Seeing the girl quiet at his side, Paul began to try and tell her something of his life, working back, as is the manner of men, from the things that are nearest their experience and yet are slipping from their memory, into the never forgotten far past.... The night marches across the silent desert, spellbound by the silver witchery of the moon, and through mehallahs, that are like a fruitful land smitten by an evil charm—its houses turned into boulders and brushwood made of its standing corn: the caravans one may meet with a grave bearded sheikh riding in front, and the bubbling dromedaries behind him, laden with great wicker "D-raths" full of squalling, naked children and silk-swathed women, who peep through the osiers and crook their fingers at the dusty legionaries tramping by in a cloud of their own dust: the sand pillars that march upon your flank, step and step, like jealous genii shepherding doomed strangers into their desert: the joy of the camp at the well, with the day's march done: the incredible lightness of the sweat-soaked body when the knapsack is lifted off.
... Or that other camp—so far away it is hard to believe it all one life. Crackling cedar wood and the good smell of coffee on the sharp light mountain air, and the jinglers riding in the squealing cavvy with a pother of dust about their unshod feet, all rosy and glorious like a halo in the cherry-red morning sun: and the long lariats held wedgewise, and the scamper and scurry as the bronchos are trapped: and the peering through a fog of sweat and dust for your own brand on shoulder or buttock, and the whirling ropes, and the laughter and horseplay as the ponies are blanketed and bitted for the dawn-to-dusk round-up.
I don't know whether Paul made a poor Othello, but I do know he had a very indifferent Desdemona. Fenella was forever interrupting the narrative on one frivolous pretext or another: to throw stick or stone for poor sleepy Rock to retrieve ("Guffetchit-Rock! Guffetchit—lazy dog!"); to gather a bunch of scarlet berries afar off, whose color had taken her eye and which were hardly redder than her lips; to run down for a minute to the pond to see what "those rummy birds" were digging for so industriously. She had all the nil admirari of the modern mind: its heedlessness of anything that lies outside its own experience; its sedulous curiosity for all that lies within. It was better when they got to Ingram's early life. She could imagine a country road along which burdocks and hemlock and other green fleshy things grow as high as young trees, and little gray frame houses tucked away behind silver birches. She was genuinely and even tenderly interested in the crippled mother, and at the story of the sister who died, blew her nose and said she had caught cold in the train. She clapped her hands at the quilting bees and candy-pulls and sleigh rides and sugar boiling camps and wished plaintively that she had been born a little American girl, to have had her share in so rapturous an adolescence. But even this part of the story was checked with immaterial, trivial questions such as on children's lips weary the maternal patience. "What happened the gray mare in the end that wouldn't pass the new letter-box? How many boys went to the sugar camp? And how many girls? Did they ever flirt?"
They had luncheon in an upper room of an old inn at Kingston, that had a curved iron balcony looking down upon the market place. The panelling was hidden by paper of an iridescent red, covered with a sprawling pattern of tarnished leaves and flowers. To right and left of the fireplace two dark pictures of bottle-necked ladies with untidy hair, brought here from God knows what household dispersion, looked disdainfully out of the canvas in opposite directions. Some fair or market was going on in the square below; the misty afternoon air was full of the bleat of sheep, the lowing of cattle, raucous cries of costermongers, and the crack of saloon rifles. They were waited on by a depressed Teuton, upon whose broad white face Paul raised a wintry smile by addressing him in his own guttural tongue. Fenella, the palms of her long kid gloves twisted round her bangles, fared delicately. She gave most of her meat to Rock—eschewed watery sprouts and fluffily mashed potatoes—and "filled up," as she would and even did express it, upon plum tart with unlimited cream and sugar. She would not drink wine or coffee, but ate all the dessert and sent out for more cob-nuts. She had all sorts of pretty, restless, bad manners: crumbled bread while she chattered—scored the cloth with a pink nail while she listened—counted her plum stones three times and made it "never"—dabbled in her tumbler for lack of a finger bowl—and upon its rim made, with one wet finger-tip, the hum of innumerable blue bottles, at which poor Rock barked and snapped under her chair.
It was late when they sat down to lunch, and they had dawdled besides. The sun was gone and twilight closing in as they recrossed the Park toward Richmond. She was so silent that Paul asked her, half peering into the veiled face, whether she had felt the afternoon dull. She said not; but her negative went no further than a little shake of the head. She had a trick of looking back every now and then and of measuring the way they had come, as if to insure a clear recollection of it, and she allowed Rock—who, rested, fed, and with his head pointed, though obliquely, for home, was in spirits that contrasted with his depressed morning mood—to roam at his will. They had just reached the avenue of trees that looks over Ham House when a furious barking made them turn their heads. The dog, bristling, and with sidelong leaps that left his nose in the one direction, was pointing at something in the long grass. Fenella cracked the whip she had been trailing along the path.
"Rock! Rock! Come here, sir! Oh, Mr. Ingram, go quick and stop him!" She covered her eyes. "He's got some poor little rabbit or bird."
Paul ran and collared the animal. A brown mottled bird with a wide yellow beak was fluttering away clumsily, with wings half spread. Fenella caught it from him as his hand was closing on it.
"Give it to me! Oh, darling! are you hurt?" She looked on her gloves for blood. "Had he bitten it, Mr. Ingram?... There, there—you're quite safe now. I tink oor more f'itened dan hurt, dear! Is he one of the birds that fly away in the winter, Mr. Ingram? I'm going to take him home and put him in the conservatory till spring.... Ah! you wicked—bad—cruel—fierce dog! It's a good job I gave him so much meat, isn't it Mr. Ingram?—or you'd be gobbled up, dee-ar!... That's right; put him on the chain. Oh, yes he does, Mr. Ingram; he eats birds, at least he scrunches them," stroking the smooth brown back with her lips. "Can we get a cage in Richmond, do you think?"
Paul looked at his watch. "I think we'd better get a train in Richmond," he said. "We've been out quite a while, and you only said 'luncheon' over the 'phone. Are you going to bring the bird along?"
"Why—of course I am."