There was one person who viewed the
enthusiastic intimacy that had sprung up between the
houses of Coppinger and Talbot-Lowry, with a disapproval
as deep as it was prejudiced. It was a person
whose opinion might, by the thoughtless, be considered
unimportant, but in this the thoughtless would greatly
err. Robert Evans was the butler at Mount Music.
He had held that position since the year 1859, from
which statement a brief and unexacting calculation
will establish the fact that he had taken office when
his present master was no more than twenty-one years
old and, it being now 1894, he had so continued for
35 years. Possibly a vision of an adoring and
devoted retainer may here present itself. If
so, it must be immediately dispelled. In Mr.
Evans’ opinion, such devotion and adoration as
the case demanded, were owed to him by the House on
which he had for so long a time bestowed the boon
of his presence, and those who were privileged with
his acquaintance had no uncertainty in the matter,
since his age, his length of service, his fidelity,
and the difficulties with which he daily contended,
formed the main subjects of his conversation.
In the palmier days of the Irish gentry
there were many households in which the religion of
the servants was a matter of considerable importance,
and those who could afford exclusiveness, were accustomed
to employ only Protestants as indoor servants.
This may seem like an unwarrantable invasion of the
inner fortress of another individual, making his views
spiritual responsible for his fortunes temporal.
But in Ireland, in the earlier half of the troubled
nineteenth century, such differentiation was inspired
not by bigotry, but by fear. When a man’s
foes might be, and often were, those of his own household,
that his servants should be of his own religion was
almost his only safeguard against espionage.
There is somewhat to be said on both sides; it will
not be said here, but that there have been times in
Ireland when such precautions were required, cannot
be ignored.
Robert Evans was a survivor of such
a period. Time was when he strutted, autocratic
and imperious as a turkey-cock, ruler of a flock of
lesser fowl, all of his own superior creed; brave days
when he and Mrs. Dixon, the housekeeper, herded and
headed, respectively, a bevy of “decent Protestant
maids” into Family Prayers every morning, and
packed “the full of two covered cars” off
to the Knockceoil Parish Church on Sundays. Evans
rarely went to church, believing that such disciplines
were superfluous for one in a state of grace, but the
glory of the House of Talbot-Lowry demanded a full
and rustling pew of female domestics, while the coachman,
and a footman or a groom, were generally to be relied
on to give a masculine stiffening to the party.
With Lady Isabel’s regime had come a slackening
of moral fibre, a culpable setting of attainments,
or of convenience, above creed, in the administration
of the household. Once had Lady Isabel been actually
overheard by Evans, offering to a friend, in excuse
for the indifferent show made by her household in
the parish church, the offensive explanation that
“R.C.’s were so sympathetic, and so easy
to find, while Protestants were not only scarce, but
were so proud of being Protestants, and expected so
much admiration” here she had perceived
the presence of Evans, and had unavailingly begun upon
the weather, but Evans’ deep-seated suspicions
as to the laxity of the English Church had been confirmed.
It is possible that the greatest shock
that Evans was capable of sustaining was administered
when he heard of the secession to the enemy of Colonel
Tom Coppinger. Only second to it was the discovery
that Colonel Tom’s poisoned offspring was to
be received at Mount Music and admitted to the fellowship
of its children.
“No!” Evans said to Mrs.
Dixon, standing on the hearthrug in the sanctuary
of the housekeeper’s room, one wet afternoon,
shortly after the Coppinger return: “I
see changes here, better and worse, good and bad,
but I didn’t think I’d live to see what
I seen to-day the children of this house
consorting with a Papist!”
“Fie!” said Mrs. Dixon,
without conviction. She was fat and easy-tempered,
and though ever anxious to conciliate him whom she
respected and feared as “Mr. Eevans,” her
powers of dissimulation often failed at a pinch of
this kind.
Mr. Evans looked at his table-companion
with a contempt to which she had long been resigned.
He was a short, thin, bald man, with a sharp nose
curved like a reaping-hook, iron-grey whiskers and
hair, and fierce pale blue eyes. Later on, Christian,
in the pride of her first introduction to Tennyson,
had been inspired by his high shoulders and black
tailed coat to entitle him “The many-wintered
crow,” and the name was welcomed by her fellows,
and registered in the repository of phrases and nicknames
that exists in all well-regulated families.
“‘Fie!’” he
repeated after Mrs. Dixon, witheringly. “I
declare before God, Mrs. Dixon, if I was to tell you
the Pope o’ Rome was coming to dinner next Sunday,
it’s all you’d say would be ‘Fie!’”
Mrs. Dixon received this supposition
of catastrophe with annoying calm, and even reverted
to Mr. Evans’ earlier statement in a manner
that might have bewildered a less experienced disputant
than he.
“Well, indeed, Mr. Eevans,”
she said, appeasingly, “I’d say he was
a nice child enough, and the very dead spit of the
poor Colonel. I dunno what harm he could do the
children at all?”
The Prophet Samuel could scarcely
have regarded Saul, when he offered those ill-fated
apologies relative to King Agag, with a more sinister
disfavour than did Evans view Mrs. Dixon.
“I’ll say one thing to
you, Mrs. Dixon,” he said, moving to the door
with that laborious shuffle that had inspired one of
the hunted and suffering tribe of his pantry-boys
to the ejaculation: “I thank God, there’s
more in his boots than what’s there room for!” “and
I’ll say it once, and that’s enough!
As sure as God made little apples, trouble and disgrace
will follow jumpers!”
Mrs. Dixon, no less than Evans, disapproved
of those who changed their religion, but this denunciation
did not seem to her to apply.
“That poor child’s no
jumper!” she called after her antagonist; “’twasn’t
his fault he was born the way he was!”
Evans slammed the door.
Mrs. Dixon dismissed the controversy
from her easy mind, looked at the clock, and laid
down her knitting.
“Miss Christian’ll be
looking for her birthday cake!” she said to
herself, hoisting her large person from her chair.
Even as she did so, there came a rapping, quick and
urgent, at the window. “Look at that now!”
said Mrs. Dixon. “I wouldn’t doubt
that child to be wanting the world in her pocket before
it was made!”
“Dixie! Dixie! Open the window!
Hurry! I want you!”
Christian’s face, surmounted
by a very old hunting-cap, and decorated with a corked
moustache, appeared at the window.
“The Lord save us, child!
What have you done to yourself? And what are
you doing out there in the wet?” answered Mrs.
Dixon, reprovingly; “sure the cake won’t
be baked for ten minutes yet.”
“I don’t want the cake.
I only want some biscuits, please. Dixie,
and hurry! Amazon’s bolted, and Cottingham’s
asked me to catch her! If you had
a bone, Dixie, she’d simply
Mrs. Dixon was gone. She disapproved
exceedingly of Christian’s rôle as kennel-boy,
but as, since Christian’s first birthday, she
had never refused her anything, she was not prepared
on her tenth to break so well-established a habit.
“I dunno in the world why Mr.
Cottingham should make a young lady like you do his
business!” she said, putting the requisition
bait into Christian’s eager, up-stretched hands,
“and if your Mamma could see you
“Oh, well done, Dixie!
What a lovely bone! Oh, thank you most awfully!”
interrupted Christian, snatching at the dainties provided,
and flitting away through the grey veils of the rain,
a preposterous little figure, clad in a ragged kennel-coat,
that had been long since discarded by the huntsman,
a pair of couples slung round her neck, and a crop
in her hand.
It was a chilly, wet August afternoon.
It had rained for the past three days, and was, by
all appearances, prepared to continue to do so for
three more. Christian ran across the fields to
the kennels, regardless of wet overhead or underfoot,
and oblivious of the corked moustache, which ran too,
almost as fast as she did. She had made a detour
to avoid the schoolroom windows. Her birthday
party was toward, and charades (accounting for her
moustache) were in full swing. But the message
from Cottingham, secretly conveyed together with the
couples, by the pantry boy, transcended in importance
all other human affairs. She had slipped away
from her fellows, and having endured the hunting cap
and the kennel coat, as the wear suitable to such
an occasion, she had not lost a minute in coming to
the horn.
Cottingham, Major Talbot-Lowry’s
First Whip and kennel huntsman, a single-souled little
Devonshire man, whose dyed hair was the solitary indication
of the age it was intended to conceal, awaited her
outside the kennels.
“Well, Missie, I knew you’d
come,” he said, approvingly. “It’s
Amazon that’s away that little badger-pye
bitch we got last week I ’ad to give
’er a bit of a ’iding she tried
to run a sheep when we was walkin’ out last
evening she’s a revengeful sort, she
is, and very artful, and when we gets near kennels,
her took an’ bolted past Jimmy over the ‘ill,
an’ I says to Jimmy, ‘Why you fool’
I says
The tale continued at length, and
with those repetitions and récapitulations peculiar
to the simple, but by no means short annals of the
poor, and especially of the English poor. Yet,
Christian, the impatient, the ardent, stood and listened
with respectful and absorbed interest. Cottingham
might be elderly, egotistic, long-winded, but at this
period of her career, Christian’s hot heart beat
throb for throb with his, and the thought, as he said,
of “that pore little bitch stoppin’ out,
and maybe spoilt, so that there’d be nothin’
for us but to shoot her, through learnin’ to
run sheep,” had precisely the same horror for
her as for him.
“I couldn’t, so to speak,
lay me ’and on ’er now; her wouldn’t
let me go anear ’er, nor she wouldn’t
let Jimmy neither, but she ain’t far away, and
she’d ’ave what I might call cawnfidence
in you, Missie ” Cottingham had at
length concluded: “Her’s that sly
we mightn’t never see ’er again!
But you take and go up that ’ill, Missie, that’s
where I seen ’er last, I’ll lay you get
’er if anyone can!”
Christian, “still,” as
Rossetti says, “with the whole of pleasure,”
received these instructions reverently, and with the
pockets of the kennel-coat further loaded with broken
biscuit, “took and went” according to
instructions. She climbed the fence behind the
kennels, and addressed herself lightly to the ascent
of the hill. It was a long hill, that began with
pasture fields, that were merged imperceptibly into
moorland, heather and furze. There were sheep,
and donkeys and goats on it, and a melancholy old
kennel-horse or two, all feeding peacefully.
Amazon could not be accused in connection with them,
so Christian reflected, and prepared herself to rebut
any such slander. The rain was lighter, and the
soaking mist that had all day filled the valley, was
slowly thinning, and revealing the mighty scroll of
silver that was the river, while the woods and hillsides
came and went, illusive as the grey hints of landscape
in a Japanese water-colour. But at the mature
age of ten years, Christian cared for none of these
things. She saw the smoke from the Mount Music
kitchen chimney blending bluely with the mist, and
thought with a momentary pang of the birthday cake.
She wondered if the Companions of Finn would so far
forget honour and fidelity as to devour it without
her. She thought of the ten candles that would
gutter to their end, untended by the heroine of the
celebration; she wondered if Cottingham would tell
Papa, and if Papa would tell Mother (thus did this
child of the ’eighties speak of her parents,
the musical abbreviations of a later day, “Mum,”
and “Dad,” not having penetrated the remoteness
in which her home was placed); she also wondered if
there would be a row about her getting wet. All
these things seemed but too probable, but she was
in for it now.
Near a ridge of the hill, in one of
the shallow valleys that furrowed, like ploughshares,
its long slant, there was a dolmen, three huge stones,
with a fourth poised on it. Their grey brows rose
over the billows of bracken, and briers, laden with
the promise of fruit, made garlands for their ancient
heads. Christian’s straying advance brought
her along the lip of the little valley in which they
reposed, and quite suddenly there rose in her the
conviction that her quest was nearing success.
She was of that mysteriously-gifted company to whom
the lairs of things lost are revealed. She “found
things”; she was “lucky.” She
was regarded by the servants as one enfolded in the
cloak of St. Anthony, that inestimable saint, whose
mission it is to find and protect the lost. It
had become a household habit to appeal to Christian
when one of every day’s most common losses occurred.
She would hearken; her little thin body would stiffen,
like a dog setting his game, a spark would light in
her brown eyes, and how led who can say? she
would fly like a wireless message to the thing sought
for.
So it was now, on the furzy side of
Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe; she knew that the moment had
come. She sat down on a ledge of rock, and waited,
throbbing with anticipation, and had not long to wait.
A brown shadow moved in the bracken near the dolmen,
a brown face peered with infinite caution, round a
flank of the great stones.
“Yoop! the little bitchie!”
said Christian to the horizon. Christian was
an apt scholar, and Cottingham’s tone and idiom
were alike accurately rendered.
The lady thus addressed gazed with
a greater intensity, but did not move. Christian
took a piece of dog-biscuit from the ragged pocket
of the kennel-coat, and, still walking closely in
Cottingham’s steps, bit it, ate a part of it,
and carelessly flung the remainder in the direction
of the shadow. This stole forth, and, having snapped
up the biscuit, sank back into the covert. Christian
did not move.
“Amazon!” she crooned,
in tones in which a doting wood-pigeon might apostrophise
a sickly fledgling; “Amazon, my darling!”
Another piece of biscuit accompanied
the apostrophe, and poor Amazon, who was indeed very
lonely and very hungry, capitulated, and came sidling
up to the charmer, with propitiatory smiles, and deprecating
stern wagging, beneath her, and in advance of her hind
legs, instead of above her and behind them.
“’Olding the buckle in
the right ’and,” said Christian to herself,
in faithful quotation from the great ensample, as
with a swiftness and decision that were creditable
to her training, she put the couples on Amazon.
Then she produced the bone that had
been “Dixie’s” bright achievement,
and it was while, in contentment and friendship, Amazon
was crunching it, that Larry Coppinger appeared.
He rose from behind a spur of rock
and furze, and came towards Christian.
“Oh, good for you!” he
said, admiringly, “I was afraid to show up till
you had got her.”
Christian was not sure that she was
pleased at this intervention.
“How did you know where I was?”
“The servants told me you had
gone to the kennels, and Jimmy showed me the hill,
and then I spotted your white coat not that
it’s so awfully white! I thought
it was rather rotten to let you go alone.”
“And why not, pray?” enquired
Christian, haughtily. Male assumption of the
duties of guardianship was a thing she found highly
offensive; “I always go about alone!”
“Well, I wanted to come, anyway,”
said Larry, with a placating grin. “I say,
that is an awful nice dog!”
“You never call foxhounds ’dogs’!”
said Christian, still with hauteur; “Larry,
you are an owl!”
But she enjoyed the consciousness
of knowing more than he did; she even forgave him
his superfluousness. She thought it was rather
decent of him to have come, and she let him lead Amazon
for a part of the way, only reserving to herself the
entry into the presence of Cottingham, bringing her
sheaf with her.