Part 17

Darby looked down at his stick, stifling a quiet sigh. Lancelot Freyne was duly taken home next day, his expression one of puffy peevishness. Even the wielding of the sword in France had not taught him how to advance his suit with Gheena. He left a gap which let in sunshine behind him, but with this clearness came frost.

Dearest George grew openly disagreeable. He growled over money. He hinted at the complete suppression of hunting.

Gheena was twenty. Five long years of dependence stretched before her--five years, during which the horses she loved would grow stout and shapeless upon grass, and she would fret and fume under the burden of authority. The two-seater which she had hoped for was out of the question now.

Mr. Freyne could be disagreeable. He could look over his wife's accounts and growl over Gheena's new clothes. He had not the greatness of any open aggression. To have fired off a big gun and borne the recoil would have been beyond him. He was one of the small bird shooters, peppering with No. 10, firing from behind hedges, nagging with a patient smile.

Sympathetic friends learnt, from reasons which a kind stepfather suppressed, how difficult Gheena was to get on with. She went to bed in a room where the grate would have gleamed with cold blacklead if she had not gone out and cut up branches and lighted a fire of wood and turf--the turf smuggled by Phil up the back stairs.

As the English held on grimly in their ditches of frozen mud, Mr. Freyne saw no reason to believe in the end of the war, so anticipated a poverty which he was never likely to see. He reproved Anne's limitless kitchen hospitality, the stout old cook sending away blind Barney ostentatiously, and then garnishing a humble piece of cod with several expensive things out of bottles.

Barney went no further than the harness-room, where a meal concealed in a stable bucket was carried to him.

"The war is above in the Masther's head," said Anne pleasantly. "An' I have all them trifles that he's so sot on emptied out over the cod, that he hates too, but me Darby loves thim."

"He has taken to ordering me about," said Gheena a little bleakly to Darby and Psyche--"to making things disagreeable for me. He wants to know my plans for the day, and tells me he wants Topsy himself so as to spare the car, and then he offers to drive me to see Lance. He wants me"--Gheena lifted a mutinous face--"to marry Lance. He hints at it with the subterfuge of a--a----"

"A charging bull," suggested Darby, "or a liner coming out of harbour." His eyes watched Gheena wistfully.

"If he is not careful," said Gheena, "I'll marry just to have the place. I'll marry----"

"Mr. Stafford, Miss," said old Naylour, opening the door.

Gheena's look of gloom deepened as she eyed the offender's grey tweed suit.

"I came to tell you news," Stafford said. "A submarine sighted off Cortra harbour last night, and again not far from here."

"Someone here is supplying them with petrol," said Gheena--"someone."

"There are tales of strange motor-cars seen about at night," said Darby thoughtfully.

Psyche's grey was a little lame; she remembered it now, jumping up to drag Darby out to know what was wrong. "Because there will be a meet to-morrow and I want to go," she whispered.

Gheena, left alone with Stafford, remarked intelligently that the evening was chilly.

"You are very down on me, Miss Freyne"--he looked down at her, his arm on the old marble mantelshelf--"because I don't join the army."

Gheena said "Then why don't you?" her cheeks fiery.

"Well, at present I can't. There are the drains, and other reasons."

"To prepare potato ground for Germans," said Gheena, "ought not to be one. As for other reasons----" Her eyes flashed.

"That's one way of referring to the drains," he said good-humouredly, his eyes twinkling. "And I run messages to the Wireless Station and up to the coastguards, and take out Mrs. Weston to drive. It's not all drains."

Gheena sat silent, pulling Crabbit's ears. Her suspicions were deepening; she grew suddenly white.

"You can't even forgive me for being a slacker, I suppose?" Basil Stafford's eyes lost their twinkle. "Perhaps I don't approve of fighting?"

"Of fighting Germans," snapped Gheena.

Mr. Stafford feared that she would never be taken on as a diplomatist. He walked to the window and added that no lights were to be used now at night near the sea; the coastguards were on the alert for offenders.

"So if the pups stray you are not to look for them with the stable lantern," he advised.

"Or with an electric torch," said Gheena, her cheeks fiery again.

"Miss Freyne," he said gravely, rather angrily, "if a man can't help himself----" He stopped suddenly, came back from the window, and said irrelevantly that he was changing his car for a new one, or perhaps he would keep both.

Psyche returned at a run to shout out that the grey horse could hunt and they'd got the second post.

It included a letter from Miss Eva Delorme, who wrote a firmly-pointed hand and could fill two sheets of notepaper with ease.

"A Mr. Stafford, you say, on the drainage works," she wrote. "I knew Staffords of Old Hall in Worcestershire, very poor people, had lost everything. Don't judge hastily; these drains may be for home defence."

Psyche gave Gheena the letter; Miss Freyne read it carefully.

"And the new car is coming--when?" she said to Basil Stafford.

"Next week, I think. What's that, Miss Delorme? Did we live at Old Hall in Worcester? Yes, that was our place. It's let. My mother's in London. She was in a sky-scraping flat before her operation, but now I've taken a nice house for her, and she won't leave for any Zeps. It's so hard to get a chauffeur, two of hers have gone. I gave her a car last June."

Gheena's lips came together. Riches had sprung up swiftly for this young man.

Basil Stafford left, looking tired, lines round his pleasant mouth.

The scratch pack hunted a fox with leisurely determination next day from Green Gorse Hill and through a nice hunt. Psyche rode close to Darby. She got in his way several times; she chattered at moments when she should have been silent; but the small face was so rapturously happy that he said nothing. Dearest George remonstrated fussily with his guest.

"You must keep quiet at the checks, Mona," he said, "and let Darby alone. He is my colleague, remember, a Master, as I am."

"He rides in front, and do you stay behind to make the lazy dogs keep up?" asked Psyche with interest. "Is that why there are two Masters?"

Amid a clarity of silence, broken only by Darby choking, George Freyne rode away.

"My! but that was the bither remark ye threw at him," murmured Rourke softly, "an' he always tryin' to conceal the way he lies back. My! but----" Mr. Rourke suddenly abandoned himself to uncontrolled laughter while Pysche mentally pigeon-holed this new piece of knowledge. She nearly fell off over a piece of timber; she rode straight on top of Darby at a drop into the road, all with serene joy. They closed on their fox, pace improved, and as they ran fast over a fair country the glow on the girl's face was as of moonlight. The small hands clenched on the reins, her little body swaying to the gallop; the extreme pleasure of it was almost pain.

They put the fox to ground at the outskirts of Longfield Wood, Darby getting off to see what the hole was like.

"To think of being you," gasped Miss Delorme, holding Darby's horse insecurely, "to direct it all, and make those cooing noises, and to have people get out of your way, and to whistle to them with that lovely hunting-horn! And oh, would you change with anybody on earth?"

"With heaps of 'em," said Darby, looking into her pale face--"the bodies, not the men. Here is my rear-guard fellow-Master coming now, looking malignant."

"I shall hunt all my life," announced Psyche earnestly, "and over here. I want to stay here always."

They rode down through the long wood. Darby's servants were sufficiently Irish to produce hot cakes almost as soon as everyone got in. The old library was warm and homelike, and Darby's dogs politely allowed guests to occupy the hearth-rug.

Admiration is a pleasant medicine. Darby felt less lonely and out of life than he had for months. He seemed to step from his horse with scarcely any difficulty, and he only used his riding-whip to steady him as he went into the house. He even forgot to look grimly at the scarred side of his face in the glass. The stir of the gallop was still in his blood--his horse's jumping, the movement of perfect shoulders, the keenness of a good hunter, unfaltering, how seldom visibly tired. And how well Grandjer, Beauty and Daisy, and the rest of them had hunted, plodding along on relentless foes.

"It's fun, anyhow," he said gaily, watching with man's carelessness precious Crown Derby cups being put out for tea.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane took off her gloves to pour out graciously. The tea-table was such an excellent stronghold to hear all news from. People had to wait for cream and sugar, and could not run away.

But it was the two girls who made tea, recklessly giving cream to everyone, splashing in water much too late, and looking dubiously at the straw-coloured second cups which were the result. Lancelot's mother and sister, who had driven to-day in a pony cart, stood close to Gheena, both looking unhappy, and presenting the expression of people who expect to be questioned, so that Gheena hoped politely that Lance was out walking as he was not driving.

To which his mother replied that Lance was either in bed or on the library sofa, she could not say which, suffering from depression and twinges.

"He does not pick up," said Lancelot's mother. "Gheena, that is only hot water; ring for more tea. Now yesterday we had to coax him to take a second meringue, and the roast beef he began with was not half eaten. He is unhappy, dear Gheena, my poor wounded boy, and for a remedy..."

"Soda mints," said Gheena absently. "I see, I must keep on filling up with hot water and not wait till it's only tea leaves. I never pour out at home. Yes, try soda mints. It's never moving about and such a lot to eat. I'll come to see him soon, I'll promise."

Mrs. Freyne got up, telling her daughter that Gheena was impossible and rather rude.

Miss O'Toole worked hard at her concert. She was a person of high ambitions, so flags of various nationalities had to be produced to festoon above the raised stage in the schoolhouse. The walls she decorated with anything which she could get, and the platform was such a nest of greenery that performers had to dive in amongst it to get into full view, and even then were hemmed in by palms and boughs. The harmonium, clasped in the Union Jack, crouched among a nest of palms in one corner; the piano, its back covered with the Tricolour, and a toy lion and a bear on the top, stood out below the platform.

The performers, when finished, fell off steep wooden steps at the back, generally noisily, so that the encores were marred by sundry rubbings of injured limbs, Dearest George, in pink, handing the singers on and off vaguely.

A congested house sat in intense heat to listen to the first important item. They had opened with a piece on the piano, the doctor's daughter clawing out concerted airs of the nations, and quite forgetting to omit Germany's which was somewhere in the middle, so that the General commanding in Cortra entered to the strains of the "Watch on the Rhine" and sat down extremely surprised as it changed to "Deutschland ueber Alles." Joan Flynne could not in any case read German, and had learnt the piece at school. The first song was then given by Mr. O'Gorman, its opening bars being interfered with by his nervous wonder as to what on earth was crawling down the back of his neck.

"'Steadily, shoulder to shoulder'"--Mr. O'Gorman moved and a second palm spike tickled his ear--"'Steadily'"--he caught at the ear, dropped his music and missed a bar--"'blade--by----' We're out, Miss O'Toole. What!" Miss O'Toole was looking up and almost wailing "Palm fronds"--"'blade--by----' Damn the things!"

Mr. O'Gorman wheeled and clutched.

"Palm fronds!" shrieked Miss O'Toole.

Mr. O'Gorman nodded happily, the bars were successfully adjusted, and the "Old Brigade" marched to a tuneful ending.

When everyone encored and a response was being made, Mr. O'Hara could be heard at the side.

"Right! I'll give 'em 'Toreador.' 'Toreador,' Miss O'Toole. Sorry I put you out, but in a place like this no one knows, does one? A sash on? Good gracious! why should I dress up like a bull?"

"Get on with it. Now then."

Mr. O'Gorman was nervous but a favourite. He swayed a stout body energetically, and his last magnificent effort of "a-do-or" was faintly marred by an audible "Damn!" and a clasp at his ear as a palm frond got him again.

Certain young ladies then warbled of loves and kisses, sweetly and fairly audibly.

Gheena sang the "Recruiting Song" with extreme energy, fixing her eyes alternately upon Mr. Stafford and a local butcher, who sometimes spoke vaguely of "giving them Germans a 'slice' with his chopper, th' ould divils."

The General commanding the district was still upset by his musical reception, and sat by his pretty wife listening absently, even to Gheena's appeal for recruits, her hands outstretched as if to gather up men.

There was a pause after this, Miss Freyne fleeing from an encore. The stage was empty until the thrilling strains of the Russian National Anthem were beaten from the harmonium, and some of the audience who recognized it shot to their feet because they thought they ought to, the rest following suit and wondering why.

To this massed enthusiasm Lancelot Freyne, upon crutches, made entry alone, bowing gracefully to an outburst of cheers and honours. Miss O'Toole pounded more anthem, everyone sat down, and George Freyne, with a whisky and soda in his hand, rushed in tardily to announce the item--"The Charge of the Light Brigade."

"'Half a league, half a league,'" said Lancelot casually, then proceeding with the "Charge of the Light Brigade."

The General commanding the district rubbed his head hard.

"But why--for this--the Russian anthem?" he whispered. "For this!"

"'Cossack and Russian reeled from the sabre's stroke--shattered and sundered,'" said Lancelot pleasantly, Miss O'Toole continuing the music with the soft pedal down, and just a boom when big drums were mentioned.

"Why?" remarked the General hopelessly. "And the beginning when I came in!" Then--he had a sense of humour--he looked at his wife, and the rest of his evening was spent in laudable endeavours to check unseemly laughter and to subdue his wife's.

"'Into the valley of Hell, into the mouth of Death,'" said Lancelot, and paused to look for his sister at the wings--"that is--'mouth of Hell.'" She was prompting.

Boom! went chords in the bass.

"It's the damn piano puts one out!" murmured Lancelot over his shoulder to his sister. "What's next?"

"Make some action," hissed his prompter.

The General buried his face in his pocket-handkerchief, overcome, as Mrs. De Burgho Keane said.

"'They rode back again, but not--not the six hundred,'" remarked Lancelot casually, and waved one crutch swiftly. The principal effect of the belated action was to upset the lion on to Miss O'Toole and make her last piece of Russian anthem a discord.

Lancelot hobbled off amid loud clapping of hands, and his mother thought with rapture of how he would look if he did it in London.

Mr. Keefe and Mrs. Keane were both upset by the fall of the lion, considering it to be a bad omen for the war.

The interval for sandwiches and liquid refreshment proved a brilliant success. Mrs. Weston showed a bag full of silver collected for programmes. She had charged all the men a shilling for programmes.

"And it was worth it," said Darby, "with such a lot thrown in--the 'Watch on the Rhine' and Lancelot's recitation."

"I would not," observed the General, "have missed it for a fiver, especially if the second half is as good and as funny and as er ... patriotic as to tunes."

Lancelot's mother wandered up and down for plaudits for her boy, discussing the "Charge."

"No exaggerations," she said, "no undue emphasizing, just the beauty of the thing--the one swing of the crutch when they were all killed, and my wounded boy doing it."

Sir Abel replied that he had never in his life been so touched by a recitation.

Just then Mrs. Freyne took off her gloves and made nervous way to the piano.

She played the prelude to "John Peel" loudly, lifting her hands then to endeavour to follow her husband on his devious paths.

He had put on his velvet cap.

"'D'ye ken John Peel?'" roared Dearest George, and found it was too high.

"'D'ye ken John Peel?'" he boomed loudly.

Mrs. Freyne struck a chord softly, and without hope. The General, who was musical, grew quite anxious.

But by the time he had got to the "Break of day," George Freyne was, so to speak, in his stride, with his wife following delicately, afraid to show marked preference to any key.

Having been loudly encored, Mr. Freyne asked his wife to play the tune and give him some help, and gave the "Meynell Hunt" with as much variety, as Darby said, as if the pack was in full cry.

A song and dance by Miss Delorme made the audience wonder if it was quite right for them to be there, for Psyche in costume gave them a song about the moon, and her dancing was as if a sprite floated over earth. By this time all the men were yelling "Encore!" and Mrs. Keane wished audibly that she had left Estelle and Maria at home.

Psyche was back again to give "A Little Bit of String," out of the _Circus Girl_, and another dance of fairy-like lightness. Then Mr. Keefe, pink and moist, was bustled on after his song had been given out.

Miss O'Toole played a prelude emphatically, unnoticed by the nervous performer.

"'Every morning I bring thee violets,'" trilled Mr. Keefe, with the piano vamping "My Old Pal" loudly.

"'Every morning I bring thee'---- Oh, look here, hang it!" said Mr. Keefe. "I can't bring them to that music, Miss O'Toole. I told you so. I said----"

Mrs. Weston threw a bunch on to the stage.

When there was a possibility of hearing him, and Miss O'Toole had changed her music gloomily, Mr. Keefe brought violets very irately, and flounced off in obvious ill-humour, declining his encore.

"To start like that when I told her time after time," he said, as he sought solace in a whisky and soda.

Then, fetched by the M.C., Violet Weston went on to the platform; very brilliant stockings gleamed under her white skirt. She was somewhat garishly handsome as she stood in the light; but as she took up the violin her expression changed. She cuddled it down, her fingers loving on the strings; she bent to Miss O'Toole, who shook her head hopelessly, as she looked at the score.

Matilda Freyne was called on; she listened, and took up the music.

Next moment the violin was rippling out wild Hungarian dances, spirits of elves, patter of breathless witches, rustle of feet on dead leaves, on polished boards, evil in merriment--they were all in the elfish music. Only two people in the audience realized what a master hand played to them--the General from Cortra leaning forward entranced, and another listener, the old Professor, sitting hidden in a corner.

With a sigh as of tired dancers it ended.

The Professor leaned forward listening. He leant back frowning, searching for something half forgotten. When had he heard this rendered before, with the same skill, the same feeling? The memory brought with it recollection of crowds, of a town.

He left his corner to waddle to the platform where Mrs. Weston was giving now a selection of Irish airs to vociferous applause.

"I have to thank you," he said simply, holding out his hand. "Music--music is all to me. But ... somewhere ... once I have heard someone else play that just as you do."

"Everyone plays it much the same, I should think," said Violet Weston, a little abruptly, moving away.

Miss O'Toole made seven pounds clear and had given, as she said, a wonderful musical treat to everyone. In fact Sir Abel Huntley had assured her that if it was a choice between another concert in Kildrellan and one at the Queen's Hall, he would come to hers.

*CHAPTER XIV*

"Not tired again, Violet?" said Gheena reproachfully. "And we began a mile on to-day?"

Mrs. Weston explained that she had twisted her ankle coming down the stony little lane, and she really could not go on. She said acidly that they had come miles, and one could see all the caves on the shore, and she did not believe anyone could hide things in them.

"There are one or two ledges," said Gheena thoughtfully, "and I've heard the water gurgling inside the rocks. I shall go on looking with Crabbit if you can't come."

They were close to the little fishing village of Leeshane. It crouched in the hollow of a shingly bay with the rocks poking out on either side, the cliffs gradually rising to the point, where ships swung into the calm water of the harbour.

They had been along the cliffs quite often, searching through the gorse bushes and trails of bramble and stunted fuchsias, until Violet Weston grew tired; high-heeled shoes soon caused twinges of pain on the rough ground.

March had come in weeping to brighten to a promise of spring. Primroses shone pale gold in more than one sheltered hollow; the wild anemones were blue in the woods; green grass was nosing through the rusty fronds of yesteryear. The catkins danced over the banks of the little trout stream.

In France, men wearying of bitter cold, welcomed the first warmth of the spring, for there they had frost in their very bones, and the cold chill of mud had clung to them as day by day they held on doggedly and waited for the advance which they were told was to be. The wild interest in the day's papers had died to a dull endurance. People got fewer wires.

While the great monster War went on drinking blood and swelling hideously, March would see the end of the hunting, and a dreary summer only enlivened by constant hopes that something must happen to end it all would be before them.

Gheena generally went away from home. This year her friends were fighting or in mourning, and she meant to stay at Castle Freyne.

"Well, if you can't go any further," said Gheena, "I'll come out myself."

"When?"

Gheena said that she did not know, because she meant to search by herself or with Psyche the sprite.

"I'll look down here now," said Gheena, dropping over the cliff.

Mrs. Weston, left alone, kicked off one shoe and rubbed her brilliant foot ill-humouredly. Then she sketched idly on a small block, a neat little sketch absolutely devoid of any claim except that of neatness; and she put that away and yawned and moved her released toes.

Gheena and Crabbit were scrambling in and out of caves, swinging along the cliff, with the tide nosing in sluggishly close to high-water mark. The sea was silvery grey under a silver sky, lapping and gurgling calmly. When a voice close by remarked that it was "airly to be lookin' for, say, birds' eggs," she turned to see Guinane, a particularly intelligent-looking youth, with bright blue eyes and a cunning mouth.

Gheena said briefly that it was. "But you never know in war times what a bird might do. It must upset them greatly, Mike, when they find they're roosting on a submarine instead of swimming," she said gravely.

Mike Guinane observed that he saw a submarine above in the big harbour, and it looked like a ship and nothin' else. Himself he doubted their powers of running down undther the wather, and thought it was mostly chat.

In fact, after a brief pause, he thought that all the war was mostly newspaper chat entirely, and got up too, to make labour scarce and dear.