CHAPTER I WHERE THE WILD GEESE FLY

A flock of wild geese flying across the sunset far away, remote, fantastic, the only living things visible in a world filling with shadows, lent the last touch of beauty to the vast and lonely moors.

“They’re makin’ for the pools of Cloyne, sir,” said the keeper.

Mr Fanshawe watched the flock pass and vanish in the amber distance like a wreath of smoke. Away to the left, covering themselves with night and gloom, stood the hills of Glynn, where the golden eagle still has its eyrie, and the wild goat its home. From there, away to the west, the great moors stretched to the hills of Cloyne.

It was a typical Irish winter’s evening, the sky threatening and forgetting to rain, the air damp and filled with the scent of the earth, near things indistinct in the gathering twilight, and far things seeming near.

From where Mr Fanshawe stood, with his pipe in his mouth and his gun under his arm, you might have started with a brave heart to walk to the hills of Cloyne. Ten miles distant, or at most twelve, they seemed, those hills that lay thirty Irish miles away.

Fanshawe was staying for the hunting with Mr Trench of Dunboyne House. He had come out to-day to have a shot at the snipe, and he had not done badly, to judge by the weight of the bag Micky Finn, the old keeper, was carrying.

“Well,” said the young man, refilling and lighting his pipe, “we’d better be getting back. How far are we from the house, Micky?”

“A matter of five mile be the boggs, sir, an’ siven be the road; which way would your ’arner be chusin’ to take?”

“The road,” said Mr Fanshawe, and, followed by Micky and the dogs, he struck towards the high-road from Dunbeg which goes across the moors white and straight like a chalk-line drawn by a giant.

“You were afther askin’ me, sir, what time the letters came from Dunbeg,” said Micky, as they stepped on to the highway. “Here’s Larry and the letters now, comin’ as hard as he can pelt two hours late, the blackguyard! He’s been stoppin’ to drink at Billy Sheehan’s, or colloguing wid the girls; musha, but it’s little he cares who waits for their letters whin the bottle’s before him.”

Mr Fanshawe shaded his eyes, and with a constriction of the heart watched the horseman and the horse coming at a furious pace and developing with magical speed against the sunset. The sound of the hoofs, like the sound of castanets in the hands of a madman, came on the breeze.

The horseman, a ragged individual with a leer on his face, no boots on his feet, and a post-bag slung on his back, reined in when he came level with the keeper and the gentleman, bringing his horse literally on its haunches.

“Any letters for Mr Fanshawe, Larry?” asked the keeper.

“Begob!” said Larry, swinging the post-bag round and opening it, “there’s letters enough for a dozen, but I’m no schollard to tell yiz who thir for; will y’ be afther puttin’ your hand in the bag, sir, and takin’ your chice?”

Mr Fanshawe did as he was invited. There was only one letter for him, all the rest were for Mr Trench or members of his household.

It was not the letter he had been half expecting by every post for weeks and weeks past, and he opened it with a gloomy brow, and read it by the light of sunset as Larry rode on and the sound of the hoofs died away on the high-road.

To be young, rich, healthy, good-looking, and yet unhappy! No other magician but Love could bring about such an extraordinary concatenation of states.

Love had done this in the case of Mr Fanshawe.

As for the letter, it was addressed from Glen Druid House, Tullagh, Mid Meath, and it ran:

“Dear Richard,—I have only just been informed that you are staying with my friends the Trenches, to whom, through you, I send my very kind regards.

“This house is only some forty miles from where you are now, and as I have a small house-party coming on the 10th, the happy idea has occurred to me that you might join us, if your engagements will permit you so to do. You will find shooting enough to please you, I think, in the coverts, and the O’Farrel’s hounds meet twice a week. You will also find a sincere welcome from your old friend,

“P.S.—I am here, at present, by myself. I would be quite alone were it not that I have your cousin Robert’s children staying with me. Bob (Lord Gawdor), Doris, and Selina my namesake.”

“Bother the children!” said Mr Fanshawe, thrusting the letter into the pocket of his shooting coat, and little dreaming what pleasant factors in the making of his fate those same children were to be.

He was rather fond of children, as a matter of fact, but he was in love, and he had been deciphering Lady Seagrave’s old-fashioned caligraphy in the hope of finding, like a flower in a wilderness, the magical name of Violet Lestrange.

“Do you know anything of Glen Druid House, near Tullagh, Micky?” he asked, as they trudged along together in the deepening twilight.

“Yes, sor,” replied Micky; “it’s be Castle Knock over beyant thim hills. It was Mr Moriarty’s in the ould days. The place went to rot an’ ruin whin the ould gintleman died, but they do be tellin’ me it’s changed hands to an ould lady from over the wather.”

“Is there good shooting?”

“Shutin’!” said Micky, speaking more from a desire to be amiable than from absolute knowledge. “Sure, it’s not a gun you’d want there at all, at all, for you could knock the cock phisints down wid your fist. Phisints! ay, be jabers! an’ woodcock an’ teal; and as for hares an’ rabbits, the groun’s is jumpin’ an’ runnin’ wid them.”

“If nothing better turns up,” said Mr Fanshawe to himself, “I’m not sure that I won’t accept the old girl’s invitation;” and ten days later, as you may have guessed from this preamble, he did.

CHAPTER II PATSY

“Miss Kiligrew,” said little Lord Gawdor, looking up from his slate and the multiplication sum on it that wouldn’t come right.

“Yes, Robert?”

“William, the page-boy, was sent away yesterday for stealing the jam.”

“Go on with your sum,” answered the governess, who was seated at the other end of the table helping Doris, little Lord Gawdor’s sister, to make a map. “This is the third time you have interrupted me with frivolous remarks. How can you expect to make your sum come right if you do not fix your mind on your slate?”

“I will in a minit,” said his lordship; “but I want to tell you, he’d cribbed a pot of plum jam, and he heard some one coming, and he popped it in the copper in the back kitchen where the clothes were boiling. Gran’ma said she never heard of an act of such—what was it, Doris?”

“Turpentine, I think,” replied Doris, throwing back her golden hair from her forehead, relieved to escape for a moment from the monotony of map-making.

“‘Turpitude,’ I suppose you mean,” said Miss Kiligrew.

“Yes, that was it,” said Lord Gawdor. “What’s it mean?”

“Wickedness,” replied Miss Kiligrew. “Go on with your sum.”

“I will; but I want just to tell you, he went away yesterday, and gran’ma said to Mrs Kinsella the cook she didn’t know what she’d do for a page-boy, and cook said she’d try and get Patsy Rooney, the son of the keeper, to come. He’s that red-headed boy we saw carrying the rabbits in the park the other day. My eye!” he concluded with a burst of laughter, “won’t he look funny in buttons!”

“Go on with your sum,” said Miss Kiligrew severely, “and don’t use vulgar expressions before your sister. Who taught you to say that?”

“What?”

“My eye.”

“William, I b’lieve.”

“Well, it is a very good thing he was sent about his business. Go on with your sum.”

Lord Gawdor did as he was bid, and there was silence for a while, broken only by the squeaking of his pencil on the slate and an occasional clicking sound from under the table, where Selina, his youngest sister, aged five, was seated on the floor playing with a box of bricks. They were in the day nursery, which was also the schoolroom, of Glen Druid Park, a great old Irish country house.

Little Lord Gawdor’s mother was dead and his father was in India. He and his sisters were living with their grandmother, Lady Seagrave. It was three weeks before Christmas, and as Lady Seagrave had invited a house-party, the house was in a state of upset owing to the preparations. Downstairs rooms were being cleaned and dusted, carpets taken up and shaken, mirrors polished, and mattresses standing to air before huge fires.

All the fun of a general house-cleaning was going on, and it seemed very hard to Lord Gawdor and Doris that they had to sit all the morning doing sums and making maps instead of helping to increase the confusion down below.

“I’ve done my sum,” said his lordship at last.

“When I have finished demarcating this frontier I will look at it,” said Miss Kiligrew, who had a paint brush in her hand, and was in the act of tinting with red the boundary line between Cochin China and Somewhere-else.

“All right,” said the boy; “don’t hurry, I can wait as long as you like.” He left the chair and, going to the window, he climbed on to the window-seat and looked out at the park. He had scarcely been a minute at the window when he gave a cry.

“Miss Kiligrew—come here, quick!”

The governess and Doris left the table and came to the window.

“That’s him,” said Lord Gawdor, pointing to a small figure trudging across the park.

“Who?” asked the governess.

“Patsy Rooney,” replied he.

“How dare you call me from my work to look at such nonsense!” cried Miss Kiligrew. “Have you no regard for the value of my time?”

“Patsy isn’t nonsense,” replied his lordship. “They say he can trap rabbits better than his father, and he keeps the ferrits and helps to clean the guns, and,” finished up Lord Gawdor, dropping off the window-seat and coming back wearily to the table, “I wish to goodness I was him!”

CHAPTER III THE FORM IN THE WOOD

It had snowed slightly in the early morning, and enough snow lay on the ground to take the track of a hare.

The ground told quite a lot of things to Patsy Rooney as he made his way across Glen Druid Park from his father’s cottage to the little village of Castle Knock, which lies beyond the park a mile to the west, where the Tullagh road meets the road to Kilgobbin.

Out in the open spaces the great feet of the crows had left their mark clear cut in the snow. Crossing them you could see the lesser traces of the ringed plover, and all sorts of little birds had left tiny footprints where the snow lay thin and white as a sheet on the borders of the beech woods.

All kinds of rare birds came to Glen Druid Park, for the place had been deserted so long that there was no one to trouble them, except Patsy’s father, who was the keeper, and who lived in the keeper’s cottage close to the Big House.

The Big House had been deserted for years, but it was deserted no longer, for only that autumn Lady Seagrave had taken it, and she and her family had already moved in; and there were, as I have hinted, to be great doings at Christmas, and the whole country-side was talking of the wonderful things that were to happen when the “quality” arrived.

By the “quality” the country people meant the guests who were coming over from England. Lords and ladies were reputed to be coming, and bringing their hunting horses with them, and there was a rumour that a bishop was coming, too. Patsy was anxious enough to see the lords and ladies, but he was more anxious still to see the bishop; what such a thing was like he could not in the least imagine. He could have asked, but he didn’t: firstly, because he was a person of such little importance that no one would have been bothered answering him; and secondly, because he did not want to spoil the sight when it came by knowing what it would be like beforehand. He thought it was some sort of animal.

He was going through the beech woods now at a “sweep’s trot” to keep himself warm. He had an old stake plucked from a fence in his hand, and as he ran he would every now and then twirl the stake round his head and give a “whoop” that sent the startled birds fluttering through the branches and the rabbits scuttling through the withered fern.

He was not going through the thick of the wood, but down a broad drive that was the shortest cut to the village; and he did not twirl the stake round his head and whoop for the fun of the thing, but to keep up his courage. For the drive was just the place where the “carriage” was always met.

Patsy’s uncle had seen the “carriage,” or said he had. So had a lot of other people. It was a hearse with plumes, driven by a man without a head, and it was supposed to haunt the grounds of Glen Druid Park, sometimes even in daylight.

The horrible thing about it was that when the man without the head saw you, he made straight for you; and, if he overtook you, down he would get and bundle you into the vehicle and drive off, and then you were done for.

The snow on the drive, like the snow on the grass of the park, showed all sorts of little footprints. Tracks of hares and rabbits and the trail of a stoat, Patsy knew and could distinguish them all. Though he could neither read or write, he knew the habits and names of all the wild animals and birds that were to be seen in the woods and ways around; he knew all the tales about the fairies that lived under the ferns in the glens, and the cluricaunes that cobbled the fairies’ boots. He had never seen a cluricaune or a fairy, but he believed in them, notwithstanding the fact that he had a very sharp and practical mind where the ordinary business of life was concerned.

Suddenly Patsy came to a stand close to the trunk of a great beech tree. He had caught a glimpse of something in the wood on the right-hand side of the drive.

CHAPTER IV CON COGAN

It looked like a heap of old clothes at first sight, then he made it out to be the figure of a man on his knees engaged in taking a rabbit from a snare.

He was a forlorn-looking man in tatters, and with long hair that hung over his shoulders, and, bent down there amidst the withered ferns, and under the shadow of the tree branches, he looked not unlike a gnome or the ghost of a robber; but he did not frighten the boy, who recognised the figure at once as that of his uncle, Con Cogan.

Con Cogan had once been the blacksmith at Castle Knock, but he had sold his business and taken to bad ways, and he was now the terror of the country-side. He had no house of his own, but just lived as he could, sleeping in barns and hayricks, sometimes begging his food, sometimes stealing it. He was suspected of being a highway robber, but he had never been caught in the act; and though a good many people knew things about him that would have sent him to prison, they never told: not because they had any special love for him, but because they were afraid. It was said that he had the evil eye, and that if he cast a “black look” on a person it would be all over with them and they would never do another day’s good. Besides this, he always carried a blackthorn stick with knobs on it; there were seven notches on the handle of it, and people said that every notch stood for a man he had killed.

As the boy stood watching his uncle, the latter suddenly rose up with the dead rabbit he had caught in his hand, and seeing his nephew gave him good-morning.

“And where are you off to, Patsy?” said he.

“I’m going on an arrand,” replied Patsy.

“And where’s that?” asked Con, as he stuffed the rabbit into the pocket of his old overcoat, and took up the blackthorn stick he had dropped.

“To Castle Knock,” replied Patsy.

“And what are you going to do with yourself when you get to Castle Knock?” asked Con.

“I’m goin’ to do me arrand.”

“Blisther you and your arrands!” shouted his uncle. “Talk English, will yiz, or I’ll prod the sinse out of you with the end of me blackthorn stick!”

“Ohone!” cried Patsy. “Sure, it’s skinned alive I’ll be if I’m not back by twelve with the ca’tridges for the guns that’s waitin’ at the post-office with the lethers for the Big House.”

“So they’ve made you the postman,” said Con.

“Bob Murphy’s laid up with the rheumatism,” replied Con’s nephew. “Crool bad he is; and me father says to me: ‘Away wid you, Patsy, to Castle Knock for the lethers, and ax thim has the ca’tridges for the guns come from Dublin, and fetch thim if they have. And if you drop wan of them it’s skinned alive you’ll be, or me name’s not Micky Rooney.’”

“Oh, he did, did he?” said Con.

“Them’s were his words,” said Patsy; “so I must be runnin’ on me arrand.”

“Oh, you must be runnin’ on your arrand, must you?” asked Con in a meditative tone.

“I must.”

“And your daddy said he’d skin you alive if you weren’t quick, did he?”

“He did.”

“Well, it’s I that’ll be skinnin’ you dead in two ticks if you don’t hould your whisht and be doin’ my bidding.”

“Ohone!” wailed Patsy.

“Whisht!” shouted Con.

Patsy became dumb. He would have darted off like a rabbit and tried to escape by running, only he was afraid of being brought to earth by Con’s blackthorn stick hurled after him, for Con was a terrible marksman, and he had been known a kill a pheasant thirty paces off with no other weapon than his deftly-flung stick.

“I’m not wishful to get you in trouble, Patsy,” said Con, “it’s not that I’m after; so I’ll just be walkin’ beside you on the way to Castle Knock, and I’ll give you the slip before we catch sight of the village, for there’s a policeman there I’m not wishful to meet, and it’s livin’ in an old tree I am to keep out of his way. What I want to ask you is, when are the quality comin’ to the Big House?”

“They’re comin’ before Chris’mas,” replied Patsy. “Lords and ladies and horses and bishop and all.”

“And who’s staying at the Big House now?”

“Old Lady Seagrave and her gran’childer,” replied Patsy, as he trotted beside his uncle.

“And how many gran’childer has the old lady?” asked Con.

“Three,” replied Patsy. “There’s the little lord; he wears putty leggin’s and a shootin’ coat an’ all, and he only nine; and there’s Miss Doris, wid the long gold hair, and she’s eight; then there’s Selina.”

“What’s that?” asked Con.

“Selina.”

“And what the divil’s Selina?”

“The baby; leastways, they call her the baby. Selina’s her name, and she’s five; she gets in the coal-scuttle when she has the chanst, she’s that small and over-bould. Biddy Mahony is their nurse, and she told me all about them. They eats off china, wid silver forks.”

“Silver forks, did you say?” asked Con.

“Yes, and spoons.”

“Patsy.”

“Yes?”

“It’s thrubled with thinkin’ I am.”

“And what are you thinkin’ about?” asked Patsy anxiously.

“I was thinkin’,” replied Con, “that if you were inside the Big House and I was outside you might maybe hand me out wan or two, or maybe three, of thim silver spoons and forks.”

“But, sure, that would be stealin’,” said Patsy.

“Who said it wouldn’t?” answered Con.

There was no reply to be made to this, so they trudged along in silence.

They had not gone more than two hundred yards when Con left the drive and turned down a path to the right.

CHAPTER V THE MAN IN THE TREE

“Sure, this isn’t the way to Castle Knock!” cried Patsy, drawing back.

“And who said it was?” replied Con, seizing him by the hand. “Is it geography you’d be teachin’ me, or what ails you at all, at all? Come on wid you now, or it’s the knock without the castle you’ll be getting in a minit.”

“Uncle Con,” said Patsy, when they had gone some distance, “where are you taking me?”

“Come along and you’ll see,” replied Con.