There was an air of calamity and yet of Sunday about the Quins’
farmyard. The pigs were shut up, tubs and buckets were put out of sight,
and Tom Quin’s little nephew, in his best frock, spent many hours of
blissful autocracy in driving the fowl from the doorstep to Siberias
behind the rick of turf. Very early in the day two stalwart and dapper
members of the Royal Irish Constabulary had made their appearance, and
from time to time women in hooded blue cloaks made their way along the
causeway that skirted the manure heap, groaned, crossed themselves, and
entered the house. In a large shed where Tom Quin had often threshed
oats and chopped furze, his body had been laid on two tables, and
covered with a sheet, some superstition about the drowned forbidding
that it should be taken into the house, lest death might strike another
there.
Awaiting inquest, the sheeted figure lay in its hidden awfulness, with
the crooked rafters and the sedgy thatch above, and the candles burning
at the head and feet in the grey winter air, wan yet ardent, like the
flame of faith in the world’s cold noonday. Beside the body the widow
Quin sat upon the earthen floor, with a black handkerchief tied over her
spotless cap frill, and did not cease from the low moaning and weeping
of unstanched grief. Sympathizers stood at the door and looked at her,
an intense comprehension of her suffering blending itself with the
inevitable fascination of the event, and prayers for the repose of the
dead man’s soul were offered with a reality in which a sense of the
extreme necessity for them was not concealed.
It was nearly twelve o’clock when Maria Quin came out of the house with
a cup of tea in her hand; she had on her black best dress, and her
boots creaked loudly. She said nothing to those whom she passed, but
took the cup of tea to her mother, placing it in the reluctant hand that
twisted the apron corner.
“Take it, asthore, take it now,” chorussed the sympathizers.
“L’ave her alone. Don’t be lookin’ at her,” said her daughter, in the
hard voice that had remained unshaken through the morning. She closed
the door in their faces, and when she presently came out again with the
empty cup, smeared with the stain of the poisonous stuff it had
contained, all recognized that the first step in the consolation of the
Widow Quin had been accomplished.
Maria turned away. Her head ached wildly, and instead of returning to
the house, she passed round the end of the shed, and into the field at
the back, that the damp wind of the hillside might blow upon her hot
forehead. Her face was quite white under its sunburn and freckles,
except where the skin below the eyes showed a lavender tinge; the eyes
themselves had a dry stare in them, yet there was nothing random or
ungoverned about her. Grief drives the active to activity, and perhaps
the long toils of the night, when successive candles found her still
sweeping and washing in preparation for the wake and the inquest, had
saved her from the reaction from her outburst in the wood; perhaps
passion is normal and without reaction in those whose hair is truly red.
The wind soothed her aching head, and she went slowly on and sat down on
a stone, with the empty cup and saucer in her lap, looking away up the
slope to where a ridge of hill was visible through the soft movement of
the mist. She did not at first observe that a grey animal with a black
muzzle had leaped on to the loose wall that surrounded the field she was
in, and was crouching and looking at her intently. It jumped down with
exquisite lightness, a pale grey fox with a beautiful white-tipped
brush, and crossed the open towards the barn where Tom Quin lay. As it
did so, Maria saw it, and sprang to her feet, her mouth open and her
eyes starting. The cup and saucer fell with a clatter, and the fox,
which had seemed disposed to loiter as it passed close under the wall of
the shed, glanced back, looked about it, and after a moment of seeming
indecision, turned and trotted at its ease up the hill, heading
apparently for much the same point as that from which it had just come.
Grey as the mist itself, it glided away, till it disappeared among the
clumps of gorse, while somewhere overhead a seagull made its unhappy
cry.
Maria Quin fell on her knees with absolute simplicity and spontaneity.
She was not frightened in the ordinary sense of the word, but she
acknowledged the power of the unseen things that had worked together to
her brother’s undoing, and she cast herself on a higher protection, half
doubtful as she was of its right to intervene. As she knelt, with her
hand thrust in the bosom of her dress to grasp the picture of the Sacred
Heart that hung around her neck, the cry of hounds came to her ear; it
approached rapidly, and she jumped up, full of a blind indignation
against those who, for their own amusement, had wrecked the fortunes of
a family, and now came to gallop past the house of death, guided by that
grey and ill-omened thing. Half-a-dozen hounds passed her, hot on the
line of the fox, with their heads up; they overran it and tried back,
then picked it up by the shed as if they were lapping it off the grass,
and with whimpers bursting into the firm note of hunting, went away up
the hill and were lost to sight amongst the furze. Others followed in
their track, and Maria, maddened by their brutal self-engrossment, their
cheery and inconsequent voices, ran in the direction from which they had
come, with some inflaming idea of stopping the riders who would follow,
equally self-engrossed, infinitely more brutal and desecrating.
As she climbed the first wall, a horse and rider leaped up into view on
a high bank some two hundred yards away to her right, near where three
thin and slanting Druidic stones were dimly seen through the mist. They
dropped down out of sight among a wild growth of hazels. Maria stood
stock still; the powers of darkness had outrun her. Neither horse nor
rider reappeared. It was stunningly complete, it was terrific and just
retribution, but yet--oh, Mother of Our Lord!--the rider was a woman.
The peasant heart struggled in the grave-clothes of hatred and
superstition, and burst forth with its native impetuousness and warmth.
Maria started forward and ran towards the field where the hazels grew.
She ran clumsily because of her ill-made boots, but she got over the
ground with surprising quickness. She climbed another wall, a strong one
with thorn-bushes laid along the top, and was in a small field full of
grey clumps of young hazel. She skirted these rapidly, but with care,
and once jumped across an ugly cleft among the bushes. The hounds were
all about her again, but they were silent now, and were hunting to and
fro among the hazel-bushes, and leaping backwards and forwards over
rifts in the ground similar to that which Maria had just crossed. Before
her was the high bank, showing above a long strip of hazel scrub; she
thrust herself, breathless, in among the thick and sturdy growth, her
eyes dilated with apprehension, her red hair falling loose in the wind.
A cry for help arose at her step, scarcely three yards away; she broke
her way to it through the crush of young branches, and saw, as if coming
up out of the ground, two gloved hands, clutching all they could hold of
twigs and saplings, that bent lithely with the weight that hung from
them.
Lady Susan was hanging over the verge of a deep and wide cleft, masked
on one side by hazels and briars; her face looked up, deeply flushed,
and distorted from the whirl of the terrible moments that make a vortex
round death, yet it was obvious that even in that extremity she had not
lost her presence of mind. Maria dropped on her knees, and twining her
left arm round a strong stem, stretched down her muscular right hand.
Lady Susan could not let go and grasp it, and Maria caught her by the
wrist and drew her slowly upward. There was a struggle, and a tremendous
strain on the arms; both women kept steady and firm, and Lady Susan got
her knee over the edge and fell forward on to Maria’s shoulder. Her hat
dangled by its guard, her habit sleeve had burst away from the shoulder,
her patent-leather boots were cut and scraped by the crevices in which
they had searched to find a footing; she drew hard breaths in the effort
to recover herself.
“Is the horse killed?” she said hoarsely, scrambling on to her feet and
looking down through the naked branches that fringed the long cleft.
Even the first glance could certify that Solomon had met his death in an
instant. He lay in a heap in the obscurity forty feet below, on loose
rocks among dark water; his head was doubled under his chest at an
impossible angle that told the tale of a broken neck. The uttermost
effort of a good horse had not been enough to save him, when he had
tried to jump out from the top of the high bank across a chasm nearly
twenty feet wide. That endeavour and all his simple and gallant life
seemed expressed in the wreck of strength and intelligence that lay
below, with the water washing over the flap of the saddle, over the
shapely brown fetlocks, over the thin and glossy mane.
It was mysterious water, an underground stream that slid out of the dumb
and sightless caverns of the rock, and passed away into them again with
a swirl, a stealthy swift thing, escaping always from the eye of day,
and eating the foundations of the limestone walls that sheltered it.
Lady Susan still held the hand that had rescued her; it led her through
the brush-wood to open ground, till the short wet grass was under her
feet and the mist blew in her face. She turned her head away, and the
sobs broke from her. Any one who has loved horse or dog will know how
and where they touch the heart and command the tear. Let us trust that
in some degree it is known to them also, that the confiding spirit may
understand that its god can grieve for it.
Maria Quin looked at Lady Susan with eyes that were as dry as glass. The
Irish peasant regards the sorrow for a mere animal as a childishness
that is almost sinful, a tempting of ill fate in its parody of the grief
rightly due only to what is described as “a Christhian”; and Maria’s
heart glowed with the unwept wrongs of her brother.
“What happened him?” she asked, and the knot of pain and outrage was
tight in her voice.
“I tried to pull him back when I saw what was coming,” said Lady Susan,
with difficulty. “I couldn’t stop him; he had too much way on. I only
did harm. I think he would have got across only for that.” She stopped
and gulped down the sob. It was dreadful to her to cry before an
inferior. “He all but got over, but he dropped his hind legs into it and
fell back. I somehow caught those branches just as he was going, and he
dropped away from under me, and I hung there. I couldn’t climb up. Then
you came.” She recovered herself a little, and turned towards her
rescuer. “I haven’t thanked you yet. It was awfully good and plucky of
you.”
Their eyes met, and it seemed as if till then Lady Susan had not
recognized Maria Quin. She visibly flinched, and her flushed face became
a deeper red, while the hand that had begun to feel for her purse came
out of her pocket empty.
“Little ye cried yestherday whin ye seen my brother thrown out on the
ground by the pool,” said Maria, with irrepressible savageness, “you
that’s breakin’ yer heart afther yer horse.”
Lady Susan took the blow in silence, and that quality in her that can
only be described as an absence of smallness, dimly appealed to the
country-woman, as occasionally through Lady Susan’s careless life it had
had its effect on women of her own class.
“D’ye know yer way home out o’ this?” said Maria sullenly. “If ye’ll
come with me I’ll show ye the short way out into the bohireen below our
house.” She was beginning to be sorry for what she had said, or perhaps
the saying of it had eased her heart. “One that didn’t know this field
would aisy be killed in it. It’s full o’ thim cracks, and we have it
finced sthrong from the sheep.” She turned and pointed to the tall
Druidic stones. “While ye live ye’ll mind yerself whin ye see thim. I
thought every one in the counthry knew this place. But sure what are you
but a sthranger!” She said it more kindly, and as if explaining the
position to herself.
“Look here,” said Lady Susan suddenly, “I want to tell you that I don’t
deserve this kindness from you, and I’m truly sorry for all that has
happened about the hounds. It won’t happen any more. Will you--will you
accept my regret for anything I have done to annoy you, and my sympathy
about your brother? I didn’t understand how things were----”
“Oh, God help ye!” broke out Maria, “what does the likes o’ ye
undherstand about the likes of us? It wasn’t wanting to desthroy us ye
were, I know that well--and faith! I think ye have nature that’d make ye
sorry if ye seen my brother this day where he’s lying beyond. I know
well the one that have no pity; maybe he’ll be in the want of it yet.”
She took Lady Susan by the sleeve, staring at her as if taking in her
good looks. “Mind yerself!” she said in a whisper; “that fella would
throw ye on the roadside whin he’d be tired o’ ye. Don’t be makin’
little o’ yerself with the likes o’ him--you that has a good husband and
nothin’ to throuble ye. I can tell ye of the day I wint to Glashgow to
the office, axing him to take back the price o’ the land, and he put a
hand on me to kiss me; he thought that was all he had to do to humour
me. He remembers that day agin me yet. It couldn’t be that you, that
might be talkin’ to the Lord Left’nant or any other, would bring sorrow
on yerself for the sake of _him_.”
Neither the straining misfit of the black dress, nor the atrocious
pretensions of the cheap boots, could impute vulgarity to the speaker.
Lady Susan kept her eyes on the ground with a firmly-set mouth, and
Maria turned away in the direction from which she had come. She was
overtaken almost immediately.
“I am going back the other way,” said Lady Susan. “I’m afraid my husband
or some one may be coming this way and not know of this place, and I
must tell them where the hounds are, but---- Good-bye.” She put out her
hand in its torn glove; it was still trembling from exertion. There was
a moment’s pause, and the country-woman’s hard, red hand took it and
shook it, and dropped it.
Neither spoke, but some thrill ran home to Maria’s heart with the
meeting of the palms, and sent the dew to her hot eyes. They separated
in silence, and Lady Susan, following the long cleft to its termination,
climbed up the bank. Looking back, she saw the hounds still hurrying in
and out among the hazels in excited and fruitless search, and beyond
them Maria’s black figure going away into the mist and fog. She walked
uncertainly, and once or twice her hand went up to her eyes.