"Then you know, Larry," she continued, her eyes showing what her firm mouth did not admit; "you know, my dear boy, it was rather—well, rather a shock to us to see in the papers your name proposed as the Nationalist candidate here. It upset Dick very much, and, I must say," she added, unflinchingly, "me too!"

Larry put down the third piece of cake, half-finished, and went round the tea-table, and sitting on the arm of Frederica's chair, put his arm round her thin shoulders.

"I'm so sorry!" he said, knowing his power, and using it, "dear Auntie Fred! I ought to have written to you. I forgot all about the beastly thing. But you wouldn't want me to go back of my word? As for the property—well, I thought that was only my own affair. I've come all right out of it; why shouldn't I give the tenants the best terms I could?"

"Cousin Dick says—" began Frederica, standing to her guns.

"And that other show," went on Larry, disregarding what Cousin Dick might have said. "Goodness knows when there'll be an election—"

"That doesn't alter the fact," said Frederica, firmly.

"Yes, I know. Of course I must hold by my own convictions, but let's put off the row until the time comes! One is bound to have rows at elections! I don't want to fight now!"

He pressed a kiss upon her forehead. He was feeling in love and charity with all men. To wheedle Aunt Freddy into forgiveness was the first outlet that presented itself for the excitement that was consuming him.

Larry walked to Mount Music through the Wood of the Ownashee, alone. Miss Coppinger said she disliked the short way across the river by the stepping stones, and preferred to drive the now venerable Tommy round by the road; in her heart, brave as she was, she trusted that Larry would have got through his meeting with Dick before she arrived. Therefore did Larry step along the pebbly path by the river, under the dense canopy of beechen boughs, with, for companions, only the two hound puppies that Bill Kirby did not fail to foist annually upon all amenable friends. These lumbered after Larry's quick foot, with all the engaging absurdity of their kind; tripping over their own enormous feet, chewing outlying portions of one another, as ill-brought-up babies chew their blankets; sitting down abruptly and unpremeditatedly, and watching with deep dubiety the departing form of their escort, as though a sudden and shattering doubt of his identity had paralysed them, until some contrary wind of doctrine blew them into action again, and they hurled themselves upon his trail, filled with the single intention to rush between his legs. Nothing but that instinct of self-preservation that operates independent of the reason, preserved Larry from frequent and violent overthrow. His head was in the clouds; he was abandoning himself to dreams, with the very same headlong enthusiasm that Scandal and Steersman brought to bear upon the problems of existence. He strode past the glade that had been the scene of the Cluhir picnic without so much as a thought of Tishy Mangan. Had you or I reminded him of that brief, yet moving, episode, he would probably have regarded us with wide, bewildered, blue eyes, and asked for details. Then, as memory awakened, he would have laughed delightedly, and said: "Yes! By Jove! So I was! But Georgy cut me out, didn't he?" And he might have added that there had been scores of them since Tishy, he had forgotten half of them—but this, THIS! Larry would then, inevitably, have lapsed into rhapsody, as would be no more than was decent and right in a young man of artistic temperament, and you or I, our malign intention baffled, would have retired in deserved confusion.

Old Evans was in the hall as Larry walked in through the open door. He received Larry's hand-shake coldly; the four years that had passed since Larry had seen him had withered and greyed him; Larry, something dashed by the reception, remembered the title given him long ago by Christian—"the many-wintered crow,"—and found satisfaction in deciding that the crow was a scald-crow, and a sour old divil at that; anyhow, Evans had always had a knife into him, so it made no difference.

In the drawing-room things went well enough, even though there was an unexplainable chill in the atmosphere. Cousin Isabel was as kind and gentle and vague as ever; Judith was there, very handsome and prosperous, not overenthusiastic in welcome, rather inclined to patronise a very young man, quite two months younger than a married lady of position and importance. Nevertheless, there was something unregenerate about her eye, that, taken in connection with the two subalterns in whose car she had come to call at Mount Music, suggested that Bill Kirby might at times find life stirring. John, recently ordained, now a very decorative curate in a London church, was there, even more patronising than Judith, and undecided whether to regard Larry with suspicion, as a brand still smouldering from the fires of secularist France, or affectionately, as a member of what, in one of his earlier sermons, he had described as "Our ancient Mother Church, dear Peopul! Beloved, but in some matters, that I will presently indicate to you, mistaken!"

The subalterns were remote, not approving of the style of Larry's tie (which he had bought in Paris, and differed from theirs) and Cousin Dick was not there.

"You must go and see him, dear Larry," says Cousin Isabel, "he's in the study."

"And Christian? Though, of course, I met her this morning—" says Larry.

Christian, poor child, went out for a little walk with the dogs just now. Christian (poor child) had felt that wretched business this morning so terribly. The wretched business was gone into, thoroughly and exhaustively, and yet Larry felt that across one corner of it there was a fold of curtain drawn. He said he would go and see Cousin Dick. There was always a chance that Christian, also, might be in the study. The axiom that "If a man want a thing he mus' have it," should, in Larry's case, have the corollary that he must have it at once.

The Major was standing by the chimney piece in the study, warming one foot after the other at the fire that Evans had just replenished. Larry met the scald-crow at the door, and Evans passed him "as if," thought Larry, disgustedly, "he had been seeing me every day for a year! The old beast always hated me!" Larry did not like being hated.

Cousin Dick's greeting was more like old times. Dick was one of those people whose wrath has a tendency to intermit and get cold, even to perish, temporarily, from forgetfulness. On the other hand, in compensation, perhaps, for this failing, it was a fire easily rekindled. He was still shaking Larry's hand, and looking him up and down, affectionately, and withal, with the inevitable patronage of a long-legged man for one from whom Nature has withheld similar advantages, when Larry discovered the large presence of Dr. Mangan uplifting itself from the chair facing Cousin Dick's, by the fire. (But Christian was not there. He resigned himself.) There was no want of warmth in the Big Doctor's reception. He was quite aware of this himself, and was artist enough to know how useful an asset was the fact that he was genuinely fond of Larry. He had indeed proposed to exhibit his affection in pleasing contrast to the coolness of Larry's Protestant relatives, and that the Major had forgotten the role assigned to him, was a little disappointing. "But wait awhile!" thought the Big Doctor, who, among his other elephantine qualities, possessed that of patience.

The Major seated himself in front of the fire, and Larry pulled up a chair, wondering in his heart what these old boys wanted with a fire this lovely afternoon, and delivered himself to the old boys and to conversation. This, naturally, set with a single movement towards the event of the morning. "A real likely little mare, and shaping well, I'm told," says Dick, "and by the bye, Larry, that's a dev'lish nice horse of yours that Christian came back on. Where did you get him?"

These hunting men were incorrigible, the Doctor thought, seeing the Carmody question in danger of being side-tracked.

"Things have come to a funny way in this country," he observed, "when a fellow will deliberately chance killing a young lady, rather than let her ride over his land—and she having a right to ride over it into the bargain!"

It needed but little to start Major Talbot-Lowry again on the topic that had occupied him unceasingly since Christian's return that morning. Beginning with the burning of the Derrylugga gorse covert, and moving on through threatening letters, and rents deliberately withheld, he lashed himself into one of the quick furies that Larry remembered well. What Larry was less prepared for than was his friend, Dr. Mangan, was the sudden turn that the storm took in his direction.

"The blackguards think they can frighten me into selling on their own terms!" shouted Dick, "and that damned priest of theirs—I beg your pardon, Mangan, but the fellow doesn't behave like a clergyman, and it's impossible to think of him as one—is backing them up, and I may say"—here it was that the heart of the storm was revealed—"I may say that I'm very little obliged to your son, or to his principal here, for the part they have played in the affair! That was the beginning of the whole thing!" He turned fiercely upon Larry, his tenor voice pitched on a higher key. "How could I, with my property loaded with charges, that were no fault of mine, sell at the price you could afford to take? Look at the price that fellow—what's his damned name?—Brady, got for his farm, for the tenant-right alone, mind you! Forty years' purchase! And I'm offered seventeen for the fee simple!"

Dick was standing up on the hearthrug, towering over the Doctor and Larry in their low chairs. Larry noticed how thin he had become, and how the well-cut grey clothes, that he always wore, hung loosely on his shrunken figure. "You're a young fellow now, Larry; wait till you've been for thirty years doing your best for your property and your country, and getting no thanks! Thanks!" Dick gave a brief and furious laugh. "I've kept the hounds for them. I've slaved on the Bench and on Grand Juries. I've got them roads and railways, and God knows what else—whatever they wanted—I've sat at the Board of Guardians, and done my best to keep down the rates, till they kicked me out to make room for men who would sell their souls for a sixpence, and made their living out of bribes!"

"Oh, come, come, Major, it's not so bad as all that!" said the Big Doctor, soothingly, as Dick stopped, panting for breath. "Don't mind it now!"

"But I must mind it!" shouted Dick. "When I think of how I've been treated, and plenty more like me, loyal men who run straight and do their best, I declare to God I feel I don't know which I hate worst, the English Government, that pitches its friends overboard to save its own skin, or my own countrymen, that don't know the meaning of the word gratitude!"

He turned again upon Larry: "And upon my word and honour, Larry, I didn't think that your father's son would have been tarred with that brush, anyhow!"

"Now, Major," broke in Dr. Mangan, again, "you know we agreed that there was no use in attaching too much importance to that transaction. Barty and Larry here were in a very difficult position, and even though you and I might not have approved entirely of their action—"

"But, Doctor," interrupted Larry, bewildered, and dismayed, "You—I thought you had advised Barty—"

The Big Doctor frowned at him, and winked too, while he laid his huge white hand on his watch-pocket, tapping with his middle finger on the spot which, as he knew, the average layman dedicated to the heart. He trusted to Larry's quickness, and did not trust in vain.

"A sort of heart attack," Aunt Freddy had said.

"I'm most frightfully sorry, Cousin Dick," Larry began, hurriedly, before a worse thing happened. "Somehow, I never thought—you see I was out of the country—it seemed to me that—" he was going to repeat those comforting sedatives about leaving the man at the helm to bark for you—(Heavens! He had been on the point of saying that! Was he going to laugh?)—but he couldn't give Barty away. He rushed into apology, regret, abuse of his own ignorance, and imbecility, and the Big Doctor, at each pause in the penitence, poured a little oil and wine into the wounds for which Larry and the Carmodys were jointly responsible, and Dick's anger, like the red that had flared to his face, fell like a spent flame.

"Say no more, boy, say no more," he said, dropping into the chair from which he had leaped in the course of his apologia pro vita sua; "I daresay you knew no better—anyhow, you didn't mean to do me a bad turn—"

Larry took his hand. "You know that, Cousin Dick," he said, in profound distress. "Of all people in the world—the very last. If there was anything I could do now—"

"Well now, I'll tell you what you could do!" cut in Dr. Mangan, jovially, "you could tell our friend Evans to bring in the Major's tumbler of hot milk and whisky, and to look sharp about it too! I ordered he was to have it at six o'clock—"

He looked hard at Larry, who realised that his disturbing presence was to be removed, and forthwith removed it.

He delivered his message, and strayed back to the big, empty hall. A sense of aloofness, of having no place nor part in this well-remembered house, was on him. None of them wanted him; he could see that easily enough, and he had done Cousin Dick a bad turn. He had said so. If it came to that, he supposed he had done Christian a bad turn, too—Christian and Cousin Dick, the only two of the whole crowd who had been really glad to see him. He thought of her face as she came riding through the dusky wood to meet him. "The dawn was in it!" he said to himself; again he saw it, lit with the light that the hunt had kindled; and then he thought of her stricken eyes, as she looked from one man to another, asking for the hope that they had to refuse her. It had been all his fault, or—here the inner apologist, that is always quick to console, interposed—not quite exactly his fault. How was he to have known? A remembrance of Cousin Dick's undeciphered letters came to him; even the inner apologist hung his head. In any case—Larry's active mind resumed its deliberations—it was quite clearly his business to find Christian and to explain to her, as far as was possible, how things stood.

He left the house. A garden-boy had seen Christian "going west the avenue"; Larry collected Scandal and Steersman from the ash-pit, and followed her "west the avenue." He walked slowly, noting how neglected was the general aspect, how badly the avenue was in need of gravel, remembering how in the old days, the bands of slingers had never failed of ammunition, wondering if the Major were really as hard up as he thought he was; wondering if they had all turned against him, and if they would set Christian against him too. He came to the turn near the river that led to the stepping stones, and stood, in deepening depression, waiting, in the hope that she might come. It was seven o'clock, the sun was setting, the sky was warming to its last loveliness of rose and amber, and amethyst, colours with names almost as beautiful as themselves. The long stretches of grass on either side of the avenue were a fierce green, the brakes of bracken were burning orange, the long shadows of the trees that fell across the roadway were purple. The grove of yew trees, that hid the course of the river from him, had the sharpness of a silhouette cut out of dark velvet.

"Not really black," Larry told himself, screwing up his eyes. He moved on to the grass, and kneeling, framed with his hands as much as seemed good to him. In a moment, in the intoxication of beauty, he had forgotton his troubles; Cousin Dick, singing the swan-song of the Irish landlords; Dr. Mangan, and his bewildering change of front; even Christian, and her views as to his responsibility for the tragedy of the morning, stood aside to make way for the absorbing problems of colour and composition.

The hound puppies strolled on, side by side, heads up, and high-held sterns, steering for nowhere in particular, oblivious as Larry of all save the moment as it passed. A rush of rooks came like a tide across the sky; they flew so low that the drive and rustle of their wings scared the puppies and startled Larry. He stood up and watched the multitudinous host swing westward to his own woods, and just then, a couple of hundred yards ahead, at the turn where the avenue plunged into the velvet gloom of the yew-trees, he saw Christian coming towards him, alone, save for a retinue of dogs.

If that old saying (already quoted with reference to Dick Talbot-Lowry) be true, when it asserts that "wise men live in the present, for its bounty suffices them," then was Larry Coppinger, like his cousin, indeed a wise man. Remorse, anxiety, the wonder of the sunset, were swept from his mind, and Christian filled it like a flood. She looked very tired, and he told her so, eyeing her so closely that she turned her face from him.

"I won't be stared at and scolded! Why shouldn't I be tired if I like?"

"If it were only tiredness—" said Larry, with more tenderness in his voice than he knew. "Christian, they've been telling me that it was my fault—the rows with the tenants, and that devil coming at you this morning—and—and everything!"

He could not speak directly of Nancy's death; he knew what Christian felt for her horses and dogs. "I've been looking for you everywhere. I wanted to try and tell you what I felt—but since I've seen your father and old Mangan, I feel too abject to dare to say I'm sorry—"

"Why should they think it was your fault? It was my own fault. I ought to have gone back when Kearney warned me—"

"They meant the whole show. Beginning with Barty's selling to my tenants, and then your father's people making trouble, and the Carmodys burning the covert, and all the rest of it! They're quite right! It's all my rotten fault! Christian, I'm going back to France! I can't face you after what I've brought on you!"

In the bad moments of life, when the bare and shivering soul stands defenceless, waiting for evil tidings, or nerving itself to endure condolence, Christian had ever a gentle touch; and she knew too, when it comforted wrong-doers to be laughed at.

"Oh, Larry! And you pretended you wanted to paint my picture!" she said, looking at his miserable face with eyes that shone as the Pool of Siloam might have shone after the Angel had troubled it; there were tears in them, but there was healing, too.

Larry took her hand and held it tight.

"You don't mean it—how could you bear to look at me?"

"But I shan't look at you! You will have to look at me—that is, if you can bear it! You must try and brace yourself to the effort!"

This, it may be admitted, was provocation on Christian's part, but, as she told herself afterwards, desperate measures were necessary, or they would both have burst into tears.



CHAPTER XXV

The resolution to return to France, announced, as has been set forth, by Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger, was not adhered to. In the first place, there was Barty Mangan and the various affairs that he represented; in the second place, there was the portrait; in the third place—which might as well, if not better, have come first—the resolve had expired, like the flame of a damp match, in the effort that gave it birth.

Aunt Freddy welcomed the suggestion of the portrait with enthusiasm. She had had four years of peace, "careing" Coppinger's Court for the reigning Coppinger; to "care" the reigning Coppinger himself, was, she felt, a far less peaceful undertaking. She agreed entirely with the well-worn adage relative to idle hands, and had no illusions as to her own capacity to offer alternative attractions.

"I felt," she remarked to Lady Isabel, "exactly as if someone had deposited a half-broken young horse in the drawing-room, and had told me to exercise it! My dear, Christian's portrait is a Godsend! But I may tell you, in strict confidence, that, so far, it's far too clever for an ignoramus like me to make head or tail of it!"

"It certainly fills their mornings very thoroughly," responded Lady Isabel, rather dubiously; "Christian vanishes from breakfast time till lunch. I suppose you see more of them?"

Aunt Freddy's reply was less distinct and definite than was usual with her. Oh, well—occasionally—yes, generally—at least, always sometimes—he was painting her in the garden, on that seat by the yew hedge—so sheltered and sunny, and the weather was so perfect; she was working in the garden herself every morning. Thus did the righteous Frederica wriggle and prevaricate, causing Lady Isabel to assume that the full rigours of chaperonage were complied with, while to herself, Aunt Freddy thought that it would be perfectly ideal. But what "it" was, she did not particularise to anyone.

Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger was not a great artist, but it had been conceded to him, even in the studio, that he had pretty colour (which was quite without reference to his own complexion) and a knack of catching a likeness. Added to these gifts he possessed a third, in being able to talk without hindering the activities of his brush. They talked a great deal to each other during those long, delightful mornings in the sunny corner by the yew-hedge; idle, intimate talk, that wandered back to the days of the Companions of Finn, and on, through stirring tales of the Quartier Latin into the future, and what it was to hold for them. Larry knew what his future must hold if it was to satisfy him. Since the moment when "Love's sickness" had laid hold of him (the same as a person would get a stitch leaning over a churn) he had known it. While he painted her, staring deep and hard, appraising, carefully, with his outer soul, the curve of her cheek, the delicate drawing of her small ear, the tender droop of her dark eyelashes, all the subtle values of light and shade, all the problem of inherent colour, and the colour that was lent by the sky and the green things round her, his inner soul was repeating the old saying: "I love my eyes for looking at you!"

Sometimes he thought he would stand it no longer, he would throw down his palette and his brushes, and let the portrait go to blazes, and kneel at her feet, telling her, over and over again, that he loved her, until she would have to believe him. Yet, for there is something inhuman about the artist, he refrained. The portrait was going so well—the best head he had ever done—out of sight better than anything he had done at the studio (what wouldn't he give to have a lesson on it from old Chose!). He wouldn't break the spell of successful work until he could carry the picture no farther. Then, he thought to himself, oh then, he would be strong to speak!

And, did he but know it, there was no need to speak; not any need at all. For Christian knew. Not enough has been said about her if it has not been made clear that, for her spirit, the barriers and coverings that other spirits take to themselves wherewith to build hiding-places and shelters were "of little avail. Motives and tendencies, the hidden forces that underlie action, were perceptible to her as are to the water-diviner the secret waters that bend and twist his hazel rod. Well she knew that Larry loved her; he was not the first in whom she had divined it, but he was the first whose heart, crying to her, voicelessly, had wakened the answering chime in hers; the first, she said to herself, and the last. She wondered, sometimes, if he knew; it seemed incredible that he could be with her, watching her, studying her least look, and not know. Yet, she loved him for not knowing, for his boyishness, his babyishness, his simplicity. She wondered if she were a fairy-woman, who by her arts had beguiled a mortal. She had met an extraordinary woman once, in London, where anyone, however extraordinary, is possible, and this being, so she told Larry, had gazed at her, raptly, had then assured her that she saw her aura (blue shot with gold) and had told her that she had a very aged soul..

"I felt as if I were an old boot!" said Christian.

"Old idiot herself!" Larry said hotly; "what else did she pretend to know about you?"

"She said she had met me before, in a previous incarnation. She couldn't believe that I didn't remember her. But I couldn't."

"I'm glad you couldn't," said Larry, still angry. "I won't have you remembering lives that I wasn't in! Anyhow, I don't believe they were half as good as this one. I call this a thundering good life. I don't want to have been Julius Caesar or Queen Anne."

"Oh, I daresay you weren't," said Christian, consolingly; "you don't remind me of either of them. What would be more to the point would be to know what you were going to be. In this life, I mean."

"Oh, a painter first," said Larry, responding with alacrity, as do most people, to the stimulus of discussing himself; "but not exclusively. I shouldn't mind having the hounds for a bit, and I should like to travel—the gorgeous East, you know—that sort of thing. And I must say," he hesitated, "I'm rather keen to have a shot at politics."

He put down his palette and brushes and began to roll a cigarette, while he walked backwards away from his easel, staring alternately at his canvas and his model.

"Have you forgotten that I'm the prospective candidate for this constituency? The Home Rule ticket, you know!" He looked at his audience with a touch of defiance; "I don't know what you may think—my notion is—"

The prospective candidate launched forth into a statement of his notions; what, precisely, they were, is a matter that may here be omitted. The kaleidoscope of Irish politics has made many new patterns since Larry outlined his views for Christian, and the pattern of 1907 interests us no more. The affinity that exists between politics and eggs is not limited to the function of the latter in emphasising criticism of the former; it also extends to individual characteristics. The morning newspaper and the morning egg should be equally recent. Larry's political notions, when he stated them, had at least the merit of freshness, and it shall be left to them.

Christian, listening to his ambitions, felt herself older than ever.

"I think I should be a painter all the time, and let Bill keep the hounds for me," she said, indulgently, "and I certainly should not play with politics—I'm certain you'd hate them."

"Well, but I'm pledged, you know! I'm absolutely in honour bound to play up if I'm wanted—"

"Whether you know the game or no?" said Christian, mockingly. "Very sporting! I'm not a Home Ruler, as it happens. I've no breadth of outlook! I haven' been in France for four years!"

"You're a reactionary!" declared Larry; "I tell you Self-Government is in the air!"

With all her suppleness of mind, Christian had in her something of the inbred obstinacy of fidelity that often goes with long descent. Her colour rose.

"We have always stood for the King!" she said, holding up her head, and looking past Larry to the high, sailing clouds.

Larry began to laugh.

"Christian! It's awfully becoming to you to talk politics! Keep quite quiet and I'll make a study of you as Britannia—or Joan of Arc—"

It was characteristic of these young people, that in the heat of political argument they joined battle as freely as if no other point of contact existed for them. This it is to be born and bred in Ireland, where people live their opinions, and everyone is a patriot with a different point of view, and politics are a hereditary disease, blatant as a port-wine mark, and persistent as a family nose.

Miss Frederica, with a guilty remembrance of Lady Isabel's enquiries, had established her weeding apparatus at a bed near the yew-hedge. She heard the voices raised in discussion, and, catching words here and there, felt that if these were the topics that occupied her charges, Isabel need not have inflicted upon her the abominable nuisance of poking in her nose where it was not wanted. Thus did Miss Coppinger summarise the duties of a chaperon; but it must be remembered that she had never been broken to the work, and in any case she had been out of harness for four years.

The luncheon gong sounded to her across the Michaelmas daisies, and the tall scarlet lobelias, and the gorgeous dahlias of the September garden; she gathered her tools together and projected a shriek in the direction of the yew hedge.

"Children! Lunch!"

As, dizzy with stooping, she slowly reared herself to be full height, she saw a black, moving blur on the drive beyond the garden. She rubbed her eyes; the blur defined itself as a man in priestly black. Not Mr. Fetherston, a she had first believed, but Father Sweeny.

"A wolf in sheep's clothing!" thought Frederica, using as was her wont, the well-worn phrase with guileless zest. She held that although it might not, primarily, have been intended to describe the Roman Catholic Priesthood, its application in a later age was obvious.

With a cautious eye on the wolf, she approached the yew hedge.

"Larry! Father Sweeny's at the hall door. You must ask him in to lunch!"

To herself she thought: "He's Larry's affair, thank goodness! And I'll see that my young man does his duty!"

When Frederica spoke of, or to, her nephew, as "my young man," it was generally in connection with what she felt to be his duty, and felt also that it was her duty to see that his was not shirked.

Father Tim Sweeny, at lunch, at the house of his chief parishioner, was a very different being from the damaged and ferocious bull in hospital. Conscious of his priestly dignity and of the need of supporting it, but shaken by the minor stresses of the situation, the senseless multiplicity of forks and spoons, the bewildering restrictions by which he felt himself to be webbed about, hampered, mastered, Father Tim was as a wild bull in a net, and was even pathetic in his unavailing efforts to prove himself equal to his surroundings. He cleared his throat at intervals, with an authority that seemed to prelude something more epoch-making than an assent to one of Frederica's industrious platitudes; he snuffled and fidgeted, eating scarcely at all, and repelling the reverential assiduities of the servants with shattering abruptness.

"Christian saved the situation," Frederica said, in subsequent conversation with the Reverend Charles Fetherston; she absolutely 'charmed him to a smile.' She said afterwards that the smile made her think of a Druidic stone circle, slightly imperfect from age! She always thinks of absurd things; but I was grateful to her! She has an amazing gift for setting people at their ease."

"I'm not sure that our respected friend might not be more tolerable when he was not at his ease!" said the Reverend Charles.

"Larry simply sulked," continued Miss Coppinger; "I'm afraid Paris life does not inculcate much respect for religion."

"Very possibly!" said the Reverend Charles, non-committally. "I feel for poor Sweeny! He knows now what Purgatory is like!"

"I assure you I was as civil as I knew how to be," asserted Frederica.

"I'm sure you were!" said the Reverend Charles, stuffing a pipe as he spoke, and sniggering into the bowl.

Miss Coppinger was justified in believing that Christian had been a success with Father Sweeny.

"I declare I could like that gerr'l, Christian Lowry," he said to Father Greer. "She's a good gerr'l enough. Decent! Civil!" Each adjective of approval was launched on a snort that indicated some co-existing irritation; "but I have me own opinion of young Coppinger!"

"A good one?" simpered Father Greer.

"The reverrse!" said Father Tim, and a least four r's rang and rolled in the word.



CHAPTER XXVI

The portrait of that civil and decent girl, Christian Talbot Lowry, was finished; it had been conveyed to Mount Music and was there established on an easel in the billiard-room The artist and the model, having raised and lowered blinds and arranged curtains to their liking, or as nearly to that unattainable ideal as circumstances permitted, were now recovering from the criticism of their relations on the completed work.

The artist who works in the bosom of his own family has much to bear, and, so the family consider, much to learn. Neither in endurance, nor in the docile assimilation of instruction, had Mr. Coppinger been conspicuously successful, and his model, on whom had rested the weighty responsibility of keeping the peace, or, at least, of averting open warfare between the painter and the critics, was now, albeit much spent by her efforts, engaged in binding up the wounds inflicted on the former by the latter.

"If you hadn't argued with them, they would have liked it very much; you took them the absolutely wrong way! But they really are deeply impressed by it."

"I don't care what they think; I know jolly well it's the best thing I've ever done!" said Larry, whose temperature was still considerably above normal. "Your mother is the only one of the lot with a soul to be saved. She didn't harangue about what she doesn't understand! She said: 'It makes me think of when she was a little child, and used to say she saw things, and the other children used to tease her so dreadfully'!"

"Quite true," said Christian. "So they did! And now they're going for you! But you never teased me, Larry."

"Thank God, I didn't!" said Larry; he had been glowering at his picture, but as he spoke he wheeled round, and sat down beside Christian on the long billiard-room sofa. "Christian, you know—" he began, stammering, and hesitating in a way that was unlike himself.

Christian interrupted him quickly.

"What shall you call the picture? I met Barty Mangan the other day, and he was asking me all sorts of questions about it."

"I shall call it 'Christian, dost thou hear them?'" said Larry, telling himself that the moment had come. "I was feeling that about you all the time—I mean when I was painting. Christian, you did hear them, didn't you? What were they saying? Did they say anything about me?"

He caught her hand and leaned to her, compelling her eyes to meet his; "Let her see into my heart!" he thought; "she will find only herself there!"

And just then the door opened, and old Evans appeared.

Larry released Christian's hand, and went red with rage up to the roots of his fair hair. What he thought of Evans' incursion was written so plainly on his face, that Christian, in that impregnable corner of her mind where dwelt her sense of humour, felt a bubble of laughter rise.

"You asked Mrs. Dixon, Miss, to see the picture," said Evans, with a sour look at Larry. "She's outside now."

"Come in, Dixie," called Christian, with a sensation of reprieve. Suspense had been trembling in the air round her; it trembled still, but Dixie would bring respite, if not calm.

Mrs. Dixon, ceremonially clad in black silk, sailed up the long billiard room, majestic as a full-rigged ship. Time had treated her well; the increase of weight that the years had brought had done little more than help to keep the wrinkles smoothed; her love for Christian, having survived the depredations of the larder that had once tried it, had triumphed over the enforced economies that marked Christian's rule as housekeeper and was now her consolation for them. To apprehend the intention of a painting is not given to all and is a matter that requires more experience than is generally supposed. To find a landscape has been reversed by the hand that wields the duster, so that the trees stand on their heads, and the sky is as the waters that are beneath the firmament, is an experience that has been denied to few painters, and Mrs. Dixon would have found many to sympathise with her, as she stood in silent stupefaction before the portrait. Larry had been justified in his belief in it, but for such as Mrs. Dixon, its appeal was inappreciable. Christian's face was in shade, the brown darkness of her loosened hair framed it, and blended with the green darkness of the yew hedge. Faint reflected lights from her white dress, touches of sunlight that came through the leaves of the surrounding trees gave the shadowed face life. In the clear stillness of the eyes, something had been caught of the wonder that was latent in Christian's look, the absorption in things far away, seen inwardly, that in childhood had set her in a place apart; rarer now, but still there for those to see who could give confidence to her shy spirit to forget the limitations of this world, and to stray forth to meet invisible comrades from other spheres. Sometimes it has been given to an artist to rise, not by his conscious volition, above his wonted power; to portray one beloved face with the force of his emotion rather than that of his capacity, transcending the limits of his ordinary skill, just as a horse will put forth his last ounce of effort in response to the magnetism of one rider, and may never again touch the same level of achievement.

But although the very fact that in this canvas something had lifted Larry's art to greatness, made it for Mrs. Dixon a mystery and a bewilderment, she had no intention of admitting defeat. After a moment or two of silence, she cast up her eyes in an appeal to what seemed to be a familiar near the ceiling, and said in impassioned tones:

"Well, well, isn't that lovely?"

The familiar apparently confirmed the opinion, for she repeated, with a long sigh: "Wonderful altogether! I could be looking at it all day!" She turned to Christian with profound deference. "And what might it be intended to represent, Miss?"

Larry, who had picked up a cue, and was knocking the balls about, gave a short and nettled laugh.

"Oh, Dixie!" said Christian, suffering equally with artist and critic, "don't you see, it's a picture of me!"

Mrs. Dixon took the blow gallantly.

"Well, wasn't I the finished fool to forget my specs! I that couldn't see the harp on a ha'penny without them!"

"Don't worry, Dixie," said Larry, smacking a ball into a pocket; "I'm not surprised you didn't recognise it—it's not half good enough."

"Master Larry, my dear," returned Mrs. Dixon, whose social perceptions were more acute than her artistic ones, "I'll go bail there isn't one could take Miss Christian's picture the way you could, you that was always her companion!" She moved away from the easel, and murmuring; "and, please God, always will be!" she rustled away down the long room. Mrs. Dixon, indomitable Protestant though she was, did not share Evans' opinion of Larry.

Larry threw down the cue and opened the high French window into the garden at the back of the house.

"Christian, for heaven's sake come out! I can't stand this stinking room any longer! I feel as if all the imbecilities that I've had to endure this afternoon were hanging in a cloud over the billiard table. Come up to the old stone on the hill, and have some fresh air."

He stepped out into the garden, and Christian followed him, smiling within herself at his impatience, the absurd impatience that she loved because it was his. It wouldn't be Larry if he suffered fools, or anything else that he disliked, gladly or peaceably. The feeling that she was immeasurably older than he was was always at its most convincing when his painting was in question; even she could not quite realise what it meant to him to have rude hand laid upon the child of his soul.

The garden was dank and heavy with overgrown, dying things, as ill-cared-for gardens are wont to be at the end of September, but the tall bush of sweet-scented verbena, that grew by the door in the south wall, was still as green and sweet as in high summer. Christian broke off some sprays and drew them through her hands before she put one into the front of her shirt.

"Here, Larry," she said, giving him one, "this will help you to forget the billiard room!"

Larry gave her a long look as he took it; "I don't altogether want to forget it," he said. "I daresay good old Dixie was a useful discipline."

Had Christian heard Mrs. Dixon's final aspiration she would have realised that with it Dixie had covered her failure as an art critic.

Outside the garden was a wide belt of fir trees, and beyond and above the trees, stretched the great hill, Cnochan an Ceoil Sidhe, the Hill of Fairy Music, that gave its name to the house and demesne. Christian and Larry passed through the shadowy grove, walking side by side along the narrow track, their footsteps made noiseless by its thick covering of pine needles. It was dark in the wood; the fir trees towered in gloom above them; here and there in the deep of the branches there was the stir of a wing, as a pigeon settled to its nest; from beyond the wood came a brief, shrill bicker of starlings; all things beside these were mute, and in the silent dusk, spirit was sensitive to spirit, and the air was tense with the unspoken word.

The sun was low in the west when they came out on to the open hillside, and went on up the path, through the heather, that led to the Druid stone beside the Tober an Sidhe, the fairies' well. The mist, golden and green, that comes with an autumn sunset, half hid, half transfigured the wide distances of the valley of the Broadwater; the darkness of the woods, blended from this aspect into one, of Mount Music and Coppinger's Court, was softened by its veils; the far hills were transparent, as if the light had fused them to clearest brown, and topaz, and opal glass. The hill side, above and beneath them, glowed and smouldered with the ruby-purple of heather.

Christian and Larry stood in the path beside the ancient stone and looked out over the valley; the vastness and the glory of the great prospect whelmed them like a flood, the sense of imminence that was over them strung their nerves to vibrating and held them silent.

"My God!" sighed Larry, at last, trembling, turning to her who had never failed to understand him, "Christian! it's too beautiful—the world is too big—I can't bear it alone—" He caught her arm. "You've got to help me. Oh Christian!—"

Christian turned her face from him.

"I believe I could," she said in a very low voice.

Even as she spoke, the truth broke out of her soul and ran through her, running from her soul to his, like the flame of oil spilled upon clear water. A voice cried a warning in her heart. "Too late!" she answered it with triumph.

"Darling!" said Larry, holding her close.

* * * * *

The sunset

"bloomed and withered on the hill Like any hill-flower";

but long those two stood by the Druid stone, knowing, perhaps, the best moment that life could give them, facing the dying radiance with hearts that were full of sunrise.



CHAPTER XXVII

Doctor Francis Mangan, driving his car at something even more than his usual high rate of speed, to the Parochial House, a mile or so from the town of Cluhir, what time the sun's last rays were falling upon the Druid stone on Cnochan an Ceoil Sidhe, would have been far from pleased had he seen what the sun then saw. On their knees by the Tober an Sidhe, Larry and Christian were looking into the tiny cave in which the fairy water rose, and were giving each to each their plighting word, the old word that they had known since they were children:

"While water stands in Tubber an shee, My heart in your hands, your heart in me,"

and, observing scrupulously the prescribed rite, were drinking a mouthful of the water, each from the other's hand.

Dr. Mangan would probably have said that it was all children's nonsense, and that it was easier to break a promise than to keep it, but it may be asserted with tolerable certainty that he would not have been pleased.

He was a strong and able driver, and his big car whirled up Father Greer's neat and narrow drive, holding undeviatingly the crown of the high-cambered track, and stopped dead at the front door of the Parochial House.

That Spirit of the Nation to whom allusion has occasionally been made in these pages, was by now well accustomed to the discouragement that she had ever received from the two young lovers whose betrothal she had been powerless to forbid. She had fled from the benign fairy influences of the Tober an Sidhe; but now, full of hope, she was hovering with wide-spread wings over the Parochial House, and, as its door was opened by Father Greer's elderly and ugly housekeeper, the Spirit folded her wings and slipped past her, as by a familiar path, into the priest's sitting-room.

Father Greer was "inside," the elderly and ugly housekeeper said; "would the Doctor sit in the parlour a minute and he'd come down?"

The Doctor "sat" as requested, in the parlour, noting, as he had often noted before, its arid asceticism, wondering how any man could stand the life of a priest, respecting the power that could enable a man to dispense with all the things that, in his opinion—which, by the way, he pronounced "oping-en"—made life worth living.

Father Greer came imperceptibly into the room while the Doctor was still pondering upon the hardness of the black horsehair-covered armchair in which he was seated.

"Why, Doctor, this is an unexpected pleasure! I heard you were away," the priest said, laying a limp hand in the Doctor's big fist.

"So I was too. I was summoned to a consultation. That's what I'm come to you about, Father. It's old Prendergast. I'm thinking he won't last much longer."

"D'ye mean Daniel? The Member?"

"I do."

Father Greer took his thin nose, with the nostrils edged with red, between his finger and thumb, and pinched it slowly downwards several times.

"Well, what then?" he said at length.

"That's the point," said the Big Doctor, looking at the priest's pale and bumpy forehead, and trying in vain to catch his eye. "You know that young Coppinger's name was sent up by our local Committee four years ago, and the Party approved it."

"I wonder were they in the right!" said Father Greer, still pinching his nose, and looking up at the Doctor over his knuckles.

"I don't see who we could find that'd do better," said Dr. Mangan, apologetically. "He's well off, and he holds strong Nationalist oping-ens; and then, of course, he's a Catholic."

"I'm told he didn't go to Mass since he came home"; Father Greet let the statement fall without expression.

"Ah well, he's only just back from France. Give him a little time, and he'll come to himself," said the Doctor, still apologetic.

"I understand he's been painting Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry's portrait," pursued Father Greer, with limpid simplicity. "I'm told she's as pretty a young girl as there is in this neighbourhood."

Whether this slight prod of the mahout's ankus was, or was not, intentional, it is not easy to say, but it took instant effect upon the Big Doctor.

"There are other pretty young girls in the neighbourhood besides Christian Lowry," he said sharply. "And maybe prettier! I don't think it would give us much trouble to find one that Larry Coppinger would be well satisfied with, and one that's in the bosom of the Church, too!"

"I greatly deplore mixed marriages," said Father Greer; permitting his eyes to meet those of Dr. Mangan. "I had hoped that in the case of this young man beneficial influences might have been brought to bear—"

"If you want to put a spoke in that wheel," interrupted the Doctor with eagerness, "you'll support his nomination. I'll undertake to say there won't be much talk of mixed marriages then!"

Father Greer's small eyes again rested for a second on the Doctor's broad face, with its strong, overhanging brows and heavy under-jaw, and drew his own conclusions from the confident smile that showed the white teeth under the drooping, black moustache that had still scarcely a grey hair in it.

"I was thinking that might be what he was after!" thought Father Greer. "Well, he's a good warrant to play his hand well, and more unsuitable things have occurred before now. Yet, didn't I hear something—!" Even in thought Father Greer observed a studied mildness and moderation, and there were contingencies which might remain unformulated until they crystallised into certainty.

"I'll think it over, Doctor," he said. "I'm inclined to your view, of the case, and I might be disposed to advocate the candidature of your nominee. But,"—here Father Greer sniffed several times, indicating that a humorous aspect of the case had occurred to him, "what will we do if he turns 'sour-face,' as they say, on us?"

This euphuism, which had been adopted by some of the more extreme of the Nationalist party to indicate members of the opposing communion, was received by Dr. Mangan as an apt and entertaining quotation on the part of his clergyman.

"No fear, no fear!" he said, laughing jovially, "but if you'll allow me to say so, I think a good deal depends on this business going through."

The Spirit of the Nation smiled also; it was evident to her that these ministers of hers were conscientiously intent on doing her pleasure, and, leaving them with confidence, she spread her wide wings and followed the broad stream of the river down the valley in the direction of Mount Music.

Dr. Mangan drove home as swiftly and capably as was his wont. It had been fair-day in Cluhir, and the people from the country were slowly and reluctantly forsaking the enjoyments of the town. Large women piled voluminously on small carts, each with a conducting little boy and a labouring little donkey somewhere beneath her; men in decent blue cloth garments, whose innate respectability must have suffered acutely from the erratic conduct of the limbs inside them; wandering knots of cattle, remotely attended by the wearers of blue cloth aforesaid; horses carting themselves and their owners home, with entire self-control and good sense; and, anchored in the tide of traffic, the ubiquitous beggar-women, their filthy hands proffering matches, green apples, bootlaces, their strident tongues mastering the noises of the street, their rapacious, humorous eyes observant of all things. All these did Dr. Mangan encounter and circumvent, frustrating their apparent determination to commit suicide by those diverse methods of abuse, cajolery, and, on the part of the car, mechanical activity, that formed an important part of the necessary equipment of an Irish motorist of the earlier time. Nevertheless, the more intimate portion of his brain was deeply engaged in those labyrinths of minor provincial intrigue in which so many able intellects spend themselves, for want of wider opportunity.

Mrs. Mangan was in the kitchen, where, indeed, she was not infrequently to be found, when the Doctor came in by the back-door from the yard.

"I want you, Annie," he said, shouldering his enormous bulk along the narrow passage, and treading heavily on the cat, who, her mystic meditations thus painfully interrupted, vanished in darkness, uttering the baleful cry of her kind, that is so inherently opposed to the blended forgiveness and apology that give poignancy to a dog's reproach for a similar injury.

"Look here, Annie. Before I forget it, I want you to take the car on Saturday—I'll want it myself to-morrow—and call upon Miss Coppinger. Barty can drive you. I got a wire awhile ago, and I have to go on the nine o'clock to-night to Broadhaven. It's that unfortunate Prendergast the Member. There's nothing can be done for the poor fellow, but whether or no, I must go."

"They'll not be satisfied till they have you dead, too, dragging at you!" protested Mrs. Mangan. "What nonsense they have, and you there only this morning! On earth, what can you do more for him?"

"They think more of me, my dear, than you do!" said the Doctor, cheerfully. "Be listening, now, to what I'm saying. You're to be as civil as be damned to old Frederica, and tell Barty he's to fix up with Larry to come here—what day is this to-day is? Thursday?—Tell him I'll be in on Sunday afternoon, and I want to talk to him on very special business. Now, will you remember that?"

He repeated his commands, as people will who have learnt, as most Doctors must learn, the fallibility of the human memory and its infinite powers of invention and substitution.

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 lasso 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-shell! 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 grass 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 grass 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 snatched 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 passing 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 grass 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 jackasses, 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, analytic 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 analysis 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 grass, 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 grass 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 butterfly upon a wheel? Those even, who pin it down, and set it up in a glass 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.

"Oh, I know all that, my dear," interrupted Judith; "'the infernal mortgagees, and the damned charges, and that blackguard rebel, young Mangan, who cut the ground from under his feet,' and so on. I've heard it all from Papa, exactly five thousand times. But the point is that there was a meeting at Pribawn, with the priest in the chair, and there were furious speeches, and they talked of boycotting Papa, and some steps ought to be taken. It's an intolerable nuisance being boycotted, if it's nothing else, and most expensive. I was with the O'Donnells that time when they were boycotted—up at five every morning to milk the cows and light the kitchen fire, and having to get every earthly thing by post from London!"

"I'll take as many steps as you like," said Christian, "if you'll only tell me where to take them."

Judith took her cigarette out of her mouth, and blew a ring of smoke, regarding her younger sister the while with a shrewd and wary blue eye.

"I've often said to you, my dear child," she began, in a voice that seemed intended to usher in a change of subject, "that if you won't take an interest in men, they won't take an interest; in you."

"Then why repeat the statement?" said Christian, wondering what Judith was working up to, and girding herself for battle; "true and beautiful though it is!"

"Because, my dear—and I may say I speak as one having authority and not as the scribes—in my opinion, and judging by what I perceived with about a quarter of one eye at breakfast, you have only to hold up your little finger, in a friendly and encouraging manner, and our young friend and relative, Mr. Coppinger, will—I admit I don't quite know what people do with little fingers in these cases, something affectionate, no doubt!"

"I thought your authority would have extended to little fingers!" broke in Christian, sparring for wind, and wishing she were not facing the window; "in any case, I fail to see what mine, in this instance, has to say to our being boycotted?"

"My dear girl," said Judith, leaning forward, and speaking with solemnity, "the priests won't want to fall foul of anyone with as much money as Larry!"

Christian was silent; she had not anticipated quite so direct an intervention in her personal affairs as was now being discovered, and she felt that her pearl was melting in the fierce solvent of Judith's interest and curiosity.

"I know it's a bore about his religion, and his politics are more than shaky, but you know, in a way, it's rather lucky, in view of the mess Papa's got everything into, to have someone on that side," went on Judith, who was far too practical to be influenced by that malign Spirit of the Nation who had so persistently endeavoured to establish herself as one of the family at Mount Music. "All I'm afraid of is that Papa may begin to beat the Protestant drum and wave the Union Jack! Such nonsense! The main thing is that Larry himself is quite all right!"

"I'm sure he would be gratified by your approval!" Judith's patronage was somewhat galling; Judith, who was quite pleased with Bill Kirby!—Good, excellent Bill, but still! Christian's colour betrayed her, and she knew it, and knowing also the remorseless cross-examination that the betrayal would immediately provoke, she decided to anticipate it.

"As a matter of fact," she went on, "he—we—" she hated the crudity of the statement.

"You're engaged!" swooped Judith, with the speed of a hawk. "Excellent girl!"

Christian found the commendation offensive.

"I assure you it's quite without either political or religious bias!" she said defiantly. She had failed to keep her secret, but she went down with her flags flying.



CHAPTER XXIX

Barty Mangan fulfilled his father's behests, and on Saturday, he drove his mother to Coppinger's Court.

He drove a motor well; not brilliantly, like Larry, because Barty did nothing brilliantly, but capably and gently, with consideration for donkey-carts, with respect for horses, with kindness towards pedestrians, even without animosity towards cur-dogs. The surprising aspect of the fact was that he should be able, in any degree, to handle a car, the control of energy being an effort foreign to his nature. What in his mother was laziness, was with him transmuted to languor; his father's vigour and decision became in Barty a sort of tepid obstinacy, and the Doctor's fierce and fighting allegiance to his Church reappeared in his son as a peevish conscientiousness, that had provoked a friend of the family to say: "Barty's a dam' bad solicitor! He'll take up no case but what pleases him, and he'll touch nothing if he thinks he'll make money out of it!"

"Ah! He was always a fool for himself!" replied, heartily, Barty's great-aunt, Mrs. Cantwell, to whom the comment had been offered.

One aspect of the practical affairs of life, and one only, had power to rouse Barty from the dreamy passivity which had excited Great-Aunt Cantwell's contempt. Where Ireland and Irish politics came into question, some deep spring of sentiment and enthusiasm in him was touched, and all the force that he was capable of became manifest. All the strength and tenacity that were in him were concentrated in the cause of Nationalism; Ireland was his religion, and he felt himself to be one of her priesthood.

There are some gentle natures, with deep affections, but without much brain-power in whom an idea, a mental attitude, and especially a personal liking or disliking, is very easily implanted; yet, easily as it is introduced, once it has taken hold it can never be dislodged. The intellect has not energy enough for reconstruction; it accepts too readily, and, once saturated, the stain is indelible, because there is no power of growth.

Behold, then, Barty, gentle and obstinate, timid and an enthusiast, loving, yet implacable, seated in Larry's studio, regarding with submissive adoration the being compact of the antithesis of his qualities, and ready, for that being's sake, to make any sacrifice save that of renouncing him.

The being in question, wholly and feverishly absorbed in his own affairs of the heart, while bound by his oath to say nothing about them, brought himself with difficulty to attend to the retrospect of financial operations, hitherto postponed, but now insisted upon, by his man of business.

"Oh, first-rate, old chap—quite all right—good business!—" With these, and similar interjections, did the employer ratify and approve of his agent's transactions. Barty's legal training abetted his conscientiousness, and in his mild and monotonous brogue he laid before Larry a statement of his money matters that was as unsparing in detail as it was accurate.

"So now you see," he concluded, "I didn't act without careful consideration, and I consulted me fawther, besides others of experience in such matters. I believe there are people who are saying we sold too cheap to the tenants. But, on the other hand, the money's good and safe now; you have a certain and secure income, and you're in a very favourable position in the eyes of the people."

Larry pulled himself from reverie to ejaculate further general approval; then he rose from the table, upon which Barty's books had been displayed, and drawing forward an easel on which was a framed canvas covered by some vivid oriental drapery, he arranged it carefully with regard to the light. Then he caught away the drapery, stepping back, quickly, from the easel.

"What do you think of that, Barty?"

Barty, who was short-sighted, stood up and adjusted his eye-glasses, while he endeavoured to readjust his ideas, and to abandon the realms of business for those of art.

"But you know, Larry," he apologised, "I know nothing about paintings. You wouldn't know what tomfoolery I mightn't—" The apology broke off abruptly.

"Oh, God!" he muttered, feeling, in the shock of meeting her eyes, as if a sudden wind had swept his mind bare of business, of Larry, of all things save Christian, "it's herself!"

His sallow face had turned a dull red. He moved back a step or two, and then went forward again. The easel was low, and Barty was very tall; he went on his knees, and gazed, speechless.

Thus might a devout Russian have greeted a lost icon, and worshipped, silently, a re-found saint. Larry, equally absorbed, as any painter will understand, in the contemplation of his work, took no heed of its effect upon Barty.

"By Jove!" he murmured, drawing a big breath, "I wonder if I did it! I don't feel as if I had—something outside me—" He stopped; he felt as if Christian herself were there; he felt as if her arms were round him, his head upon her bosom. He was giddy with emotion. Scarcely knowing what he did he walked across the room, and stared out of the window, looking across his own woods to the woods of Mount Music.

That morning he had said good-bye to her for three long days. She had met him at the old stepping stones across the Ownashee, and she had made him renew his promise of silence until her return; he was sorry he couldn't tell old Barty; but no matter, nothing mattered, except the marvel that she was his. He whispered adoration to her, breathing her name again and again, crowning it, as with a wreath, with those old, familiar adjectives that had so lately become intense with new meaning for him; he forgot Barty, forgot even her portrait, as he thought of herself.

Barty came over to him; the two young men, with their common secret, suspected by neither, a secret that for one was a living ecstasy, and for the other an impossible ideal, stood silent, full of their own thoughts. Barty spoke first.

"It's a wonder to me! I didn't think you could paint like that, Larry! I didn't think anyone could!"

"Well, no more I can, really. This was a sort of a miracle and it painted itself."

The same impulse moved them both, and they returned to the easel on which was the picture, but with a quick movement Larry flung the drapery over the frame again and hid the picture.

"Didn't you say you had a message for me from your father?"

Barty accepted the change of subject with his accustomed resignation to Larry's moods.

"I have. He said he'd be at home to-morrow afternoon—that's Sunday—and he wanted to see you on very special business."

"Do you know what about?" Larry asked, without interest, while he arranged the many-coloured silken drapery in effective folds over the picture.

"I believe old Prendergast's dying."

Barty hesitated; then, remembering that his father had not enjoined secrecy, he rushed into his subject. "Larry, I believe the chance we've been waiting for is come—or as good as come!"

"Do you mean that it's Prendergast the Member who's dying? Do you mean my getting into Parliament?"

Larry swung round on Barty, and fired the questions at him, quick as shots from a revolver.

The colour rose again in Barty's face. His dark, shortsighted eyes, that were set on Larry, had a sudden glow in them. He nodded.

"He's likely dead by now! Oh Larry!" he cried, panting in his eagerness. "May be the chance has come at last! I believe you might be the man Ireland wants! I believe you might take Parnell's place! Me fawther says you're certain to be nominated, and there's no opposition, of course. Anyhow, if there were, itself, you'd go in flying, just the same! You're the man we're all waiting for! Larry, old cock! The day will come when I'll be bragging that I was the one first gave you the notion to go into politics!"

Larry was gazing at his man of business, whose aspect, it may be conceded, was at this moment singularly at variance with the usual conception of such a functionary. The man of business gazed back at him, the glow intensifying behind his eye-glasses and gathering energy from the answering gleam in Larry's eyes.

"The Bloody Wars!" uttered Larry, slowly and quite irrelevantly, and with great emphasis. "By all the crosses in a yard of check! Let me hold on to something and think! This is a game and a half! I must think furiously!"

"Do not!" exclaimed Barty; "don't think at all! Don't be wasting time like that! No man ever had a greater chance than this! Lep at it, Larry, old lad! Give me the word I want, and I'll wire the Doctor to-night—a message he'll understand, and no one else. Oh Larry!" he implored, "don't cry off now! You've pots of money; you can do any damn thing you like! If you refuse this chance now you'll only regret it the once, and that'll be all your life!"

Then did that mysterious and mighty agency, the warp that a mind has received in childhood, come to reinforce the enthusiasms and ambitions of youth, and urge Larry to assent. That other and nobler Spirit of the Nation woke, and the passionate, irreconcilable voice, that had first spoken to him when he was a little boy, woke and uttered itself again, shouting to him its wild summons at a moment when the tide of life was running fiercest in him, when every emotion was at highest pressure and calling for great adventure.

"All right, Barty, my son, I'm for it!" said Larry, with the assumption of outward calm, when heart and pulses are pounding, that has been claimed as one of the assets of a public school education, and is, even without that advantage, the birthright of such as young Mr. Coppinger.



CHAPTER XXX

Larry bicycled up to the white chapel on the hill, to Second Mass, on the following morning. He rode fast through the converging groups of people, on foot, on outside cars, in carts, on horseback. It was four years since he had last attended a service there, and to many of the assembled congregation he had become a stranger. None the less there was no hesitation in any man's mind in identifying him; these were people who knew a gentleman when they saw one, and the young owner of Coppinger's Court was the only gentleman ever to be seen at the white chapel on the hill.

Therefore it was that Larry's right hand was seldom on his handle-bar, as he skimmed through the people, decent and dark-dressed in their Sunday best, who saluted with a long-established friendship and respect this solitary representative of their traditional enemies, the landlords.

There cannot be in the world a people more unfailingly church-going than those sons and daughters of Rome who are bred in Southern Ireland. Larry looked down, from his pew in the gallery, at the close ranks of kneeling figures, and thought with compunction how long it was since he had been in a church, and thanked God that he had come home to his own people, and that their religion was his. He followed the words of the service with a new realisation of their ancient beauty. He trembled with an unfamiliar emotion, as, in the charged silence of the crowded chapel, the bell tinkled and the censer clashed, sounds that have in them at such moments a heart-shaking power, magnetic, mystical. He heard nothing of the sermon; in his eager mind two thoughts raced side by side, now one, now the other, leading. These two marvels that had befallen. That Christian should love him; this had the mastery, irradiating all; but with the vivid sense of fellowship and communion that the service brought the other thought, the old dream that was coming true of standing for these people, of making their interests his, their welfare his care, moved him profoundly.

Outside in the chapel yard, after the service, the congregation was in no hurry to disperse. Larry looked about him, and found many friendly eyes set on him. Larry, too, had a friendly heart, and he bethought him that, as a future M.P., he should lose no opportunity of intercourse with his constituents. He recognised the solid presence of John Herlihy, an elderly farmer who had been one of the largest of his own late tenants, and he went across the yard to where he stood and shook hands with him.

"Fine day, John! Good and hot for the harvest! Got your threshing done yet?"

"'Tis very warm, sir," answered John Herlihy, correcting, as is invariable, Larry's employment of the vulgar adjective "hot"; "very warm entirely, and sure I have my corn threshed this ten days, the same as yourself!"

"Nothing like taking time by the fetlock, is there, John!" chaffed Larry (who, until that moment, had been unaware that he possessed any corn); "it's a good harvest all round, isn't it?"

"Well, pretty fair, thank God!"

"And the country's quiet?"

"Never better, sir, never better!" responded John Herlihy, weightily; but something in his cool eyes, grey and wise as a parrot's, impelled Larry, in his new-born sense of responsibility, to further questioning.

Mr. John Herlihy was a man of the order to whom the label "respectable" inevitably attaches itself (that adjective which acts as a touch-stone in the definition of class, and is a compliment up to a certain point, an offence higher up the scale); one of those sound and sensible and thrifty farmers who are the strength of Ireland, and are as the stones of a break-water, over which the storm-froth of the waters of politics sweeps unheeded.

"Well," Larry went on, "it wasn't a very nice way that those Carmodys up at Derrylugga treated Miss Christian Talbot-Lowry the other day! Killing her mare under her, the cowardly blackguards!"

The grey parrot eyes scanned Larry, summing him up, determining how far he might be trusted, deciding that an oblique approach might be most advisable.

"Major Lowry's a fine gentleman," said John Herlihy, largely; "a fine, easy, grauver man! I declare I was sorry to me heart when he gave up the hounds! If it was to be only a scold or a curse from him, ye'd rather it, and to have he be goin' through the country!"

"Then what have people against him? Good God!" cried Larry, hotly. "It's too easy he is! I wouldn't have let those devils off as easy as he did!"

"I heard the Priest and a few more, was above at Mount Music ere yesterday," said John Herlihy, in a slightly lowered voice, "about the sale of the property they were, I b'lieve. You done well, Master Larry, you got quit o' the whole kit of us!"

Having thus shelved the controversial subject, Mr. Herlihy, laughing heartily at his own jest, moved towards his horse and car, that were hitched to the chapel gate, and let down the upturned side of the car.

"Come! Get up, woman! Get up!" he called to his wife, a prosperous lady, in a massive, blue, hooded cloak, who had been standing by the gate, patiently waiting his pleasure; "don't be delaying me this way!"

He winked at Larry, scrambling on to the car.

"What tashpy he has!" remarked Mrs. Herlihy, benignantly, as Larry shook hands with her.

"Ah, you spoil him, Mrs. Herlihy! You should dock his oats!" said Larry, laughing into her jolly, round, red face, that was glistening with heat under the heavy cloth hood. "It's a grand hot day, isn't it?"

"'Tis very warm, sir, indeed," corrected Mrs. Herlihy, as she mounted the car with an agility as competent, and as unexpected, as that of a trespassing cow confronted with a stone-faced bank.

Larry went home, and continued a letter to Christian that he had begun over night. He told her of Barty's visit, and of all that it was likely to involve. He said that he was very lonely, and he believed she had been gone a year. Even Aunt Freddy had bolted off to Dublin, on urgent private affairs, which meant the dentist, as usual. He would go over to see Cousin Dick, only that he was absolutely bound to go into Cluhir. At this point he entered anew upon the subject of his political future, and what it meant to him. Of the fun he would have canvassing the electors. Christian would have to come round with him, and in very obdurate cases there was always the classical method of the Duchess of Devonshire to be resorted to! Already, he said, he was frightfully interested in the whole show, and he meant—several pages were devoted by Larry to his intentions.

Christian, far away in the County Limerick, received the letter with her early cup of tea, and, as she read it, felt her soul disquieted within her. The conjunction of the stars of Love and Politics presaged, she felt, disaster—as if the question of religion had not been complicating enough! Even had her gift of envisaging a situation by the light of reason failed her, that spiritual aneroid, which, sensitive to soul-pressure, warned her intuitively of coming joy or sorrow, ill luck or good fortune, had fallen from set fair to stormy. She had gone to sleep with sunshine in her heart; she awoke in clouds, dark and threatening. She read Larry's letter, and knew that the foreboding would come true.

It is probable that no human being was ever less the prey of intuitions or presentiments than was young Mr. Coppinger, as he bicycled lightly into Cluhir along the solitary steam-rolled road of the district, a typical effort of Irish civilisation, initiated by Dr. Mangan, that had proposed to link Cluhir with the outer world, but had died, like a worn-out tramp, at the end of a few faltering miles, on the steps of the work-house hospital at Riverstown. The road ran along the bank of the great river, with nothing save a low fence and a footpath between it and the water. The river was still and gleaming. Masses of dove-coloured cloud, with touches of silver-saffron, where their lining showed through, draped the wide sky, in over-lapping folds. The planes of distance up the broad valley were graduated in tone by a succession of screens of luminous vapour that parcelled out the landscape, taking away all colour save that bestowed by the transparent golden grey of the mist. The roofs of Cluhir made a dark profile in the middle distance, the lower part of the houses hidden in the steaming mist, and the beautiful outline of the twin crests of Carrigaholt was like a golden shadow in the sky above them. The spire and the tower of the two churches of Cluhir, rose on either side of the pale radiance of the river, with the slender arch of the bridge joining them, as if to show in allegory their inherent oneness, their joint access to the water of life. Religion counted for but little with Larry in those days, yet as the wonder of beauty sank into his soul, that was ever thirsty for beauty, the thought of what it would mean for Ireland if the symbol of the linking bridge had its counterpart in reality sprang into his eager mind. Then he thought of himself and Christian, and knew that religion could never come between him and her, and, as the close-followed thought of what these last days had brought, rose in his mind, the wonder of it overwhelmed him. He told himself that the only possible explanation of her caring for such as he, was that Narcissus-like, she had seen her own image reflected in his heart, and had fallen in love with it. The fancy attracted him; he rode on, his mind set on a sonnet that should fitly enshrine the thought, and politics and religion, symbols and ideals, faded, as the stars go out when the sun comes.