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

Chaps. XI-XIV

Chapter XI
Next morning, while the last of three white frosts was vanishing from the grass, Hugh stood in the hall at French’s Court, pinning a bunch of violets into his red coat. Tops and waistcoat, tie and pin, obeyed to a hair-breadth the minute rigour of male fashion in the hunting-field, the violets made their bold yet not exasperating contrast with the scarlet, and Hugh’s pale face was almost picturesque in its gay and vivid setting. Taking up his flask, he went to the dining-room and filled it at the sideboard with old liqueur brandy; he poured out a glass from the same bottle, and was going to raise it to his lips, when he heard voices outside the open door. One of the voices was his wife’s, and he heard it with that sense of severance from her affairs that had been his since he and his gun-cases had reappeared at French’s, Court the evening before. He was not usually sensitive to social temperatures, but it seemed to him that there was something flat and ungenial about the whole party. Bunbury was spasmodically agreeable, Slaney was silent, his wife was heavy-eyed and listless; he encouraged and nurtured the bitter conviction that no one wanted him.
 “I suppose you’re riding Gambler to day?” Major Bunbury was saying to some one in the hall.
 “No,” replied Lady Susan, speaking rather quickly and indistinctly, “I’m riding Mr. Glasgow’s old horse, Solomon, you know. He came over last night. I’ve always wanted to try him.” Bunbury whistled a few bars of a tune, and knocked down things in the whip-rack.
 “Hugh’s riding that grey,” she went on; “it’s quite absurd. He can’t do anything with him, and he only makes an exhibition of himself.”
 “Oh, the horse is all right now,” replied Bunbury, lowering his voice; “he was very green that first day that Hugh rode him.”
 “Very well,” she said, “you’ll see. He won’t take that horse across two fences to-day.”
 Bunbury passed on out of the hall door, and left Lady Susan standing on the door step. She looked up at the cold blue and uncertain grey of the sky, and out at the ruffled and hazy sea, the strong light showing lines of sleeplessness about her eyes; then, turning back into the house, she met her husband. She did not suppose that he had overheard her, yet she was aware of something in his lonely face that she did not care to look at. She went to the table and took up her gloves without speaking.
 “Hum!” she exclaimed, “there’s a letter here that came for you. I found it on the floor one night, and didn’t think it worth sending on. Some one has shoved it behind the card-tray.”
 Hugh looked at the vulgar and rambling handwriting, and mechanically tore open the envelope. It was a letter clearly written in close and crooked lines, and its purport appeared to be a confused complaint of “persecution” received from the hounds in connection with the covert of Cahirdreen. Hugh read on with a frowning brow. In other days he would have asked his wife to come and read it over his shoulder, but that time seemed now very far away.
 Glasgow’s name appeared in the letter, with more complaints of persecution; he hardly tried to understand what it was all about. All at once his wife’s name seemed to leap out from the paper, and to sink back, indelible, irrevocable, linked to Glasgow’s by two or three gross and barbarous phrases, by a warning not less crude, by a cunning treatment of the matter as one of common knowledge. There was no signature, no thing to suggest its connection with the dead hand that still clutched the broken reed when Tom Quin’s body was taken from the pond.
 Hugh raised his eyes and looked at his wife, tasting in that moment the transcendent anguish of the mind that once or twice in a lifetime teaches the body what suffering can be. She was buttoning her glove, standing tall and straight in the light from the open door, in all the spotless austerity of her iron-grey habit and white tie. She seemed far out of the reach of accusation, yet, as he took in every well-known line, forgotten things rose up against her in an evil swarm. His belief in her was falling with the fall of a strong and shading tree; he clung to it even as it fell; and all the while she stood and buttoned the glove across her white wrist.
 At half-past eleven a misty fog was drifting loosely up from the south-west on the shoulders of the thaw, and the group of riders outside the covert of Cahirdreen began to turn up their collars. It was a small group, and an eye accustomed to the usual muster would have noticed at once the absence of Mr. Glasgow; he was one of the people whose presence makes itself felt in all the varied fortunes of a day’s hunting. As the minutes passed, and the horses nibbled idly at the gorse in the fence, the dispensary doctor closed the top of his flask with a snap, and remarked facetiously that he supposed business must sometimes come before pleasure, even with railway contractors.
 Lady Susan was at a little distance, apparently absorbed, as was her wont, in attentiveness to what was going on in covert. At the laugh that followed Dr. Hallahan’s remark, she moved away, and rode slowly along the edge of the wood. She was on Solomon, who had already taken full note of a lighter hand, a lighter weight, and the absence of spurs; he had had ideas about bucking on the road to testify his appreciation of these things, but on finding that Lady Susan had also ideas of her own on the subject, he had made up his mind to treat her with respect. She rode on round the top of the covert, and stationed herself on its farther side; Solomon stood like a rock, with his brown roach back humped against the cold mist.
 The hounds had been put in at the lower end of the wood, and were working through it, so far without result. As before, when Cahirdreen had been drawn, Danny-O was not to be found when the time came for him to take the hounds through the covert, and the master, on his grey horse, was riding up a track in the heart of the wood, where the mist had as yet scarcely made its way, and the silence dwelt like a spirit The horse went ever more slowly among the slender stems of the fir-trees, sharing in the lethargy conveyed by the slack rein and the loose leg of his rider, while the hounds were pushing well ahead through the briars and the bracken, leaving Hugh behind. A straggler or two passed him by, with a wary eye on the whip, not realizing, as the house dog so readily does, that human beings have preoccupations in which dogs can be ignored.
 It was some time before Hugh noticed the fact that there was somebody near him in the wood - a figure moving among the trees at a little distance. The Scotch firs and larch had been thinned out here for sale to the contractor of the new railway line, and the wood was more open. The figure was that of an old man, who seemed to be advancing in a direction parallel with Hugh. Sometimes the misty fog blotted him out, sometimes the grouping of the tree-stems conspired to hide him; he went onward as if fitfully; the moments when he was lost to sight scarcely accounted for his reappearances farther on. He shuffled like an infirm man, yet his progress through the undergrowth was so steady that it seemed as if he were walking on a path. Irritated at length by the persistent espionage, Hugh called to him to ask what he was doing in the covert. He received no reply, and the mist crept in between them. When it cleared again the old man was crossing an open space fifty yards away. Hugh noticed the profound melancholy of his bent head, the yellow paleness of his cheek. Even while something familiar about him vexed Hugh’s memory, like an evil dream half-forgotten, he appeared to stumble, and fell with outspread arms and without a sound into some unseen hollow or ditch. Hugh pressed the grey horse through the briars and under the branches till he reached the spot; he pulled up abruptly as he found himself at the edge of a disused sandpit. There were a few rocks flung about at the bottom of it, with the briars growing among them; a rabbit came up out of them, and scuttled to its burrow in the sand at the sound of the horse’s tread; nothing else whatever was there.
 Hugh put his hand to his head and wondered if he were going mad. Then, quite unexpectedly, his knees began to tremble, and the breath of the unknown entered into him, cowing the conventions and disbeliefs of ordinary life. At the same instant a hound began to throw his tongue in the covert, two or three more joined, and the grey horse turned of himself to get back to the path. As if through a dark atmosphere of foreboding and doom Hugh heard the whimpers strengthen to yells in all the wild and animal and mundane delight of hunting; he moved mechanically on, while the borders of existence became immeasurable about him, and his unhappiness stretched out into all futurity. There was a rustle in the undergrowth near him, and a fox slipped across the path and away among the trees towards the fence that bounded the wood. It was silver-grey, with black ears and paws, its eyes as it glanced at Hugh were like topazes, and seemed full of the cold lore of unearthly things. The thrill went again from Hugh’s heart to his throat, and died away in a sickly chill.
 “Damn it all!” he broke out suddenly,. “what am I afraid of? I’m going to break my neck - that’s what it is - and the sooner the better.”
 An old hound came working and yelping up through the dead bracken she flung up her head with a long shriek of excitement as she crossed the path; half-a-dozen others rushed to her well-known cry, and went streaming past on the line. The grey horse was quivering and hopping from leg to leg with excitement. Hugh could feel his heart beating up through the saddle.
 “All right, you devil,” he said, turning him through the trees at a trot; “you’ll get a skinful of it now.”
 The bank was blind and high, and the last hounds were struggling over it with difficulty; Hugh rode along it for a hundred yards or so at a canter, with branches hitting him in the face, till he found a place that seemed possible, and sent the horse at it with a cruel dig of the spurs. In three big bounds the grey was at the fence, the fourth landed him on top among briars and furze, and a drop of seven or eight feet into a marshy hollow was revealed. Lady Susan’s handling had not been lost on the grey; he kept his head up, and jumped out like a stag, landing clear of the rotten ground, and collecting himself in a moment with his eye on the hounds. Hugh sat him loosely and recklessly; what he felt was not pleasure, yet it was not wholly removed from it. He had, at all events, the fierce and bitter satisfaction of taking his weaker nature by the throat, and keeping it down, even to the death that every fibre was expectant of.
 One other rider had seen the hounds going away. As Hugh turned down the hill, with the pack already three fields ahead, he saw through the mist that a lady on a brown horse had got away on good terms with them from the first. It was his wife, on Glasgow’s horse. The rest of the field were left at the wrong side of the covert, ignorant of the fact that the fox had gone away, and, from the line that he had taken, not likely to know for some time. Certainly Hugh was not in the mood to remember their existence. He took the grey horse by the head and galloped him at a loose stone wall. They were over with a send and a swoop, and Hugh began to lose the cold trembling in his knees, and to feel again the forgotten grip and swing. Somewhere in the back of his heart he was afraid, but sinister clouds of fatalism and heats of jealousy were between him and that latent and irresponsible treachery of the nerves.
 The hounds were running hard, down towards the railway, and Lady Susan was going at her ease with them on Solomon. They flashed across it, and Hugh saw his wife ride unhesitatingly at the stark bog drain, that was the only fence of the unfinished line. The old horse jumped it like a four-year-old, and as he scrambled up the embankment Lady Susan looked back: the mist was creeping down the hill, but Hugh knew that she could not mistake the grey horse. He swore to himself that he would show her that he was as good a man as Glasgow, his horse as good as Glasgow’s; the most primitive and animal of human hatreds had taken hold of him, and was disfiguring mind and face like a possession of the devil.
 In a minute the hoofs of the grey were thudding on the railway sleepers, but in that minute the hounds and Lady Susan had slipped away again; he felt that if they got any farther from him he would lose them in the mist. The going was heavy and the banks rotten in the boggy lowlands beyond the line. He took no care to pick his way, but rode wildly through swampy patches and over rocks muffled in furze, in pursuit of the flying shadow that the mist was momently hiding from him. It was not the way to get safely over a bad country. In the next five minutes the grey horse had twice been nearly down, and his white nose was black with bog mud; he had given up pulling, yet he was going at his best, strong and free, and his ears were pricked as gallantly as ever towards his work.
 They had galloped perhaps three miles, and were bending back again towards the railway; Hugh was nearer to his wife by a hundred yards as he came with a heavy drop into a lane up which the hounds were running, and thundered up it in her wake, neither knowing nor caring where he was. The fact that they suddenly recrossed the railway by a level crossing conveyed to him no sense of locality. He was possessed by the passion to let his wife see that he was not afraid; to leave her and her borrowed horse behind; and, having gained that miserable joy, to be killed before her eyes. He was as nearly mad as presentiment, physical excitement, and the burning pain of jealousy could make him, and the grey horse was finding it out.
 With a heave and a scramble they were out of the lane and over a bank; it was uphill now, in heather and rough ground, and the grey was puffing audibly as he answered the relentless spur. The mist thickened on the higher levels, Lady Susan and the hounds were suddenly lost to sight, and, after a minute or two of fruitless galloping, Hugh pulled up and listened, with his pulses thumping and his mouth dry. A curlew whistled overhead, a trembling crescent of sound, then, high up the hill to his left, he heard again the cry of the hounds. He rode to it desperately, skirting a high furzy knoll, and at the other side caught sight of the pack beginning to run fast again after a check, and his wife was still near them. He saw Solomon slip over a bank and ditch with all the seeming ease of a clever horse well ridden, and he cursed him and his rider aloud. The paltry blasphemy went out into the wind and mist, and was swallowed up in their large and pure philosophy, and it had scarcely left his lips when the greyness that blurred the hill- top became thinner as it drifted, and he saw three tall Druid stones stand out against the sky.
 Immediately some remembrance, vague yet urgent, drove its way into the blind and single resolve of his mind. It was grouse- shooting long ago, - the grey horse took down half a loose wall with him as he jumped, and Hugh chucked him in the mouth and hit him - a man had spoken to him that day about something connected with those stones, he had seen that man again lately - quite lately - there was some thing horrible about it all. - Come up, horse! why the devil can’t you look where you’re going? - and yet it eluded him. Then it came, like the dart of a snake out of a ruined wall. It was old Dan Quin, who was dead, whom he had seen in the covert; it was Dan Quin who had spoken to him out grouse-shooting; he had pointed to those stones and told him - Oh, God! his wife was within a hundred yards of the place! He shouted her name with his utmost strength. She did not hear him; she was cantering Solomon up the field, and the hounds were crossing a fence above her, beside the lean and crooked emblems of the Druids.
 The grey horse was blowing and gulping, yet he answered the furious spurring. Hugh shouted again and again, with his eyes straining after his wife’s figure; in the white light of that agony he knew his love for her and his helplessness to save her. She tuned Solomon at the fence beside the Druid stones; it was a big bank, with withered branches of thorn-bushes masking its outline, and she sent him at it hard. The old horse jumped on to it like a cat, seemed to stagger and hesitate, and they both were gone.
 The grey felt his rider relax and sway, but being young he did not understand what it meant: he was nearing a bank that he felt he could not jump, but the dread of the spur was present with him. He did his best, and but for a rotten take-off he might possibly have scrambled over. As it was, his knees took the bank, his hindquarters flew up, and he turned a somersault, falling over into the next field. Hugh was shot from his back and pitched on his head and shoulder beside the horse. The latter struggled to his feet, but Hugh rolled convulsively to one side with an inarticulate sound, and lay still. (p.159.)

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Chapter XII
There was an air of calamity and yet of Sunday about the Quins’ farmyard. The pigs were shut up, tubs and buckets were put out of sight, and Tom Quin’s little nephew, in his best frock, spent many hours of blissful autocracy in banishing the fowl from the doorstep to Siberias behind the rick of turf. Very early in the day two stalwart and dapper members of the Royal Irish Constabulary had made their appearance, and from time to time women in hooded blue cloaks made their way along the causeway that skirted the manure heap, groaned, crossed themselves, and entered the house. In a large shed where Tom Quin had often threshed oats and chopped furze, his body had been laid on two tables, and covered with a sheet, some superstition about the drowned forbidding that it should be taken into the house, lest death might strike another there.
 Awaiting inquest, the sheeted figure lay in its hidden awfulness, with the crooked rafters and the sedgy thatch above, and the candles burning at the head and feet in the grey winter air, wan yet ardent, like the flame of faith in the world’s cold noonday. Beside the body the widow Quin sat upon the earthen floor, with a black handkerchief tied over her spotless cap frill, and did not cease from the low moaning and weeping of unstanched grief. Sympathizers stood at the door and looked at her, an intense comprehension of her suffering blending itself with the inevitable fascination of the event, and prayers for the repose of the dead man’s soul were offered with a reality in which a sense of the extreme necessity for them was not concealed.
 It was nearly twelve o’clock when Maria Quin came out of the house with a cup of tea in her band; she had on her black best dress, and her boots creaked loudly. She said nothing to those whom she passed, but took the cup of tea to her mother, placing it in the reluctant hand that fisted the apron corner.
 “Take it, asthore, take it now,” chorussed the sympathizers.
 “Lave her alone, Don’t be lookin’ at her,” said her daughter, in the hard voice that had remained unshaken through the morning. She closed the door in their faces, and when she presently came out again with the empty cup, smeared with the stain of the poisonous stuff it had contained, all recognized that the first step in the consolation of the Widow Quin had been accomplished.
 Maria turned away. Her head ached wildly, and instead of returning to the house, she passed round the end of the shed, and into the field at the back, that the damp wind of the hillside might blow upon her hot forehead. Her face was quite white under its sunburn and freckles, except where the skin below the eyes showed a lavender tinge; the eyes themselves had a city stare in them, yet there was nothing random or ungoverned about her. Grief drives the active to activity, and perhaps the long toils of the night, when successive candles found her still sweeping and washing in preparation for the wake and the inquest, had saved her from the reaction from her outburst in the wood; perhaps passion is normal and without reaction in those whose hair is truly red.
 The wind soothed her aching head, and she went slowly on and sat down on a stone, with the empty cup and saucer in her lap, looking away up the slope to where a ridge of hill was visible through the soft movement of the mist. She did not at first observe that a grey animal with a black muzzle had leaped on to the loose wall that surrounded the field she was in, and was crouching and looking at her intently. It jumped down with exquisite lightness, a pale grey fox with a beautiful white-tipped brush, and crossed the open towards the barn where Tom Quin lay. As it did so, Maria saw it, and sprang to her feet, her mouth open and her eyes starting. The cup and saucer fell with a clatter, and the fox, which had seemed disposed to loiter as it passed close under the wall of the shed, glanced back, looked about it, and after a moment of seeming indecision, turned and trotted at its ease up the hill, heading apparently for much the same point as that from which it had just come. Grey as the mist itself, it glided away, till it disappeared among the clumps of gorse, while somewhere overhead a seagull made its unhappy cry.
 Maria Quin fell on her knees with absolute simplicity and spontaneity. She was not frightened in the ordinary sense of the word, but she acknowledged the power of the unseen things that had worked together to her brother’s undoing, and she cast herself on a higher protection, half doubtful as she was of its right to intervene. As she knelt, with her hand thrust in the bosom of her dress to grasp the picture of the Sacred Heart that hung around her neck, the cry of hounds came to her ear; it approached rapidly, and she jumped up, full of a blind indignation against those who, for their own amusement, had wrecked the fortunes of a family, and now came to gallop past the house of death, guided by that grey and ill-omened thing. Half-a-dozen hounds passed her, hot on the line of the fox, with their heads up; they overran it and tried back, then picked it up by the shed as if they were lapping it off the grass, and with whimpers bursting into the firm note of hunting, went away up the hill and were lost to sight amongst the furze. Others followed in their track, and Maria, maddened by their brutal self-engrossment, their cheery and inconsequent voices, ran in the direction from which they had come, with some in flaming idea of stopping the riders who would follow, equally self-engrossed, infinitely more brutal and desecrating.
 As she climbed the first wall, a horse and rider leaped up into view on a high bank some two hundred yards away to her right, near where three thin and slanting Druidic stones were dimly seen through the mist. They dropped down out of sight among a wild growth of hazels. Maria stood stock still; the powers of darkness had outrun her. Neither horse nor rider reappeared. It was stunningly complete, it was terrific and just retribution, but yet - oh, Mother of Our Lord! - the rider was a woman. The peasant heart struggled in the grave-clothes of hatred and superstition, and burst forth with its native impetuousness and warmth. Maria started forward and ran towards the field where the hazels grew. She ran clumsily because of her ill-made boots, but she got over the ground with surprising quickness. She climbed another wall, a strong one with thorn-bushes laid along the top, and was in a small field full of grey dumps of young hazel. She skirted these rapidly, but with care, and once jumped across an ugly cleft among the bushes. The hounds were all about her again, but they were silent now, and were hunting to and fro among the hazel- bushes, and leaping backwards and forwards over rifts in the ground similar to that which Maria had just crossed. Before her was the high bank, showing above a long strip of hazel scrub; she thrust herself, breathless, in among the thick and sturdy growth, her eyes dilated with apprehension, her red hair falling loose in the wind. A cry for help arose at her step, scarcely three yards away; she broke her way to it through the crush of young branches, and saw, as if coming up out of the ground, two gloved hands, clutching all they could hold of twigs and saplings, that bent lithely with the weight that hung from them.
 Lady Susan was hanging over the verge of a deep and wide cleft, masked on one side by hazels and briars; her face looked up, deeply flushed, and distorted from the whirl of the terrible moments that make a vortex round death, yet it was obvious that even in that extremity she had not lost her presence of mind. Maria dropped on her knees, and twining her left arm round a strong stem, stretched down her muscular right hand. Lady Susan could not let go and grasp it, and Maria caught her by the wrist and drew her slowly upward. There was a struggle, and a tremendous strain on the arms; both women kept steady and firm, and Lady Susan got her knee over the edge and fell forward on to Maria’s shoulder. Her hat dangled by its guard, her habit sleeve had burst away from the shoulder, her patent-leather boots were cut and scraped by the crevices in which they had searched to find a footing; she drew hard breaths in the effort to recover herself.
 “Is the horse killed?” she said hoarsely, scrambling on to her feet and looking down through the naked branches that fringed the long cleft.
 Even the first glance could certify that Solomon had met his death in an instant.
 He lay in a heap in the obscurity forty feet below, on loose rocks among dark water, his head was doubled under his chest at an impossible angle that told the tale of a broken neck. The uttermost effort of a good horse had not been enough to save him, when he had tried to jump out from the top of the high bank across a chasm nearly twenty feet wide. That endeavour and all his simple and gallant life seemed expressed in the wreck of strength and intelligence that lay below, with the water washing over the flap of the saddle, over the shapely brown fetlocks, over the thin and glossy mane.
 It was mysterious water, an underground stream that slid out of the dumb and sight less caverns of. the rock, and passed away into them again with a swirl, a stealthy swift thing, escaping always from the eye of day, and eating the foundations of the limestone walls that sheltered it.
 Lady Susan still held the hand that had rescued her; it led her through the brush-wood to open ground, till the short wet grass was under her feet and the mist blew in her face. She turned her head away, and the sobs broke from her. Any one who has loved horse or dog will know how and where they touch the heart and command the tear. Let us trust that in some degree it is known to them also, that the confiding spirit may understand that its god can grieve for it.
 Maria Quin looked at Lady Susan with eyes that were as dry as glass. The Irish peasant regards the sorrow for a mere animal as a childishness that is almost sinful, a tempting of ill fate in its parody of the grief rightly due only to what is described as “a Christhian”; and Maria’s heart glowed with the unwept wrongs of her brother.
 “What happened him?” she asked, and the knot of pain and outrage was tight in her voice.
 “I tried to pull him back when I saw what was coming,” said Lady Susan, with difficulty. “I couldn’t stop him; he had too much way on. I only did harm. I think he would have got across only for that.” She stopped and gulped down the sob. It was dreadful to her to cry before an inferior. “He all but got over, but he dropped his hind legs into it and fell back. I somehow caught those branches just as he was going, and he dropped away from under me, and I hung there. I couldn’t climb up. Then you came.” She recovered herself a little, and turned towards her rescuer. “I haven’t thanked you yet. It was awfully good and plucky of you.”
 Their eyes met, and it seemed as if till then Lady Susan had not recognized Maria Quin. She visibly flinched, and her flushed face became a deeper red, while the hand that had begun to feel for her purse came out of her pocket empty.
 “Little ye cried yestherday whin ye seen my brother thrown out on the ground by the pool,” said Maria, with irrepressible savageness, “you that’s breakin’ yer heart afther yer horse.”
 Lady Susan took the blow in silence, and that quality in her that can only be described as an absence of smallness, dimly appealed to the country-woman, as occasionally through Lady Susan’s careless life it had had its effect on women of her own class.
 “D’ye know yer way home out o’ this?” said Maria sullenly. “If ye’ll come with me I’ll show ye the short way out into the bohireen below our house.” She was beginning to be sorry for what she had said, or perhaps the saying of it had eased her heart. “One that didn’t know this field would aisy be killed in it. It’s full o’ thim racks, and we have it finced strong from the sheep.” She turned and pointed to the tall Druidic stones. “While ye live ye’ll mind yerself whin ye see thim; I thought every one in the counthry knew this place. But sure what are you but a sthranger!” She said it more kindly, and as if explaining the position to herself.
 “Look here,” said Lady Susan suddenly, “I want to tell you that I don’t deserve this kindness from you, and I’m truly sorry for all that has happened about the hounds. It won’t happen any more. Will you - will you accept my regret for anything I have done to annoy you, and my sympathy about your brother? I didn’t understand how things were —”
 “Oh, God help ye!” broke out Maria, “what does the likes o’ ye undherstand about the likes of us? It wasn’t wanting to desthroy us ye were, I know that well - and faith! I think ye have nature that’d make ye sorry if ye seen my brother this day where he’s lying beyond. I know well the one that have no pity; maybe he’ll be in the want of it yet.” She took Lady Susan by the sleeve, staring at her as if taking in her good looks. “Mind yerself!” she said in a whisper; “that fella would throw ye on the roadside whin he’d be tired o’ ye. Don’t be makin’ little o’ yerself with the likes o’ him - you that has a good husband and nothin’ to throuble ye. I can tell ye of the day I wint to Glashgow to the office, axing him to take back the price o’ the land, and he put a hand on me to kiss me; he thought that was all he had to do to humour me. He remembers that day agin me yet. It couldn’t be that you, that might be talkin’ to the Lord Left’nant or any other, would bring sorrow on yerself for the sake of him.”
 Neither the straining misfit of the black dress, nor the atrocious pretensions of the cheap boots, could impute vulgarity to the speaker. Lady Susan kept her eyes on the ground with a firmly-set mouth, and Maria turned away in the direction from which she had come. She was overtaken almost immediately.
 “I am going back the other way,” said Lady Susan. “I’m afraid my husband or some one may be coming this way and not know of this place, and I must tell them where the hounds are, but - Good bye.” She put out her hand in its torn glove; it was still trembling from exertion. There was a moment’s pause, and the country-woman’s hard, red hand took it and shook it, and dropped it.
 Neither spoke, but some thrill ran horns to Maria’s heart with the meeting of the palms, and sent the dew to her hot eyes. They separated in silence, and Lady Susan, following the long cleft to its termination, climbed up the bank. Looking back, she saw the hounds still hurrying in and out among the hazels in excited and fruitless search, and beyond them Maria’s black figure going away into the mist and fog. She walked uncertainly, and once or twice her hand went up to her eyes. (p.175.)

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Chapter XIII
As Lady Susan scrambled down the other side of the bank she said mechanically to herself that Hugh must have taken another turn before they crossed the railway, only for that she would have seen him when she looked back before she rode at her last jump. How extraordinarily well he had been going - how long ago it seemed, and yet it could only have been about ten minutes. Below her stretched the long fields up which Solomon had carried her; the mist swept thick and cold across them, shutting out the rest of the world, and making their loneliness more complete. A grey horse was moving up the field towards her; she walked uneasily towards it, crippled by her safety habit, stiff in every limb.
 She could at first only make out that it was lame, she neared and saw a saddle and dangling reins. The stillness of the hillside seemed to tell her the rest. She came up to the grey horse and took him by the head; he was dead lame and trembling all over, there was mud on his jaw, on his shoulder, on the saddle. She had seen before what horses looked like after a bad fall. She led him down the field in the direction from which he had come, and saw, away by the fence, a motionless spot of scarlet and white.
 In a few moments she was on her knees beside her husband. His face was buried in a heather tussock, his hands were clinched in the black and boggy soil; as she tried to turn him over the blood trickled heavily from the corner of his mouth. A little gurgling sound in his throat told her that he was alive, but he was far away in that trance of physical defeat in which soul and body seem alike absorbed.
 She was wholly unversed in illness, unacquainted with death, but in the novels she had read episodes of fainting had been freely scattered, and they had left a general idea in her mind. With shaking fingers, shaking from her recent struggle and the impact of this latest shock, she unfastened Hugh’s hunting-tie and the neck of his shirt, while her sinking heart told her of her own ignorance and loneliness, and the white face remained unmoved. It seemed to have become smaller, and the temples hollow and blue. She took off the glove from the heavy, listless hand, and tried with her unskilled fingers to feel the pulse. It was just perceptible, and at the contact with that thread of life shut up inside the intolerable mystery of unconsciousness, the fear, the paralyzing helplessness began to give way. Something like the clinking of a tin can came to her ear, and she started up. Two little girls, with red petticoats over their heads, were crossing the field, and Lady Susan ran towards them, calling with what voice she could muster. At sight of the dishevelled vision in top-boots and a man’s hat emerging from the mist, the children seemed disposed to fly, but finally came to her. Her heart sank as she saw their hesitating, timorous faces. Could she make them understand? To every request they returned the same whispered “We will, miss,” with their lovely eyes cast down in shyness, but half-a-crown and a glimpse of the figure lying by the fence quickened their sense of the seriousness of the matter. They were taking their father’s dinner to where he was working on the line, they would run on to Letter Kyle with a note to the doctor, they would send people to help. Their nimble red feet seemed to promise speed; Lady Susan snatched out her pencil-case, but on what was the note to be written? It came to her like a flash that she had seen Hugh put a letter into his breast-pocket before he started; the inside of the envelope would do. She went back to him, and with a shrinking hand moved the inert form and found the letter. As she took it out of the envelope she saw her own name and that of Glasgow; and in one blinding moment read the sentence that connected them. There was a pause. She looked up and saw the innocent and awe-struck eyes of the children fixed on her as they stood, too frightened to come near the prostrate figure in the red coat. She put the letter into her own pocket, and opening out the envelope wrote on it her demand for help, for a doctor, for a carriage from French’s Court. The final “We will, miss,” was murmured, the red legs carried the children down the hill at full speed, till the rhythmic clanking of the milk- can died away.
 Let her not be blamed if her first thought was for herself and her position. Her seven-and-twenty years, her careless and daring flirtations, and her marriage, had not taught her what it was to be in love. She knew that Hugh was in love with her; it was a comfortable knowledge, pleasant and commonplace as sunshine, and she bad no more real comprehension of what he might suffer on her behalf than she had of the flames of hell. She thought first of herself, accused in public, accused in private; she put her hands over her face and said she would go away and never come back to French’s Court, where the people spent their time in spying and telling these foul, infernal lies. Hughie would believe her anyhow. She would tell him all about it. It wasn’t so very much, after all, and he wasn’t a bit strait-laced. She took her hands from her face and saw the motionless body flung in the heathery grass, the vacant brow, the strangeness, the terrific pallor. She stood as people stand when the sudden inrush of an idea overwhelms the physical part of them; it had come to her that it might be too late to tell Hughie about it. It sank into her soul, carrying with it the remembrance of her husband standing by the hall door with the letter in his hand. He had read it before he started; he had only spoken to her once afterwards, something about the balance-strap of her saddle, but he had not seemed different, She had noticed that he looked ill, and had presently forgotten all about it. The past flowed in on her; his kindliness, his simpleness, his straightness, most of all, that belief in her that was bound up in the deepest heart of an unjealous nature. The face that lay sideways in the heather began to torture her with its mute reproach; she knelt down beside him, tearless and tense, enduring strong feeling as the undemonstrative must endure it. She bent over him at length, and, as if half afraid, stooped her head and kissed the pale cheek, knowing for the first time the dreadful kiss that is so much to one, so much less than nothing to the other. (p.182.)

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Chapter XIII
IT WAS 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 get on 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 back entrance 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.” (p.188.)

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Chapter XV
Six months 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 Phoenix 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 grass and 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 bin 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 there was 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.
 “You do believe me still that I was only an idiot?” she said, looking up at him with the tears in her eyes.
 He kissed her. (p.195.)

 THE END

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