“Well, if I were Delane,” I thought, “I’d pay a good deal to keep that old ruffian out of sight.”
Mrs. Delane, turning to watch her father’s retreat, saw me and nodded. At the same moment Delane, on a tall deep-chested poney, ambled across the field, stick on shoulder. As he rode thus, heavily yet mightily, in his red-and-black shirt and white breeches, his head standing out like a bronze against the turf, I whimsically recalled the figure of Guidoriccio da Foligno, the famous mercenary, riding at a slow powerful pace across the fortressed fresco of the Town Hall of Siena. Why a New York banker of excessive weight and more than middle age, jogging on a poney across a Long Island polo field, should have reminded me of a martial figure on an armoured war-horse, I find it hard to explain. As far as I knew there were no turreted fortresses in Delane’s background; and his too juvenile polo cap and gaudy shirt were a poor substitute for Guidoriccio’s coat of mail. But it was the kind of trick the man was always playing; reminding me, in his lazy torpid way, of times and scenes and people greater than he could know. That was why he kept on interesting me.
It was this interest which caused me to pause by Mrs. Delane, whom I generally avoided. After a vague smile she had already turned her gaze on the field.
“You’re admiring your husband?” I suggested, as Delane’s trot carried him across our line of vision.
She glanced at me dubiously. “You think he’s too fat to play, I suppose?” she retorted, a little snappishly.
“I think he’s the finest figure in sight. He looks like a great general, a great soldier of fortune—in an old fresco, I mean.”
She stared, perhaps suspecting irony, as she always did beneath the unintelligible.
“Ah, he can pay anything he likes for his mounts!” she murmured; and added, with a wandering laugh: “Do you mean it as a compliment? Shall I tell him what you say?”
“I wish you would.”
But her eyes were off again, this time to the opposite end of the field. Of course—Bolton Byrne was playing on the other side! The fool of a woman was always like that—absorbed in her latest adventure. Yet there had been so many, and she must by this time have been so radiantly sure there would be more! But at every one the girl was born anew in her: she blushed, palpitated, “sat out” dances, plotted for tête-à-têtes, pressed flowers (I’ll wager) in her copy of “Omar Khayyám,” and was all white muslin and wild roses while it lasted. And the Byrne fever was then at its height.