And yet, he had thought they would be different. It had all been twenty years ago, and he 'd been away all that time, and he 'd been only two days back. But they 'd never forgotten. What haters they were, these Irish! What implacable enemies! What brought him back, anyhow? He could have been happy in America. Or hunting in England. What he 'd come back for was the red Irish fox.
"Steady, blast you!" he warned the big hunter.
"There he goes!" some woman cried, and "No, Janet, no!" a friend laughed. Janet! That would be Janet Conyers. And Janet Conyers must be forty now, and here she was still riding to hounds. Yes, he recognized a full dozen of them. Good Lord! Did people live as long as that? There was old Sir John Burroughs, spare as a lance, and old McGinty, who owned the Mill Farm. Yes, and the Master of Munsterbeg was there, red-faced, hale, all of sixty. And that Grecian profile--was n't that Di Connors, who was now Baroness Rothlin? And the big gaunt man with the hook nose, was n't that Ian More Campbell of the Antrim glens? Poet and soldier and horseman. Morgan felt a tremor of fear before the great Ulster Scot.
There was the yelp of a foxhound and a roar of anger. The thundering master of the hounds was turning on an inoffensive stranger.
"What the--what the--what the blazes do you mean, sir, riding over hounds in that manner? What hunt do you belong to, anyhow?"
"I don't belong to any hunt."
"Well, what the--what did you come out here for, anyhow?"
"My medical man told me I needed fresh air and exercise, and I thought--"
"You thought! You thought! Why in blazes don't you buy a bellows and stick it up your nose? You 'd get all the fresh air and exercise you want, but--"
There was a roar of laughter from the field, and above it rose Morgan's deep basso, like the bourdon note of an organ. But the instant the field noted his laughter, their laughter died.
Morgan smothered a curse and moved fifty yards down where he could get a flying start away from the rush of hunting. How they hated him, resented him, he felt, and yet he had killed no man, stolen no money, betrayed no woman. They hated him as much as they had loved and admired his wife Reynardine. Queer! Queer! He was the one they should love and she was the one they should have felt aloof toward. For he was the steeplechaser, the horseman, the hunter of foxes, and she was of a family whose tradition it was never to hunt or harry a fox, but to protect and aid it. You would have thought it would be the other way around; that they would have liked him and been cool or indifferent toward Reynardine, these hunting women, these sporting men. But no!
And that was twenty years ago, and they hated still. Twenty years! War and famine and pestilence had raged through the world. But they remained the same, these Irish gentlefolk. Yes, it was all of twenty years, nearly to a day, since he had left for foreign parts, and Reynardine, his wife, had died.
II
"Cop forard away!" went the ringing formula of the huntsmen. "Cop forard away!" A long wail on the horn. The covert had been drawn blank.
Two sharp notes and a halloing. "Yo ho, Tinker! Yo ho! Tim! Forard, hounds, forard!" And the pack of hounds began to move like a slow wave toward the distant woodland. The hunt followed at a slow trot....
Her name had been Petronilla, but through the country-side she was known as Reynardine, partly because of the Irish folk-song she could sing so well, with its haunting minors, its suggestion of superhuman music. He could see her slight form still, spiritual, virginal in the Irish twilight. He could hear her pulsating contralto voice:
"If by chance you look for me Perhaps you 'll not me find, For I 'll be in my castle-- Enquire for Reynardine."
No, he would n't look for her, though he knew where she was. She was in her castle, for sure! Her deep and narrow castle in the ancient, disused Cistercian monastery where the Fitzpauls buried their dead. Tier on tier the old Norman-Irish family lay, with their strange names, Fulke and Gilles, Milo, Tortulf, Bertran. There they lay with their carved effigies, dogs at their feet and swords at their side--old Crusaders. There they lay, ancient harriers of the Irish clans, Arnold and Eudo. There they lay, old peers of the Irish parliament, Robert, Gerald and Byssak. There lay the newer landlords, Jenico and Maurice. There they lay, dead as their tradition. There they lay, and be damned to them, Morgan thought! All there was left of them now was one daughter, his and Reynardine's, whom he had seen only once, in swaddling-clothes, and whom, he trusted, he would never see again.
"If by chance you look for me," her song had gone. "Look for you," Morgan sneered. "I 'll be in my castle!" "Well, you can stay there, wife!" he sneered.
He 'd never look for her, even though he could see the monastery where she slept from where he sat on his horse's back....
They had come to a woodland upwind and the hunt had slowed down to a walk. The hounds were being urged in by the pink-coated huntsman. He heard the short note of the huntsman to wake the fox, saw the pack pour in like a stream....
III
He had come out this morning, his second morning in the country, to hunt, to kill the fox, to enjoy the sport he loved with what had become a mania. And now his day was being spoiled by old black memories. Perhaps it was the Abbey where Reynardine slept that nudged him with ghostly concentration, perhaps it was the field that ignored him as though he did not exist, perhaps it was the proximity of the fox itself--he had n't seen or hunted an Irish fox for twenty years. But he was troubled as a man is troubled by imminent disaster. He wished they 'd get on.
"Wind him, boys. Wind him. Yooi, get him out. Joyous! Tinker! Marvan! Leu in!"
But there was naught but the crash of whins, and the whirring of pheasants as they rose. There rose the huntsman's clear call:
"Yo hote back. Yooi over try back!" And the blast of the horn as he turned to draw the woodland again.
Twenty years ago! Could it have been only twenty years ago that he had met and married and parted from Reynardine? It was so misty, so vague, he had come to think of it as centuries before. He had come north from Dublin, a boy of twenty-two, just out of Trinity, son of old Jasper Morgan who had made a half-dozen fortunes in remounts for the South African War, grandson of Ed Morgan who had been ostler and stableman and later livery-keeper at Kingstown. And because he rode hard and well he was admitted everywhere. There is no democracy as open as that of the Ulster clans. A baron from William the Conqueror's invasion, or an Irish chieftain whose ancestors were Druidists yields precedence to any man who can do a thing better than he.... At a hunt ball young Morgan met Petronilla Fitzpaul, who was known through the country as Reynardine.
She was just at the momentous instant when a girl turns woman, that strange first of three tides in a woman's life. And the first tide breathlessly waited, curled, flowed in as he came. Very slight, very dark-haired, very deep-eyed, she was spared the ancestral Norman traits. She had n't the eagle beak of her brothers, or their intent scowling brows. She was a little thing of kindliness and deep emotions. One felt it in the face, somehow like a pansy, one felt it in her eyes, one felt it in her hands....
She liked him. He was new to her. She liked his dash. She liked, as gentlewomen will, the faint flavor of vulgarity in him. It was new to her. She liked the dash of his clothes. His assurance overcame her. She liked him. And she was at the mystic tide of her life. She thought she loved him.
And what intrigued Morgan was the spirit within. Some faint conception of her beauty and mystery penetrated to him. No man is interested in a woman bodily, no matter how much he thinks he is. He is interested in cosmic womanhood, or in the one spiritual entity that actuates the body. And before Morgan was a thread of flame that might lead him now down a formal garden, rhythmic with the murmur of bees, now through a woodland where the thrush sang in the branches, now through a Roman crypt, mysterious and sanctified. He was like a barbarian who has found a great jewel, topaz or opal or sapphire, the light of which enthralls him, but of whose value and use he is ignorant....
Her brothers and her father were not inclined to view a marriage between them with favor. It was not because of his lack of lineage, but because the points of view were so different. They saw a gulf. But Reynardine dissuaded them.
"Brothers dear and my father, cannot I, cannot we all--" she put her hands out toward them--"make him see our way, take our things to his heart?"
They were all great hulking men, her father and her brothers, Ulick, Garrett, Gilchrist, Kevin, and she was the only woman of them--her mother had died so long ago!--and she was so little, so pleading! They were as wax in her hands.