Next morning, while the last of three white frosts was vanishing from
the grass, Hugh stood in the hall at French’s Court, pinning a bunch of
violets into his red coat. Tops and waistcoat, tie and pin, obeyed to a
hair-breadth the minute rigour of male fashion in the hunting-field, the
violets made their bold yet not exasperating contrast with the scarlet,
and Hugh’s pale face was almost picturesque in its gay and vivid
setting. Taking up his flask, he went to the dining-room and filled it
at the sideboard with old liqueur brandy; he poured out a glass from the
same bottle, and was going to raise it to his lips, when he heard voices
outside the open door. One of the voices was his wife’s, and he heard it
with that sense of severance from her affairs that had been his since
he and his gun-cases had reappeared at French’s Court the evening
before. He was not usually sensitive to social temperatures, but it
seemed to him that there was something flat and ungenial about the whole
party. Bunbury was spasmodically agreeable, Slaney was silent, his wife
was heavy-eyed and listless; he encouraged and nurtured the bitter
conviction that no one wanted him.
“I suppose you’re riding Gambler to-day?” Major Bunbury was saying to
some one in the hall.
“No,” replied Lady Susan, speaking rather quickly and indistinctly, “I’m
riding Mr. Glasgow’s old horse, Solomon, you know. He came over last
night. I’ve always wanted to try him.”
Bunbury whistled a few bars of a tune, and knocked down things in the
whip-rack.
“Hugh’s riding that grey,” she went on; “it’s quite absurd. He can’t do
anything with him, and he only makes an exhibition of himself.”
“Oh, the horse is all right now,” replied Bunbury, lowering his voice;
“he was very green that first day that Hugh rode him.”
“Very well,” she said, “you’ll see. He won’t take that horse across two
fences to-day.”
Bunbury passed on out of the hall door, and left Lady Susan standing on
the doorstep. She looked up at the cold blue and uncertain grey of the
sky, and out at the ruffled and hazy sea, the strong light showing lines
of sleeplessness about her eyes; then, turning back into the house, she
met her husband. She did not suppose that he had overheard her, yet she
was aware of something in his lonely face that she did not care to look
at. She went to the table and took up her gloves without speaking.
“Hullo!” she exclaimed, “there’s a letter here that came for you. I
found it on the floor one night, and didn’t think it worth sending on.
Some one has shoved it behind the card-tray.”
Hugh looked at the vulgar and rambling handwriting, and mechanically
tore open the envelope. It was a letter clearly written in close and
crooked lines, and its purport appeared to be a confused complaint of
“persecution” received from the hounds in connection with the covert of
Cahirdreen. Hugh read on with a frowning brow. In other days he would
have asked his wife to come and read it over his shoulder, but that time
seemed now very far away.
Glasgow’s name appeared in the letter, with more complaints of
persecution; he hardly tried to understand what it was all about. All at
once his wife’s name seemed to leap out from the paper, and to sink
back, indelible, irrevocable, linked to Glasgow’s by two or three gross
and barbarous phrases, by a warning not less crude, by a cunning
treatment of the matter as one of common knowledge. There was no
signature, nothing to suggest its connection with the dead hand that
still clutched the broken reed when Tom Quin’s body was taken from the
pond.
Hugh raised his eyes and looked at his wife, tasting in that moment the
transcendent anguish of the mind that once or twice in a lifetime
teaches the body what suffering can be. She was buttoning her glove,
standing tall and straight in the light from the open door, in all the
spotless austerity of her black habit and white tie. She seemed far out
of the reach of accusation, yet, as he took in every well-known line,
forgotten things rose up against her in an evil swarm. His belief in her
was falling with the fall of a strong and shading tree; he clung to it
even as it fell; and all the while she stood and buttoned the glove
across her white wrist.
At half-past eleven a misty fog was drifting loosely up from the
south-west on the shoulders of the thaw, and the group of riders outside
the cover of Cahirdreen began to turn up their collars. It was a small
group, and an eye accustomed to the usual muster would have noticed at
once the absence of Mr. Glasgow; he was one of the people whose presence
makes itself felt in all the varied fortunes of a day’s hunting. As the
minutes passed, and the horses nibbled idly at the gorse in the fence,
the dispensary doctor closed the top of his flask with a snap, and
remarked facetiously that he supposed business must sometimes come
before pleasure, even with railway contractors.
Lady Susan was at a little distance, apparently absorbed, as was her
wont, in attentiveness to what was going on in covert. At the laugh that
followed Dr. Hallahan’s remark, she moved away, and rode slowly along
the edge of the wood. She was on Solomon, who had already taken full
note of a lighter hand, a lighter weight, and the absence of spurs: he
had had ideas about bucking on the road to testify his appreciation of
these things, but on finding that Lady Susan had also ideas of her own
on the subject, he had made up his mind to treat her with respect. She
rode on round the top of the covert, and stationed herself on its
farther side; Solomon stood like a rock, with his brown roach back
humped against the cold mist.
The hounds had been put in at the lower end of the wood, and were
working through it, so far without result. As before, when Cahirdreen
had been drawn, Danny-O was not to be found when the time came for him
to take the hounds through the covert, and the master, on his grey
horse, was riding up a track in the heart of the wood, where the mist
had as yet scarcely made its way, and the silence dwelt like a spirit.
The horse went ever more slowly among the slender stems of the
fir-trees, sharing in the lethargy conveyed by the slack rein and the
loose leg of his rider, while the hounds were pushing well ahead through
the briars and the bracken, leaving Hugh behind. A straggler or two
passed him by, with a wary eye on the whip, not realizing, as the house
dog so readily does, that human beings have preoccupations in which dogs
can be ignored.
It was some time before Hugh noticed the fact that there was somebody
near him in the wood--a figure moving among the trees at a little
distance. The Scotch firs and larch had been thinned out here for sale
to the contractor of the new railway line, and the wood was more open.
The figure was that of an old man, who seemed to be advancing in a
direction parallel with Hugh. Sometimes the misty fog blotted him out,
sometimes the grouping of the tree-stems conspired to hide him; he went
onward as if fitfully; the moments when he was lost to sight scarcely
accounted for his reappearances farther on. He shuffled like an infirm
man, yet his progress through the undergrowth was so steady that it
seemed as if he were walking on a path. Irritated at length by the
persistent espionage, Hugh called to him to ask what he was doing in the
covert. He received no reply, and the mist crept in between them. When
it cleared again the old man was crossing an open space fifty yards
away. Hugh noticed the profound melancholy of his bent head, the yellow
paleness of his cheek. Even while something familiar about him vexed
Hugh’s memory, like an evil dream half-forgotten, he appeared to
stumble, and fell with out-spread arms and without a sound into some
unseen hollow or ditch. Hugh pressed the grey horse through the briars
and under the branches till he reached the spot; he pulled up abruptly
as he found himself at the edge of a disused sandpit. There were a few
rocks flung about at the bottom of it, with the briars growing among
them; a rabbit came up out of them, and scuttled to its burrow in the
sand at the sound of the horse’s tread; nothing else whatever was there.
Hugh put his hand to his head and wondered if he were going mad. Then,
quite unexpectedly, his knees began to tremble, and the breath of the
unknown entered into him, cowing the conventions and disbeliefs of
ordinary life. At the same instant a hound began to throw his tongue in
the covert, two or three more joined, and the grey horse turned of
himself to get back to the path. As if through a dark atmosphere of
foreboding and doom Hugh heard the whimpers strengthen to yells in all
the wild and animal and mundane delight of hunting; he moved
mechanically on, while the borders of existence became immeasurable
about him, and his unhappiness stretched out into all futurity. There
was a rustle in the undergrowth near him, and a fox slipped across the
path and away among the trees towards the fence that bounded the wood.
It was silver-grey, with black ears and paws, its eyes as it glanced at
Hugh were like topazes, and seemed full of the cold lore of unearthly
things. The thrill went again from Hugh’s heart to his throat, and died
away in a sickly chill.
“Damn it all!” he broke out suddenly, “what am I afraid of? I’m going to
break my neck--that’s what it is--and the sooner the better.”
An old hound came working and yelping up through the dead bracken; she
flung up her head with a long shriek of excitement as she crossed the
path; half-a-dozen others rushed to her well-known cry, and went
streaming past on the line. The grey horse was quivering and hopping
from leg to leg with excitement. Hugh could feel his heart beating up
through the saddle.
“All right, you devil,” he said, turning him through the trees at a
trot; “you’ll get a skinful of it now.”
The bank was blind and high, and the last hounds were struggling over it
with difficulty; Hugh rode along it for a hundred yards or so at a
canter, with branches hitting him in the face, till he found a place
that seemed possible, and sent the horse at it with a cruel dig of the
spurs. In three big bounds the grey was at the fence, the fourth landed
him on top among briars and furze, and a drop of seven or eight feet
into a marshy hollow was revealed. Lady Susan’s handling had not been
lost on the grey; he kept his head up, and jumped out like a stag,
landing clear of the rotten ground, and collecting himself in a moment
with his eye on the hounds. Hugh sat him loosely and recklessly; what he
felt was not pleasure, yet it was not wholly removed from it. He had, at
all events, the fierce and bitter satisfaction of taking his weaker
nature by the throat, and keeping it down, even to the death that every
fibre was expectant of.
One other rider had seen the hounds going away. As Hugh turned down the
hill, with the pack already three fields ahead, he saw through the mist
that a lady on a brown horse had got away on good terms with them from
the first. It was his wife, on Glasgow’s horse. The rest of the field
were left at the wrong side of the covert, ignorant of the fact that the
fox had gone away, and, from the line that he had taken, not likely to
know for some time. Certainly Hugh was not in the mood to remember
their existence. He took the grey horse by the head and galloped him at
a loose stone wall. They were over with a send and a swoop, and Hugh
began to lose the cold trembling in his knees, and to feel again the
forgotten grip and swing. Somewhere in the back of his heart he was
afraid, but sinister clouds of fatalism and heats of jealousy were
between him and that latent and irresponsible treachery of the nerves.
The hounds were running hard, down towards the railway, and Lady Susan
was going at her ease with them on Solomon. They flashed across it, and
Hugh saw his wife ride unhesitatingly at the stark bog drain, that was
the only fence of the unfinished line. The old horse jumped it like a
four-year-old, and as he scrambled up the embankment Lady Susan looked
back: the mist was creeping down the hill, but Hugh knew that she could
not mistake the grey horse. He swore to himself that he would show her
that he was as good a man as Glasgow, his horse as good as Glasgow’s;
the most primitive and animal of human hatreds had taken hold of him,
and was disfiguring mind and face like a possession of the devil.
In a minute the hoofs of the grey were thudding on the railway sleepers,
but in that minute the hounds and Lady Susan had slipped away again; he
felt that if they got any farther from him he would lose them in the
mist. The going was heavy and the banks rotten in the boggy lowlands
beyond the line. He took no care to pick his way, but rode wildly
through swampy patches and over rocks muffled in furze, in pursuit of
the flying shadow that the mist was momently hiding from him. It was not
the way to get safely over a bad country. In the next five minutes the
grey horse had twice been nearly down, and his white nose was black with
bog mud; he had given up pulling, yet he was going at his best, strong
and free, and his ears were pricked as gallantly as ever towards his
work.
They had galloped perhaps three miles, and were bending back again
towards the railway; Hugh was nearer to his wife by a hundred yards as
he came with a heavy drop into a lane up which the hounds were running,
and thundered up it in her wake, neither knowing nor caring where he
was. The fact that they suddenly recrossed the railway by a level
crossing conveyed to him no sense of locality. He was possessed by the
passion to let his wife see that he was not afraid; to leave her and her
borrowed horse behind; and, having gained that miserable joy, to be
killed before her eyes. He was as nearly mad as presentiment, physical
excitement, and the burning pain of jealousy could make him, and the
grey horse was finding it out.
With a heave and a scramble they were out of the lane and over a bank;
it was uphill now, in heather and rough ground, and the grey was puffing
audibly as he answered the relentless spur. The mist thickened on the
higher levels, Lady Susan and the hounds were suddenly lost to sight,
and, after a minute or two of fruitless galloping, Hugh pulled up and
listened, with his pulses thumping and his mouth dry. A curlew whistled
overhead, a trembling crescent of sound, then, high up the hill to his
left, he heard again the cry of the hounds. He rode to it desperately,
skirting a high furzy knoll, and at the other side caught sight of the
pack beginning to run fast again after a check, and his wife was still
near them. He saw Solomon slip over a bank and ditch with all the
seeming ease of a clever horse well ridden, and he cursed him and his
rider aloud. The paltry blasphemy went out into the wind and mist, and
was swallowed up in their large and pure philosophy, and it had scarcely
left his lips when the greyness that blurred the hill-top became thinner
as it drifted, and he saw three tall Druid stones stand out against the
sky.
Immediately some remembrance, vague yet urgent, drove its way into the
blind and single resolve of his mind. It was grouse-shooting long
ago,--the grey horse took down half a loose wall with him as he jumped,
and Hugh chucked him in the mouth and hit him--a man had spoken to him
that day about something connected with those stones, he had seen that
man again lately--quite lately--there was something horrible about it
all.--Come up, horse! why the devil can’t you look where you’re
going?--and yet it eluded him. Then it came, like the dart of a snake
out of a ruined wall. It was old Dan Quin, who was dead, whom he had
seen in the covert; it was Dan Quin who had spoken to him out
grouse-shooting; he had pointed to those stones and told him---- Oh,
God! his wife was within a hundred yards of the place! He shouted her
name with his utmost strength. She did not hear him; she was cantering
Solomon up the field, and the hounds were crossing a fence above her,
beside the lean and crooked emblems of the Druids.
The grey horse was blowing and gulping, yet he answered the furious
spurring. Hugh shouted again and again, with his eyes straining after
his wife’s figure; in the white light of that agony he knew his love for
her and his helplessness to save her. She turned Solomon at the fence
beside the Druid stones; it was a big bank, with withered branches of
thorn-bushes masking its outline, and she sent him at it hard. The old
horse jumped on to it like a cat, seemed to stagger and hesitate, and
they both were gone.
The grey felt his rider relax and sway, but being young he did not
understand what it meant: he was nearing a bank that he felt he could
not jump, but the dread of the spur was present with him. He did his
best, and but for a rotten take-off he might possibly have scrambled
over. As it was, his knees took the bank, his hindquarters flew up, and
he turned a somer-sault, falling over into the next field. Hugh was
shot from his back and pitched on his head and shoulder beside the
horse. The latter struggled to his feet, but Hugh rolled convulsively to
one side with an inarticulate sound, and lay still.