"'Twas Mr. Gunning of Streamstown bought that one from Miss Fitzroy at the Dublin Show, and a hundhred pound he gave for her!"

The smith mentally docked this sum by seventy pounds, but said, "By dam!" in polite convention.

"'Twasn't a week afther that I got her for twinty-five pounds!"

The smith made a further mental deduction equally justified by the facts; the long snore and wheeze of the bellows filled the silence, and the dirty walls flushed and glowed with the steady crescendo and diminuendo of the glow.

The ex-tinker picked up the bottle with the candle. "Look at that!" he said, lowering the light and displaying a long transverse scar beginning at the mare's knee and ending in an enlarged fetlock.

"I seen that," said the smith.

"And look at that!" continued Mr. Fennessy, putting back the s.h.a.ggy hair on her shoulder. A wide and shiny patch of black skin showed where the hatter's plate gla.s.s had flayed the shoulder. "She played the divil goin' through the streets, and made flitthers of herself this way, in a shop window. Gunning give the word to shoot her. The dealer's boy told Patsey Crimmeen. 'Twas Patsey was caring her at the show for Miss Fitzroy. Shtan' will ye!"--this to the mare, whose eyes glinted white as she flung away her head from the light of the candle.

"Whatever fright she got she didn't forget it," said the smith.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MR. GUNNING WAS LOOKIN' OUT FOR A COB."]

"I was up in Dublin meself the same time," pursued Mr. Fennessy. "Afther I seem' Patsey I took a sthroll down to Brennan's yard. The leg was in two halves, barrin' the shkin, and the showldher swoll up as big as a sack o' meal. I was three or four days goin' down to look at her this way, and I seen she wasn't as bad as what they thought. I come in one morning, and the boy says to me, 'The boss has three horses comin' in to-day, an' I dunno where'll we put this one.' I goes to Brennan, and he sitting down to his breakfast, and the wife with him. 'Sir,' says I, 'for the honour of G.o.d sell me that mare!' We had hard strugglin' then.

In the latther end the wife says, 'It's as good for ye to part her, James,' says she, 'and Mr. Gunning'll never know what way she went. This honest man'll never say where he got her.' 'I will not, ma'am,' says I.

'I have a brother in the postin' line in Belfast, and it's for him I'm buyin' her.'"

The, process of making nail-holes in the shoe seemed to engross the taciturn young smith's attention for the next minute or two.

"There was a man over from Craffroe in town yesterday," he observed presently, "that said Mr. Gunning was lookin' out for a cob, and he'd fancy one that would lep."

He eyed his work sedulously as he spoke.

Something, it might have been the light of the candle, woke a flicker in Mr. Fennessy's eye. He pa.s.sed his hand gently down the mare's quarter.

"Supposing now that the mane was off her, and something about six inches of a dock took off her tail, what sort of a cob d'ye think she'd make, Larry?"

The smith, with a sudden falsetto cackle of laughter, plunged the shoe into a tub of water, in which it gurgled and spluttered as if in appreciation of the jest.

PART III

Dotted at intervals throughout society are the people endowed with the faculty for "getting up things". They are dauntless people, filled with the power of driving lesser and deeper reluctant spirits before them; remorseless to the timid, carneying to the stubborn.

Of such was Mrs. Carteret, with powers matured in hill-stations in India, mellowed by much voyaging in P. and O. steamers. Not even an environment as unpromising as that of Enniscar in its winter torpor had power to dismay her. A public whose artistic tastes had hitherto been nourished upon travelling circuses, Nationalist meetings, and missionary magic lanterns in the Wesleyan schoolhouse, was, she argued, practically virgin soil, and would ecstatically respond to any form of cultivation.

"I know there's not much talent to be had," she said combatively to her husband, "but we'll just black our faces, and call ourselves the Green c.o.o.ns or something, and it will be all right!"

"Dashed if I'll black my face again," said Captain Carteret; "I call it rot trying to get up anything here. There's no one to do anything."

"Well, there's ourselves and little Taylour" ("little Taylour," it may be explained, was Captain Carteret's subaltern), "that's two banjoes and a bones anyhow; and Freddy Alexander, and there's your dear friend f.a.n.n.y Fitz--she'll be home in a few days, and these two big Hamilton girls--"

"Oh, Lord!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Captain Carteret.

"Oh, yes!" continued Mrs. Carteret, unheedingly, "and there's Mr.

Gunning; he'll come if f.a.n.n.y Fitz does."

"He'll not be much advantage when he does come," said Captain Carteret spitefully.

"Oh, he sings," said Mrs. Carteret, arranging her neat small fringe at the gla.s.s--"rather a good voice. You needn't be afraid, my dear, I'll arrange that the fascinating f.a.n.n.y shall sit next you!"

Upon this somewhat unstable basis the formation of the troupe of Green c.o.o.ns was undertaken. Mrs. Carteret took off her coat to the work, or rather, to be accurate, she put on a fur-lined one, and attended a Nationalist meeting in the Town Hall to judge for herself how the voices carried. She returned rejoicing--she had sat at the back of the hall, and had not lost a syllable of the oratory, even during sundry heated episodes, discreetly summarised by the local paper as "interruption".

The Town Hall was chartered, superficially cleansed, and in the s.p.a.ce of a week the posters had gone forth.

By what means it was accomplished that Rupert Gunning should attend the first rehearsal he did not exactly understand; he found himself enmeshed in a promise to meet every one else at the Town Hall with tea at the Carterets' afterwards. Up to this point the fact that he was to appear before the public with a blackened face had been diplomatically withheld from him, and an equal diplomacy was shown on his arrival in the deputing of Miss Fitzroy to break the news to him.

"Mrs. Carteret says it's really awfully becoming," said f.a.n.n.y, breathless and brilliant from a.s.siduous practice of a hornpipe under Captain Carteret's tuition, "and as for trouble! We might as well make a virtue of necessity in this incredibly dirty place; my hands are black already, and I've only swept the stage!"

She was standing at the edge of the platform that was to serve as the stage, looking down at him, and it may be taken as a sufficient guide to his mental condition that his abhorrence of the prospect for himself was swallowed up by fury at the thought of it for her.

"Are you--do you mean to tell me you are going to dance _with a black face_?" he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.

"No, I'm going to dance with Captain Carteret!" replied f.a.n.n.y frivolously, "and so can you if you like!"

She was maddeningly pretty as she smiled down at him, with her bright hair roughened, and the afterglow of the dance alight in her eyes and cheeks. Nevertheless, for one whirling moment, the old Adam, an Adam blissfully unaware of the existence of Eve, a.s.serted himself in Rupert.

He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than going home and thinking about them.

From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr.

Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive manner of Captain Carteret.

The rehearsal progressed after the manner of amateur rehearsals. The troupe, with the exception of Mr. Gunning, who remained wrapped in silence, talked irrepressibly, and quite inappropriately to their role as Green c.o.o.ns. Freddy Alexander and Mr. Taylour bear-fought untiringly for possession of the bones and the position of Corner Man; Mrs.

Carteret alone had a copy of the music that was to be practised, and in consequence, the company hung heavily over her at the piano in a deafening and discordant swarm. The two tall Hamiltons, hitherto speechless by nature and by practice, became suddenly exhilarated at finding themselves in the inner circle of the soldiery, and bubbled with impotent suggestions and reverential laughter at the witticisms of Mr.

Taylour. f.a.n.n.y Fitz and Captain Carteret finally removed themselves to a grimy corner behind the proscenium, and there practised, _sotto voce_, the song with banjo accompaniment that was to culminate in the hornpipe.

Freddy Alexander had gone forth to purchase a pack of cards, in the futile hope that he could prevail upon Mrs. Carteret to allow him to inflict conjuring tricks upon the audience.

"As if there were anything on earth that bored people as much as card tricks!" said that experienced lady to Rupert Gunning. "Look here, _would_ you mind reading over these riddles, to see which you'd like to have to answer. Now, here's a local one. I'll ask it--'Why am dis room like de Enniscar Demesne?'--and then _you'll_ say, 'Because dere am so many pretty little deers in it'!"

"Oh, I couldn't possibly do that!" said Rupert hastily, alarmed as well as indignant; "I'm afraid I really must go now--"

He had to pa.s.s by f.a.n.n.y Fitz on his way out of the hall. There was something vexed and forlorn about him, and, being sympathetic, she perceived it, though not its cause.

"You're deserting us!" she said, looking up at him.

"I have an appointment," he said stiffly, his glance evading hers, and resting on Captain Carteret's well-clipped little black head.

Some of f.a.n.n.y's worst sc.r.a.pes had been brought about by her incapacity to allow any one to part from her on bad terms, and, moreover, she liked Rupert Gunning. She cast about in her mind for something conciliatory to say to him.

"When are you going to show me the cob that you bought at the Horse Show?"

The olive branch thus confidently tendered had a somewhat withering reception.

"The cob I bought at the Horse Show?" Mr. Gunning repeated with an increase of rigidity, "Oh, yes--I got rid of it."