produced from images available at The Internet Archive)

                            THE SILVER FOX

                            THE SILVER FOX

                                  BY

                   MARTIN ROSS AND E. Œ. SOMERVILLE

          AUTHORS OF “AN IRISH COUSIN,” “NABOTH’S VINEYARD,”
                      “THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC.

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                                LONDON
                       LAWRENCE AND BULLEN, LTD.
               16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

                                 1898

                              SILVER FOX

CHAPTER I

Lady Susan had never been so hungry in her life. So, for the sixth time,
she declared between loud and unbridled yawns. She worked her chair
across the parquet towards the fire-place, dragging the hearthrug into
folds in her progress, and put her large and well-shod feet on the
fender.

“What a beast of a fire! When you’ve quite done with it, Bunny, I
shouldn’t mind seeing it just the same. You are a selfish thing!”

In obedience to this rebuke Major Bunbury moved an inch or two to one
side.

“I’m not as selfish as you are,” he said, with agreeable simplicity.
“Miss Morris can’t see anything but your boots.”

“Oh, she likes seeing boots,” replied Lady Susan, establishing one on
the hob. “They don’t have ’em in Ireland, do they, Slaney!”

It was obviously the moment for Miss Morris to say something brilliant,
but she let the opportunity slip. Perhaps she was hampered by the
consciousness that her boots had been made in an Irish country town. She
got red. She did not know that it was becoming to her to get red.
Finding no more appropriate retort, she laughed, and pushing back her
chair, walked over to the window. What she looked out on was the lawn at
Hurlingham, covered smoothly and desolately with snow; a line of
huddled, white hummocks of ice, moving very slowly across the middle
distance, represented the River Thames; down to the right, five or six
skaters glided on the black and serpentine curves of a little lake--they
looked like marionettes sliding along a wire. Even at that distance
they seemed to Slaney over-dressed and artificial. No doubt they were
screaming inanities to each other, as were these other English idiots in
the room behind her. How ineffably stupid they were, and how shy and
provincial they made her feel! How could Hugh have married into such a
pack?

One of the double doors at the end of the room opened, and a small, dark
man appeared.

“Awfully sorry to have kept you all waiting,” he said abjectly. “I’m
afraid it’s a bad business; they say that there’s nothing to be had here
on Sundays at this time of year, unless it’s ordered beforehand.”

“Oh Lord!” ejaculated Lady Susan, bringing her foot and the shovel down
with a crash. “Do you mean to say there’s nothing to eat?”

“It’s not quite as bad as that, but precious nearly,” he replied,
looking at her so deplorably that Slaney felt inclined to laugh. “We’re
going to have some of the waiter’s dinner. It’s a leg of mutton, and he
says he don’t think it’s quite boiled yet, but I said we wouldn’t wait.”

Lady Susan seized Major Bunbury’s hand, and pulled herself out of her
chair. She was stalwart and tall, and her dress fitted beautifully. With
a whisk and rustle of silk petticoats she was across the room and caught
Miss Morris by the arm.

“Worry, worry, worry! Sess, sess, sess!” she said, with a sufficiently
fortunate imitation of her father’s kennel huntsman. “Come on and eat
raw leg of mutton! I _hope_ the waiter likes onion sauce!”

In the dining-room a genial fire was blazing; a soft and rich-coloured
carpet glowed on the floor; the atmosphere was of old-fashioned comfort;
there was a desirable smell of fried potatoes. The party sank into their
places at an oval table, and to each was administered a plateful of pink
mutton that grew rosier at every slice. Captain Hugh French, late of
the ----th Hussars, looked round upon his guests, and felt that
champagne was the only reparation in his power.

“I feel it’s all my fault bringing you people down here to starve.
You’ll have to take it out in drink,” he said helplessly.

The words were addressed to the company, but his brown eyes, that were
like the eyes of a good small dog, addressed themselves to those of his
wife. Slaney, following them, wondered whether he could help seeing the
black line frankly drawn along the edge of Lady Susan’s lower eyelids.
The white glare from the snow showed it unsparingly, as she looked at
her husband over the rim of the champagne glass from which she was
drinking.

“Yes, darling, you’re a silly little thing,” she said blandly; “I always
said that spill had given you softening of the brain.”

“What spill?” asked Slaney. It was almost the first time she had spoken.
She had sat, inwardly scornful and outwardly shy, in the midst of
conversation whose knack she could not catch, and whose purport she
thought either babyish or vulgar. There must be an English and an Irish
form of humour, so at least it seemed to Slaney, as she listened with
the intolerance of the clever provincial to Lady Susan’s loud and ready
laugh. Hugh, at all events, was not, she thanked Heaven, humorous in
either manner. She found herself less of a fool when she was talking to
Hugh.

“I’m afraid you don’t take much interest in your cousin’s misfortunes,
Slaney,” he said. “Didn’t you know that I was smashed up at Bungalore
last spring, playing polo? I was trying to ‘ride off’ this great brute,”
indicating Major Bunbury, “and I got the worst of it. I was in hospital
for a month, and grew a thundering big black beard. Couldn’t shave for
six weeks.”

“Don’t make me sick,” said Lady Susan, beginning heartily on biscuits
and cheese. “If I’d known that in time I wouldn’t have married you. A
little man with a beard’s like a cob with a long tail. Couldn’t do with
you if you’d a long tail, Hughie.”

“I’m goin’ to grow another when we get down to French’s Court,” retorted
Hughie. “I shan’t have anything else to do there. What on earth do you
do with yourself at Letter Kyle, Slaney?”

“Do you grow a beard, Slaney?” shouted Lady Susan, with her mouth full
of biscuit. “If _I’m_ bored over there I shall just dye my hair again.
How do you like it now, Bunny? I got it done in Paris on our way
through. I think it might be a bit redder.”

“Why, it’s as red as a fox now,” said Major Bunbury, regarding it
critically.

“Talking of foxes,” put in Slaney, endeavouring to be genial, “they all
expect Hugh to start the hounds again when he comes over. That will give
you something to do, Hugh.”

“Tally ho!” uttered Major Bunbury, with a subdued whoop. “That’s a
rippin’ good notion. I’ll come over and whip for you, Hughie.”

“No, you won’t!” cried Lady Susan. “I’ll whip for him myself; but I
don’t believe he knows anything about it--does he, Bunny?”

“Oh dear, no!” replied Major Bunbury, with elephantine sarcasm; “he’s a
perfect owl. Can’t think why we made him carry the horn till he left the
regiment--and the funny thing was that he seemed quite up to the job.”

Captain French took no notice of the compliment.

“I can’t imagine who the people are who want me to get up a pack there,”
he said, without much enthusiasm; “last time I was over there seemed to
be no one in the place but the parson and the two old Miss Macarthys.
They’d make a pretty sort of a hunt.”

“Oh, there are a lot of farmers,” replied Slaney, “and there’s the
police officer, and there’s Mr. Glasgow, the contractor of the new
railway.” To her own surprise and annoyance she blushed as she spoke,
and Major Bunbury, glancing incidentally at her, thought her almost
handsome.

“Glasgow,” repeated Hugh; “there was a chap called Glasgow at Eton with
me. What sort of age is this man?”

“Oh, he’s young--at least, not very young--I mean he’s not exactly old;
but he’s older than you are, Hugh,” replied Slaney, with incoherence
probably due to the blush; “his name is Wilfrid,” she added. “I think he
did say something about having been at school with you.”

“That’s the man. Clever sort of chap; fancies himself a bit. I remember
one of my pals was a fag of his, and said he was awfully particular
about his toast. He wants hounds, does he? Why don’t he get them up for
himself?”

“He’s too busy; besides, he said you were the man to do it, Hugh. He
said he had always heard you were a great rider, and knew all about your
having won the Gold Cup at Punchestown.” She was conscious of pleasure
in the expounding of Mr. Glasgow.

Lady Susan, on the contrary, began to find it a bore.

“Oh, look here, you people,” she broke in, “we can’t sit here all day to
listen to Hughie being made more conceited than he is. Come out and
skate.”

She snatched Major Bunbury’s plate from before him, and put it down in
front of an expectant cat, flung a dinner napkin over her husband’s
head, and fell to arranging her fringe and veil at a looking-glass with
minute care and entire disregard of the company.

As Miss Morris walked after her cousin’s wife down the snowy path to the
lake, she framed with a confident touch the description that she would
give of her to Mr. Glasgow. Scarcely less confidently, and with a
comfortable sense of fore-knowledge of his ideas and point of view, she
formulated the phrase in which he would give his opinion of Lady Susan.
It was satisfactory to reflect that, though she was a failure in Lady
Susan’s set, she found no difficulty in talking to intellectual people
like Mr. Wilfred Glasgow.

A light and stinging wind blew along the ice, powdering the surface with
infinitely delicate particles of snow. The graceful lawns and slopes of
Hurlingham stared in blank whiteness, the evergreens stood out
unnaturally dark and trim in the colourless monotony; beyond the scrape
and hiss of the skates the silence was extraordinary. Slaney did not
enjoy herself. The south-west of Ireland is not the climate in which to
learn skating; she toiled up against the wind with aching ankles, she
drifted back in front of it, and finally, in bitter resentment of her
ungainly helplessness, achieved the haven of a chair. Lady Susan swung
and circled, and knew that her colour was rising in a manner more
becoming than the best rouge that money could buy; Major Bunbury swung
assiduously after her. Hugh was cutting intricate figures far away.
Slaney began thinking of the gaunt afternoon service in progress at that
moment in the church of Letter Kyle. There would be no music because
she was not there to play the harmonium; Uncle Charles would be longer
and louder than ever over the responses to the Psalms now that her
reproving eye was off him; Mr. Glasgow----no, she felt tolerably sure
that the Sundays of her absence would not be the ones selected by Mr.
Glasgow for walking over to afternoon service at Letter Kyle.

“Come along, Slaney,” said Captain French, sailing down upon her with
his hands extended, “I know it’s poor fun for you, but you must keep at
it.”

They moved off together, and Slaney felt, as she often did, a glow of
appreciation of Hugh’s desire to make things pleasant for others. She
did not notice character very much, except at the moments when it was in
contact with herself. Between the manifestations of her cousin’s
amiability towards her she habitually thought of him as merely
unintellectual. At this stage of Slaney’s history intellectual people
were to her as irrevocably severed from the others as were the sheep
from the goats.

“Tell me more about this idea of the hounds,” said Hugh, dodging behind
the island to avoid the raking sweep of Lady Susan’s advance. “What am I
to hunt? Hares or foxes or a red herring?”

“Foxes, of course,” replied Slaney; “there are any amount of them. Uncle
Charles shot two in our wood this autumn.”

“Good Lord!” ejaculated Hugh; “where does he expect to go when he dies?”

“Where do you think?” answered Slaney, with an effort to be suitably
flippant; “if there’s anything in the world that Uncle Charles is more
convinced of than another it is that he always has moved in the highest
circles, and that he always will.”

Hugh laughed in his kindly, indiscriminating way.

“By the way,” went on Slaney, following up a connection of ideas,
“there’s a curious story in the country now about a fox. Mr. Glasgow
wanted gravel for the new railway, and bought a bit of a hillside from
old Danny Quin at Cahirdreen. There was a big patch of furze there, and
the men said that when the first blast went off a grey fox ran out of it
and away into the hills; a sort of fox that no one had ever seen before.
They say that there is an old prophecy about the bad luck that is to
come when that hill is thrown into Tully Lake, and that is just what is
to be done where the line crosses a corner of the lake. They believe
that the fox is a witch or a fairy, and that it will bring the bad
luck.”

“By Jove! that’s rather interesting,” said Hugh, steering Slaney into a
chair and subsiding into another beside her; “we’ll have to kill that
grey fox.”

“The men say he was more a silver colour,” pursued Slaney, “and Mike
Driscoll told me ‘he thought he’d never ate another bit, afther he seen
the way it legged it up the hill, an’ it lashin’ the tail and makin’
snouts at them like a thing that’d be grinnin’ and laughin’.” Slaney was
very successful in her rendering of Mike Driscoll, and Hugh laughed
again, his ugly little falsetto laugh, and felt that Slaney was a very
good fellow indeed.

Lady Susan, doing “Dutch roll,” bore down upon them.

“The horrid thing was lying on my feet,” she was exclaiming to Major
Bunbury, whose hand she was holding at the full stretch of both their
arms. “I never remembered that till this instant,--Hughie,” she called
to Captain French as they passed, and grasping at his chair she whirled
round and came sitting on his knee--“It really was a most awful dream,
darling. I had it last night when you were snoring, and it suddenly came
into my head now. I thought some ghastly thing was sitting on my feet,
like a dog or something, and then suddenly it turned into a whitey,
silvery sort of thing, a kind of Arctic fox, and the horrid thing was
smiling and showing all its teeth. My word, I _was_ in a funk. And then
it turned out to be only the hot-water bag.”

“It’s all tricks, Slaney,” said Hugh, “she heard what we were saying.”
He laughed and looked at Slaney, whose curious hazel-green eyes were
fixed in consternation on Lady Susan.

CHAPTER II

Danny Quin was to be buried that afternoon. It was the third day of the
wake, and his house, always dependent for light on its open door, was
dark with the crowd of people inside and outside the threshold. In the
corner of the kitchen, behind the brute obstruction of human beings,
awkward and inert with stale drink, half-a-dozen candles made a garish
night-time round the dead man. He lay with the yellow flicker on his
steadfast face, a presence of extraordinary refinement and soulful
trance among his late fellows. He was an old man, in his lifetime a
driver of hard bargains, a teller of old tales in which his own
sagacity, uprightness, and power of repartee were unflinchingly set
forth. Here his super-natural pallor and tranquil lips spoke of death
and resurrection to an audience whose greatest care was to accept in a
seemly and gloomy manner as many glasses of whisky as were offered to
them.

His wife’s eyes were hollow and glazed from want of sleep; she stood in
her Sunday gown and white cap, receiving condolences without a tear, and
with the invariable reply, “Sure it couldn’t be helped.”

She hardly knew whether it were night or day, or how often the evening
light in the doorway had turned to blackness, and the blackness
quickened to cold blue-grey dawn since they had pulled the feather-bed
from under her husband in order that he might, in accordance with
ancient custom, breathe his last on the mattress. Her two married
daughters dispensed the whisky and the punch at a table near the door;
in the bed-room behind the kitchen the more honourable visitors sat with
their hats on, and became sapiently and solemnly tipsy. The room was
set out for company; a brand new counterpane covered the mountainous
bed, a naked mahogany table stood in the centre, bearing a black bottle,
a loaf of bread, and a two-pound lump of butter on a plate. A dazzling
three-and-sixpenny hearthrug was placed on the earthen floor in front of
a fire-place without a grate.

“I had not the pleasure of the--the--the dead gentleman’s acquaintance,”
said one of the visitors, a stout and greasy public-house keeper, who
had driven over to the entertainment with a mutual friend, from a town
twelve miles away. “But I undherstand he was greatly respected in this
neighbourhood, and all his family the same.”

The eyes of the speaker were of a moist redness befitting the occasion;
his voice had a husky roll in it, and the raw and tepid reek of bad
whisky accompanied the eulogy.

“As for respect,” rejoined the mutual friend, addressing the hearthrug
with slow determination, “he had it, the Lord have mercy on him, and
more than he’d ax of it. Ye needn’t be talking of respect.”

Several of the party remarked, “that’s thrue,” and the publican felt
that he had said the right thing. Danny Quin’s son here rose and went
round the circle with the bottle. The attention was accepted with
protests, or with groans that betokened indifference to all earthly
affairs. Young Quin sat down again. He was not drunk, but he had been
drinking and crying on and off for three days and nights, and his big
limbs felt tremulous and his brain hot.

“A nice, dacent little man as ever was in the barony,” said an old woman
glibly; “the Lord have mercy on him, ’tis he got the death very
sudden”--she crossed herself--“and very quare, the Lord save us.”

“I undherstand,” said the publican, conscious of leading the
conversation with ability, “that he sustained fatal injuries from a
fall.”

“Arrah, what fatal injuries!” returned the old woman with scorn; “no,
but to break his neck was what he done. Didn’t he walk out over the
brink o’ the big sandpit in Cashel the same as one that wouldn’t have
the sighth, an’ he a fine soople man no more than seventy years? ’Twas
like a reelin’ in the head the crayture got.”

The tone was that of cautious supposition, and it was easy to discern
the desire of contradiction.

“’Twas no reeling,” said Tom Quin, suddenly addressing the company in a
loud voice. “I know well what was on him, and so do thim that was
lookin’ at him. ’Twas a start he took, the same as if he seen somethin’
followin’ him. And I hope in God I’ll be dead to-morrow if it isn’t
thrue what I’m sayin’, that if he didn’t put his hand to the
Park-na-Moddhera to sell it he’d be dhrinkin’ his glass in the fair of
Letter Kyle this day.”

His auditors exclaimed, groaned, and crossed themselves. All present,
except the publican, knew every detail connected with Danny Quin’s
death, but they knew even better what was due to the dramatic moments
in a story.

There was a stir in the kitchen outside, and Quin’s youngest daughter
pushed her way into the room, crying and clapping her hands.

“The priest is come--they’re closin’ the coffin on him--oh, dada, dada!”
she wailed, and flung herself half-across the table without an effort at
self-control.

The women proffered consolation, and raised her red head from where it
lay beside the butter. Swaying and lolling, she was propped against
their shoulders, with the light full on her convulsed face, and the
whole party crushed forth into the kitchen. There was some delay, while
a plate, with a heap of silver upon it, was taken from a table outside
the door of the house and handed over to the priest, and many faces
peered in a circle round the counting of the money. There was more than
eight pounds, subscribed in silver and two half-sovereigns by the
visitors to the funeral, as payment to the priest for masses for the
soul of the deceased. It is an institution known as “the altar,” and
happily combines a politeness to the dead man and his family, with a
keen sense of the return that will be made in kind when it becomes the
donor’s turn to have a funeral. The sight of the gold was balm to the
dazed spirit of the Widow Quin.

“Thank God, they showed that much respect for him,” she said, as
congratulations were passed round. “’Twas a great althar.”

A windy sunset of January was set forth that afternoon in cold orange
and green behind the bogs near Tully Lake. The new railway line ran
across them, away in the north-west, and the rails gleamed along a track
that seemed to end against the breast of the evening sky. Coming from
the east, the line emerged from a cutting in a wooded hill, where blocks
of stone, overturned trucks, and stumps of trees with twisted, agonized
roots, littered the yellow sand. The wood ran to the lips of the cutting
on either side, and the strong fir-trees on the height could look down
the tawny slants upon their fallen comrades.

Standing below, the jaws of the ugly cleft let in the winter sunset and
the twin glitter of the rails, while above, the fir-trees strove against
the evening wind. It was worth remaining still to look at, in spite of
the cold, and Mr. Wilfrid Glasgow, with two long account-books under his
arm, and the peak of his cap over his eyes, stood for at least a minute
surveying alternately his own handiwork and that of his Creator. He felt
a proper admiration for both; impartially he perhaps thought that his
own was more deserving of credit. At length, turning his back upon the
sunset, he walked along the line to where a road crossed it. As he
climbed some bars and swung himself down into the road it could be seen
that he was active, with the skilled and wary activity of forty. He was
tall and slight; when his hat was on, his fair thin moustache and light
figure made short-sighted people place him in the early thirties.

Voices and footsteps were on the road, and groups of people straggled
towards him in the twilight. They were the remnant of Danny Quin’s
funeral _cortége_, and even at a distance of a hundred yards the blatant
drawl of drunkenness was discernible in their conversation. He passed
quickly through them, and walked fast till he was clear of the reek of
whisky, tobacco, and stale turf smoke that followed them.

“What swine they are,” he thought, drawing a long breath. He was walking
in a bend of the road where trees stood up on either side, and in the
shelter the twilight seemed to fall as heavily as dew. A cold, sharp
moon came forlornly from behind a wisp of cloud; the road glistened
pallidly in its light, and he saw a tall man walking unsteadily towards
him.

“Good-evening, Quin,” said Mr. Glasgow, recognizing as he neared him the
young man’s white face and dark beard; “I was sorry to hear of your
trouble. Only four days ago I was talking to your father, and I was
very much shocked to hear how sudden his death was.”

Quin stood still in the middle of the road, with his soft black hat
pulled over his brows. He breathed hard, and Glasgow thought he was
going to cry. Instead of doing so, however, Quin caught him by the arm.

“How dar’ ye bring up me father’s name to me?” he said, in a loud voice.
“If it wasn’t for you and yer railway the stones wouldn’t be over his
head this night!”

Glasgow shook his hand off.

“Go home, Quin, go home,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ll talk to you
to-morrow.”

“What do I want o’ yer talk when ye have the bad luck dhrew down on us!
God knows ye talked enough to me father, blasht ye!” Quin here unloosed
his terrified angry soul by the simple channel of bad language. “I’ll
have satisfaction out o’ ye, ye English hound,” he raved on, seeing that
Glasgow was turning impassively away. “You that laughed when I axed ye
to let me father out o’ the bargain! Well I knew that there was none of
us’d do a day’s good afther it----” he faltered and sobbed.

Glasgow knew enough of the man to take him quietly. He looked at him as
he stood in the moonlight with the tears running down his hairy cheeks,
and walked away. He had not gone far when the imperative sting of a
bicycle bell made him move to one side with the resentment inevitably
roused in the pedestrian by that sound. Looking back he saw Lady Susan
French skimming past Tom Quin; a wheeled apparition that must have been
as startling to him as an Apocalyptic vision. Glasgow had dined at
French’s Court the night before, and, as he took off his cap, Lady Susan
recognized him.

“How-de-do?” she called out, and jumped off, “I must take things easy
and give my husband a chance. He was pounded by that awful hill outside
Letter Kyle. Would you lead my bike? Thanks, awfully.”

Torrents of soft grey rain were falling on Fornagh Hill. The
furze-bushes were grey with it, the slatey walls gleamed darkly, the
streams rushed in yellow fury over the ledges of rock. The new red coat
of Dan O’Driscoll the huntsman (familiarly known as Danny-O) had purple
patches on it where the wet had soaked through, and, as he himself
expressed it to one of his friends, “every step he’d take, the wather
was gabblin’ in his boots.” At the time of this remark, he was on foot
in the centre of a crowd of men and boys, who had apparently risen from
the hillside to point out the precise spot where the fox had gone to
ground.

“’Tis within in the gully he is!” shouted one of them. “I heard the
dogs yowling, and whin I seen him, there wasn’t the breadth o’ yer nail
between himself and the first o’ thim.”

That which the speaker had referred to as “a gully” was a covered-in
drain that carried off the waters of a small stream beneath a road and
down the hillside, its lower opening being at this moment blocked by a
large yellow cur, whose owner was sedulously pinching its tail as a
stimulant to its reluctant advance upon the fox. A small group of riders
huddled, with turned-up collars, under the lee of a high furzy fence;
their muddy horses steamed, with the wet reins hanging loose on their
necks. One lady and four men were all that the rocks and fences of
Fornagh had left of the field. The dispensary doctor’s chestnut was
bleeding from a cut on the fetlock, Mr. James Mahony, a hard-riding
farmer, had a dark patch of mud on his shoulder, and Major Bunbury was
swearing quietly to himself as he examined an over-reach that had
stained his mare’s white pastern pink with blood. Lady Susan’s big bay
had lost a fore shoe. Lady Susan’s face was an unbecoming, diffused
pink; the rain beaded her dark eyebrows and ran down her well-shaped
nose; her hunting cravat might as well have been a wet dishclout. Under
the circumstances, perhaps, the epithets which she was applying to the
weather and the country were excusable.

“What can have become of Hughie?” she said for the twentieth time,
bending her head to let the water run out of the brim of her hat; “I
don’t remember seeing him since that place where the cow ran after us.”

“Clinkin’ good fencer she was too,” said Major Bunbury, “she went two
fields with us. Upon my soul, I don’t know what happened to Hughie. I’d
quite enough to do to look out for myself.”

“I hope he’s all right,” said Lady Susan, easily, “that horse wasn’t
going very kindly with him.”

“Oh, he’s all right. Probably he’s done for the horse, though, in this
infernal country--bleedin’ to death under a furze-bush somewhere, and no
wonder, when they make their fences out of razors and porridge.”

“Glasgow goes well,” remarked Lady Susan, in a lower voice, eying Mr.
Glasgow where he stood talking to a countryman. “I was very glad he was
there to give me a lead--_you_ weren’t much good to me, Bunny dear!”

“Would it be putting too much delay on your ladyship to send for a
tarrier?” said Danny-O, the huntsman, approaching Lady Susan; “there’s
one Dinny Hegarty that lives back on the hill here, and they say he have
a grand dog.”

Lady Susan listened in bewilderment to this request.

“Oh, certainly. I don’t know what he wants,” she continued in her
strident soprano, to Mr. Glasgow; “I wish Hugh would come and look after
his own hounds, _I_ can’t speak Irish.”

“I saw Captain French having rather a time with that young horse,” said
Mr. Glasgow suavely, “you ought to have a try at him, Lady Susan; a lady
will often make a horse go when a man can’t--at least, some ladies can.”

Lady Susan cast her dark eyes upon him and laughed.

“Oh, I say, that’s what they call blarney over here, isn’t it? We call
it humbug in England, you know!”

None the less, her opinion of Mr. Glasgow rose, and, so much is there in
the manner of saying a stupid thing, he was pleased by the approval and
did not notice the stupidity.

The emissary to the home of “the grand dog” was already on his way over
the hill, speeded by injunctions from his friends to “kick off the owld
shoes and be hirrying.” The remainder of the party applied themselves to
the agreeable device of damming, at the upper end of the drain, the
stream that flowed through it, with the object, as was explained, of
“gethering a flood,” which when released, would wash the fox out before
it.

At intervals a rider or two arrived, hot, wet, and full of explanations
of the cause of delay, but of the new Master there was no sign. Slaney
Morris was one of these later arrivals. She proffered no excuses, being
probably aware that these were made for her by her mount with an
eloquence beyond all gainsaying. Slaney had, in an unpretentious way,
ridden from her youth up, but she rode merely as a means of transit,
very much as people use omnibuses; her enthusiasms were reserved for
other pursuits. She was now seated on an elderly brown mare, whose
natural _embonpoint_ was emphasized by Uncle Charles’ humane scruples on
the subject of clipping horses. As a further tribute to his clemency,
the brown mare’s tail had passed undocked through the changing fashions
of fifteen years, and hung like a heavy black skirt, in righteous
protest against the spruce abbreviations of the French’s Court horses.

Mr. Glasgow looked at Slaney, at her old-fashioned habit, at her saddle,
horned like the moon, at the mare’s tufted fetlocks and dingy
curb-chain, and realized that Miss Morris’s most sincere admirers could
not attribute to her the sacred quality of smartness. With Mr. Glasgow,
as with most of his countrymen, smartness came next to cleanliness and
considerably in advance of godliness. He had often ridden with Slaney,
and the points he now uncomfortably noted had merely seemed an
unimportant part of the background of a life whose charm depended on
culture and not on fashion. He wished that he had not persuaded her to
come out.

The rain had turned to a thick mist; the hounds sat on the soaked grass
in solemn and disconsolate patience, looking as sapient and as silly as
only hounds can; the crowd of country boys remained as indifferent to
the weather as if it had been a summer breeze; and after what seemed to
the shivering riders a long delay, the emissary returned, breathless,
with the grand dog slinking at his bare heels. The yellow cur was
withdrawn by the tail from the lower end of the drain, and the terrier
was rammed in like a charge into a gun, its owner, a very respectable
elderly man, lying flat on his face in the mud, with his head in the
drain, bellowing encouragement. Faint squeaks from the bowels of the
earth soon testified that the combat had begun, and the owner redoubled
his bawls of “Good boy! good lad!” At this moment a shout arose from the
road above that “the flood was loosed,” in other words, that the
artificers of the dam had lost patience, and had turned the pent-up
waters of the stream once more into the drain. Dinny Hegarty arose from
the lower end to protest, but he was too late. There was a chorus of
shouts, “The dog’ll be shoked”--“The two o’ thim’ll be shoked”--“There
isn’t as much wather as’d shoke them”--“Faith, the divil himself’d be
shoked in it!”

What were the experiences of the sub-terranean combatants none could
tell; the flood burst from the lower end of the drain and ran down the
field brown with mud and redolent of fox, and the pack, without a
moment’s hesitation, pursued it hotly down the field till, amidst yells
of laughter, it escaped from them into a boghole. After a brief
interval, muffled hostilities recommenced in the drain; two spades and a
pick appeared, as if by magic, and a shaft was sunk upon the squeaks.

“Give over the spades,” shouted Danny-O, as the roofing stones of “the
gully” appeared, “the hands is the besht. Hurry now, before he’ll go
north in it from ye!”

“Arrah, what north! he haven’t room to turn in it!”

“Dom yer sowl, he’d turn in a kayhole!”

“Go get a briar!” roared another voice, “he isn’t two foot from the
hole! Twisht it in his hair now--twisht it, can’t ye, and dhraw him
out!”

The principle was that adopted by dentists in extracting the nerve from
a tooth, but the briar failed of its office. The spade and pick were
again resorted to, and observations were taken by a small boy.

“The daag have him!”

“Is it by the tail?”

“No, but in a throttlesome way!”

“Come out now,” interposed Danny-O, “till I thry could I ketch a howlt
of him.”

“Put on yer glove, Dan; take care would he bite ye.” “Sure, the gloves
is no use, only silk.” “A fox can’t bite through silk. Wrop yer hand in
silk and he can’t put a tooth through it!” Thus, and much more from the
chorus, while Dan, addressing an eye of scornful and civilized humour to
Mr. Glasgow, commanded that a “gowlogue” and a bag should be brought to
him. The young man who had been leading his horse about leaped into the
saddle and undertook the errand, and the little boy who had been
entrusted with the doctor’s wounded chestnut immediately pursued him at
an emulous canter, with his bare feet thrust into the stirrup-leathers.
Presently both returned at full gallop, one with a forked stick, the
other with a meal sack, and then, dazzled by success, proceeded to race
round the field. The hounds started once more in pursuit, and were
themselves pursued by Danny-O, while the digging party broke into
enthusiastic cheers.

Lady Susan was not at all amused. She felt much as a devout clergyman
might feel at beholding a low travesty of the Church service, and she
was almost shocked at the way in which Major Bunbury and Mr. Glasgow
laughed.

“Men will laugh at anything,” she said, turning to Slaney, “but _I_ call
this awful rot, you know. Hughie gave a lot of money for these hounds,
and this sort of nonsense should not be allowed.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got to learn a good many new things about hunting
when you come to this part of Ireland, and to forget a good many more!”
said Glasgow, looking up at her with his charming smile. It was a smile
that Slaney had often thought of when she lay awake at night, but in
none of her reveries had she ever fancied its light being shed upon Lady
Susan.

At about this moment Hugh, three miles away, was engaged in pulling down
the stones of a loosely-built wall with the handle of his whip. He was
riding a tall, powerful, young grey horse, and was holding him hard on
the curb as he leaned over and pushed at the stones. It was obvious that
horse and rider were on bad terms. Hugh’s face was white, and splashed
with mud--mud from the hoofs of the farmers’ horses--behind whom he had
galloped through dirty lanes; there was a long red scratch on the grey’s
shoulder that looked as if it had been made by a spur, and Hugh’s new
velvet cap had obviously been on the ground. The wall was reduced to two
feet high before Captain French turned his horse and put him at it. He
tried to pull him into a walk, and swore at him as he curveted and
sidled, chafing against the curb. The horse refused, whirled round, and
finally bucked over the wall, lifting his rider perceptibly in the
saddle. There was but one fence now between Hugh and the road. It was a
large bank with furze-bushes growing on it, and a small ditch in front
of it. Hugh trotted down its whole length with a sick, angry heart,
looking for a low place.

“My God!” he said to himself, “I can’t ride at it. It’s no good trying.”

One spot seemed to him a trifle lower than the rest, and setting his
teeth, he put the horse at it. The effort to command himself and not to
pull the horse’s head as he came to the jump amounted in its way to
agony; he did not know if he were glad or sorry when the grey, soured by
the day’s misadventures, swerved from the fence and bucketed round the
field, pulling hard and trying to get his head down. Hugh stopped him
and dismounted. He would not think of what he was going to do, but there
was a hard knot in his throat as he walked the grey across the field. He
tied the lash of his whip to the reins, and climbing on to the fence,
led him over it. The horse followed him as lightly and quietly as a dog,
and stood still to let him untie the lash. His hand shook, and he did it
awkwardly, while the lump in his throat grew bigger.

The events of the morning were present with him. The jovial
breakfast-table at which he had played so sorry a part; the look of the
grey horse bucking as he was led round to the door; the cold, sick
feeling when the hounds opened on the fox in covert; the look of
Glasgow’s back as he and the others disappeared over the hill, leaving
him stuck at the first fence, engaged in that half-hearted battle with
his horse that had resulted in a fall for them both. He hated them
all--Bunbury, Glasgow, the road-riding faction, who had volunteered with
horrible sympathy to show him the short cuts: he almost hated his wife
for the easy confidence in him that he knew he did not deserve.

“I’ll get over it,” he said to himself, swearing furiously and
futilely. “After all, this is pretty nearly the first time I’ve been on
a horse since that smash. Damn you, you brute, keep quiet!” This to the
grey, who was fidgeting and pulling, with his ears pricked in
expectation of anything and everything. “I’ve never had a right feel
about a horse since that time.” He pulled out his flask and took a
drink--his wife had given it to him--and as he put it back he thought,
with almost the bitterest pang of all, that she would never
understand--that he could never tell her.

The note of the horn struck on his ear, and, looking back through the
rain, he saw the hounds coming quietly along the road behind him. Lady
Susan and Mr. Glasgow were riding in front of them, and he knew that the
time had come when he would have to begin to tell lies.

CHAPTER IV

Slaney was reading Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon.” It was Sunday
afternoon, and she had dined in the middle of the day. It would soon be
time to get ready for afternoon service.

Before beginning to read she had looked for a moment at the name
“Wilfrid Glasgow” at the beginning of the book. The same hand that had
written the name had marked with heavy and frequent lines the passages
most approved by the writer. It is a habit that may be intolerable to
succeeding readers, but Slaney did not take offence. Her hazel eyes,
that had surveyed Uncle Charles this morning with such impartial
severity when he upset his cup of tea, dilated and lingered among the
ringing lines; she raised them and looked out with a quickened pulse at
the bright afternoon and the clear rugged outline of the mountain. The
drawing-room window commanded a slope of rough lawn, the black and
swirling curve of a river, an opening to the west through a young wood
of larch and Scotch fir letting in the barren mountain, leaning aslant,
and the sunsets that wrought and died upon its shoulder.

    “In his heart is a blind desire,
     In his eyes foreknowledge of death.”

The approval of Mr. Glasgow was firmly and neatly given to the passage;
she felt it to be the mouthpiece of his soul, and she felt also that
hers was probably the only soul within a radius of twenty miles capable
of apprehending Mr. Glasgow’s in its higher walks. Slaney remembered
that at dinner last night Lady Susan had gaily announced that she hated
all poetry--“at least all good poetry.” The recollection was
inconsequent, but it was agreeable.

“Mrs. Quin from Cahirdreen’s outside in the back hall, Miss Slaney, and
would be thankful to speak to you.”

Thus Tierney, the pantry boy; Slaney was irritably aware that two
buttons were missing from his jacket. It would need poetry of the
highest moral tendency to preserve the serenity of an Irish housekeeper.

Slaney went out into the draughty hall wondering dismally if it would be
the cough-bottle or the burn-plaster that would be required, and found
the widow Quin awaiting her in tears. Slaney had the turn for doctoring
that is above all things adorable to the Irish poor, whose taste for the
contraband finds in a female quack a gratification almost comparable to
“potheen-making.” She understood them and their ailments by nature and
by practice, and, since her childhood, had been accustomed to go to
their deathbeds, and their funerals. Such scenes moved her strongly, but
she had learned to prize the artistic value of strong emotion.

The hood of Mrs. Quin’s blue cloak was drawn over her face, a fact
implying mystery as well as tribulation. Slaney immediately came to the
conclusion that her husband’s will had not been satisfactory, and
addressed herself to the task of arriving at the object of the visit
with as little preamble as possible. Nevertheless it was with much
circumlocution, and with many apprehensive glances at the closed door,
through which was audible Uncle Charles’ Scripture lesson to the
pantry-boy, that the widow Quin finally delivered her soul.

“But whatever I cried afther Dan,” she said, after a lengthy exordium on
the virtues of the deceased, “Tom have him cried out an’ out, an’ indeed
’tis for I knowing the wish you had always for Tom that I came down
throubling your honour. Sure yerself knows he was always innocent like,
and when he was a child not a word out of him the longest year ever came
only talkin’ of God and the fairies, and the like o’ that, and that was
no way for any poor crayture to be. Sure yourself knows well the way he
was. Ye had undherstanding always, God bless ye----”

“Are you afraid his head is getting wrong again?” interrupted Slaney
inexorably. Mrs. Quin fell at once into a rancour and tearful whisper.

“It’s whatever owld talk the people have about that place above in
Park-na-Moddhera that has him desthroyed. Every spadeful that’s throwing
out o’ that hill it’s the same to him as if it was down on his heart
they were throwing it, and sure they say that grey fox or whatever it
was poor Danny seen is like a witch or a fairy that’d dhraw down bad
luck if it wouldn’t be let alone, the Lord save us----” she crossed
herself; “didn’t Danny tell me one time he felt like a wind from the say
coming bechuxt his skin and his blood afther he seeing the same fox?”

“But Tom has nothing to say to the hill now,” said Slaney; “why should
the bad luck come to him any more than to Mr. Glasgow?”

“Sure isn’t that what I’m tellin’ him, but what himself says that it’s
bechuxt the two o’ thim. God help the crayture, ye wouldn’t like to be
listening to him.” Mrs. Quin wiped her eyes and groaned; “maybe your
honour would spake a word to him, or maybe”--she turned a crafty eye on
Slaney--“ye’d spake a word to Mr. Glasgow, maybe he wouldn’t ax to take
any more gravel out o’ the hill if it was your honour told him the way
Tom is.”

The opportunity of speaking to Mr. Glasgow did not come as soon as
Slaney had expected. He had given her to understand, in the ambiguous
special manner with which he chose to beguile her, that he would meet
her at afternoon service, and walk home with her; till the second lesson
the special manner was ample guarantee, then the ambiguity began to
suggest itself to her memory. She walked home with Uncle Charles, and
listened for the twentieth time to his reprobation of the Canon’s popish
practice of turning to the east during the Creed. The Honourable
Charles Herrick was an elderly and prosperous bachelor, whose blameless
life was devoted to two pursuits, gardening and writing controversial
letters to the Church papers. He was a small, dry gentleman, very clean,
and not in the least deaf. Strangers always experienced a slight shock
on finding that he was not a clergyman.

Slaney put away her best hat, and felt that there were yet many hours
till bedtime. Those who lay out with a confident hand the order of a
day’s events would do well to prepare also an alternative.

Yet Fate had, after all, reserved a blessing.

Slaney had scarcely settled herself by the fire, when she heard Lady
Susan’s voice in the hall, and following on it the voices of Hugh and
Mr. Glasgow. The afternoon leaped again into life and meaning. As she
came into the lamp-lit hall to meet her visitors, Lady Susan and Major
Bunbury realized in their different ways that she was better-looking
than they had believed. Her dark hair rose full and soft from her white
forehead, in the simplicity that is often extolled, but is seldom
becoming; her complexion was pale and tender with western air and
country living, the refinement that was so ineffective at Hurlingham was
here pervading and subtle. Lady Susan looked hard at her, and promoted
her at once and ungrudgingly from the ranks of non-combatants. Major
Bunbury felt that his special sister (who read Carlyle and played
Scarlatti) would like to meet her. Although he hunted six days a week,
he kept a soul somewhere, and his sister knew where it was.

They all sat down in the firelight of the drawing-room, where the tall
west window showed a clear twilight sky, tinged with pink, and barbed
with a moon as hard and keen as a scimitar. There was a quaint and
sprawling paper on the walls, a band of brass gleamed round the wide
opening of the fire-place, a slight smell of turf and wood smoke added
its sentiment of country quietness to the air.

“It was jolly coming over,” said Lady Susan, displaying a good deal of
drab gaiter as she leaned back and sipped her tea, “but we’re not going
to have any hunting to-morrow. My bike was breaking ice on all the
puddles.”

“I thought it was going to break _me_ when you overtook me in the avenue
just now,” said Mr. Glasgow, in a tone that masked surprisingly well the
sentiments he had expressed to Slaney about the modern young woman and
her bicycle. He had not thought of mentioning that when the modern young
woman possessed a figure that did not admit of a second opinion, and a
title, his views might be subject to modification.

“I shan’t think of taking the hounds out to-morrow,” said Hugh; “Dan
knows the country, and he says it would not be the least use.”

Inwardly he was telling himself that he was a coward and a cur, because
he felt such entire thankfulness for the frost. He had told them all how
the leg that he had broken at polo had stopped him last Friday, when
the fox had been run to ground on Fornagh Hill, and he hated himself for
his own fluency in lying. His horror and despair were out of all
proportion to the fact of a broken nerve. He could do but one thing
well, and that one thing was taken from him. He loved his wife with all
the strength of a very simple and kindly nature, but some new, chill
instinct told him that this was a disaster that it would be wise to hide
from her. So far, at all events, his secret was in his own keeping.

For ten full minutes Lady Susan talked of the run, lamented the
misconduct of the grey horse, and with an enjoyment of a twice-told
tale, that was characteristic of her very moderate mental abilities,
regaled Mr. Glasgow with excruciating imitations of Danny-O and his
satellites on the occasion of the digging out of the fox. Glasgow, with
his eyes fixed on her glowing face, listened delightedly; Slaney,
through her talk to the others, was conscious of a new-found
bitterness.

“I say, Slaney!” Lady Susan called out, “I want you to talk sense to
your friend, Danny-O. The old pig refuses to draw that gorse above the
railway--_you_ know,” turning to Glasgow, “that place where the cutting
is; he said it was an unlucky place, and that the fox there was a witch!
Such rot!”

Slaney did not answer at once. There are some people for whom the limits
of the possible seem to be set farther out than for the rest of the
world. They see and hear things inexplicable; for them the darkened
glass is less dark, to them all things are possible. It cannot be called
superstition--being neither ignorant dread nor self-interested faith; it
seems like the possession of another sense--imperfect, yet distinct from
all others. Slaney had seen and heard--between the sunset and the
dawn--things not easily accounted for; she herself accepted them without
fear; but she knew--as any one who knows well a half-civilized people
must know--how often a superstition is justified of its works.

“I often think,” she said slowly, “that it isn’t much good to go against
the country people in these things.”

“I don’t agree with you, Miss Morris,” struck in Glasgow. “I never give
in to them. The other day I told one of my fellows to cut down a thorn
bush that came in my way surveying. He told me it was a holy thorn, and
he wouldn’t stir it. I just took the bill-hook and cut it down myself.”

Mr. Glasgow gave his fair moustache a twist, and looked at Lady Susan.
He had a noble gift of self-confidence, and a quietness in manifesting
it that made him immediately attractive to lesser intelligences.

“Quite right too,” said Lady Susan, in her strong clear voice, “that’s
the way to talk to these people. Why, it’s as bad as the Land League,
not being allowed to draw one of the nicest coverts in the country, for
rubbish of that kind. Hughie, if you don’t kill that old white fox I
shall think you’re in a funk too. You Irish people are all the same. I
don’t care, Mr. Glasgow and I will take the hounds to Cahirdreen, and
we’ll have that white brush! I want it awfully to show to the people at
home, and tell them I got a witch’s brush!”

“You could say it was an evolution of the broomstick,” said Slaney.

Mr. Glasgow laughed, and it gave Slaney some satisfaction to see that
Lady Susan was bewildered.

When the French’s Court party betook themselves to their bicycles for
the homeward ride Mr. Glasgow came back from the hall door close to
Slaney. She had stirred the logs till they blazed strongly, and the warm
eager flicker met the unearthly stillness of the moonlight.

“I couldn’t get away in time for church,” said Glasgow, as if dropping
into an undercurrent of both their minds; “I had a terrible amount of
work to get through. It isn’t finished now, but--I just let it remain
unfinished.” He looked at her, to see in what manner she would show her
gratification, and found her eyes cast down, and her sensitive mouth
closed in an unsympathetic line. He had never known her other than
sympathetic, with that quick brain sympathy that was especially hers;
she had shown him without reserve or femininity that his conversation
was agreeable to her, but her heart was hidden from him, perhaps from
her own inability to reveal it. He felt, as his eyes dwelt on her, that
she was complex and unexplored; he was pleasurably aware that she was
attractive.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” he went on, in his confident,
quiet voice. “I thought you would have come down to the cutting
yesterday to see how we are getting on.”

“It was too cold,” said Slaney, indifferently; “besides, I went to
French’s Court.”

“It _was_ rather cold, especially when one waited and was
disappointed,” said Glasgow. “I always looked upon you as a person who
kept your promises.”

“There is only one thing more irrational than making promises, and that
is keeping them,” said Slaney, with a flippancy that Glasgow was not
accustomed to in her; “but in this case there was no promise.”

“When a thing has happened very often, one has a right to expect it to
happen again,” he said; “that is how one arrives at most conclusions.”

“Sometimes things come to a conclusion of themselves,” said Slaney, with
a little laugh.

She looked up and found his eyes waiting to meet hers. They had an
undisguised, irrelevant tenderness, and Slaney was surprised into
accepting it for one silent moment, while her heart beat and her head
swam. She recovered herself, as one might struggle up out of soft
ground. The thought of Lady Susan was like setting her feet again on
hard rock.

“Mrs. Quin was here to-day,” she said, catching at the first subject
that suggested itself. “From what she tells me, I am afraid that Tom
Quin must be going out of his mind.”

“I should believe that if I thought he had any mind to go out of,” said
Glasgow irritably. Slaney was not playing the part he had cast for her,
and the subject of the Quins was not calculated to soothe him. “The
whole family have persecuted me about that gravel-pit--Quin, and his
mother, and the red-haired sister, and all. I wonder if they really
think I am going to give up working the place to please them!”

“Yes, I think they do,” replied Slaney, staring before her into the blue
and pink and yellow flames of the wood fire. Then, after a pause, “I am
not quite sure that I don’t sympathize with them.”

“Sympathize with what?” asked Glasgow impatiently. “With their distress,
or with their superstition?”

“Perhaps a little of both.”

At his tone her fastidious upper lip had set itself again into an
unsympathetic line; her forehead seemed as white and quiet as the
moonlight behind her.

“Very well,” said Glasgow, provoked and scornful, yet beyond all things
attracted, “I take all consequences. I appropriate all the ill-luck. Now
will you sympathize with _me_?”

“Oh, don’t!” she exclaimed, putting out her hand with a horrified
gesture, as if what he had said would be instantly overheard.

“Will you?” he repeated, deliciously perceptive of her fear, and before
he realized what he was doing he had kissed the fastidious, spiritual
mouth, and found it a trembling and human one.

“You can learn twelve of the ‘I wills’ of the Psalms for next Sunday,
Tierney,” said Uncle Charles’ voice in the hall, “and three more of the
‘Plain Reasons against joining the Church of Rome.’”

Uncle Charles opened the drawing-room door as he made the concluding
charge, and met Mr. Glasgow in the act of taking leave of his niece.

When Slaney went up to her room that night she sat for a long time by
the fire, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. There
was a little table by her. On it were an old-fashioned desk, a good many
books, and, half-emerging from the paper in which it had been wrapped, a
number of the _Fortnightly Review_. She sat for a long time, and
sometimes in the silence of the house the beating of her heart was like
a voice in her ears, telling her irrepressibly of her own weakness and
strength, of depths of herself hitherto unknown. Her pure and ardent
nature was awakening out of narrowness, her clear intellect scaled all
possibilities like a strong climber.

As if she had yielded to herself for too long, she sat up at length, and
after a moment, took up the _Fortnightly Review_, and began to turn its
pages over--Glasgow had brought it to her that afternoon--and she
searched for the article that he had commended. Cold logic and
relentless statistics would inflict composure, would steady her down to
the level of sleep.

Two of the pages fell apart where a sheet of paper had been thrust in;
she was abruptly confronted by a letter in a large, heavy handwriting.
The eye is quicker than the will. Before she snatched her eyes away she
had taken in its half-a-dozen lines. For some moments she sat perfectly
still, while the blood came with a rush to her cheeks and forehead. Then
she crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fire.

CHAPTER V

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.

CHAPTER VI

Taken from an architectural point of view there was nothing to be said
for French’s Court. It belonged to the race of stone boxes, with
tightly-fitting lids, that were built in Ireland a hundred years ago,
the greater box or the less, according to the circumstances of the
builder, and it was of as Presbyterian a gauntness as its tribe.
Contrary, however, to the rule which ordained that the stone box should,
as far as possible, face north and east, French’s Court, with its ranks
of high windows, looked out into the sunset across a great plain of
western ocean. From the edge of the long bare terrace in front of the
house, the grass-lands sloped suavely between plantations to the sea,
where Atlantic rollers charged and volleyed in stubborn fastnesses of
cliff. The low hills behind the house were clothed with woods, brown and
grey now in the mute suspense of January, touched here and there with
orange where last year’s beech leaves clung like a stain of rust.

It was a big outlook, and the owner of French’s Court was a very small
incident of the foreground, as he stood on the terrace and watched the
fishing-boats creeping out in the raw, grey calm to the solitudes beyond
the horizon. A portmanteau and a gun-case stood on the steps of the hall
door, and a brown retriever was moving nervously round the gun-case,
hurrying from it now and again to thrust her curly head into Hugh’s
hand, and beseech him with her amber eyes not to leave her behind. Every
dog believed in Hugh, and told him so by the varied and untiring dog
methods, but now, with that restless and aching reference of all things
to one subject, Hugh gave his hand to the innocent homage with the
feeling that every one except his dog had found him out. His wife knew
it, Bunbury knew it, he writhed under their tact when they avoided all
discussion of his part in the run that the Silver Fox had given them; he
detected with agony the consideration that prompted Lady Susan’s gallant
efforts to talk on subjects unconnected with horses. He could have found
it in his heart to swear at her and tell her she need not take so much
trouble; he would have liked to quarrel with Bunbury and show him which
was the pluckier man; he dwelt on the thought with pitiful, childish
intensity, and drove his heel into the gravel, half knowing himself to
be pitiful and childish.

There are junctures in a life when deficiency of intellect may
disastrously alter the moral balance, and the smaller mind may have need
of supreme and heroic effort to attain the philosophy or even the sanity
that are easy to stronger intelligences. All Hugh’s native good-feeling
was not enough to avail him when he remembered his wife’s figure up
against the sky on the top of the stone-faced bank, while he turned and
made for the byways and highways that had been his portion throughout
the day. Passionate admiration, turning to passionate jealousy of her
flawless courage, and self-contempt, and knowledge that his eyes would
never again meet hers without consciousness of failure; all these
because a good little average man had but two ideas in his life, and
when one was taken from him, the other sickened like a poisoned thing.

The slow beat of a horse’s hoofs became audible on the avenue, and a
sombre vehicle, that was half brougham and half cab, emerged from the
trees into the open. Its coachman had a long red beard, a frieze coat,
and a hat with a silver cord round it; the horse was white and shaggy,
the wheels of the brougham turned in as if it were bandy-legged. Hugh
recognized the equipage of his Uncle Charles, and stationed himself at
the hall door to receive it.

“It’s awfully good of you to come, Slaney,” he said, with an effort at
his wonted geniality. “Such short notice too. I didn’t know that I was
going to this shoot till I got in from hunting the day before
yesterday.”

He could remember, as he spoke, the mountain stream by which, when
riding home, he had made up his mind to go, while the steady patter of
the hounds’ paws sounded behind him on the wet road, and the honest
hound faces that he was beginning to hate looked up at him from time to
time.

Slaney and he found the drawing-room empty of all but a smell of
cigarettes, and pursuing a fresh trail of it to the smoking-room, found
Lady Susan sitting with a cigarette in her shapely mouth, and in front
of her a mandoline, from which she was plucking a shrill and agueish
chatter of melody, representing a waltz. A grey poodle lay at her feet,
with his moustached muzzle buried in the fur rug, and his eyes rolling
purgatorially upward in the forbidden longing to lift up his voice and
howl an accompaniment to the tune. Major Bunbury was reading a newspaper
with that air of serving his country that belongs to men when they read
papers. No woman can hope to read the _Times_ as though it were a
profession; it is a masculine gift, akin to that of dining.

“Oh, it’s only Slaney!” exclaimed Lady Susan. “We bolted in here when we
saw the white horse. We thought it was the parson. Well, you’re very
good to come, dear, and it’s very nice to have you.” She kissed Slaney
briskly on both cheeks, conveying a mingled flavour of smart clothes,
tobacco, and careless friendliness. “Hughie could never have gone away
and left Bunny and me here together for a week, you know! It would have
been hideously improper, wouldn’t it? Uncle Charles would have had three
fits on the spot, wouldn’t he?” She stationed herself on the arm of
Major Bunbury’s chair, and put her elbow on his shoulder.

Slaney realized that of the whole party she alone felt the proceeding to
be unusual, yet Major Bunbury did not seem to appreciate it.

“Well, I’m off, anyhow,” said Hugh. “Make them look after you, Slaney.
If Glasgow wants to know anything more about the next meet or stopping
the earths, or anything, Bunbury, Dan can tell him.” In spite of
himself, his voice stiffened till all the good-fellowship was gone from
it. “Well, good-bye, everybody.”

He wondered whether his wife would come out to see him off, but he could
not ask her. She got up and came to the door, and stood leaning against
it as he passed out. She was not quite sufficiently feminine to discern
that, in spite of his unprepossessing manner, and bald brevity of
farewell, he hated going away from her, and he went down the passage
unaccompanied except by his dog.

“I think Hughie’s got influenza, or liver, or something,” remarked Lady
Susan, returning to the mandoline, “he’s awfully grumpy.”

Bunbury got up without answering, and followed his host to the hall
door.

CHAPTER VII

Mr. Glasgow made no difficulty about hunting the hounds during Hugh’s
absence. The office was very much to his taste, and its obligations
fitted in satisfactorily with his inclinations. These he summarized with
a fine brevity. He promised himself that he would wipe French’s eye; his
exact motive for doing so he did not attempt to define. He calculated
that he would have four days of office before Hugh returned. Four days
only! The inequality of things! he thought, with an impatient sigh,
gathering up a bundle of highly unsatisfactory letters, that he had
received that morning, and slamming the lid of his desk down on them.

Fortune favoured him. The weather was perfect, from a hunting point of
view, there never was better scent, and the foxes ran the way they were
wanted. “Bedad,” said Danny-O, “if I had a red herrin’ in a halther I
couldn’t make a nater line than thimselves.” There were long jogs to the
meets through the pleasant soft weather, when Lady Susan rode at the
head of her husband’s hounds with the acting master, while Slaney and
Bunbury followed old Danny at their heels. Once or twice they left off
twelve or fourteen miles from home, and a friendship can progress
marvellously in the slow return in the twilight, with the golden link of
a day’s enjoyment, and the easy snatches of talk and silence of a
_tête-à-tête_ on horseback.

It had become a custom that Glasgow should dine at French’s Court on
hunting days, and it was on the third of these occasions that a letter
from Hugh arrived, saying that he was prolonging his visit for a few
more days. The post had been brought in while dessert was in progress.
Lady Susan leaned back in her chair with folded arms. They were white
arms, and had that composure about them that belongs to arms accustomed
from their infancy to emerge from the latest variety of sleeve.

“Hughie says that we’re bound to go to this show to-night, and he’s
thanking his stars he’s out of it, the little beast!” she remarked
presently. “What sort of thing will they do, Slaney? You know all about
’em, I suppose. I never went to a parochial hall in my life. Will they
sing the Doxology? I never can remember exactly what the Doxology is.
Oh, I say, Bunny, shall you ever forget that night we dined with old
Lady Pemberton, when she wanted her pet Bishop to say grace, and she
leaned over and told him in her awful solemn old way to say ‘God save
the Queen’!” Lady Susan laughed her loud short laugh, and looked across
the round table at Major Bunbury.

Glasgow, sitting beside her, caught at that passing flash of her glance
that was intended for him specially, and replied to it with an intimacy
that startled Slaney. His face was pale, and had the tired look that
comes with mental rather than physical fatigue, but the crisp tingle of
the champagne had given its inimitable fillip; the excellence of the
dinner had brought him into charity with all men--even with his Irish
workmen--and the warm luxury and charm of the surroundings had the
effect of a perfume whose dizzy fragrance can steep mind and body in
repose. The anxieties that he had to bear alone, the reverses that hit
him harder than he dared admit, slept in this atmosphere of ease.
“Lovely Thais” sat beside him, and the gods had considerately prolonged
the absence of her husband. Even Slaney, who might at one time have
complicated the situation, now fell into her place in the general
sentiment of repose, and made a pleasant background of literary
intelligence and perceptiveness. He remembered only as a transient
caprice the moment, unforgetable for her, that had given her life its
first touch of passion. He finished his glass of burgundy, and took a
cigarette from the silver box that his hostess pushed towards him.

“We’ll play bézique in the ’bus,” pursued Lady Susan; “we couldn’t
possibly talk for six miles. I should go to sleep.”

“Oh, heavens, not more cards!” groaned Bunbury. “Do you know, Miss
Morris, that she made me play rubicon bézique with her for three hours
on end this afternoon. I’d hardly got my boots off when she sent William
to hurry me down. I wish she’d teach William to play with her.”

“I used to play ‘Spoilt Five’ with the yard boys when I was a child,”
said Slaney. “I never aspired to any one as grand as William. We used to
play secretly in an old loose box, and the cards were so black that we
only knew them by private marks on their backs.”

Her eyes were clear and half shy, like a boy’s. Bunbury looked at her
delicate, clever hand, and tried to imagine it holding the grimy cards,
and wondered how it was that so many impossible things were possible in
Ireland.

The concert in the Parochial Hall at Letter Kyle was neither more nor
less than such entertainments are wont to be. Lady Susan, in her
gorgeous _sortie-de-bal_, sat in the front row and carried on a
conversation with Mr. Glasgow that, thanks to the vigour of her lungs,
was quite unhampered by the efforts of the performers, and was only
interrupted when some achievement of Letter Kyle millinery stupefied her
into a moment of silence. Slaney was inured to parochial concerts. It
was beside her that Glasgow had sat at the last of them, not so many
months ago. She remembered how angry Uncle Charles had been because they
laughed when the school-master’s wife had tranquilly omitted the top
note in “The Lost Chord” as being beyond her compass. To-night she felt
as though a wall had been built between her and the founts of laughter.

Weighted by encores, the dismal programme wore on, and it was eleven
o’clock before the French’s Court party could escape from the long
incarceration in hot air, winnowed by draughts that were heavy with hair
oil. Slaney leaned back in the corner of the ’bus, and the darkness of
the heart that she had been striving with fell upon her like a tangible
thing. In spite of hot-water tins and a vast fur rug the cold breath of
a foggy night made itself felt. The faces of the four occupants of the
’bus glimmered white as the glimmer of the windows. Glasgow was sitting
beside Slaney, and some feeling blended of compunction and of desire to
retain a captive, made him try to involve her in the desultory talk. She
tasted a certain joyless gratification in ignoring him. The road was
very dark as they drove through a wood, and the glimmer of Slaney’s face
was almost lost when Glasgow, determined to remind her of the kiss that
had so lightly come and gone between the firelight and the moonlight,
slid his hand along the rug, and took hers with confident tenderness.
It was gone from him in a moment, and Slaney, with that level politeness
of voice that is the distilled essence of a perfected anger, was telling
Lady Susan that her head ached, and that she would like to sit by the
door.

Lady Susan changed places with her, and presently fell to arranging,
with Mr. Glasgow, the details of an expedition up the new railway line
in a cattle-truck. Their voices sank gradually to that level that
indicates to an outside world that it is superfluous. What they said
seemed to be wholly trivial, and flagrant only in aridness; yet the low
voices, half-lost in the noise of the wheels, had a quality that drove
Bunbury and Slaney into a conversation lame with consciousness of what
it tried to ignore.

Glasgow’s dog-cart was waiting for him at French’s Court, and it waited
long before the supper was over, at which Lady Susan made amends for her
philanthropy in cigarettes and hock and seltzer. When the door at
length opened to let the guest out into the fog, Lady Susan was near it,
tall and resplendent, with the fur of her glistening silk wrap clinging
round her white neck. The door closed, and as she turned away she saw
something white under its flap.

“I say, it’s a letter,” she exclaimed, stooping for it, “some one must
have dropped it, and it caught under the door. Why, it’s for
Hughie--looks like a washerwoman’s bill. Funny way of sending it in,
isn’t it?” she yawned hugely; “well, it will keep, anyhow. Let’s go to
bed; good-night, my dears.” She flung the letter on a table and rustled
up-stairs.

Slaney was in the habit of saying her prayers. She knelt down and put
her head into the soft cushion of the chair, conscious of little except
that she had flung down the burden of another day. She remained for a
long time on her knees, with a blank, spent mind, soothed in some dull
way by the suggestions of her attitude, till a slight sound on the
terrace, under her open window, made her lift her head and listen.

The sound came and went, and Slaney was roused to put aside the curtains
and look down. There was nothing to be seen but the fog that had risen
out of the sea and settled on the land, with frost and moonlight blended
in its whiteness; all the world seemed arrested and tranced, all the air
changed with its cold and mysterious presence.

“It was a rabbit,” she said to herself, and instantly, as if to
contradict her, a black-and-grey collie passed quickly under the window,
with its nose down as if running a trail.

CHAPTER VIII

The ring of the trowel travelled far on the wind across the heather, a
voice of civilization, saying pertinent, unhesitating things to a
country where all was loose, and limitless, and inexact. Up here, by the
shores of Lough Turc, people had, from all ages, told the time by the
sun, and half-an-hour either way made no difference to any one;
now--most wondrous of all impossibilities--the winter sunrise was daily
heralded by the steely shriek of an engine whirling truckloads of men to
their work across the dark and dumb bog-lands. The trout in the lakes no
longer glided to safety at the recurrence of the strange tremor and
clatter that accompanied the twilights, the wild duck no longer
splashed into wing along the water’s surface, and the people scattered
among the hillsides already counted as their chiefest landmark the red
gable of the new railway-station.

Every morning saw a villageful of men shot into it; bricklayers working
high up in the gable, stone-cutters dressing limestone blocks with
infinite chip and clink, workmen shovelling gravel, and over all the
voice of the ganger arising at intervals in earnest, profuse profanity.
The Dublin artisans worked in silence, except when one or other trolled
forth one of the ditties of his class--genteel romance, with a waltz
refrain, or obscure vulgarity of the three-penny music-hall, yet
representing to the singer the songs of Zion in a strange land; while
the local gang used every chance of proximity to carry on a low growl of
conversation. Whether it was the party of twenty whose picks and spades
were gradually levelling and filling the unfinished platform, or the two
whose voices ascended in Irish from the depths of the well that they
were sinking, the general topic was the same, and was one that
intimately concerned Mr. Glasgow.

“Jim Mulloy’s brother told me he seen the paymasther ’ere yestherday in
Letther Kyle,” said a withered little man, who was mixing mortar with
extraordinary deliberation. “He was comin’ out o’ the bank, an’ he
havin’ the brown bag with him.”

“Maybe it’s little chance oursel’ has of it, whether or no,” responded
his satellite, a red-faced youth, whose occupation of eternally shaking
sand through a sieve might well foster pessimism. “Don’t ye know well
thim isn’t workin’ for nothin’”--indicating the bricklayers on the
gable, and the portly and prosperous stonemasons, chipping away in
professional silence. “Short thim fellows’d be leggin’ it away to Dublin
if they wasn’t gettin’ their pay; an’ d----d well Glasgow knows it’s
the likes of us must be waitin’ on him!”

The man who was supplying the sand tilted his barrow up on end and
leaned on the handles, secure in the knowledge that the ganger was
engaged at the other side of the station in raining down expletives upon
the heads of the sinkers of the well.

“It’s what they’re sayin’ beyond,” he remarked, jerking his head in the
direction of the men working at the platform, “that what has him
desthroyed is the bog of Tully. Eight months now they’re sthrivin’ to
fill that spot.”

“An’ if they were eight months more,” said the man who was mixing the
mortar, “they’ll not fill it.” He took off the tin lid of his pipe and
stirred up its embers with a horny fore-finger. “Betther for him not to
be intherfarin’ with the likes o’ that place.”

The pessimist with the sieve laughed with the superiority of youth, and
of a reader of the _Daily Independent_.

“There’s wather runnin’ undher the ground there in every place,” went on
the same speaker, “me father knew that well--sure the bog itsel’ is
only sittin’ on it. There’s holes up in Cahirdreen that’s sixty feet
deep, and wather runnin’ in the bottom o’ them. ’Tis out undher Tully
that wather goes. Sure there was a man had a grand heifer--God knows
ye’d sooner be lookin’ at her than atin’ yer dinner--she fell down in
one o’ them holes, and went away undher the ground with the wather. As
sure as I’m alive, they heard her screeching up through the bog!”

The reader of the _Independent_ was half-staggered, and the ganger, who
had advanced upon the party with the quietness of a dangerous bull, here
broke upon the conversation in gross and fervid oratory.

“They’re gettin’ it in style down there,” said one of the platform
party. “By damn, if he comes to talkin’ to me, I’ll throw down the
shovel and ax him where is me three weeks’ wages!”

“Maybe ye will, Mortheen,” rejoined his next-door neighbour, “an’ maybe
this time next week ye’ll be afther him axing him to take ye back.”

“Is it _him_?” replied the undaunted Mortheen; “little I’d think of
breaking his snout for him, or Glasgow’s ayther!”

As he spoke, the whistle of an engine, thinned by distance, made itself
heard, and away on the horizon the steam cloud blossomed like a silver
flower against the sunny sky.

When the engine and its accompanying brake-van drew up at the station,
Glasgow’s eye could discover no flaw in the exemplary and dead silent
industry that prevailed. The shovelfuls flung by Mortheen were heavier
and more frequent than those of his fellows, and even the spectacle of
Lady Susan emerging in sables from the van and passing among the buckets
and heaps of lime, did not seem to be noticed by so much as the lift of
an eyelid. It was almost one o’clock, and the ganger, transformed into
an official of submissive urbanity, sounded his whistle for the
dinner-hour. The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds,
and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into
the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the
desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step.

Their employer’s picnic-party was already established in the
newly-roofed kitchen of the new station, by a fire of chips and bits of
plank. A luncheon-basket stood on a carpenter’s bench, a
champagne-bottle on the window-sill, and Lady Susan and Slaney were
sitting on boxes by the fire, eating game pie. Lady Susan had violets in
her toque, and possessed more strikingly than usual that air of being
very handsome that is not always given to handsome people. Behind her
the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a
myriad sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the grey and
faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a
background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host.

“How far do you want us to walk?” she said, looking over her shoulder at
the view, “all the way to that wood there? How silly of you to say the
bikes would be no use!”

“I don’t dispute the fact that they would have been of use to you and
Major Bunbury,” replied her host, cutting the wires of the second bottle
of champagne.

“It’s so contemptible of you not to learn the bike,” she went on, with a
manner half discontented, half brusque. “It’s all prejudice.”

“I’m beginning to cultivate prejudice,” said Glasgow, retaining the cork
with skill, “it’s so respectable. Churchwardens and generals and heads
of departments are always prejudiced.”

“I didn’t know that you were so wonderfully addicted to respectability,”
said Lady Susan, with a laugh and a look that made Slaney feel rather
hot--“since when, may I ask?” Lady Susan was too careless and too
little disposed for the toils of finesse to foster a flirtation for its
own sake; when she did find a sufficing motive, these same qualities
created a startling directness of method.

“Since when?” repeated Glasgow. “Oh, since I took to church-going, I
suppose. Perhaps Miss Morris could tell you!”

Slaney had become accustomed to these morsels flung to the memory of a
past, but they never failed to remind her of the moment when she had
placed herself for ever at a disadvantage.

“I’m not a very good authority,” she said, with a smile as cold as the
January wind; “Uncle Charles has a better memory for things connected
with church-going.”

The intention to be unresponsive often makes itself felt more
disagreeably than a repartee. It annoyed Glasgow, even while he set it
down as an indirect tribute to his desertion.

“I refuse to be described as a thing connected with church-going,” he
said, looking straight at her and laughing; “I thought I had other
associations.”

Major Bunbury looked up quickly, not at Glasgow, but at Slaney. Her
flushed silence was obvious enough for any one, except Lady Susan, who
merely supposed that champagne at luncheon was having its almost
inevitable result on the complexion. Perhaps it was by contrast that
Glasgow’s habitual pallor seemed pastiness, and his easy manner
something that struck Major Bunbury as being like bad form.

“I say,” remarked Lady Susan, “when are we to go on and see this
wonderful waterfall, or whatever it is? Where are the cigarettes? Let’s
light up before we start.”

“I think you’d better not,” said Glasgow, “the men will be back
directly.”

“Well, what do they matter?”

“I think you’d better not,” he repeated, in that intimate tone that
seemed so uncalled for.

Lady Susan put up her eyebrows with an expression of petulant inquiry,
and something as near a pout as was possible for a person not versed in
the habit, but she shut her cigarette-case. Major Bunbury thought he had
never seen her look so foolish.

“Is she going to lose her head about him?” was the question that was
suddenly driven in upon him. Until to-day, he thought she was merely
occupying idleness and exhibiting indifferent taste.

He and Slaney walked behind her and Glasgow along the muddy road, in
that double _tête-à-tête_ now become inevitable; the wind blew cold and
sweet off the lake and off the bog--cold, and sweet, and inimitably
Irish, like Slaney herself, as Major Bunbury was at this moment capable
of expressing it, if he had known that he was making the comparison. His
mind had unconsciously stored up many such impressions of her, to what
end it had not occurred to him to inquire. The road crossed a
trout-stream, and by the bridge Glasgow and Lady Susan turned off and
began to follow the bank of the little river through a stunted and
intricate wood. In the track by which they made their way it was not
possible to walk side by side; Bunbury went first, sometimes holding
back a branch, sometimes giving her his hand when the rocks of the river
brink thrust their slippery shoulders across the way. They spoke little,
and by the gift of imaginative sympathy that was hers for those who
interested her, she knew that his silence was vexed with misgiving about
Lady Susan.

The river was brimming full, and, as it raced, the black water and the
cold froth washed in deep eddies between the rocks; the sunlit bank
opposite was red with withered bracken and sedge; the soft booming of a
waterfall came to the ear. Passing round the curve they saw the thick
and creamy column of water plunge from its edge of low crag to its ruin
among the boulders; above it two or three battered fir-trees stood on
the high ground, grey and straight and rigid beside the lavish rush and
confusion.

Lady Susan was leaning against one of the fir-trees, smoking her
cigarette, and looking fixedly and dreamily at the water; Glasgow, with
her fur-lined coat on his arm, was standing very close to her, looking
as if he had said something to which she had not as yet replied. She did
not move when Slaney and Bunbury joined them, and was unaffectedly
uninterested in general conversation. Slaney had never thought her so
handsome; her eyes seemed to look out of her heart and into a remote
place unseen of others, instead of summing up things around her with her
wonted practical glance.

It was against all theories of woman-kind, yet the fact remained that
Slaney liked Lady Susan.

CHAPTER IX

The party returned to the station by different ways, that chosen by
Slaney and Bunbury involving a good deal of wandering by dark and
intricate paths in the hollow of the wood before the high road again was
reached. The other half of the picnic was not in sight; and when Slaney
and her companion arrived at the station, the engine and brake van, in
which they had come, had disappeared, and in their place was another
engine that had come up the line with a train of trucks. It was a small
and very dirty engine, the driver’s white jumper was as grimy as his
face, and coal-dust and oil had gone hand-in-hand to effect a general
and thorough defilement.

The ganger explained the position respect-fully. Mr. Glasgow had found
that he was obliged to catch the mail train for Dublin, and he and the
lady had started a quarter of an hour before; he had ordered the
ballast-engine to wait for Major Bunbury.

Slaney recovered herself on the verge of looking aghast. Major Bunbury
kept his eyes away from the neighbourhood of hers, and with almost
excessive carelessness made inquiries as to the hour at which the mail
train was due at Letter Kyle. It appeared that there remained forty-five
minutes before it arrived there, and that the usual time required by the
ballast-engine for the distance was an hour and a quarter. Possibilities
spread and soaked coldly through Slaney’s mind, like suddenly spilt
water. Situations in novels that she had read lent their smooth
probability to the raw and disjointed circumstance; she found herself
wondering that it was all so horribly painful, so ugly, so devoid of
subtle psychological interest and large bearing; not realizing that in
actual life feeling is born first, help-less as a blind puppy, and
philosophy is not born at all, but is built, with infinite
self-consciousness.

She was already on the engine--it was moving; she was holding on to an
iron rail as she stood, and was not unaware that it was spoiling her
gloves. Major Bunbury’s conversation with the engine-driver had ended
with an almost imperceptible glide of the latter’s hand into his
trousers pocket, and Major Bunbury himself was standing beside Slaney in
the cramped space available for them, looking preternaturally cheerful
and unaffected. He possessed that gift of trivial observation that is
the parent of tact and is one of the rarest of male attributes. It can
be formidable, it can also be attractive beyond most other things. He
hardly looked at Slaney, who was gazing straight ahead through the
bull’s-eye windows, but he knew that what she saw was not so much the
wide tumbling waste of moor with its skirting mountains, as the
creations of her own unsophisticated sus-picion. The pace of the engine
increased momently, from a tremulous glide to a clattering rush; every
movement of the driver’s hand as he heightened the speed was answered by
a forward start, like a powerful horse touched with the spur--unhampered
by carriage or tender it raced and swung. Slaney held on with both
hands, while the wind from the open sides encircled and buffeted her,
ardent with heat snatched from the engine fire, bitter with the frost
that had turned the bog drain into mirrors for the keen colours of a
winter sunset. There was not as yet a signal worked on the line; they
must trust to eyesight and pluck for the safety of an engine driven at
nearly its best speed; and the strident shriek tore the air incessantly,
and each curve or cutting meant a slackening and an instant of suspense
before the long vista opened clear, and they were away again with that
living bound that thrilled Slaney’s unaccustomed heart as only pace can
thrill. She began to understand that they were racing against time and
luck to intercept--what? Could it be to foil the insane impulse of a
woman who had lost her head in the terrible discovery that she had a
heart?

The miles fleeted past, until the engine and its pent scream burst forth
from the clanging walls of a rock cutting, and skirting a lake, entered
on the great brown plain of Tully bog. A double line of drains, fed by
innumerable cuts, made a herring-bone pattern on either side; the spongy
gravel sprang beneath the strides of the engine; the water in the drains
flapped and washed in sympathy against its peat walls. It seemed a
singular audacity of engineering to force a line of rails across such a
morass. Three miles away the heights of Cahirdreen were dark in the
evening sky; recognizing them, Slaney felt the influence of an evil fate
cross her keen excitement like a cold streak--like a shiver across the
heat of fever. The driver looked at his watch, and, with one hand on the
brake, added the last possible five miles an hour to the pace. The
engine seemed to be swallowing the endless strip of line that flowed
into its clutch; the motion felt like sliding on a wire, without effort
or possibility of stopping. Thundering along an imperceptible curve,
they neared the hill, with its fir-trees ranged in tall and quiet ranks
in the twilight. At a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, the cutting
opened before them as they rounded the bend, and all four uttered a
simultaneous exclamation. The V-shaped cleft held a dark obstruction.

Instantly, with a jar and a jerk, the brakes were on at their full
power, and Slaney was leaning back as if to hold off the shock that was
already sending shoots of anticipation through her feet and fingers.
Shouts, and the whistling of another engine came through the noise, the
brakes bit, and shoved, and clung. Somewhere in the jolting, deafening
seconds an arm came strongly round Slaney’s waist, and drew her towards
the footboard. She understood that if the worst came she was to jump
with Major Bunbury; then another hand caught her skirt, and pulled her
back. She recognized the driver’s filthy white sleeve, and at the same
moment some one shouted that they were safe. Squeaking, and grinding,
and skidding, the engine was fought to a standstill, while yet ten yards
separated it from the buffers of the brake van in which Lady Susan and
Glasgow had started an hour before. Fifty yards further on, the line was
blocked by a great pile of gravel and rock, newly fallen from the side
of the cutting.

Lady Susan and Glasgow were there; her face looked wild and white, and
as she came to Slaney, she seemed to struggle to speak. It was a moment
of extremes and exaggeration in feeling. Slaney felt that two
independent currents of supreme and fore-ordained evil had made their
onslaught, and, in meeting, had neutralized each other.

CHAPTER X

Mr. Glasgow’s brown hunter, Solomon, had not lived his thirteen years in
vain. When he was led out into the yard one idle forenoon, and was there
walked and trotted up and down in front of his owner and two strange men
in tight trousers, and when, later, one of the strange men, who had the
knowledgeable light fingers of a vet., passed his hand down his legs,
and looked into his eyes, and pinched his throat, Solomon knew that it
looked like his fifth change of owners. Afterwards he was taken out and
cantered in a field, and though he felt chilly and dull, he jumped a
trial bank with self-respect, and with the consciousness that he was
giving a lead to the chestnut, who did not understand the principle of
jumping in cold blood.

He was not mistaken in the purport of these things. Glasgow felt a pain
about his throat as he saw the old horse walk into his stall again. He
had not thought he would have minded so much. He stood by in the silence
that characterizes horse-dealing, while the chestnut underwent
examination, and looked round the yard at the miscellaneous collection
of wreckage from his railway contract--the broken pumping-engine, the
automatic crossing-gates that would not work, the corrugated iron hut
that the men would not sleep in--and said to himself that the luck had
been against him. It did not occur to him that he had shouldered his
competitors out of the contract by a tender that left no margin for
mistakes. Mr. Glasgow never made mistakes, but he had based his
brilliant and minute calculations on the theory that the cheap Irish
labour would accomplish as much in the day as the costly English, and
the fact that it had not done so was obviously beyond the sphere of
rational calculation. In the long stable at the other side of the yard a
heavy hoof was dealing sledge-hammer kicks to the stall, and Glasgow, as
he heard it, estimated what price the creditors would get for the big
dray-horses that he had brought over from England for the railway work.
When he thought of the value of the plant that he was going to leave
behind, he scarcely felt like a defaulter: there would be more than
enough realized to pay the men, and the Railway Company could afford to
lose. There remained to him his private means, the Argentine Republic,
his own considerable gifts as a civil engineer, and---- Would Lady Susan
remain? He felt little doubt about that part of his future.

Mr. Andrew Murphy was offering him, in the accents of Tipperary, a
hundred pounds for the two horses--seventy for the chestnut and thirty
for old Solomon--and he was holding out for a hundred and twenty with
his usual decision. If there were a weakness in his business dealings,
it lay in his determination to be decisive at all points. The small and
deliberate methods of expediency were intolerable to him; he would
rather do without bread than accept the half-loaf. Now, even while each
trivial episode was tinged with the reflected light of his future, and
all were converging towards an immediate crisis, he held to his point,
and had not Mr. Murphy known of an immediate customer for Solomon, the
bargain might have ended untimely. As it was, the two horses changed
hands at Mr. Glasgow’s price, with the understanding that both could be
hunted next day by their former owner. Mr. Glasgow insisted on this
point, and took all risks.

When it was all over, and Mr. Murphy and the vet. had had
whiskies-and-sodas and gone away, Glasgow went back to his office and
took up again his task of burning and sorting papers. Being habitually
orderly in his habits, the work went steadily, and, to all appearance,
without effort; yet, as the time went on, his pale face became jaded and
grey, and the lines about his mouth deepened.

The terrace at French’s Court witnessed that afternoon the least
dignified of earthly sights--the struggles of a lady-beginner on a
bicycle. It was somewhat of a descent from the heroics of forty miles an
hour on an engine, yet as Slaney, flushed and dishevelled, wobbled to
her one-and-twentieth overthrow, the past and future were forgotten in
the ignoble excitements of the moment. Major Bunbury, himself in no mean
condition of heat, picked her up out of a holly-bush and started her
again; he had been doing the same thing for half-an-hour, but it had not
seemed to pall. When the two-and-twentieth collapse had been safely
accomplished, Slaney confessed to feeling somewhat shattered, and
returning to the hall, sank into a chair, with aching knees and hands
seamed with gravel.

“It’s nothing to what you’ll feel like to-morrow,” said Major Bunbury,
encouragingly. “You rode into the pillar of the gate so _very_ hard last
time.” He looked down at her from his position on the hearthrug, and
then glanced across to the dusky, comfortable corner where the piano
was. “I wonder if you remember that you said you were too tired this
morning to play that Impromptu?”

“My hands were, and are, permanently hooked from holding on to the rail
on the engine,” said Slaney, whose spirits had risen as surprisingly as
her colour with her first experience on the bicycle, “and no one with a
proper sense of how things ought to be would have expected me to do
anything but lie on the sofa and faint. Instead of which, I am asked to
sit on a music-stool and humiliate myself by playing things that I don’t
know.”

“I think Susan looks more knocked out of time than you do,” remarked
Bunbury, after one of those comfortable pauses that mark intimacy, “and
they really had not so near a shave as we had. They weren’t going
anything like our pace when they saw that the cutting had fallen in.”
Another pause. “By the way, did you--did you understand that I thought
we should have to jump, that time that I--that I put my arm round you?”

“Oh, perfectly,” said Slaney distantly, and blushed with fervour. “Mr.
Glasgow did not seem to mind missing his train, after all,” she went on,
speeding into the topic she most wished to avoid, as is frequently the
fate of those who talk for the sake of changing the conversation.

“I believe that was all a mistake. Glasgow hadn’t the slightest idea of
going; he only wanted to see one of the directors who was travelling up
by the mail,” said Bunbury elaborately.

“Susan waited for us at the station till she was frozen,” continued
Slaney, taking her share in the apology. “She would have come on our
engine only that it would have spoiled her box cloth coat.”

“Do you know where she is now?” asked Bunbury, after another silence.

“She said something about going to look for daffodils. I saw her going
up the backway towards the woods some time ago.”

“Are you too tired to walk up to meet her? You may choose between that
and playing the Impromptu.”

They went up the hill at the back of the house by a seldom-used avenue,
where cart-wheels had made deep brown ruts in the grass, and the
bordering oaks hung their branches low and unpruned; pale winter
pastures spread on either side, and the cattle were already moving
downwards towards their night’s lodging. Yet the hint of coming spring
was in the lengthened afternoon; stiff-necked daffodil buds were
beginning to bend their heads and show the hoarded gold through the
jealous green, and thrushes were twining a net of song in the
shrubberies below. It is in the days of February that the Irish air
begins again to breathe suggestion--no longer mere food for the lungs,
it invades the heart, and bewilders the brain with griefs and hopes.
Even to the dimming of the eye that smell of the fields entered into
Slaney; with a new and strong understanding of herself she could have
wept for the guileless egoist who had been Slaney Morris when last the
February winds blew sweet.

“Have you written that letter to say that you are not going home
to-morrow?” said Bunbury, as he held open the gate that admitted them
into the wood.

He had realized during his walk up across the pastures that days in
which Slaney had no share would be strangely meaningless. Not being
introspective the discovery was sudden enough to set his blood beating
and his heart instinctively aching. He knew that she could look forward
to days without him as unconcernedly as she would look back to days with
him; she was self-sufficing, as the ideal ever seems to be the
idealizer, and such as he had no portion beyond the opening of gates for
her to pass through. Major Bunbury’s elder sister must have faithfully
fulfilled the mission of elder sisters, or else his natural estimation
of himself was low.

“No,” replied Slaney, with her eyes on the ground, “after all, I made up
my mind not to write.”

“Your mind was made up the other way when you talked about it after
breakfast,” said Bunbury, looking down at her as she flicked a fir-cone
aside with her stick. “Do you generally change it every few hours?”

“Emerson says that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” replied
Slaney, with a little sententious air that Bunbury found exasperatingly
charming.

“Does Emerson say that Uncle Charles is a hobgoblin for small minds, and
could very well look after himself for another week?” There was a
resentment in Major Bunbury’s voice that he did not try to conceal.

“He says nothing of the sort. He might have said Uncle Charles was a
Diocesan Nominator, only he forgot to,” said Slaney, still preoccupied
with the carpet of pine-needles on which they were walking. “But as
you’re not an Irishman,” she went on, “I suppose you don’t even know
what that is?”

“It seems to be a thing that requires a great deal of unnecessary
attention, and can’t take care of itself,” said Bunbury gloomily.

“Well, you’re quite wrong,” replied Slaney, looking up with a laugh that
was shy and friendly, and a little conscious. She was not accustomed to
finding that her comings and goings were of importance to people like
Major Bunbury. “It’s a most self-sufficing and useful thing. It goes
away at intervals to elect clergymen for the Irish Church, and it sent
over a note this afternoon to say I was not to go home for two or three
days.”

Bunbury was quite silent for a few moments; then, while the pine-needle
carpet seemed to rise up under his feet, he took her ungloved right
hand, and raised it, stick and all, to meet his face as he bent over it,
like a man stooping to drink. He kissed it, hurriedly and awkwardly, but
in an instant the fine and slender fingers had escaped from his lips,
and he stood by her, speechless and dizzy. In that moment of silence his
heart opened and let in her dearness like a flood; before the next could
dawn with its possibilities, a woman’s voice broke out of the wood,
through twilight barred with tree stems. It was so near, it was so
whetted with agony, so flung about with gusts of passion, that, for the
moment, oblivious of what had just passed, they stared at each other for
the space of a long-held breath, and were carried on towards it with
that instinct that drags every human being towards suffering. A smell of
wood-smoke drifted lightly in the air; it strengthened as a bend of the
path straightened before them, till they saw among the trees a group of
men, a fire of fir-branches crackling in a bed of red ember and white
ash, and down at the left side of the path a pond that glimmered darkly
in a pale setting of sedgy grass. There was a punt on the pond, and
boat-hooks and ropes were flung about. Glasgow was standing by, why or
how it did not occur to Slaney to inquire. There were several countrymen
whom she recognized, and all seemed silently intent on some central
catastrophe.

The woman’s voice was unintelligible now, half-smothered and near the
ground, as if her mouth were laid against the grass. Two men stooped and
tried to pull her to her feet. A red head appeared, swaying, as when, a
month before, Maria Quin staggered through the drunken crowd while they
closed her father’s coffin. Slaney saw now what it was that lay on the
ground beside her; the fixed sprawl of the limbs in the soaked clothing,
the discoloured cheek, torn by boat-hooks; it expressed with terrific
completeness the hunted life, the lonely act of death that had attained
such peace as this stillness might betoken.

Tom Quin’s black-and-grey dog moved restlessly round the body of his
master, sniffing closely at the face, trying to turn over with his nose
the rigid hand that still clutched a fragment of sodden reed, in that
dumb distress and fear of death that animals must bear uncomforted.
Slaney dragged her eyes from the engrossing horror of it, and in doing
so met those of Lady Susan at the far side of the group; but nothing
seemed strange to her now, not even the white fixity of Lady Susan’s
face, that told of a plucky woman strongly moved.

At that instant Maria Quin broke out of the group and confronted
Glasgow, eyes and face and voice beyond all control or desire of it, and
repellent as human frenzy must inevitably be.

“If it wasn’t for the way you had him persecuted,” she yelled, “he
wouldn’t be thrown out there on the grass undher yer feet. ’Twas _you_
refused him the money back and dhrew the curse on him till ye had him
wandhering the counthry night and day like a wild goose. Couldn’t
annyone know the crayture’s heart was broke whin he threw the scafflin’
off him and left it on the stone by the brink? Oh, God and His Mother!
He knew he couldn’t dhrown if that was on him”--she held up the
scapulary that Quin, like most Irish Roman Catholics, wore round his
neck, and shook it in Glasgow’s face--“and you to come walkin’ through
the woods with yer lover, so quiet! That yersel’s may be lookin’ for a
place to die and be threw in a grave that won’t be blessed!”

There was a general stifled exclamation, and the man said audibly--

“The Cross of Christ be between us and harm!” One of the French’s Court
workmen caught at Maria Quin’s arm as if to silence her; another pulled
him away, telling him in Irish that the curse might fall on any one who
interfered with her.

Lady Susan passed quickly round the outside of the group and came
straight to Bunbury, her figure in its brilliant modernity accentuating
the sombreness of a tragedy of this archaic kind.

“I’m going home,” she said indistinctly, and walked past him; “I feel
rather queer from seeing that----” Her voice failed her, and she put her
hand to her eyes. Bunbury followed her without a word. It came home with
a pang to Slaney’s heart that Lady Susan had turned to him, expecting no
quarter from the girl.

She turned to follow them, but she had not gone more than a few yards
when she heard a step behind her. Glasgow overtook her, and without
speaking began to walk beside her; he looked straight in front of him,
and something about his movement and the carriage of his head told her
that he was entirely absorbed in hot white anger.

“I hope you are gratified at the result of encouraging superstition,” he
said at last, in a voice that told of the inward pressure of feeling.

“It seems to have been more the result of discouraging it,” she replied,
without attempting to keep out of her voice the antagonism that was in
her heart.

“It would be simpler if you said at once that honest or sane people had
better give up having any dealings with the Irish,” he returned hotly.

“Do you mean English people? They certainly have not been eminently
successful so far.”

Slaney felt quite cool, and Glasgow wondered how he had ever found her
attractive.

“As you are a friend of these Quins,” he said, holding his temper back,
but not his imperiousness, “I think it would be as well if you advised
that woman to take care about what she says of me, as she may get
herself into trouble.”

He forgot for the moment the trouble that lay ahead of him; yet the
strong nervous excitement that fed his anger was due to the imminence
of that trouble, forgotten or no.

“I think advice would be rather thrown away on her just now,” replied
Slaney, thinking of what lay by the pool, and of the wet torn face that
the dog smelt at; “even Irish people feel things sometimes.”

She suddenly became aware of the spring of tears that lies at the back
of a shock, and she bit her lip and drove her stick hard into the ground
as she walked.

“I can only suppose then,” he said, “that you don’t object to hearing
your friends publicly libelled.”

He held the gate of the wood open for her, and she walked through as
stiff as a dart. She knew quite well what sentence of Maria Quin’s it
was that was foremost on his ear, and it was intolerable that he should
take his stand beside Lady Susan. Her distrust of him had become so
invincible that she felt Lady Susan to be a bird in the snare of the
fowler; she could not think of her as a confederate.

“Can’t you realize,” she said, at last, “that nothing I could say would
do any good now?”

“I see,” he sneered, while he sought among his cast-iron theories of
women for something that should fit this abnormal one. “You mean that it
is no use to hope that a woman will hold her tongue, whether it be to
her own advantage or not!”

The long-pent anger suddenly stirred in her, and with it the resolution
that had long lain dormant.

“Would it surprise you to hear,” she began, with the sensation of coming
into the open, under fire, “that a woman has held her tongue about you
for some time past?”

He half turned and looked hard at her. “I have ceased to be surprised at
anything a woman may do, but I should certainly like to hear the
particulars of such a piece of self-sacrifice.”

Slaney hesitated. It was nearly impossible to say it. The twilight was
falling and the thrushes in the shrubberies below were piercing it with
long shafts of rhapsody. Lady Susan and Bunbury were walking under the
bare and drooping branches some distance in front.

“Well,” repeated Glasgow, “what about this martyr to principle?”

“It was I,” she said, and everything around seemed to throb and stand
still, like her heart.

“Perhaps you will kindly explain what you mean,” he said, very coldly
and politely.

“You lent me a book last month--the _Fortnightly Review_--and I found a
letter to you in it, a letter that you had forgotten was there.”

He remained silent for a moment, and then spoke with a jerk--

“May I ask who it was from?”

“A woman.”

“You read it?”

“I could hardly help reading it, it was all on the first sheet.”

She looked at him with the courage of an honourable nature owning to
what it would self-righteously have despised in another, and he saw the
moistness in her eyes.

“Oh yes, I understand that quite well,” he replied, with a quickness
that did honour both to him and to her.

There was a pause.

“I burned it at once,” she added.

“Oh!” There was no shade of feeling in the monosyllable. “I remember the
letter you speak of,” he went on very quietly; “what I cannot understand
is why you have told me of it? I can hardly think it was for the sake of
saying something unpleasant.”

“It was because I am fond of Lady Susan,” she said desperately.

In the silence that followed it seemed to her as though she had thrown a
heavy stone into deep water, without hope of result beyond the broken
mirror and the flagging ripple.

CHAPTER XI

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