There are illnesses that take possession of their victims slowly and
quietly, with an imperceptible start, and a gradual crescendo of
envelopment; others there are, that strike, sudden as a hawk, or a
bullet. And this is true also of that other illness, the fever of the
mind and heart that is called Love. An old song says, and says, for
the most part, truly,
"I attempt from Love's sickness to fly in vain."
Larry Coppinger did not attempt to fly, even though he knew as
precisely the moment when the fever struck him, as did Peter's wife's
mother when her fever left her. Perhaps he might then have tried to
escape; he knew it was too late now. That fatal rapturous moment had
been when he saw Christian setting forth, a lonely, piteous figure, to
fetch Carmody's gun. He had followed her, and his entreaties to her to
let him deal with the matter had prevailed. She had turned back, and
kneeling down again, kissed the white star on Nancy's forehead,
murmuring something to her that Larry could not hear. He had put her
saddle on his own horse; when he mounted her, she had stooped down
from the tall horse's back, and had whispered: "'That thou hast to do,
do quickly.'" He went over it all in his mind; that was all she had
said, and he had not seen her since.
On that afternoon as he moved about the room he had chosen for his
studio, and unpacked the monster cases he had brought from Paris, he
remembered how, long ago, Mrs. Twomey had laughed at him when he told
her he was never going to marry.
"Wait awhile!"' mocked Mrs. Twomey, "one day it'll sthrike ye all in
the minute--the same as a pairson'd get a stitch when they'd be
leaning-over a churn!"
Well, it had so struck him, and struck him hard, and he was reeling
from the blow.
Her courage, oh God! her courage! How she had ridden that little mad
devil of a mare! There wasn't a man out who would have got her over
that big country as she had! And then, when that cur had done his
dirty work and bolted, was there a whimper or a cry from her? She had
faced the music; she had started off to get the gun herself. He knew,
just a little, just dimly, he told himself humbly, what the sight of
suffering was to her, and she had stood up to it. She, with her
passion for animals; she, with her tender, tender heart! Larry, who
believed himself to be profoundly introspective, did not know that it
was his own flawless physical courage, finding and recognising its
fellow in Christian, that had first lit the flame. He thought it was
her face, with its delicate charm, its faint, elusive loveliness, that
had felled him, laid him low, devastated him. He pleased himself in
reiterating his overthrow, in enumerating its causes, while he banged
bundles of canvases on to the floor, and pitched clattering
sketching-easels and stools into corners, and covered tables and
chairs with the myriad colour-boxes, sketch-books, palettes of every
shape and variety, brushes, bottles, all the snares that the ingenious
_marchand à couleurs_ spreads in the sight of the bird, and into
which the bird, especially if he be, like Larry, a rich amateur,
cheerfully hops. He hardly was aware of what he was doing, his hot
thoughts raced in his brain. It seemed to him now to have been years
ago that he saw her, in the grey light, riding towards him on Nancy.
She had said that he might paint her; that was all that he had thought
of then. Much had happened since then; the supreme thing had happened
since then! Nothing else really mattered, he thought, sitting down on
the edge of a half-empty packing case, and lighting a cigarette, not
even the shooting of Nancy. He would give her a dozen Nancys if she
wanted them! The first and most important thing in the world was to
see her again; and he had to arrange how, and when, and where he
should paint her. Obviously he must at once proceed to Mount Music.
There is a saying among Larry's countrymen: "If a man want a thing he
_mus'_ have it!" Fortune had, so far, been kind to Larry, and
those things that he had wanted sufficiently, he had had. It now
remained to be proved if the rule were to have an exception.
"I'm going over to Mount Music just now," he said to Frederica at tea
time. "I want to see them all. Will you come, Aunt Freddy?"
Aunt Freddy looked perturbed.
"You haven't seen Cousin Dick yet, have you?"
"No. How could I? He wasn't out. I've seen no one yet but Christian."
His voice lingered on the beloved name, beloved, consciously, since so
few hours.
But Aunt Freddy was not apt to perceive fine shades, and she was,
moreover, occupied with the framing of a warning.
"You know that Cousin Dick is a good deal changed since you saw him?"
she began. "He had a sort of heart attack about a year ago--Dr. Mangan
was with him, luckily. They have to try and keep him very quiet, and
the worst of it is that so little puts him out."
"Well, I shan't put him out, shall I?" said Larry, confidently,
beginning on a third slice of cake, love not having, so far, impaired
his appetite.
"He was fearfully put out about your selling to the tenants. He said
young Mangan had no right to advise you to sell so low. He told me
that even Dr. Mangan was quite against his doing so."
Miss Coppinger regarded her nephew with anxiety. After four years of
absence, one never knew exactly how much a young man might not have
changed. That little, upturned, golden moustache might not by any
means be the whole of it. The ice barrier had been forgotten in the
excitement of his return, but even though she understood--and tried
not to feel that the fact had its mitigations--that all young men in
France were atheists, that other fact remained, that next Sunday, when
she started for Knock Ceoil church, Larry, if he went anywhere, would
go to the white chapel on the hill. Aunt Freddy was afraid of no one
where she believed herself to be right (and the Spirit of the Nation
had long since assured her of this in matters of religion); least of
all was she afraid of "a brat of a boy," whom, as she boasted, she had
often whipped soundly when he deserved it. But, unfortunately, the
brat had her heart in his hands, and her heart was softer than Aunt
Freddy knew; and this gave the brat an unfair advantage.
"Then you know, Larry," she continued, her eyes showing what her firm
mouth did not admit; "you know, my dear boy, it was rather--well,
rather a shock to us to see in the papers your name proposed as the
Nationalist candidate here. It upset Dick very much, and, I must say,"
she added, unflinchingly, "me too!"
Larry put down the third piece of cake, half-finished, and went round
the tea-table, and sitting on the arm of Frederica's chair, put his
arm round her thin shoulders.
"I'm so sorry!" he said, knowing his power, and using it, "dear Auntie
Fred! I ought to have written to you. I forgot all about the beastly
thing. But you wouldn't want me to go back of my word? As for the
property--well, I thought that was only my own affair. I've come all
right out of it; why shouldn't I give the tenants the best terms I
could?"
"Cousin Dick says--" began Frederica, standing to her guns.
"And that other show," went on Larry, disregarding what Cousin Dick
might have said. "Goodness knows when there'll be an election--"
"That doesn't alter the fact," said Frederica, firmly.
"Yes, I know. Of course I must hold by my own convictions, but let's
put off the row until the time comes! One is bound to have rows at
elections! I don't want to fight now!"
He pressed a kiss upon her forehead. He was feeling in love and
charity with all men. To wheedle Aunt Freddy into forgiveness was the
first outlet that presented itself for the excitement that was
consuming him.
Larry walked to Mount Music through the Wood of the Ownashee, alone.
Miss Coppinger said she disliked the short way across the river by the
stepping stones, and preferred to drive the now venerable Tommy round
by the road; in her heart, brave as she was, she trusted that Larry
would have got through his meeting with Dick before she arrived.
Therefore did Larry step along the pebbly path by the river, under the
dense canopy of beechen boughs, with, for companions, only the two
hound puppies that Bill Kirby did not fail to foist annually upon all
amenable friends. These lumbered after Larry's quick foot, with all the
engaging absurdity of their kind; tripping over their own enormous
feet, chewing outlying portions of one another, as ill-brought-up
babies chew their blankets; sitting down abruptly and unpremeditatedly,
and watching with deep dubiety the departing form of their escort, as
though a sudden and shattering doubt of his identity had paralysed
them, until some contrary wind of doctrine blew them into action again,
and they hurled themselves upon his trail, filled with the single
intention to rush between his legs. Nothing but that instinct of
self-preservation that operates independent of the reason, preserved
Larry from frequent and violent overthrow. His head was in the clouds;
he was abandoning himself to dreams, with the very same headlong
enthusiasm that Scandal and Steersman brought to bear upon the problems
of existence. He strode past the glade that had been the scene of the
Cluhir picnic without so much as a thought of Tishy Mangan. Had you or
I reminded him of that brief, yet moving, episode, he would probably
have regarded us with wide, bewildered, blue eyes, and asked for
details. Then, as memory awakened, he would have laughed delightedly,
and said: "Yes! By Jove! So I was! But Georgy cut me out, didn't he?"
And he might have added that there had been scores of them since Tishy,
he had forgotten half of them--but this, THIS! Larry would then,
inevitably, have lapsed into rhapsody, as would be no more than was
decent and right in a young man of artistic temperament, and you or I,
our malign intention baffled, would have retired in deserved confusion.
Old Evans was in the hall as Larry walked in through the open door. He
received Larry's hand-shake coldly; the four years that had passed
since Larry had seen him had withered and greyed him; Larry, something
dashed by the reception, remembered the title given him long ago by
Christian--"the many-wintered crow,"--and found satisfaction in
deciding that the crow was a scald-crow, and a sour old divil at that;
anyhow, Evans had always had a knife into him, so it made no
difference.
In the drawing-room things went well enough, even though there was an
unexplainable chill in the atmosphere. Cousin Isabel was as kind and
gentle and vague as ever; Judith was there, very handsome and
prosperous, not overenthusiastic in welcome, rather inclined to
patronise a very young man, quite two months younger than a married
lady of position and importance. Nevertheless, there was something
unregenerate about her eye, that, taken in connection with the two
subalterns in whose car she had come to call at Mount Music, suggested
that Bill Kirby might at times find life stirring. John, recently
ordained, now a very decorative curate in a London church, was there,
even more patronising than Judith, and undecided whether to regard
Larry with suspicion, as a brand still smouldering from the fires of
secularist France, or affectionately, as a member of what, in one of
his earlier sermons, he had described as "Our ancient Mother Church,
dear Peopul! Beloved, but in some matters, that I will presently
indicate to you, mistaken!"
The subalterns were remote, not approving of the style of Larry's tie
(which he had bought in Paris, and differed from theirs) and Cousin
Dick was not there.
"You must go and see him, dear Larry," says Cousin Isabel, "he's in
the study."
"And Christian? Though, of course, I met her this morning--" says
Larry.
Christian, poor child, went out for a little walk with the dogs just
now. Christian (poor child) had felt that wretched business this
morning so terribly. The wretched business was gone into, thoroughly
and exhaustively, and yet Larry felt that across one corner of it
there was a fold of curtain drawn. He said he would go and see Cousin
Dick. There was always a chance that Christian, also, might be in the
study. The axiom that "If a man want a thing he _mus'_ have it,"
should, in Larry's case, have the corollary that he must have it at
once.
The Major was standing by the chimney piece in the study, warming one
foot after the other at the fire that Evans had just replenished.
Larry met the scald-crow at the door, and Evans passed him "as if,"
thought Larry, disgustedly, "he had been seeing me every day for a
year! The old beast always hated me!" Larry did not like being hated.
Cousin Dick's greeting was more like old times. Dick was one of those
people whose wrath has a tendency to intermit and get cold, even to
perish, temporarily, from forgetfulness. On the other hand, in
compensation, perhaps, for this failing, it was a fire easily
rekindled. He was still shaking Larry's hand, and looking him up and
down, affectionately, and withal, with the inevitable patronage of a
long-legged man for one from whom Nature has withheld similar
advantages, when Larry discovered the large presence of Dr. Mangan
uplifting itself from the chair facing Cousin Dick's, by the fire.
(But Christian was not there. He resigned himself.) There was no want
of warmth in the Big Doctor's reception. He was quite aware of this
himself, and was artist enough to know how useful an asset was the
fact that he was genuinely fond of Larry. He had indeed proposed to
exhibit his affection in pleasing contrast to the coolness of Larry's
Protestant relatives, and that the Major had forgotten the rôle
assigned to him, was a little disappointing. "But wait awhile!"
thought the Big Doctor, who, among his other elephantine qualities,
possessed that of patience.
The Major seated himself in front of the fire, and Larry pulled up a
chair, wondering in his heart what these old boys wanted with a fire
this lovely afternoon, and delivered himself to the old boys and to
conversation. This, naturally, set with a single movement towards the
event of the morning. "A real likely little mare, and shaping well,
I'm told," says Dick, "and by the bye, Larry, that's a dev'lish nice
horse of yours that Christian came back on. Where did you get him?"
These hunting men were incorrigible, the Doctor thought, seeing the
Carmody question in danger of being side-tracked.
"Things have come to a funny way in this country," he observed, "when
a fellow will deliberately chance killing a young lady, rather than
let her ride over his land--and she having a right to ride over it
into the bargain!"
It needed but little to start Major Talbot-Lowry again on the topic
that had occupied him unceasingly since Christian's return that
morning. Beginning with the burning of the Derrylugga gorse covert,
and moving on through threatening letters, and rents deliberately
withheld, he lashed himself into one of the quick furies that Larry
remembered well. What Larry was less prepared for than was his friend,
Dr. Mangan, was the sudden turn that the storm took in his direction.
"The blackguards think they can frighten me into selling on their own
terms!" shouted Dick, "and that damned priest of theirs--I beg your
pardon, Mangan, but the fellow doesn't behave like a clergyman, and
it's impossible to think of him as one--is backing them up, and I may
say"--here it was that the heart of the storm was revealed--"I may say
that I'm very little obliged to your son, or to his principal here,
for the part they have played in the affair! That was the beginning of
the whole thing!" He turned fiercely upon Larry, his tenor voice
pitched on a higher key. "How could I, with my property loaded with
charges, that were no fault of mine, sell at the price you could
afford to take? Look at the price that fellow--what's his damned
name?--Brady, got for his farm, for the tenant-right alone, mind you!
Forty years' purchase! And I'm offered seventeen for the fee simple!"
Dick was standing up on the hearthrug, towering over the Doctor and
Larry in their low chairs. Larry noticed how thin he had become, and
how the well-cut grey clothes, that he always wore, hung loosely on
his shrunken figure. "You're a young fellow now, Larry; wait till
you've been for thirty years doing your best for your property and
your country, and getting no thanks! Thanks!" Dick gave a brief and
furious laugh. "I've kept the hounds for them. I've slaved on the
Bench and on Grand Juries. I've got them roads and railways, and God
knows what else--whatever they wanted--I've sat at the Board of
Guardians, and done my best to keep down the rates, till they kicked
me out to make room for men who would sell their souls for a sixpence,
and made their living out of bribes!"
"Oh, come, come, Major, it's not so bad as all that!" said the Big
Doctor, soothingly, as Dick stopped, panting for breath. "Don't mind
it now!"
"But I _must_ mind it!" shouted Dick. "When I think of how I've
been treated, and plenty more like me, loyal men who run straight and
do their best, I declare to God I feel I don't know which I hate
worst, the English Government, that pitches its friends overboard to
save its own skin, or my own countrymen, that don't know the meaning
of the word gratitude!"
He turned again upon Larry: "And upon my word and honour, Larry, I
didn't think that your father's son would have been tarred with that
brush, anyhow!"
"Now, Major," broke in Dr. Mangan, again, "you know we agreed that
there was no use in attaching too much importance to that transaction.
Barty and Larry here were in a very difficult position, and even
though you and I might not have approved entirely of their action--"
"But, Doctor," interrupted Larry, bewildered, and dismayed, "You--I
thought you had advised Barty--"
The Big Doctor frowned at him, and winked too, while he laid his huge
white hand on his watch-pocket, tapping with his middle finger on the
spot which, as he knew, the average layman dedicated to the heart. He
trusted to Larry's quickness, and did not trust in vain.
"A sort of heart attack," Aunt Freddy had said.
"I'm most frightfully sorry, Cousin Dick," Larry began, hurriedly,
before a worse thing happened. "Somehow, I never thought--you see I
was out of the country--it seemed to me that--" he was going to
repeat those comforting sedatives about leaving the man at the helm to
bark for you--(Heavens! He had been on the point of saying that! Was
he going to laugh?)--but he couldn't give Barty away. He rushed into
apology, regret, abuse of his own ignorance, and imbecility, and the
Big Doctor, at each pause in the penitence, poured a little oil and
wine into the wounds for which Larry and the Carmodys were jointly
responsible, and Dick's anger, like the red that had flared to his
face, fell like a spent flame.
"Say no more, boy, say no more," he said, dropping into the chair from
which he had leaped in the course of his _apologia pro vita sua_;
"I daresay you knew no better--anyhow, you didn't mean to do me a bad
turn--"
Larry took his hand. "You know that, Cousin Dick," he said, in
profound distress. "Of all people in the world--the very last. If
there was anything I could do now--"
"Well now, I'll tell you what you could do!" cut in Dr. Mangan,
jovially, "you could tell our friend Evans to bring in the Major's
tumbler of hot milk and whisky, and to look sharp about it too! I
ordered he was to have it at six o'clock--"
He looked hard at Larry, who realised that his disturbing presence was
to be removed, and forthwith removed it.
He delivered his message, and strayed back to the big, empty hall. A
sense of aloofness, of having no place nor part in this
well-remembered house, was on him. None of them wanted him; he could
see that easily enough, and he had done Cousin Dick a bad turn. He had
said so. If it came to that, he supposed he had done Christian a bad
turn, too--Christian and Cousin Dick, the only two of the whole crowd
who had been really glad to see him. He thought of her face as she
came riding through the dusky wood to meet him. "The dawn was in it!"
he said to himself; again he saw it, lit with the light that the hunt
had kindled; and then he thought of her stricken eyes, as she looked
from one man to another, asking for the hope that they had to refuse
her. It had been all his fault, or--here the inner apologist, that is
always quick to console, interposed--not quite exactly his fault. How
was he to have known? A remembrance of Cousin Dick's undeciphered
letters came to him; even the inner apologist hung his head. In any
case--Larry's active mind resumed its deliberations--it was quite
clearly his business to find Christian and to explain to her, as far
as was possible, how things stood.
He left the house. A garden-boy had seen Christian "going west the
avenue"; Larry collected Scandal and Steersman from the ash-pit, and
followed her "west the avenue." He walked slowly, noting how neglected
was the general aspect, how badly the avenue was in need of gravel,
remembering how in the old days, the bands of slingers had never
failed of ammunition, wondering if the Major were really as hard up as
he thought he was; wondering if they had all turned against him, and
if they would set Christian against him too. He came to the turn near
the river that led to the stepping stones, and stood, in deepening
depression, waiting, in the hope that she might come. It was seven
o'clock, the sun was setting, the sky was warming to its last
loveliness of rose and amber, and amethyst, colours with names almost
as beautiful as themselves. The long stretches of grass on either side
of the avenue were a fierce green, the brakes of bracken were burning
orange, the long shadows of the trees that fell across the roadway
were purple. The grove of yew trees, that hid the course of the river
from him, had the sharpness of a silhouette cut out of dark velvet.
"Not really black," Larry told himself, screwing up his eyes. He moved
on to the grass, and kneeling, framed with his hands as much as seemed
good to him. In a moment, in the intoxication of beauty, he had
forgotton his troubles; Cousin Dick, singing the swan-song of the
Irish landlords; Dr. Mangan, and his bewildering change of front; even
Christian, and her views as to his responsibility for the tragedy of
the morning, stood aside to make way for the absorbing problems of
colour and composition.
The hound puppies strolled on, side by side, heads up, and high-held
sterns, steering for nowhere in particular, oblivious as Larry of all
save the moment as it passed. A rush of rooks came like a tide across
the sky; they flew so low that the drive and rustle of their wings
scared the puppies and startled Larry. He stood up and watched the
multitudinous host swing westward to his own woods, and just then, a
couple of hundred yards ahead, at the turn where the avenue plunged
into the velvet gloom of the yew-trees, he saw Christian coming
towards him, alone, save for a retinue of dogs.
If that old saying (already quoted with reference to Dick
Talbot-Lowry) be true, when it asserts that "wise men live in the
present, for its bounty suffices them," then was Larry Coppinger, like
his cousin, indeed a wise man. Remorse, anxiety, the wonder of the
sunset, were swept from his mind, and Christian filled it like a
flood. She looked very tired, and he told her so, eyeing her so
closely that she turned her face from him.
"I won't be stared at and scolded! Why shouldn't I be tired if I
like?"
"If it were only tiredness--" said Larry, with more tenderness in
his voice than he knew. "Christian, they've been telling me that it
was my fault--the rows with the tenants, and that devil coming at you
this morning--and--and everything!"
He could not speak directly of Nancy's death; he knew what Christian
felt for her horses and dogs. "I've been looking for you everywhere. I
wanted to try and tell you what I felt--but since I've seen your
father and old Mangan, I feel too abject to dare to say I'm sorry--"
"Why should they think it was your fault? It was my own fault. I ought
to have gone back when Kearney warned me--"
"They meant the whole show. Beginning with Barty's selling to my
tenants, and then your father's people making trouble, and the
Carmodys burning the covert, and all the rest of it! They're quite
right! It's all my rotten fault! Christian, I'm going back to France!
I can't face you after what I've brought on you!"
In the bad moments of life, when the bare and shivering soul stands
defenceless, waiting for evil tidings, or nerving itself to endure
condolence, Christian had ever a gentle touch; and she knew too, when
it comforted wrong-doers to be laughed at.
"Oh, Larry! And you pretended you wanted to paint my picture!" she
said, looking at his miserable face with eyes that shone as the Pool
of Siloam might have shone after the Angel had troubled it; there were
tears in them, but there was healing, too.
Larry took her hand and held it tight.
"You don't mean it--how could you bear to look at me?"
"But I shan't look at you! You will have to look at me--that is, if
you can bear it! You must try and brace yourself to the effort!"
This, it may be admitted, was provocation on Christian's part, but, as
she told herself afterwards, desperate measures were necessary, or
they would both have burst into tears.