Itwas a singular piece of good luck that the two children with the milk-can should have met Dr. Hallahan riding homewards down a lane after an ineffectual search for the hounds. It was also fortunate that it being, so to speak, but the third hour of the day, he was perfectly, almost dismally sober. It was barely a quarter of an hour before he was unfastening Hugh’s waistcoat and feeling him all over, while Lady Susan stood silently by. She had found water in a ditch, and brought it in her hat; she stood motionless, with her fashionable head bare to the mist, and when Dr. Hallahan looked up at her he was aware that a handsomer and more haggardly-set face had never waited for his verdict.
“He’s badly hurt, Lady French,” he said, his brogue rough with compassion for her; “he seems to have a couple of ribs broken, and there’s probably concussion too, and it might be a bit of a crush under the horse.”
“Oh!” said Lady Susan stonily. Then, her brain travelling slowly on, “Can we carry him between us? He only weighs nine six.”
As she spoke she saw that Bunbury, Slaney, and others were hurrying towards them; it did not surprise her, everything seems to be drawn naturally into the suction of disaster.
Afterwards she realized that it was a long time before a messenger returned with a blue counterpane, and other messengers with a couple of rails from a wooden paling. A species of hammock was made, and Hugh was, with utmost care, laid in it; she noticed that Dr. Hallahan told the bearers not to walk in step. Then Bunbury led up Slaney’s horse, and told her she must geton to it, that she was not able to walk. Bunbury was white and silent; Slaney’s eyes were moist, and her voice unsteady. She seemed to Lady Susan extraordinarily kind.
They made her drink some whisky out of his flask, and she rode on after the hammock down a sheep-track, along a bohireen that was like the bed of a rocky stream, into yet another endless bohireen. Slaney walked beside her; they did not speak, but she knew that Slaney was sorry for her. It made her quite sure that Hugh was dying.
“Where are the hounds?” she said suddenly. “Are they killed too?”
“Dan’s got them,” Bunbury answered; “the fox went down one of the clefts in that field, and Fisherman and Mexico went after him. The others are all right.”
Lady Susan rode on in silence, and Bunbury, leading his horse, walked by Slaney. It was quite unnecessary that he should walk, yet Slaney understood.
They neared at length a white house with fir-trees round it; there was a backentrance into the lane, and the hammock was carried into a yard where strange lumber lay about; a broken pumping-engine, signal-posts, long white gates.
“Mr. Glasgow’s house was nearest,” said Slaney, with her eyes on the ground. “Dr. Hallahan is afraid to take him farther.”
The back door of the house was open, and they went in, finding themselves in the kitchen.
“Nobody in,” said Dr. Hallahan, exploring the back premises rapidly, “and no one here either,” opening and shutting the door of Glasgow’s office. “Carry him up. I know the house.”
The hammock, with its light burden, was engineered up a narrow staircase; as Lady Susan followed, she noticed Glasgow’s gloves on the hall-table, his hunting-crop in a rack. They reminded her of all that was now so very far away, they added inconceivably to his reality and yet to his remoteness. Meeting him again would be more difficult than she had thought.
Dr. Hallahan opened the door of a room on the landing.
“This is a spare room, I think——” he said, and stopped short.
A woman started up from a table at which she was writing, and stared at them. Her hair was straw-coloured, and drooped in nauseous picturesqueness over her coal-black eyebrows; her face was fat and white, her dress was a highly-coloured effort at the extreme of the latest fashion but one; the general effect was elderly.
“I beg your pardon,” said Dr. Hallahan, recovering himself; “we’ve brought Captain French here, he’s very badly hurt, and I can’t take him any farther. Perhaps you could show us where to put him—or ask Mr. Glasgow?”
“Mr. Glasgow has left;” the voice was nasal and cockney. “You can take the gentleman into his room for the present, but I’m going to have an auction of this furniture in less than a week. I’m just taking an inventory now.”
Sheets of foolscap paper were scattered on the table, the list of the furniture sprawled over them in large, black, irregular writing. Slaney had seen that writing before; she felt as if she were in a bad dream—a dream that she had dreamt before, one that was both tragic and ridiculous.
“Had I arrived lawst evening things might have been different,” went on the yellow-haired lady; “but I missed my train.”
Then, with an air that irresistibly suggested the footlights, she moved from behind the table into a clear space in the room. The bad dream culminated; Slaney knew what was coming.
“Perhaps I had better introduce myself,” said the yellow-haired lady,—“I am Mrs. Glasgow.”
Sixmonths afterwards, when the August sunshine was hot and yellow, and the streets of Dublin were in a fever from the crowd of the Horse Show week, a breeze was to be found under the elms by the polo ground in Phœnix Park. It came from the south, where the Dublin mountains were cool and blue; it was sweet with miles of warm grass, and it was nectar to the polo ponies as they were led up and down with twitching tails and soapy necks after their turn of play. The people who had driven out to see the match sat in the shade, while men and ponies wheeled and raced in the glaring heat, and stroke answered stroke, and the ball was worried about in a medley of polo sticks and ponies’ legs.
Lady Susan was sitting on an outside car by the rails, never taking her eyes off the game.
“I call that a brute of a pony,” she said, “don’t you, Captain Onslow?” to a man who stood by the car. “I mean the roan that my husband is on. Look there”—as the ball went skipping over the sunny sward, with the roan pony and his rider heading the rush after it—“see how he’s pulling, and if he gets his temper up he bolts, and there’s no holding him. I can’t bear to see Hughie on him.”
“I don’t think you need be anxious about your husband,” said Captain Onslow, inwardly a little piqued by this excessive attention to the game and its dangers, “that pony’s about the best on the ground when he’s properly played, and that’s just what is happening to him. Well hit, indeed!” as Hugh turned the ball with a smooth and clean back-hander.
“I don’t care,” murmured Lady Susan, “I call polo a beastly dangerous game.”
“It’s a true bill against Major Bunbury, isn’t it?” asked Captain Onslow, presently, lifting an eyebrow in the direction of two people standing by the rails.
“You go and ask them,” replied Lady Susan.
“Does that mean you want me to go away?” Captain Onslow said these sort of things rather well, and he wanted Lady Susan to look at him and not at the polo.
She glanced down at him in recognition. Her glance was charming.
“It means——” she began. But there came a thundering of ponies’ hoofs, a race for the ball with the roan pony getting the best of it again, and Captain Onslow had to do without knowing what Lady Susan meant.
Slaney sat by Lady Susan as they drove back, flying down through the park with that exhilarating swing and swiftness that belong exclusively to the Dublin outside car. The afternoon was more balmy sweet as the shadows lengthened and the coolness came; beyond the beautiful miles of grassand trees the western sky was gathering the warmth of sunset; opposite in the east, the brown smoke of Dublin stained the tranquil heaven, and above it a ghostly half-moon stood like a little white cloud in the depths of blue.
There are moments in life when it is given to some hearts to know their own happiness, and to know it trembling. Come what might, earth’s greatest pleasure was Slaney’s now: she knew it with all the tenderness and strong romance that were hidden in her nature, with all the comprehension of herself that had grown out of a bitter experience. It was a state of mind that seemed incompatible with the prosaic tweed coat-sleeve that rested on the car as Major Bunbury leaned across from the other side; but as he looked at her he understood that the exceeding beauty of the evening had in some way touched her nearly as it was touching him. As has been said, he kept a soul somewhere, and Slaney had found it and entered in.
“I want to tell you, Slaney,” said Lady Susan, expressing the position from her own point of view, “I never saw you look as well as you do to-day. I’m awfully glad I made you get that hat. It makes your eyes just the right colour.”
Lady Susan was beginning to think of getting out of her arm-chair to dress for dinner that night when her husband came into the room. He did not look as happy as a man ought who has hit two goals for his side and has been at the club afterwards to hear it talked about, and he came and sat on the arm of her chair without speaking.
“You don’t feel bad after all that play?” she said, taking his hand and giving him that look of solicitude and affection that can be the best thing in the world to receive.
“Not I—I’m as right as possible. I can’t remember that I ever was hurt.”
“I hate you riding the grey to-morrow at the show,” she went on; “I shall be miserable all the time. If I were riding him myself I shouldn’t remember that therewas any danger—and I suppose there isn’t really—but it’s awfully different to look on. I know it’s very rotten of me to be afraid, but you know I did get an awful fright about you—that time.”
He laughed. “You mustn’t think about all that,” he said gently, “that time is over and done with.”
There was a pause.
“I want to tell you a thing I saw at the club just now, a thing in the paper——” He seemed rather at a loss how to go on. “It was about Glasgow,” he said uncomfortably. The hand that was in his became rather stiff. “Poor chap,” Hugh went on, “he was—he met with an accident—I mean—in fact, he’s been killed.” There was silence. “He fell down the shaft of a mine or waterworks or something that he was engineering out in the Argentine Republic, and was killed on the spot. It’s a ghastly sort of thing,” he ended nervously.
She turned her head till her eyes were hidden against his shoulder. “All right,Hughie,” she said, in a muffled voice, “it’s all right. You know I don’t mind. Not really. It’s only—it’s so horrible—and it makes me think of all that time—and what they said of the bad luck, and everything——”
“Yes, I know,” he said, putting his arm round her.
“Youdobelieve me still that I was only an idiot?” she said, looking up at him with the tears in her eyes.
He kissed her.
THE END.Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,London & Bungay.