In a minute the hoofs of the grey were thudding on the railway sleepers, but in that minute the hounds and Lady Susan had slipped away again; he felt that if they got any farther from him he would lose them in the mist. The going was heavy and the banks rotten in the boggy lowlands beyond the line. He took no care to pick his way, but rode wildly through swampy patches and over rocks muffled in furze, in pursuit of the flying shadow that the mist was momently hiding from him. It was not the way to get safely over a bad country. In the next five minutes the grey horse had twice been nearly down, and his white nose was black with bog mud; he had given up pulling, yet he was going at his best, strong and free, and his ears were pricked as gallantly as ever towards his work.
They had galloped perhaps three miles, and were bending back again towards the railway; Hugh was nearer to his wife by a hundred yards as he came with a heavy drop into a lane up which the hounds were running, and thundered up it in her wake, neither knowing nor caring where he was. The fact that they suddenly recrossed the railway by a level crossing conveyed to him no sense of locality. He was possessed by the passion to let his wife see that he was not afraid; to leave her and her borrowed horse behind; and, having gained that miserable joy, to be killed before her eyes. He was as nearly mad as presentiment, physical excitement, and the burning pain of jealousy could make him, and the grey horse was finding it out.
With a heave and a scramble they were out of the lane and over a bank; it was uphill now, in heather and rough ground, and the grey was puffing audibly as he answered the relentless spur. The mist thickened on the higher levels, Lady Susan and the hounds were suddenly lost to sight, and, after a minute or two of fruitless galloping, Hugh pulled up and listened, with his pulses thumping and his mouth dry. A curlew whistled overhead, a trembling crescent of sound, then, high up the hill to his left, he heard again the cry of the hounds. He rode to it desperately, skirting a high furzy knoll, and at the other side caught sight of the pack beginning to run fast again after a check, and his wife was still near them. He saw Solomon slip over a bank and ditch with all the seeming ease of a clever horse well ridden, and he cursed him and his rider aloud. The paltry blasphemy went out into the wind and mist, and was swallowed up in their large and pure philosophy, and it had scarcely left his lips when the greyness that blurred the hill-top became thinner as it drifted, and he saw three tall Druid stones stand out against the sky.
Immediately some remembrance, vague yet urgent, drove its way into the blind and single resolve of his mind. It was grouse-shooting long ago,—the grey horse took down half a loose wall with him as he jumped, and Hugh chucked him in the mouth and hit him—a man had spoken to him that day about something connected with those stones, he had seen that man again lately—quite lately—there was something horrible about it all.—Come up, horse! why the devil can’t you look where you’re going?—and yet it eluded him. Then it came, like the dart of a snake out of a ruined wall. It was old Dan Quin, who was dead, whom he had seen in the covert; it was Dan Quin who had spoken to him out grouse-shooting; he had pointed to those stones and told him—— Oh, God! his wife was within a hundred yards of the place! He shouted her name with his utmost strength. She did not hear him; she was cantering Solomon up the field, and the hounds were crossing a fence above her, beside the lean and crooked emblems of the Druids.
The grey horse was blowing and gulping, yet he answered the furious spurring. Hugh shouted again and again, with his eyes straining after his wife’s figure; in the white light of that agony he knew his love for her and his helplessness to save her. She turned Solomon at the fence beside the Druid stones; it was a big bank, with withered branches of thorn-bushes masking its outline, and she sent him at it hard. The old horse jumped on to it like a cat, seemed to stagger and hesitate, and they both were gone.
The grey felt his rider relax and sway, but being young he did not understand what it meant: he was nearing a bank that he felt he could not jump, but the dread of the spur was present with him. He did his best, and but for a rotten take-off he might possibly have scrambled over. As it was, his knees took the bank, his hindquarters flew up, and he turned a somer-sault, falling over into the next field. Hugh was shot from his back and pitched on his head and shoulder beside the horse. The latter struggled to his feet, but Hugh rolled convulsively to one side with an inarticulate sound, and lay still.
CHAPTER XII
There was an air of calamity and yet of Sunday about the Quins’ farmyard. The pigs were shut up, tubs and buckets were put out of sight, and Tom Quin’s little nephew, in his best frock, spent many hours of blissful autocracy in driving the fowl from the doorstep to Siberias behind the rick of turf. Very early in the day two stalwart and dapper members of the Royal Irish Constabulary had made their appearance, and from time to time women in hooded blue cloaks made their way along the causeway that skirted the manure heap, groaned, crossed themselves, and entered the house. In a large shed where Tom Quin had often threshed oats and chopped furze, his body had been laid on two tables, and covered with a sheet, some superstition about the drowned forbidding that it should be taken into the house, lest death might strike another there.
Awaiting inquest, the sheeted figure lay in its hidden awfulness, with the crooked rafters and the sedgy thatch above, and the candles burning at the head and feet in the grey winter air, wan yet ardent, like the flame of faith in the world’s cold noonday. Beside the body the widow Quin sat upon the earthen floor, with a black handkerchief tied over her spotless cap frill, and did not cease from the low moaning and weeping of unstanched grief. Sympathizers stood at the door and looked at her, an intense comprehension of her suffering blending itself with the inevitable fascination of the event, and prayers for the repose of the dead man’s soul were offered with a reality in which a sense of the extreme necessity for them was not concealed.
It was nearly twelve o’clock when Maria Quin came out of the house with a cup of tea in her hand; she had on her black best dress, and her boots creaked loudly. She said nothing to those whom she passed, but took the cup of tea to her mother, placing it in the reluctant hand that twisted the apron corner.