CHAPTER V OLD IKE, THE EARTH-STOPPER

In a day or two, with the constant attendance of my medical man, himself rather a character in his way, and the considerate cares of Miss Lushington, I was sufficiently recovered from the effects of my accident to crawl to the stable and visit those now useless animals which I had reviewed with such pride and pleasure on the first Sunday afternoon that I had taken up my quarters at Soakington. In my opinion, there are few more unsatisfactory performances than these inspections of a stud thus thrown out of work. The horses all look so blooming in their coats, so high in their condition, and altogether so fit to go, that it seems a pity that they should be disappointed of their hunting, and compelled to limit their energies to that exploit which is called “eating their heads off”—a feat never performed with such an appetite as during a course of enforced idleness either from frost or any other cause that stops the fascinating pursuit for which they have been bought, and summered, and got into condition. Also, on these occasions, partly from their actual fulness and vigour consequent upon losing a turn, partly from that peculiarity in the human mind which enhances the value of everything out of reach, we cannot help fancying the nags a good deal better than they are, and ourselves much more enthusiastic and skilful than we know ourselves to be, in our cooler moments, say, for instance, when mounted and at the covert-side, a fine country before us, every probability of a run, a north-east wind rather keener than agreeable, bathing our uncovered face like cold water, and a chill misgiving that last week’s frost is not thoroughly out of the ground, particularly just under the fences, and that the thaw which rejoiced us so exceedingly after dinner, has only succeeded in making the surface greasy, and not in rendering it soft. Ah! if we could always feel as we do for that glorious hour from about seven to eight P.M., when we stretch our napkin-covered legs towards the cheerful fire, blazing and crackling, and sparkling into rubies, as it reflects itself in our brimming glass of Bordeaux, what good fellows we should all be! how generous, how open-hearted, and how successful in our avocations and pursuits! The process of digestion, that highly important function, when properly performed, seems to endow us with all the most admirable qualities of manhood. We become conscious that we are possessed of sagacity, courage, humour, and general benevolence. We could lend a friend a hundred pounds willingly, if we had it. We could go the best run that ever was seen, on the very backs of the hounds, if that was only an actual existing country, which we trace in the glowing embers, instead of a dream of fairyland, the offspring of Newcastle coal and Chateau Lafitte. Then how we can converse on the inexhaustible topic, of “The Horse and how to ride him!” We are never tired of laying down the law “what to jump, creep, and avoid.” We do not believe we are deceiving ourselves, or our listeners, when we profess our partiality for high timber, or our proficiency and personal experience in water-jumping. We combine, in our heated imaginations, the “science of Meynell,” with the courage and dexterity of the late Mr. Assheton Smith. We believe, for the nonce, in many fallacies that our better judgment has so often proved to be such by the testimony of sad experience; to wit, that “if a horse can only gallop, he is sure to jump;” that, “what one hunter can clear, another can;” that, “if a man’s heart is in the right place, his horse is sure to carry him well with hounds:” and that, “large fences are the safest to ride at”—established positions which nobody thinks it worth while to dispute, laid down as they are by retired sportsmen, confirmed valetudinarians, and other non-hunting members of the community, but which to-morrow morning too clearly demonstrates to be mere after-dinner sentiments, unsafe to act upon, and in practice but a delusion and a snare.

If we were to pin our faith on what we hear, and what we read, concerning the engrossing theme of horsemanship, we should ere long be led to believe that nothing was so easy as to keep alongside of a clipping pack of fox-hounds running hard over a grass country intersected with those formidable impediments which defend such verdant districts. Poor Nimrod tells us how to get our horses into condition; Beckford, Cooke, Delmé Radcliffe, Grantley Berkeley, Smith (not Assheton), and a host of others, instruct us patiently and at considerable length, in the scientific details of our favourite amusements. The author of “Soapy Sponge” presents to our delighted view the humours and ridiculous side of the question, conveying, by means of Mr. Jorrock’s inimitable vein of absurdity, many home-truths and incontrovertible reflections; whilst last of all comes Sir Francis Head, with the brilliancy of his reputation, and the weight of his personal experience, to give the finishing touches to our education. He tells us in the simplest language, and as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do it as well as himself, how we are to saddle our horse and bridle our horse, how to dress and how to feed, how to go out in the morning and how to come at night, how to transform our hack into a hunter, and, when so metamorphosed, how to ride the astonished animal over the highest gates and the widest brooks that can be found in the midland counties of merry England; the whole performance to be achieved in a jovial off-hand style, as if it were the simplest and safest thing in the world. Now this is all very well in theory, but becomes a more complicated question when reduced to a matter of practice. It seems to me that to achieve excellence in riding to hounds, something more is required than a hard heart and a light pair of hands; that with all the advantages of courage, strength, and activity, being good horsemen, and with excellent hunters to ride, many men go out day after day, and season after season, without ever seeing a run to their own satisfaction; nay, with a certainty, unless they are piloted by some more gifted sportsman, of losing the hounds in the first three fields. A man may be as bold as Alexander, and as well mounted too, never giving less than “three figures” for his Bucephalus, and yet unless he be possessed of a peculiar knack of finding his way over a country which it is almost impossible to explain, he will invariably be left behind in a quick thing.

This knack is a sort of instinct rather than an acquirement, an intuitive sagacity, akin to that faculty by which the Red Indian, in common with other savages, takes the right direction through the pathless woods, and over the monotonous prairies of the West. We will suppose a man to be riding his own line, fairly with a pack of fox-hounds, in a country he has never seen before, with a good scent, and a fox’s head set up-wind. He jumps into a field from which there are but two possible egresses, a quarter of a mile apart, the one to the right, the other to the left; he goes unhesitatingly to the former, and the hounds bend towards him almost as soon as he is clear of the obstacle which has obliged him to diverge from his line. He could not, probably, explain why he thus acted; yet he did it, and he was right. All through a run you will see some men gaining every turn upon the hounds, just as others lose them. This happy facility is but a modification of that which makes the difference between a bad huntsman and a good one. The latter seems to possess an intuitive knowledge of the run of a fox, independent of all extraneous accidents, such as wind, sheep, dogs, people ready to head him at every turn, and the thousand obstacles that are always present to destroy the chance of a good run—nay, even of country, for such men exhibit it in districts with which they have no acquaintance. I begin to think people are born sportsmen, just as they are born poets, painters, and peers of the realm. We see them in every class of life; and there is many an honest fellow who loses half a day’s work, and wears out his shoe-leather, to make the best he can of his fox-hunting on foot, who, in a higher position, would have achieved a brilliant reputation in the eyes of the sporting world.

What leads me to this reflection is the glimpse I had of Miss Lushington, at the window of her sanctuary commanding the stableyard, pouring out a wineglassful of a fluid that looked like water, but smelt like gin, and handing the same to one of the most dilapidated individuals it has ever been my fortune to encounter.

As I entered the back-door of the “Haycock,” he touched an extremely damaged hunting-cap, and greeted me with much cordiality. I then recognised a character with whom I could not fail to have made acquaintance, even during my short stay in the Soakington country, and whom I never heard called by any other name than “Old Ike, the Earth-stopper.” As an example of what I have above alluded to—the creature in whom the sporting instinct seems fully developed, the man who must obviously have been intended by Nature for a sportsman—Old Ike deserves to have his portrait taken, more especially as the office he fills so well is the only one in which he could have found his appropriate place in the world.

He is a tough, spare old man, very lean and very wrinkled, who looks as if all the juices had been exuded from his body by severe and unremitting exercise, till nothing has been left but sinew, gristle, and a pair of keen, dark eyes, like those of a hawk. It is as if the original Isaac had been boiled down to what chemists call a residuum, and “Ike” was the result. He must have been a tall fellow in his youth, although he is now so bent, and twisted, and knotted, that he carries his head at a much lower elevation than was intended by Nature, and his light, wiry form still denotes the possession of considerable strength. To look at him, you could swear he was the sort of fellow who was the best runner, leaper, cricketer, and fisherman of his parish; who could throw a stone further, and consequently hit harder, than any of his brother-yokels, and who was sure to be at the core of all the merry-making, and half the mischief that angered the squire and made the parson grieve. There is always one such scapegrace in every hamlet. As a boy at the village school, he climbs the tallest elms, takes the earliest birds’ nests, and is constantly prowling about the belfry, to curry favour with the ringers, and interfere, with unspeakable interest, when anything is done to the church clock. As a lad, he turns out a swift bowler, a dead hand at skittles, and a very useful fellow at all odd jobs; yet somehow, continually out of work. By degrees, he becomes an irregular attendant at church, and is always hankering about the stream, partly to make love to the miller’s daughter, and partly (as the squire’s keeper—a wary old bird, who began in exactly the same way himself—has found out) to set night-lines, trimmers, and such abominations, thereby entering unfailingly on the downward career of the poacher, to which “the contemplative man’s recreation” is apt to be the first step. After that, he gets thoroughly inoculated with the fatal passion. Then come the “shiny nights,” the slaughtered pheasants, and the netted hares; the sleep by day; the pot-house rendezvous; the covered cart driven to a poulterer’s, who ought to know better, in the neighbouring market-town; the general laxity of principle, and utter demoralisation consequent on a life of habitual crime—perhaps the irresistible temptation of too heavy a sweep, the conflict with the keepers, fought out fiercely and unsparingly on both sides, to result in a verdict of manslaughter, and transportation for life.

Old Ike’s beginning, however, although sufficiently unpromising as regarded steadiness of habits, or the prospect of ever doing well in some settled trade or profession, was not destined to end in so fatal a catastrophe. Moreover, his was one of those characters so often met with, of which it is difficult to reconcile the apparent contradictions. With a tendency amounting to a passion for every pastime that could possibly come under the category of the term “sport,” he was yet the gentlest and most amiable of created beings, where his fellow-man was concerned. Although as a boy he would risk his neck with the greatest delight to get a bird’s nest, and when obtained seemed utterly pitiless of the poor parents’ anxiety for their offspring, the same reckless lad would sit still for hours to rock the cradle of a suffering child, or run any number of miles in the wet and the dark to bring home the medicine for itself or its mother.

Though he could handle a game-fowl with remarkable coolness in the pit, and, what is a far more brutal and debasing amusement, look on with excited interest whilst two faithful and high-couraged dogs tore and worried each other for a five-shilling stake, he could not bear to see a fellow-creature in pain, and would soothe any of the village urchins, with whom he was a prime favourite, under the infliction of a bruised knee and cut finger, as gently and tenderly as a woman. “Ike” was made up of contradictions, both within and without, nor was his moral being less twisted, and toughened, and knotted, than his frame.

Like a good many other persons in a higher sphere, “Ike” was ruined by the agreeable process of having a small fortune left him. This legacy acting on a temperament in which the love of approbation largely predominated, made him for a time an exceedingly conspicuous and remarkably popular individual in his own humble circle. He was not an idle man—far from it; but his habits were desultory—a much more dangerous characteristic. In fact, an idle man seldom does himself great positive harm. Like a vegetable, he may run to seed, or he may be trampled down; but he will not seek misfortune, and that unwelcome visitor is often a long time before she finds a tranquil person out.

Now Isaac must always be doing something; only, unluckily, it was the profitable work that ever seemed to him the most laborious. To set-to with a will, and earn a shilling by six hours’ labour, would have been the most unwelcome proposal you could have made him; yet he would readily have paid you the same money, if he had it, to carry a game-bag for fourteen or fifteen hours, over the roughest country you could choose. You see the game-bag was unproductive, and therefore attracted him irresistibly.

Ike’s fortune was not a large one. It consisted of two hundred pounds, and this he spent in about fourteen months, during which period he constantly treated some of the worst characters in the parish, and lived almost entirely in the open air, undergoing great hardship, both of work and weather, in the pursuit of that sport which to him was certainly synonymous with pleasure.

Just as he arrived at the last five-pound note of his two hundred, an Irish gentleman who was staying at Castle-Cropper, and delighted the whole neighbourhood with the breadth of his brogue, the daring of his horsemanship, and the vivacity of his manners, took a great fancy to Ike, from the masterly way in which he saw the latter fishing a pool below the Mill, and easily persuaded him to accompany him back to Ireland, as a sort of humble sporting companion. There being no profit and nothing definite to do, the situation was exactly suited to our friend; and as he could neither read nor write, it is needless to state that his patron called him his private secretary forthwith.

Most men have some period in their lives—not always the happiest while it was actually present—on which they are continually looking back, and to which they lose no opportunity of reverting, as a sort of Utopian existence, rendering everything else tame and desolate by comparison. Such, it would appear, was Ike’s residence in the county Galway. Whenever the old man’s heart was warmed and his nose reddened by his usual potation, “a little gin-and-cloves,” he would enlarge upon his favourite theme. He was never tired of detailing the glories of Bally-Blazer, the improvidence of the housekeeping, the liberality and general recklessness of “The Master.” The latter, by Ike’s account (although the narrator, it must be admitted, varied a little in his statistics), seems to have kept more young horses and old servants, drank more claret, and betted more freely on the Curragh, than any other gentleman in the West of Ireland. Here Ike acquired his principal knowledge of hunting, and a taste, which rapidly grew into a passion, for that amusement. Mounted by The Master upon what he was pleased to call “the pick of the stable,” Ike, by his own account, distinguished himself for his daring feats of horsemanship as well as by his scientific knowledge of the chase.

It is difficult to make out whether the aborigines of the country believed him to be an English relative of The Master’s, or a foreigner of distinction on a special mission from his Holiness the Pope. Isaac rather leads us to infer that the latter supposition was the favourite theory in and about the demesne. Be this as it may, under the auspices of his patron he soon became, in every sense of the word, a leading characteristic with “The Flamers,” that celebrated hunt, which has so often been immortalised in song and story. “Mr. Isaacs,” as he vows he was always called, drank, talked, and rode with the boldest, the loudest, and the thirstiest of them. He seems to have ridden in and out of the celebrated Pound at Ballinasloe, on an average, once every half-hour, during the two days and nights that well-known horse-fair is supposed to last; and it was here that Ike distinguished himself by the great and crowning exploit of his life.

It was in the old fighting, roistering days. Captain Bounceable quarrelled with Major O’Toole, upon the merits of a “harse,” as each of the belligerents was pleased to term the noble animal that originated their differences. The lie which had been told pretty frequently during the dispute, was at length given with offensive directness; and nothing but “thunder an’ turf:” pistols and coffee, could be the result. The time was hard upon midnight; the next morning was Sunday; the principals, men of the strictest orthodoxy and the soundest Protestantism. The quarrel could not possibly keep till Monday morning. Major O’Toole was impatient for action: Captain Bounceable thirsted for blood. They must have it out then and there, in the inn-garden, without waiting for daylight.

Except at the two ends of a handkerchief, however, even Irishmen cannot conveniently fight a duel in the dark. It was proposed, therefore, and agreed to with considerable cordiality, that each combatant should hold a lighted torch in his left hand, to direct his adversary’s fire; a loaded pistol in his right, to return it. But here arose an unexpected difficulty. Major O’Toole had but one arm; and, although Captain Bounceable had but one eye, the advantage was obviously on the side of the latter, in a case of steady pistol practice.

The duel might now have been postponed—perhaps even prevented altogether—had it not been for the self-devotion of Mr. Isaacs.

“The gentlemen shall not be disappointed,” said Ike—“I’ll see fair, and hold the candle for both of ’em.”

“Where will you stand?” asked Major O’Toole.

“Halfway between ye,” replied the daring Englishman, “and take the chance of both of ye missing me. Give us a lantern, though,” he added; “for the wind’s rising from the south-west.”

“Faith, if it’s a bull’s-eye,” quoth Bounceable, “I’ll be safe to snuff it out; and we’ll be worse in the dark than ever, for a second shot.”

So Mr. Isaacs placed himself in a cross-fire, at five paces’ distance from the muzzle of each pistol; and it is not surprising that one bullet should have gone through the tail of his coat, and the other grazed his elbow, so as to incapacitate him for ever for that hard work to which he had always shown such a profound disinclination.

After this truly Hibernian satisfaction had been given and received, the party all sat down again, and drank claret till church-time.

But these days could not last for ever. One rainy morning, Ike’s good-humoured patron sent for his old nurse, his huntsman, his trainer, and the parish priest, bid the three first an affectionate farewell, and took his own departure very peaceably under the offices of the last. He left a handsome amount of debt, accumulated during many years, but no ready money, except a crooked sixpence on his watch-chain. Mr. Isaacs, returning to England without a shilling, became plain “Ike” once more.

He tried life in towns, under many different characters. As a billiard-marker, a light porter, an assistant-ostler, and a penny-postman; but the temptation to the copses and hedgerows was too strong for him, and the receipt of regular wages so unnatural as to be almost unpleasant. Even the tinker’s nomadic profession, which he adopted for a time, was of too settled and business-like a nature; and he gave it up ere long, in a fit of impatience and disgust.

This wandering trade, however, brought him one winter into the neighbourhood of Soakington; and a day with the Castle-Cropper hounds, beginning on the old pony that drew his cart, and ended on his own active and enduring feet, revived all his smouldering passion for the chase.

From that time, he took up his residence in one of the tumble-down cottages near The Haycock, of which he rented a little apartment like a dog-kennel. Hence he hunted as regularly as any other sportsman with half-a-dozen horses and a covert-hack. No distance was too great for him in the morning; indeed he generally travelled to the meet with the hounds, stayed out all day, and came home in the same good company. Whatever might be the pace he contrived to live with them, even before he became thoroughly familiar with the country, and would face the large Soakington fences—ay, and clear them, too—in his stride, as gallantly as a thorough-bred horse sixteen hands high, and up to fourteen stone.

“Old Ike,” as he began in the lapse of time to be called throughout the Hunt, must have made a good thing of it during the winter season, in the many half-crowns and shillings with which he was presented by his riding friends, to whom he was often useful, in the way of pulling up girths, tightening curb-chains, and catching loose horses. Nay, on one occasion he is reported to have ridden a young one over the Sludge, on behalf of a cautious sportsman following his property on foot, but who, not calculating on the difficulty of clearing some fourteen feet in boots and breeches, landed (if we may use the expression) up to his chin in water, and was extricated, at great personal inconvenience, by the daring pedestrian to whom he had entrusted his horse. Old red-coats, too, were amongst the perquisites freely bestowed on Ike. At one time, I have been informed, he had no less than forty of these cast-off garments in his wardrobe—the origin of many jests and much amusement, at the expense of their previous wearers.

It may be supposed that Ike’s Irish experience had not failed to sharpen his powers of repartee; and many anecdotes were current anent the “retorts courteous” with which, on several occasions, he had turned the laugh against those who thought either to brow-beat or what is vulgarly termed “chaff” him.

One frosty morning, at the covert-side, bidding a cordial “Good-morrow” to a certain patron not distinguished for sweetness of temper, the gentleman, who seemed to have forgotten the universal courtesy which alone gives a man a title to the name, replied by telling him to “go to ——” a place not mentioned in good company.

“Faith,” says Ike, “it’s warmer there than here, at any rate; for I’m just come from it.”

Struck by so strange an answer, the mounted sportsman asked the one on foot “How things were going on in those lower regions?”

“Much as usual,” replied Ike, with a sly twinkle in his eye, and a glance at his interrogator, who had lately inherited a large fortune—“much as usual, and terribly crowded about the doorway. The poor all coming out, and the rich all going in!”

The wealthy man struck spurs into his horse, and forbore to ask Ike any farther questions.

But Time, which, as the poet tells us, will “rust the keenest blade,” did not fail to leave the marks of his progress upon old Ike. Hard work, hard fare, and the lapse of years eventually disqualified him for such severe exertion as that of following fox-hounds on foot; and the Earl of Castle-Cropper, with that consideration which, under his calm exterior, has always attested the warmth of his heart, gave him the appointment of earth-stopper in his establishment—an office which the old man fills thoroughly con amore, and for which his exceedingly active habits, his utter disregard of all conventional hours or customs, and his extraordinary familiarity with the habits of wild animals, render him peculiarly fitted.

It is not often he indulges, as I saw him at the bar-window, in the use of stimulants; but when he does “take a drop of anything, it is always a glass of gin-and-cloves.” In this fragrant compound he invariably drinks the same toast—an old-world sentiment almost forgotten—
“Horses stout, and hounds healthy;
Earths well stopped, and foxes plenty!”