“Take it, asthore, take it now,” chorussed the sympathizers.
“L’ave her alone. Don’t be lookin’ at her,” said her daughter, in the hard voice that had remained unshaken through the morning. She closed the door in their faces, and when she presently came out again with the empty cup, smeared with the stain of the poisonous stuff it had contained, all recognized that the first step in the consolation of the Widow Quin had been accomplished.
Maria turned away. Her head ached wildly, and instead of returning to the house, she passed round the end of the shed, and into the field at the back, that the damp wind of the hillside might blow upon her hot forehead. Her face was quite white under its sunburn and freckles, except where the skin below the eyes showed a lavender tinge; the eyes themselves had a dry stare in them, yet there was nothing random or ungoverned about her. Grief drives the active to activity, and perhaps the long toils of the night, when successive candles found her still sweeping and washing in preparation for the wake and the inquest, had saved her from the reaction from her outburst in the wood; perhaps passion is normal and without reaction in those whose hair is truly red.
The wind soothed her aching head, and she went slowly on and sat down on a stone, with the empty cup and saucer in her lap, looking away up the slope to where a ridge of hill was visible through the soft movement of the mist. She did not at first observe that a grey animal with a black muzzle had leaped on to the loose wall that surrounded the field she was in, and was crouching and looking at her intently. It jumped down with exquisite lightness, a pale grey fox with a beautiful white-tipped brush, and crossed the open towards the barn where Tom Quin lay. As it did so, Maria saw it, and sprang to her feet, her mouth open and her eyes starting. The cup and saucer fell with a clatter, and the fox, which had seemed disposed to loiter as it passed close under the wall of the shed, glanced back, looked about it, and after a moment of seeming indecision, turned and trotted at its ease up the hill, heading apparently for much the same point as that from which it had just come. Grey as the mist itself, it glided away, till it disappeared among the clumps of gorse, while somewhere overhead a seagull made its unhappy cry.
Maria Quin fell on her knees with absolute simplicity and spontaneity. She was not frightened in the ordinary sense of the word, but she acknowledged the power of the unseen things that had worked together to her brother’s undoing, and she cast herself on a higher protection, half doubtful as she was of its right to intervene. As she knelt, with her hand thrust in the bosom of her dress to grasp the picture of the Sacred Heart that hung around her neck, the cry of hounds came to her ear; it approached rapidly, and she jumped up, full of a blind indignation against those who, for their own amusement, had wrecked the fortunes of a family, and now came to gallop past the house of death, guided by that grey and ill-omened thing. Half-a-dozen hounds passed her, hot on the line of the fox, with their heads up; they overran it and tried back, then picked it up by the shed as if they were lapping it off the grass, and with whimpers bursting into the firm note of hunting, went away up the hill and were lost to sight amongst the furze. Others followed in their track, and Maria, maddened by their brutal self-engrossment, their cheery and inconsequent voices, ran in the direction from which they had come, with some inflaming idea of stopping the riders who would follow, equally self-engrossed, infinitely more brutal and desecrating.
As she climbed the first wall, a horse and rider leaped up into view on a high bank some two hundred yards away to her right, near where three thin and slanting Druidic stones were dimly seen through the mist. They dropped down out of sight among a wild growth of hazels. Maria stood stock still; the powers of darkness had outrun her. Neither horse nor rider reappeared. It was stunningly complete, it was terrific and just retribution, but yet—oh, Mother of Our Lord!—the rider was a woman.
The peasant heart struggled in the grave-clothes of hatred and superstition, and burst forth with its native impetuousness and warmth. Maria started forward and ran towards the field where the hazels grew. She ran clumsily because of her ill-made boots, but she got over the ground with surprising quickness. She climbed another wall, a strong one with thorn-bushes laid along the top, and was in a small field full of grey clumps of young hazel. She skirted these rapidly, but with care, and once jumped across an ugly cleft among the bushes. The hounds were all about her again, but they were silent now, and were hunting to and fro among the hazel-bushes, and leaping backwards and forwards over rifts in the ground similar to that which Maria had just crossed. Before her was the high bank, showing above a long strip of hazel scrub; she thrust herself, breathless, in among the thick and sturdy growth, her eyes dilated with apprehension, her red hair falling loose in the wind. A cry for help arose at her step, scarcely three yards away; she broke her way to it through the crush of young branches, and saw, as if coming up out of the ground, two gloved hands, clutching all they could hold of twigs and saplings, that bent lithely with the weight that hung from them.
Lady Susan was hanging over the verge of a deep and wide cleft, masked on one side by hazels and briars; her face looked up, deeply flushed, and distorted from the whirl of the terrible moments that make a vortex round death, yet it was obvious that even in that extremity she had not lost her presence of mind. Maria dropped on her knees, and twining her left arm round a strong stem, stretched down her muscular right hand. Lady Susan could not let go and grasp it, and Maria caught her by the wrist and drew her slowly upward. There was a struggle, and a tremendous strain on the arms; both women kept steady and firm, and Lady Susan got her knee over the edge and fell forward on to Maria’s shoulder. Her hat dangled by its guard, her habit sleeve had burst away from the shoulder, her patent-leather boots were cut and scraped by the crevices in which they had searched to find a footing; she drew hard breaths in the effort to recover herself.
“Is the horse killed?” she said hoarsely, scrambling on to her feet and looking down through the naked branches that fringed the long cleft.
Even the first glance could certify that Solomon had met his death in an instant. He lay in a heap in the obscurity forty feet below, on loose rocks among dark water; his head was doubled under his chest at an impossible angle that told the tale of a broken neck. The uttermost effort of a good horse had not been enough to save him, when he had tried to jump out from the top of the high bank across a chasm nearly twenty feet wide. That endeavour and all his simple and gallant life seemed expressed in the wreck of strength and intelligence that lay below, with the water washing over the flap of the saddle, over the shapely brown fetlocks, over the thin and glossy mane.