But--funny! He could never get out of his mind's eye the vision of his
wife sitting by the great piano, plucking out the ancient melody:
"If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you 'll not me find,
For I 'll be in my castle--"
The hounds shifted, grew keen. "Ay! Ay!" came the tongue of the
finder. Scent was picked up again. "Ay! Ay! Ay!" went the pack,
heads up, tails straight. There was a red flash ahead in the grassy
field.
"Come up, Finn!" the master shoved his great horse onward.
"Ay! Ay! Ay!" They were off. "Ay! Ay! Ay!" Seventy hounds and
forty horsemen. "Ay! Ay! Ay!" And one red fox running for his life.
"Ay! Ay!" A dead fox or a broken neck! "Ay! Ay! Ay!"
V
For years he had been looking forward to this first fox-hunt in
Ireland, and now with the red speck ahead of him, and the flood of
hounds following it, and the great gray between his knees, it occurred
to him that he was not enjoying it. Never was a morning better for
hunting, never a keener scent, never a better pack; never had he pushed
as powerful, as sure-footed a horse at a fence. Behind him the field
fell, was blown, dropped out, until there were hardly a half-dozen
left. And he was close on the master of the hunt, close on the
huntsman, close on the pack. Yet there was something in it that took
the thrill away and left a leaden depression instead.
She would n't go out of his mind, would Reynardine. What was that
daughter of hers--and his--like? Like her mother, he 'd be bound,
every inch of her a Fitzpaul. Hardly any of his blood there. His only
were the mechanics of procreation; she was not his daughter. Nothing
lifeful of him had fused with the soul of Reynardine to perform the
ineffable miracle. No, she would be all her mother--all Fitzpaul.
God! how he hated that name of Fitzpaul! How he hated Reynardine, who
had made him feel like a cur, though he wouldn't admit it! How he had
hated those four big brothers, who had made him feel afraid--an
unforgivable thing!
Well, they were dead, he laughed, all dead. Gilchrist had died on
Nevison's expedition to the pole, and he lay somewhere in the
immaculate Arctic snows with the inscription his comrades had written
on a simple cross: "Here lies a very gallant Irish gentleman." And
Kevin had died fighting the Turks in Asia. And Ulick! Ulick was
somewhere in the depths of the Irish sea, where he went out with the
coast-guards to rescue a vessel in distress. And Garrett was funniest
of all. He was killed defending a woman of the people from her drunken
husband in a Dublin slum. All dead! Serve them right, too. They were
always doing something that never got them anywhere. Fools!
He had hated them in life, and he hated them in death. But now their
bodies were in dissolution, there was nothing concrete to hate, and, by
some strange symbolism, he had come to hate what in his mind was most
closely allied to the family, the fox that was their crest, the fox
that had their protection. He hated it. He hunted it. He wanted to
kill it. The day on which a fox was killed was to him a red-letter
day. He felt somehow that he had killed a Fitzpaul.
Foxes took on for him now a strange, sinister entity. By thinking much
of them, he had come to think of them as a quasi-human, supernormal
race. There was something strange about them, anyway. Cleverest of
all the beasts of the field, with their cunning they outwitted men.
They were strange in their likes and dislikes. Their only friend was
the dull-witted badger, a dark personality, too, whose burrows they
used, with whom they often lived. They would eat fruit and shellfish.
And though they killed birds, they would not touch a dead bird of prey.
They had tabus as strict as a Maori's. Strange, mystical laws.
Very sinister they seemed to Morgan. Once in America he had seen Michi
Itow, the Japanese, dance his dance of the fox. And there was
something terrible in it, something so mysteriously awful that he all
but rose in his seat, the cry of the pack ringing from his throat: "Ay!
Ay! Ay! ... Ay! Ay!"
And he had a dreadful waking dream, of an acre of foxes watching him in
the twilight, never moving, still on their pads. Just their pointed
muzzles, their baleful, luminous eyes....
He had hunted foxes everywhere since he left Ireland. In Canada, where
he had many a good kill. In England, where the sport was too ladida,
too much of a social gathering to please. In America, in Maryland,
where they hunted the gray fox, with hounds stag crossed with fox, but
seldom killed. He could n't stand their way of hunting. The
Marylanders did n't care to kill, and they had dubbed their favorite
foxes with endearing nicknames. No! That was ridiculous! What he
wanted was an Irish hunt--fine horses and good riders, and keen hounds,
and a dead fox at the end of the day.
He looked up from the pack as they swung through a plowed field. The
fox had swung in a circle and was running to where it had started.
There was Cashelshane, King John's castle. There was Owana Ma ach Meg,
the river of the little trout! There was Crock Na Mero, the hill of
the querns! There was--there was the abbey where the Fitzpauls, where
Reynardine slept.
"If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you 'll not me find,
For I 'll be in my castle--"
A great castle that, he laughed, six feet underground.... Damn it!
Were those hounds checked again?