Next morning, while the last of three white frosts was vanishing from the grass, Hugh stood in the hall at French’s Court, pinning a bunch of violets into his red coat. Tops and waistcoat, tie and pin, obeyed to a hair-breadth the minute rigour of male fashion in the hunting-field, the violets made their bold yet not exasperating contrast with the scarlet, and Hugh’s pale face was almost picturesque in its gay and vivid setting. Taking up his flask, he went to the dining-room and filled it at the sideboard with old liqueur brandy; he poured out a glass from the same bottle, and was going to raise it to his lips, when he heard voices outside the open door. One of the voices was his wife’s, and he heard it with{142} that sense of severance from her affairs that had been his since he and his gun-cases had reappeared at French’s Court the evening before. He was not usually sensitive to social temperatures, but it seemed to him that there was something flat and ungenial about the whole party. Bunbury was spasmodically agreeable, Slaney was silent, his wife was heavy-eyed and listless; he encouraged and nurtured the bitter conviction that no one wanted him. “I suppose you’re riding Gambler to-day?” Major Bunbury was saying to some one in the hall.
“No,” replied Lady Susan, speaking rather quickly and indistinctly, “I’m riding Mr. Glasgow’s old horse, Solomon, you know. He came over last night. I’ve always wanted to try him.”
Bunbury whistled a few bars of a tune, and knocked down things in the whip-rack.
“Hugh’s riding that grey,” she went on; “it’s quite absurd. He can’t do anything{143} with him, and he only makes an exhibition of himself.”
“Oh, the horse is all right now,” replied Bunbury, lowering his voice; “he was very green that first day that Hugh rode him.”
“Very well,” she said, “you’ll see. He won’t take that horse across two fences to-day.”
Bunbury passed on out of the hall door, and left Lady Susan standing on the doorstep. She looked up at the cold blue and uncertain grey of the sky, and out at the ruffled and hazy sea, the strong light showing lines of sleeplessness about her eyes; then, turning back into the house, she met her husband. She did not suppose that he had overheard her, yet she was aware of something in his lonely face that she did not care to look at. She went to the table and took up her gloves without speaking.
“Hullo!” she exclaimed, “there’s a letter here that came for you. I found it on the floor one night, and didn’t think it worth{144} sending on. Some one has shoved it behind the card-tray.”
Hugh looked at the vulgar and rambling handwriting, and mechanically tore open the envelope. It was a letter clearly written in close and crooked lines, and its purport appeared to be a confused complaint of “persecution” received from the hounds in connection with the covert of Cahirdreen. Hugh read on with a frowning brow. In other days he would have asked his wife to come and read it over his shoulder, but that time seemed now very far away.
Glasgow’s name appeared in the letter, with more complaints of persecution; he hardly tried to understand what it was all about. All at once his wife’s name seemed to leap out from the paper, and to sink back, indelible, irrevocable, linked to Glasgow’s by two or three gross and barbarous phrases, by a warning not less crude, by a cunning treatment of the matter as one of common knowledge. There was no signature, nothing to suggest its connection with the{145} dead hand that still clutched the broken reed when Tom Quin’s body was taken from the pond.
Hugh raised his eyes and looked at his wife, tasting in that moment the transcendent anguish of the mind that once or twice in a lifetime teaches the body what suffering can be. She was buttoning her glove, standing tall and straight in the light from the open door, in all the spotless austerity of her black habit and white tie. She seemed far out of the reach of accusation, yet, as he took in every well-known line, forgotten things rose up against her in an evil swarm. His belief in her was falling with the fall of a strong and shading tree; he clung to it even as it fell; and all the while she stood and buttoned the glove across her white wrist.
At half-past eleven a misty fog was drifting loosely up from the south-west on the shoulders of the thaw, and the group of riders outside the cover of Cahirdreen began to turn up their collars. It was a small{146} group, and an eye accustomed to the usual muster would have noticed at once the absence of Mr. Glasgow; he was one of the people whose presence makes itself felt in all the varied fortunes of a day’s hunting. As the minutes passed, and the horses nibbled idly at the gorse in the fence, the dispensary doctor closed the top of his flask with a snap, and remarked facetiously that he supposed business must sometimes come before pleasure, even with railway contractors.
Lady Susan was at a little distance, apparently absorbed, as was her wont, in attentiveness to what was going on in covert. At the laugh that followed Dr. Hallahan’s remark, she moved away, and rode slowly along the edge of the wood. She was on Solomon, who had already taken full note of a lighter hand, a lighter weight, and the absence of spurs: he had had ideas about bucking on the road to testify his appreciation of these things, but on finding that Lady Susan had also ideas of her own{147} on the subject, he had made up his mind to treat her with respect. She rode on round the top of the covert, and stationed herself on its farther side; Solomon stood like a rock, with his brown roach back humped against the cold mist.
The hounds had been put in at the lower end of the wood, and were working through it, so far without result. As before, when Cahirdreen had been drawn, Danny-O was not to be found when the time came for him to take the hounds through the covert, and the master, on his grey horse, was riding up a track in the heart of the wood, where the mist had as yet scarcely made its way, and the silence dwelt like a spirit. The horse went ever more slowly among the slender stems of the fir-trees, sharing in the lethargy conveyed by the slack rein and the loose leg of his rider, while the hounds were pushing well ahead through the briars and the bracken, leaving Hugh behind. A straggler or two passed him by, with a wary eye on the whip, not realizing, as the house{148} dog so readily does, that human beings have preoccupations in which dogs can be ignored.
It was some time before Hugh noticed the fact that there was somebody near him in the wood—a figure moving among the trees at a little distance. The Scotch firs and larch had been thinned out here for sale to the contractor of the new railway line, and the wood was more open. The figure was that of an old man, who seemed to be advancing in a direction parallel with Hugh. Sometimes the misty fog blotted him out, sometimes the grouping of the tree-stems conspired to hide him; he went onward as if fitfully; the moments when he was lost to sight scarcely accounted for his reappearances farther on. He shuffled like an infirm man, yet his progress through the undergrowth was so steady that it seemed as if he were walking on a path. Irritated at length by the persistent espionage, Hugh called to him to ask what he was doing in the covert. He received no reply, and the mist{149} crept in between them. When it cleared again the old man was crossing an open space fifty yards away. Hugh noticed the profound melancholy of his bent head, the yellow paleness of his cheek. Even while something familiar about him vexed Hugh’s memory, like an evil dream half-forgotten, he appeared to stumble, and fell with out-spread arms and without a sound into some unseen hollow or ditch. Hugh pressed the grey horse through the briars and under the branches till he reached the spot; he pulled up abruptly as he found himself at the edge of a disused sandpit. There were a few rocks flung about at the bottom of it, with the briars growing among them; a rabbit came up out of them, and scuttled to its burrow in the sand at the sound of the horse’s tread; nothing else whatever was there.
Hugh put his hand to his head and wondered if he were going mad. Then, quite unexpectedly, his knees began to tremble, and the breath of the unknown entered into{150} him, cowing the conventions and disbeliefs of ordinary life. At the same instant a hound began to throw his tongue in the covert, two or three more joined, and the grey horse turned of himself to get back to th............