Mrs. Mangan listened obediently and promised attention. Although in matters to which she attached slight importance, such as the proportions of a prescription, her memory was liable to betray her, in other affairs, it had the cast-iron accuracy of the peasant, and without having been privileged with the Doctor's full confidence, she was probably deeper in it than he was aware.

While still these intentions with regard to young Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger were whirling in the air above him, as a la.s.so swirls and circles before it secures its victim, that young man was, it is no exaggeration to say, staggering home under the weight of his happiness. After the sacrament at the Tober an Sidhe he and Christian had gone from the hill, hand in hand, like two children. In silence they had gone through the dark wood, and almost in silence had made their mutual farewells in the fragrant shadow of the pines.

When the soul is tuned to its highest it cannot find an interpreter.

The lips can utter only broken sounds, pathetically inadequate to express emotions that may, in some future sphere, make themselves known in terms other than are permitted to us. There is an inner radiance that is beyond thought, that might conceivably utter itself in music or in colour, but that can no more be translated into words than can the radiance of the mid-day sun be more than indicated by earthly painters with earthly pigments.

So it was with Larry and Christian. It chances now and then on this old, and prosaic, and often tearful earth that some kindly spirit leaves the door of Paradise a little open, and two happy people--though sometimes it is only one--are caught inside for a time, and come out, as Larry did, bewildered, dazzled, wandering back to earth, he scarcely knew how, saying, drunkenly, to himself:

"Good Lord! She is so bright to-night!" as the blackbird said, who was "blowing his bugle to one far bright star."

CHAPTER XXVIII

Old, prosaic, and often tearful, though this earth may be, few are anxious to hasten their departure from it, and Daniel Prendergast, Esq., M.P., abetted by the ministrations of that able consultant, Dr.

Mangan, "hung on," as his friends put it, with unexpected tenacity to his share of the world. And, so far reaching are the etheric cords that are said to bind us all together, Mr. Prendergast's grip of his sorry and suffering life bestowed upon Larry and Christian three days to be spent within the confines of Paradise.

This may seem an over-statement when it is recorded that their next meeting was at 7 a.m. at a cubbing meet of the hounds, which occurred on the morning following on Larry's discovery that the _entree_ to Paradise had been his for the asking; it is, however, no more than the truth. Christian had exacted a promise from him that no word was to be said to any other of the high contracting parties until Monday, and, as they rode in at the Castle Ire gates, the matter was still under debate.

"Three days we must have, just three, with this secret hidden between us like a pearl in an oyster-sh.e.l.l! Larry, you know _I_ can keep a secret!"

"And you think I can't!" said Larry, affronted.

"I don't think, I know it! But you must try! Don't forget I've got to week-end at the--" she named people who lived in the next county.

"No one shall be told until I come home!"

This was when they were riding to the meet. Larry had brought over Joker, the bay horse, for her and he was himself riding a small grey four-year-old mare, on whose education as a hunter he was entering. It was one of those gorgeous mornings of late September, when everything is intense in colour and in sentiment. A light white frost was melting, in the first rays of the sun, to a silver dew, that twinkled on gra.s.s and bush and twig. Now and then a beech leaf, prematurely gold, came spinning down in the still air; from high places of heaven a tiny gabble of music, cold, and shrill, and sweet, told of the songs of the larks at those heavenly gates within which Larry's and Christian's spirits were dwelling.

"Yes!" Christian repeated, as they rode tranquilly along on the gra.s.s beside one of the long Castle Ire avenues, "it shall remain a secret as long as possible, unprofaned by the vulgar! It's like this morning; the dew's on it still. Larry, you've got to try!"

"Got to try, have I?" said Larry, beaming at her fatuously.

The horses were sidling close to one another after the manner of stable companions; Larry put his hand on the bay horse's withers and gazed into Christian's laughing eyes, while the blue of the southern Irish sky uttered its strong, splendid note of colour behind the pale rose of her face, and the ineffable freshness of the morning thrilled in him.

"If you look at me like that in general society," he declared, "I shall either give it away on the spot--or burst! Look here, here's the measured-mile gallop; I'll race you to the hall door! If I get in first, I shall tell everyone we're engaged!"

"Done!" said Christian, instantly shortening her reins; "but I back Joker!"

She touched Joker with her heel and the big horse sprang, at the hint, into a gallop. Quickly as he started, Rayleen, the grey mare (whose name, being interpreted, is Little Star), being ever concentrated for instant effort, as is the manner of small and well-bred four-year-olds, was up to his shoulder in a couple of bounds, even in the flame of her youth and enthusiasm, she drove ahead of Joker's ordered strides, and led him for awhile. Larry's laugh of triumph, that the wind tossed back to her, was not needed to rouse Christian to emulation. Any hint of a race, any touch of a contest, appealed to her as instantly as to Rayleen, and she was racing for that secret that was like a pearl. Sitting very still she touched Joker again with her heel and spoke to him. There was in her the magnetism that can fire a horse to his best, by some mystery, compound of sympathy and stimulation, that has no outward manifestation. Joker's great shoulders worked under her as he lengthened and quickened his beautiful, rhythmic stride. The wind of the pace whistled in her ears and s.n.a.t.c.hed at her hair. She crammed her hat over her forehead, laughing with the joy of battle. She was level with Larry now. Now she was pa.s.sing him, and the little grey strove in vain to hold her place.

Gallant as she was, what could she do against a raking, trained galloper, well over sixteen hands, and nearly thoroughbred?

The smooth mile of shining gra.s.s was annihilated, wiped out in a few whirling minutes. Joker had but just fairly settled down to go when the end of the race was at hand. Had he been a shade less of a gentleman than he was, Christian, and the snaffle in which she was riding him, would hardly have stopped him, as did their joint efforts, on the gravel in front of the goal that Larry had given her.

Hunts come, and hunts go, and are forgotten. Horses, the best and dearest of them, fade, in some degree, from remembrance; where are the snows of yester year, and where the great gallops that we rode when we were young? But here and there something defies the mists of memory, and remains, bright and imperishable as a diamond. I believe that for Christian that mile of sun and wind and speed and flight, with her lover thundering at her heels, will remain ever vivid, one of the moments that are of the incalculable bounty of Chance; moments that earth can never equal, nor Heaven better.

The hounds and staff were waiting at the farther end of the long front of Castle Ire, when Larry and Christian made their somewhat sensational entrance upon the scene.

"Joker wins, by a length and a half," said Bill Kirby, judicially, "and a very pretty race. I never saw a prettier, on any sands, on any jacka.s.ses, on any Bank Holiday! I suppose this is how people always fetch up at meets in France? It's not come in in this benighted country yet."

"His fault!" said Christian, breathless and glowing. "He dar'd me!

Where are you going to draw?"

"The ash-pit and the fowl-houses," replied Bill, picking up his reins.

"Then the backstairs, and the kitchenmaid's bedroom. Judith and Mrs.

Brady say he's taking all the fowl, and they're going to lay poison--I don't mean the fowl--"

"Isn't he bright this morning?" said Judith, looking down upon the party from an upper window, effectively arrayed in one of those lacy and lazy garments that invite, while they repudiate, society. "No, I'm not coming out. Too early for me. Come in and eat something--breakfast or lunch, anything--when you've done enough."

The hounds moved on and were soon busy in the screens of glossy laurel round the house. Other riders arrived. A fox was found, if not in the kitchenmaid's bedroom in some spot of almost equal intimacy, and the Hunt surged in and through yards, and haggards, outhouses, and gardens, the hounds over-running all the complicated surroundings of an Irish country-house, while every grade of domestic, forsaking his or her lawful occupation, joined in the chase.

Christian had betaken herself to a point on the avenue remote from the fray. A run, she told herself, would have tranquillised her, and made things seem more normal, but there was no prospect of one. "I'll wait till this rat-hunt is over," she thought, letting Joker stroll across the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken and bushes, a jewel dropped from heaven. A couple of stiff-necked swans floated in motionless trance upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing, splashing flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves in jerks towards her, confident that any human being meant food. Two gigantic turquoise dragon-flies rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings, from a dead log under Joker's feet. One of them swung round the horse's head, and lit on his shaven neck. It brooded there, apparently unperceptive of the difference of this resting place from the one that it had abandoned; its dull globes of eyes looked as if sight was the last purpose for which they were intended. Joker stretched his long neck to nibble a willow twig, and the blue mystery, rising, remained poised over him for another moment of meditation, before it sailed away, sideways, on its own obscure occasions.

Christian sat in the sunshine, and thought about Larry, and wondered.

She knew now that what she felt for him was no new thing. It had been with her always, not merely since the painting of her portrait, but always, unacknowledged yet implicit, ever since that first day when he had rescued her from Richard. Her intensely criticising, a.n.a.lytic brain refused to surrender to vague emotion. She was resolved to understand herself, to rationalise her overthrow. It was the difference, for which that half-hour of sunset was responsible, in the degree of what she felt, that bewildered her. Yesterday, she told herself, it was a deep, but well-controlled and respectable little stream. To-day it was a flood. "I must keep my feet," she thought; "I must not be swept away!" The thought of him was sometimes overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative, and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun went higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the cries of the water-birds, the buzz of insects over the bright lake, became more insistent, and the blue and lovely morning spread and strengthened round her, criticism and a.n.a.lysis failed. She could only think of him, helplessly, saying to herself what she had once heard a peasant woman say: "My heart'd open when I thinks of him."

Across the park came repeated notes from the horn, the baying of hounds, and the screams that celebrate with orthodox excitement the death of a fox. The rat-hunt was over. Joker lifted his spare, aristocratic head from the gra.s.s, and listened, with a wisp of dewy green stuff in his mouth. Christian looked at her watch. It was early still, not eight o'clock. A grey horse and its rider came forth from the dark grove of laurels. Larry was looking for her. She sighed; she did not know why. She thought of the old Mendelssohn open-air part-song:

"The talk of the lovers in silence dies, They weep, yet they know not why tears fill their eyes."

The old, absurd words, that she had so often laughed at. She laughed again, but at herself, and sat still, watching the grey mare coming lightly over the sunny gra.s.s to her.

"They got him!" Larry shouted, as he came near. "The brute wouldn't run for 'em! Too full of hen, I suppose! They're going on now to the gorse in the high paddock. Why did you come away here?"

"Because I'm illogical. I like hunting, and I hate catching what I hunt. Besides, I wanted to think."

"Rotten habit," said Larry. "I won't have you changing your mind!"

Christian looked at him, and sighed again. He was on her right, and she took her hunting-crop in her left hand, with the reins, and stretched out her right hand to him. He caught it, and kissed her slender wrist above the glove. There came back to Christian, with a rush, the remembrance of the May morning at the kennels when he had kissed her wrist. That had been the left wrist. The kiss had meant more to her than it had to him. Now, as she met his eyes she knew that she and he stood on level ground.

Who breaks a b.u.t.terfly upon a wheel? Those even, who pin it down, and set it up in a gla.s.s case in the cause of science and for the edification of an inquisitive public, are not wholly to be commended, praiseworthy though their intentions may be. Let a rule of silence, therefore be observed, as far as may be. What this boy and girl said to each other, is their secret, not ours.

The gorse in the high paddock held a fox; several, in fact, a lady having reared a fine young family there without any anxieties as to their support, thanks to the votive offerings of crows and rabbits, obsequiously laid on her doorstep, by her best friend, and her most implacable enemy, Mr. William Kirby, M.F.H. In recognition, no doubt, of these attentions, the lady in question permitted one of her sons to afford a little harmless pleasure to her benefactor, and this, having included a lively gallop of some three miles, ceased in a plantation where was the place of safety that had been indicated to the beginner, and ceased appositely, at an hour that made a late breakfast at Castle Ire a matter obvious, even imperative, for those who were not prepared to await, in patient starvation, that very inferior repast, an early lunch.

Young Mrs. Kirby had not lost, with matrimony, the habit of having her own way.

"No, Christian, you're not going home. You haven't seen Baby, and he really looks _rather_ sweet in his new--" (a negligible matter, whatever the attire the formulae being unvaried)--"and, besides,"

continued young Mrs. Kirby, with decision, "I want to talk to you."

Being talked to by Judith was an adequate modern equivalent for an interview with the "Jailer's Daughter," as a method of obtaining information.

Christian trembled for the secret of the pearl.

"Bill tells me," began Judith, after the late breakfast had been disposed of, settling herself luxuriously in an armchair in the round tower-room which she had made her own sitting-room and lighting a cigarette, "that our tenants--I mean Papa's people--are getting rather nasty. Of course, there was that disgraceful business when your mare was killed but I don't mean that--Bill thinks old Fairfax was right in advising Papa to do nothing about that--but about this archaic nonsense of feudal feeling and not selling the property. Of course he's bound to lose by the sale, but the longer he waits the worse it gets."

"I don't think it's only feudal feeling--he says he can't afford to sell," began Christian.