“I have to thank you for your lead,” said May.
For one moment she turned her large eyes down to him. “You ride well, sir,” said she.
When the M. D. H. and others of the hunt came up, they found these two talking on a footing of ancient friendship. The slot was duly cut off and presented to Mrs. Dehon; and many compliments fell to our hero’s share, for all of which May gave credit to the beautiful huntress beside him.
Tom Leigh cocked his eye at this, but did not venture to present him to her after that twenty-mile run. It were throwing the helve after the hatchet, to present the man after the heart. And thus it happened that to her our hero was never introduced.
When Mr. Dehon arrived, some hours later, Tom Leigh led him up. “Mr. Dehon,” said he, “I think that you should know my particular friend, Mr. Austin May.” And Tom Leigh cocked his eye again.
May looked at the pursy little old man, and felt that his hatred for him would only be buried in his enemy’s grave. But his enemy was magnanimous, and promptly asked them both to dinner, which May did not scruple to accept.
III.
PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.
Austin May fell devoutly in love with Mrs. Dehon. This was without doubt the grande passion of his life. And it was hopeless.
He was just at the age when such affairs are sternest realities to modern men. He was beyond the uncertainty of youth, and before the compromises and practicalities of middle life. And there was something about Gladys Dehon to make a man who cared for her ride rough-shod, neck or nothing, over all things else. All the world admired her; would have loved her had it dared. There was no daring about it in Austin’s case; his audacity was not self-conscious; he simply followed her as he had followed her over combe and beacon on that Exmoor day.
People could tell him little about her, save that she had been very poor and very proud, and was very beautiful. Gladys Darcy—that had been her name—last of a broken family of Devon and of Ireland. She had neither sister nor brother, only a broken-down father, long since sold out of his Household captaincy. She had sold herself to Terwilliger Dehon, the rich speculator; and she was his, as a cut diamond might have been his; bought with his money, shining in his house, and he no more within her secret self than he might have been within the diamond’s brilliant surface. And two months after the wedding her old father had died and made the sacrifice in vain. Then she became the personage that the world knew as the “beautiful Mrs. Dehon.” May used to dream and ponder about her, long hours of nights and days; and he fancied that something about her life, her lonely bringing-up, her father’s precepts, had made her scornfully incredulous of there being such a thing as the novelist’s love in life. She had been a greater nature than her father, and all mankind had been nothing to her as compared with even him. Too early scorn of this world’s life prepares the soul for evil compromises.