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{44} 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{45} 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.{46}
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{47} 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?{48}”
“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{49} 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{50} 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.{51}
“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{52} 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{53} 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{54}—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,{55} 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.{56} 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{57} 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.{58}
“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.{59}”
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{60} 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{61} 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.