He had come out this morning, his second morning in the country, to
hunt, to kill the fox, to enjoy the sport he loved with what had become
a mania. And now his day was being spoiled by old black memories.
Perhaps it was the Abbey where Reynardine slept that nudged him with
ghostly concentration, perhaps it was the field that ignored him as
though he did not exist, perhaps it was the proximity of the fox
itself--he had n't seen or hunted an Irish fox for twenty years. But
he was troubled as a man is troubled by imminent disaster. He wished
they 'd get on.
"Wind him, boys. Wind him. Yooi, get him out. Joyous! Tinker!
Marvan! Leu in!"
But there was naught but the crash of whins, and the whirring of
pheasants as they rose. There rose the huntsman's clear call:
"Yo hote back. Yooi over try back!" And the blast of the horn as he
turned to draw the woodland again.
Twenty years ago! Could it have been only twenty years ago that he had
met and married and parted from Reynardine? It was so misty, so vague,
he had come to think of it as centuries before. He had come north from
Dublin, a boy of twenty-two, just out of Trinity, son of old Jasper
Morgan who had made a half-dozen fortunes in remounts for the South
African War, grandson of Ed Morgan who had been ostler and stableman
and later livery-keeper at Kingstown. And because he rode hard and
well he was admitted everywhere. There is no democracy as open as that
of the Ulster clans. A baron from William the Conqueror's invasion, or
an Irish chieftain whose ancestors were Druidists yields precedence to
any man who can do a thing better than he.... At a hunt ball young
Morgan met Petronilla Fitzpaul, who was known through the country as
Reynardine.
She was just at the momentous instant when a girl turns woman, that
strange first of three tides in a woman's life. And the first tide
breathlessly waited, curled, flowed in as he came. Very slight, very
dark-haired, very deep-eyed, she was spared the ancestral Norman
traits. She had n't the eagle beak of her brothers, or their intent
scowling brows. She was a little thing of kindliness and deep
emotions. One felt it in the face, somehow like a pansy, one felt it
in her eyes, one felt it in her hands....
She liked him. He was new to her. She liked his dash. She liked, as
gentlewomen will, the faint flavor of vulgarity in him. It was new to
her. She liked the dash of his clothes. His assurance overcame her.
She liked him. And she was at the mystic tide of her life. She
thought she loved him.
And what intrigued Morgan was the spirit within. Some faint conception
of her beauty and mystery penetrated to him. No man is interested in a
woman bodily, no matter how much he thinks he is. He is interested in
cosmic womanhood, or in the one spiritual entity that actuates the
body. And before Morgan was a thread of flame that might lead him now
down a formal garden, rhythmic with the murmur of bees, now through a
woodland where the thrush sang in the branches, now through a Roman
crypt, mysterious and sanctified. He was like a barbarian who has
found a great jewel, topaz or opal or sapphire, the light of which
enthralls him, but of whose value and use he is ignorant....
Her brothers and her father were not inclined to view a marriage
between them with favor. It was not because of his lack of lineage,
but because the points of view were so different. They saw a gulf.
But Reynardine dissuaded them.
"Brothers dear and my father, cannot I, cannot we all--" she put her
hands out toward them--"make him see our way, take our things to his
heart?"
They were all great hulking men, her father and her brothers, Ulick,
Garrett, Gilchrist, Kevin, and she was the only woman of them--her
mother had died so long ago!--and she was so little, so pleading! They
were as wax in her hands.
"You know, dears--" she hung her head--"I love this man."
"Do what your heart says, Reynardine," they gave her the precept they
obeyed themselves with such success and chivalry. And they frowned the
family frown. "If she can do so much with us, what can't she do with
him!" they reasoned in their simple way. Alas! poor gentlemen!
There was an immensity of pride in Morgan's heart, apart from pride in
his young wife, to be allied to a family such as the Fitzpauls. Twice
they had refused duchies. They were so old they went back into the
mists of Norman tradition. They had the quaint customs of their sort,
and strange superstitions, such as all Irish families
have--superstitions being but ancient mystic conceptions of nature, and
customs observed so often through the centuries that their shadows
became facts.
But of all quaint customs, their friendship to the fox was strangest of
all. Their crest was a fox courant, and over no square foot of their
lands could a fox be hunted. Great horsemen they were, but none had
ever followed the hounds in a hunt. Perhaps some old Fitzpaul, seeing
all people concentrated on ridding the land of the fox, had pitied the
little red hunted one, and given it protection. Perhaps by some
accident of border warfare a fox had deflected the chase from a hunted
Fitzpaul and so earned the family gratitude. Perhaps this. Perhaps
that. What did it matter?
Yes, a quaint observance, this trait of the Fitzpauls. An
idiosyncrasy, a person might put it, such as a woman's objection to
mice, or the energy of Henry Bergh--God rest him!--who fought that the
law should protect horses from maltreatment. But what was queerer
still, was their power over the foxes. Foxes greeted a Fitzpaul
joyously, barking and wagging their tails like dogs--foxes, the most
suspicious of all animals of the field. The Fitzpauls had some strange
rhythmic power over foxes, as some people have over dogs. And yet,
though this was mysterious, it was not so immensely mysterious. Some
trainers are born with power over man-eating tigers, some men can
handle snakes, some can sooth stampeding cattle. Morgan remembered
hearing his father speak of Whistler Sullivan, who was called in when
all hope of breaking a horse was gone. A mean, ferret-faced man, he
would steal into the stall where a man-eating horse was tied and
hackled, closing the door behind him, and a half-hour later he would
bring the horse out. The horse would be coved and dripping with sweat,
and never afterward would it balk or bolt or rear. And the Whistler
had never laid a hand on him. He had only talked or hissed. People
were afraid of the Whistler; the peasantry declared he had bargained
his soul with the devil; but he had only power over horses, as the
Fitzpauls had over the foxes of the field.
Well, that was all explicable, within the range of human knowledge. It
was extraordinary, but that was all. But there was an eerier thing yet
about that family. Other families had their banshees, their ghostly
pipes, their drummers on battlements to portend or announce approaching
death. But when a Fitzpaul died,--so went the tradition, so it had
been attested by living men, so it had happened within a wheen of
years,--the lawns were peopled with foxes at the dusk of day. Not
spectral things, but foxes of the field and wood who gathered to bid
their protectors God-speed on their strange, strange journey. They
knew of death as bee-keepers say bees know. They made no sound but for
the rustle of the grass and the faint thudding of their pads. But they
were there. And a passing peasant might see them and raise his hat.
"God be good to the Fitzpauls," he would pray. "'T is they are good to
the poor!"
A strange thing that of the foxes, a thing not understood. How little,
after all did we know of animals! But to blazes with that! Morgan
swore. Animals were n't here to be understood. Animals were here to
be used, a horse to be ridden; a hound to hunt with; a fox to be chased
to the death--as he was here to ride and hunt and chase to-day; as he
had done always; as he had done when Reynardine, his wife, lived....
A bird rose shrieking from the copse, and suddenly a hound gave tongue,
and then another, and then the pack cried as one dog. There was a
blast of the horn.
"Gone away!" came the cheer of the huntsman. "Away! Away!"
Then fifty horses thundered.