Six months afterwards, when the August sunshine was hot and yellow, and the streets of Dublin were in a fever from the crowd of the Horse Show week, a breeze was to be found under the elms by the polo ground in Ph?nix Park. It came from the south, where the Dublin mountains were cool and blue; it was sweet with miles of warm grass, and it was nectar to the polo ponies as they were led up and down with twitching tails and soapy necks after their turn of play. The people who had driven out to see the match sat in the shade, while men and ponies wheeled and raced in the glaring heat, and stroke answered stroke, and the ball was worried about in a medley of polo sticks and ponies’ legs.{190} Lady Susan was sitting on an outside car by the rails, never taking her eyes off the game.
“I call that a brute of a pony,” she said, “don’t you, Captain Onslow?” to a man who stood by the car. “I mean the roan that my husband is on. Look there”—as the ball went skipping over the sunny sward, with the roan pony and his rider heading the rush after it—“see how he’s pulling, and if he gets his temper up he bolts, and there’s no holding him. I can’t bear to see Hughie on him.”
“I don’t think you need be anxious about your husband,” said Captain Onslow, inwardly a little piqued by this excessive attention to the game and its dangers, “that pony’s about the best on the ground when he’s properly played, and that’s just what is happening to him. Well hit, indeed!” as Hugh turned the ball with a smooth and clean back-hander.
“I don’t care,” murmured Lady Susan, “I call polo a beastly dangerous game.{191}”
“It’s a true bill against Major Bunbury, isn’t it?” asked Captain Onslow, presently, lifting an eyebrow in the direction of two people standing by the rails.
“You go and ask them,” replied Lady Susan.
“Does that mean you want me to go away?” Captain Onslow said these sort of things rather well, and he wanted Lady Susan to look at him and not at the polo.
She glanced down at him in recognition. Her glance was charming.
“It means——” she began. But there came a thundering of ponies’ hoofs, a race for the ball with the roan pony getting the best of it again, and Captain Onslow had to do without knowing what Lady Susan meant.
Slaney sat by Lady Susan as they drove back, flying down through the park with that exhilarating swing and swiftness that belong exclusively to the Dublin outside car. The afternoon was more balmy sweet as the shadows lengthened and the coolness came; beyond the beautiful miles of grass{192} and trees the western sky was gathering the warmth of sunset; opposite in the east, the brown smoke of Dublin stained the tranquil heaven, and above it a ghostly half-moon stood like a little white cloud in the depths of blue.
There are moments in life when it is given to some hearts to know their own happiness, and to know it trembling. Come what might, earth’s greatest pleasure was Slaney’s now: she knew it with all the tenderness and strong romance ............