She said, "Thank you, Roger." They shook hands. He remembered afterwards how the lustre of the honesty shewed behind her head. A worn old panther skin, the relic of a beast which had been shot in India by Ottalie's father so many years before that the hairless hide was like parchment beneath the feet, crackled as she left the room. Roger plucked some of the silvery seed vessels for remembrance.
He stood in the hall for a moment trying to fix it in his mind. There was the barometer, by Dakins, of South Castle Street, in Liverpool, an old piece, handsome, but long since useless. There were the well-remembered doors. The dining-room door, the library door, the door leading into the jolly south room, the room sweet with the vague perfume, almost the memory of a perfume, as though the ghosts of flowers strayed there. The door of that room was open. Through its open windows he could see the blue of the bay, twinkling to the wind. Near the window was the piano, heaped with music. A waltz lay upon the piano: the Myosotis Waltz. Let no one despise dance music. It is the music which breaks the heart. It is full of lights and scents, the laughter of pretty women and youth's triumph. To the man or woman who has failed in life the sound of such music is bitter. It is youth reproaching age. It indicates the anti-climax.
He walked with Leslie through the village. The ragged men on the bridge, hearing them coming, turned, and touched what had once been their hats to them. They were not made for death, those old men. They were the only Irish things which the English tourist had not corrupted. They leant on the parapet all day. In the forenoons they looked at the road and at the people passing. In the afternoons, when the sun made their old eyes blink, they turned and looked into the water, where it gurgled over rusty cans, a clear brown peat-stream. A quarter of a mile up the stream was the graveyard, where the earth had by this time ceased to settle over Ottalie's face. On the grave, loosely tied with rushes, was a bunch of dog-roses.
They climbed the sharp rise beyond the bridge. Here they began to ride. They were going to ride thirty miles to the hotel. There they would sleep. In the morning Roger would take the steamer and return to London, where he would dree his weird by his lane as best he could.
The men on the quay were loading ore, as of old, into a dirty Glasgow coaster. One of them asked Roger which team had won at the hurling.
They ploughed through the red mud churned by the ore-carts. The schooner lay bilged on the sand, as of old, with one forlorn rope flogging the air. One or two golfers loafed with their attendant loafers on the links. They rode past them. Then on the long, straight, eastward bearing road, which rounds Cam Point, they began to hurry, having the wind from the glens behind them. Soon they were at the last gloomy angle from which the familiar hills could be seen. They rounded it. They passed the little turnpike. A cutter yacht, standing close inshore, bowed slowly under all sail before them. She lifted, poising, as the helm went down. Her sails trembled into a great rippling shaking, then steadied suddenly as the sheet checked. A man aboard her waved his hand to them, calling something. They spun downhill from the cutter. Now they were passing by a shore where the water broke on weed-covered boulders. From that point the road became more ugly at each turn of the wheel. It was the road to England.
They stopped at the posting-house so that a puncture might be mended while they were at tea. Tea was served in a long, damp, decaying room, hung with shabby stuff curtains. Vividly coloured portraits of Queen Victoria and Robert Emmet hung from the walls. On the sideboard were many metal teapots. On the table, copies of Commerce, each surmounted by a time-table in a hard red cover, surrounded a tray of pink wineglasses grouped about an aspodesta. On a piano was a pile of magazines, some of them ten years old, all coverless and dog's-eared. Roger picked up one of the newest of them, not because he wanted to read it, but because, like many literary men, he was unable to keep his hands off printed matter. He answered Leslie at random as he looked through it. There was not much to interest him there. Towards the end of it there was a photograph of an African hut, against which a man and woman huddled, apparently asleep. A white man in tropical clothes stood beside them, looking at something in a sort of test-tube.
"A COMMON SCENE IN THE SLEEPING SICKNESS BELT," ran the legend. Underneath, in smaller type, was written, "This photograph represents two natives in the last stages of the dread disease, which, at present, is believed to be incurable. The man in white, to l. of the picture (reader's r.), is Dr. Wanklyn, of the Un. Kgdm. Med. Assn. The photograph was taken by Mr. A. S. Smallpiece, Dr. Wanklyn's assistant. Copyright."
"What do you know of sleeping sickness, Leslie?" he asked.
"Sleeping sickness?" said Leslie. "There was an article about it in The Fortnightly, or one of the reviews. There was a theory that it is caused in some way by the bite of a tsetse fly."