Edith Somerville & Martin Ross, The Silver Fox (1897)

Chaps IV-VI

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 raucous 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 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. Glashgow, 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 bed time. 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 wails, 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 modem 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 home ward 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 under current 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 tine 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 sealed 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 anti forehead. Then she crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fire. (p.61.)

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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 into 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 hearth stone. 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 Tally 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’ ye 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 tuned, 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 bechuxt 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 “list” 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 be, 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 bounds running like the devil over the top of the bill! 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 in explicable 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. (p.81.)

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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 be 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 wheel of the brougham turned in as if it wen 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. (p.89.)