Old, prosaic, and often tearful, though this earth may be, few are
anxious to hasten their departure from it, and Daniel Prendergast,
Esq., M.P., abetted by the ministrations of that able consultant, Dr.
Mangan, "hung on," as his friends put it, with unexpected tenacity to
his share of the world. And, so far reaching are the etheric cords
that are said to bind us all together, Mr. Prendergast's grip of his
sorry and suffering life bestowed upon Larry and Christian three days
to be spent within the confines of Paradise.
This may seem an over-statement when it is recorded that their next
meeting was at 7 a.m. at a cubbing meet of the hounds, which occurred
on the morning following on Larry's discovery that the _entrée_
to Paradise had been his for the asking; it is, however, no more than
the truth. Christian had exacted a promise from him that no word was
to be said to any other of the high contracting parties until Monday,
and, as they rode in at the Castle Ire gates, the matter was still
under debate.
"Three days we must have, just three, with this secret hidden between
us like a pearl in an oyster-shell! Larry, you know _I_ can keep
a secret!"
"And you think I can't!" said Larry, affronted.
"I don't think, I know it! But you must try! Don't forget I've got to
week-end at the--" she named people who lived in the next county.
"No one shall be told until I come home!"
This was when they were riding to the meet. Larry had brought over
Joker, the bay horse, for her and he was himself riding a small grey
four-year-old mare, on whose education as a hunter he was entering. It
was one of those gorgeous mornings of late September, when everything
is intense in colour and in sentiment. A light white frost was
melting, in the first rays of the sun, to a silver dew, that twinkled
on grass and bush and twig. Now and then a beech leaf, prematurely
gold, came spinning down in the still air; from high places of heaven
a tiny gabble of music, cold, and shrill, and sweet, told of the songs
of the larks at those heavenly gates within which Larry's and
Christian's spirits were dwelling.
"Yes!" Christian repeated, as they rode tranquilly along on the grass
beside one of the long Castle Ire avenues, "it shall remain a secret
as long as possible, unprofaned by the vulgar! It's like this morning;
the dew's on it still. Larry, you've got to try!"
"Got to try, have I?" said Larry, beaming at her fatuously.
The horses were sidling close to one another after the manner of
stable companions; Larry put his hand on the bay horse's withers and
gazed into Christian's laughing eyes, while the blue of the southern
Irish sky uttered its strong, splendid note of colour behind the pale
rose of her face, and the ineffable freshness of the morning thrilled
in him.
"If you look at me like that in general society," he declared, "I
shall either give it away on the spot--or burst! Look here, here's the
measured-mile gallop; I'll race you to the hall door! If I get in
first, I shall tell everyone we're engaged!"
"Done!" said Christian, instantly shortening her reins; "but I back
Joker!"
She touched Joker with her heel and the big horse sprang, at the hint,
into a gallop. Quickly as he started, Rayleen, the grey mare (whose
name, being interpreted, is Little Star), being ever concentrated for
instant effort, as is the manner of small and well-bred
four-year-olds, was up to his shoulder in a couple of bounds, even in
the flame of her youth and enthusiasm, she drove ahead of Joker's
ordered strides, and led him for awhile. Larry's laugh of triumph,
that the wind tossed back to her, was not needed to rouse Christian to
emulation. Any hint of a race, any touch of a contest, appealed to her
as instantly as to Rayleen, and she was racing for that secret that
was like a pearl. Sitting very still she touched Joker again with her
heel and spoke to him. There was in her the magnetism that can fire a
horse to his best, by some mystery, compound of sympathy and
stimulation, that has no outward manifestation. Joker's great
shoulders worked under her as he lengthened and quickened his
beautiful, rhythmic stride. The wind of the pace whistled in her ears
and snatched at her hair. She crammed her hat over her forehead,
laughing with the joy of battle. She was level with Larry now. Now she
was passing him, and the little grey strove in vain to hold her place.
Gallant as she was, what could she do against a raking, trained
galloper, well over sixteen hands, and nearly thoroughbred?
The smooth mile of shining grass was annihilated, wiped out in a few
whirling minutes. Joker had but just fairly settled down to go when
the end of the race was at hand. Had he been a shade less of a
gentleman than he was, Christian, and the snaffle in which she was
riding him, would hardly have stopped him, as did their joint efforts,
on the gravel in front of the goal that Larry had given her.
Hunts come, and hunts go, and are forgotten. Horses, the best and
dearest of them, fade, in some degree, from remembrance; where are the
snows of yester year, and where the great gallops that we rode when we
were young? But here and there something defies the mists of memory,
and remains, bright and imperishable as a diamond. I believe that for
Christian that mile of sun and wind and speed and flight, with her
lover thundering at her heels, will remain ever vivid, one of the
moments that are of the incalculable bounty of Chance; moments that
earth can never equal, nor Heaven better.
The hounds and staff were waiting at the farther end of the long front
of Castle Ire, when Larry and Christian made their somewhat
sensational entrance upon the scene.
"Joker wins, by a length and a half," said Bill Kirby, judicially,
"and a very pretty race. I never saw a prettier, on any sands, on any
jackasses, on any Bank Holiday! I suppose this is how people always
fetch up at meets in France? It's not come in in this benighted
country yet."
"His fault!" said Christian, breathless and glowing. "He dar'd me!
Where are you going to draw?"
"The ash-pit and the fowl-houses," replied Bill, picking up his reins.
"Then the backstairs, and the kitchenmaid's bedroom. Judith and Mrs.
Brady say he's taking all the fowl, and they're going to lay poison--I
don't mean the fowl--"
"Isn't he bright this morning?" said Judith, looking down upon the
party from an upper window, effectively arrayed in one of those lacy
and lazy garments that invite, while they repudiate, society. "No, I'm
not coming out. Too early for me. Come in and eat something--breakfast
or lunch, anything--when you've done enough."
The hounds moved on and were soon busy in the screens of glossy laurel
round the house. Other riders arrived. A fox was found, if not in the
kitchenmaid's bedroom in some spot of almost equal intimacy, and the
Hunt surged in and through yards, and haggards, outhouses, and
gardens, the hounds over-running all the complicated surroundings of
an Irish country-house, while every grade of domestic, forsaking his
or her lawful occupation, joined in the chase.
Christian had betaken herself to a point on the avenue remote from the
fray. A run, she told herself, would have tranquillised her, and made
things seem more normal, but there was no prospect of one. "I'll wait
till this rat-hunt is over," she thought, letting Joker stroll across
the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken and bushes, a
jewel dropped from heaven. A couple of stiff-necked swans floated in
motionless trance upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing,
splashing flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of
patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves in jerks
towards her, confident that any human being meant food. Two gigantic
turquoise dragon-flies rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings,
from a dead log under Joker's feet. One of them swung round the
horse's head, and lit on his shaven neck. It brooded there, apparently
unperceptive of the difference of this resting place from the one that
it had abandoned; its dull globes of eyes looked as if sight was the
last purpose for which they were intended. Joker stretched his long
neck to nibble a willow twig, and the blue mystery, rising, remained
poised over him for another moment of meditation, before it sailed
away, sideways, on its own obscure occasions.
Christian sat in the sunshine, and thought about Larry, and wondered.
She knew now that what she felt for him was no new thing. It had been
with her always, not merely since the painting of her portrait, but
always, unacknowledged yet implicit, ever since that first day when he
had rescued her from Richard. Her intensely criticising, analytic
brain refused to surrender to vague emotion. She was resolved to
understand herself, to rationalise her overthrow. It was the
difference, for which that half-hour of sunset was responsible, in the
degree of what she felt, that bewildered her. Yesterday, she told
herself, it was a deep, but well-controlled and respectable little
stream. To-day it was a flood. "I must keep my feet," she thought; "I
must not be swept away!" The thought of him was sometimes
overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative,
and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the
thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the
northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during
darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun went
higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the cries of the
water-birds, the buzz of insects over the bright lake, became more
insistent, and the blue and lovely morning spread and strengthened
round her, criticism and analysis failed. She could only think of him,
helplessly, saying to herself what she had once heard a peasant woman
say: "My heart'd open when I thinks of him."
Across the park came repeated notes from the horn, the baying of
hounds, and the screams that celebrate with orthodox excitement the
death of a fox. The rat-hunt was over. Joker lifted his spare,
aristocratic head from the grass, and listened, with a wisp of dewy
green stuff in his mouth. Christian looked at her watch. It was early
still, not eight o'clock. A grey horse and its rider came forth from
the dark grove of laurels. Larry was looking for her. She sighed; she
did not know why. She thought of the old Mendelssohn open-air
part-song:
"The talk of the lovers in silence dies,
They weep, yet they know not why tears fill their eyes."
The old, absurd words, that she had so often laughed at. She laughed
again, but at herself, and sat still, watching the grey mare coming
lightly over the sunny grass to her.
"They got him!" Larry shouted, as he came near. "The brute wouldn't
run for 'em! Too full of hen, I suppose! They're going on now to the
gorse in the high paddock. Why did you come away here?"
"Because I'm illogical. I like hunting, and I hate catching what I
hunt. Besides, I wanted to think."
"Rotten habit," said Larry. "I won't have you changing your mind!"
Christian looked at him, and sighed again. He was on her right, and
she took her hunting-crop in her left hand, with the reins, and
stretched out her right hand to him. He caught it, and kissed her
slender wrist above the glove. There came back to Christian, with a
rush, the remembrance of the May morning at the kennels when he had
kissed her wrist. That had been the left wrist. The kiss had meant
more to her than it had to him. Now, as she met his eyes she knew that
she and he stood on level ground.
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Those even, who pin it down, and
set it up in a glass case in the cause of science and for the
edification of an inquisitive public, are not wholly to be commended,
praiseworthy though their intentions may be. Let a rule of silence,
therefore be observed, as far as may be. What this boy and girl said
to each other, is their secret, not ours.
The gorse in the high paddock held a fox; several, in fact, a lady
having reared a fine young family there without any anxieties as to
their support, thanks to the votive offerings of crows and rabbits,
obsequiously laid on her doorstep, by her best friend, and her most
implacable enemy, Mr. William Kirby, M.F.H. In recognition, no doubt,
of these attentions, the lady in question permitted one of her sons to
afford a little harmless pleasure to her benefactor, and this, having
included a lively gallop of some three miles, ceased in a plantation
where was the place of safety that had been indicated to the beginner,
and ceased appositely, at an hour that made a late breakfast at Castle
Ire a matter obvious, even imperative, for those who were not prepared
to await, in patient starvation, that very inferior repast, an early
lunch.
Young Mrs. Kirby had not lost, with matrimony, the habit of having her
own way.
"No, Christian, you're not going home. You haven't seen Baby, and he
really looks _rather_ sweet in his new--" (a negligible matter,
whatever the attire the formulae being unvaried)--"and, besides,"
continued young Mrs. Kirby, with decision, "I want to talk to you."
Being talked to by Judith was an adequate modern equivalent for an
interview with the "Jailer's Daughter," as a method of obtaining
information.
Christian trembled for the secret of the pearl.
"Bill tells me," began Judith, after the late breakfast had been
disposed of, settling herself luxuriously in an armchair in the round
tower-room which she had made her own sitting-room and lighting a
cigarette, "that our tenants--I mean Papa's people--are getting rather
nasty. Of course, there was that disgraceful business when your mare
was killed but I don't mean that--Bill thinks old Fairfax was right in
advising Papa to do nothing about that--but about this archaic
nonsense of feudal feeling and not selling the property. Of course
he's bound to lose by the sale, but the longer he waits the worse it
gets."
"I don't think it's only feudal feeling--he says he can't afford to
sell," began Christian.
"Oh, I know all that, my dear," interrupted Judith; "'the infernal
mortgagees, and the damned charges, and that blackguard rebel, young
Mangan, who cut the ground from under his feet,' and so on. I've heard
it all from Papa, exactly five thousand times. But the point is that
there was a meeting at Pribawn, with the priest in the chair, and
there were furious speeches, and they talked of boycotting Papa, and
some steps _ought_ to be taken. It's an intolerable nuisance
being boycotted, if it's nothing else, and most expensive. I was with
the O'Donnells that time when they were boycotted--up at five every
morning to milk the cows and light the kitchen fire, and having to get
every earthly thing by post from London!"
"I'll take as many steps as you like," said Christian, "if you'll only
tell me where to take them."
Judith took her cigarette out of her mouth, and blew a ring of smoke,
regarding her younger sister the while with a shrewd and wary blue
eye.
"I've often said to you, my dear child," she began, in a voice that
seemed intended to usher in a change of subject, "that if you _won't_
take an interest in men, _they_ won't take an interest; in you."
"Then why repeat the statement?" said Christian, wondering what Judith
was working up to, and girding herself for battle; "true and beautiful
though it is!"
"Because, my dear--and I may say I speak as one having authority and
not as the scribes--in _my_ opinion, and judging by what I
perceived with about a quarter of one eye at breakfast, you have only
to hold up your little finger, in a friendly and encouraging manner,
and our young friend and relative, Mr. Coppinger, will--I admit I
don't quite know what people do with little fingers in these cases,
something affectionate, no doubt!"
"I thought your authority would have extended to little fingers!"
broke in Christian, sparring for wind, and wishing she were not facing
the window; "in any case, I fail to see what mine, in this instance,
has to say to our being boycotted?"
"My dear girl," said Judith, leaning forward, and speaking with
solemnity, "the priests won't want to fall foul of anyone with as much
money as Larry!"
Christian was silent; she had not anticipated quite so direct an
intervention in her personal affairs as was now being discovered, and
she felt that her pearl was melting in the fierce solvent of Judith's
interest and curiosity.
"I know it's a bore about his religion, and his politics are
_more_ than shaky, but you know, in a way, it's rather lucky, in
view of the mess Papa's got everything into, to have someone on that
side," went on Judith, who was far too practical to be influenced by
that malign Spirit of the Nation who had so persistently endeavoured
to establish herself as one of the family at Mount Music. "All I'm
afraid of is that Papa may begin to beat the Protestant drum and wave
the Union Jack! Such nonsense! The main thing is that Larry himself is
quite all right!"
"I'm sure he would be gratified by your approval!" Judith's patronage
was somewhat galling; Judith, who was quite pleased with Bill
Kirby!--Good, excellent Bill, but still! Christian's colour betrayed
her, and she knew it, and knowing also the remorseless cross-examination
that the betrayal would immediately provoke, she decided to anticipate
it.
"As a matter of fact," she went on, "he--we--" she hated the crudity
of the statement.
"You're engaged!" swooped Judith, with the speed of a hawk. "Excellent
girl!"
Christian found the commendation offensive.
"I assure you it's quite without either political or religious bias!"
she said defiantly. She had failed to keep her secret, but she went
down with her flags flying.