He paused; the tw.a.n.ging of Captain Carteret's banjo bridged the interval imperturbably.

"Why had you to get rid of it?" asked f.a.n.n.y, still sympathetic.

"She was a failure!" said Rupert vindictively; "I made a fool of myself in buying her!"

f.a.n.n.y looked at him sideways from under her lashes.

"And I had counted on your giving me a mount on her now and then!"

Rupert forgot his wrath, forgot even the tw.a.n.ging banjo.

"I've just got another cob," he said quickly; "she jumps very well, and if you'd like to hunt her next Tuesday--"

"Oh, thanks awfully, but Captain Carteret has promised me a mount for next Tuesday!" said the perfidious f.a.n.n.y.

Mrs. Carteret, on her knees by a refractory footlight, watched with anxiety Mr. Gunning's abrupt departure from the room.

"f.a.n.n.y!" she said severely, "what have you been doing to that man?"

"Oh, nothing!" said f.a.n.n.y.

"If you've put him off singing I'll never forgive you!" continued Mrs.

Carteret, advancing on her knees to the next footlight.

"I tell you I've done nothing to him," said f.a.n.n.y Fitz guiltily.

"Give me the hammer!" said Mrs. Carteret. "Have I eyes, or have I not?"

"He's awfully keen about her!" Mrs. Carteret said that evening to her husband. "Bad temper is one of the worst signs. Men in love are always cross."

"Oh, he's a rotter!" said Captain Carteret conclusively.

In the meantime the object of this condemnation was driving his ten Irish miles home, by the light of a frosty full moon. Between the shafts of his cart a trim-looking mare of about fifteen hands trotted lazily, forging, shying, and generally comporting herself in a way only possible to a gra.s.s-fed animal who has been in the hands of such as Mr. William Fennessy. The thick and dingy mane that had hung impartially on each side of her neck, now, together with the major portion of her voluminous tail, adorned the manure heap in the rear of the Fennessy public-house.

The pallid fleece in which she had been m.u.f.fled had given place to a polished coat of iron-grey, that looked black in the moonlight. A week of over-abundant oats had made her opinionated, but had not, so far, restored to her the fine lady nervousness that had landed her in the window of the hat shop.

Rupert laid the whip along her fat sides with bitter disfavour. She was a brute in harness, he said to himself, her blemished fetlock was uglier than he had at first thought, and even though she had yesterday schooled over two miles of country like an old stager, she was too small to carry him, and she was not, apparently, wanted to carry any one else. Here the purchase received a very disagreeable cut on the neck that interrupted her speculations as to the nature of the shadows of telegraph-posts. To have bought two useless horses in four months was pretty average bad luck. It was also pretty bad luck to have been born a fool. Reflection here became merged in the shapeless and futile fumings of a man badly in love and preposterously jealous.

Known only to the elect among entertainment promoters are the methods employed by Mrs. Carteret to float the company of The Green c.o.o.ns. The fact remains that on the appointed night the chosen troupe, approximately word-perfect, and with spirits something chastened by stage fright, were a.s.sembled in the clerk's room of the Enniscar Town Hall, round a large basin filled horribly with a compound of burnt cork and water.

"It's not as bad as it looks!" said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands and heroically smearing her face with a ma.s.s of black oozy matter believed to be a sponge. "It's quite becoming if you do it thoroughly.

Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and the roots of your hair!"

The Hamiltons, giggling wildly, submitted themselves to the ministrations of Freddy Alexander, and Mrs. Carteret, appallingly transformed into a little West Indian coolie woman, applied the sponge to the shrinking f.a.n.n.y Fitz.

"Will you do Mr. Gunning, f.a.n.n.y?" she whispered into one of the ears that she had conscientiously blackened. "I think he'd bear it better from you!"

"I shall do nothing of the kind!" replied f.a.n.n.y, with a dignity somewhat impaired by her ebon countenance and monstrous green turban.

"Why not?"

Mrs. Carteret's small neat features seemed unnaturally sharpened, and her eyes and teeth glittered in her excitement.

"For goodness' sake, take your awful little black face away, Mabel!"

exclaimed f.a.n.n.y hysterically. "It quite frightens me! I'm _very_ angry with Mr. Gunning! I'll tell you why some other time."

"Well, don't forget you've got to say 'Buck up, Sambo!' to him after he's sung his song, and you may fight with him as much as you like afterwards," said Mrs. Carteret, hurrying off to paint glaring vermilion mouths upon the loudly protesting Hamiltons.

During these vicissitudes, Rupert Gunning, arrayed in a green swallow-tailed calico coat, short white cotton trousers, and a skimpy n.i.g.g.e.r wig, presented a pitiful example of the humiliations which the allied forces of love and jealousy can bring upon the just. f.a.n.n.y Fitz has since admitted that, in spite of the wrath that burned within her, the sight of Mr. Gunning morosely dabbing his long nose with the repulsive sponge that was shared by the troupe, almost moved her to compa.s.sion.

A pleasing impatience was already betraying itself in cat-calls and stampings from the sixpenny places, and Mrs. Carteret, flitting like a sheep dog round her flock, arranged them in couples and drove them before her on to the stage, singing in chorus, with a fair a.s.sumption of hilarity, "As we go marching through Georgia".

For f.a.n.n.y Fitz the subsequent proceedings became merged in a nightmare of blinding heat and glare, made actual only by poignant anxiety as to the length of her green skirt. The hope that she might be unrecognisable was shattered by the yell of "More power, Miss f.a.n.n.y!" that crested the thunderous encore evoked by her hornpipe with Captain Carteret, and the question of the skirt was decided by the fact that her aunts, in the front row, firmly perused their programmes from the beginning of her dance to its conclusion.

The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its kind. The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert Gunning's song, of the truculent order dedicated to ba.s.ses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Oth.e.l.lo, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences. The performance raged to its close in a "Cake Walk," to the inspiring strains of "Razors a-flying through the air," and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar _Independent_ described cryptically as "a _tout ensemble a la conversazione_ that was refreshingly unique".

"Five minutes more and I should have had heat apoplexy!" said Mrs.

Carteret, hurling her turban across the clerk's room, "but it all went splendidly! Empty that basin out of the window, somebody, and give me the vaseline. The last time I blacked my face it was covered with red spots for a week afterwards because I used soap instead of vaseline!"

Rupert Gunning approached f.a.n.n.y with an open note in his hand.

"I've had this from your aunt," he said, handing it to her; it was decorated with sooty thumb marks, to which f.a.n.n.y's black claw contributed a fresh batch as she took it, but she read it without a smile.

It was to the effect that the heat of the room had been too much for the elder Misses Fitzroy, and they had therefore gone home, but as Mr.

Gunning had to pa.s.s their gate perhaps he would be kind enough to drive their niece home.

"Oh--" said f.a.n.n.y, in tones from which dismay was by no means eliminated. "How stupid of Aunt Rachel!"

"I'm afraid there seems no way out of it for you," said Rupert offendedly.

A glimpse of their two wrathful black faces in the gla.s.s abruptly checked f.a.n.n.y's desire to say something crushing. At this juncture she would rather have died than laughed.

Burnt cork is not lightly to be removed at the first essay, and when, half an hour later, f.a.n.n.y Fitz, with a pale and dirty face, stood under the dismal light of the lamp outside the Town Hall, waiting for Mr.

Gunning's trap, she had the pleasure of hearing a woman among the loiterers say compa.s.sionately:--

"G.o.d help her, the crayture! She looks like a servant that'd be bate out with work!"

Mr. Gunning's new cob stood hearkening with flickering ears to the various commotions of the street--she understood them all perfectly well, but her soul being unlifted by reason of oats, she chose to resent them as impertinences. Having tolerated with difficulty the instalment of Miss Fitzroy in the trap, she started with a flourish, and pulled hard until clear of the town and its flaring public-houses. On the open road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the light of the rising moon, she settled down. Rupert turned to his silent companion. He had become aware during the evening that something was wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background.

"What do you think of my new buy?" he said pacifically, "she's a good goer, isn't she?"

"Very," replied f.a.n.n.y.

Silence again reigned. One or two further attempts at conversation met with equal discouragement. The miles pa.s.sed by. At length, as the mare slackened to walk up a long hill, Rupert said with a voice that had the shake of pent-up injury:--

"I've been wondering what I've done to be put into Coventry like this!"

"I thought you probably wouldn't care to speak to me!" was f.a.n.n.y's astonishing reply, delivered in tones of ice.