Old, prosaic, and often tearful, though
this earth may be, few are anxious to hasten their
departure from it, and Daniel Prendergast, Esq., M.P.,
abetted by the ministrations of that able consultant,
Dr. Mangan, “hung on,” as his friends
put it, with unexpected tenacity to his share of the
world. And, so far reaching are the etheric cords
that are said to bind us all together, Mr. Prendergast’s
grip of his sorry and suffering life bestowed upon
Larry and Christian three days to be spent within
the confines of Paradise.
This may seem an over-statement when
it is recorded that their next meeting was at 7 a.m.
at a cubbing meet of the hounds, which occurred on
the morning following on Larry’s discovery that
the entree to Paradise had been his for the
asking; it is, however, no more than the truth.
Christian had exacted a promise from him that no word
was to be said to any other of the high contracting
parties until Monday, and, as they rode in at the
Castle Ire gates, the matter was still under debate.
“Three days we must have, just
three, with this secret hidden between us like a pearl
in an oyster-shell! Larry, you know I can
keep a secret!”
“And you think I can’t!” said Larry,
affronted.
“I don’t think, I know
it! But you must try! Don’t forget
I’ve got to week-end at the ”
she named people who lived in the next county.
“No one shall be told until I come home!”
This was when they were riding to
the meet. Larry had brought over Joker, the bay
horse, for her and he was himself riding a small grey
four-year-old mare, on whose education as a hunter
he was entering. It was one of those gorgeous
mornings of late September, when everything is intense
in colour and in sentiment. A light white frost
was melting, in the first rays of the sun, to a silver
dew, that twinkled on grass and bush and twig.
Now and then a beech leaf, prematurely gold, came
spinning down in the still air; from high places of
heaven a tiny gabble of music, cold, and shrill, and
sweet, told of the songs of the larks at those heavenly
gates within which Larry’s and Christian’s
spirits were dwelling.
“Yes!” Christian repeated,
as they rode tranquilly along on the grass beside
one of the long Castle Ire avenues, “it shall
remain a secret as long as possible, unprofaned by
the vulgar! It’s like this morning; the
dew’s on it still. Larry, you’ve got
to try!”
“Got to try, have I?”
said Larry, beaming at her fatuously.
The horses were sidling close to one
another after the manner of stable companions; Larry
put his hand on the bay horse’s withers and
gazed into Christian’s laughing eyes, while the
blue of the southern Irish sky uttered its strong,
splendid note of colour behind the pale rose of her
face, and the ineffable freshness of the morning thrilled
in him.
“If you look at me like that
in general society,” he declared, “I shall
either give it away on the spot or burst!
Look here, here’s the measured-mile gallop;
I’ll race you to the hall door! If I get
in first, I shall tell everyone we’re engaged!”
“Done!” said Christian,
instantly shortening her reins; “but I back
Joker!”
She touched Joker with her heel and
the big horse sprang, at the hint, into a gallop.
Quickly as he started, Rayleen, the grey mare (whose
name, being interpreted, is Little Star), being ever
concentrated for instant effort, as is the manner
of small and well-bred four-year-olds, was up to his
shoulder in a couple of bounds, even in the flame
of her youth and enthusiasm, she drove ahead of Joker’s
ordered strides, and led him for awhile. Larry’s
laugh of triumph, that the wind tossed back to her,
was not needed to rouse Christian to emulation.
Any hint of a race, any touch of a contest, appealed
to her as instantly as to Rayleen, and she was racing
for that secret that was like a pearl. Sitting
very still she touched Joker again with her heel and
spoke to him. There was in her the magnetism that
can fire a horse to his best, by some mystery, compound
of sympathy and stimulation, that has no outward manifestation.
Joker’s great shoulders worked under her as
he lengthened and quickened his beautiful, rhythmic
stride. The wind of the pace whistled in her ears
and snatched at her hair. She crammed her hat
over her forehead, laughing with the joy of battle.
She was level with Larry now. Now she was passing
him, and the little grey strove in vain to hold her
place. Gallant as she was, what could she do
against a raking, trained galloper, well over sixteen
hands, and nearly thoroughbred?
The smooth mile of shining grass was
annihilated, wiped out in a few whirling minutes.
Joker had but just fairly settled down to go when
the end of the race was at hand. Had he been a
shade less of a gentleman than he was, Christian,
and the snaffle in which she was riding him, would
hardly have stopped him, as did their joint efforts,
on the gravel in front of the goal that Larry had given
her.
Hunts come, and hunts go, and are
forgotten. Horses, the best and dearest of them,
fade, in some degree, from remembrance; where are the
snows of yester year, and where the great gallops that
we rode when we were young? But here and there
something defies the mists of memory, and remains,
bright and imperishable as a diamond. I believe
that for Christian that mile of sun and wind and speed
and flight, with her lover thundering at her heels,
will remain ever vivid, one of the moments that are
of the incalculable bounty of Chance; moments that
earth can never equal, nor Heaven better.
The hounds and staff were waiting
at the farther end of the long front of Castle Ire,
when Larry and Christian made their somewhat sensational
entrance upon the scene.
“Joker wins, by a length and
a half,” said Bill Kirby, judicially, “and
a very pretty race. I never saw a prettier, on
any sands, on any jackasses, on any Bank Holiday!
I suppose this is how people always fetch up at meets
in France? It’s not come in in this benighted
country yet.”
“His fault!” said Christian,
breathless and glowing. “He dar’d
me! Where are you going to draw?”
“The ash-pit and the fowl-houses,”
replied Bill, picking up his reins. “Then
the backstairs, and the kitchenmaid’s bedroom.
Judith and Mrs. Brady say he’s taking all the
fowl, and they’re going to lay poison I
don’t mean the fowl
“Isn’t he bright this
morning?” said Judith, looking down upon the
party from an upper window, effectively arrayed in
one of those lacy and lazy garments that invite, while
they repudiate, society. “No, I’m
not coming out. Too early for me. Come in
and eat something breakfast or lunch, anything when
you’ve done enough.”
The hounds moved on and were soon
busy in the screens of glossy laurel round the house.
Other riders arrived. A fox was found, if not
in the kitchenmaid’s bedroom in some spot of
almost equal intimacy, and the Hunt surged in and
through yards, and haggards, outhouses, and gardens,
the hounds over-running all the complicated surroundings
of an Irish country-house, while every grade of domestic,
forsaking his or her lawful occupation, joined in
the chase.
Christian had betaken herself to a
point on the avenue remote from the fray. A run,
she told herself, would have tranquillised her, and
made things seem more normal, but there was no prospect
of one. “I’ll wait till this rat-hunt
is over,” she thought, letting Joker stroll across
the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken
and bushes, a jewel dropped from heaven. A couple
of stiff-necked swans floated in motionless trance
upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing, splashing
flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of
patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves
in jerks towards her, confident that any human being
meant food. Two gigantic turquoise dragon-flies
rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings, from
a dead log under Joker’s feet. One of them
swung round the horse’s head, and lit on his
shaven neck. It brooded there, apparently unperceptive
of the difference of this resting place from the one
that it had abandoned; its dull globes of eyes looked
as if sight was the last purpose for which they were
intended. Joker stretched his long neck to nibble
a willow twig, and the blue mystery, rising, remained
poised over him for another moment of meditation, before
it sailed away, sideways, on its own obscure occasions.
Christian sat in the sunshine, and
thought about Larry, and wondered. She knew now
that what she felt for him was no new thing. It
had been with her always, not merely since the painting
of her portrait, but always, unacknowledged yet implicit,
ever since that first day when he had rescued her
from Richard. Her intensely criticising, analytic
brain refused to surrender to vague emotion. She
was resolved to understand herself, to rationalise
her overthrow. It was the difference, for which
that half-hour of sunset was responsible, in the degree
of what she felt, that bewildered her. Yesterday,
she told herself, it was a deep, but well-controlled
and respectable little stream. To-day it was
a flood. “I must keep my feet,” she
thought; “I must not be swept away!” The
thought of him was sometimes overwhelming, like the
fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative, and wound
about with memories, like twilight, and the song of
the thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow
that lives behind the northern horizon in midsummer,
witnessing to the hidden glory, during darkness, or
the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun
went higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the
cries of the water-birds, the buzz of insects over
the bright lake, became more insistent, and the blue
and lovely morning spread and strengthened round her,
criticism and analysis failed. She could only
think of him, helplessly, saying to herself what she
had once heard a peasant woman say: “My
heart’d open when I thinks of him.”
Across the park came repeated notes
from the horn, the baying of hounds, and the screams
that celebrate with orthodox excitement the death
of a fox. The rat-hunt was over. Joker lifted
his spare, aristocratic head from the grass, and listened,
with a wisp of dewy green stuff in his mouth.
Christian looked at her watch. It was early still,
not eight o’clock. A grey horse and its
rider came forth from the dark grove of laurels.
Larry was looking for her. She sighed; she did
not know why. She thought of the old Mendelssohn
open-air part-song:
“The talk of the lovers in silence
dies,
They weep, yet they know not why tears
fill their eyes.”
The old, absurd words, that she had
so often laughed at. She laughed again, but at
herself, and sat still, watching the grey mare coming
lightly over the sunny grass to her.
“They got him!” Larry
shouted, as he came near. “The brute wouldn’t
run for ’em! Too full of hen, I suppose!
They’re going on now to the gorse in the high
paddock. Why did you come away here?”
“Because I’m illogical.
I like hunting, and I hate catching what I hunt.
Besides, I wanted to think.”
“Rotten habit,” said Larry.
“I won’t have you changing your mind!”
Christian looked at him, and sighed
again. He was on her right, and she took her
hunting-crop in her left hand, with the reins, and
stretched out her right hand to him. He caught
it, and kissed her slender wrist above the glove.
There came back to Christian, with a rush, the remembrance
of the May morning at the kennels when he had kissed
her wrist. That had been the left wrist.
The kiss had meant more to her than it had to him.
Now, as she met his eyes she knew that she and he
stood on level ground.
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Those even, who pin it down, and set it up in a glass
case in the cause of science and for the edification
of an inquisitive public, are not wholly to be commended,
praiseworthy though their intentions may be. Let
a rule of silence, therefore be observed, as far as
may be. What this boy and girl said to each other,
is their secret, not ours.
The gorse in the high paddock held
a fox; several, in fact, a lady having reared a fine
young family there without any anxieties as to their
support, thanks to the votive offerings of crows and
rabbits, obsequiously laid on her doorstep, by her
best friend, and her most implacable enemy, Mr. William
Kirby, M.F.H. In recognition, no doubt, of these
attentions, the lady in question permitted one of her
sons to afford a little harmless pleasure to her benefactor,
and this, having included a lively gallop of some
three miles, ceased in a plantation where was the
place of safety that had been indicated to the beginner,
and ceased appositely, at an hour that made a late
breakfast at Castle Ire a matter obvious, even imperative,
for those who were not prepared to await, in patient
starvation, that very inferior repast, an early lunch.
Young Mrs. Kirby had not lost, with
matrimony, the habit of having her own way.
“No, Christian, you’re
not going home. You haven’t seen Baby, and
he really looks rather sweet in his new ”
(a negligible matter, whatever the attire the formulae
being unvaried) “and, besides,”
continued young Mrs. Kirby, with decision, “I
want to talk to you.”
Being talked to by Judith was an adequate
modern equivalent for an interview with the “Jailer’s
Daughter,” as a method of obtaining information.
Christian trembled for the secret of the pearl.
“Bill tells me,” began
Judith, after the late breakfast had been disposed
of, settling herself luxuriously in an armchair in
the round tower-room which she had made her own sitting-room
and lighting a cigarette, “that our tenants I
mean Papa’s people are getting rather
nasty. Of course, there was that disgraceful business
when your mare was killed but I don’t mean that Bill
thinks old Fairfax was right in advising Papa to do
nothing about that but about this archaic
nonsense of feudal feeling and not selling the property.
Of course he’s bound to lose by the sale, but
the longer he waits the worse it gets.”
“I don’t think it’s
only feudal feeling he says he can’t
afford to sell,” began Christian.
“Oh, I know all that, my dear,”
interrupted Judith; “’the infernal mortgagees,
and the damned charges, and that blackguard rebel,
young Mangan, who cut the ground from under his feet,’
and so on. I’ve heard it all from Papa,
exactly five thousand times. But the point is
that there was a meeting at Pribawn, with the priest
in the chair, and there were furious speeches, and
they talked of boycotting Papa, and some steps ought
to be taken. It’s an intolerable nuisance
being boycotted, if it’s nothing else, and most
expensive. I was with the O’Donnells that
time when they were boycotted up at five
every morning to milk the cows and light the kitchen
fire, and having to get every earthly thing by post
from London!”
“I’ll take as many steps
as you like,” said Christian, “if you’ll
only tell me where to take them.”
Judith took her cigarette out of her
mouth, and blew a ring of smoke, regarding her younger
sister the while with a shrewd and wary blue eye.
“I’ve often said to you,
my dear child,” she began, in a voice that seemed
intended to usher in a change of subject, “that
if you won’t take an interest in men,
they won’t take an interest; in you.”
“Then why repeat the statement?”
said Christian, wondering what Judith was working
up to, and girding herself for battle; “true
and beautiful though it is!”
“Because, my dear and
I may say I speak as one having authority and not
as the scribes in my opinion, and
judging by what I perceived with about a quarter of
one eye at breakfast, you have only to hold up your
little finger, in a friendly and encouraging manner,
and our young friend and relative, Mr. Coppinger, will I
admit I don’t quite know what people do with
little fingers in these cases, something affectionate,
no doubt!”
“I thought your authority would
have extended to little fingers!” broke in Christian,
sparring for wind, and wishing she were not facing
the window; “in any case, I fail to see what
mine, in this instance, has to say to our being boycotted?”
“My dear girl,” said Judith,
leaning forward, and speaking with solemnity, “the
priests won’t want to fall foul of anyone with
as much money as Larry!”
Christian was silent; she had not
anticipated quite so direct an intervention in her
personal affairs as was now being discovered, and
she felt that her pearl was melting in the fierce solvent
of Judith’s interest and curiosity.
“I know it’s a bore about
his religion, and his politics are more than
shaky, but you know, in a way, it’s rather lucky,
in view of the mess Papa’s got everything into,
to have someone on that side,” went on Judith,
who was far too practical to be influenced by that
malign Spirit of the Nation who had so persistently
endeavoured to establish herself as one of the family
at Mount Music. “All I’m afraid of
is that Papa may begin to beat the Protestant drum
and wave the Union Jack! Such nonsense!
The main thing is that Larry himself is quite all
right!”
“I’m sure he would be
gratified by your approval!” Judith’s patronage
was somewhat galling; Judith, who was quite pleased
with Bill Kirby! Good, excellent Bill,
but still! Christian’s colour betrayed
her, and she knew it, and knowing also the remorseless
cross-examination that the betrayal would immediately
provoke, she decided to anticipate it.
“As a matter of fact,”
she went on, “he we ”
she hated the crudity of the statement.
“You’re engaged!”
swooped Judith, with the speed of a hawk. “Excellent
girl!”
Christian found the commendation offensive.
“I assure you it’s quite
without either political or religious bias!”
she said defiantly. She had failed to keep her
secret, but she went down with her flags flying.