The frost that had sharpened the moon and armoured the pools, held its
ground for but one night. The voice of the south moaned in the
casements, a grey, strong rain followed it, and on the morning of the
second day a clean wind blew across the soaked fields, and the sun came
forth in a sky of new-born blue.
Tom Quin’s red-haired sister stood at the door of her house, and looked
across the furzy uplands to where a long wood climbed and sank on a spur
of Cahirdreen hill. Her hair seemed on fire in the sunshine, and the
pupils of her light eyes were contracted to pin points by the glare from
the white-washed lintel.
“He’s coming,” she said, turning back in to the house, where her mother
was sitting on a stool by the fire, with a cup of tea in her hand, and a
bare-legged grandchild squatting beside her on the warm hearthstone.
Since her bereavement, the widow Quin breakfasted fitfully by
half-cupfuls at intervals during the morning, and did not sit at the
table.
“Oh, musha, musha, a quare hour o’ the day he comes to his breakfast,
goin’ on eleven o’clock, an’ he that wint out before it was makin’ day!”
Mrs. Quin shed tears, and little Mikeen utilized the opportunity by
burying his dirty face in her cup, and taking a long drink of the bitter
strong tea.
Tom Quin did not waste words on his family when he came in. He sat down
on the settle, with his hat on, and his eyes fixed on the floor between
his muddy boots. His dog, a black-and-grey cur, remotely allied to the
collie breed, snuffed with an habituated nose at the pots and pans under
the dresser, found no change in them since he had licked them the night
before, passed the lair of the cat with respectful rigidity, and lay
down as if tired, submitting like a Christian and a gentleman to the
fondlings of Mikeen.
“Have they the bridge finished yet, in Tully Bog?” asked Maria Quin, as
she took the teapot up from its nest in the hot ashes.
Quin raised his heavy eyes quickly.
“Ye think ye’re damn wise,” he said, “follyin’ me, an’ axin’ me this an’
that what was I doin’. Haven’t I throuble enough without the likes o’
yee annoyin’ me!”
“Oh, asthoreen,” wailed his mother, “sure it’s only that we’re that much
unaisy for the way ye are, that we’d ax where’d ye go. Take the cup o’
tay, asthore, don’t be talkin’ that way.”
Quin relapsed into silence, and Maria was in the act of pouring out his
tea, when the long sweet note of a horn struck suddenly on their ears,
and Watch sprang out of the open door, barking his shrill vulgar bark,
and sniffing the breeze. He was hardly quicker than his master. Before
Maria had time to put down the teapot, Quin was outside, listening and
staring, and cursing the dog into silence. He saw two red-coated
horsemen trotting round the end of the wood, and the note of the horn
came again, smooth and melodious. Quin started at a run in the direction
of the covert, drawing hard, sobbing breaths as he ran.
On the road at the other side of the covert, Slaney was sitting on
Isabella, the elderly brown mare, and wishing that she had stayed at
home. To sit on Isabella’s back was an experience almost distinct from
riding; it suggested more than anything else a school-room sofa
propelled into action by a sour and sluggish sense of the inevitable, a
school-room sofa that partook of the nature of the governess. Slaney’s
sharply-cut face was pale and sleepless-looking; she was no longer the
ethereal creature of the firelight and moonlight, merely an
ill-turned-out girl, with interesting eyes and a clear skin, who
appeared to be absorbed in discussing bronchitis kettles with the
dispensary doctor. Lady Susan was a little farther down the road on her
husband’s grey, the horse who was, so far, the only creature possessed
of the knowledge that Hugh was afraid of him. He was well aware that
Lady Susan was not, but that, after all, was a fact that was patent to
all beholders.
Mr. Glasgow, turning away from Lady Susan, and looking back as he
turned, thought that she was as good a thing to look at as he had ever
seen. He was on his way to Slaney, and as he neared her he attuned his
eye to that expression of understanding, even of tenderness, that the
occasion required. He delighted in the position; it was intricate, it
was a little risky, and in spite of Slaney’s wrinkled habit and
old-fashioned hat, he still recognized the attractive quality in her. He
felt that it was discriminating and chivalrous of him to be able to do
so, and looking down on her from the mental elevation of his assured
horsemanship, and his power of being agreeable to women, he anticipated
with sufficient pleasure another harmless deviation or so from the
ordinary paths of friendship.
“So you did come out, after all,” he began, riding possessively up to
her, “in spite of the Witch! Do you know that Dan’s afraid to go into
the covert, and Major Bunbury’s taking the hounds through it!”
The sun shone on the top of his head as he took his hat off; Slaney had
not before noticed the exact extent of his baldness. She gave him a
conventional smile and nod, and went on talking to Dr. Hallahan. Glasgow
waited, lighting a cigarette, and, at the next pause, spoke to her
again. His eyes were full of meaning and penetration, and he knew that
they were kind, but hers met them with the merest politeness as she
answered him. There was a perplexed whimper from a hound down at the
lower end of the covert; Glasgow caught up his reins and trotted away in
the direction in which Lady Susan was already moving. This was not the
moment for winding back through the maze of Slaney’s mood; he held the
clue and could use it at his leisure.
Slaney detached herself from Dr. Hallahan, and rode alone up the
mountain road. The hounds had drawn the gorse outside the covert, and
were slowly working up through a wood of scrubby aboriginal oak trees,
woven together by a tangle of briars; round the outskirts a band of
young firs and larches imparted an effect of amenity, but the domain of
the oaks had as impracticable an air as the curled and bossed forehead
of the mountain bull that was shouting defiance from a neighbouring
field. Slaney moved slowly on and up till she reached the top corner of
the covert; and pausing there, the brown mare proceeded, with her usual
air of infinite leisure, to crop the green spikes of a furze-bush. The
smoke from Quin’s farm rose bluely from the valley below, a long stretch
of brown country spangled with lakes lay beyond, and behind all, rising
to meet the eye, the sea stood high like a silver wall against the
horizon. Curlew were crying on the sunny slopes above Slaney, and the
whistling of green plover filled the air. No one was in sight save a
rider posted out on the hill to watch the top of the covert; the
inevitable mob of country boys was at the lower end, and the sound of
Hugh’s and Major Bunbury’s voices, holloaing to the hounds, came
distantly from the bottom of the wood.
Slaney sat quite still, while the life and freshness of the morning
passed by her, and left her dull as stone. The thud of a footstep that
ran, and laboured in running, did not make her look round; she thought
it was the usual country boy till she saw Tom Quin come lurching and
stumbling round the far corner of the wood, with his dog panting at his
heels. Even at a distance of a hundred yards or more an extravagance as
of despair was unmistakable about him. As Slaney looked at him, a hound,
not far off in the covert, gave two or three contralto notes in
succession, and at the same moment there was a rustle in the bracken, a
few yards in front of her. A grey face parted the brown fern and looked
out at her; a fox’s face, with its oblique crafty eyes and sharp refined
muzzle, but the fur was silver-grey.
“A thing like an Arctic fox,” Slaney heard Lady Susan’s voice declaiming
on the ice at Hurlingham.
The fox slipped down off the fence through the bracken, crossed the road
with a dainty whisk of its grey brush, glided up the opposite bank like
a shadow, and was gone. A cold and prickling sensation passed over
Slaney, that feeling of “a wind from the say coming betune the skin an’
the blood” that old Dan Quin had felt. It died away, and left her with a
bounding heart and a reddened cheek, and a sense of intense
participation in the events of the moment, instead of the lifeless
passivity of five minutes before. Her courage repelled the shock to her
instinct, but her understanding had taken a lift to the unknown and the
impossible, and in spite of the morning sunshine and the candid blue
sky, she could not altogether right herself.
A long shout of “gone away” came from the watcher on the hill, and the
hounds came tumbling out of the wood in the lovely headlong rush that
has the shape of a wave and a thousandfold its impetuosity. With the
indescribable chorus of yells and squeals that is known as full cry,
they swept past Slaney, and it was at this juncture that Isabella, the
brown mare, found herself the victim of a gush of enthusiasm. It may
have been a survival in her old soul of the days when she had, according
to tradition, carried the huntsman of the county pack; it may have been
that she, like her rider, was lifted out of herself by the discerning of
spiritual things; at any rate, when she found her head pointed at a
promising place in the fence, she bundled over it with an agility for
which no one would have given her credit, and Slaney found herself
galloping alone behind the racing pack.
The fox had done all that was most unexpected, had gone away into the
teeth of the wind, in a direction wide of any known destination, and the
field, both horse and foot, were all left at the wrong side of the big
irregular covert. Yet Slaney had not gone a hundred yards when Lady
Susan and Glasgow were behind her like a storm, and shot past with their
horses pulling in the wildness of a first burst. The next fence was a
towering bank, wet and rotten and blind with briars, feasible only at a
spot where a breach made for cattle had been built up with loose stones.
Glasgow came first at it, checking his young horse’s ingenuous desire to
buck, and sitting down for a big fly. He was suddenly confronted by Tom
Quin at the far side, brandishing a stone as big as a turnip as if in
the act to throw it, and the young horse swung round with a jerk that
perceptibly tried his rider’s seat. Lady Susan was close in his tracks,
and, far from trying to stop her horse, she gave him a vigorous blow
with her hunting-crop, and drove him full pace at the fence and its
defender. The grey horse jumped like a deer, and Quin perforce sprang
aside, cursing vilely and threatening Lady Susan with the stone. She was
gone in an instant, and, before Glasgow had pulled his horse together,
Slaney and Isabella were charging the place, Slaney with a white face
and a crooked hat, Isabella with her long nose poked well forward to
take her distance. With an economical yet sufficient hoist of her hind
quarters the old mare was over, while Tom Quin remained staring as if
stupefied by the feat.
“Go away, Tom!” called Slaney, as she passed him. “Don’t mind them--it’s
no use--go home!”
She seemed to herself to be calling out of a dream; yet she had never
felt so strongly and defiantly alive. The thud of galloping hoofs was
in her ears, and she looked back in time to see Glasgow’s horse clear
the stones with a long bound, and receive a blow across the nose from
Tom Quin’s stick as he landed. Drag as she might she could not calm
Isabella, who was bucketing through the heather tussocks with
school-girl ardour; when she looked again, Quin was holding his hand to
his face, as if he had been struck upon it, and was raving in that
inarticulate futility of rage that is not good to see. Glasgow came on
like a thunderbolt, and was beside Slaney in a moment, his horse still
rampant from the blow.
“He’s mad!” she called out through the wind that sang in her teeth. “He
didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Didn’t he, though!” Glasgow shouted back, his eyes tracking the hounds
where they were flitting like white birds across a green field near the
brow of the hill; “he knows now, I think!”
Lady Susan was a hundred yards ahead. Glasgow let his horse go, reducing
the distance at every stride, and leaving Slaney behind. He did not seem
like the lover who had found out the secret of her lips two evenings
ago.
Other riders were close to her now, converging from different points;
she was dimly aware of Major Bunbury below her on the left, riding hard
and steady to pick up a bad start; she saw Danny’s red coat far away in
the heather; she vaguely missed Hugh’s. She was in the green field at
last, with the hounds casting themselves at the farther side of an ugly
stone-faced bank plumed with furze-bushes. The grey had refused, with
the nervousness of youth and inexperience, and Glasgow was looking about
for a better place to get over. At the same moment Slaney saw Hugh
galloping towards them up a hillside track on the bay that his wife had
ridden the Friday before, and through the maddening din of the hounds
opening again on the line, she heard Lady Susan call to him to give
them a lead.
“There, Hughie!” she cried, “between the two furze-bushes is the only
chance. That horse will do it flying.”
Hugh cantered to the place, the bay horse pulling and fuming; he looked
at the steep face of the bank, the deep ditch in front of it, and knew
that to save his soul he could not ride at it.
“It’s not good enough,” he called out, turning his horse. “We must try
round some other way.”
“Try round!” ejaculated Lady Susan, rushing the grey at the fence. “Look
at the hounds running like the devil over the top of the hill! Come up,
horse!”
The grey horse recognized the inevitable; he came up on to the top of
the bank with an effort, and jumped boldly out across the boggy stream
on the far side. Glasgow came next, getting over with a scramble, and
after him followed the wholly incredible Isabella. As Major Bunbury,
cramming his screwy mare at the same place, saw Isabella’s crafty hind
legs fetch securely up on the bank, he said to himself, with some
excitement, that Miss Morris was a clinking good girl, and that there
was nothing in creation like an Irish mare, young or old. At this
juncture his own mare alighted on her chest and nose, and the eulogy was
interrupted.
Slaney was but chaotically conscious of subsequent events. The hounds
crested the hill, and sped down into the brown and green patchwork of
the rough country at the other side, and in a dream-like rush she
pursued the flying figures of Glasgow and Lady Susan, scuffling and
sliding down rocky hillsides, straining up again with fingers twisted in
Isabella’s abundant mane, scrambling over rotten fences, splashing and
labouring through bog, bucking over loose walls, while physical effort
and the excitement of success were mixed up with the fragrance of the
beaten sod, the peaty whiff of the broken bog fence, and the
consciousness of encomium and advice from Major Bunbury. There was a
check or two, when she was aware of puffing horses snatching their wind,
and flushed riders, telling each other that it was a great run, and then
again the brown country flowing past her, and the unfailing guile of
Isabella.
It was an hour and a half before Glasgow, dropping down into a road from
the top of a heathery bank, found the hounds at fault on the edge of a
wide and famished expanse, half marsh, half bog. They seemed beaten and
spiritless; some were already sitting idle and panting on their
haunches, and one of the younger ones was baying at a little bare-legged
girl, who was uttering lamentable cries at finding herself in the middle
of the pack. She and the few starveling cattle she was tending were the
only living creatures in sight. It was a flat and inexplicable
conclusion, but it was final beyond all ingenuity of casting.
It was a twelve-mile ride home for Slaney. She turned Isabella’s head
almost immediately, and started at a walk, while the heat and
enthusiasm died slowly away, and to-morrow lay as flat and cold before
her as the marsh at her side. She was soon out of sight and hearing of
the group on the road, and passed on through the loneliness of the
barren hills, a tired figure on a tired horse, forgotten by all. So it
was that she saw herself, with that acute perception of the gloom of the
position that is with some natures the preliminary to tears.
“What happened to Slaney Morris?” said Lady Susan to Glasgow, an hour
later, as she rode home with him. “She vanished like the fox. Is _she_ a
witch, too? I think she must be to have got that old crock along as she
did.”
“Major Bunbury will tell you all about her,” replied Glasgow, not
without interest in the manner in which the information would be
received. “I saw him catch her up before she had gone half-a-mile.”
“Oh, the wily and dissolute old Bunny,” exclaimed Lady Susan, in high
amusement. “Won’t he hear about it from me! I’m simply screaming for a
cigarette,” she went on, “and Hughie has my case in his pocket, and he’s
miles behind--oh, thanks!” She took one from Glasgow’s case, and lit it
in the fresh breeze with practised ease.
“I suppose Hughie’s leg must have been bad again to-day,” she said,
rather awkwardly, as they moved on again. Glasgow stroked his moustache
and looked the other way, with a tact sufficiently ostentatious to
impress Lady Susan.
“I saw him come out of the covert over a two-foot wall,” Hugh’s wife
went on, “and he had no more cling than a toy.” She paused again, and
Glasgow still was silent. “You saw him at that fence where I asked him
for a lead,” she said, with some genuine hesitation. “What do you think
was wrong with him?”
“I don’t suppose you can imagine what it feels like to lose your nerve,
Lady Susan,” said Glasgow slowly.
She took her cigarette out of her mouth.
“I’ve been horribly afraid it was that,” she said, in a low voice, and
their eyes met in a fellowship in which Hugh could never have a part.