Part 12

They went to church presently, where the cotton-wool texts looked brave, if a little tired, and the usual smell of roast stove and drying cushions pervaded the airless atmosphere. Mr. Brady completely forgot the season when he touched upon the war. He took for his text the writing on the wall, and forgot that too, as he plunged into metaphor as difficult to follow as modern tactics; for in a breath he compared the Germans with burrowing snakes and carrion-seeking eagles, both of which expressions were listened to with rapture by his wife, and made the General and Darby tap their heads softly. Mr. Brady then explained smoothly how even as a God-fearing nation we wanted nothing but peace, and the best way to get it was to go and kill every man Jack of German traitors and treaty violators, until there were only grey-beards and infants left. "And, of course, the prisoners," he added, regretfully.

"The Redeemer of the world," he said, "never meant an army which warred on women and children to dominate humanity, and to-day, in the words of the Bible, it 'was to us to go forth and kill.'"

If he had not got on to the National Anthem very quickly someone would have cheered.

"Even if we are fighting, the texts will never do for next year," said Mrs. Keefe in the doorway. "So what would you think, Mrs. Freyne, of stuffing pillows for the troops with them now while the wool is fairly dry."

A fine rain was falling outside, and the gleam of wintry sunshine somewhere behind it; the day was very cold.

The heavy appetite engendered by church made George Freyne fidget, when Gheena delayed him by rushing off with Violet Weston. Mrs. Weston was brilliant in rather crude mauve, with sky-blue silk stockings on, and held Gheena's arm very affectionately as they whispered together.

The old Professor beamed at them all, a beam with sadness in it.

"In Germany they love Christmas so," he said gently. "The Gretchens and the Annas romp like children over their presents; they all over-eat themselves and everywhere is the smell of pine needles and candles which have burnt themselves out--the 'Tannen-baum.' The women are as bad as the men, you say, Mr. Freyne, because they look now as ever, when they are told to look. They clap their poor hands now for war as they did for the beauty of the Christmas-tree. Christmas, with empty chairs near the fire--is it not sad for all?"

"How you can say one word for the brutes who lamed my Lancelot," said Mrs. Augustus Freyne, "I do not know, Professor."

The Professor said humbly that he only spoke for humanity and Christmastide.

"We are astonished to hear the dreadful people ever mentioned," said Mrs. De Burgho Keane heavily. "After all, if there were no dreadful fat mothers there would be no brutal sons to run about murdering and rapining." Here Mrs. Keane stopped to consider if that was quite the right word, especially in the churchyard path, because the Professor chuckled softly and Darby grinned. Changing the conversation, Mrs. Keane objected to last year's texts as disrespectful to the season.

Mrs. Brady uneasily remarked that the cotton-wool was to make pillows, and it will all look quite nice with the lights up this evening.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane replied energetically that the evening would not concern her. She passed on to interrogate Lancelot as he hopped to the motor, and wished to know if the brutal Germans really laughed when they wounded people, or if that was a newspaper lie.

Lancelot replied vaguely, the tail of his eye on the General. It was a secret carefully preserved that he had not gone beyond Boulogne. His foot was badly crushed, and he was not likely to see service again.

Then came the heaviness of Christmas luncheon. A meal which was always faintly neglected by Anne, who had dinner upon her mind, to say nothing of roast beef and plum pudding backed up by cheap sherry in the kitchen.

When it was over George Freyne helped Lancelot his nephew to his study, where he talked to him long and seriously.

A wounded man possessed the privilege of sympathy. Now was the hour to lay siege to Gheena's heart. Lancelot was not at all averse to life at Castle Freyne on a large income. The fear which he felt for his cousin Gheena now would easily turn to sulky authority when he found his position secure. A boy who had been indulged for his twenty-three years, was not likely to be a very pleasant companion through life.

Dearest George, moving his mind on its narrow ledge of cunning, decided that a new regime of petty tyranny would make his stepdaughter inclined to take her liberty at all costs, and Lancelot had promised faithfully that the Dower House would never be his father-in-law's position.

Gheena, through the soft cold which was turning to frost outside, wandered off by the sea. It shimmered in steely restlessness, mouthing white-toothed at the brown rocks. Cold held the world in its grip, the brown world looked icy, the shingle as though its touch would hurt in its chill.

"And out in the North Sea they keep watch," said a voice behind Gheena, "with the wind we find here cutting, there as a knife, and spray freezing on their eyelashes, and constant anxiety."

"And those dreadful submarines," said Gheena, turning to see Stafford, who had come up quietly over the grass.

"Which they threaten to blockade us with in the early spring."

"And--you believe there are bases here--men who help them?" said Gheena.

Mr. Stafford said dreamily that money would do anything.

"You have wanted it badly?" said Gheena.

Basil Stafford shot a swift look at Gheena as he answered that he had once wanted it so badly that he would have sold a limb to get it.

"I suppose," said Gheena, walking on, "that you won't keep to the drains after the winter here. You'll join something."

"You're not thinking of putting a white feather in my mince-pie for dinner, are you?" he said gravely. "There are other ways of helping besides wearing khaki, Miss Gheena, helping on war."

Gheena repeated "Helping on war" with sarcastic emphasis, and told Crabbit not to chase seagulls.

Crabbit leapt forth in swift pursuit of an elusive bird, a stately gull, which sailed off and then bobbed down into the icy sea, floating there gracefully, Crabbit immediately putting his paws into the water, trying to pretend that he had only come down to take the temperature. Then he pounced on something in the line of flotsam, and galloped back to Gheena to lay the offering at her feet.

It was a pocket-handkerchief of large size.

Gheena said "Crabbit, you beast!" turning away; but Stafford bent down and picked the sodden rag up; then dropped it again with a sharp exclamation and looked out to sea.

"We'll go back." Gheena walked towards the house. The kitchen chimney was absolutely pouring out smoke, heaving against the evening light.

"After all," said Stafford, "if there had been no war someone else would have been employed for the drainage, and I should never have come here."

Gheena, nose in air, considered the evening sky.

He laughed slightly bitterly.

"And it doesn't much matter when I go away again, I suppose," he said. "There is the Professor on the cliffs. He must have sampled every rock in the place by now."

"And also Hook, coming back." Gheena stopped to look at the General's man. "He seems to do everything except look after his master, that man of the General's."

Hook and the Professor met upon the cliffs and spoke. Then the valet overtook them.

"Been right away to the point, sir," he said to Stafford. "Regular nest of caves and holes, this coast."

"There are some that one can see the water going into, but are quite hidden," said Gheena. "I believe there are entrances from the land. I know of a way down to one of those caves. My old nurse, who came from the village out there, said there were two or three others, but she never showed them to me."

Hook stroked his chin thoughtfully.

"One is curious. It's just over there, if you'd like to see it, with the tide coming in its ease."

Stafford looked longingly at the lighted house, for Gheena was already flying back through the scrum of trees and out on to the chill low cliffs with the sea moaning below. Here, diving through a tangle of dead bracken and unpleasantly live gorse, she came to a hole in the ground, caught a lichen-covered slab of slaty rock and dropped out of sight, remarking cheerily that it was pitch dark and very slippery.

The cliff ran out just there in bare slaty stone, with stunted fuchsias clinging in the crevices, and brambles creeping along, long and thorny.

To get goatwise from slab to slab in a grey gloom of almost complete darkness, with the touch of the stones biting numbly, was not pleasant, but the two men followed Gheena down.

"Here is the shingle. The sea is up. Oh----"

For Stafford snapped on an electric torch and a dripping gloomy cavern came into view. It smelt dankly salt, and cold sea-water was pouring along the wet floor, sluicing in through inlets in the rock.

One could imagine sightless slimy fish in there living in the deep pools in the rocks, chill weeds and noisome things. The sea echoed outside, slushing and gurgling, and the swelling rim of water creeping in through hidden channels was ghost-like in its grey upward movement.

"But there's no outlet," was what Hook said thoughtfully.

Stafford said it was like a nightmare, snapped off his torch and scrambled for the entrance.

The grey dusk outside was sweet daylight after the gloom below. Hook thanked them, and they scurried back to the house, through wisps of white mist which were rising in the hollows..

"Your cousin is being helped in to tea." The blinds were not drawn, and the surrounded entrance of Lancelot could be plainly seen, with a chair being made ready for him and footstools arranged.

"He went out to fight," said Gheena sympathetically. "Whether it was a cart or shrapnel, he did go out to try to be hit."

Basil Stafford's lips came together with a snap.

Lancelot complained of pain at tea-time. He carped at his mother and invited Gheena to adjust his cushions. When she had done that, he asked her for more tea, because she knew the exact quantities of cream and sugar--and then he begged her to show him _Punch's_ Almanack.

The well of pity in which so much female reason drowns kept Gheena attending to the invalid and forbearing to say sharp things. He had gone out bravely and done his best.

She listened while he fretted and grumbled because now he could never do anything; his soldier's life was over for quite a year, if not more, when the war must be over. He talked of what he might have done, and of the loneliness at Cahercalla.

The big dining-room table had to have a leaf put in it for dinner that night. The Freynes had collected everyone in the village, down to the Professor, who came in baggy evening clothes and square-toed boots.

A meal of mighty courses marched solemnly to the haven of dessert--champagne creamed, regardless of war time, and from fine oysters to fine brandy-veiled plum-pudding--it was indigestible Christmas fare.

Of course everyone talked of the war, until Mrs. Freyne suddenly remembered that Mr. Brady ought to tell the General his splendid scheme, even down to the Kaiser's place of imprisonment in Runnymede.

Darby's "Why Runnymede?" held a note of astonishment.

Matilda Freyne said she supposed because it would always remind the dreadful man of Magna Charta and England's might. Well, if it was Spike Island Mr. Brady had suggested, she thought Runnymede was much more suitable, so English all round, and everyone agreed with her gravely.

They played games afterwards, to amuse the Brady and O'Toole children--blind man's buff and general post--in which game Mrs. Freyne could never think of any post save London to Berlin, and as no one would be Berlin, London got tired of hopping up vainly, and allowed poor Paris to be caught when someone called this town.

When Mr. Keefe, the blind man, spun frantically round the room amid a ring of mockers, Gheena took refuge in a window recess, to find General Brownlow smoking there peacefully.

Next minute Stafford was caught and blinded. In the whirl of pulling hands he felt one catch harder than the others, and having secured Lucy Brady, of eleven, wondered if it was chance or design that had placed a goose-quill in his button-hole. The Keefe children had had one to torment their father with, but---- He took it out and put it carefully into his pocket-book.

"If anyone did that on purpose," said Brownlow as Gheena came back to him, "it was a dirty thing to do."

"He won't forget, though," said Gheena carelessly. "And he doesn't care. Miss O'Toole might have done it."

"Don't you ever judge Don't-cares by appearances, young lady," he snapped. "And don't judge that boy, because he's a good sort, or I'm no judge myself."

Mrs. Weston, in flaming pink silk high to the throat, and wearing a becoming feather boa because she had a cold, had disappeared from view with Mr. Keefe. A murmur of voices from the firelit library indicated their retreat.

Darby, by the blazing drawing-room fire, looked on. He could not romp with the grown-up children, and no one could settle to Bridge. Some of the sadness of any anniversary fell on him. How many Christmases had come and gone in that old room! How many generations of white-frocked mites, grown year by year to girls and boys, to men and women, until they sat by the fire and tried to forget that soon they must go alone into the unknown! The withered-handed, tottering people, with their little pleasures of warmth, which glows as new life into their blood; of some favourite dish; or of love for the youth crowding them out of life--their lives are of the day; they are past looking back and dare not look forward. So the hours of waking after fitful sleep to the time when, tired out, they seek it again--makes each day a life to them. How many gay brides had fluttered in new finery to their new home, wives of the three-bottle men of old days, when shutters were shut at five and the day old by night!--women who had no voice in life. Subservient, early Victorian wives, advanced now to dinner at seven, putting away the fragile lovely furniture which had delighted their forbears, filling the room with hideous heaviness, with round tables and mirrors, and stiff arm-chairs and clumsy cabinets. A later Victorian, Gheena's grandmother, rejoicing in an outbreak of macrame-edged brackets, of good china entombed in red plush mounts, of black and gold, of chenille monkeys, and satin antimacassars worked over with rosebuds or forget-me-nots.

An old house must be a sad thing, a looker-on at the life which comes and goes within its portals--the birth so gladly hailed, to the solemn tramp of heavily-laden men and the flower-smothered coffin standing in the hall.

Darby's own house was older than Castle Freyne, and had seen more people pass, and now he lived there alone, only son of an only son--and who would come after him? There was a cousin, a bright boy at school, heir if Darby never married.

The entrance of a huge bowl of punch carried in by Naylour broke up the games. Everyone took a spoonful, coughed apologetically, and had a little more, for it was rather a wonderfully deceitful punch, hiding its Samson-like strength behind a mild and mingled flavour of lemons and innocent things.

"To those in France who guard us here!" Gheena proposed a toast and swung her glass so vigorously that she upset a large portion of her punch over her stepfather.

"And thank goodness Christmas is over!" said Dearest George ill-humouredly, wiping sticky punch from inside his collar.

"I'm leaving two fellows I like behind me," said old Tony Brownlow next day, "Stafford and Dillon. All right, George; come on to the stables before I go."

The Stephen's Day hunt at Dunkillen began with a completely illegal race run for any stakes which could be collected, anything over four pounds being called a present.

It was run over an S-shaped course, consisting of small slaty banks and open ditches and two stone gaps, and they went round three times.

Darby gave a silver cup this year, so that competition was, as Phil termed it, fierce entirely.

Dan Rooney's That's the Boy was an easy favourite from James Rourke's dun gelding, unnamed--That's the Boy being a great over-lopped, leggy bay, almost in the book, with a whistler's head and no bone, and the dun a scrubby beast, hiding a certain amount of quality behind a goose rump and a ewe neck, but with great second thighs and nine inches below the knee. A weedy grey mare was the only other animal expected to complete the course. There were four three-year-olds willing to go until they fell from exhaustion, and Andy on the Rat, which he had begged leave to enter.

"You'll never get him round the turns," was what Darby said to young Rooney, "and you're backing the horse as if the race was over."

Mr. Rooney replied contemptuously that That's the Boy had time to run out and back and catch what was against him, and that he hoped there'd be no talks of this race when he pulled the horse out to win in Cork Park.

"I'm allowing for a fall or two even," observed Rooney, as he pulled off his coat to display a silk jacket and a pair of very baggy drab breeches.

The dun's owner affected a flannel shirt and trousers tied in below the knee with string, and this, with varieties of shirts and trousers, was the fashionable and favourite get-up.

Darby, with the hounds grouped patiently in the background, was starter and judge. He dropped the flag directly they came at all near him, knowing the handiness of their heels, and saw them tear off in a bunch, the Rat scuttling along in the rear and the rush of That's the Boy knocking over one horse at the first fence.

"Bedam to himself an' his breedin'," commented the fallen jockey bitterly. "An' me mare gone home on me for certainty, an' maybe a boy away for the coffin before I'd be back meself."

That's the Boy's great stride carried him out with a clean lead, his Roman-nosed head in air; he shaved two banks with nerve-shattering carelessness, and being pulled in from the first turn, was crossed by a three-year-old, ridden out with whip and spur, and came down handsomely.

"There's the price of him," commented the knocked-out jockey by Darby's side.

The Field's snatched lead was easily taken back, but they had some way to go, and Darby still prophesied that the turns would do for the great big horse, even if he did not come down again.

The first stone gaps being scattered and shattered, the horses made for the second inward turn. Two of the three-year-olds were now trailing, completely done, and the little Rat, going at his ease, was close up with the leaders.

Quick and handily, James Rourke's dun slipped over the narrow banks with cat-like accurate ease, a complete contrast to the big horse's slithering bounds, invariably wrongly timed; but so far as pace went, That's the Boy had only to gallop on and win.

He tore at his head at the fences, cheeked his bit, and rushed out of the course, the violent wrench which brought him round bringing him also into collision with a rather awkward bank and sending him on to his knees.

Now a variety of mistakes will blow any horse. When Dan Rooney set his mount going again he did not meet with the same response, and the dun, the grey and the Rat were a field ahead.

"Bet you a sovereign, Rourke," said Darby. "Gheena, a sovereign."

Gheena, of course, backed That's the Boy. Wild shrieks began to arise from the crowd, and the local bookmaker could not issue tickets fast enough. He had absolutely lost count of where he stood, so much that he eyed his outside car more than once.

The grey mare, going gallantly, closed with the dun, who wore her down and shot out. Half a field behind, That's the Boy, white with foam, was being unmercifully flogged on. But the dun gave the last bank a lightning-like kick, and as James Rourke wondered if he would be caught in the run home, something slipped by him.

The Rat was clean bred, with brothers and sisters running races in England. He had been going quite within himself, and now he stretched his wicked little head and made for the hounds at a pace which completely worsted the dun five-year-old.

"The divil's delight to it, but the pony has it won!" yelled someone frantically. "The pony!"

"Andy, for the love of God!" wailed James Rourke. "An' I have three pound on at fours. Twelve pounds, Andy, I'll be dhrawin'."

"I have a shillin' on meself," replied Andy, leaning forward victoriously.

"Cosy in the trinches they might be the ways they is chattin'," said a disturbed and embittered onlooker, who had backed the big horse; "an' even the _obb_jectin' won't save us now with that Kinnat out there in front. Someone suggested obbjectin' to both for conspiracy and colloquy.

"If we could rowl a hat or two accidental to swherve thim," suggested another backer of the favourite, "an' let Rooney up."

Someone else declared the two were too tirened out to mind any hats, but the big horse was coming on. James Rourke bent down and called something out to little Andy, something emphatic.

Andy shook his head, Rourke bent again, and the next moment the Rat, instead of passing the post, made for the waiting hounds, sailing through the crowd dexterously.

And in a hail of hats and a hurricane of yells, the dun went past the post at his lobbing gallop, with That's the Boy's head just at his girth and well past him before they pulled up.

Darby declined to give the cup if there were any objections, but he went on to Andy to demand explanation.

"Well, you see, me Mama would take the cup for the parlour, an' he offered me two pounds of them twelve to pull out," said Andy equably; "an' he a dacent bye that won't break his word; so I pulled out, and that was the thraffic there was betune us."

"And such is Irish racing," said Darby thoughtfully. "You send that pony home, Andy, and ride old Dobbin to hounds."

Basil Stafford said that if he laughed any more he knew something would give way.

"What you see to laugh at when my pony might have had a silver cup," said Gheena angrily, "I cannot see. Oh, call it Irish. You don't expect us to be Germans, do you?"

"If they could only meet you all for a little," gasped Stafford, "and see your little methods!"

"Oh, you'd like us to meet them, would you?" said Gheena. "You seem to know Germany well."

Stafford gasped that he wanted to see German officials encountering Phil and Andy, or your old Anne. That is _verboten_.

"'Forbidden. Is that so, young man?'

"'_Himmel_! Haf I not said it must not be done? Schwine!'

"'One side, young man, an' kape a civil tongue in ye're head. Isn't the right side the same as the left for th'ass a cyar if there is none in the sthreet?' Oh, if you only knew them and their superiority and their rages."

"Some people," said Gheena darkly, "ought to know them better at present."

Mr. Stafford's fingers touched his pocket-book; he leant forward suddenly.

"There is something here which you may take back some day," he said softly--"something which you gave me, I think."

Gheena turned away, looking puzzled.

"Ivery penny he paid me," said Andy deliriously joyful; "an' isn't that same bether than a silver cup on the table at home, Miss Gheena? An' sure, in honour an' glory I was first as well."

They moved on presently to draw a hill from the crest of which one could see the sea plainly.

Gheena began to talk of the submarines, wondering if the menace would ever be carried out.

"They'll want help if they do it," returned Stafford absently--"bases along coasts and ships to supply oil. People will do it. Money can buy anything, Miss Freyne, even some people's honour."

Gheena grew a little pale.