CHAPTER XXXI
THE FOX HUNT
We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but a sharpness lingered in the air from last night’s frost, like a cold spring in a warm lake. Over the hazy, genial oak woods on the hills sailed slow white gulls all crying, “wheel whill” with a shrillness that suited the high blue sky. Sowers went across the long red fields, casting dark seeds that flew in curved clouds before them at each second step and vanished in the wind. On the steep roads the dust whirled in curves as of perfect dancers, which the kestrel repeated on a grand scale high overhead. Thrushes sang at ash tops and in hedges. And we four talked, making such harmonious music to a fine day as men may, with jest and recollection and anticipation of the meet of the fox hounds to which we were going, two to ride and two to follow afoot.
Within a mile of the meet we got down at a farmhouse, where the horses were awaiting their owners and the yeoman was to join us.
The farm-buildings made almost a complete quadrangle with the side of the house—stables, cow stalls, a granary of ancient stone, a barn with a low-arched Tudor doorway like a broad back ready to receive a weight, and ladders and lengths of oak leaning against the walls. There stood the horses, nodding by their grooms, with restless fetlocks; a red calf flung up its heels amongst the flying, yellow straw; the fowls were stately and fluttered by turns. The house was all white, except for the roof of stone “slats” and the large dark windows. Close to it, away from the farm buildings, lay the crooked orchard. We passed through the shrubbery, without offending its warbling blackbirds, and across a lawn to the door.
The yeoman was of a noble, antique type; of medium height; straight, but mobile, and stooping gently as he listened, with moderate, neat, large-featured head; reticent, slow but beautiful of speech, ready with laughter. He made me think of the last Roman who spoke the speech of Virgil and Cæsar quite pure. He was in his prime, past thirty, the last of his family, and still holding their few hundred acres, a bachelor who had not long since won his captivity from the pale, fair-haired beauty at his side, to judge by her commanding smiles from time to time.
They were sure of a fox, he said; not so sure to kill, because the ground was dry again in spite of last night’s frost, and scent bad.
As we stood round the room eating sandwiches—there was yet half an hour before the meet—one asked him if he knew anything of an old house in a valley some miles away. All the doors and walls were panelled with mirrors amidst their bright oak, and as you sat there you saw your party repeated as if through the walls in the neighbouring rooms. He had not time to answer when an old bent and pallid man, his uncle, who had sat unobserved, began to speak in a feeble, singing voice, strangely laughing at times.
“I know the house with the mirrors. The Merediths lived there for three hundred years, and I knew the last of them well. She was Arabella. She had no brothers, and there is no child. I was a young man then, and though you may not easily believe it, when you see this arm, I was a fine, strong man. Ha! ha! ha!”
He stopped to chuckle abstractedly, with ambiguous irony at the contrast between his early lustihood and the decrepitude which had coffined it. Perhaps his nephew winced at the garrulity and such irony as the thick laughter disclosed to him, but he did nothing to divert the talk, nor did Enid, his betrothed, when she filled a glass with whisky and water for the old man, who did but admire it with a sudden satisfaction, and then continued:—