THE HEART OF TARA

The Mistress of the Kennels held on to one of Finn's fore-paws as though she feared he might be spirited away from the den, even while he was being welcomed home there. The fatted calf took the form of a dish of new milk and some sardines on toast which had been prepared for the next morning's breakfast. But this came later, and was polished off by Finn more by reason of its rare daintiness and his desire to live up to what the occasion seemed to demand of him, than because he was hungry. At an early stage in proceedings the Master noticed, and removed, the slip-collar.

"Well, that disposes of the theory that Finn wandered away of his own accord," said the Master. "If the police know their business this ought to help them." Then he turned to Finn again. "You didn't know there was a twenty-five pound reward out for you, my son, did you? It was to have been made fifty in another day or two; though, if you did but know it, our solvency demands rather that you should be sold, than paid for in that fashion."

The Mistress nodded thoughtfully.

"But that's quite impossible after this," she said; "selling Finn, I mean."

The Master smiled. "I suppose it is. That seems to be rather our way. It's a dead sure thing there can be no selling of Tara, and--I'm inclined to think you're right about Finn, too. Heavens! If I could lay my hands on the man who took that chip off his muzzle, I think I'd run to the length of a ten pounds fine for assault. I'd get my money's worth, too. The dog has been clubbed; he has been man-handled; I could swear he has had to fight for his freedom. Poor old Finn! What a dog! What a Finn it is!"

While the last of these remarks was being made the Master was carefully examining Finn all over, parting the Wolfhound's dense hard hair over places in which the skin beneath had been broken, and pressing his fingers along the lines of different bones and muscles solicitously. There was a half-spoken oath on the Master's lips when Finn winced from him as his hand passed down the ribs of the hound's right side.

"There is a rib broken here," he said to the Mistress, "unless I am much mistaken. When the post office opens in the morning we must wire for Turle, the vet. Thieving's bad enough, but--there are some stupid brutes in this world!"

The Mistress stared.

"Oh, no, I don't mean Finn; nor any of his honest four-legged kind. I meant two-legged brutes. Finn has been handled more roughly than an understanding man would handle a tiger. And look at his face. Look into his eyes. Notice his keenly watchful air, even while I am handling him. Well, Finn, my son, you have said good-bye to puppyhood with a vengeance now. Unless I am much mistaken he has crowded more into the last three days than all the rest of his life till now had taught him. That dog's years older than Kathleen to-night in some ways. Do you get the effect I mean? The youth has gone; there is a certain new hardness. Watch his eye now as I lift my hand!"

The Master lifted his hand with a sudden jerk, and the two who were watching Finn's eyes saw that in them which they had never seen in Kathleen's, nor yet even in Tara's eyes; for neither Tara nor her daughter had ever pitted their agility against man's brutality. They had never been clubbed or kicked; they had never seen as far into the ugly places of human nature as Finn; and you might brandish your arms in any way you chose before old Tara or Kathleen, and, while the one would have blinked at you with courteous tolerance of your foolishness, the other would have suspected you of inventing a new game, and gambolled before you like a huge kitten.

It was not, of course, that Finn was foolish enough to distrust the Master, or suspect him of any hostile intention. But certain instincts had been awakened in the young Wolfhound, and, for a long time, at all events, and probably for the rest of his life, those instincts would not again become latent. In some respects he may have been the better off; certainly he was better equipped to face the world; but the Master, naturally enough, could not withhold a sigh for the old utter trustfulness which had held even the instincts of self-preservation in abeyance. But, as has been said, Finn was better equipped to face the world than either his sister, or that gentle great lady, his mother; all his instincts were more alert, and his senses also. His eyes moved more rapidly than their eyes; his attitude toward life and toward men-folk was more elastic and less absolute. Men-folk remained his superiors in Finn's eyes, his superiors in a hundred ways, and it might be his dearly loved friends; but they were not any more the absolute, omnipotent, and all-perfect gods that they had been, and still were to Kathleen, for example, who would not have felt the slightest uneasiness if the Master had placed his heel on her throat, or touched her head with a club, as she lay on the ground before him.

To a great extent, however, the Master's sympathetic anger over Finn's wounds, and twinges of regret regarding the subtle changes which he recognised in the hound he affectionately called "son," were out-balanced by the joy he felt at seeing Finn safe in his den again. The loss of Finn had been hard to bear, and not the less hard because it came immediately after the great triumph of the Show. There were the seven prize cards adorning the wall over Tara's great bed in the den; but their presence had been something of a mockery in the absence of their winner. When the Master and the Mistress finally bade Finn good night, after making him thoroughly comfortable in his own clean, big bed, the coach-house door was carefully padlocked.

It could not have been said a month later that Finn was physically the worse for his adventure in the hands of Matey. His ribs were sound once more, and all his wounds and bruises were healed, though a light-coloured scar remained, and would remain on his muzzle, where the dog-stealer's stick had bitten into the bone. If it had come nine months earlier, such an experience would have been bad indeed, for sets-back in puppyhood are hard to make up. But at fifteen months Finn had as perfect a physical foundation to go upon as any living creature could have. He was fortified against physical ills as few animals can be; his system lacked nothing that makes for resisting power; he had attained his full growth without having known a day's illness, and his reserve strength was enormous.

And now came a long and rather severe winter, in which no evil thing befell Finn, and the process of "furnishing" went on in him with never a hitch of any sort, and in circumstances that could not possibly have been more favourable. All day long he drank in the heartiest air in England; on every day he had ample exercise and ample food, and when young summer of the next year brought him to his second birthday, Finn scaled 149 lbs., and his shoulder bones just skimmed the under side of the measuring standard at thirty-six inches. Hard measurement brought him within an eighth of an inch of the yard, and it was fair to say that, favourably measured, standing well up, he did reach full thirty-six inches at the shoulder.

Remember that, when his head was inclined upward, the tip of his nose would be more than a foot higher than his shoulder. With all four feet on the floor, he could rest his nose on a window-ledge that was exactly four feet high. His eyes, and shaggy brows and beard, like the tip of his tail, were dark as night; there were some extra dark hairs at his hocks, fetlocks and shoulder blades; and all the rest of Finn was of a hard, steely grey brindle colour; the typical wolf colour of northern climes, very steely, and with odd suggestions about it of ghostly fleetness, of great speed and enduring strength. His fore-legs were straight as gun-barrels, his knees flat as the palm of your hand; his feet hard, close, round, and rather cat-like, save that his claws were more like chisels, black, and hard, and strongly curved. His hind-legs, on the other hand, were finely curved, with swelling rolls of muscle in the upper thighs. The first or upper thighs were very long and strong, curving sharply out to hocks that were well let down, and without a hint of turn inward or outward. His loins were well arched, his chest deep, like an Arab stallion's, his neck long, arched, and very strong, like the massy muscles of his fore-arms. It was difficult to say that he had grown much since his fifteenth month, and yet he looked a very much bigger dog, and, above all, he looked and was very much stronger. There was no longer anything immature or unformed about Finn. During his next year he might possibly add half a score of pounds to his already great weight; but on his second birthday he was set and furnished, a superb specimen of pure breeding and perfect rearing in Irish Wolfhounds.

For almost six months now Finn's only companion of his own kind had been Tara. He had not seen Kathleen's departure from the cottage beside the Downs, and for some days he was greatly puzzled by her absence. He even stood by the orchard gate and growled fiercely, with the hair on his shoulders standing almost erect, because the thought was in his mind that Matey may have had something to do with this disappearance. The Master saw him engaged in this way, and was greatly puzzled by it. He said to the Mistress of the Kennels afterwards--

"I really think old Finn must have gone mad for five minutes this morning. I never saw a more fearsome-looking creature than he was when he stood and growled beside the orchard gate. I assure you he was terrible. He looked about six feet high, and as fierce as any tiger. It made me think of his ancient godfather, or namesake, the Finn of fifteen hundred years ago, who kept King Cormac's three hundred Irish Wolfhounds in fighting trim, as the most awe-inspiring and death-dealing portion of his master's army. I must read over those 'Tales of the Cycle of Finn' again; they are fine, stirring things. But in these worrying days I hardly seem to get time for sleep, let alone for reading about old Finn. But I wish you had seen Finn--our Finn--this morning. He was very terrible, but I never saw a dog look more magnificent. Upon my word, I believe there are very few living things that Finn could not implant fear in, if he set his mind to it; yes, and pull down, to boot--a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone, and teeth and fire and spirit!"

But Finn need not have worried for Kathleen's sake. She had gone to a good home, and lives there to-day in honoured old age. Her owner paid a hundred guineas for her, and would not sell her for ten times the figure. But there was no way of telling Finn these things, for though he could understand most things that the Master said to him, and was able to tell the Master most things that he wanted to tell; yet the matter of buying and selling and its causes were naturally beyond him. He had no way of telling that the Master was in sore straits financially, though he did know that his friend was not over and above happy. Neither could he tell that the mere keeping of a Wolfhound like Kathleen runs away with the better part of twenty pounds a year. Things were not prospering with the Master, and, feeling that he could not part with Finn or Tara, he had been absolutely obliged to sell Kathleen.

But that was by no means the end of the Master's troubles, the root of which lay in the fact that he loved the country, and hated the town, but was unable to earn money enough in the country to meet the various obligations with which he saddled himself, and was saddled by circumstances. And so it fell out that soon after Finn's second birthday the Master began to spend a good deal of time away from the house by the Downs. Tara liked to pass the greater part of her time in the Master's outside den with her muzzle on his slippers, but Finn was not like that. Tara was a matron getting on in years, and her matronhood had cost her dear in illness from which it had been thought she could never recover. Finn, on the other hand, was the very personification of lusty youth and tireless virility. The Mistress of the Kennels would take him out behind her bicycle, while Tara lay dreaming at home, and it may be that the Mistress fancied her gentle ten and twelve mile runs tired Finn. She never saw him when he would set off upon his hunting expeditions, in the course of which he covered every foot of the Downs for a dozen miles around. He was safe enough, too, for he would have had nothing but angry growls for any man of Matey's ilk, charmed he never so wisely with spiced meats and the like. The weasels and the stoats, and a score of other wild things that roamed that country-side, could have told the Mistress of the Kennels just why Finn did not always clear his dinner dish in these days, and thereby saved her an addition to her many worries of that period. She did not like to depress the Master with tales of half-eaten meals, and she had no knowledge of the half-eaten hares and rabbits and other wild creatures which Finn left behind him on his hunting trails.

From one point of view, Finn suffered at this stage from the absence of the Master's eye and hand, and so did the rabbits; but, from another point of view, Finn gained. He became harder, more wily, and a far more expert hunter than he would have been under a more disciplined regime. But certainly he also became less domesticated, and vastly less fastidious than, for example, that exquisite great lady, his mother.

There came a certain late summer's day, with more than a hint of autumn in the air, when something happened which Finn never quite forgot. The Master had been away for three weeks on end, and Tara had missed him sadly. In the evening the great bitch would often whimper quietly as she lay outstretched, with her long, grey muzzle resting on the slippers which the Mistress never thought of taking from her. Of late she had cared less and less for any kind of activity, and seemed more and more to desire the presence of the Master. Now, in the evening of the day which brought strong hints of coming autumn with it, Finn lay beside Tara in the outside den, thinking lazily of an upland meadow, with a copse at its far end, which he meant to hunt presently. Suddenly there came a sound of a man's footfall on the gravel beyond the gateway and in front of the house. Tara's nostrils quivered as her head rose. With one mighty bound she was outside the den. The gates stood open. The Master, at the garden's far end, called--

"Tara! Tara, girl! Here, girl!"

Finn was by Tara's flank, and he saw her leap forward, hurtling through the air like an arrow from a bow. Six great bounds she gave, while fleet Finn galloped a good twenty paces behind her, and then Tara stopped suddenly with a strange, moaning cry, staggered for a moment, as the Master ran towards her, and then fell sideways, against his knee, with glazing eyes turned up for a last glimpse of the face she loved. The Master was kneeling on the gravel, and Tara's shoulders were in his arms; but at the end of two long-drawn sighs, Tara was dead.

Finn was sniffing at his mother's back. He did not know just what had happened, but he was profoundly conscious that the happening was tragic, and that his beautiful mother was the victim. The shock to the Master was very great; for he was already unhappy, and he had loved this mother of heroes of his very dearly. But the shock to Finn, though far less complex, was scarcely less great. He had killed many scores of times, but it seemed that he had never seen death till now. He recognized it clearly enough. He knew that Tara was never going to move again; the instant his sensitive nostrils touched her still, warm body he knew that. But there had been no killing. That was what baffled Finn, and struck a kind of terror into his heart, to lend poignancy to his sorrow. One more look he gave at his mother's sightless face, this time where it rested on the crook of the Master's arm, and then he sat down on his haunches, and with muzzle raised high poured out his grief in the long-drawn Irish Wolfhound howl; the most melancholy cry in nature.

The Master had looked careworn and weary before he called Tara to him. It was a very grey, sad face he showed when he rose gently and bade Finn go into the coach-house and be silent. He had known that Tara's heart was weak, but this thing that had happened he had never anticipated, and the nature and circumstances of Tara's death were such as to move a man deeply. In a sense, her love of the Master had killed this beautiful hound. Her great love had burst her heart in sunder, and so she died, the very noble daughter of an ancient, noble line.

fox sniffing dead rabbit