CHAPTER XXXI

THE FOX HUNT

We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but a sharpness lingered in the air from last night’s frost, like a cold spring in a warm lake. Over the hazy, genial oak woods on the hills sailed slow white gulls all crying, “wheel whill” with a shrillness that suited the high blue sky. Sowers went across the long red fields, casting dark seeds that flew in curved clouds before them at each second step and vanished in the wind. On the steep roads the dust whirled in curves as of perfect dancers, which the kestrel repeated on a grand scale high overhead. Thrushes sang at ash tops and in hedges. And we four talked, making such harmonious music to a fine day as men may, with jest and recollection and anticipation of the meet of the fox hounds to which we were going, two to ride and two to follow afoot.

Within a mile of the meet we got down at a farmhouse, where the horses were awaiting their owners and the yeoman was to join us.

The farm-buildings made almost a complete quadrangle with the side of the house--stables, cow stalls, a granary of ancient stone, a barn with a low-arched Tudor doorway like a broad back ready to receive a weight, and ladders and lengths of oak leaning against the walls. There stood the horses, nodding by their grooms, with restless fetlocks; a red calf flung up its heels amongst the flying, yellow straw; the fowls were stately and fluttered by turns. The house was all white, except for the roof of stone “slats” and the large dark windows. Close to it, away from the farm buildings, lay the crooked orchard. We passed through the shrubbery, without offending its warbling blackbirds, and across a lawn to the door.

The yeoman was of a noble, antique type; of medium height; straight, but mobile, and stooping gently as he listened, with moderate, neat, large-featured head; reticent, slow but beautiful of speech, ready with laughter. He made me think of the last Roman who spoke the speech of Virgil and Cæsar quite pure. He was in his prime, past thirty, the last of his family, and still holding their few hundred acres, a bachelor who had not long since won his captivity from the pale, fair-haired beauty at his side, to judge by her commanding smiles from time to time.

They were sure of a fox, he said; not so sure to kill, because the ground was dry again in spite of last night’s frost, and scent bad.

As we stood round the room eating sandwiches--there was yet half an hour before the meet--one asked him if he knew anything of an old house in a valley some miles away. All the doors and walls were panelled with mirrors amidst their bright oak, and as you sat there you saw your party repeated as if through the walls in the neighbouring rooms. He had not time to answer when an old bent and pallid man, his uncle, who had sat unobserved, began to speak in a feeble, singing voice, strangely laughing at times.

“I know the house with the mirrors. The Merediths lived there for three hundred years, and I knew the last of them well. She was Arabella. She had no brothers, and there is no child. I was a young man then, and though you may not easily believe it, when you see this arm, I was a fine, strong man. Ha! ha! ha!”

He stopped to chuckle abstractedly, with ambiguous irony at the contrast between his early lustihood and the decrepitude which had coffined it. Perhaps his nephew winced at the garrulity and such irony as the thick laughter disclosed to him, but he did nothing to divert the talk, nor did Enid, his betrothed, when she filled a glass with whisky and water for the old man, who did but admire it with a sudden satisfaction, and then continued:--

“Well, I was about the age of my nephew yonder, and I had never known what pain or misery was, except when I was nearly beaten by a gipsy in running down Mowland Hill. I farmed and I hunted, and it was understood that I was to marry an amiable and pretty young woman whom my father admired so much that he was willing that nobody should be my wife if not she. But I was in no haste, and indeed I was not fond of women. Others I knew seemed stupid or frivolous. This one was chiefly busy with the church and the poor. I respected her, and I believe now that she would have looked after me well in my old age. She understood me; we had known one another since we were children, and I used to delight to stop my horse to speak to her on a fine day when I was feeling fresh and gay. At last it was agreed that we were soon to be married, and I did not know why to draw back.”

Enid glanced quickly at my host, all the command having left her meek smile, and as quickly dropped her eyes. It seemed to me that the glance betrayed a slender fear or anticipation which she was ashamed of immediately. By his over-rigid tranquillity it may be that her lover gave a similar sign, the only one, and lost on her.

“No,”--the old man paused, as though he would still have liked to unearth some excuse which he might, fifty years back, have made for breaking his troth. “No,” he said, questioningly, “I did not know why to draw back. But one day a woman I had sometimes heard of--she had been away at school and with friends almost continually--came and joined our hunt for the first time--Arabella Meredith. She was over one bank before me, and I thought that Edith would never have done that. We had a good day and a long one. As I was riding back I was pretty well satisfied when with great clatter Miss Meredith rode up to me. She had had a long day and she was hot with her gallop, and yet as she came alongside, I turning my horse so that both curvetted together in the narrow road, she was as fresh as if it had been raining and she just out to take the air, as fresh as a young lime leaf and as clean and, if you understand me, as inhuman in a way, at least I thought so that evening when I was alone. When I saw her eyes, as I soon did, they seemed to belong to somebody else hiding there, and not the woman I had seen jumping.

“‘Mr. Arnold,’ she said, ‘I hear you are to be married....’

“‘Yes,’ I said.

“‘Then you will marry me,’ she said.

“In a mazy way I said that I would think about it, and she replied instantly,--

“‘Please ride as far as our house with me--not but that I can look after myself, though it is fifteen miles away, and the roads bad and dark--and you will have plenty of time to think about it.’

“I rode home with her, and I did not think at all, and I did not speak; nor did she, except to the horse; and at the end I said that I would marry her if she were willing.

“‘I will think about it,’ she said, ‘good-night,’ and I turned my horse to do the ten miles that divided the house with the mirrors from this. It was an extraordinary thing to do, I think. The next day I told Edith that I could not marry her because I wanted to marry Miss Meredith. There was trouble, but it is a long time ago. Edith never married, but continued to help the church and the poor in another part of the country. She was a good woman.”

Enid had flushed--was it angrily?--at the first mention of Arabella. She was become serious and very still, and looked no more at her neighbour who was apparently studying some drawings of spaniels. Seeing the gentle girl’s pain I was sorry that I had not helped her in the attempt to check the old man. But that was impossible now.

“Arabella was wonderful,” he exclaimed, his old voice slowing to a stronger tone and a new solemnity. “Arabella was wonderful. I believed then that for a man to live as I had lived for so long, and then to see her all suddenly, was the best thing in the world. I used to look at her, and even when I did not see her face, but only her neck and hair and dress and feet, it was just like--like it used to be looking up on a day like this at the blossoming tops of tall elms right in the sky, and hearing the cuckoo’s mate up there.

“Twice a week I used to walk over to her house or to some place near by to see her. I don’t know which was best--the fine weather or the wet--when I went, for in the rain I used to shut out the noise of the rain with my singing all kinds of songs, and sometimes I used to run and whoop as if the hounds had just killed a fox. It was a long way to walk, and sometimes, especially at night, I used to go almost mad with thinking of all the dense space and time and other people, intervening between her and me. Yet I always refused to ride if a farmer stopped his cart, and took footpaths to avoid them. The train to London which I saw all bright on winter evenings used to give me an odd joy and envy--thinking of all those unknown people as if they were hurrying faster than I to see their sweethearts. I did think her beautiful. When I saw Edith in those days, it was somehow painful, like seeing a lamb lying aside dead in a ditch.”

Enid had turned her face away to the window and the lawn. Just so pitiful might she seem were she passed over by her lover.

“I am not going to tell you,” the old lover went on, looking at nothing visible, “what we did when we met. I think sometimes now that we were not wise. But we used to walk and walk, and she would tell me about girls and the ways of girls, and her childhood, so that I wished I had been a boy with her. She would praise me and say that if ever anything happened to me so that I was hurt and maimed, or if I should die, she would not go on living. The thought of such a thing made her angry and she would stop, and, without looking at me and seeming to forget me, would lift her arms and say confused things that sounded fierce which I could not hear, and then suddenly turn to me quite happy again.

“It was the finest day in my life, when, one May day we fished together, and cooked some fresh caught trout by the riverside over a fire of oak branches, and ate them together in the morning, just as the sun grew hot.

“Every day I wished to marry her, especially when she spoke suddenly after being silent, or when I could only smell her lovely breath and see the pale skin under her little ear in the dark.

“She did extraordinary things and she made me do extraordinary things.

“One day as we were walking we heard the sound of the Fair, and Arabella said that we must go. As quick as thought she knocked some walnuts off a tree and we stained our faces with the juice of the rind, and at a friendly cottage borrowed a rude disguise, for we went as gipsies. Arabella told fortunes, first, and I had to tell some too. Then she wanted me to play on a flute while she danced; but instead I kept somewhere near while she danced, to see that all was as it should be; and as it was, I nearly had to knock down a little Welshman whose harp she began dancing to; for while he played and she danced I hardly knew what was happening; it was as if I had gone into a church with rich windows out of a dark night. She danced all the way home, sometimes with her right hand just touching my right shoulder and looking up at me--Ah! Perhaps she thought I was a little careless at seeing her as much in love with me as I with her, and suddenly taking her hand off my shoulder she said quite fiercely that I must do something to show that I would do anything for her.”

Here the old man stopped and laughed and drank his whisky and seemed disinclined to go on. The yeoman rose hastily and we had to follow at once, all but Enid, the old man and the boldest and worst horseman who was taking some more “jumping powder” with an air; and then, when all had mounted in the farmyard, I found courage to equal my curiosity and asked the yeoman for the end of the story. He stopped his impatient horse and said,--

“One night in November, when the river was in flood, my uncle remembered what Miss Meredith had said, and in his clothes he swam over instead of going round by the bridge. It was a long and difficult swim and he got bruised on the rocks; but he got through and then went to meet Miss Meredith. I do not know what happened that evening, but the next day his life was in danger from fever, and for many days he was