There are illnesses that take possession of their victims slowly and quietly, with an imperceptible start, and a gradual crescendo of envelopment; others there are, that strike, sudden as a hawk, or a bullet. And this is true also of that other illness, the fever of the mind and heart that is called Love. An old song says, and says, for the most part, truly,

“I attempt from Love’s sickness to fly in vain.”

Larry Coppinger did not attempt to fly, even though he knew as precisely the moment when the fever struck him, as did Peter’s wife’s mother when her fever left her. Perhaps he might then have tried to escape; he knew it was too late now. That fatal rapturous moment had been when he saw Christian setting forth, a lonely, piteous figure, to fetch Carmody’s gun. He had followed her, and his entreaties to her to let him deal with the matter had prevailed. She had turned back, and kneeling down again, kissed the white star on Nancy’s forehead, murmuring something to her that Larry could not hear. He had put her saddle on his own horse; when he mounted her, she had stooped down from the tall horse’s back, and had whispered: “’That thou hast to do, do quickly.’” He went over it all in his mind; that was all she had said, and he had not seen her since.

On that afternoon as he moved about the room he had chosen for his studio, and unpacked the monster cases he had brought from Paris, he remembered how, long ago, Mrs. Twomey had laughed at him when he told her he was never going to marry.

“Wait awhile!"’ mocked Mrs. Twomey, “one day it’ll sthrike ye all in the minute the same as a pairson’d get a stitch when they’d be leaning-over a churn!”

Well, it had so struck him, and struck him hard, and he was reeling from the blow.

Her courage, oh God! her courage! How she had ridden that little mad devil of a mare! There wasn’t a man out who would have got her over that big country as she had! And then, when that cur had done his dirty work and bolted, was there a whimper or a cry from her? She had faced the music; she had started off to get the gun herself. He knew, just a little, just dimly, he told himself humbly, what the sight of suffering was to her, and she had stood up to it. She, with her passion for animals; she, with her tender, tender heart! Larry, who believed himself to be profoundly introspective, did not know that it was his own flawless physical courage, finding and recognising its fellow in Christian, that had first lit the flame. He thought it was her face, with its delicate charm, its faint, elusive loveliness, that had felled him, laid him low, devastated him. He pleased himself in reiterating his overthrow, in enumerating its causes, while he banged bundles of canvases on to the floor, and pitched clattering sketching-easels and stools into corners, and covered tables and chairs with the myriad colour-boxes, sketch-books, palettes of every shape and variety, brushes, bottles, all the snares that the ingenious marchand a couleurs spreads in the sight of the bird, and into which the bird, especially if he be, like Larry, a rich amateur, cheerfully hops. He hardly was aware of what he was doing, his hot thoughts raced in his brain. It seemed to him now to have been years ago that he saw her, in the grey light, riding towards him on Nancy. She had said that he might paint her; that was all that he had thought of then. Much had happened since then; the supreme thing had happened since then! Nothing else really mattered, he thought, sitting down on the edge of a half-empty packing case, and lighting a cigarette, not even the shooting of Nancy. He would give her a dozen Nancys if she wanted them! The first and most important thing in the world was to see her again; and he had to arrange how, and when, and where he should paint her. Obviously he must at once proceed to Mount Music.

There is a saying among Larry’s countrymen: “If a man want a thing he mus’ have it!” Fortune had, so far, been kind to Larry, and those things that he had wanted sufficiently, he had had. It now remained to be proved if the rule were to have an exception.

“I’m going over to Mount Music just now,” he said to Frederica at tea time. “I want to see them all. Will you come, Aunt Freddy?”

Aunt Freddy looked perturbed.

“You haven’t seen Cousin Dick yet, have you?”

“No. How could I? He wasn’t out. I’ve seen no one yet but Christian.”

His voice lingered on the beloved name, beloved, consciously, since so few hours.

But Aunt Freddy was not apt to perceive fine shades, and she was, moreover, occupied with the framing of a warning.

“You know that Cousin Dick is a good deal changed since you saw him?” she began. “He had a sort of heart attack about a year ago Dr. Mangan was with him, luckily. They have to try and keep him very quiet, and the worst of it is that so little puts him out.”

“Well, I shan’t put him out, shall I?” said Larry, confidently, beginning on a third slice of cake, love not having, so far, impaired his appetite.

“He was fearfully put out about your selling to the tenants. He said young Mangan had no right to advise you to sell so low. He told me that even Dr. Mangan was quite against his doing so.”

Miss Coppinger regarded her nephew with anxiety. After four years of absence, one never knew exactly how much a young man might not have changed. That little, upturned, golden moustache might not by any means be the whole of it. The ice barrier had been forgotten in the excitement of his return, but even though she understood and tried not to feel that the fact had its mitigations that all young men in France were atheists, that other fact remained, that next Sunday, when she started for Knock Ceoil church, Larry, if he went anywhere, would go to the white chapel on the hill. Aunt Freddy was afraid of no one where she believed herself to be right (and the Spirit of the Nation had long since assured her of this in matters of religion); least of all was she afraid of “a brat of a boy,” whom, as she boasted, she had often whipped soundly when he deserved it. But, unfortunately, the brat had her heart in his hands, and her heart was softer than Aunt Freddy knew; and this gave the brat an unfair advantage.

“Then you know, Larry,” she continued, her eyes showing what her firm mouth did not admit; “you know, my dear boy, it was rather well, rather a shock to us to see in the papers your name proposed as the Nationalist candidate here. It upset Dick very much, and, I must say,” she added, unflinchingly, “me too!”

Larry put down the third piece of cake, half-finished, and went round the tea-table, and sitting on the arm of Frederica’s chair, put his arm round her thin shoulders.

“I’m so sorry!” he said, knowing his power, and using it, “dear Auntie Fred! I ought to have written to you. I forgot all about the beastly thing. But you wouldn’t want me to go back of my word? As for the property well, I thought that was only my own affair. I’ve come all right out of it; why shouldn’t I give the tenants the best terms I could?”

“Cousin Dick says ” began Frederica, standing to her guns.

“And that other show,” went on Larry, disregarding what Cousin Dick might have said. “Goodness knows when there’ll be an election

“That doesn’t alter the fact,” said Frederica, firmly.

“Yes, I know. Of course I must hold by my own convictions, but let’s put off the row until the time comes! One is bound to have rows at elections! I don’t want to fight now!”

He pressed a kiss upon her forehead. He was feeling in love and charity with all men. To wheedle Aunt Freddy into forgiveness was the first outlet that presented itself for the excitement that was consuming him.

Larry walked to Mount Music through the Wood of the Ownashee, alone. Miss Coppinger said she disliked the short way across the river by the stepping stones, and preferred to drive the now venerable Tommy round by the road; in her heart, brave as she was, she trusted that Larry would have got through his meeting with Dick before she arrived. Therefore did Larry step along the pebbly path by the river, under the dense canopy of beechen boughs, with, for companions, only the two hound puppies that Bill Kirby did not fail to foist annually upon all amenable friends. These lumbered after Larry’s quick foot, with all the engaging absurdity of their kind; tripping over their own enormous feet, chewing outlying portions of one another, as ill-brought-up babies chew their blankets; sitting down abruptly and unpremeditatedly, and watching with deep dubiety the departing form of their escort, as though a sudden and shattering doubt of his identity had paralysed them, until some contrary wind of doctrine blew them into action again, and they hurled themselves upon his trail, filled with the single intention to rush between his legs. Nothing but that instinct of self-preservation that operates independent of the reason, preserved Larry from frequent and violent overthrow. His head was in the clouds; he was abandoning himself to dreams, with the very same headlong enthusiasm that Scandal and Steersman brought to bear upon the problems of existence. He strode past the glade that had been the scene of the Cluhir picnic without so much as a thought of Tishy Mangan. Had you or I reminded him of that brief, yet moving, episode, he would probably have regarded us with wide, bewildered, blue eyes, and asked for details. Then, as memory awakened, he would have laughed delightedly, and said: “Yes! By Jove! So I was! But Georgy cut me out, didn’t he?” And he might have added that there had been scores of them since Tishy, he had forgotten half of them but this, THIS! Larry would then, inevitably, have lapsed into rhapsody, as would be no more than was decent and right in a young man of artistic temperament, and you or I, our malign intention baffled, would have retired in deserved confusion.

Old Evans was in the hall as Larry walked in through the open door. He received Larry’s hand-shake coldly; the four years that had passed since Larry had seen him had withered and greyed him; Larry, something dashed by the reception, remembered the title given him long ago by Christian “the many-wintered crow,” and found satisfaction in deciding that the crow was a scald-crow, and a sour old divil at that; anyhow, Evans had always had a knife into him, so it made no difference.

In the drawing-room things went well enough, even though there was an unexplainable chill in the atmosphere. Cousin Isabel was as kind and gentle and vague as ever; Judith was there, very handsome and prosperous, not overenthusiastic in welcome, rather inclined to patronise a very young man, quite two months younger than a married lady of position and importance. Nevertheless, there was something unregenerate about her eye, that, taken in connection with the two subalterns in whose car she had come to call at Mount Music, suggested that Bill Kirby might at times find life stirring. John, recently ordained, now a very decorative curate in a London church, was there, even more patronising than Judith, and undecided whether to regard Larry with suspicion, as a brand still smouldering from the fires of secularist France, or affectionately, as a member of what, in one of his earlier sermons, he had described as “Our ancient Mother Church, dear Peopul! Beloved, but in some matters, that I will presently indicate to you, mistaken!”

The subalterns were remote, not approving of the style of Larry’s tie (which he had bought in Paris, and differed from theirs) and Cousin Dick was not there.

“You must go and see him, dear Larry,” says Cousin Isabel, “he’s in the study.”

“And Christian? Though, of course, I met her this morning ” says Larry.

Christian, poor child, went out for a little walk with the dogs just now. Christian (poor child) had felt that wretched business this morning so terribly. The wretched business was gone into, thoroughly and exhaustively, and yet Larry felt that across one corner of it there was a fold of curtain drawn. He said he would go and see Cousin Dick. There was always a chance that Christian, also, might be in the study. The axiom that “If a man want a thing he mus’ have it,” should, in Larry’s case, have the corollary that he must have it at once.

The Major was standing by the chimney piece in the study, warming one foot after the other at the fire that Evans had just replenished. Larry met the scald-crow at the door, and Evans passed him “as if,” thought Larry, disgustedly, “he had been seeing me every day for a year! The old beast always hated me!” Larry did not like being hated.

Cousin Dick’s greeting was more like old times. Dick was one of those people whose wrath has a tendency to intermit and get cold, even to perish, temporarily, from forgetfulness. On the other hand, in compensation, perhaps, for this failing, it was a fire easily rekindled. He was still shaking Larry’s hand, and looking him up and down, affectionately, and withal, with the inevitable patronage of a long-legged man for one from whom Nature has withheld similar advantages, when Larry discovered the large presence of Dr. Mangan uplifting itself from the chair facing Cousin Dick’s, by the fire. (But Christian was not there. He resigned himself.) There was no want of warmth in the Big Doctor’s reception. He was quite aware of this himself, and was artist enough to know how useful an asset was the fact that he was genuinely fond of Larry. He had indeed proposed to exhibit his affection in pleasing contrast to the coolness of Larry’s Protestant relatives, and that the Major had forgotten the rôle assigned to him, was a little disappointing. “But wait awhile!” thought the Big Doctor, who, among his other elephantine qualities, possessed that of patience.

The Major seated himself in front of the fire, and Larry pulled up a chair, wondering in his heart what these old boys wanted with a fire this lovely afternoon, and delivered himself to the old boys and to conversation. This, naturally, set with a single movement towards the event of the morning. “A real likely little mare, and shaping well, I’m told,” says Dick, “and by the bye, Larry, that’s a dev’lish nice horse of yours that Christian came back on. Where did you get him?”

These hunting men were incorrigible, the Doctor thought, seeing the Carmody question in danger of being side-tracked.

“Things have come to a funny way in this country,” he observed, “when a fellow will deliberately chance killing a young lady, rather than let her ride over his land and she having a right to ride over it into the bargain!”

It needed but little to start Major Talbot-Lowry again on the topic that had occupied him unceasingly since Christian’s return that morning. Beginning with the burning of the Derrylugga gorse covert, and moving on through threatening letters, and rents deliberately withheld, he lashed himself into one of the quick furies that Larry remembered well. What Larry was less prepared for than was his friend, Dr. Mangan, was the sudden turn that the storm took in his direction.

“The blackguards think they can frighten me into selling on their own terms!” shouted Dick, “and that damned priest of theirs I beg your pardon, Mangan, but the fellow doesn’t behave like a clergyman, and it’s impossible to think of him as one is backing them up, and I may say” here it was that the heart of the storm was revealed “I may say that I’m very little obliged to your son, or to his principal here, for the part they have played in the affair! That was the beginning of the whole thing!” He turned fiercely upon Larry, his tenor voice pitched on a higher key. “How could I, with my property loaded with charges, that were no fault of mine, sell at the price you could afford to take? Look at the price that fellow what’s his damned name? Brady, got for his farm, for the tenant-right alone, mind you! Forty years’ purchase! And I’m offered seventeen for the fee simple!”

Dick was standing up on the hearthrug, towering over the Doctor and Larry in their low chairs. Larry noticed how thin he had become, and how the well-cut grey clothes, that he always wore, hung loosely on his shrunken figure. “You’re a young fellow now, Larry; wait till you’ve been for thirty years doing your best for your property and your country, and getting no thanks! Thanks!” Dick gave a brief and furious laugh. “I’ve kept the hounds for them. I’ve slaved on the Bench and on Grand Juries. I’ve got them roads and railways, and God knows what else whatever they wanted I’ve sat at the Board of Guardians, and done my best to keep down the rates, till they kicked me out to make room for men who would sell their souls for a sixpence, and made their living out of bribes!”

“Oh, come, come, Major, it’s not so bad as all that!” said the Big Doctor, soothingly, as Dick stopped, panting for breath. “Don’t mind it now!”

“But I must mind it!” shouted Dick. “When I think of how I’ve been treated, and plenty more like me, loyal men who run straight and do their best, I declare to God I feel I don’t know which I hate worst, the English Government, that pitches its friends overboard to save its own skin, or my own countrymen, that don’t know the meaning of the word gratitude!”

He turned again upon Larry: “And upon my word and honour, Larry, I didn’t think that your father’s son would have been tarred with that brush, anyhow!”

“Now, Major,” broke in Dr. Mangan, again, “you know we agreed that there was no use in attaching too much importance to that transaction. Barty and Larry here were in a very difficult position, and even though you and I might not have approved entirely of their action

“But, Doctor,” interrupted Larry, bewildered, and dismayed, “You I thought you had advised Barty

The Big Doctor frowned at him, and winked too, while he laid his huge white hand on his watch-pocket, tapping with his middle finger on the spot which, as he knew, the average layman dedicated to the heart. He trusted to Larry’s quickness, and did not trust in vain.

“A sort of heart attack,” Aunt Freddy had said.

“I’m most frightfully sorry, Cousin Dick,” Larry began, hurriedly, before a worse thing happened. “Somehow, I never thought you see I was out of the country it seemed to me that ” he was going to repeat those comforting sedatives about leaving the man at the helm to bark for you (Heavens! He had been on the point of saying that! Was he going to laugh?) but he couldn’t give Barty away. He rushed into apology, regret, abuse of his own ignorance, and imbecility, and the Big Doctor, at each pause in the penitence, poured a little oil and wine into the wounds for which Larry and the Carmodys were jointly responsible, and Dick’s anger, like the red that had flared to his face, fell like a spent flame.

“Say no more, boy, say no more,” he said, dropping into the chair from which he had leaped in the course of his apologia pro vita sua; “I daresay you knew no better anyhow, you didn’t mean to do me a bad turn

Larry took his hand. “You know that, Cousin Dick,” he said, in profound distress. “Of all people in the world the very last. If there was anything I could do now

“Well now, I’ll tell you what you could do!” cut in Dr. Mangan, jovially, “you could tell our friend Evans to bring in the Major’s tumbler of hot milk and whisky, and to look sharp about it too! I ordered he was to have it at six o’clock

He looked hard at Larry, who realised that his disturbing presence was to be removed, and forthwith removed it.

He delivered his message, and strayed back to the big, empty hall. A sense of aloofness, of having no place nor part in this well-remembered house, was on him. None of them wanted him; he could see that easily enough, and he had done Cousin Dick a bad turn. He had said so. If it came to that, he supposed he had done Christian a bad turn, too Christian and Cousin Dick, the only two of the whole crowd who had been really glad to see him. He thought of her face as she came riding through the dusky wood to meet him. “The dawn was in it!” he said to himself; again he saw it, lit with the light that the hunt had kindled; and then he thought of her stricken eyes, as she looked from one man to another, asking for the hope that they had to refuse her. It had been all his fault, or here the inner apologist, that is always quick to console, interposed not quite exactly his fault. How was he to have known? A remembrance of Cousin Dick’s undeciphered letters came to him; even the inner apologist hung his head. In any case Larry’s active mind resumed its deliberations it was quite clearly his business to find Christian and to explain to her, as far as was possible, how things stood.

He left the house. A garden-boy had seen Christian “going west the avenue”; Larry collected Scandal and Steersman from the ash-pit, and followed her “west the avenue.” He walked slowly, noting how neglected was the general aspect, how badly the avenue was in need of gravel, remembering how in the old days, the bands of slingers had never failed of ammunition, wondering if the Major were really as hard up as he thought he was; wondering if they had all turned against him, and if they would set Christian against him too. He came to the turn near the river that led to the stepping stones, and stood, in deepening depression, waiting, in the hope that she might come. It was seven o’clock, the sun was setting, the sky was warming to its last loveliness of rose and amber, and amethyst, colours with names almost as beautiful as themselves. The long stretches of grass on either side of the avenue were a fierce green, the brakes of bracken were burning orange, the long shadows of the trees that fell across the roadway were purple. The grove of yew trees, that hid the course of the river from him, had the sharpness of a silhouette cut out of dark velvet.

“Not really black,” Larry told himself, screwing up his eyes. He moved on to the grass, and kneeling, framed with his hands as much as seemed good to him. In a moment, in the intoxication of beauty, he had forgotton his troubles; Cousin Dick, singing the swan-song of the Irish landlords; Dr. Mangan, and his bewildering change of front; even Christian, and her views as to his responsibility for the tragedy of the morning, stood aside to make way for the absorbing problems of colour and composition.

The hound puppies strolled on, side by side, heads up, and high-held sterns, steering for nowhere in particular, oblivious as Larry of all save the moment as it passed. A rush of rooks came like a tide across the sky; they flew so low that the drive and rustle of their wings scared the puppies and startled Larry. He stood up and watched the multitudinous host swing westward to his own woods, and just then, a couple of hundred yards ahead, at the turn where the avenue plunged into the velvet gloom of the yew-trees, he saw Christian coming towards him, alone, save for a retinue of dogs.

If that old saying (already quoted with reference to Dick Talbot-Lowry) be true, when it asserts that “wise men live in the present, for its bounty suffices them,” then was Larry Coppinger, like his cousin, indeed a wise man. Remorse, anxiety, the wonder of the sunset, were swept from his mind, and Christian filled it like a flood. She looked very tired, and he told her so, eyeing her so closely that she turned her face from him.

“I won’t be stared at and scolded! Why shouldn’t I be tired if I like?”

“If it were only tiredness ” said Larry, with more tenderness in his voice than he knew. “Christian, they’ve been telling me that it was my fault the rows with the tenants, and that devil coming at you this morning and and everything!”

He could not speak directly of Nancy’s death; he knew what Christian felt for her horses and dogs. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I wanted to try and tell you what I felt but since I’ve seen your father and old Mangan, I feel too abject to dare to say I’m sorry

“Why should they think it was your fault? It was my own fault. I ought to have gone back when Kearney warned me

“They meant the whole show. Beginning with Barty’s selling to my tenants, and then your father’s people making trouble, and the Carmodys burning the covert, and all the rest of it! They’re quite right! It’s all my rotten fault! Christian, I’m going back to France! I can’t face you after what I’ve brought on you!”

In the bad moments of life, when the bare and shivering soul stands defenceless, waiting for evil tidings, or nerving itself to endure condolence, Christian had ever a gentle touch; and she knew too, when it comforted wrong-doers to be laughed at.

“Oh, Larry! And you pretended you wanted to paint my picture!” she said, looking at his miserable face with eyes that shone as the Pool of Siloam might have shone after the Angel had troubled it; there were tears in them, but there was healing, too.

Larry took her hand and held it tight.

“You don’t mean it how could you bear to look at me?”

“But I shan’t look at you! You will have to look at me that is, if you can bear it! You must try and brace yourself to the effort!”

This, it may be admitted, was provocation on Christian’s part, but, as she told herself afterwards, desperate measures were necessary, or they would both have burst into tears.