THE SILVER FOX

THE SILVER FOX

BY
MARTIN ROSS AND E. Œ. SOMERVILLE
AUTHORS OF “AN IRISH COUSIN,” “NABOTH’S VINEYARD,”
“THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC.

LONDON
LAWRENCE AND BULLEN, Ltd.
16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1898

SILVER FOX

CHAPTER I

Lady Susan had never been so hungry in her life. So, for the sixth time, she declared between loud and unbridled yawns. She worked her chair across the parquet towards the fire-place, dragging the hearthrug into folds in her progress, and put her large and well-shod feet on the fender.

“What a beast of a fire! When you’ve quite done with it, Bunny, I shouldn’t mind seeing it just the same. You are a selfish thing!”

In obedience to this rebuke Major Bunbury moved an inch or two to one side.

“I’m not as selfish as you are,” he said, with agreeable simplicity. “Miss Morris can’t see anything but your boots.”

“Oh, she likes seeing boots,” replied Lady Susan, establishing one on the hob. “They don’t have ’em in Ireland, do they, Slaney!”

It was obviously the moment for Miss Morris to say something brilliant, but she let the opportunity slip. Perhaps she was hampered by the consciousness that her boots had been made in an Irish country town. She got red. She did not know that it was becoming to her to get red. Finding no more appropriate retort, she laughed, and pushing back her chair, walked over to the window. What she looked out on was the lawn at Hurlingham, covered smoothly and desolately with snow; a line of huddled, white hummocks of ice, moving very slowly across the middle distance, represented the River Thames; down to the right, five or six skaters glided on the black and serpentine curves of a little lake—they looked like marionettes sliding along a wire. Even at that distance they seemed to Slaney over-dressed and artificial. No doubt they were screaming inanities to each other, as were these other English idiots in the room behind her. How ineffably stupid they were, and how shy and provincial they made her feel! How could Hugh have married into such a pack?

One of the double doors at the end of the room opened, and a small, dark man appeared.

“Awfully sorry to have kept you all waiting,” he said abjectly. “I’m afraid it’s a bad business; they say that there’s nothing to be had here on Sundays at this time of year, unless it’s ordered beforehand.”

“Oh Lord!” ejaculated Lady Susan, bringing her foot and the shovel down with a crash. “Do you mean to say there’s nothing to eat?”

“It’s not quite as bad as that, but precious nearly,” he replied, looking at her so deplorably that Slaney felt inclined to laugh. “We’re going to have some of the waiter’s dinner. It’s a leg of mutton, and he says he don’t think it’s quite boiled yet, but I said we wouldn’t wait.”

Lady Susan seized Major Bunbury’s hand, and pulled herself out of her chair. She was stalwart and tall, and her dress fitted beautifully. With a whisk and rustle of silk petticoats she was across the room and caught Miss Morris by the arm.

“Worry, worry, worry! Sess, sess, sess!” she said, with a sufficiently fortunate imitation of her father’s kennel huntsman. “Come on and eat raw leg of mutton! I hope the waiter likes onion sauce!”

In the dining-room a genial fire was blazing; a soft and rich-coloured carpet glowed on the floor; the atmosphere was of old-fashioned comfort; there was a desirable smell of fried potatoes. The party sank into their places at an oval table, and to each was administered a plateful of pink mutton that grew rosier at every slice. Captain Hugh French, late of the ——th Hussars, looked round upon his guests, and felt that champagne was the only reparation in his power.

“I feel it’s all my fault bringing you people down here to starve. You’ll have to take it out in drink,” he said helplessly.

The words were addressed to the company, but his brown eyes, that were like the eyes of a good small dog, addressed themselves to those of his wife. Slaney, following them, wondered whether he could help seeing the black line frankly drawn along the edge of Lady Susan’s lower eyelids. The white glare from the snow showed it unsparingly, as she looked at her husband over the rim of the champagne glass from which she was drinking.

“Yes, darling, you’re a silly little thing,” she said blandly; “I always said that spill had given you softening of the brain.”

“What spill?” asked Slaney. It was almost the first time she had spoken. She had sat, inwardly scornful and outwardly shy, in the midst of conversation whose knack she could not catch, and whose purport she thought either babyish or vulgar. There must be an English and an Irish form of humour, so at least it seemed to Slaney, as she listened with the intolerance of the clever provincial to Lady Susan’s loud and ready laugh. Hugh, at all events, was not, she thanked Heaven, humorous in either manner. She found herself less of a fool when she was talking to Hugh.

“I’m afraid you don’t take much interest in your cousin’s misfortunes, Slaney,” he said. “Didn’t you know that I was smashed up at Bungalore last spring, playing polo? I was trying to ‘ride off’ this great brute,” indicating Major Bunbury, “and I got the worst of it. I was in hospital for a month, and grew a thundering big black beard. Couldn’t shave for six weeks.”

“Don’t make me sick,” said Lady Susan, beginning heartily on biscuits and cheese. “If I’d known that in time I wouldn’t have married you. A little man with a beard’s like a cob with a long tail. Couldn’t do with you if you’d a long tail, Hughie.”

“I’m goin’ to grow another when we get down to French’s Court,” retorted Hughie. “I shan’t have anything else to do there. What on earth do you do with yourself at Letter Kyle, Slaney?”

“Do you grow a beard, Slaney?” shouted Lady Susan, with her mouth full of biscuit. “If I’m bored over there I shall just dye my hair again. How do you like it now, Bunny? I got it done in Paris on our way through. I think it might be a bit redder.”

“Why, it’s as red as a fox now,” said Major Bunbury, regarding it critically.

“Talking of foxes,” put in Slaney, endeavouring to be genial, “they all expect Hugh to start the hounds again when he comes over. That will give you something to do, Hugh.”

“Tally ho!” uttered Major Bunbury, with a subdued whoop. “That’s a rippin’ good notion. I’ll come over and whip for you, Hughie.”

“No, you won’t!” cried Lady Susan. “I’ll whip for him myself; but I don’t believe he knows anything about it—does he, Bunny?”

“Oh dear, no!” replied Major Bunbury, with elephantine sarcasm; “he’s a perfect owl. Can’t think why we made him carry the horn till he left the regiment—and the funny thing was that he seemed quite up to the job.”

Captain French took no notice of the compliment.

“I can’t imagine who the people are who want me to get up a pack there,” he said, without much enthusiasm; “last time I was over there seemed to be no one in the place but the parson and the two old Miss Macarthys. They’d make a pretty sort of a hunt.”

“Oh, there are a lot of farmers,” replied Slaney, “and there’s the police officer, and there’s Mr. Glasgow, the contractor of the new railway.” To her own surprise and annoyance she blushed as she spoke, and Major Bunbury, glancing incidentally at her, thought her almost handsome.

“Glasgow,” repeated Hugh; “there was a chap called Glasgow at Eton with me. What sort of age is this man?”

“Oh, he’s young—at least, not very young—I mean he’s not exactly old; but he’s older than you are, Hugh,” replied Slaney, with incoherence probably due to the blush; “his name is Wilfrid,” she added. “I think he did say something about having been at school with you.”

“That’s the man. Clever sort of chap; fancies himself a bit. I remember one of my pals was a fag of his, and said he was awfully particular about his toast. He wants hounds, does he? Why don’t he get them up for himself?”

“He’s too busy; besides, he said you were the man to do it, Hugh. He said he had always heard you were a great rider, and knew all about your having won the Gold Cup at Punchestown.” She was conscious of pleasure in the expounding of Mr. Glasgow.

Lady Susan, on the contrary, began to find it a bore.

“Oh, look here, you people,” she broke in, “we can’t sit here all day to listen to Hughie being made more conceited than he is. Come out and skate.”

She snatched Major Bunbury’s plate from before him, and put it down in front of an expectant cat, flung a dinner napkin over her husband’s head, and fell to arranging her fringe and veil at a looking-glass with minute care and entire disregard of the company.

As Miss Morris walked after her cousin’s wife down the snowy path to the lake, she framed with a confident touch the description that she would give of her to Mr. Glasgow. Scarcely less confidently, and with a comfortable sense of fore-knowledge of his ideas and point of view, she formulated the phrase in which he would give his opinion of Lady Susan. It was satisfactory to reflect that, though she was a failure in Lady Susan’s set, she found no difficulty in talking to intellectual people like Mr. Wilfred Glasgow.

A light and stinging wind blew along the ice, powdering the surface with infinitely delicate particles of snow. The graceful lawns and slopes of Hurlingham stared in blank whiteness, the evergreens stood out unnaturally dark and trim in the colourless monotony; beyond the scrape and hiss of the skates the silence was extraordinary. Slaney did not enjoy herself. The south-west of Ireland is not the climate in which to learn skating; she toiled up against the wind with aching ankles, she drifted back in front of it, and finally, in bitter resentment of her ungainly helplessness, achieved the haven of a chair. Lady Susan swung and circled, and knew that her colour was rising in a manner more becoming than the best rouge that money could buy; Major Bunbury swung assiduously after her. Hugh was cutting intricate figures far away. Slaney began thinking of the gaunt afternoon service in progress at that moment in the church of Letter Kyle. There would be no music because she was not there to play the harmonium; Uncle Charles would be longer and louder than ever over the responses to the Psalms now that her reproving eye was off him; Mr. Glasgow——no, she felt tolerably sure that the Sundays of her absence would not be the ones selected by Mr. Glasgow for walking over to afternoon service at Letter Kyle.

“Come along, Slaney,” said Captain French, sailing down upon her with his hands extended, “I know it’s poor fun for you, but you must keep at it.”

They moved off together, and Slaney felt, as she often did, a glow of appreciation of Hugh’s desire to make things pleasant for others. She did not notice character very much, except at the moments when it was in contact with herself. Between the manifestations of her cousin’s amiability towards her she habitually thought of him as merely unintellectual. At this stage of Slaney’s history intellectual people were to her as irrevocably severed from the others as were the sheep from the goats.

“Tell me more about this idea of the hounds,” said Hugh, dodging behind the island to avoid the raking sweep of Lady Susan’s advance. “What am I to hunt? Hares or foxes or a red herring?”

“Foxes, of course,” replied Slaney; “there are any amount of them. Uncle Charles shot two in our wood this autumn.”

“Good Lord!” ejaculated Hugh; “where does he expect to go when he dies?”

“Where do you think?” answered Slaney, with an effort to be suitably flippant; “if there’s anything in the world that Uncle Charles is more convinced of than another it is that he always has moved in the highest circles, and that he always will.”

Hugh laughed in his kindly, indiscriminating way.

“By the way,” went on Slaney, following up a connection of ideas, “there’s a curious story in the country now about a fox. Mr. Glasgow wanted gravel for the new railway, and bought a bit of a hillside from old Danny Quin at Cahirdreen. There was a big patch of furze there, and the men said that when the first blast went off a grey fox ran out of it and away into the hills; a sort of fox that no one had ever seen before. They say that there is an old prophecy about the bad luck that is to come when that hill is thrown into Tully Lake, and that is just what is to be done where the line crosses a corner of the lake. They believe that the fox is a witch or a fairy, and that it will bring the bad luck.”

“By Jove! that’s rather interesting,” said Hugh, steering Slaney into a chair and subsiding into another beside her; “we’ll have to kill that grey fox.”

“The men say he was more a silver colour,” pursued Slaney, “and Mike Driscoll told me ‘he thought he’d never ate another bit, afther he seen the way it legged it up the hill, an’ it lashin’ the tail and makin’ snouts at them like a thing that’d be grinnin’ and laughin’.” Slaney was very successful in her rendering of Mike Driscoll, and Hugh laughed again, his ugly little falsetto laugh, and felt that Slaney was a very good fellow indeed.

Lady Susan, doing “Dutch roll,” bore down upon them.

“The horrid thing was lying on my feet,” she was exclaiming to Major Bunbury, whose hand she was holding at the full stretch of both their arms. “I never remembered that till this instant,—Hughie,” she called to Captain French as they passed, and grasping at his chair she whirled round and came sitting on his knee—“It really was a most awful dream, darling. I had it last night when you were snoring, and it suddenly came into my head now. I thought some ghastly thing was sitting on my feet, like a dog or something, and then suddenly it turned into a whitey, silvery sort of thing, a kind of Arctic fox, and the horrid thing was smiling and showing all its teeth. My word, I was in a funk. And then it turned out to be only the hot-water bag.”

“It’s all tricks, Slaney,” said Hugh, “she heard what we were saying.” He laughed and looked at Slaney, whose curious hazel-green eyes were fixed in consternation on Lady Susan.

CHAPTER II

Danny Quin was to be buried that afternoon. It was the third day of the wake, and his house, always dependent for light on its open door, was dark with the crowd of people inside and outside the threshold. In the corner of the kitchen, behind the brute obstruction of human beings, awkward and inert with stale drink, half-a-dozen candles made a garish night-time round the dead man. He lay with the yellow flicker on his steadfast face, a presence of extraordinary refinement and soulful trance among his late fellows. He was an old man, in his lifetime a driver of hard bargains, a teller of old tales in which his own sagacity, uprightness, and power of repartee were unflinchingly set forth. Here his super-natural pallor and tranquil lips spoke of death and resurrection to an audience whose greatest care was to accept in a seemly and gloomy manner as many glasses of whisky as were offered to them.

His wife’s eyes were hollow and glazed from want of sleep; she stood in her Sunday gown and white cap, receiving condolences without a tear, and with the invariable reply, “Sure it couldn’t be helped.”

She hardly knew whether it were night or day, or how often the evening light in the doorway had turned to blackness, and the blackness quickened to cold blue-grey dawn since they had pulled the feather-bed from under her husband in order that he might, in accordance with ancient custom, breathe his last on the mattress. Her two married daughters dispensed the whisky and the punch at a table near the door; in the bed-room behind the kitchen the more honourable visitors sat with their hats on, and became sapiently and solemnly tipsy. The room was set out for company; a brand new counterpane covered the mountainous bed, a naked mahogany table stood in the centre, bearing a black bottle, a loaf of bread, and a two-pound lump of butter on a plate. A dazzling three-and-sixpenny hearthrug was placed on the earthen floor in front of a fire-place without a grate.

“I had not the pleasure of the—the—the dead gentleman’s acquaintance,” said one of the visitors, a stout and greasy public-house keeper, who had driven over to the entertainment with a mutual friend, from a town twelve miles away. “But I undherstand he was greatly respected in this neighbourhood, and all his family the same.”

The eyes of the speaker were of a moist redness befitting the occasion; his voice had a husky roll in it, and the raw and tepid reek of bad whisky accompanied the eulogy.

“As for respect,” rejoined the mutual friend, addressing the hearthrug with slow determination, “he had it, the Lord have mercy on him, and more than he’d ax of it. Ye needn’t be talking of respect.”

Several of the party remarked, “that’s thrue,” and the publican felt that he had said the right thing. Danny Quin’s son here rose and went round the circle with the bottle. The attention was accepted with protests, or with groans that betokened indifference to all earthly affairs. Young Quin sat down again. He was not drunk, but he had been drinking and crying on and off for three days and nights, and his big limbs felt tremulous and his brain hot.

“A nice, dacent little man as ever was in the barony,” said an old woman glibly; “the Lord have mercy on him, ’tis he got the death very sudden”—she crossed herself—“and very quare, the Lord save us.”

“I undherstand,” said the publican, conscious of leading the conversation with ability, “that he sustained fatal injuries from a fall.”

“Arrah, what fatal injuries!” returned the old woman with scorn; “no, but to break his neck was what he done. Didn’t he walk out over the brink o’ the big sandpit in Cashel the same as one that wouldn’t have the sighth, an’ he a fine soople man no more than seventy years? ’Twas like a reelin’ in the head the crayture got.”

The tone was that of cautious supposition, and it was easy to discern the desire of contradiction.

“’Twas no reeling,” said Tom Quin, suddenly addressing the company in a loud voice. “I know well what was on him, and so do thim that was lookin’ at him. ’Twas a start he took, the same as if he seen somethin’ followin’ him. And I hope in God I’ll be dead to-morrow if it isn’t thrue what I’m sayin’, that if he didn’t put his hand to the Park-na-Moddhera to sell it he’d be dhrinkin’ his glass in the fair of Letter Kyle this day.”

His auditors exclaimed, groaned, and crossed themselves. All present, except the publican, knew every detail connected with Danny Quin’s death, but they knew even better what was due to the dramatic moments in a story.

There was a stir in the kitchen outside, and Quin’s youngest daughter pushed her way into the room, crying and clapping her hands.

“The priest is come—they’re closin’ the coffin on him—oh, dada, dada!” she wailed, and flung herself half-across the table without an effort at self-control.

The women proffered consolation, and raised her red head from where it lay beside the butter. Swaying and lolling, she was propped against their shoulders, with the light full on her convulsed face, and the whole party crushed forth into the kitchen. There was some delay, while a plate, with a heap of silver upon it, was taken from a table outside the door of the house and handed over to the priest, and many faces peered in a circle round the counting of the money. There was more than eight pounds, subscribed in silver and two half-sovereigns by the visitors to the funeral, as payment to the priest for masses for the soul of the deceased. It is an institution known as “the altar,” and happily combines a politeness to the dead man and his family, with a keen sense of the return that will be made in kind when it becomes the donor’s turn to have a funeral. The sight of the gold was balm to the dazed spirit of the Widow Quin.

“Thank God, they showed that much respect for him,” she said, as congratulations were passed round. “’Twas a great althar.”

A windy sunset of January was set forth that afternoon in cold orange and green behind the bogs near Tully Lake. The new railway line ran across them, away in the north-west, and the rails gleamed along a track that seemed to end against the breast of the evening sky. Coming from the east, the line emerged from a cutting in a wooded hill, where blocks of stone, overturned trucks, and stumps of trees with twisted, agonized roots, littered the yellow sand. The wood ran to the lips of the cutting on either side, and the strong fir-trees on the height could look down the tawny slants upon their fallen comrades.

Standing below, the jaws of the ugly cleft let in the winter sunset and the twin glitter of the rails, while above, the fir-trees strove against the evening wind. It was worth remaining still to look at, in spite of the cold, and Mr. Wilfrid Glasgow, with two long account-books under his arm, and the peak of his cap over his eyes, stood for at least a minute surveying alternately his own handiwork and that of his Creator. He felt a proper admiration for both; impartially he perhaps thought that his own was more deserving of credit. At length, turning his back upon the sunset, he walked along the line to where a road crossed it. As he climbed some bars and swung himself down into the road it could be seen that he was active, with the skilled and wary activity of forty. He was tall and slight; when his hat was on, his fair thin moustache and light figure made short-sighted people place him in the early thirties.

Voices and footsteps were on the road, and groups of people straggled towards him in the twilight. They were the remnant of Danny Quin’s funeral cortége, and even at a distance of a hundred yards the blatant drawl of drunkenness was discernible in their conversation. He passed quickly through them, and walked fast till he was clear of the reek of whisky, tobacco, and stale turf smoke that followed them.

“What swine they are,” he thought, drawing a long breath. He was walking in a bend of the road where trees stood up on either side, and in the shelter the twilight seemed to fall as heavily as dew. A cold, sharp moon came forlornly from behind a wisp of cloud; the road glistened pallidly in its light, and he saw a tall man walking unsteadily towards him.

“Good-evening, Quin,” said Mr. Glasgow, recognizing as he neared him the young man’s white face and dark beard; “I was sorry to hear of your trouble. Only four days ago I was talking to your father, and I was very much shocked to hear how sudden his death was.”

Quin stood still in the middle of the road, with his soft black hat pulled over his brows. He breathed hard, and Glasgow thought he was going to cry. Instead of doing so, however, Quin caught him by the arm.

“How dar’ ye bring up me father’s name to me?” he said, in a loud voice. “If it wasn’t for you and yer railway the stones wouldn’t be over his head this night!”

Glasgow shook his hand off.

“Go home, Quin, go home,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ll talk to you to-morrow.”

“What do I want o’ yer talk when ye have the bad luck dhrew down on us! God knows ye talked enough to me father, blasht ye!” Quin here unloosed his terrified angry soul by the simple channel of bad language. “I’ll have satisfaction out o’ ye, ye English hound,” he raved on, seeing that Glasgow was turning impassively away. “You that laughed when I axed ye to let me father out o’ the bargain! Well I knew that there was none of us’d do a day’s good afther it——” he faltered and sobbed.

Glasgow knew enough of the man to take him quietly. He looked at him as he stood in the moonlight with the tears running down his hairy cheeks, and walked away. He had not gone far when the imperative sting of a bicycle bell made him move to one side with the resentment inevitably roused in the pedestrian by that sound. Looking back he saw Lady Susan French skimming past Tom Quin; a wheeled apparition that must have been as startling to him as an Apocalyptic vision. Glasgow had dined at French’s Court the night before, and, as he took off his cap, Lady Susan recognized him.

“How-de-do?” she called out, and jumped off, “I must take things easy and give my husband a chance. He was pounded by that awful hill outside Letter Kyle. Would you lead my bike? Thanks, awfully.”

CHAPTER III

Torrents of soft grey rain were falling on Fornagh Hill. The furze-bushes were grey with it, the slatey walls gleamed darkly, the streams rushed in yellow fury over the ledges of rock. The new red coat of Dan O’Driscoll the huntsman (familiarly known as Danny-O) had purple patches on it where the wet had soaked through, and, as he himself expressed it to one of his friends, “every step he’d take, the wather was gabblin’ in his boots.” At the time of this remark, he was on foot in the centre of a crowd of men and boys, who had apparently risen from the hillside to point out the precise spot where the fox had gone to ground.

“’Tis within in the gully he is!” shouted one of them. “I heard the dogs yowling, and whin I seen him, there wasn’t the breadth o’ yer nail between himself and the first o’ thim.”

That which the speaker had referred to as “a gully” was a covered-in drain that carried off the waters of a small stream beneath a road and down the hillside, its lower opening being at this moment blocked by a large yellow cur, whose owner was sedulously pinching its tail as a stimulant to its reluctant advance upon the fox. A small group of riders huddled, with turned-up collars, under the lee of a high furzy fence; their muddy horses steamed, with the wet reins hanging loose on their necks. One lady and four men were all that the rocks and fences of Fornagh had left of the field. The dispensary doctor’s chestnut was bleeding from a cut on the fetlock, Mr. James Mahony, a hard-riding farmer, had a dark patch of mud on his shoulder, and Major Bunbury was swearing quietly to himself as he examined an over-reach that had stained his mare’s white pastern pink with blood. Lady Susan’s big bay had lost a fore shoe. Lady Susan’s face was an unbecoming, diffused pink; the rain beaded her dark eyebrows and ran down her well-shaped nose; her hunting cravat might as well have been a wet dishclout. Under the circumstances, perhaps, the epithets which she was applying to the weather and the country were excusable.

“What can have become of Hughie?” she said for the twentieth time, bending her head to let the water run out of the brim of her hat; “I don’t remember seeing him since that place where the cow ran after us.”

“Clinkin’ good fencer she was too,” said Major Bunbury, “she went two fields with us. Upon my soul, I don’t know what happened to Hughie. I’d quite enough to do to look out for myself.”

“I hope he’s all right,” said Lady Susan, easily, “that horse wasn’t going very kindly with him.”

“Oh, he’s all right. Probably he’s done for the horse, though, in this infernal country—bleedin’ to death under a furze-bush somewhere, and no wonder, when they make their fences out of razors and porridge.”

“Glasgow goes well,” remarked Lady Susan, in a lower voice, eying Mr. Glasgow where he stood talking to a countryman. “I was very glad he was there to give me a lead—you weren’t much good to me, Bunny dear!”

“Would it be putting too much delay on your ladyship to send for a tarrier?” said Danny-O, the huntsman, approaching Lady Susan; “there’s one Dinny Hegarty that lives back on the hill here, and they say he have a grand dog.”

Lady Susan listened in bewilderment to this request.

“Oh, certainly. I don’t know what he wants,” she continued in her strident soprano, to Mr. Glasgow; “I wish Hugh would come and look after his own hounds, I can’t speak Irish.”

“I saw Captain French having rather a time with that young horse,” said Mr. Glasgow suavely, “you ought to have a try at him, Lady Susan; a lady will often make a horse go when a man can’t—at least, some ladies can.”

Lady Susan cast her dark eyes upon him and laughed.

“Oh, I say, that’s what they call blarney over here, isn’t it? We call it humbug in England, you know!”

None the less, her opinion of Mr. Glasgow rose, and, so much is there in the manner of saying a stupid thing, he was pleased by the approval and did not notice the stupidity.

The emissary to the home of “the grand dog” was already on his way over the hill, speeded by injunctions from his friends to “kick off the owld shoes and be hirrying.” The remainder of the party applied themselves to the agreeable device of damming, at the upper end of the drain, the stream that flowed through it, with the object, as was explained, of “gethering a flood,” which when released, would wash the fox out before it.

At intervals a rider or two arrived, hot, wet, and full of explanations of the cause of delay, but of the new Master there was no sign. Slaney Morris was one of these later arrivals. She proffered no excuses, being probably aware that these were made for her by her mount with an eloquence beyond all gainsaying. Slaney had, in an unpretentious way, ridden from her youth up, but she rode merely as a means of transit, very much as people use omnibuses; her enthusiasms were reserved for other pursuits. She was now seated on an elderly brown mare, whose natural embonpoint was emphasized by Uncle Charles’ humane scruples on the subject of clipping horses. As a further tribute to his clemency, the brown mare’s tail had passed undocked through the changing fashions of fifteen years, and hung like a heavy black skirt, in righteous protest against the spruce abbreviations of the French’s Court horses.

Mr. Glasgow looked at Slaney, at her old-fashioned habit, at her saddle, horned like the moon, at the mare’s tufted fetlocks and dingy curb-chain, and realized that Miss Morris’s most sincere admirers could not attribute to her the sacred quality of smartness. With Mr. Glasgow, as with most of his countrymen, smartness came next to cleanliness and considerably in advance of godliness. He had often ridden with Slaney, and the points he now uncomfortably noted had merely seemed an unimportant part of the background of a life whose charm depended on culture and not on fashion. He wished that he had not persuaded her to come out.

The rain had turned to a thick mist; the hounds sat on the soaked grass in solemn and disconsolate patience, looking as sapient and as silly as only hounds can; the crowd of country boys remained as indifferent to the weather as if it had been a summer breeze; and after what seemed to the shivering riders a long delay, the emissary returned, breathless, with the grand dog slinking at his bare heels. The yellow cur was withdrawn by the tail from the lower end of the drain, and the terrier was rammed in like a charge into a gun, its owner, a very respectable elderly man, lying flat on his face in the mud, with his head in the drain, bellowing encouragement. Faint squeaks from the bowels of the earth soon testified that the combat had begun, and the owner redoubled his bawls of “Good boy! good lad!” At this moment a shout arose from the road above that “the flood was loosed,” in other words, that the artificers of the dam had lost patience, and had turned the pent-up waters of the stream once more into the drain. Dinny Hegarty arose from the lower end to protest, but he was too late. There was a chorus of shouts, “The dog’ll be shoked”—“The two o’ thim’ll be shoked”—“There isn’t as much wather as’d shoke them”—“Faith, the divil himself’d be shoked in it!”

What were the experiences of the sub-terranean combatants none could tell; the flood burst from the lower end of the drain and ran down the field brown with mud and redolent of fox, and the pack, without a moment’s hesitation, pursued it hotly down the field till, amidst yells of laughter, it escaped from them into a boghole. After a brief interval, muffled hostilities recommenced in the drain; two spades and a pick appeared, as if by magic, and a shaft was sunk upon the squeaks.

“Give over the spades,” shouted Danny-O, as the roofing stones of “the gully” appeared, “the hands is the besht. Hurry now, before he’ll go north in it from ye!”

“Arrah, what north! he haven’t room to turn in it!”

“Dom yer sowl, he’d turn in a kayhole!”

“Go get a briar!” roared another voice, “he isn’t two foot from the hole! Twisht it in his hair now—twisht it, can’t ye, and dhraw him out!”

The principle was that adopted by dentists in extracting the nerve from a tooth, but the briar failed of its office. The spade and pick were again resorted to, and observations were taken by a small boy.

“The daag have him!”

“Is it by the tail?”

“No, but in a throttlesome way!”

“Come out now,” interposed Danny-O, “till I thry could I ketch a howlt of him.”

“Put on yer glove, Dan; take care would he bite ye.” “Sure, the gloves is no use, only silk.” “A fox can’t bite through silk. Wrop yer hand in silk and he can’t put a tooth through it!” Thus, and much more from the chorus, while Dan, addressing an eye of scornful and civilized humour to Mr. Glasgow, commanded that a “gowlogue” and a bag should be brought to him. The young man who had been leading his horse about leaped into the saddle and undertook the errand, and the little boy who had been entrusted with the doctor’s wounded chestnut immediately pursued him at an emulous canter, with his bare feet thrust into the stirrup-leathers. Presently both returned at full gallop, one with a forked stick, the other with a meal sack, and then, dazzled by success, proceeded to race round the field. The hounds started once more in pursuit, and were themselves pursued by Danny-O, while the digging party broke into enthusiastic cheers.

Lady Susan was not at all amused. She felt much as a devout clergyman might feel at beholding a low travesty of the Church service, and she was almost shocked at the way in which Major Bunbury and Mr. Glasgow laughed.

“Men will laugh at anything,” she said, turning to Slaney, “but I call this awful rot, you know. Hughie gave a lot of money for these hounds, and this sort of nonsense should not be allowed.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got to learn a good many new things about hunting when you come to this part of Ireland, and to forget a good many more!” said Glasgow, looking up at her with his charming smile. It was a smile that Slaney had often thought of when she lay awake at night, but in none of her reveries had she ever fancied its light being shed upon Lady Susan.

At about this moment Hugh, three miles away, was engaged in pulling down the stones of a loosely-built wall with the handle of his whip. He was riding a tall, powerful, young grey horse, and was holding him hard on the curb as he leaned over and pushed at the stones. It was obvious that horse and rider were on bad terms. Hugh’s face was white, and splashed with mud—mud from the hoofs of the farmers’ horses—behind whom he had galloped through dirty lanes; there was a long red scratch on the grey’s shoulder that looked as if it had been made by a spur, and Hugh’s new velvet cap had obviously been on the ground. The wall was reduced to two feet high before Captain French turned his horse and put him at it. He tried to pull him into a walk, and swore at him as he curveted and sidled, chafing against the curb. The horse refused, whirled round, and finally bucked over the wall, lifting his rider perceptibly in the saddle. There was but one fence now between Hugh and the road. It was a large bank with furze-bushes growing on it, and a small ditch in front of it. Hugh trotted down its whole length with a sick, angry heart, looking for a low place.

“My God!” he said to himself, “I can’t ride at it. It’s no good trying.”

One spot seemed to him a trifle lower than the rest, and setting his teeth, he put the horse at it. The effort to command himself and not to pull the horse’s head as he came to the jump amounted in its way to agony; he did not know if he were glad or sorry when the grey, soured by the day’s misadventures, swerved from the fence and bucketed round the field, pulling hard and trying to get his head down. Hugh stopped him and dismounted. He would not think of what he was going to do, but there was a hard knot in his throat as he walked the grey across the field. He tied the lash of his whip to the reins, and climbing on to the fence, led him over it. The horse followed him as lightly and quietly as a dog, and stood still to let him untie the lash. His hand shook, and he did it awkwardly, while the lump in his throat grew bigger.

The events of the morning were present with him. The jovial breakfast-table at which he had played so sorry a part; the look of the grey horse bucking as he was led round to the door; the cold, sick feeling when the hounds opened on the fox in covert; the look of Glasgow’s back as he and the others disappeared over the hill, leaving him stuck at the first fence, engaged in that half-hearted battle with his horse that had resulted in a fall for them both. He hated them all—Bunbury, Glasgow, the road-riding faction, who had volunteered with horrible sympathy to show him the short cuts: he almost hated his wife for the easy confidence in him that he knew he did not deserve.

“I’ll get over it,” he said to himself, swearing furiously and futilely. “After all, this is pretty nearly the first time I’ve been on a horse since that smash. Damn you, you brute, keep quiet!” This to the grey, who was fidgeting and pulling, with his ears pricked in expectation of anything and everything. “I’ve never had a right feel about a horse since that time.” He pulled out his flask and took a drink—his wife had given it to him—and as he put it back he thought, with almost the bitterest pang of all, that she would never understand—that he could never tell her.

The note of the horn struck on his ear, and, looking back through the rain, he saw the hounds coming quietly along the road behind him. Lady Susan and Mr. Glasgow were riding in front of them, and he knew that the time had come when he would have to begin to tell lies.

CHAPTER IV

Slaney was reading Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon.” It was Sunday afternoon, and she had dined in the middle of the day. It would soon be time to get ready for afternoon service.

Before beginning to read she had looked for a moment at the name “Wilfrid Glasgow” at the beginning of the book. The same hand that had written the name had marked with heavy and frequent lines the passages most approved by the writer. It is a habit that may be intolerable to succeeding readers, but Slaney did not take offence. Her hazel eyes, that had surveyed Uncle Charles this morning with such impartial severity when he upset his cup of tea, dilated and lingered among the ringing lines; she raised them and looked out with a quickened pulse at the bright afternoon and the clear rugged outline of the mountain. The drawing-room window commanded a slope of rough lawn, the black and swirling curve of a river, an opening to the west through a young wood of larch and Scotch fir letting in the barren mountain, leaning aslant, and the sunsets that wrought and died upon its shoulder.

“In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death.”

The approval of Mr. Glasgow was firmly and neatly given to the passage; she felt it to be the mouthpiece of his soul, and she felt also that hers was probably the only soul within a radius of twenty miles capable of apprehending Mr. Glasgow’s in its higher walks. Slaney remembered that at dinner last night Lady Susan had gaily announced that she hated all poetry—“at least all good poetry.” The recollection was inconsequent, but it was agreeable.

“Mrs. Quin from Cahirdreen’s outside in the back hall, Miss Slaney, and would be thankful to speak to you.”

Thus Tierney, the pantry boy; Slaney was irritably aware that two buttons were missing from his jacket. It would need poetry of the highest moral tendency to preserve the serenity of an Irish housekeeper.

Slaney went out into the draughty hall wondering dismally if it would be the cough-bottle or the burn-plaster that would be required, and found the widow Quin awaiting her in tears. Slaney had the turn for doctoring that is above all things adorable to the Irish poor, whose taste for the contraband finds in a female quack a gratification almost comparable to “potheen-making.” She understood them and their ailments by nature and by practice, and, since her childhood, had been accustomed to go to their deathbeds, and their funerals. Such scenes moved her strongly, but she had learned to prize the artistic value of strong emotion.

The hood of Mrs. Quin’s blue cloak was drawn over her face, a fact implying mystery as well as tribulation. Slaney immediately came to the conclusion that her husband’s will had not been satisfactory, and addressed herself to the task of arriving at the object of the visit with as little preamble as possible. Nevertheless it was with much circumlocution, and with many apprehensive glances at the closed door, through which was audible Uncle Charles’ Scripture lesson to the pantry-boy, that the widow Quin finally delivered her soul.

“But whatever I cried afther Dan,” she said, after a lengthy exordium on the virtues of the deceased, “Tom have him cried out an’ out, an’ indeed ’tis for I knowing the wish you had always for Tom that I came down throubling your honour. Sure yerself knows he was always innocent like, and when he was a child not a word out of him the longest year ever came only talkin’ of God and the fairies, and the like o’ that, and that was no way for any poor crayture to be. Sure yourself knows well the way he was. Ye had undherstanding always, God bless ye——”

“Are you afraid his head is getting wrong again?” interrupted Slaney inexorably. Mrs. Quin fell at once into a rancour and tearful whisper.

“It’s whatever owld talk the people have about that place above in Park-na-Moddhera that has him desthroyed. Every spadeful that’s throwing out o’ that hill it’s the same to him as if it was down on his heart they were throwing it, and sure they say that grey fox or whatever it was poor Danny seen is like a witch or a fairy that’d dhraw down bad luck if it wouldn’t be let alone, the Lord save us——” she crossed herself; “didn’t Danny tell me one time he felt like a wind from the say coming bechuxt his skin and his blood afther he seeing the same fox?”

“But Tom has nothing to say to the hill now,” said Slaney; “why should the bad luck come to him any more than to Mr. Glasgow?”

“Sure isn’t that what I’m tellin’ him, but what himself says that it’s bechuxt the two o’ thim. God help the crayture, ye wouldn’t like to be listening to him.” Mrs. Quin wiped her eyes and groaned; “maybe your honour would spake a word to him, or maybe”—she turned a crafty eye on Slaney—“ye’d spake a word to Mr. Glasgow, maybe he wouldn’t ax to take any more gravel out o’ the hill if it was your honour told him the way Tom is.”

The opportunity of speaking to Mr. Glasgow did not come as soon as Slaney had expected. He had given her to understand, in the ambiguous special manner with which he chose to beguile her, that he would meet her at afternoon service, and walk home with her; till the second lesson the special manner was ample guarantee, then the ambiguity began to suggest itself to her memory. She walked home with Uncle Charles, and listened for the twentieth time to his reprobation of the Canon’s popish practice of turning to the east during the Creed. The Honourable Charles Herrick was an elderly and prosperous bachelor, whose blameless life was devoted to two pursuits, gardening and writing controversial letters to the Church papers. He was a small, dry gentleman, very clean, and not in the least deaf. Strangers always experienced a slight shock on finding that he was not a clergyman.

Slaney put away her best hat, and felt that there were yet many hours till bedtime. Those who lay out with a confident hand the order of a day’s events would do well to prepare also an alternative.

Yet Fate had, after all, reserved a blessing.

Slaney had scarcely settled herself by the fire, when she heard Lady Susan’s voice in the hall, and following on it the voices of Hugh and Mr. Glasgow. The afternoon leaped again into life and meaning. As she came into the lamp-lit hall to meet her visitors, Lady Susan and Major Bunbury realized in their different ways that she was better-looking than they had believed. Her dark hair rose full and soft from her white forehead, in the simplicity that is often extolled, but is seldom becoming; her complexion was pale and tender with western air and country living, the refinement that was so ineffective at Hurlingham was here pervading and subtle. Lady Susan looked hard at her, and promoted her at once and ungrudgingly from the ranks of non-combatants. Major Bunbury felt that his special sister (who read Carlyle and played Scarlatti) would like to meet her. Although he hunted six days a week, he kept a soul somewhere, and his sister knew where it was.

They all sat down in the firelight of the drawing-room, where the tall west window showed a clear twilight sky, tinged with pink, and barbed with a moon as hard and keen as a scimitar. There was a quaint and sprawling paper on the walls, a band of brass gleamed round the wide opening of the fire-place, a slight smell of turf and wood smoke added its sentiment of country quietness to the air.

“It was jolly coming over,” said Lady Susan, displaying a good deal of drab gaiter as she leaned back and sipped her tea, “but we’re not going to have any hunting to-morrow. My bike was breaking ice on all the puddles.”

“I thought it was going to break me when you overtook me in the avenue just now,” said Mr. Glasgow, in a tone that masked surprisingly well the sentiments he had expressed to Slaney about the modern young woman and her bicycle. He had not thought of mentioning that when the modern young woman possessed a figure that did not admit of a second opinion, and a title, his views might be subject to modification.

“I shan’t think of taking the hounds out to-morrow,” said Hugh; “Dan knows the country, and he says it would not be the least use.”

Inwardly he was telling himself that he was a coward and a cur, because he felt such entire thankfulness for the frost. He had told them all how the leg that he had broken at polo had stopped him last Friday, when the fox had been run to ground on Fornagh Hill, and he hated himself for his own fluency in lying. His horror and despair were out of all proportion to the fact of a broken nerve. He could do but one thing well, and that one thing was taken from him. He loved his wife with all the strength of a very simple and kindly nature, but some new, chill instinct told him that this was a disaster that it would be wise to hide from her. So far, at all events, his secret was in his own keeping.

For ten full minutes Lady Susan talked of the run, lamented the misconduct of the grey horse, and with an enjoyment of a twice-told tale, that was characteristic of her very moderate mental abilities, regaled Mr. Glasgow with excruciating imitations of Danny-O and his satellites on the occasion of the digging out of the fox. Glasgow, with his eyes fixed on her glowing face, listened delightedly; Slaney, through her talk to the others, was conscious of a new-found bitterness.

“I say, Slaney!” Lady Susan called out, “I want you to talk sense to your friend, Danny-O. The old pig refuses to draw that gorse above the railway—you know,” turning to Glasgow, “that place where the cutting is; he said it was an unlucky place, and that the fox there was a witch! Such rot!”

Slaney did not answer at once. There are some people for whom the limits of the possible seem to be set farther out than for the rest of the world. They see and hear things inexplicable; for them the darkened glass is less dark, to them all things are possible. It cannot be called superstition—being neither ignorant dread nor self-interested faith; it seems like the possession of another sense—imperfect, yet distinct from all others. Slaney had seen and heard—between the sunset and the dawn—things not easily accounted for; she herself accepted them without fear; but she knew—as any one who knows well a half-civilized people must know—how often a superstition is justified of its works.

“I often think,” she said slowly, “that it isn’t much good to go against the country people in these things.”

“I don’t agree with you, Miss Morris,” struck in Glasgow. “I never give in to them. The other day I told one of my fellows to cut down a thorn bush that came in my way surveying. He told me it was a holy thorn, and he wouldn’t stir it. I just took the bill-hook and cut it down myself.”

Mr. Glasgow gave his fair moustache a twist, and looked at Lady Susan. He had a noble gift of self-confidence, and a quietness in manifesting it that made him immediately attractive to lesser intelligences.

“Quite right too,” said Lady Susan, in her strong clear voice, “that’s the way to talk to these people. Why, it’s as bad as the Land League, not being allowed to draw one of the nicest coverts in the country, for rubbish of that kind. Hughie, if you don’t kill that old white fox I shall think you’re in a funk too. You Irish people are all the same. I don’t care, Mr. Glasgow and I will take the hounds to Cahirdreen, and we’ll have that white brush! I want it awfully to show to the people at home, and tell them I got a witch’s brush!”

“You could say it was an evolution of the broomstick,” said Slaney.

Mr. Glasgow laughed, and it gave Slaney some satisfaction to see that Lady Susan was bewildered.

When the French’s Court party betook themselves to their bicycles for the homeward ride Mr. Glasgow came back from the hall door close to Slaney. She had stirred the logs till they blazed strongly, and the warm eager flicker met the unearthly stillness of the moonlight.

“I couldn’t get away in time for church,” said Glasgow, as if dropping into an undercurrent of both their minds; “I had a terrible amount of work to get through. It isn’t finished now, but—I just let it remain unfinished.” He looked at her, to see in what manner she would show her gratification, and found her eyes cast down, and her sensitive mouth closed in an unsympathetic line. He had never known her other than sympathetic, with that quick brain sympathy that was especially hers; she had shown him without reserve or femininity that his conversation was agreeable to her, but her heart was hidden from him, perhaps from her own inability to reveal it. He felt, as his eyes dwelt on her, that she was complex and unexplored; he was pleasurably aware that she was attractive.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” he went on, in his confident, quiet voice. “I thought you would have come down to the cutting yesterday to see how we are getting on.”

“It was too cold,” said Slaney, indifferently; “besides, I went to French’s Court.”

“It was rather cold, especially when one waited and was disappointed,” said Glasgow. “I always looked upon you as a person who kept your promises.”

“There is only one thing more irrational than making promises, and that is keeping them,” said Slaney, with a flippancy that Glasgow was not accustomed to in her; “but in this case there was no promise.”

“When a thing has happened very often, one has a right to expect it to happen again,” he said; “that is how one arrives at most conclusions.”

“Sometimes things come to a conclusion of themselves,” said Slaney, with a little laugh.

She looked up and found his eyes waiting to meet hers. They had an undisguised, irrelevant tenderness, and Slaney was surprised into accepting it for one silent moment, while her heart beat and her head swam. She recovered herself, as one might struggle up out of soft ground. The thought of Lady Susan was like setting her feet again on hard rock.

“Mrs. Quin was here to-day,” she said, catching at the first subject that suggested itself. “From what she tells me, I am afraid that Tom Quin must be going out of his mind.”

“I should believe that if I thought he had any mind to go out of,” said Glasgow irritably. Slaney was not playing the part he had cast for her, and the subject of the Quins was not calculated to soothe him. “The whole family have persecuted me about that gravel-pit—Quin, and his mother, and the red-haired sister, and all. I wonder if they really think I am going to give up working the place to please them!”

“Yes, I think they do,” replied Slaney, staring before her into the blue and pink and yellow flames of the wood fire. Then, after a pause, “I am not quite sure that I don’t sympathize with them.”

“Sympathize with what?” asked Glasgow impatiently. “With their distress, or with their superstition?”

“Perhaps a little of both.”

At his tone her fastidious upper lip had set itself again into an unsympathetic line; her forehead seemed as white and quiet as the moonlight behind her.

“Very well,” said Glasgow, provoked and scornful, yet beyond all things attracted, “I take all consequences. I appropriate all the ill-luck. Now will you sympathize with me?”

“Oh, don’t!” she exclaimed, putting out her hand with a horrified gesture, as if what he had said would be instantly overheard.

“Will you?” he repeated, deliciously perceptive of her fear, and before he realized what he was doing he had kissed the fastidious, spiritual mouth, and found it a trembling and human one.

“You can learn twelve of the ‘I wills’ of the Psalms for next Sunday, Tierney,” said Uncle Charles’ voice in the hall, “and three more of the ‘Plain Reasons against joining the Church of Rome.’”

Uncle Charles opened the drawing-room door as he made the concluding charge, and met Mr. Glasgow in the act of taking leave of his niece.

When Slaney went up to her room that night she sat for a long time by the fire, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. There was a little table by her. On it were an old-fashioned desk, a good many books, and, half-emerging from the paper in which it had been wrapped, a number of the Fortnightly Review. She sat for a long time, and sometimes in the silence of the house the beating of her heart was like a voice in her ears, telling her irrepressibly of her own weakness and strength, of depths of herself hitherto unknown. Her pure and ardent nature was awakening out of narrowness, her clear intellect scaled all possibilities like a strong climber.

As if she had yielded to herself for too long, she sat up at length, and after a moment, took up the Fortnightly Review, and began to turn its pages over—Glasgow had brought it to her that afternoon—and she searched for the article that he had commended. Cold logic and relentless statistics would inflict composure, would steady her down to the level of sleep.

Two of the pages fell apart where a sheet of paper had been thrust in; she was abruptly confronted by a letter in a large, heavy handwriting. The eye is quicker than the will. Before she snatched her eyes away she had taken in its half-a-dozen lines. For some moments she sat perfectly still, while the blood came with a rush to her cheeks and forehead. Then she crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fire.

CHAPTER V

The frost that had sharpened the moon and armoured the pools, held its ground for but one night. The voice of the south moaned in the casements, a grey, strong rain followed it, and on the morning of the second day a clean wind blew across the soaked fields, and the sun came forth in a sky of new-born blue.

Tom Quin’s red-haired sister stood at the door of her house, and looked across the furzy uplands to where a long wood climbed and sank on a spur of Cahirdreen hill. Her hair seemed on fire in the sunshine, and the pupils of her light eyes were contracted to pin points by the glare from the white-washed lintel.

“He’s coming,” she said, turning back in to the house, where her mother was sitting on a stool by the fire, with a cup of tea in her hand, and a bare-legged grandchild squatting beside her on the warm hearthstone. Since her bereavement, the widow Quin breakfasted fitfully by half-cupfuls at intervals during the morning, and did not sit at the table.

“Oh, musha, musha, a quare hour o’ the day he comes to his breakfast, goin’ on eleven o’clock, an’ he that wint out before it was makin’ day!”

Mrs. Quin shed tears, and little Mikeen utilized the opportunity by burying his dirty face in her cup, and taking a long drink of the bitter strong tea.

Tom Quin did not waste words on his family when he came in. He sat down on the settle, with his hat on, and his eyes fixed on the floor between his muddy boots. His dog, a black-and-grey cur, remotely allied to the collie breed, snuffed with an habituated nose at the pots and pans under the dresser, found no change in them since he had licked them the night before, passed the lair of the cat with respectful rigidity, and lay down as if tired, submitting like a Christian and a gentleman to the fondlings of Mikeen.

“Have they the bridge finished yet, in Tully Bog?” asked Maria Quin, as she took the teapot up from its nest in the hot ashes.

Quin raised his heavy eyes quickly.

“Ye think ye’re damn wise,” he said, “follyin’ me, an’ axin’ me this an’ that what was I doin’. Haven’t I throuble enough without the likes o’ yee annoyin’ me!”

“Oh, asthoreen,” wailed his mother, “sure it’s only that we’re that much unaisy for the way ye are, that we’d ax where’d ye go. Take the cup o’ tay, asthore, don’t be talkin’ that way.”

Quin relapsed into silence, and Maria was in the act of pouring out his tea, when the long sweet note of a horn struck suddenly on their ears, and Watch sprang out of the open door, barking his shrill vulgar bark, and sniffing the breeze. He was hardly quicker than his master. Before Maria had time to put down the teapot, Quin was outside, listening and staring, and cursing the dog into silence. He saw two red-coated horsemen trotting round the end of the wood, and the note of the horn came again, smooth and melodious. Quin started at a run in the direction of the covert, drawing hard, sobbing breaths as he ran.

On the road at the other side of the covert, Slaney was sitting on Isabella, the elderly brown mare, and wishing that she had stayed at home. To sit on Isabella’s back was an experience almost distinct from riding; it suggested more than anything else a school-room sofa propelled into action by a sour and sluggish sense of the inevitable, a school-room sofa that partook of the nature of the governess. Slaney’s sharply-cut face was pale and sleepless-looking; she was no longer the ethereal creature of the firelight and moonlight, merely an ill-turned-out girl, with interesting eyes and a clear skin, who appeared to be absorbed in discussing bronchitis kettles with the dispensary doctor. Lady Susan was a little farther down the road on her husband’s grey, the horse who was, so far, the only creature possessed of the knowledge that Hugh was afraid of him. He was well aware that Lady Susan was not, but that, after all, was a fact that was patent to all beholders.

Mr. Glasgow, turning away from Lady Susan, and looking back as he turned, thought that she was as good a thing to look at as he had ever seen. He was on his way to Slaney, and as he neared her he attuned his eye to that expression of understanding, even of tenderness, that the occasion required. He delighted in the position; it was intricate, it was a little risky, and in spite of Slaney’s wrinkled habit and old-fashioned hat, he still recognized the attractive quality in her. He felt that it was discriminating and chivalrous of him to be able to do so, and looking down on her from the mental elevation of his assured horsemanship, and his power of being agreeable to women, he anticipated with sufficient pleasure another harmless deviation or so from the ordinary paths of friendship.

“So you did come out, after all,” he began, riding possessively up to her, “in spite of the Witch! Do you know that Dan’s afraid to go into the covert, and Major Bunbury’s taking the hounds through it!”

The sun shone on the top of his head as he took his hat off; Slaney had not before noticed the exact extent of his baldness. She gave him a conventional smile and nod, and went on talking to Dr. Hallahan. Glasgow waited, lighting a cigarette, and, at the next pause, spoke to her again. His eyes were full of meaning and penetration, and he knew that they were kind, but hers met them with the merest politeness as she answered him. There was a perplexed whimper from a hound down at the lower end of the covert; Glasgow caught up his reins and trotted away in the direction in which Lady Susan was already moving. This was not the moment for winding back through the maze of Slaney’s mood; he held the clue and could use it at his leisure.

Slaney detached herself from Dr. Hallahan, and rode alone up the mountain road. The hounds had drawn the gorse outside the covert, and were slowly working up through a wood of scrubby aboriginal oak trees, woven together by a tangle of briars; round the outskirts a band of young firs and larches imparted an effect of amenity, but the domain of the oaks had as impracticable an air as the curled and bossed forehead of the mountain bull that was shouting defiance from a neighbouring field. Slaney moved slowly on and up till she reached the top corner of the covert; and pausing there, the brown mare proceeded, with her usual air of infinite leisure, to crop the green spikes of a furze-bush. The smoke from Quin’s farm rose bluely from the valley below, a long stretch of brown country spangled with lakes lay beyond, and behind all, rising to meet the eye, the sea stood high like a silver wall against the horizon. Curlew were crying on the sunny slopes above Slaney, and the whistling of green plover filled the air. No one was in sight save a rider posted out on the hill to watch the top of the covert; the inevitable mob of country boys was at the lower end, and the sound of Hugh’s and Major Bunbury’s voices, holloaing to the hounds, came distantly from the bottom of the wood.

Slaney sat quite still, while the life and freshness of the morning passed by her, and left her dull as stone. The thud of a footstep that ran, and laboured in running, did not make her look round; she thought it was the usual country boy till she saw Tom Quin come lurching and stumbling round the far corner of the wood, with his dog panting at his heels. Even at a distance of a hundred yards or more an extravagance as of despair was unmistakable about him. As Slaney looked at him, a hound, not far off in the covert, gave two or three contralto notes in succession, and at the same moment there was a rustle in the bracken, a few yards in front of her. A grey face parted the brown fern and looked out at her; a fox’s face, with its oblique crafty eyes and sharp refined muzzle, but the fur was silver-grey.

“A thing like an Arctic fox,” Slaney heard Lady Susan’s voice declaiming on the ice at Hurlingham.

The fox slipped down off the fence through the bracken, crossed the road with a dainty whisk of its grey brush, glided up the opposite bank like a shadow, and was gone. A cold and prickling sensation passed over Slaney, that feeling of “a wind from the say coming betune the skin an’ the blood” that old Dan Quin had felt. It died away, and left her with a bounding heart and a reddened cheek, and a sense of intense participation in the events of the moment, instead of the lifeless passivity of five minutes before. Her courage repelled the shock to her instinct, but her understanding had taken a lift to the unknown and the impossible, and in spite of the morning sunshine and the candid blue sky, she could not altogether right herself.

A long shout of “gone away” came from the watcher on the hill, and the hounds came tumbling out of the wood in the lovely headlong rush that has the shape of a wave and a thousandfold its impetuosity. With the indescribable chorus of yells and squeals that is known as full cry, they swept past Slaney, and it was at this juncture that Isabella, the brown mare, found herself the victim of a gush of enthusiasm. It may have been a survival in her old soul of the days when she had, according to tradition, carried the huntsman of the county pack; it may have been that she, like her rider, was lifted out of herself by the discerning of spiritual things; at any rate, when she found her head pointed at a promising place in the fence, she bundled over it with an agility for which no one would have given her credit, and Slaney found herself galloping alone behind the racing pack.

The fox had done all that was most unexpected, had gone away into the teeth of the wind, in a direction wide of any known destination, and the field, both horse and foot, were all left at the wrong side of the big irregular covert. Yet Slaney had not gone a hundred yards when Lady Susan and Glasgow were behind her like a storm, and shot past with their horses pulling in the wildness of a first burst. The next fence was a towering bank, wet and rotten and blind with briars, feasible only at a spot where a breach made for cattle had been built up with loose stones. Glasgow came first at it, checking his young horse’s ingenuous desire to buck, and sitting down for a big fly. He was suddenly confronted by Tom Quin at the far side, brandishing a stone as big as a turnip as if in the act to throw it, and the young horse swung round with a jerk that perceptibly tried his rider’s seat. Lady Susan was close in his tracks, and, far from trying to stop her horse, she gave him a vigorous blow with her hunting-crop, and drove him full pace at the fence and its defender. The grey horse jumped like a deer, and Quin perforce sprang aside, cursing vilely and threatening Lady Susan with the stone. She was gone in an instant, and, before Glasgow had pulled his horse together, Slaney and Isabella were charging the place, Slaney with a white face and a crooked hat, Isabella with her long nose poked well forward to take her distance. With an economical yet sufficient hoist of her hind quarters the old mare was over, while Tom Quin remained staring as if stupefied by the feat.

“Go away, Tom!” called Slaney, as she passed him. “Don’t mind them—it’s no use—go home!”

She seemed to herself to be calling out of a dream; yet she had never felt so strongly and defiantly alive. The thud of galloping hoofs was in her ears, and she looked back in time to see Glasgow’s horse clear the stones with a long bound, and receive a blow across the nose from Tom Quin’s stick as he landed. Drag as she might she could not calm Isabella, who was bucketing through the heather tussocks with school-girl ardour; when she looked again, Quin was holding his hand to his face, as if he had been struck upon it, and was raving in that inarticulate futility of rage that is not good to see. Glasgow came on like a thunderbolt, and was beside Slaney in a moment, his horse still rampant from the blow.

“He’s mad!” she called out through the wind that sang in her teeth. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Didn’t he, though!” Glasgow shouted back, his eyes tracking the hounds where they were flitting like white birds across a green field near the brow of the hill; “he knows now, I think!”

Lady Susan was a hundred yards ahead. Glasgow let his horse go, reducing the distance at every stride, and leaving Slaney behind. He did not seem like the lover who had found out the secret of her lips two evenings ago.

Other riders were close to her now, converging from different points; she was dimly aware of Major Bunbury below her on the left, riding hard and steady to pick up a bad start; she saw Danny’s red coat far away in the heather; she vaguely missed Hugh’s. She was in the green field at last, with the hounds casting themselves at the farther side of an ugly stone-faced bank plumed with furze-bushes. The grey had refused, with the nervousness of youth and inexperience, and Glasgow was looking about for a better place to get over. At the same moment Slaney saw Hugh galloping towards them up a hillside track on the bay that his wife had ridden the Friday before, and through the maddening din of the hounds opening again on the line, she heard Lady Susan call to him to give them a lead.

“There, Hughie!” she cried, “between the two furze-bushes is the only chance. That horse will do it flying.”

Hugh cantered to the place, the bay horse pulling and fuming; he looked at the steep face of the bank, the deep ditch in front of it, and knew that to save his soul he could not ride at it.

“It’s not good enough,” he called out, turning his horse. “We must try round some other way.”

“Try round!” ejaculated Lady Susan, rushing the grey at the fence. “Look at the hounds running like the devil over the top of the hill! Come up, horse!”

The grey horse recognized the inevitable; he came up on to the top of the bank with an effort, and jumped boldly out across the boggy stream on the far side. Glasgow came next, getting over with a scramble, and after him followed the wholly incredible Isabella. As Major Bunbury, cramming his screwy mare at the same place, saw Isabella’s crafty hind legs fetch securely up on the bank, he said to himself, with some excitement, that Miss Morris was a clinking good girl, and that there was nothing in creation like an Irish mare, young or old. At this juncture his own mare alighted on her chest and nose, and the eulogy was interrupted.

Slaney was but chaotically conscious of subsequent events. The hounds crested the hill, and sped down into the brown and green patchwork of the rough country at the other side, and in a dream-like rush she pursued the flying figures of Glasgow and Lady Susan, scuffling and sliding down rocky hillsides, straining up again with fingers twisted in Isabella’s abundant mane, scrambling over rotten fences, splashing and labouring through bog, bucking over loose walls, while physical effort and the excitement of success were mixed up with the fragrance of the beaten sod, the peaty whiff of the broken bog fence, and the consciousness of encomium and advice from Major Bunbury. There was a check or two, when she was aware of puffing horses snatching their wind, and flushed riders, telling each other that it was a great run, and then again the brown country flowing past her, and the unfailing guile of Isabella.

It was an hour and a half before Glasgow, dropping down into a road from the top of a heathery bank, found the hounds at fault on the edge of a wide and famished expanse, half marsh, half bog. They seemed beaten and spiritless; some were already sitting idle and panting on their haunches, and one of the younger ones was baying at a little bare-legged girl, who was uttering lamentable cries at finding herself in the middle of the pack. She and the few starveling cattle she was tending were the only living creatures in sight. It was a flat and inexplicable conclusion, but it was final beyond all ingenuity of casting.

It was a twelve-mile ride home for Slaney. She turned Isabella’s head almost immediately, and started at a walk, while the heat and enthusiasm died slowly away, and to-morrow lay as flat and cold before her as the marsh at her side. She was soon out of sight and hearing of the group on the road, and passed on through the loneliness of the barren hills, a tired figure on a tired horse, forgotten by all. So it was that she saw herself, with that acute perception of the gloom of the position that is with some natures the preliminary to tears.

“What happened to Slaney Morris?” said Lady Susan to Glasgow, an hour later, as she rode home with him. “She vanished like the fox. Is she a witch, too? I think she must be to have got that old crock along as she did.”

“Major Bunbury will tell you all about her,” replied Glasgow, not without interest in the manner in which the information would be received. “I saw him catch her up before she had gone half-a-mile.”

“Oh, the wily and dissolute old Bunny,” exclaimed Lady Susan, in high amusement. “Won’t he hear about it from me! I’m simply screaming for a cigarette,” she went on, “and Hughie has my case in his pocket, and he’s miles behind—oh, thanks!” She took one from Glasgow’s case, and lit it in the fresh breeze with practised ease.

“I suppose Hughie’s leg must have been bad again to-day,” she said, rather awkwardly, as they moved on again. Glasgow stroked his moustache and looked the other way, with a tact sufficiently ostentatious to impress Lady Susan.

“I saw him come out of the covert over a two-foot wall,” Hugh’s wife went on, “and he had no more cling than a toy.” She paused again, and Glasgow still was silent. “You saw him at that fence where I asked him for a lead,” she said, with some genuine hesitation. “What do you think was wrong with him?”

“I don’t suppose you can imagine what it feels like to lose your nerve, Lady Susan,” said Glasgow slowly.

She took her cigarette out of her mouth.

“I’ve been horribly afraid it was that,” she said, in a low voice, and their eyes met in a fellowship in which Hugh could never have a part.

CHAPTER VI

Taken from an architectural point of view there was nothing to be said for French’s Court. It belonged to the race of stone boxes, with tightly-fitting lids, that were built in Ireland a hundred years ago, the greater box or the less, according to the circumstances of the builder, and it was of as Presbyterian a gauntness as its tribe. Contrary, however, to the rule which ordained that the stone box should, as far as possible, face north and east, French’s Court, with its ranks of high windows, looked out into the sunset across a great plain of western ocean. From the edge of the long bare terrace in front of the house, the grass-lands sloped suavely between plantations to the sea, where Atlantic rollers charged and volleyed in stubborn fastnesses of cliff. The low hills behind the house were clothed with woods, brown and grey now in the mute suspense of January, touched here and there with orange where last year’s beech leaves clung like a stain of rust.

It was a big outlook, and the owner of French’s Court was a very small incident of the foreground, as he stood on the terrace and watched the fishing-boats creeping out in the raw, grey calm to the solitudes beyond the horizon. A portmanteau and a gun-case stood on the steps of the hall door, and a brown retriever was moving nervously round the gun-case, hurrying from it now and again to thrust her curly head into Hugh’s hand, and beseech him with her amber eyes not to leave her behind. Every dog believed in Hugh, and told him so by the varied and untiring dog methods, but now, with that restless and aching reference of all things to one subject, Hugh gave his hand to the innocent homage with the feeling that every one except his dog had found him out. His wife knew it, Bunbury knew it, he writhed under their tact when they avoided all discussion of his part in the run that the Silver Fox had given them; he detected with agony the consideration that prompted Lady Susan’s gallant efforts to talk on subjects unconnected with horses. He could have found it in his heart to swear at her and tell her she need not take so much trouble; he would have liked to quarrel with Bunbury and show him which was the pluckier man; he dwelt on the thought with pitiful, childish intensity, and drove his heel into the gravel, half knowing himself to be pitiful and childish.

There are junctures in a life when deficiency of intellect may disastrously alter the moral balance, and the smaller mind may have need of supreme and heroic effort to attain the philosophy or even the sanity that are easy to stronger intelligences. All Hugh’s native good-feeling was not enough to avail him when he remembered his wife’s figure up against the sky on the top of the stone-faced bank, while he turned and made for the byways and highways that had been his portion throughout the day. Passionate admiration, turning to passionate jealousy of her flawless courage, and self-contempt, and knowledge that his eyes would never again meet hers without consciousness of failure; all these because a good little average man had but two ideas in his life, and when one was taken from him, the other sickened like a poisoned thing.

The slow beat of a horse’s hoofs became audible on the avenue, and a sombre vehicle, that was half brougham and half cab, emerged from the trees into the open. Its coachman had a long red beard, a frieze coat, and a hat with a silver cord round it; the horse was white and shaggy, the wheels of the brougham turned in as if it were bandy-legged. Hugh recognized the equipage of his Uncle Charles, and stationed himself at the hall door to receive it.

“It’s awfully good of you to come, Slaney,” he said, with an effort at his wonted geniality. “Such short notice too. I didn’t know that I was going to this shoot till I got in from hunting the day before yesterday.”

He could remember, as he spoke, the mountain stream by which, when riding home, he had made up his mind to go, while the steady patter of the hounds’ paws sounded behind him on the wet road, and the honest hound faces that he was beginning to hate looked up at him from time to time.

Slaney and he found the drawing-room empty of all but a smell of cigarettes, and pursuing a fresh trail of it to the smoking-room, found Lady Susan sitting with a cigarette in her shapely mouth, and in front of her a mandoline, from which she was plucking a shrill and agueish chatter of melody, representing a waltz. A grey poodle lay at her feet, with his moustached muzzle buried in the fur rug, and his eyes rolling purgatorially upward in the forbidden longing to lift up his voice and howl an accompaniment to the tune. Major Bunbury was reading a newspaper with that air of serving his country that belongs to men when they read papers. No woman can hope to read the Times as though it were a profession; it is a masculine gift, akin to that of dining.

“Oh, it’s only Slaney!” exclaimed Lady Susan. “We bolted in here when we saw the white horse. We thought it was the parson. Well, you’re very good to come, dear, and it’s very nice to have you.” She kissed Slaney briskly on both cheeks, conveying a mingled flavour of smart clothes, tobacco, and careless friendliness. “Hughie could never have gone away and left Bunny and me here together for a week, you know! It would have been hideously improper, wouldn’t it? Uncle Charles would have had three fits on the spot, wouldn’t he?” She stationed herself on the arm of Major Bunbury’s chair, and put her elbow on his shoulder.

Slaney realized that of the whole party she alone felt the proceeding to be unusual, yet Major Bunbury did not seem to appreciate it.

“Well, I’m off, anyhow,” said Hugh. “Make them look after you, Slaney. If Glasgow wants to know anything more about the next meet or stopping the earths, or anything, Bunbury, Dan can tell him.” In spite of himself, his voice stiffened till all the good-fellowship was gone from it. “Well, good-bye, everybody.”

He wondered whether his wife would come out to see him off, but he could not ask her. She got up and came to the door, and stood leaning against it as he passed out. She was not quite sufficiently feminine to discern that, in spite of his unprepossessing manner, and bald brevity of farewell, he hated going away from her, and he went down the passage unaccompanied except by his dog.

“I think Hughie’s got influenza, or liver, or something,” remarked Lady Susan, returning to the mandoline, “he’s awfully grumpy.”

Bunbury got up without answering, and followed his host to the hall door.

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 tête-à-tête 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, unforgetable 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 bézique 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 bézique 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 air, 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 changed 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.

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 Turc, 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 three-penny 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 tête-à-tête 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.