The Silver Fox

by Martin Ross; E. Oe. Somerville

Lady Susan was at a little distance, apparently absorbed, as was her wont, in attentiveness to what was going on in covert. At the laugh that followed Dr. Hallahan’s remark, she moved away, and rode slowly along the edge of the wood. She was on Solomon, who had already taken full note of a lighter hand, a lighter weight, and the absence of spurs: he had had ideas about bucking on the road to testify his appreciation of these things, but on finding that Lady Susan had also ideas of her own on the subject, he had made up his mind to treat her with respect. She rode on round the top of the covert, and stationed herself on its farther side; Solomon stood like a rock, with his brown roach back humped against the cold mist.

The hounds had been put in at the lower end of the wood, and were working through it, so far without result. As before, when Cahirdreen had been drawn, Danny-O was not to be found when the time came for him to take the hounds through the covert, and the master, on his grey horse, was riding up a track in the heart of the wood, where the mist had as yet scarcely made its way, and the silence dwelt like a spirit. The horse went ever more slowly among the slender stems of the fir-trees, sharing in the lethargy conveyed by the slack rein and the loose leg of his rider, while the hounds were pushing well ahead through the briars and the bracken, leaving Hugh behind. A straggler or two passed him by, with a wary eye on the whip, not realizing, as the house dog so readily does, that human beings have preoccupations in which dogs can be ignored.

It was some time before Hugh noticed the fact that there was somebody near him in the wood—a figure moving among the trees at a little distance. The Scotch firs and larch had been thinned out here for sale to the contractor of the new railway line, and the wood was more open. The figure was that of an old man, who seemed to be advancing in a direction parallel with Hugh. Sometimes the misty fog blotted him out, sometimes the grouping of the tree-stems conspired to hide him; he went onward as if fitfully; the moments when he was lost to sight scarcely accounted for his reappearances farther on. He shuffled like an infirm man, yet his progress through the undergrowth was so steady that it seemed as if he were walking on a path. Irritated at length by the persistent espionage, Hugh called to him to ask what he was doing in the covert. He received no reply, and the mist crept in between them. When it cleared again the old man was crossing an open space fifty yards away. Hugh noticed the profound melancholy of his bent head, the yellow paleness of his cheek. Even while something familiar about him vexed Hugh’s memory, like an evil dream half-forgotten, he appeared to stumble, and fell with out-spread arms and without a sound into some unseen hollow or ditch. Hugh pressed the grey horse through the briars and under the branches till he reached the spot; he pulled up abruptly as he found himself at the edge of a disused sandpit. There were a few rocks flung about at the bottom of it, with the briars growing among them; a rabbit came up out of them, and scuttled to its burrow in the sand at the sound of the horse’s tread; nothing else whatever was there.

Hugh put his hand to his head and wondered if he were going mad. Then, quite unexpectedly, his knees began to tremble, and the breath of the unknown entered into him, cowing the conventions and disbeliefs of ordinary life. At the same instant a hound began to throw his tongue in the covert, two or three more joined, and the grey horse turned of himself to get back to the path. As if through a dark atmosphere of foreboding and doom Hugh heard the whimpers strengthen to yells in all the wild and animal and mundane delight of hunting; he moved mechanically on, while the borders of existence became immeasurable about him, and his unhappiness stretched out into all futurity. There was a rustle in the undergrowth near him, and a fox slipped across the path and away among the trees towards the fence that bounded the wood. It was silver-grey, with black ears and paws, its eyes as it glanced at Hugh were like topazes, and seemed full of the cold lore of unearthly things. The thrill went again from Hugh’s heart to his throat, and died away in a sickly chill.

“Damn it all!” he broke out suddenly, “what am I afraid of? I’m going to break my neck—that’s what it is—and the sooner the better.”

An old hound came working and yelping up through the dead bracken; she flung up her head with a long shriek of excitement as she crossed the path; half-a-dozen others rushed to her well-known cry, and went streaming past on the line. The grey horse was quivering and hopping from leg to leg with excitement. Hugh could feel his heart beating up through the saddle.

“All right, you devil,” he said, turning him through the trees at a trot; “you’ll get a skinful of it now.”

The bank was blind and high, and the last hounds were struggling over it with difficulty; Hugh rode along it for a hundred yards or so at a canter, with branches hitting him in the face, till he found a place that seemed possible, and sent the horse at it with a cruel dig of the spurs. In three big bounds the grey was at the fence, the fourth landed him on top among briars and furze, and a drop of seven or eight feet into a marshy hollow was revealed. Lady Susan’s handling had not been lost on the grey; he kept his head up, and jumped out like a stag, landing clear of the rotten ground, and collecting himself in a moment with his eye on the hounds. Hugh sat him loosely and recklessly; what he felt was not pleasure, yet it was not wholly removed from it. He had, at all events, the fierce and bitter satisfaction of taking his weaker nature by the throat, and keeping it down, even to the death that every fibre was expectant of.

One other rider had seen the hounds going away. As Hugh turned down the hill, with the pack already three fields ahead, he saw through the mist that a lady on a brown horse had got away on good terms with them from the first. It was his wife, on Glasgow’s horse. The rest of the field were left at the wrong side of the covert, ignorant of the fact that the fox had gone away, and, from the line that he had taken, not likely to know for some time. Certainly Hugh was not in the mood to remember their existence. He took the grey horse by the head and galloped him at a loose stone wall. They were over with a send and a swoop, and Hugh began to lose the cold trembling in his knees, and to feel again the forgotten grip and swing. Somewhere in the back of his heart he was afraid, but sinister clouds of fatalism and heats of jealousy were between him and that latent and irresponsible treachery of the nerves.

The hounds were running hard, down towards the railway, and Lady Susan was going at her ease with them on Solomon. They flashed across it, and Hugh saw his wife ride unhesitatingly at the stark bog drain, that was the only fence of the unfinished line. The old horse jumped it like a four-year-old, and as he scrambled up the embankment Lady Susan looked back: the mist was creeping down the hill, but Hugh knew that she could not mistake the grey horse. He swore to himself that he would show her that he was as good a man as Glasgow, his horse as good as Glasgow’s; the most primitive and animal of human hatreds had taken hold of him, and was disfiguring mind and face like a possession of the devil.