“So you did come out, after all,” he began, riding possessively up to her, “in spite of the Witch! Do you know that Dan’s afraid to go into the covert, and Major Bunbury’s taking the hounds through it!”
The sun shone on the top of his head as he took his hat off; Slaney had not before noticed the exact extent of his baldness. She gave him a conventional smile and nod, and went on talking to Dr. Hallahan. Glasgow waited, lighting a cigarette, and, at the next pause, spoke to her again. His eyes were full of meaning and penetration, and he knew that they were kind, but hers met them with the merest politeness as she answered him. There was a perplexed whimper from a hound down at the lower end of the covert; Glasgow caught up his reins and trotted away in the direction in which Lady Susan was already moving. This was not the moment for winding back through the maze of Slaney’s mood; he held the clue and could use it at his leisure.
Slaney detached herself from Dr. Hallahan, and rode alone up the mountain road. The hounds had drawn the gorse outside the covert, and were slowly working up through a wood of scrubby aboriginal oak trees, woven together by a tangle of briars; round the outskirts a band of young firs and larches imparted an effect of amenity, but the domain of the oaks had as impracticable an air as the curled and bossed forehead of the mountain bull that was shouting defiance from a neighbouring field. Slaney moved slowly on and up till she reached the top corner of the covert; and pausing there, the brown mare proceeded, with her usual air of infinite leisure, to crop the green spikes of a furze-bush. The smoke from Quin’s farm rose bluely from the valley below, a long stretch of brown country spangled with lakes lay beyond, and behind all, rising to meet the eye, the sea stood high like a silver wall against the horizon. Curlew were crying on the sunny slopes above Slaney, and the whistling of green plover filled the air. No one was in sight save a rider posted out on the hill to watch the top of the covert; the inevitable mob of country boys was at the lower end, and the sound of Hugh’s and Major Bunbury’s voices, holloaing to the hounds, came distantly from the bottom of the wood.
Slaney sat quite still, while the life and freshness of the morning passed by her, and left her dull as stone. The thud of a footstep that ran, and laboured in running, did not make her look round; she thought it was the usual country boy till she saw Tom Quin come lurching and stumbling round the far corner of the wood, with his dog panting at his heels. Even at a distance of a hundred yards or more an extravagance as of despair was unmistakable about him. As Slaney looked at him, a hound, not far off in the covert, gave two or three contralto notes in succession, and at the same moment there was a rustle in the bracken, a few yards in front of her. A grey face parted the brown fern and looked out at her; a fox’s face, with its oblique crafty eyes and sharp refined muzzle, but the fur was silver-grey.
“A thing like an Arctic fox,” Slaney heard Lady Susan’s voice declaiming on the ice at Hurlingham.
The fox slipped down off the fence through the bracken, crossed the road with a dainty whisk of its grey brush, glided up the opposite bank like a shadow, and was gone. A cold and prickling sensation passed over Slaney, that feeling of “a wind from the say coming betune the skin an’ the blood” that old Dan Quin had felt. It died away, and left her with a bounding heart and a reddened cheek, and a sense of intense participation in the events of the moment, instead of the lifeless passivity of five minutes before. Her courage repelled the shock to her instinct, but her understanding had taken a lift to the unknown and the impossible, and in spite of the morning sunshine and the candid blue sky, she could not altogether right herself.
A long shout of “gone away” came from the watcher on the hill, and the hounds came tumbling out of the wood in the lovely headlong rush that has the shape of a wave and a thousandfold its impetuosity. With the indescribable chorus of yells and squeals that is known as full cry, they swept past Slaney, and it was at this juncture that Isabella, the brown mare, found herself the victim of a gush of enthusiasm. It may have been a survival in her old soul of the days when she had, according to tradition, carried the huntsman of the county pack; it may have been that she, like her rider, was lifted out of herself by the discerning of spiritual things; at any rate, when she found her head pointed at a promising place in the fence, she bundled over it with an agility for which no one would have given her credit, and Slaney found herself galloping alone behind the racing pack.
The fox had done all that was most unexpected, had gone away into the teeth of the wind, in a direction wide of any known destination, and the field, both horse and foot, were all left at the wrong side of the big irregular covert. Yet Slaney had not gone a hundred yards when Lady Susan and Glasgow were behind her like a storm, and shot past with their horses pulling in the wildness of a first burst. The next fence was a towering bank, wet and rotten and blind with briars, feasible only at a spot where a breach made for cattle had been built up with loose stones. Glasgow came first at it, checking his young horse’s ingenuous desire to buck, and sitting down for a big fly. He was suddenly confronted by Tom Quin at the far side, brandishing a stone as big as a turnip as if in the act to throw it, and the young horse swung round with a jerk that perceptibly tried his rider’s seat. Lady Susan was close in his tracks, and, far from trying to stop her horse, she gave him a vigorous blow with her hunting-crop, and drove him full pace at the fence and its defender. The grey horse jumped like a deer, and Quin perforce sprang aside, cursing vilely and threatening Lady Susan with the stone. She was gone in an instant, and, before Glasgow had pulled his horse together, Slaney and Isabella were charging the place, Slaney with a white face and a crooked hat, Isabella with her long nose poked well forward to take her distance. With an economical yet sufficient hoist of her hind quarters the old mare was over, while Tom Quin remained staring as if stupefied by the feat.
“Go away, Tom!” called Slaney, as she passed him. “Don’t mind them—it’s no use—go home!”
She seemed to herself to be calling out of a dream; yet she had never felt so strongly and defiantly alive. The thud of galloping hoofs was in her ears, and she looked back in time to see Glasgow’s horse clear the stones with a long bound, and receive a blow across the nose from Tom Quin’s stick as he landed. Drag as she might she could not calm Isabella, who was bucketing through the heather tussocks with school-girl ardour; when she looked again, Quin was holding his hand to his face, as if he had been struck upon it, and was raving in that inarticulate futility of rage that is not good to see. Glasgow came on like a thunderbolt, and was beside Slaney in a moment, his horse still rampant from the blow.