Theparty 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 tointercept—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.
Mr. Glasgow’sbrown 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 didnot 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, andthe 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 andtwenty 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 habituallyorderly 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 soveryhard 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 thatmark 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 onlythat 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 ofFebruary 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 theidealizer, 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 fewmoments; 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 sawamong 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 expressedwith 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 yerfeet. ’Twasyourefused 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 nervousexcitement 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 andthe 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—theFortnightly 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.
Nextmorning, 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 withthat sense of severance from her affairs that had been his since he and his gun-cases had reappeared at French’s Court the evening before. He was not usually sensitive to social temperatures, but it seemed to him that there was something flat and ungenial about the whole party. Bunbury was spasmodically agreeable, Slaney was silent, his wife was heavy-eyed and listless; he encouraged and nurtured the bitter conviction that no one wanted him.
“I suppose you’re riding Gambler to-day?” Major Bunbury was saying to some one in the hall.
“No,” replied Lady Susan, speaking rather quickly and indistinctly, “I’m riding Mr. Glasgow’s old horse, Solomon, you know. He came over last night. I’ve always wanted to try him.”
Bunbury whistled a few bars of a tune, and knocked down things in the whip-rack.
“Hugh’s riding that grey,” she went on; “it’s quite absurd. He can’t do anythingwith him, and he only makes an exhibition of himself.”
“Oh, the horse is all right now,” replied Bunbury, lowering his voice; “he was very green that first day that Hugh rode him.”
“Very well,” she said, “you’ll see. He won’t take that horse across two fences to-day.”
Bunbury passed on out of the hall door, and left Lady Susan standing on the doorstep. She looked up at the cold blue and uncertain grey of the sky, and out at the ruffled and hazy sea, the strong light showing lines of sleeplessness about her eyes; then, turning back into the house, she met her husband. She did not suppose that he had overheard her, yet she was aware of something in his lonely face that she did not care to look at. She went to the table and took up her gloves without speaking.
“Hullo!” she exclaimed, “there’s a letter here that came for you. I found it on the floor one night, and didn’t think it worthsending on. Some one has shoved it behind the card-tray.”
Hugh looked at the vulgar and rambling handwriting, and mechanically tore open the envelope. It was a letter clearly written in close and crooked lines, and its purport appeared to be a confused complaint of “persecution” received from the hounds in connection with the covert of Cahirdreen. Hugh read on with a frowning brow. In other days he would have asked his wife to come and read it over his shoulder, but that time seemed now very far away.
Glasgow’s name appeared in the letter, with more complaints of persecution; he hardly tried to understand what it was all about. All at once his wife’s name seemed to leap out from the paper, and to sink back, indelible, irrevocable, linked to Glasgow’s by two or three gross and barbarous phrases, by a warning not less crude, by a cunning treatment of the matter as one of common knowledge. There was no signature, nothing to suggest its connection with thedead hand that still clutched the broken reed when Tom Quin’s body was taken from the pond.
Hugh raised his eyes and looked at his wife, tasting in that moment the transcendent anguish of the mind that once or twice in a lifetime teaches the body what suffering can be. She was buttoning her glove, standing tall and straight in the light from the open door, in all the spotless austerity of her black habit and white tie. She seemed far out of the reach of accusation, yet, as he took in every well-known line, forgotten things rose up against her in an evil swarm. His belief in her was falling with the fall of a strong and shading tree; he clung to it even as it fell; and all the while she stood and buttoned the glove across her white wrist.
At half-past eleven a misty fog was drifting loosely up from the south-west on the shoulders of the thaw, and the group of riders outside the cover of Cahirdreen began to turn up their collars. It was a smallgroup, and an eye accustomed to the usual muster would have noticed at once the absence of Mr. Glasgow; he was one of the people whose presence makes itself felt in all the varied fortunes of a day’s hunting. As the minutes passed, and the horses nibbled idly at the gorse in the fence, the dispensary doctor closed the top of his flask with a snap, and remarked facetiously that he supposed business must sometimes come before pleasure, even with railway contractors.
Lady Susan was at a little distance, apparently absorbed, as was her wont, in attentiveness to what was going on in covert. At the laugh that followed Dr. Hallahan’s remark, she moved away, and rode slowly along the edge of the wood. She was on Solomon, who had already taken full note of a lighter hand, a lighter weight, and the absence of spurs: he had had ideas about bucking on the road to testify his appreciation of these things, but on finding that Lady Susan had also ideas of her ownon the subject, he had made up his mind to treat her with respect. She rode on round the top of the covert, and stationed herself on its farther side; Solomon stood like a rock, with his brown roach back humped against the cold mist.
The hounds had been put in at the lower end of the wood, and were working through it, so far without result. As before, when Cahirdreen had been drawn, Danny-O was not to be found when the time came for him to take the hounds through the covert, and the master, on his grey horse, was riding up a track in the heart of the wood, where the mist had as yet scarcely made its way, and the silence dwelt like a spirit. The horse went ever more slowly among the slender stems of the fir-trees, sharing in the lethargy conveyed by the slack rein and the loose leg of his rider, while the hounds were pushing well ahead through the briars and the bracken, leaving Hugh behind. A straggler or two passed him by, with a wary eye on the whip, not realizing, as the housedog so readily does, that human beings have preoccupations in which dogs can be ignored.
It was some time before Hugh noticed the fact that there was somebody near him in the wood—a figure moving among the trees at a little distance. The Scotch firs and larch had been thinned out here for sale to the contractor of the new railway line, and the wood was more open. The figure was that of an old man, who seemed to be advancing in a direction parallel with Hugh. Sometimes the misty fog blotted him out, sometimes the grouping of the tree-stems conspired to hide him; he went onward as if fitfully; the moments when he was lost to sight scarcely accounted for his reappearances farther on. He shuffled like an infirm man, yet his progress through the undergrowth was so steady that it seemed as if he were walking on a path. Irritated at length by the persistent espionage, Hugh called to him to ask what he was doing in the covert. He received no reply, and the mistcrept in between them. When it cleared again the old man was crossing an open space fifty yards away. Hugh noticed the profound melancholy of his bent head, the yellow paleness of his cheek. Even while something familiar about him vexed Hugh’s memory, like an evil dream half-forgotten, he appeared to stumble, and fell with out-spread arms and without a sound into some unseen hollow or ditch. Hugh pressed the grey horse through the briars and under the branches till he reached the spot; he pulled up abruptly as he found himself at the edge of a disused sandpit. There were a few rocks flung about at the bottom of it, with the briars growing among them; a rabbit came up out of them, and scuttled to its burrow in the sand at the sound of the horse’s tread; nothing else whatever was there.
Hugh put his hand to his head and wondered if he were going mad. Then, quite unexpectedly, his knees began to tremble, and the breath of the unknown entered intohim, cowing the conventions and disbeliefs of ordinary life. At the same instant a hound began to throw his tongue in the covert, two or three more joined, and the grey horse turned of himself to get back to the path. As if through a dark atmosphere of foreboding and doom Hugh heard the whimpers strengthen to yells in all the wild and animal and mundane delight of hunting; he moved mechanically on, while the borders of existence became immeasurable about him, and his unhappiness stretched out into all futurity. There was a rustle in the undergrowth near him, and a fox slipped across the path and away among the trees towards the fence that bounded the wood. It was silver-grey, with black ears and paws, its eyes as it glanced at Hugh were like topazes, and seemed full of the cold lore of unearthly things. The thrill went again from Hugh’s heart to his throat, and died away in a sickly chill.
“Damn it all!” he broke out suddenly, “what am I afraid of? I’m going to breakmy neck—that’s what it is—and the sooner the better.”
An old hound came working and yelping up through the dead bracken; she flung up her head with a long shriek of excitement as she crossed the path; half-a-dozen others rushed to her well-known cry, and went streaming past on the line. The grey horse was quivering and hopping from leg to leg with excitement. Hugh could feel his heart beating up through the saddle.
“All right, you devil,” he said, turning him through the trees at a trot; “you’ll get a skinful of it now.”
The bank was blind and high, and the last hounds were struggling over it with difficulty; Hugh rode along it for a hundred yards or so at a canter, with branches hitting him in the face, till he found a place that seemed possible, and sent the horse at it with a cruel dig of the spurs. In three big bounds the grey was at the fence, the fourth landed him on top among briars and furze, and a drop of seven or eight feetinto a marshy hollow was revealed. Lady Susan’s handling had not been lost on the grey; he kept his head up, and jumped out like a stag, landing clear of the rotten ground, and collecting himself in a moment with his eye on the hounds. Hugh sat him loosely and recklessly; what he felt was not pleasure, yet it was not wholly removed from it. He had, at all events, the fierce and bitter satisfaction of taking his weaker nature by the throat, and keeping it down, even to the death that every fibre was expectant of.
One other rider had seen the hounds going away. As Hugh turned down the hill, with the pack already three fields ahead, he saw through the mist that a lady on a brown horse had got away on good terms with them from the first. It was his wife, on Glasgow’s horse. The rest of the field were left at the wrong side of the covert, ignorant of the fact that the fox had gone away, and, from the line that he had taken, not likely to know for some time.Certainly Hugh was not in the mood to remember their existence. He took the grey horse by the head and galloped him at a loose stone wall. They were over with a send and a swoop, and Hugh began to lose the cold trembling in his knees, and to feel again the forgotten grip and swing. Somewhere in the back of his heart he was afraid, but sinister clouds of fatalism and heats of jealousy were between him and that latent and irresponsible treachery of the nerves.
The hounds were running hard, down towards the railway, and Lady Susan was going at her ease with them on Solomon. They flashed across it, and Hugh saw his wife ride unhesitatingly at the stark bog drain, that was the only fence of the unfinished line. The old horse jumped it like a four-year-old, and as he scrambled up the embankment Lady Susan looked back: the mist was creeping down the hill, but Hugh knew that she could not mistake the grey horse. He swore to himself that he wouldshow her that he was as good a man as Glasgow, his horse as good as Glasgow’s; the most primitive and animal of human hatreds had taken hold of him, and was disfiguring mind and face like a possession of the devil.
In a minute the hoofs of the grey were thudding on the railway sleepers, but in that minute the hounds and Lady Susan had slipped away again; he felt that if they got any farther from him he would lose them in the mist. The going was heavy and the banks rotten in the boggy lowlands beyond the line. He took no care to pick his way, but rode wildly through swampy patches and over rocks muffled in furze, in pursuit of the flying shadow that the mist was momently hiding from him. It was not the way to get safely over a bad country. In the next five minutes the grey horse had twice been nearly down, and his white nose was black with bog mud; he had given up pulling, yet he was going at his best, strong and free, and his earswere pricked as gallantly as ever towards his work.
They had galloped perhaps three miles, and were bending back again towards the railway; Hugh was nearer to his wife by a hundred yards as he came with a heavy drop into a lane up which the hounds were running, and thundered up it in her wake, neither knowing nor caring where he was. The fact that they suddenly recrossed the railway by a level crossing conveyed to him no sense of locality. He was possessed by the passion to let his wife see that he was not afraid; to leave her and her borrowed horse behind; and, having gained that miserable joy, to be killed before her eyes. He was as nearly mad as presentiment, physical excitement, and the burning pain of jealousy could make him, and the grey horse was finding it out.
With a heave and a scramble they were out of the lane and over a bank; it was uphill now, in heather and rough ground, and the grey was puffing audibly as heanswered the relentless spur. The mist thickened on the higher levels, Lady Susan and the hounds were suddenly lost to sight, and, after a minute or two of fruitless galloping, Hugh pulled up and listened, with his pulses thumping and his mouth dry. A curlew whistled overhead, a trembling crescent of sound, then, high up the hill to his left, he heard again the cry of the hounds. He rode to it desperately, skirting a high furzy knoll, and at the other side caught sight of the pack beginning to run fast again after a check, and his wife was still near them. He saw Solomon slip over a bank and ditch with all the seeming ease of a clever horse well ridden, and he cursed him and his rider aloud. The paltry blasphemy went out into the wind and mist, and was swallowed up in their large and pure philosophy, and it had scarcely left his lips when the greyness that blurred the hill-top became thinner as it drifted, and he saw three tall Druid stones stand out against the sky.
Immediately some remembrance, vague yet urgent, drove its way into the blind and single resolve of his mind. It was grouse-shooting long ago,—the grey horse took down half a loose wall with him as he jumped, and Hugh chucked him in the mouth and hit him—a man had spoken to him that day about something connected with those stones, he had seen that man again lately—quite lately—there was something horrible about it all.—Come up, horse! why the devil can’t you look where you’re going?—and yet it eluded him. Then it came, like the dart of a snake out of a ruined wall. It was old Dan Quin, who was dead, whom he had seen in the covert; it was Dan Quin who had spoken to him out grouse-shooting; he had pointed to those stones and told him—— Oh, God! his wife was within a hundred yards of the place! He shouted her name with his utmost strength. She did not hear him; she was cantering Solomon up the field, and the hounds were crossing a fence above her,beside the lean and crooked emblems of the Druids.
The grey horse was blowing and gulping, yet he answered the furious spurring. Hugh shouted again and again, with his eyes straining after his wife’s figure; in the white light of that agony he knew his love for her and his helplessness to save her. She turned Solomon at the fence beside the Druid stones; it was a big bank, with withered branches of thorn-bushes masking its outline, and she sent him at it hard. The old horse jumped on to it like a cat, seemed to stagger and hesitate, and they both were gone.
The grey felt his rider relax and sway, but being young he did not understand what it meant: he was nearing a bank that he felt he could not jump, but the dread of the spur was present with him. He did his best, and but for a rotten take-off he might possibly have scrambled over. As it was, his knees took the bank, his hindquarters flew up, and he turned a somer-sault, falling over into the next field. Hugh was shot from his back and pitched on his head and shoulder beside the horse. The latter struggled to his feet, but Hugh rolled convulsively to one side with an inarticulate sound, and lay still.
Therewas an air of calamity and yet of Sunday about the Quins’ farmyard. The pigs were shut up, tubs and buckets were put out of sight, and Tom Quin’s little nephew, in his best frock, spent many hours of blissful autocracy in driving the fowl from the doorstep to Siberias behind the rick of turf. Very early in the day two stalwart and dapper members of the Royal Irish Constabulary had made their appearance, and from time to time women in hooded blue cloaks made their way along the causeway that skirted the manure heap, groaned, crossed themselves, and entered the house. In a large shed where Tom Quin had often threshed oats and chopped furze, his body had been laid on two tables,and covered with a sheet, some superstition about the drowned forbidding that it should be taken into the house, lest death might strike another there.
Awaiting inquest, the sheeted figure lay in its hidden awfulness, with the crooked rafters and the sedgy thatch above, and the candles burning at the head and feet in the grey winter air, wan yet ardent, like the flame of faith in the world’s cold noonday. Beside the body the widow Quin sat upon the earthen floor, with a black handkerchief tied over her spotless cap frill, and did not cease from the low moaning and weeping of unstanched grief. Sympathizers stood at the door and looked at her, an intense comprehension of her suffering blending itself with the inevitable fascination of the event, and prayers for the repose of the dead man’s soul were offered with a reality in which a sense of the extreme necessity for them was not concealed.
It was nearly twelve o’clock when Maria Quin came out of the house with a cup oftea in her hand; she had on her black best dress, and her boots creaked loudly. She said nothing to those whom she passed, but took the cup of tea to her mother, placing it in the reluctant hand that twisted the apron corner.
“Take it, asthore, take it now,” chorussed the sympathizers.
“L’ave her alone. Don’t be lookin’ at her,” said her daughter, in the hard voice that had remained unshaken through the morning. She closed the door in their faces, and when she presently came out again with the empty cup, smeared with the stain of the poisonous stuff it had contained, all recognized that the first step in the consolation of the Widow Quin had been accomplished.
Maria turned away. Her head ached wildly, and instead of returning to the house, she passed round the end of the shed, and into the field at the back, that the damp wind of the hillside might blow upon her hot forehead. Her face was quite whiteunder its sunburn and freckles, except where the skin below the eyes showed a lavender tinge; the eyes themselves had a dry stare in them, yet there was nothing random or ungoverned about her. Grief drives the active to activity, and perhaps the long toils of the night, when successive candles found her still sweeping and washing in preparation for the wake and the inquest, had saved her from the reaction from her outburst in the wood; perhaps passion is normal and without reaction in those whose hair is truly red.
The wind soothed her aching head, and she went slowly on and sat down on a stone, with the empty cup and saucer in her lap, looking away up the slope to where a ridge of hill was visible through the soft movement of the mist. She did not at first observe that a grey animal with a black muzzle had leaped on to the loose wall that surrounded the field she was in, and was crouching and looking at her intently. It jumped down with exquisite lightness, apale grey fox with a beautiful white-tipped brush, and crossed the open towards the barn where Tom Quin lay. As it did so, Maria saw it, and sprang to her feet, her mouth open and her eyes starting. The cup and saucer fell with a clatter, and the fox, which had seemed disposed to loiter as it passed close under the wall of the shed, glanced back, looked about it, and after a moment of seeming indecision, turned and trotted at its ease up the hill, heading apparently for much the same point as that from which it had just come. Grey as the mist itself, it glided away, till it disappeared among the clumps of gorse, while somewhere overhead a seagull made its unhappy cry.
Maria Quin fell on her knees with absolute simplicity and spontaneity. She was not frightened in the ordinary sense of the word, but she acknowledged the power of the unseen things that had worked together to her brother’s undoing, and she cast herself on a higher protection, half doubtful as she was of its right to intervene. As sheknelt, with her hand thrust in the bosom of her dress to grasp the picture of the Sacred Heart that hung around her neck, the cry of hounds came to her ear; it approached rapidly, and she jumped up, full of a blind indignation against those who, for their own amusement, had wrecked the fortunes of a family, and now came to gallop past the house of death, guided by that grey and ill-omened thing. Half-a-dozen hounds passed her, hot on the line of the fox, with their heads up; they overran it and tried back, then picked it up by the shed as if they were lapping it off the grass, and with whimpers bursting into the firm note of hunting, went away up the hill and were lost to sight amongst the furze. Others followed in their track, and Maria, maddened by their brutal self-engrossment, their cheery and inconsequent voices, ran in the direction from which they had come, with some inflaming idea of stopping the riders who would follow, equally self-engrossed, infinitely more brutal and desecrating.
As she climbed the first wall, a horse and rider leaped up into view on a high bank some two hundred yards away to her right, near where three thin and slanting Druidic stones were dimly seen through the mist. They dropped down out of sight among a wild growth of hazels. Maria stood stock still; the powers of darkness had outrun her. Neither horse nor rider reappeared. It was stunningly complete, it was terrific and just retribution, but yet—oh, Mother of Our Lord!—the rider was a woman.
The peasant heart struggled in the grave-clothes of hatred and superstition, and burst forth with its native impetuousness and warmth. Maria started forward and ran towards the field where the hazels grew. She ran clumsily because of her ill-made boots, but she got over the ground with surprising quickness. She climbed another wall, a strong one with thorn-bushes laid along the top, and was in a small field full of grey clumps of young hazel. She skirted these rapidly, but with care, and oncejumped across an ugly cleft among the bushes. The hounds were all about her again, but they were silent now, and were hunting to and fro among the hazel-bushes, and leaping backwards and forwards over rifts in the ground similar to that which Maria had just crossed. Before her was the high bank, showing above a long strip of hazel scrub; she thrust herself, breathless, in among the thick and sturdy growth, her eyes dilated with apprehension, her red hair falling loose in the wind. A cry for help arose at her step, scarcely three yards away; she broke her way to it through the crush of young branches, and saw, as if coming up out of the ground, two gloved hands, clutching all they could hold of twigs and saplings, that bent lithely with the weight that hung from them.
Lady Susan was hanging over the verge of a deep and wide cleft, masked on one side by hazels and briars; her face looked up, deeply flushed, and distorted from the whirl of the terrible moments that make avortex round death, yet it was obvious that even in that extremity she had not lost her presence of mind. Maria dropped on her knees, and twining her left arm round a strong stem, stretched down her muscular right hand. Lady Susan could not let go and grasp it, and Maria caught her by the wrist and drew her slowly upward. There was a struggle, and a tremendous strain on the arms; both women kept steady and firm, and Lady Susan got her knee over the edge and fell forward on to Maria’s shoulder. Her hat dangled by its guard, her habit sleeve had burst away from the shoulder, her patent-leather boots were cut and scraped by the crevices in which they had searched to find a footing; she drew hard breaths in the effort to recover herself.
“Is the horse killed?” she said hoarsely, scrambling on to her feet and looking down through the naked branches that fringed the long cleft.
Even the first glance could certify that Solomon had met his death in an instant.He lay in a heap in the obscurity forty feet below, on loose rocks among dark water; his head was doubled under his chest at an impossible angle that told the tale of a broken neck. The uttermost effort of a good horse had not been enough to save him, when he had tried to jump out from the top of the high bank across a chasm nearly twenty feet wide. That endeavour and all his simple and gallant life seemed expressed in the wreck of strength and intelligence that lay below, with the water washing over the flap of the saddle, over the shapely brown fetlocks, over the thin and glossy mane.
It was mysterious water, an underground stream that slid out of the dumb and sightless caverns of the rock, and passed away into them again with a swirl, a stealthy swift thing, escaping always from the eye of day, and eating the foundations of the limestone walls that sheltered it.
Lady Susan still held the hand that had rescued her; it led her through the brush-wood to open ground, till the short wet grass was under her feet and the mist blew in her face. She turned her head away, and the sobs broke from her. Any one who has loved horse or dog will know how and where they touch the heart and command the tear. Let us trust that in some degree it is known to them also, that the confiding spirit may understand that its god can grieve for it.
Maria Quin looked at Lady Susan with eyes that were as dry as glass. The Irish peasant regards the sorrow for a mere animal as a childishness that is almost sinful, a tempting of ill fate in its parody of the grief rightly due only to what is described as “a Christhian”; and Maria’s heart glowed with the unwept wrongs of her brother.
“What happened him?” she asked, and the knot of pain and outrage was tight in her voice.
“I tried to pull him back when I saw what was coming,” said Lady Susan, with difficulty. “I couldn’t stop him; he hadtoo much way on. I only did harm. I think he would have got across only for that.” She stopped and gulped down the sob. It was dreadful to her to cry before an inferior. “He all but got over, but he dropped his hind legs into it and fell back. I somehow caught those branches just as he was going, and he dropped away from under me, and I hung there. I couldn’t climb up. Then you came.” She recovered herself a little, and turned towards her rescuer. “I haven’t thanked you yet. It was awfully good and plucky of you.”
Their eyes met, and it seemed as if till then Lady Susan had not recognized Maria Quin. She visibly flinched, and her flushed face became a deeper red, while the hand that had begun to feel for her purse came out of her pocket empty.
“Little ye cried yestherday whin ye seen my brother thrown out on the ground by the pool,” said Maria, with irrepressible savageness, “you that’s breakin’ yer heart afther yer horse.”
Lady Susan took the blow in silence, and that quality in her that can only be described as an absence of smallness, dimly appealed to the country-woman, as occasionally through Lady Susan’s careless life it had had its effect on women of her own class.
“D’ye know yer way home out o’ this?” said Maria sullenly. “If ye’ll come with me I’ll show ye the short way out into the bohireen below our house.” She was beginning to be sorry for what she had said, or perhaps the saying of it had eased her heart. “One that didn’t know this field would aisy be killed in it. It’s full o’ thim cracks, and we have it finced sthrong from the sheep.” She turned and pointed to the tall Druidic stones. “While ye live ye’ll mind yerself whin ye see thim. I thought every one in the counthry knew this place. But sure what are you but a sthranger!” She said it more kindly, and as if explaining the position to herself.
“Look here,” said Lady Susan suddenly,“I want to tell you that I don’t deserve this kindness from you, and I’m truly sorry for all that has happened about the hounds. It won’t happen any more. Will you—will you accept my regret for anything I have done to annoy you, and my sympathy about your brother? I didn’t understand how things were——”
“Oh, God help ye!” broke out Maria, “what does the likes o’ ye undherstand about the likes of us? It wasn’t wanting to desthroy us ye were, I know that well—and faith! I think ye have nature that’d make ye sorry if ye seen my brother this day where he’s lying beyond. I know well the one that have no pity; maybe he’ll be in the want of it yet.” She took Lady Susan by the sleeve, staring at her as if taking in her good looks. “Mind yerself!” she said in a whisper; “that fella would throw ye on the roadside whin he’d be tired o’ ye. Don’t be makin’ little o’ yerself with the likes o’ him—you that has a good husband and nothin’ to throuble ye. I cantell ye of the day I wint to Glashgow to the office, axing him to take back the price o’ the land, and he put a hand on me to kiss me; he thought that was all he had to do to humour me. He remembers that day agin me yet. It couldn’t be that you, that might be talkin’ to the Lord Left’nant or any other, would bring sorrow on yerself for the sake ofhim.”
Neither the straining misfit of the black dress, nor the atrocious pretensions of the cheap boots, could impute vulgarity to the speaker. Lady Susan kept her eyes on the ground with a firmly-set mouth, and Maria turned away in the direction from which she had come. She was overtaken almost immediately.
“I am going back the other way,” said Lady Susan. “I’m afraid my husband or some one may be coming this way and not know of this place, and I must tell them where the hounds are, but—— Good-bye.” She put out her hand in its torn glove; it was still trembling from exertion.There was a moment’s pause, and the country-woman’s hard, red hand took it and shook it, and dropped it.
Neither spoke, but some thrill ran home to Maria’s heart with the meeting of the palms, and sent the dew to her hot eyes. They separated in silence, and Lady Susan, following the long cleft to its termination, climbed up the bank. Looking back, she saw the hounds still hurrying in and out among the hazels in excited and fruitless search, and beyond them Maria’s black figure going away into the mist and fog. She walked uncertainly, and once or twice her hand went up to her eyes.
AsLady Susan scrambled down the other side of the bank she said mechanically to herself that Hugh must have taken another turn before they crossed the railway, only for that she would have seen him when she looked back before she rode at her last jump. How extraordinarily well he had been going—how long ago it seemed, and yet it could only have been about ten minutes. Below her stretched the long fields up which Solomon had carried her; the mist swept thick and cold across them, shutting out the rest of the world, and making their loneliness more complete. A grey horse was moving up the field towards her; she walked uneasily towards it, crippled by her safety habit, stiff in every limb.She could at first only make out that it was lame, she neared and saw a saddle and dangling reins. The stillness of the hillside seemed to tell her the rest. She came up to the grey horse and took him by the head; he was dead lame and trembling all over, there was mud on his jaw, on his shoulder, on the saddle. She had seen before what horses looked like after a bad fall. She led him down the field in the direction from which he had come, and saw, away by the fence, a motionless spot of scarlet and white.
In a few moments she was on her knees beside her husband. His face was buried in a heather tussock, his hands were clinched in the black and boggy soil; as she tried to turn him over the blood trickled heavily from the corner of his mouth. A little gurgling sound in his throat told her that he was alive, but he was far away in that trance of physical defeat in which soul and body seem alike absorbed.
She was wholly unversed in illness, un-acquainted with death, but in the novels she had read episodes of fainting had been freely scattered, and they had left a general idea in her mind. With shaking fingers, shaking from her recent struggle and the impact of this latest shock, she unfastened Hugh’s hunting-tie and the neck of his shirt, while her sinking heart told her of her own ignorance and loneliness, and the white face remained unmoved. It seemed to have become smaller, and the temples hollow and blue. She took off the glove from the heavy, listless hand, and tried with her unskilled fingers to feel the pulse. It was just perceptible, and at the contact with that thread of life shut up inside the intolerable mystery of unconsciousness, the fear, the paralyzing helplessness began to give way. Something like the clinking of a tin can came to her ear, and she started up. Two little girls, with red petticoats over their heads, were crossing the field, and Lady Susan ran towards them, calling with what voice she could muster. Atsight of the dishevelled vision in top-boots and a man’s hat emerging from the mist, the children seemed disposed to fly, but finally came to her. Her heart sank as she saw their hesitating, timorous faces. Could she make them understand? To every request they returned the same whispered “We will, miss,” with their lovely eyes cast down in shyness, but half-a-crown and a glimpse of the figure lying by the fence quickened their sense of the seriousness of the matter. They were taking their father’s dinner to where he was working on the line, they would run on to Letter Kyle with a note to the doctor, they would send people to help. Their nimble red feet seemed to promise speed; Lady Susan snatched out her pencil-case, but on what was the note to be written? It came to her like a flash that she had seen Hugh put a letter into his breast-pocket before he started; the inside of the envelope would do.
She went back to him, and with a shrinking hand moved the inert form and foundthe letter. As she took it out of the envelope she saw her own name and that of Glasgow; and in one blinding moment read the sentence that connected them. There was a pause. She looked up and saw the innocent and awe-struck eyes of the children fixed on her as they stood, too frightened to come near the prostrate figure in the red coat. She put the letter into her own pocket, and opening out the envelope wrote on it her demand for help, for a doctor, for a carriage from French’s Court. The final “We will, miss,” was murmured, the red legs carried the children down the hill at full speed, till the rhythmic clanking of the milk-can died away.
Let her not be blamed if her first thought was for herself and her position. Her seven-and-twenty years, her careless and daring flirtations, and her marriage, had not taught her what it was to be in love. She knew that Hugh was in love with her; it was a comfortable knowledge, pleasant and commonplace as sunshine, and she had nomore real comprehension of what he might suffer on her behalf than she had of the flames of hell. She thought first of herself, accused in public, accused in private; she put her hands over her face and said she would go away and never come back to French’s Court, where the people spent their time in spying and telling these foul, infernal lies. Hughie would believe her anyhow. She would tell him all about it. It wasn’t so very much, after all, and he wasn’t a bit strait-laced. She took her hands from her face and saw the motionless body flung in the heathery grass, the vacant brow, the strangeness, the terrific pallor. She stood as people stand when the sudden inrush of an idea overwhelms the physical part of them; it had come to her that it might be too late to tell Hughie about it. It sank into her soul, carrying with it the remembrance of her husband standing by the hall door with the letter in his hand. He had read it before he started; he had only spoken to her onceafterwards, something about the balance-strap of her saddle, but he had not seemed different. She had noticed that he looked ill, and had presently forgotten all about it. The past flowed in on her; his kindliness, his simpleness, his straightness, most of all, that belief in her that was bound up in the deepest heart of an unjealous nature.
The face that lay sideways in the heather began to torture her with its mute reproach; she knelt down beside him, tearless and tense, enduring strong feeling as the undemonstrative must endure it. She bent over him at length, and, as if half afraid, stooped her head and kissed the pale cheek, knowing for the first time the dreadful kiss that is so much to one, so much less than nothing to the other.