II.
A LEAD OF HEARTS.
Mrs. Terwilliger Dehon—ah, Mrs. Dehon! Great heavens! why had they not met earlier—before she had sacrificed herself upon Terwilliger’s commonplace altars—before her radiant youth had been shrouded in tragedy?
The Russo-French police may be successfully evaded, but not so the laws of society. Naught but misery could he see in store for them both—one long life-agony of divided souls.
Of course, it took some time before this dismal prospect lay fairly out before them. At their first meeting there was nothing sadder in sight than the purple hills of Exmoor and the clear cascade of Bagworthy Water; and their talk was broken only by the cheerful yelp of hounds. And there had been fortune, too, in this; fortune we call fate, when fortune turns out ill. He had hardly seen her at the Cloudsham meet, and but just knew who she was. Thither he had gone with his friends, the Leighs, to see the red deer hunted in his ancient lair; and as he stood there, snuffing with his horse the sea-breeze that came up from Porlock Bay, immaculate in coat and patent-leathers, she had ridden up with a fat and pursy citizen beside her. This stall-fed citizen was horse-back on another square-built brute, and it was very Psychecide to call the wretch her husband. A Diana, by heaven! thought he; and, indeed, she sat her horse as any goddess might, and clothed her own riding-habit as the moon her covering of cloud.
“Who’s that?” said he to Tom Leigh.
“That’s the girl that married old Dehon,” said Tom. “She did it——”
But when or how she did it Austin never knew, for just then there was a joyous baying from the hounds, and whish! they scampered downward, skirting hanging Cloudsham Wood. Unluckily, they were at the wrong end of the field, and before they reached the steep bit of gorsy moor that overlooks the valley everyone else who meant to ride had disappeared in the cover of the forest. She reined in her beautiful horse on the very brink, and looked up the valley over Oare Hill; May stood a few yards below and looked down the valley in the direction of Porlock. Then she looked down the valley to Porlock, and May looked up the valley to Oare Hill. And their eyes met.
Her beautiful eyes glanced quickly off, like a sunbeam from a single eyeglass. She turned, as if in sudden decision, and sped like an arrow over the high moor. May’s eyes followed her; and his soul was in his eyes, and his body went after the soul. One dig of the spurs nigh unseated him, as if his spirited horse scorned such an incitement to chivalric duty; and so, for some twenty minutes on end they rode, May neither gaining nor losing, and both out of sight of the rest of the hunt. Now and then the cry of hounds came up from the forest-valley on the right, and May fancied he heard below a crashing as of bushes; but he had faith in his guiding goddess and he took her lead.
The high winds whistled by his head, and there were blue glimpses of the sea and wide gray gleams of misty moorland; but the soft heather made no sound of their mad gallop, and May was conscious of nothing else save the noble horse before him and the flutter of the lady’s riding-habit in the wind. Now the earth that rushed beneath was yellow with the gorse, now purple with the heather; here, he would sail over a turf-bank, there, his horse would swerve furiously from the feeling of an Exmoor bog; where she would ride, he would ride. This he swore to himself; but she rode straight, and he could make no gain. At the top of the moor, almost on the ridge of Dunkery Beacon, was a narrow cart-path, fenced six feet high in ferny turf, after the usual manner of Devonshire lanes. May saw it and exulted; this was sure to turn her, till she found a gate at least.
But his beautiful chase rode up the gentle inner incline and sailing over the lane like a bird, was lost to sight upon the other side.