Mount Music written by E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

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MOUNT MUSIC

by

E. OE. SOMERVILLE and MARTIN ROSS

Authors of _The Real Charlotte_, _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._,
_All on the Irish Shore_, etc., etc.

1920

By the same Authors

Some Experiences of An Irish R.M.
Further Experiences of An Irish R.M.
In Mr. Knox's Country
All On The Irish Shore
Some Irish Yesterdays
An Irish Cousin
The Real Charlotte
The Silver Fox
Irish Memories

PREFACE

This book was planned some years ago by Martin Ross and myself. A
few portions of it were written, and it was then put aside for other
work.

Without her help and inspiration, it would not have been begun, and
could not have been completed. I feel, therefore, that to join her
name with mine on the title-page is my duty, as well as my pleasure.

E. OE. SOMERVILLE.

CHAPTER I

"Christian, dost them see them?" sang an elder brother, small enough
to be brutal, large enough to hurt, while he twisted Christian's arm
as though it were indeed the rope that it so much resembled.

"I won't say I saw them, because I didn't!" replied Christian, who had
ceased to struggle, but was as far as ever from submission; "but if I
had, you might twist my arm till it was like an old pig's tail and I
wouldn't give in!"

Possibly John realised the truth of this defiance. He administered a
final thump on what he believed to be Christian's biceps, and released
her.

"Pretty rotten to spoil the game, and then tell lies," he said, with
severity.

"I don't tell lies," said Christian, flitting like a gnat to the open
window of the schoolroom. "You sang the wrong verse! It ought to have
been '_hear_ them,' and I _do_!"

Having thus secured the last word, Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry, aged
nine in years, and ninety in spirit, sprang upon the window-sill,
leapt lightly into a flower-bed, and betook herself to the resort most
favoured by her, the kennels of her father's hounds.

What person is there who, having attained to such maturity as is
required for legible record, shall presume to reconstruct, either from
memory or from observation, the mind of a child? Certain mental
attitudes may be recalled, certain actions predicated in certain
circumstances, but the stream of the mind, with its wayward currents,
its secret eddies, flows underground, and its course can only be
guessed at by tokens of speech and of action, that are like the
rushes, and the yellow king-cups, and the emerald of the grass, that
show where hidden waters run. Nothing more presumptuous than the
gathering of a few of these tokens will here be attempted, and of
these, only such as may help to explain the time when these children,
emerging from childhood, began to play their parts in the scene
destined to be theirs.

This history opens at a moment for Christian and her brethren when,
possibly for the last time in their several careers, they asked
nothing more of life. This was the beginning of the summer holidays;
the sky was unclouded by a governess, the sunny air untainted by the
whiff of a thought of a return to school. Anything might happen in
seven weeks. The end of the world, for instance, might mercifully
intervene, and, as this was Ireland, there was always a hope of a
"rising," in which case it would be the boys' pleasing duty to stay at
home and fight.

"Well, and Judith and I would fight, too," Christian would say,
thinking darkly of the Indian knife that she had stolen from the
smoking-room, for use in emergencies. She varied in her arrangements
as to the emergency. Sometimes the foe was to be the Land Leaguers,
who were much in the foreground at this time; sometimes she decided
upon the English oppressors of a down-trodden Ireland, to whose
slaughter, on the whole, her fancy most inclined. But whatever the
occasion, she was quite determined she was not going to be outdone by
the boys.

At nine years old, Christian was a little rag of a girl; a rag, but
imbued with the spirit of the rag that is nailed to the mast, and
flaunts, unconquered, until it is shot away. She had a small head,
round and brown as a hazel-nut, and a thick mop of fine, bright hair,
rebellious like herself, of the sort that goes with an ardent
personality, waved and curled over her little poll, and generally
ended the day in a tangle only less intricate than can be achieved by
a skein of silk. Of her small oval face, people were accustomed to say
it was all eyes, an unoriginal summarising, but one that forced itself
inevitably upon those who met Christian's eyes, clear and shining, of
the pale brown that the sun knows how to waken in a shallow pool in a
hill-stream, set in a dark fringe of lashes that were like the rushes
round the pool. Before she could speak, it was told of her eyes that
they would quietly follow some visitor, invisible to others, but
obvious to her. Occasionally, after the mysterious power of
speech--that is almost as mysterious as the power of reading--had come
to her, she had scared the nursery by broken conversation with
viewless confederates, defined by the nursery-maid as "quare turns
that'd take her, the Lord save us!" and by her mother, as "something
that she will outgrow, and the less said about it the better,
darlings. Remember, she is the youngest, and you must all be very wise
and kind--" (a formula that took no heed of punctuation, and was
practically invariable).

But as Christian grew older the confederates withdrew, either that, or
the protecting shell of reserve that guards the growth of
individuality, interposed, and her dealings with things unseen ceased
to attract the attention of her elders. It was John, her senior by two
years, who preserved an interest, of an inquisitorial sort, in what he
had decided to call the Troops of Midian. There was a sacerdotal turn
about John. He had early decided upon the Church as his vocation, and
only hesitated between the roles of Primate of Ireland and Pope of
Rome. He had something of the poet and enthusiast about him, and
something also of the bully, and it was quite possible that he might
do creditably in either position, but at this stage of his development
his ecclesiastical proclivities chiefly displayed themselves in a
dramatic study, founded upon that well-known Lenten hymn that puts a
succession of searching enquiries, of a personal character, to a
typical Christian. A missionary lecture on West Africa had supplied
some useful hints as to the treatment of witches, and Christian's
name, and the occult powers with which she was credited, had indicated
her as heroine of the piece.

On this particular afternoon the game had begun prosperously, with
Christian as the Witch of Endor, and John as a blend of the Prophet
Samuel and the Head Inquisitor of Spain. A smouldering saucer of
sulphur, purloined by the witch herself from the kennels
medicine-cupboard, gave a stimulating reality to the scene, even
though it had driven the fox terriers, who habitually acted as the
Witch's cats, to abandon their parts, and to hurry, sneezing and
coughing indignantly, to the kitchen. The twins, Jimmy and Georgy,
however, obligingly took their parts, and all was going according to
ritual, when one of the sudden and annoying attacks of rebellion to
which she was subject, came upon the Witch of Endor. The orthodox
conclusion involved a penitential march through the kitchen regions,
the Witch swathed in a sheet, and carrying lighted candles, while she
was ceremonially flagellated by the Prophet with one of his father's
hunting crops. This crowning moment was approaching, Christian had but
to reply suitably to the intimidating riddles of the hymn, and the
final act would open in all its solemnity. For, as has been said, the
spirit of revolt whispered to her, and ingeniously persuaded her that
the required recantation committed her to a falsehood.

As she told John, when the formal inquisition had passed through acrid
dispute to torture, she didn't tell lies.

CHAPTER II

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 Curran's 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 qualites de ses defauts_,"
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.

CHAPTER III

There are certain persons who are born heralds and genealogists; there
are many more to whom these useful gifts have been denied. With
apologies to both classes, to the one for sins of omission, to the
other in the reverse sense, I find that an excerpt from the
Talbot-Lowry pedigree must be inflicted upon them.

With all brevity, let it be stated that Dick Talbot-Lowry possessed a
father, General John Richard, and General John Richard had an only
sister, Caroline. Caroline, fair and handsome, like all her family,
was "married off," as was the custom of her period, at the age of
seventeen, to elderly Anthony Coppinger, chiefly for the reason that
he was the owner of Coppinger's Court, with a very comfortable
rent-roll, and a large demesne, that marched, as to its eastern
boundaries, with that of Mount Music, and was, as it happened, divided
from it by no more than the Ownashee, that mountain river of which
mention has been made. It was, therefore, exceedingly advisable that
the existing friendly relations should be cemented, as far as was
practicable, and the fair and handsome Caroline was an obvious and
suitable adhesive. To Anthony and Caroline, two children were born;
Frederica, of whom more hereafter, and Thomas. By those who lay claim
to genealogic skill, it will now be apparent that these were the first
cousins of Dick Talbot-Lowry. Thomas went into the Indian Army, and in
India met and married a very charming young lady, Theresa Quinton, a
member of an ancient Catholic family in the North of England, and an
ardent daughter of her Church. In India, a son was born to them, and
Colonel Tom, who adored his wife, remarking that these things were out
of his line, made no objection to her bringing up the son, St.
Lawrence Anthony, in her own religion, and hoped that the matter would
end there. Mrs. Coppinger, however, remembering St. Paul's injunctions
to believing wives and unbelieving husbands, neither stopped nor
stayed her prayers and exhortations, until, just before the birth of a
second child, she had succeeded in inducing Tom Coppinger--(just "to
please her, and for the sake of a quiet life," as he wrote,
apologetically, to his relations and friends, far away in Ireland) to
join her Communion. She then died, and her baby followed her. Colonel
Tom, a very sad and lonely man, came to England and visited St.
Lawrence Anthony at the school selected for him by his mother; then he
returned to his regiment in India, and was killed, within a year of
his wife's death, in a Frontier expedition. He left Larry in the joint
guardianship of his sister, Frederica, and his first cousin, Dick
Talbot-Lowry, with the request that the former would live with the boy
at Coppinger's Court, and that the latter would look after the
property until the boy came of age and could do so himself; he also
mentioned that he wished his son's education to continue on the lines
laid down by his "beloved wife, Theresa."

It must, with regret, be stated, that the relatives and friends in
far-away Ireland, instead of admiring "poor Tom's" fidelity to his
wife's wishes, murmured together that it was very unfortunate that
"poor Theresa" had not died when Larry was born, as, in that case,
this "disastrous change of religion" would not have taken place.
Taking into consideration the fact that Larry was to live among his
Irish cousins, it is possible that from the point of view of
expediency, the relations and friends were in some degree justified.

Ireland, it is almost superfluous to observe, has long since decided
to call herself The Island of Saints, an assertion akin to the
national challenge of trailing the coat-tails, and believers in
hereditary might, perhaps, be justified in assuming a strictly
celibate sainthood. Be that as it may, Irish people have ever been
prone to extremes, and, in spite of the proverb, there are some
extremes that never touch, and chief among them are those that concern
religion. Religion, or rather, difference of religion, is a factor in
every-day Irish life of infinitely more potency than it is, perhaps,
in any other Christian country. The profundity of disagreement is such
that in most books treating of Ireland, that are not deliberately
sectarian, a system of water-tight compartments in such matters is
carefully established. It is, no doubt, possible to write of human
beings who live in Ireland, without mentioning their religious views,
but to do so means a drastic censoring of an integral feature of
nearly all mundane affairs. This it is to live in the Island of
Saints.

In this humble account of the late Plesiosauridae and their
contemporaries, it is improbable that any saint of any sect will be
introduced; one assurance, at least, may be offered without
reservation. Those differing Paths, that alike have led many wayfarers
to the rest that is promised to the saints, will be treated with an
equal reverence and respect. But no rash undertakings can be given as
touching the wayfarers, or even their leaders, who may chance to
wander through these pages. Neither is any personal responsibility
accepted for the views that any of them may express. One does not
blame the gramophone if the song is flat, or if the reciter drops his
h's.

After this exhaustive exordium it is tranquillising to return to the
comparative simplicities of the existence of the young Talbot-Lowrys.
Those summer holidays of the year 1894 were made ever memorable for
them by the re-inhabiting of Coppinger's Court. Mount Music was a
lonely place; it lay on the river, about midway between the towns of
Cluhir and Riverstown, either of which meant a five or six mile drive,
and to meet such friends and acquaintances as the neighbourhood
afforded, was, in winter, a matter confined to the hunting-field, and
in summer was restricted, practically, to the incidence of lawn-tennis
parties. Possibly the children of Mount Music, thus thrown upon their
own resources, developed a habit of amusing themselves that was as
advantageous to their caretakers as to their characters. It certainly
enhanced very considerably their interest in the advent of Master St.
Lawrence Coppinger. He became the subject of frequent and often heated
discussions, the opinion most generally held, and stated with a fine
simplicity, being that he would prove to be "a rotter."

"India," John said, "had the effect of making people effemeral."

"Effeminate, ass!" corrected Richard, shortly.

"Anyhow," said a Twin, charitably, "we can knock that out of him!"

"Anyhow," said Judith, next to Richard in age and authority, "if he
_is_ a rotter, he can go into the Brats' band. You want someone
decent," she added, addressing the Twin, whose remark she felt to have
savoured of presumption.

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