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Edith Somerville & Martin Ross, The Silver Fox (1897)
Chaps. VII-X
Chapter VII
Mr. Glasgow made no difficulty about hunting the hounds during Hugh’s absence. The office was very much to his taste, and its obligations fitted in satisfactorily with his inclinations. These he summarized with a fine brevity. He promised himself that he would wipe French’s eye; his exact motive for doing so he did not attempt to define. He calculated that he would have four days of office before Hugh returned. Four days only! The inequality of things! he thought, with an impatient sigh, gathering up a bundle of highly unsatisfactory letters, that he had received that morning, and slamming the lid of his desk down on them.
Fortune favoured him. The weather was perfect, from a hunting point of view, there never was better scent, and the foxes ran the way they were wanted. “Bedad,” said Danny-O, “if I had a red herrin’ in a halther I couldn’t make a nater line than thimselves.” There were long jogs to the meets through the pleasant soft weather, when Lady Susan rode at the head of her husband’s hounds with the acting master, while Slaney and Bunbury followed old Danny at their heels. Once or twice they left off twelve or fourteen miles from home, and a friendship can progress marvellously in the slow return in the twilight, with the golden link of a day’s enjoyment, and the easy snatches of talk and silence of a tete-?-tete on horseback.
It had become a custom that Glasgow should dine at French’s Court on hunting days, and it was on the third of these occasions that a letter from Hugh arrived, saying that he was prolonging his visit for a few more days. The post had been brought in while dessert was in progress. Lady Susan leaned back in her chair with folded arms. They were white arms, and had that composure about them that belongs to arms accustomed from their infancy to emerge from the latest variety of sleeve.
“Hughie says that we’re bound to go to this show to-night, and he’s thanking his stars he’s out of it, the little beast!” she remarked presently. “What sort of thing will they do, Slaney? You know all about ’em, I suppose. I never went to a parochial hall in my life. Will they sing the Doxology? I never can remember exactly what the Doxology is. Oh, I say, Bunny, shall you ever forget that night we dined with old Lady Pemberton, when she wanted her pet Bishop to say grace, and she leaned over and told him in her awful solemn old way to say ’God save the Queen’!” Lady Susan laughed her loud short laugh, and looked across the round table at Major Bunbury.
Glasgow, sitting beside her, caught at that passing flash of her glance that was intended for him specially, and replied to it with an intimacy that startled Slaney. His face was pale, and had the tired look that comes with mental rather than physical fatigue, but the crisp tingle of the champagne had given its inimitable fillip; the excellence of the dinner had brought him into charity with all men - even with his Irish workmen - and the warm luxury and charm of the surroundings had the effect of a perfume whose dizzy fragrance can steep mind and body in repose. The anxieties that he had to bear alone, the reverses that hit him harder than he dared admit, slept in this atmosphere of ease. “Lovely Thais” sat beside him, and the gods had considerately prolonged the absence of her husband. Even Slaney, who might at one time have complicated the situation, now fell into her place in the general sentiment of repose, and made a pleasant background of literary intelligence and perceptiveness, he remembered only as a transient caprice the moment, unforgettable for her, that had given her life its first touch of passion. He finished his glass of burgundy, and took a cigarette from the silver box that his hostess pushed towards him.
“We’ll play bezique in the ’bus,” pursued Lady Susan; “we couldn’t possibly talk for six miles. I should go to sleep.”
“Oh, heavens, not more cards!” groaned Bunbury. “Do you know, Miss Morris, that she made me play rubicon bezique with her for three hours on end this afternoon. I’d hardly got my boots off when she sent William to hurry me down. I wish she’d teach William to play with her.”
“I used to play ’Spoilt Five’ with the yard boys when I was a child,” said Slaney. “I never aspired to any one as grand as William. We used to play secretly in an old loose box, and the cards were so black that we only knew them by private marks on their backs.”
Her eyes were clear and half shy, like a boy’s. Bunbury looked at her delicate, clever hand, and tried to imagine it holding the grimy cards, and wondered how it was that so many impossible things were possible in Ireland.
The concert in the Parochial Hall at Letter Kyle was neither more nor less than such entertainments are wont to be. Lady Susan, in her gorgeous sortie-de-bal, sat in the front row and carried on a conversation with Mr. Glasgow that, thanks to the vigour of her lungs, was quite unhampered by the efforts of the performers, and was only interrupted when some achievement of Letter Kyle millinery stupefied her into a moment of silence. Slaney was inured to parochial concerts. It was beside her that Glasgow had sat at the last of them, not so many months ago. She remembered how angry Uncle Charles had been because they laughed when the school-master’s wife had tranquilly omitted the top note in “The Lost Chord” as being beyond her compass. To-night she felt as though a wall had been built between her and the founts of laughter.
Weighted by encores, the dismal programme wore on, and it was eleven o’clock before the French’s Court party could escape from the long incarceration in hot aft, winnowed by draughts that were heavy with hair oil. Slaney leaned back in the corner of the ’bus, and the darkness of the heart that she had been striving with fell upon her like a tangible thing. In spite of hot-water tins and a vast fur rug the cold breath of a foggy night made itself felt. The faces of the four occupants of the ’bus glimmered white as the glimmer of the windows. Glasgow was sitting beside Slaney, and some feeling blended of compunction and of desire to retain a captive, made him try to involve her in the desultory talk. She tasted a certain joyless gratification in ignoring him. The road was very dark as they drove through a wood, and the glimmer of Slaney’s face was almost lost when Glasgow, determined to remind her of the kiss that had so lightly come and gone between the firelight and the moonlight, slid his hand along the rug, and took hers with confident tenderness. It was gone from him in a moment, and Slaney, with that level politeness of voice that is the distilled essence of a perfected anger, was telling Lady Susan that her head ached, and that she would like to sit by the door.
Lady Susan changed places with her, and presently fell to arranging, with Mr. Glasgow, the details of an expedition up the new railway line in a cattle-truck. Their voices sank gradually to that level that indicates to an outside world that it is superfluous. What they said seemed to be wholly trivial, and flagrant only in aridness; yet the low voices, half-lost in the noise of the wheels, had a quality that drove Bunbury and Slaney into a conversation lame with consciousness of what it tried to ignore.
Glasgow’s dog-cart was waiting for him at French’s Court, and it waited long before the supper was over, at which Lady Susan made amends for her philanthropy in cigarettes and hock and seltzer. When the door at length opened to let the guest out into the fog, Lady Susan was near it, tall and resplendent, with the fur of her glistening silk wrap clinging round her white neck. The door closed, and as she turned away she saw something white under its flap.
“I say, it’s a letter,” she exclaimed, stooping for it, “some one must have dropped it, and it caught under the door. Why, it’s for Hughie - looks like a washerwoman’s bill. Funny way of sending it in, isn’t it?” she yawned hugely; “well, it will keep, anyhow. Let’s go to bed; good-night, my dears.” She flung the letter on a table and rustled up-stairs.
Slaney was in the habit of saying her prayers. She knelt down and put her head into the soft cushion of the chair, conscious of little except that she had flung down the burden of another day. She remained for a long time on her knees, with a blank, spent mind, soothed in some dull way by the suggestions of her attitude, till a slight sound on the terrace, under her open window, made her lift her head and listen.
The sound came and went, and Slaney was roused to put aside the curtains and look down. There was nothing to be seen but the fog that had risen out of the sea and settled on the land, with frost and moonlight blended in its whiteness; all the world seemed arrested and tranced, all the air charged with its cold and mysterious presence.
“It was a rabbit,” she said to herself, and instantly, as if to contradict her, a black-and-grey collie passed quickly under the window, with its nose down as if running a trail.
(p.99.)
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Chapter VIII
The ring of the trowel travelled far on the wind across the heather, a voice of civilization, saying pertinent, unhesitating things to a country where all was loose, and limitless, and inexact. Up here, by the shores of Lough Ture, people had, from all ages, told the time by the sun, and half-an-hour either way made no difference to any one; now - most wondrous of all impossibilities - the winter sunrise was daily heralded by the steely shriek of an engine whirling truckloads of men to their work across the dark and dumb bog-lands. The trout in the lakes no longer glided to safety at the recurrence of the strange tremor and clatter that accompanied the twilights, the wild duck no longer splashed into wing along the water’s surface, and the people scattered among the hillsides already counted as their chiefest landmark the red gable of the new railway-station. Every morning saw a villageful of men shot into it; bricklayers working high up in the gable, stone-cutters dressing limestone blocks with infinite chip and clink, workmen shovelling gravel, and over all the voice of the ganger arising at intervals in earnest, profuse profanity. The Dublin artisans worked in silence, except when one or other trolled forth one of the ditties of his class - genteel romance, with a waltz refrain, or obscure vulgarity of the threepenny music-hall, yet representing to the singer the songs of Zion in a strange land; while the local gang used every chance of proximity to carry on a low growl of conversation. Whether it was the party of twenty whose picks and spades were gradually levelling and filling the unfinished platform, or the two whose voices ascended in Irish from the depths of the well that they were sinking, the general topic was the same, and was one that intimately concerned Mr. Glasgow.
“Jim Mulloy’s brother told me he seen the paymasther ’ere yestherday in Letther Kyle,” said a withered little man, who was mixing mortar with extraordinary deliberation. “He was comin’ out o’ the bank, an’ he havin’ the brown bag with him.”
“Maybe it’s little chance oursel’ has of it, whether or no,” responded his satellite, a red-faced youth, whose occupation of eternally shaking sand through a sieve might well foster pessimism. “Don’t ye know well thim isn’t workin’ for nothin’” - indicating the bricklayers on the gable, and the portly and prosperous stonemasons, chipping away in professional silence. “Short thim fellows’d be leggin’ it away to Dublin if they wasn’t gettin’ their pay; an’ d—d well Glasgow knows it’s the likes of us must be waitin’ on him!”
The man who was supplying the sand tilted his barrow up on end and leaned on the handles, secure in the knowledge that the ganger was engaged at the other side of the station in raining down expletives upon the heads of the sinkers of the well.
“It’s what they’re sayin’ beyond,” he remarked, jerking his head in the direction of the men working at the platform, “that what has him desthroyed is the bog of Tully. Eight months now they’re sthrivin’ to fill that spot.”
“An’ if they were eight months more,” said the man who was mixing the mortar, “they’ll not fill it,” He took off the tin lid of his pipe and stirred up its embers with a horny fore-finger. “Betther for him not to be intherfarin’ with the likes o’ that place.”
The pessimist with the sieve laughed with the superiority of youth, and of a reader of the Daily Independent.
“There’s wather runnin’ undher the ground there in every place,” went on the same speaker, “me father knew that well - sure the bog itsel’ is only sittin’ on it. There’s holes up in Cahirdreen that’s sixty feet deep, and wather runnin’ in the bottom o’ them. ’Tis out undher Tully that wather goes. Sure there was a man had a grand heifer - God knows ye’d sooner be lookin’ at her than atin’ yer dinner - she fell down in one o’ them holes, and went away undher the ground with the wather. As sure as I’m alive, they heard her screeching up through the bog!” The reader of the Independent was half-staggered, and the ganger, who had advanced upon the party with the quietness of a dangerous bull, here broke upon the conversation in gross and fervid oratory.
“They’re gettin’ it in style down there,” said one of the platform party. “By damn, if he comes to talkin’ to me, I’ll throw down the shovel and ax him where is me three weeks’ wages!”
“Maybe ye will, Mortheen,” rejoined his next-door neighbour, “an’ maybe this time next week ye’ll be afther him axing him to take ye back.”
“Is it him?” replied the undaunted Mortheen; “little I’d think of breaking his snout for him, or Glasgow’s ayther!”
As he spoke, the whistle of an engine, thinned by distance, made itself heard, and away on the horizon the steam cloud blossomed like a silver flower against the sunny sky.
When the engine and its accompanying brake-van drew up at the station, Glasgow’s eye could discover no flaw in the exemplary and dead silent industry that prevailed. The shovelfuls flung by Mortheen were heavier and more frequent than those of his fellows, and even the spectacle of Lady Susan emerging in sables from the van and passing among the buckets and heaps of lime, did not seem to be noticed by so much as the lift of an eyelid. It was almost one o’clock, and the ganger, transformed into an official of submissive urbanity, sounded his whistle for the dinner-hour. The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds, and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step.
Their employer’s picnic-party was already established in the newly-roofed kitchen of the new station, by a fire of chips and bits of plank. A luncheon-basket stood on a carpenter’s bench, a champagne-bottle on the window-sill, and Lady Susan and Slaney were sitting on boxes by the fire, eating game pie. Lady Susan had violets in her toque, and possessed more strikingly than usual that air of being very handsome that is not always given to handsome people. Behind her the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a myriad sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the grey and faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host.
“How far do you want us to walk?” she said, looking over her shoulder at the view, “all the way to that wood there? How silly of you to say the bikes would be no use!”
“I don’t dispute the fact that they would have been of use to you and Major Bunbury,” replied her host, cutting the wires of the second bottle of champagne.
“It’s so contemptible of you not to learn the bike,” she went on, with a manner half discontented, half brusque. “It’s all prejudice.”
“I’m beginning to cultivate prejudice,” said Glasgow, retaining the cork with skill, “it’s so respectable. Churchwardens and generals and heads of departments are always prejudiced.”
“I didn’t know that you were so wonderfully addicted to respectability,” said Lady Susan, with a laugh and a look that made Slaney feel rather hot - “since when, may I ask?” Lady Susan was too careless and too little disposed for the toils of finesse to foster a flirtation for its own sake; when she did find a sufficing motive, these same qualities created a startling directness of method.
“Since when?” repeated Glasgow. “Oh, since I took to church- going, I suppose. Perhaps Miss Morris could tell you!”
Slaney had become accustomed to these morsels flung to the memory of a past, but they never failed to remind her of the moment when she had placed herself for ever at a disadvantage.
“I’m not a very good authority,” she said, with a smile as cold as the January wind; “Uncle Charles has a better memory for things connected with church-going.”
The intention to be unresponsive often makes itself felt more disagreeably than a repartee. It annoyed Glasgow, even while he set it down as an indirect tribute to his desertion.
“I refuse to be described as a thing connected with church-going,” he said, looking straight at her and laughing; “I thought I had other associations.”
Major Bunbury looked up quickly, not at Glasgow, but at Slaney. Her flushed silence was obvious enough for any one, except Lady Susan, who merely supposed that champagne at luncheon was having its almost inevitable result on the complexion. Perhaps it was by contrast that Glasgow’s habitual pallor seemed pastiness, and his easy manner something that struck Major Bunbury as being like bad form.
“I say,” remarked Lady Susan, “when are we to go on and see this wonderful waterfall, or whatever it is? Where are the cigarettes? Let’s light up before we start.”
“I think you’d better not,” said Glasgow, “the men will be back directly.”
“Well, what do they matter?”
“I think you’d better not,” he repeated, in that intimate tone that seemed so uncalled for.
Lady Susan put up her eyebrows with an expression of petulant inquiry, and something as near a pout as was possible for a person not versed in the habit, but she shut her cigarette-case. Major Bunbury thought he had never seen her look so foolish.
“Is she going to lose her head about him?” was the question that was suddenly driven in upon him. Until to-day, he thought she was merely occupying idleness and exhibiting indifferent taste.
He and Slaney walked behind her and Glasgow along the muddy road, in that double tete-a-tete now become inevitable; the wind blew cold and sweet off the lake and off the bog - cold, and sweet, and inimitably Irish, like Slaney herself, as Major Bunbury was at this moment capable of expressing it, if he had known that he was making the comparison. His mind had unconsciously stored up many such impressions of her, to what end it had not occurred to him to inquire. The road crossed a trout-stream, and by the bridge Glasgow and Lady Susan turned off and began to follow the bank of the little river through a stunted and intricate wood. In the track by which they made their way it was not possible to walk side by side; Bunbury went first, sometimes holding back a branch, sometimes giving her his hand when the rocks of the river brink thrust their slippery shoulders across the way. They spoke little, and by the gift of imaginative sympathy that was hers for those who interested her, she knew that his silence was vexed with misgiving about Lady Susan.
The river was brimming full, and, as it raced, the black water and the cold froth washed in deep eddies between the rocks; the sunlit bank opposite was red with withered bracken and sedge; the soft booming of a waterfall came to the ear. Passing round the curve they saw the thick and creamy column of water plunge from its edge of low crag to its ruin among the boulders; above it two or three battered fir-trees stood on the high ground, grey and straight and rigid beside the lavish rush and confusion.
Lady Susan was leaning against one of the fir-trees, smoking her cigarette, and looking fixedly and dreamily at the water; Glasgow, with her fur-lined coat on his arm, was standing very close to her, looking as if he had said something to which she had not as yet replied. She did not move when Slaney and Bunbury joined them, and was unaffectedly uninterested in general conversation, Slaney had never thought her so handsome; her eyes seemed to look out of her heart and into a remote place unseen of others, instead of summing up things around her with her wonted practical glance.
It was against all theories of woman-kind, yet the fact remained that Slaney liked Lady Susan.
(p.112.)
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Chapter IX
The party returned to the station by different ways, that chosen by Slaney and Bunbury involving a good deal of wandering by dark and intricate paths in the hollow of the wood before the high road again was reached. The other half of the picnic was not in sight; and when Slaney and her companion arrived at the station, the engine, and brake van, in which they had come, had disappeared, and in their place was another engine that had come up the line with a train of trucks. It was a small and very dirty engine, the driver’s white jumper was as grimy as his face, and coal-dust and oil had gone hand-in-hand to effect a general and thorough defilement.
The ganger explained the position respectfully. 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, helpless 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 suspicion. 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 drains into mirrors for the keen colours of a winter sunset. There was not as yet a signal worked on the line; they must trust to eyesight and pluck for the safety of an engine driven at nearly its best speed; and the strident shriek tore the air incessantly, and each curve or cutting meant a slackening and an instant of suspense before the long vista opened clear, and they were away again with that living bound that thrilled Slaney’s unaccustomed heart as only pace can thrill. She began to understand that they were racing against time and luck to intercept - what? Could it be to foil the insane impulse of a woman who had lost her head in the terrible discovery that she had a heart?
The miles fleeted past, until the engine and its pent scream burst forth from the clanging walls of a rock cutting, and skirting a lake, entered on the great brown plain of Tully bog. A double line of drains, fed by innumerable cuts, made a herring-bone pattern on either side; the spongy gravel sprang beneath the strides of the engine; the water in the drains flapped and washed in sympathy against its peat walls. It seemed a singular audacity of engineering to force a line of rails across such a morass. Three miles away the heights of Cahirdreen were dark in the evening sky; recognizing them, Slaney felt the influence of an evil fate cross her keen excitement like a cold streak - like a shiver across the heat of fever. The driver looked at his watch, and, with one hand on the brake, added the last possible five miles an hour to the pace. The engine seemed to be swallowing the endless strip of line that flowed into its clutch; the motion felt like sliding on a wire, without effort or possibility of stopping. Thundering along an imperceptible curve, they neared the hill, with its fir-trees ranged in tall and quiet ranks in the twilight. At a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, the cutting opened before them as they rounded the bend, and all four uttered a simultaneous exclamation. The V- shaped cleft held a dark obstruction.
Instantly, with a jar and a jerk, the brakes were on at their full power, and Slaney was leaning back as if to hold off the shock that was already sending shoots of anticipation through her feet and fingers. Shouts, and the whistling of another engine came through the noise, the brakes bit, and shoved, and clung. Somewhere in the jolting, deafening seconds an arm came strongly round Slaney’s waist, and drew her towards the footboard. She understood that if the worst came she was to jump with Major Bunbury; then another hand caught her skirt, and pulled her back. She recognized the driver’s filthy white sleeve, and at the same moment some one shouted that they were safe. Squeaking, and grinding, and skidding, the engine was fought to a standstill, while yet ten yards separated it from the buffers of the brake van in which Lady Susan and Glasgow had started an hour before. Fifty yards further on, the line was blocked by a great pile of gravel and rock, newly fallen from the side of the cutting.
Lady Susan and Glasgow were there; her face looked wild and white, and as she came to Slaney, she seemed to struggle to speak. It was a moment of extremes and exaggeration in feeling. Slaney felt that two independent currents of supreme and foreordained evil had made their onslaught, and, in meeting, had neutralized each other.
(p.119.) [ top ]
Chapter X
Mr. Glasgow’s brown hunter, Solomon, had not lived his thirteen years in vain. When he was led out into the yard one idle forenoon, and was there walked and trotted up and down in front of his owner and two strange men in tight trousers, and when, later, one of the strange men, who had the knowledgeable light fingers of a vet., passed his hand down his legs, and looked into his eyes, and pinched his throat, Solomon knew that it looked like his fifth change of owners. Afterwards he was taken out and cantered in a field, and though he felt chilly and dull, he jumped a trial bank with self-respect, and with the consciousness that he was giving a lead to the chestnut, who did not understand the principle of jumping in cold blood.
He was not mistaken in the purport of these things. Glasgow felt a pain about his throat as he saw the old horse walk into his stall again. He had not thought he would have minded, so much. He stood by in the silence that characterizes horse-dealing, while the chestnut underwent examination, and looked round the yard at the miscellaneous collection of wreckage from his railway contract - the broken pumping-engine, the automatic crossing-gates that would not work, the corrugated iron hut that the men would not sleep in - and said to himself that the luck had been against him. It did not occur to him that he had shouldered his competitors out of the contract by a tender that left no margin for mistakes. Mr. Glasgow never made mistakes, but he had based his brilliant and minute calculations on the theory that the cheap Irish labour would accomplish as much in the day as the costly English, and the fact that it had not done so was obviously beyond the sphere of rational calculation. In the long stable at the other side of the yard a heavy hoof was dealing sledge-hammer kicks to the stall, and Glasgow, as he heard it, estimated what price the creditors would get for the big dray-horses that he had brought over from England for the railway work. When he thought of the value of the plant that he was going to leave behind, he scarcely felt like a defaulter: there would be more than enough realized to pay the men, and the Railway Company could afford to lose. There remained to him his private means, the Argentine Republic, his own consider able gifts as a civil engineer, and - Would Lady Susan remain? He felt little doubt about that part of his future.
Mr. Andrew Murphy was offering him, in the accents of Tipperary, a hundred pounds for the two horses - seventy for the chestnut and thirty for old Solomon - and he was holding out for a hundred and twenty with his usual decision. If there were a weakness in his business dealings, it lay in his determination to be decisive at all points. The small and deliberate methods of expediency were intolerable to him; he would rather do without bread than accept the half-loaf. Now, even while each trivial episode was tinged with the reflected light of his future, and all were converging towards an immediate crisis, he held to his point, and had not Mr. Murphy known of an immediate customer for Solomon, the bargain might have ended untimely. As it was, the two horses changed hands at Mr. Glasgow’s price, with the understanding that both could be hunted next day by their former owner. Mr. Glasgow insisted on this point, and took all risks.
When it was all over, and Mr. Murphy and the vet, had had whiskies-and-sodas and gone away, Glasgow went back to his office and took up again his task of burning and sorting papers. Being habitually orderly in his habits, the work went steadily, and, to all appearance, without effort; yet, as the time went on, his pale face became jaded and grey, and the lines about his mouth deepened.
The terrace at French’s Court witnessed that afternoon the least dignified of earthly sights - the struggles of a lady-beginner on a bicycle. It was somewhat of a descent from the heroics of forty miles an hour on an engine, yet as Slaney, flushed and dishevelled, wobbled to her one-and-twentieth overthrow, the past and future were forgotten in the ignoble excitements of the moment. Major Bunbury, himself in no mean condition of heat, picked her up out of a holly-bush and started her again; he had been doing the same thing for half-an-hour, but it had not seemed to pall. When the two- and-twentieth collapse had been safely accomplished, Slaney confessed to feeling somewhat shattered, and returning to the hall, sank into a chair, with aching knees and hands seamed with gravel. “It’s nothing to what you’ll feel like to-morrow,” said Major Bunbury, encouragingly. “You rode into the pillar of the gate so very hard last time.” He looked down at her from his position on the hearthrug, and then glanced across to the dusky, comfortable corner where the piano was. “I wonder if you remember that you said you were too tired this morning to play that Impromptu?”
“My hands were, and are, permanently hooked from holding on to the rail on the engine,” said Slaney, whose spirits had risen as surprisingly as her colour with her first experience on the bicycle, “and no one with a proper sense of how things ought to be would have expected me to do anything but lie on the sofa and faint. Instead of which, I am asked to sit on a music-stool and humiliate myself by playing things that I don’t know.”
“I think Susan looks more knocked out of time than you do,” remarked Bunbury, after one of those comfortable pauses that mark intimacy, “and they really had not so near a shave as we had. They weren’t going anything like our pace when they saw that the cutting had fallen in.” Another pause. “By the way, did you - did you understand that I thought we should have to jump, that time that I - that I put my arm round you?
“Oh, perfectly,” said Slaney distantly, and blushed with fervour. “Mr. Glasgow did not seem to mind missing his train, after all,” she went on, speeding into the topic she most wished to avoid, as is frequently the fate of those who talk for the sake of changing the conversation.
“I believe that was all a mistake. Glasgow hadn’t the slightest idea of going; he only wanted to see one of the directors who was travelling up by the mail,” said Bunbury elaborately.
“Susan waited for us at the station till she was frozen,” continued Slaney, taking her share in the apology. “She would have come on our engine only that it would have spoiled her box cloth coat.”
“Do you know where she is now?” asked Bunbury, after another silence.
“She said something about going to look for daffodils. I saw her going up the back way towards the woods some time ago.”
“Are you too tired to walk up to meet her? You may choose between that and playing the Impromptu.”
They went up the hill at the back of the house by a seldom-used avenue, where cart wheels had made deep brown ruts in the grass, and the bordering oaks hung their branches low and unpruned; pale winter pastures spread on either side, and the cattle were already moving downwards towards their night’s lodging. Yet the hint of coming spring was in the lengthened afternoon; stiff-necked daffodil buds were beginning to bend their heads and show the hoarded gold through the jealous green, and thrushes were twining a net of song in the shrubberies below. It is in the days of February that the Irish air begins again to breathe suggestion - no longer mere food for the lungs, it invades the heart, and bewilders the brain with griefs and hopes. Even to the dimming of the eye that smell of the fields entered into Slaney; with a new and strong understanding of herself she could have wept for the guileless egoist who had been Slaney Morris when last the February winds blew sweet.
“Have you written that letter to say that you are not going home to- morrow?” said Bunbury, as he held open the gate that admitted them into the wood.
He had realized during his walk up across the pastures that days in which Slaney had no share would be strangely meaningless. Not being introspective the discovery was sudden enough to set his blood beating and his heart instinctively aching. He knew that she could look forward to days without him as unconcernedly as she would look back to days with him; she was self-sufficing, as the ideal ever seems to be the idealizer, and such as he had no portion beyond the opening of gates for her to pass through. Major Bunbury’s elder sister must have faithfully fulfilled the mission of elder sisters, or else his natural estimation of himself was low.
“No,” replied Slaney, with her eyes on the ground, “after all, I made up my mind not to write.”
“Your mind was made up the other way when you talked about it after breakfast,” said Bunbury, looking down at her as she flicked a fir-cone aside with her stick. “Do you generally change it every few hours?”
“Emerson says that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” replied Slaney, with a little sententious air that Bunbury found exasperatingly charming.
“Does Emerson say that Uncle Charles is a hobgoblin for small minds, and could very well look after himself for another week?” There was a resentment in Major Bunbury’s voice that he did not try to conceal.
“He says nothing of the sort. He might have said Uncle Charles was a Diocesan Nominator; only he forgot to,” said Slaney, still preoccupied with the carpet of pine needles on which they were walking. “But as you’re not an Irishman,” she went on, “I suppose you don’t even know what that is?”
“It seems to be a thing that requires a great deal of unnecessary attention, and can’t take care of itself,” said Bunbury gloomily.
“Well, you’re quite wrong,” replied Slaney, looking up with a laugh that was shy and friendly, and a little conscious. She was not accustomed to finding that her comings and goings were of importance to people like Major Bunbury. “It’s a most self- sufficing and useful thing. It goes away at intervals to elect clergymen for the Irish Church, and it sent over a note this afternoon to say I was not to go home for two or three days.”
Bunbury was quite silent for a few moments; then, while the pine- needle carpet seemed to rise up under his feet, he took her ungloved right hand, and raised it, stick and all, to meet his face as he bent over it, like a man stooping to drink. He kissed it, hurriedly and awkwardly, but in an instant the fine and slender fingers had escaped from his lip; and he stood by her, speechless and dizzy. In that moment of silence his heart opened and let in her dearness like a flood; before the next could dawn with its possibilities, a woman’s voice broke out of the wood, through twilight barred with tree stems. It was so near, it was so whetted with agony, so flung about with gusts of passion, that, for the moment, oblivious of what had just passed, they stared at each other for the space of a long-held breath, and were carried on towards it with that instinct that drags every human being towards suffering. A smell of wood- smoke drifted lightly in the air; it strengthened as a bend of the path straightened before them, till they saw among the trees a group of men, a fire of fir-branches crackling in a bed of red ember and white ash, and down at the left side of the path a pond that glimmered darkly in a pale setting of sedgy grass. There was a punt on the pond, and boat-hooks and ropes were flung about. Glasgow was standing by, why or how it did not occur to Slaney to inquire. There were several countrymen whom she recognized, and all seemed silently intent on some central catastrophe.
The woman’s voice was unintelligible now, half-smothered and near the ground, as if her mouth were laid against the grass. Two men stooped and tried to pull her to her feet. A red head appeared, swaying, as when, a month before, Maria Quin staggered through the drunken crowd while they closed her father’s coffin. Slaney saw now what it was that lay on the ground beside her; the fixed sprawl of the limbs in the soaked clothing, the discoloured cheek, torn by boat-hooks; it expressed with terrific completeness the hunted life, the lonely act of death that had attained such peace as this stillness might betoken.
Tom Quin’s black-and-grey dog moved restlessly round the body of his master, sniffing closely at the face, trying to turn over with his nose the rigid hand that still clutched a fragment of sodden reed, in that dumb distress and fear of death that animals must bear uncomforted. Slaney dragged her eyes from the engrossing horror of it, and in doing so met those of Lady Susan at the far side of the group; but nothing seemed strange to her now, not even the white fixity of Lady Susan’s face, that told of a plucky woman strongly moved.
At that instant Maria Quin broke out of the group and confronted Glasgow, eyes and face and voice beyond all control or desire of it, and repellent as human frenzy must inevitably be.
“If it wasn’t for the way you had him persecuted,” she yelled, “he wouldn’t be thrown out there on the grass undher yer feet. ’Twas you refused him the money back and dhrew the curse on him till ye had him wandhering the counthry night and day like a wild goose. Couldn’t annyone know the crayture’s heart was broke whin he threw the scafflin’ off him and left it on the stone by the brink? Oh, God and His Mother! He knew he couldn’t dhrown if that was on him “ - she held up the scapulary that Quin, like most Irish Roman Catholics, wore round his neck, and shook it in Glasgow’s face - “and you to come walkin’ through the woods with yer lover, so quiet! That yersel’ 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 a 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 he 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 a girl.
She turned to follow them, but she had not gone more than a few yards when she heard a step behind her. Glasgow over took her, and without speaking began to walk beside her; he looked straight in front of him, and something about his movement and the carriage of his head told her that he was entirely absorbed in hot white anger.
“I hope you are gratified at the result of encouraging superstition,” he said at last, in a voice that told of the inward pressure of feeling.
“It seems to have been more the result of discouraging it,” she replied, without attempting to keep out of her voice the antagonism that was in her heart.
“It would be simpler if you said at once that honest or sane people had better give up having any dealings with the Irish,” he returned hotly.
“Do you mean English people? They certainly have not been eminently successful so far.”
Slaney felt quite cool, and Glasgow wondered how he had ever found her attractive.
“As you are a friend of these Quins,” he said, holding his temper back, but not his imperiousness, “I think it would be as well if you advised that woman to take care about what she says of me, as she may get herself into trouble.”
He forgot for the moment the trouble that lay ahead of him; yet the strong nervous excitement that fed his anger was due to the imminence of that trouble, forgotten or no.
“I think advice would be rather thrown away on her just now,” replied Slaney, thinking of what lay by the pool, and of the wet torn face that the dog smelt at; “even Irish people feel things sometimes.”
She suddenly became aware of the spring of tears that lies at the back of a shock, and she bit her lip and drove her stick hard into the ground as she walked.
“I can only suppose then,” he said, “that you don’t object to hearing your friends publicly libelled.”
He held the gate of the wood open for her, and she walked through as stiff as a dart. She knew quite well what sentence of Maria Quin’s it was that was foremost on his ear, and it was intolerable that he should take his stand beside Lady Susan. Her distrust of him had become so invincible that she felt Lady Susan to be a bird in the snare of the fowler; she could not think of her as a confederate.
“Can’t you realize,” she said, at last, “that nothing I could say would do any good now?”
“I see,” he sneered, while he sought among his cast-iron theories of women for something that should fit this abnormal one. “You mean that it is no use to hope that a woman will hold her tongue, whether it be to her own advantage or not!”
The long-pent anger suddenly stirred in her, and with it the resolution that had long lain dormant.
“Would it surprise you to hear,” she began, with the sensation of coming into the open, under fire, “that a woman has held her tongue about you for some time past?”
He half turned and looked hard at her. “I have ceased to be surprised at anything a woman may do, but I should certainly like to hear the particulars of such a piece of self-sacrifice.” Slaney hesitated. It was nearly impossible to say it. The twilight was failing and the thrushes in the shrubberies below were piercing it with long shafts of rhapsody. Lady Susan and Bunbury were walking under the bare and drooping branches some distance in front.
“Well,” repeated Glasgow, “what about this martyr to principle?”
“It was I,” she said, and everything around seemed to throb and stand still, like her heart.
“Perhaps you will kindly explain what you mean,” he said, very coldly and politely.
“You lent me a book last month - the Fortnightly Review - and I found a letter to you in it, a letter that you had forgotten was there.”
He remained silent for a moment, and then spoke with a jerk - “May I ask who it was from?”
“A woman.”
“You read it?”
“I could hardly help reading it, it was all on the first sheet.”
She looked at him with the courage of an honourable nature owning to what it would self-righteously have despised in another, and he saw the moistness in her eyes.
“Oh yes, I understand that quite well,” he replied, with a quickness that did honour both to him and to her.
There was a pause.
“I burned it at once,” she added.
“Oh!” There was no shade of feeling in the monosyllable. “I remember the letter you speak of,” he went on very quietly; “what I cannot understand is why you have told me of it? I can hardly think it was for the sake of saying something unpleasant.”
“It was because I am fond of Lady Susan,” she said desperately.
In the silence that followed it seemed to her as though she had thrown a heavy stone into deep water, without hope of result beyond the broken mirror and the flagging ripple. (p.140.)
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