CHAPTER VII—NOLAN
Very quietly he sauntered to the front-door, which was ajar, and into the portico. He stood there meditating. In front he could vaguely discern the forms of the trees in the orchard, but beyond these nothing. The night was as dark as a wolfs mouth. Then the sound of a horse’s rapid hoof caught his ear. The wind had fallen, and everything was still. Looking down the hill, he could see the light of a vehicle ascending the slope of Watling Street. The sound of the horse’s trot came nearer and nearer, passed the end of the boreen, and so continued up the hill, getting fainter now, till it died entirely away as the vehicle dipped down the gradient into Hockliffe. The vehicle was one of her late Majesty’s mails, which took that route at that hour on Saturday nights only. It constituted a perfectly simple weekly phenomenon, yet somehow the birth, growth, fading, and death of the sound of the horse’s trot on the great road affected Richard’s imagination to a singular degree.
‘What is my position up here now?’ he asked himself. ‘Am I to depart an unconfessed spy, without another word to Raphael Craig or Teresa, or—what?’
The old man’s recital had touched him, and Teresa’s swoon had decidedly touched him more.
He strolled very leisurely down the drive, staring about him. Then, with senses suddenly alert, he whispered:
‘Come out, there. I see you quite well.’ Micky was hiding in the bushes under the drawing-room window. The little man obeyed complacently enough.
‘Come out into the road with me, Mike; I want to have a chat with you.’
Richard had sufficient tact not to put any sign of reproof or anger into his tone. He accepted Micky’s spying as a thing of course. They walked along the boreen together and up the high-road towards Hockliffe.