"Why, of course; but, look here, you'll be awfully sore. You haven't ridden after the hounds since I knew you. You might even get a fall."
"I used to go, though, a great deal—and it won't hurt me to be stiff for a few days. Besides, I want to take up hunting again."
Her motive was beyond him—perhaps because of her nearness, which prevented his getting the proper perspective of vision. For all his keenness of insight, he failed utterly to see into the mysterious mind of his wife. He could not penetrate that subtle interplay of traditional virtues and discover that she was in the clutch of one of the oldest and most savage of the passions.
"Then you'd better go to bed early and get some sleep," he said. "I suppose we'll have a cup of coffee before starting."
"I'll make it on the oil stove while I am dressing. Marthy won't be up then."
"Well, I'll come upstairs in ten minutes," he replied, taking up his paper again. "I only want to finish this article."
In the morning when she opened the old green shutters and looked out of the window, the horses, having been saddled by candlelight, were standing under the mulberry tree at the gate. Eight years ago, in her girlhood, she would have awakened in a delicious excitement on the morning of a fox-hunt, and have dressed as eagerly as if she were going to a ball; but to-day, while she lit the oil-stove in the hall room and put on the kettle of water, she was supported not by the hope of pleasure, but by a dull, an almost indefinable sensation of dread. The instinct of woman to adjust her personality to the changing ideals of the man she loves—this instinct older than civilization, rooted in tragedy, and existing by right of an unconquerable necessity—rose superior at the moment to that more stable maternal passion with which it has conflicted since the beginning of motherhood. While she put on her riding-habit and tied up the plait of her hair, the one thought in Virginia's mind was that she must be, at all costs, the kind of woman that Oliver wanted.
A little later, when they set out under the mulberry trees, she glanced at him wistfully, as though she wanted him to praise the way she looked in the saddle. But his eyes were on the end of the street, where a little company of riders awaited them, and before she could ask a question, Abby's high voice was heard exclaiming pleasantly upon her presence. Not a particularly imposing figure, because of her rather short legs, when she was on the ground, it was impossible for Virginia to deny that Abby was amazingly handsome on horseback. Plump, dark, with a superb bosom, and a colour in her cheeks like autumnal berries, she had never appeared to better advantage than she did, sitting on her spirited bay mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs over the trees and bushes.
"Remember to look out for the creeks. That's where the danger comes," said Oliver, riding close to her, and he added nervously, "Don't try to keep up with Abby."
Ahead of them stretched a deserted Virginia road, with its look of brooding loneliness, as if it had waited patiently through the centuries for a civilization which had never come; and on the right of it, beyond a waste of scarlet sumach and sassafras and a winding creek screened in elder bushes, the dawn was breaking slowly under a single golden-edged cloud. Somebody on Virginia's left—a large, raw-boned, passionate huntsman, in an old plum-coloured overcoat with a velvet collar—was complaining loudly that they had started too late and the fox would have gone to his lair before they reached the main party. Except for an oath, which he rapped out by way of an emphasis not intended for the ladies, he might have been conducting a religious revival, so solemnly energetic, so deeply moved, was his manner. The hunt, which observed naturally the characteristics of a society that was ardently individualistic even in its sports, was one of those informal, "go-as-you-please" affairs in which the supreme joy of killing is not hampered by tedious regulations or unnecessary restrictions. The chief thing was to get a run—to start a rare red fox, if luck was good, because he was supposed to run straight by nature and not to move in circles after the inconsiderate manner of the commoner grey sort. But Providence, being inattentive to the needs of hunters in the neighbourhood of Dinwiddie, had decreed that the red fox should live there mainly in the vivid annals of old sportsmen.