Bunbury whistled a few bars of a tune, and knocked down things in the whip-rack.
“Hugh’s riding that grey,” she went on; “it’s quite absurd. He can’t do anything with him, and he only makes an exhibition of himself.”
“Oh, the horse is all right now,” replied Bunbury, lowering his voice; “he was very green that first day that Hugh rode him.”
“Very well,” she said, “you’ll see. He won’t take that horse across two fences to-day.”
Bunbury passed on out of the hall door, and left Lady Susan standing on the doorstep. She looked up at the cold blue and uncertain grey of the sky, and out at the ruffled and hazy sea, the strong light showing lines of sleeplessness about her eyes; then, turning back into the house, she met her husband. She did not suppose that he had overheard her, yet she was aware of something in his lonely face that she did not care to look at. She went to the table and took up her gloves without speaking.
“Hullo!” she exclaimed, “there’s a letter here that came for you. I found it on the floor one night, and didn’t think it worth sending on. Some one has shoved it behind the card-tray.”
Hugh looked at the vulgar and rambling handwriting, and mechanically tore open the envelope. It was a letter clearly written in close and crooked lines, and its purport appeared to be a confused complaint of “persecution” received from the hounds in connection with the covert of Cahirdreen. Hugh read on with a frowning brow. In other days he would have asked his wife to come and read it over his shoulder, but that time seemed now very far away.
Glasgow’s name appeared in the letter, with more complaints of persecution; he hardly tried to understand what it was all about. All at once his wife’s name seemed to leap out from the paper, and to sink back, indelible, irrevocable, linked to Glasgow’s by two or three gross and barbarous phrases, by a warning not less crude, by a cunning treatment of the matter as one of common knowledge. There was no signature, nothing to suggest its connection with the dead hand that still clutched the broken reed when Tom Quin’s body was taken from the pond.
Hugh raised his eyes and looked at his wife, tasting in that moment the transcendent anguish of the mind that once or twice in a lifetime teaches the body what suffering can be. She was buttoning her glove, standing tall and straight in the light from the open door, in all the spotless austerity of her black habit and white tie. She seemed far out of the reach of accusation, yet, as he took in every well-known line, forgotten things rose up against her in an evil swarm. His belief in her was falling with the fall of a strong and shading tree; he clung to it even as it fell; and all the while she stood and buttoned the glove across her white wrist.
At half-past eleven a misty fog was drifting loosely up from the south-west on the shoulders of the thaw, and the group of riders outside the cover of Cahirdreen began to turn up their collars. It was a small group, and an eye accustomed to the usual muster would have noticed at once the absence of Mr. Glasgow; he was one of the people whose presence makes itself felt in all the varied fortunes of a day’s hunting. As the minutes passed, and the horses nibbled idly at the gorse in the fence, the dispensary doctor closed the top of his flask with a snap, and remarked facetiously that he supposed business must sometimes come before pleasure, even with railway contractors.