Changeling, and Other Stories

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. "You know, dears--" she hung her head--"I love this man." "Do what your heart says, Reynardine," they gave her the precept they obeyed themselves with such success and chivalry. And they frowned the family frown. "If she can do so much with us, what can't she do with him!" they reasoned in their simple way. Alas! poor gentlemen! There was an immensity of pride in Morgan's heart, apart from pride in his young wife, to be allied to a family such as the Fitzpauls. Twice they had refused duchies. They were so old they went back into the mists of Norman tradition. They had the quaint customs of their sort, and strange superstitions, such as all Irish families have--superstitions being but ancient mystic conceptions of nature, and customs observed so often through the centuries that their shadows became facts. But of all quaint customs, their friendship to the fox was strangest of all. Their crest was a fox courant, and over no square foot of their lands could a fox be hunted. Great horsemen they were, but none had ever followed the hounds in a hunt. Perhaps some old Fitzpaul, seeing all people concentrated on ridding the land of the fox, had pitied the little red hunted one, and given it protection. Perhaps by some accident of border warfare a fox had deflected the chase from a hunted Fitzpaul and so earned the family gratitude. Perhaps this. Perhaps that. What did it matter? Yes, a quaint observance, this trait of the Fitzpauls. An idiosyncrasy, a person might put it, such as a woman's objection to mice, or the energy of Henry Bergh--God rest him!--who fought that the law should protect horses from maltreatment. But what was queerer still, was their power over the foxes. Foxes greeted a Fitzpaul joyously, barking and wagging their tails like dogs--foxes, the most suspicious of all animals of the field. The Fitzpauls had some strange rhythmic power over foxes, as some people have over dogs. And yet, though this was mysterious, it was not so immensely mysterious. Some trainers are born with power over man-eating tigers, some men can handle snakes, some can sooth stampeding cattle. Morgan remembered hearing his father speak of Whistler Sullivan, who was called in when all hope of breaking a horse was gone. A mean, ferret-faced man, he would steal into the stall where a man-eating horse was tied and hackled, closing the door behind him, and a half-hour later he would bring the horse out. The horse would be coved and dripping with sweat, and never afterward would it balk or bolt or rear. And the Whistler had never laid a hand on him. He had only talked or hissed. People were afraid of the Whistler; the peasantry declared he had bargained his soul with the devil; but he had only power over horses, as the Fitzpauls had over the foxes of the field. Well, that was all explicable, within the range of human knowledge. It was extraordinary, but that was all. But there was an eerier thing yet about that family. Other families had their banshees, their ghostly pipes, their drummers on battlements to portend or announce approaching death. But when a Fitzpaul died,--so went the tradition, so it had been attested by living men, so it had happened within a wheen of years,--the lawns were peopled with foxes at the dusk of day. Not spectral things, but foxes of the field and wood who gathered to bid their protectors God-speed on their strange, strange journey. They knew of death as bee-keepers say bees know. They made no sound but for the rustle of the grass and the faint thudding of their pads. But they were there. And a passing peasant might see them and raise his hat. "God be good to the Fitzpauls," he would pray. "'T is they are good to the poor!" A strange thing that of the foxes, a thing not understood. How little, after all did we know of animals! But to blazes with that! Morgan swore. Animals were n't here to be understood. Animals were here to be used, a horse to be ridden; a hound to hunt with; a fox to be chased to the death--as he was here to ride and hunt and chase to-day; as he had done always; as he had done when Reynardine, his wife, lived.... A bird rose shrieking from the copse, and suddenly a hound gave tongue, and then another, and then the pack cried as one dog. There was a blast of the horn. "Gone away!" came the cheer of the huntsman. "Away! Away!" Then fifty horses thundered. IV First there was the minute red flash of the fox, slipping through the furze like a serpent, then the dappled flood of hounds, tails up, giving tongue like bells, then the master of the hunt on his great brown steeplechaser, then the huntsman, gay in pink, leather-faced with puckered eyes, on his little black mare. Then came the bunched hunt, the crash of ditches, the crackle of brambles, the thunder over turf, the _splosh-splosh_ over plowed land. There was the cheering of the country-side.