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His acquaintance with Fanny extended over a three-day shooting party in Kildare, and a dance given by the detachment of his regiment at Enniscar, for which he had come down from the depôt. It was not sufficient to enlighten him as to what it meant to her to own and sell a horse for the first time in her life.
"As if there were anything on earth that bored people as much as card tricks!" said that experienced lady to Rupert Gunning. "Look here, would you mind reading over these riddles, to see which you'd like to have to answer. Now, here's a local one. I'll ask it 'Why am dis room like de Enniscar Demesne? and then you'll say, 'Because dere am so many pretty little deers in it'!"
Not even an environment as unpromising as that of Enniscar in its winter torpor had power to dismay her. A public whose artistic tastes had hitherto been nourished upon travelling circuses, Nationalist meetings, and missionary magic lanterns in the Wesleyan schoolhouse, was, she argued, practically virgin soil, and would ecstatically respond to any form of cultivation.
Fanny Fitz left the matter, together with a further instalment of the thirty pounds, in the hands of the sergeant of police, and went home, and, improbable as it may appear, in the course of something less than ten days she received an invoice from the local railway station, Enniscar, briefly stating: "1 horse arrd. Please remove."
Finally she returned, third-class, to her home in Ireland, with nothing to show for the expedition except a new and very smart habit, and a vague assurance that Captain Carteret would give her a mount now and then with Freddy Alexander's hounds. Captain Carteret was to be on detachment at Enniscar. Mr.
"I jolly soon kicked him on to his legs," went on Freddy, "not that they were much use to him he must have been on the booze all night. After that I went on to the stable yard, and if you'll believe me, the two chaps there had never turned up at all at half-past eight, mind you! and there was Fennessy doing up the horses. He said he believed that there'd been a wake down at Enniscar last night.
The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its kind. The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert Gunning's song, of the truculent order dedicated to basses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences. The performance raged to its close in a "Cake Walk," to the inspiring strains of "Razors a-flying through the air," and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar Independent described cryptically as "a tout ensemble
The fact remains that on the appointed night the chosen troupe, approximately word-perfect, and with spirits something chastened by stage fright, were assembled in the clerk's room of the Enniscar Town Hall, round a large basin filled horribly with a compound of burnt cork and water. "It's not as bad as it looks!" said Mrs.
William Fennessy, lately returned from America, at present publican in Enniscar and proprietor of a small farm on its outskirts, had taken a grey mare to the forge. It was now November, and the mare had been out at grass for nearly three months, somewhat to the detriment of her figure, but very much to her general advantage.
But what were these enthusiasms compared to the deep-seated ecstasy of Freddy Alexander as in his new pink coat he rode down the main street of Enniscar, Patsey in equal splendour bringing up the rear, unspeakably conscious of the jibes of his relatives and friends. There was a select field, consisting of Mr.
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