Two women, I should say. I got tangled up with a woman."

"And you tried to cut the knot with a whisky bottle. Well, you're not the first. Fire away, and tell us about it."

"It's this way," said Mr. Dashwood. "A year ago I met a Miss Hitchin. She was one of those red-haired girls who wear green gowns, don't you know? and go in for things—Herbert Spencer and all that sort of stuff, don't you know? I met her at a show a Johnny took me to for fun, a kind of literary club business. Then, next day I met her again by accident in the Park, and we walked round the Serpentine. You see, I'd never met a woman like that before. She lived in rooms by herself, like a man, and she had a latchkey.

"I wasn't in love with her," continued the ingenuous Mr. Dashwood, "but, somehow or another, before I'd known her ten days I was engaged to her. Awfully funny business. You see, she had a lot of mind of her own, and I admire intellect in a woman, and she was a right good sort. I told her all about my life, and she wanted me to lead a higher one. Said she never could marry me unless I did. The strange thing about her was she always made me feel as if I was in a Sunday school, though she wasn't pious in the least. As a matter of fact, she didn't believe in religion; that is to say, church, and all that; but she was a Socialist.

"Awfully strong on dividing up every one's money so that every one would have five pounds a week. I used to fight her over that, for she had three hundred a year of her own, and stuck to it; besides, I didn't see the force of making all the rotters in the world happy, and drunk, with five quid a week out of my pocket; but she never would give in; always had some card up her sleeve to trump me with.

"You see, I'm not a political Johnny, and hadn't studied up the question. But we never fought really over that. Men and women don't ever really fight over that sort of thing; and I'd always give in for a quiet life, and we'd go off and have tea at the British Museum and look at the mummies and the marbles and things, and after six months or so I got quite fond of her in a way, and I began to look forward to marrying her.

"I used to mug up Herbert Spencer and a chap called Marx, and I never looked at another woman, and scarcely ever made a bet: and it might have gone on to us getting two latchkeys only——"

Mr. Dashwood stopped.

"Only I met another girl," he went on. "That put me in a beastly position, and the long and short of it is I went on the razzle-dazzle from the botheration of it all. Miss H. found out, and she cut the knot herself. I'm glad to be free," finished Mr. Dashwood, "but I wish it had happened some other way. In fact, I wish I'd never met Miss H. at all."

"And who is the other girl?" asked Mr. French.

"Oh, you know her."

"I?"

"Yes; she's down at your place now."

"Not Miss Grimshaw?"

"Yes, Miss Grimshaw. And that's the reason I'm going down west. I want to see her and tell her all."

French whistled; then he laughed.

"You seem in mighty good spirits over her," said he. "How do you know she'll have anything to do with you? Have you asked her?"

"Asked her! No. How could I, when I was tied up like that? That's what drove me off my balance. But I'm going to ask her, and that's why I've come over to Ireland."

"Look here," said Mr. French.

"Yes?"

"You said when I met you in the hall you were going to put up at Mrs. Sheelan's. You're not. Come and stay at Drumgool, on one condition."

"What's that?"

"That you don't ask her. First of all, you haven't known her long enough; and she hasn't known you long enough to find out whether you are properly matched. Second, I'm not so sure that I'm not going to ask her myself."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Dashwood.

"Oh, you needn't beg my pardon. I'm just telling you what's in my mind. I'm so moithered with one thing and another, I've no heart for anything at present, but just this horse I told you about, you remember—Garryowen. And I'm not a man to stand between two young people if their minds are set on each other. But the question is, Are they? You care for her, but does she care for you? So, take an open field and no favour. Don't go sticking at Mrs. Sheelan's, seeing her maybe only once in a week, but come right to Drumgool. No proposing, mind you, or any of that rubbish. I'm giving you your chance fair and square, and I'm telling you fair and square it's in my mind that I may ask her myself. So, there you are. Take the offer or leave it."

Mr. Dashwood paused for a moment before this astonishing proposition, which upset all his preconceived ideas of love affairs; then the straightness and strangeness and sense of it went to his heart. Surely never had a man a more generous rival than this, and the sporting nature and the humour of it completed the business, and he held out his hand.

"Right," said he. "Another man would have acted differently. Yes, I'll come. And I'll play the game; get to know her better, and then, why, if she cares for me, it's the fortune of war."

"That's it," said French, "and now I want to tell you about the horse."

He gave the full history of his predicament, of the league, and the money worries, and the enemies who seemed bent on destroying his chance of success. "If I could only get the horse out of the country," said French. "But I can't."

"Can't you?" said Bobby, who had followed the tale with sparkling eyes and rising colour. "Who says you can't? I say you can, and I'll show you how."

He rose up and paced the floor.

"Don't speak to me. This is simply frabjous! Why, my dear chap, I've got just what you want."

"What's that?"

"A place where you can train half a dozen horses if you want to."

"Where?"

"Where? Why, down at Crowsnest, in Sussex. It's not my place; it belongs, 's'matter of fact, to Emmanuel Ibbetson. He's chucked horses, and he's going to pull the place down and rebuild when he comes back from Africa. I can get a loan of it for three or four months."

"What would the rent be?" asked Mr. French.

"Nothing. He'll lend me it. He's just now constructing a big-game expedition, and they start in a few days. I saw him only the day before yesterday at White's. Lucky, ain't it, that I thought of it? I'll wire to him now asking for the permit. The place is furnished all right; there's a caretaker in it. It's a bungalow with no end of fine stables. The Martens is the name of it."

"Begad," said Mr. French, "this is like Providence!"

"Isn't it? You hold on here, and I'll send the wire. I'll send it to his chambers in the Albany, and we'll have the reply back to-night or to-morrow morning."

When the wire was despatched, Mr. French proposed an adjournment to the Kildare-street Club, whither, accordingly, the two gentlemen took their way.

"If," said he, "we can pull this business off, I'll never forget it to you. You don't know what this means to me. It's not the money so much—though that's a good deal—but it's the outwitting and getting the better of those scoundrels, Dick Giveen and the rest of them. Even if your friend agrees to lend us this place, all our troubles aren't ended. I want to get the horse away without any one knowing where I'm taking him to. I'll have to take Moriarty and Andy and I can't leave Effie behind, for if I did I'd have to write to her, and they open the letters at the post-office in Cloyne, and even if they didn't open them they'd see the post-marks. I mustn't leave a clue behind me to tell where I'm gone to, and with that beast of a Giveen nosing about like a rat it'll be difficult rather; but we'll do it!"

"Yes," said Mr. Dashwood, "we'll do it."

The excitement of the business filled him with pleasurable anticipations; and he had not reckoned on Emmanuel Ibbetson in vain, for when they got back to the Shelbourne in the evening they found a wire from that gentleman. It only contained three words:

"Yes, with pleasure."

With this telegram there was another. It was from Miss Grimshaw, and it ran:

"Come back at once."

CHAPTER XII

The day Mr. French left Drumgool on his visit to Dublin it rained.

Croagh Mahon had been winding himself with scarves of mist all the day before, and he had come up so close to Drumgool that you might have hit him with a biscuit, to use Moriarty's expression.

The weather kept the great mountain for ever in fantastic movement, now retreating, now advancing. He grew and shrank in a wizard way with the changes of the atmosphere. To-day he would be immense, slate-coloured, strewn with dim ravines standing beneath the subdued beauty of the quiet winter daylight, a sure sign that on the morrow he would be blotted out. Fine weather would cast him far away, and he would stand, heather purple in the blue distance, but still calling you to come to him.

When Mr. French departed for the station the weather was clear, and Miss Grimshaw, having watched him drive away, strolled down the garden, then through a little wicket she passed into the kitchen garden, and from there along the uphill path to the cliffs.

There was little wind on the cliffs, and the sea was coming in unruffled, yet hugely stirring in league-long lapses of swell.

Boom!

The whole coast answered with a deep organ note to the leisurely breaking of the billows.

Boom!

You could hear the voice of the Devil's Kitchen, the voices of the Seven Sisters, the voices of the long Black Strand, the voices of the headlands, as billow after billow struck the coast—great waves from the very heart of the ocean; and the snarl of the pebbles to the undertow on the strand beneath could be heard shrill like the voice of each dying wave, "I have come from afar—afar—afar!"

No other sound.

Not a whisper from the land stretching away to the distant hills under the dull grey sky; not a whisper from the heaving sea stretching away to the fleckless grey horizon.

Boom!

"I have come from afar—afar—afar!" Nothing more except the cry of a gull. The girl stood on the cliff edge, looking and listening. The air was sweet with the recent rain, invigorating as wine, clear as crystal, filled with ozone from the seaweed-strewn shore and the perfume of earth from the rain-soaked land.

She could see the Seven Sisters seated in their rings of foam. Miles of coast lay on either hand, cliff, and headland, and bay singing together and being sung to by the waves, tremendous, majestic, desolate, just as they sang and were sung to a million years ago, just as they will sing and be sung to a million years hence.

The recollection of Mr. Giveen, called up in her mind by the sea, brought French and his troubles before her, the league and its pettiness, and old Ryan and his cows' tails. Before the tremendous seascape all these things shrank to their true proportions, and the booming of the billows seemed like a voice commenting on it all, yet indifferent to the doings, the hopes, and aims of man as Death.

A spot of rain touched her cheek, and she turned from the cliff and began the descent towards the house. At the gate leading into the kitchen garden a dirty and draggle-tailed girl without boots or shoes, a girl of about fourteen, with a dirty face, was endeavouring to unravel the mystery of the latch—it was a patent latch with a trick bar in the staple—and failing.

Miss Grimshaw came to her assistance, opened the gate, and held it open for the other to pass through, but the damsel did not enter.

She stood with eyes downcast. Then she looked up, then she looked down, then——

"If you plaze, miss," said she, "are you the young lady ould Mrs. Moriarty tould me to ax for?"

"I'm sure I don't know," laughed Violet, then, remembering the name, "Do you mean old Mrs. Moriarty at Cloyne?"

"Yes, miss."

"Well, why did she send you?"

"If you plaze, miss, I'm Shusey Gallagher."

"Yes?"

"I'm the servant at the blacksmith's, miss, and ould Mrs. Moriarty sez to me to keep me ears open to hear if the bhoys was afther playin' any tricks on Mr. Frinch, an' she'd give me a sixpence, miss; so I lays wid me ears open, pretendin' to be aslape, and I heard him say to his wife: 'It's fixed for Thursday night,' says he. 'What's fixed?' says she. 'Frinch's job,' says he."

"Yes, yes," cut in Miss Grimshaw. "But who were these people speaking?"

"Mr. Blood, the blacksmith, miss, and his wife, and I lyin' wid me ears open and they thinkin' me aslape. 'What are they goin' to do?' says she. 'Hamstring the coult,' says he. 'Garryowen?' says she. 'The same,' says he. 'And how many of them on the job?' says she. 'Only one,' says he. 'That'll larn ould Frinch,' says she. 'And who's goin' to do it?' 'Black Larry,' he says, 'and now shut your head, for it's tired I am and wants to go to slape.'"

"Good heavens!" said Miss Grimshaw.

"Yes, miss," replied the taleteller, evidently pleased with the effect of her information. "And ould Mrs. Moriarty, when I tould her, 'Run, Shusey,' says she, 'hot-fut to Dhrumgool, and ax for the young lady and give her me rispicts, an' tell her what you've tould me, and maybe she won't forget you for your thrubble.'"

"That she won't," said Miss Grimshaw, taking her purse from her pocket and half a crown from her purse. She also took a sixpence, and, giving the child the sixpence, she showed her the half-crown.

"I will give you that," said she, "next Friday if what you have told me is true, and if you say nothing about this to any one else. Tell old Mrs. Moriarty I will call and see her and thank her very much for sending you. Now, mind, if you say a word of this to any one else you won't get the half-crown."

Susie Gallagher, whose mouth had flown open wide at the sight of the half-crown, closed it again.

"Plaze, miss, is the whole half-crown for me?"

"Yes, if you don't say a word."

"Not a word, miss; sure, I'd bite me tongue off before I'd let it be tellin' a word."

"And go on keeping your ears open," said Miss Grimshaw, "and let me know if you hear anything more."

"Yes, miss."

"That'll do," said Miss Grimshaw, and Susie Gallagher departed running, taking a hop, skip, and a jump now and then, presumably as an outlet for her emotions.

When this desirable and faithful servitor had vanished round the corner, Miss Grimshaw passed through the kitchen-garden towards the stables. She wanted to find Moriarty. The news had shocked her, but as yet she could scarcely believe in its truth. Susie Gallagher was not a person to bear conviction, however easily she might bear tales, but Moriarty would be able to decide.

Moriarty was in the stableyard with Doolan. They were overhauling the fishing-tackle of the past season, deep-sea lines and conger hooks, and what not, while Mrs. Driscoll stood at the back entrance to the kitchen premises, her apron over her arms, assisting them. She popped in when Miss Grimshaw made her appearance, and Moriarty touched his cap.