“He’s mad!” she called out through the wind that sang in her teeth. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Didn’t he, though!” Glasgow shouted back, his eyes tracking the hounds where they were flitting like white birds across a green field near the brow of the hill; “he knows now, I think!”
Lady Susan was a hundred yards ahead. Glasgow let his horse go, reducing the distance at every stride, and leaving Slaney behind. He did not seem like the lover who had found out the secret of her lips two evenings ago.
Other riders were close to her now, converging from different points; she was dimly aware of Major Bunbury below her on the left, riding hard and steady to pick up a bad start; she saw Danny’s red coat far away in the heather; she vaguely missed Hugh’s. She was in the green field at last, with the hounds casting themselves at the farther side of an ugly stone-faced bank plumed with furze-bushes. The grey had refused, with the nervousness of youth and inexperience, and Glasgow was looking about for a better place to get over. At the same moment Slaney saw Hugh galloping towards them up a hillside track on the bay that his wife had ridden the Friday before, and through the maddening din of the hounds opening again on the line, she heard Lady Susan call to him to give them a lead.
“There, Hughie!” she cried, “between the two furze-bushes is the only chance. That horse will do it flying.”
Hugh cantered to the place, the bay horse pulling and fuming; he looked at the steep face of the bank, the deep ditch in front of it, and knew that to save his soul he could not ride at it.
“It’s not good enough,” he called out, turning his horse. “We must try round some other way.”
“Try round!” ejaculated Lady Susan, rushing the grey at the fence. “Look at the hounds running like the devil over the top of the hill! Come up, horse!”
The grey horse recognized the inevitable; he came up on to the top of the bank with an effort, and jumped boldly out across the boggy stream on the far side. Glasgow came next, getting over with a scramble, and after him followed the wholly incredible Isabella. As Major Bunbury, cramming his screwy mare at the same place, saw Isabella’s crafty hind legs fetch securely up on the bank, he said to himself, with some excitement, that Miss Morris was a clinking good girl, and that there was nothing in creation like an Irish mare, young or old. At this juncture his own mare alighted on her chest and nose, and the eulogy was interrupted.
Slaney was but chaotically conscious of subsequent events. The hounds crested the hill, and sped down into the brown and green patchwork of the rough country at the other side, and in a dream-like rush she pursued the flying figures of Glasgow and Lady Susan, scuffling and sliding down rocky hillsides, straining up again with fingers twisted in Isabella’s abundant mane, scrambling over rotten fences, splashing and labouring through bog, bucking over loose walls, while physical effort and the excitement of success were mixed up with the fragrance of the beaten sod, the peaty whiff of the broken bog fence, and the consciousness of encomium and advice from Major Bunbury. There was a check or two, when she was aware of puffing horses snatching their wind, and flushed riders, telling each other that it was a great run, and then again the brown country flowing past her, and the unfailing guile of Isabella.