mr. glasgow’s brown hunter, solomon, had not lived his thirteen years in vain. when he was led out into the yard one idle forenoon, and was there walked and trotted up and down in front of his owner and two strange men in tight trousers, and when, later, one of the strange men, who had the knowledgeable light fingers of a vet., passed his hand down his legs, and looked into his eyes, and pinched his throat, solomon knew that it looked like his fifth change of owners. afterwards he was taken out and cantered in a field, and though he felt chilly and dull, he jumped a trial bank with self-respect, and with the consciousness that he was giving a lead to the chestnut, who did{121} not understand the principle of jumping in cold blood.
he was not mistaken in the purport of these things. glasgow felt a pain about his throat as he saw the old horse walk into his stall again. he had not thought he would have minded so much. he stood by in the silence that characterizes horse-dealing, while the chestnut underwent examination, and looked round the yard at the miscellaneous collection of wreckage from his railway contract—the broken pumping-engine, the automatic crossing-gates that would not work, the corrugated iron hut that the men would not sleep in—and said to himself that the luck had been against him. it did not occur to him that he had shouldered his competitors out of the contract by a tender that left no margin for mistakes. mr. glasgow never made mistakes, but he had based his brilliant and minute calculations on the theory that the cheap irish labour would accomplish as much in the day as the costly english, and{122} the fact that it had not done so was obviously beyond the sphere of rational calculation. in the long stable at the other side of the yard a heavy hoof was dealing sledge-hammer kicks to the stall, and glasgow, as he heard it, estimated what price the creditors would get for the big dray-horses that he had brought over from england for the railway work. when he thought of the value of the plant that he was going to leave behind, he scarcely felt like a defaulter: there would be more than enough realized to pay the men, and the railway company could afford to lose. there remained to him his private means, the argentine republic, his own considerable gifts as a civil engineer, and—— would lady susan remain? he felt little doubt about that part of his future.
mr. andrew murphy was offering him, in the accents of tipperary, a hundred pounds for the two horses—seventy for the chestnut and thirty for old solomon—and he was holding out for a hundred and{123} twenty with his usual decision. if there were a weakness in his business dealings, it lay in his determination to be decisive at all points. the small and deliberate methods of expediency were intolerable to him; he would rather do without bread than accept the half-loaf. now, even while each trivial episode was tinged with the reflected light of his future, and all were converging towards an immediate crisis, he held to his point, and had not mr. murphy known of an immediate customer for solomon, the bargain might have ended untimely. as it was, the two horses changed hands at mr. glasgow’s price, with the understanding that both could be hunted next day by their former owner. mr. glasgow insisted on this point, and took all risks.
when it was all over, and mr. murphy and the vet. had had whiskies-and-sodas and gone away, glasgow went back to his office and took up again his task of burning and sorting papers. being habitually{124} orderly in his habits, the work went steadily, and, to all appearance, without effort; yet, as the time went on, his pale face became jaded and grey, and the lines about his mouth deepened.
the terrace at french’s court witnessed that afternoon the least dignified of earthly sights—the struggles of a lady-beginner on a bicycle. it was somewhat of a descent from the heroics of forty miles an hour on an engine, yet as slaney, flushed and dishevelled, wobbled to her one-and-twentieth overthrow, the past and future were forgotten in the ignoble excitements of the moment. major bunbury, himself in no mean condition of heat, picked her up out of a holly-bush and started her again; he had been doing the same thing for half-an-hour, but it had not seemed to pall. when the two-and-twentieth collapse had been safely accomplished, slaney confessed to feeling somewhat shattered, and returning to the hall, sank into a chair, with aching knees and hands seamed with gravel.{125}
“it’s nothing to what you’ll feel like to-morrow,” said major bunbury, encouragingly. “you rode into the pillar of the gate so very hard last time.” he looked down at her from his position on the hearthrug, and then glanced across to the dusky, comfortable corner where the piano was. “i wonder if you remember that you said you were too tired this morning to play that impromptu?”
“my hands were, and are, permanently hooked from holding on to the rail on the engine,” said slaney, whose spirits had risen as surprisingly as her colour with her first experience on the bicycle, “and no one with a proper sense of how things ought to be would have expected me to do anything but lie on the sofa and faint. instead of which, i am asked to sit on a music-stool and humiliate myself by playing things that i don’t know.”
“i think susan looks more knocked out of time than you do,” remarked bunbury, after one of those comfortable pauses that{126} mark intimacy, “and they really had not so near a shave as we had. they weren’t going anything like our pace when they saw that the cutting had fallen in.” another pause. “by the way, did you—did you understand that i thought we should have to jump, that time that i—that i put my arm round you?”
“oh, perfectly,” said slaney distantly, and blushed with fervour. “mr. glasgow did not seem to mind missing his train, after all,” she went on, speeding into the topic she most wished to avoid, as is frequently the fate of those who talk for the sake of changing the conversation.
“i believe that was all a mistake. glasgow hadn’t the slightest idea of going; he only wanted to see one of the directors who was travelling up by the mail,” said bunbury elaborately.
“susan waited for us at the station till she was frozen,” continued slaney, taking her share in the apology. “she would have come on our engine only{127} that it would have spoiled her box cloth coat.”
“do you know where she is now?” asked bunbury, after another silence.
“she said something about going to look for daffodils. i saw her going up the backway towards the woods some time ago.”
“are you too tired to walk up to meet her? you may choose between that and playing the impromptu.”
they went up the hill at the back of the house by a seldom-used avenue, where cart-wheels had made deep brown ruts in the grass, and the bordering oaks hung their branches low and unpruned; pale winter pastures spread on either side, and the cattle were already moving downwards towards their night’s lodging. yet the hint of coming spring was in the lengthened afternoon; stiff-necked daffodil buds were beginning to bend their heads and show the hoarded gold through the jealous green, and thrushes were twining a net of song in the shrubberies below. it is in the days of{128} february that the irish air begins again to breathe suggestion—no longer mere food for the lungs, it invades the heart, and bewilders the brain with griefs and hopes. even to the dimming of the eye that smell of the fields entered into slaney; with a new and strong understanding of herself she could have wept for the guileless egoist who had been slaney morris when last the february winds blew sweet.
“have you written that letter to say that you are not going home to-morrow?” said bunbury, as he held open the gate that admitted them into the wood.
he had realized during his walk up across the pastures that days in which slaney had no share would be strangely meaningless. not being introspective the discovery was sudden enough to set his blood beating and his heart instinctively aching. he knew that she could look forward to days without him as unconcernedly as she would look back to days with him; she was self-sufficing, as the ideal ever seems to be the{129} idealizer, and such as he had no portion beyond the opening of gates for her to pass through. major bunbury’s elder sister must have faithfully fulfilled the mission of elder sisters, or else his natural estimation of himself was low.
“no,” replied slaney, with her eyes on the ground, “after all, i made up my mind not to write.”
“your mind was made up the other way when you talked about it after breakfast,” said bunbury, looking down at her as she flicked a fir-cone aside with her stick. “do you generally change it every few hours?”
“emerson says that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” replied slaney, with a little sententious air that bunbury found exasperatingly charming.
“does emerson say that uncle charles is a hobgoblin for small minds, and could very well look after himself for another week?” there was a resentment in major bunbury’s voice that he did not try to conceal.{130}
“he says nothing of the sort. he might have said uncle charles was a diocesan nominator, only he forgot to,” said slaney, still preoccupied with the carpet of pine-needles on which they were walking. “but as you’re not an irishman,” she went on, “i suppose you don’t even know what that is?”
“it seems to be a thing that requires a great deal of unnecessary attention, and can’t take care of itself,” said bunbury gloomily.
“well, you’re quite wrong,” replied slaney, looking up with a laugh that was shy and friendly, and a little conscious. she was not accustomed to finding that her comings and goings were of importance to people like major bunbury. “it’s a most self-sufficing and useful thing. it goes away at intervals to elect clergymen for the irish church, and it sent over a note this afternoon to say i was not to go home for two or three days.”
bunbury was quite silent for a few{131} moments; then, while the pine-needle carpet seemed to rise up under his feet, he took her ungloved right hand, and raised it, stick and all, to meet his face as he bent over it, like a man stooping to drink. he kissed it, hurriedly and awkwardly, but in an instant the fine and slender fingers had escaped from his lips, and he stood by her, speechless and dizzy. in that moment of silence his heart opened and let in her dearness like a flood; before the next could dawn with its possibilities, a woman’s voice broke out of the wood, through twilight barred with tree stems. it was so near, it was so whetted with agony, so flung about with gusts of passion, that, for the moment, oblivious of what had just passed, they stared at each other for the space of a long-held breath, and were carried on towards it with that instinct that drags every human being towards suffering. a smell of wood-smoke drifted lightly in the air; it strengthened as a bend of the path straightened before them, till they saw{132} among the trees a group of men, a fire of fir-branches crackling in a bed of red ember and white ash, and down at the left side of the path a pond that glimmered darkly in a pale setting of sedgy grass. there was a punt on the pond, and boat-hooks and ropes were flung about. glasgow was standing by, why or how it did not occur to slaney to inquire. there were several countrymen whom she recognized, and all seemed silently intent on some central catastrophe.
the woman’s voice was unintelligible now, half-smothered and near the ground, as if her mouth were laid against the grass. two men stooped and tried to pull her to her feet. a red head appeared, swaying, as when, a month before, maria quin staggered through the drunken crowd while they closed her father’s coffin. slaney saw now what it was that lay on the ground beside her; the fixed sprawl of the limbs in the soaked clothing, the discoloured cheek, torn by boat-hooks; it expressed{133} with terrific completeness the hunted life, the lonely act of death that had attained such peace as this stillness might betoken.
tom quin’s black-and-grey dog moved restlessly round the body of his master, sniffing closely at the face, trying to turn over with his nose the rigid hand that still clutched a fragment of sodden reed, in that dumb distress and fear of death that animals must bear uncomforted. slaney dragged her eyes from the engrossing horror of it, and in doing so met those of lady susan at the far side of the group; but nothing seemed strange to her now, not even the white fixity of lady susan’s face, that told of a plucky woman strongly moved.
at that instant maria quin broke out of the group and confronted glasgow, eyes and face and voice beyond all control or desire of it, and repellent as human frenzy must inevitably be.
“if it wasn’t for the way you had him persecuted,” she yelled, “he wouldn’t be thrown out there on the grass undher yer{134} feet. ’twas you refused him the money back and dhrew the curse on him till ye had him wandhering the counthry night and day like a wild goose. couldn’t annyone know the crayture’s heart was broke whin he threw the scafflin’ off him and left it on the stone by the brink? oh, god and his mother! he knew he couldn’t dhrown if that was on him”—she held up the scapulary that quin, like most irish roman catholics, wore round his neck, and shook it in glasgow’s face—“and you to come walkin’ through the woods with yer lover, so quiet! that yersel’s may be lookin’ for a place to die and be threw in a grave that won’t be blessed!”
there was a general stifled exclamation, and the man said audibly—
“the cross of christ be between us and harm!” one of the french’s court workmen caught at maria quin’s arm as if to silence her; another pulled him away, telling him in irish that the curse might fall on any one who interfered with her.{135}
lady susan passed quickly round the outside of the group and came straight to bunbury, her figure in its brilliant modernity accentuating the sombreness of a tragedy of this archaic kind.
“i’m going home,” she said indistinctly, and walked past him; “i feel rather queer from seeing that——” her voice failed her, and she put her hand to her eyes. bunbury followed her without a word. it came home with a pang to slaney’s heart that lady susan had turned to him, expecting no quarter from the girl.
she turned to follow them, but she had not gone more than a few yards when she heard a step behind her. glasgow overtook her, and without speaking began to walk beside her; he looked straight in front of him, and something about his movement and the carriage of his head told her that he was entirely absorbed in hot white anger.
“i hope you are gratified at the result of encouraging superstition,” he said at last,{136} in a voice that told of the inward pressure of feeling.
“it seems to have been more the result of discouraging it,” she replied, without attempting to keep out of her voice the antagonism that was in her heart.
“it would be simpler if you said at once that honest or sane people had better give up having any dealings with the irish,” he returned hotly.
“do you mean english people? they certainly have not been eminently successful so far.”
slaney felt quite cool, and glasgow wondered how he had ever found her attractive.
“as you are a friend of these quins,” he said, holding his temper back, but not his imperiousness, “i think it would be as well if you advised that woman to take care about what she says of me, as she may get herself into trouble.”
he forgot for the moment the trouble that lay ahead of him; yet the strong nervous{137} excitement that fed his anger was due to the imminence of that trouble, forgotten or no.
“i think advice would be rather thrown away on her just now,” replied slaney, thinking of what lay by the pool, and of the wet torn face that the dog smelt at; “even irish people feel things sometimes.”
she suddenly became aware of the spring of tears that lies at the back of a shock, and she bit her lip and drove her stick hard into the ground as she walked.
“i can only suppose then,” he said, “that you don’t object to hearing your friends publicly libelled.”
he held the gate of the wood open for her, and she walked through as stiff as a dart. she knew quite well what sentence of maria quin’s it was that was foremost on his ear, and it was intolerable that he should take his stand beside lady susan. her distrust of him had become so invincible that she felt lady susan to be a bird in the snare of the fowler; she could not think of her as a confederate.{138}
“can’t you realize,” she said, at last, “that nothing i could say would do any good now?”
“i see,” he sneered, while he sought among his cast-iron theories of women for something that should fit this abnormal one. “you mean that it is no use to hope that a woman will hold her tongue, whether it be to her own advantage or not!”
the long-pent anger suddenly stirred in her, and with it the resolution that had long lain dormant.
“would it surprise you to hear,” she began, with the sensation of coming into the open, under fire, “that a woman has held her tongue about you for some time past?”
he half turned and looked hard at her. “i have ceased to be surprised at anything a woman may do, but i should certainly like to hear the particulars of such a piece of self-sacrifice.”
slaney hesitated. it was nearly impossible to say it. the twilight was falling and{139} the thrushes in the shrubberies below were piercing it with long shafts of rhapsody. lady susan and bunbury were walking under the bare and drooping branches some distance in front.
“well,” repeated glasgow, “what about this martyr to principle?”
“it was i,” she said, and everything around seemed to throb and stand still, like her heart.
“perhaps you will kindly explain what you mean,” he said, very coldly and politely.
“you lent me a book last month—the fortnightly review—and i found a letter to you in it, a letter that you had forgotten was there.”
he remained silent for a moment, and then spoke with a jerk—
“may i ask who it was from?”
“a woman.”
“you read it?”
“i could hardly help reading it, it was all on the first sheet.{140}”
she looked at him with the courage of an honourable nature owning to what it would self-righteously have despised in another, and he saw the moistness in her eyes.
“oh yes, i understand that quite well,” he replied, with a quickness that did honour both to him and to her.
there was a pause.
“i burned it at once,” she added.
“oh!” there was no shade of feeling in the monosyllable. “i remember the letter you speak of,” he went on very quietly; “what i cannot understand is why you have told me of it? i can hardly think it was for the sake of saying something unpleasant.”
“it was because i am fond of lady susan,” she said desperately.
in the silence that followed it seemed to her as though she had thrown a heavy stone into deep water, without hope of result beyond the broken mirror and the flagging ripple.
