In the days when Christian Talbot-Lowry
was a little girl, that is to say between the eighties
and nineties of the nineteenth century, the class
known as Landed Gentry was still pre-eminent in Ireland.
Tenants and tradesmen bowed down before them, with
love sometimes, sometimes with hatred, never with
indifference. The newspapers of their districts
recorded their enterprises in marriage, in birth, in
death, copiously, and with a servile rapture of detail
that, though it is not yet entirely withheld from
their survivors, is now bestowed with equal unction
on those who, in many instances, have taken their places,
geographically, if not their place, socially, in Irish
every-day existence. There is little doubt but
that after the monsters of the Primal Periods had
been practically extinguished, a stray reptile, here
and there, escaped the general doom, and, as Mr. Yeats
says of his lug-worm, may have-sung with “its
grey and muddy mouth” of how “somewhere
to North or West or South, there dwelt a gay, exulting,
gentle race” of Plesiosauridae, or Pterodactyli.
Even thus may this record be regarded; as partial,
perhaps, but as founded on the facts of a not wholly
to be condemned past.
Christian’s father, Richard
Talbot-Lowry, was a good-looking, long-legged, long-moustached
Major, who, conforming beautifully to type, was a
soldier, sportsman, and loyalist, as had been his
ancestors before him. He had fought in the Mutiny
as a lad of nineteen, and had been wounded in the
thigh in a cavalry charge in a subsequent fight on
the Afghan Frontier. Dick, like Horatius, “halted
upon one knee” for the rest of his life, but
since the injury gave him no trouble in the saddle,
and did not affect the sit of his trousers, he did
not resent it, and possibly enjoyed its occasional
exposition to an enquirer. When his father died,
he left the Army, and, still true to the family traditions,
proceeded to “settle down” at Mount Music,
and to take into his own hands the management of the
property.
Of the Talbot-Lowrys it may be truly
said that the lot had fallen to them in a fair ground.
Their ancestor, the Gentleman Adventurer of Queen
Elizabeth’s time, had had the eye for the country
that, in a slightly different sense, had descended
to his present representative. Mount Music House
stood about midway of a long valley, on a level plateau
of the hill from which it took its name, Cnocan an
Ceoil Sidhe, which means the Hill of Fairy Music,
and may, approximately, be pronounced “Knockawn
an K’yole Shee.” The hill melted downwards no
other word can express the velvet softness of those
mild, grassy slopes to the shore of the
River Broadwater, a slow and lordly stream, that moved
mightily down the wide valley, became merged for a
space in Lough Kieraun, and thence flowed onwards,
broad and brimming, bearded with rushes, passing like
a king, cloaked in the splendours of the sunset, to
its suicide in the far-away Atlantic. The demesne
of Mount Music lay along its banks; in woods often,
more often in pastures; with boggy places ringed with
willows, lovely, in their seasons, with yellow flags,
and meadowsweet, kingcups, ragwort and loosestrife.
Its western boundary was the Ownashee, a mountain stream,
a tributary of the great river, that came storming
down from the hills, and, in times of flood, snatching,
like a border-reiver, at sheep, and pigs, and fowl,
tossing its spoils in a tumble of racing waves into
the wide waters of its chieftain.
Mount Music House was large, intensely solid, practical,
sensible, of that special type of old Irish country-house that is entirely
remote from the character of the men that originated it, and can only be
explained as the expiring cry of the English blood. How many Anglo-Irish
great-great-grandfathers have not raised these monuments to their English
forbears, and then, recognising their obligations to their Irish mothers
ancestry, have filled them, gloriously, with horses and hounds, and butts of
claret, and hungry poor relations unto the fourth and fifth generations?
That they were a puissant breed, the history of the Empire, in which they have
so staunchly borne their parts, can tell; their own point of view is fairly
accurately summed up in Currans verse:
“If sadly thinking, with spirits
sinking,
Could more than drinking my
cares compose,
A cure for sorrow from sighs I’d
borrow,
And hope to-morrow would end
my woes.
But as in wailing there’s nought
availing,
And Death unfailing will strike
the blow,
Then for that reason, and for a season,
Let us be merry before we
go.”
For Dick Talbot-Lowry, however, and
many another like him, the merriment of his great-grandfather
was indifferent compensation for the fact that his
grandfather’s and his father’s consequent
borrowings were by no means limited to cures for sorrow.
Mortgages, charges, younger children (superfluous
and abhorrent to the Heaven-selected Head of a Family) all
these had driven wedges deep into the Mount Music
estate. But, fortunately, a good-looking, long-legged,
ex-Hussar need not rely exclusively on his patrimony,
while matrimony is still within the sphere of practical
politics. When, at close on forty-one years of
age (and looking no more than thirty), Dick left the
Army, his next step was to make what was universally
conceded to be “a very nice marriage,”
and on the whole, regarding it from the impartial
standpoint of Posterity, the universe may be said to
have been justified in its opinion.
Lady Isabel Christian was the daughter
of an English Earl, and she brought with her to Mount
Music twenty thousand golden sovereigns, which are
very nice things, and Lady Isabel herself was indisputably
a nice thing too. She was tall and fair, and
quite pretty enough (as Dick’s female relatives
said, non-committally). She was sufficiently
musical to play the organ in church (which is also
a statement provided with an ample margin); she was
a docile and devoted wife, a futile and extravagant
house-keeper, kindly and unpunctual, prolific without
resentment; she regarded with mild surprise the large
and strenuous family that rushed past her, as a mountain
torrent might rush past an untidy flower garden, and,
after nearly fourteen years of maternal experience,
she had abandoned the search for a point of contact
with their riotous souls, and contented herself with
an indiscriminate affection for their very creditable
bodies. Lady Isabel had if the saying
may be reversed les qualités de
ses défauts,” and these latter could have
no environment less critical and more congenial than
that in which it had pleased her mother to place her.
It was right and fitting that the wife of the reigning
Talbot-Lowry of Mount Music, should inevitably lead
the way at local dinner-parties; should, with ladylike
inaudibleness, declare that “this Bazaar”
or “Village Hall” was open. It was
no more than the duty of Major Talbot-Lowry (D.L.,
and J.P.) to humanity, that his race should multiply
and replenish the earth, and Lady Isabel had unrepiningly
obliged humanity to the extent of four sons and two
daughters. Major Dick’s interest in the
multiplication was, perhaps, more abstract than hers.
“Yes,” he would say, genially,
to an enquiring farmer, “I have four ploughmen
and two dairymaids!”
Or, to a friend of soldiering days:
“Four blackguard boys and only a brace of the
Plentiful Sex!”
A disproportion for which, by some
singular action of the mind, he took to himself considerable
credit.
Miss Frederica Coppinger (who will
presently be introduced) was accustomed to scandalise
Lady Isabel by the assertion that paternal affection
no more existed in men than in tom-cats. An over-statement,
no doubt, but one that was quite free from malice or
disapproval. Undoubtedly, a father should learn
to bear the yoke in his youth, and Dick was old, as
fathers go. It cannot be denied that when the
Four Blackguards began to clamour for mounts with
the hounds, and the representatives of the Plentiful
Sex outgrew the donkey, Major Talbot-Lowry had moments
of resentment against his offspring, during which
his wife, like a wise doe-rabbit, found it safest to
sweep her children out of sight, and to sit at the
mouth of the burrow, having armed herself with an
appealing headache and a better dinner than usual.
The children liked him; not very much, but sufficient
for general decency and the Fifth Commandment.
They loved their mother, but despised her, faintly;
(again, not too much for compliance with the Commandment
aforesaid). Finally, it may be said that Major
Dick and Lady Isabel were sincerely attached to one
another, and that she took his part, quite frequently,
against the children.
If, accepting the tom-cat standard
of paternity, Dick Talbot-Lowry had a preference for
one kitten more than another, that kitten was, indisputably,
Christian.
“The little devil knows the
hounds better than I do!” he would say to a
brother M.F.H. at the Puppy Show. “Her mother
can’t keep her out of the kennels. And
the hounds are mad about her. I believe she could
take ’em walking-out single-handed!”
To which the brother M.F.H. would
probably respond with perfidious warmth: “By
Jove!” while, addressing that inner confidant,
who always receives the raciest share of any conversation,
he would say that he’d be jiggered before
he’d let any of his children mess the
hounds about with petting and nonsense.
In justice to Lady Isabel, it should
be said that she shared the visiting M.F.H.’s
view of the position, though regarding it from a different
angle.
“Christian, my dearest child,”
she said, on the day following the Puppy Show that
had coincided with Christian’s eighth birthday,
when, after a long search, she had discovered her
youngest daughter, seated, tailor-wise, in one of
the kennels, the centre of a mat of hounds. “This
is not a not a place for you! You don’t
know what you may not bring back with you
“If you mean fleas, Mother,”
replied Christian, firmly, “the hounds have
none, except what I bring them from Yummie.”
(Yummie was Lady Isabel’s dog, a sickly and
much despised spaniel). “The Hounds!”
Christian laughed a little; the laugh that is the flower
of the root of scorn. Then her eyes softened
and glowed. “Darlings!” she murmured,
kissing wildly the tan head of the puppy who, but the
day before, had been rest from her charge.