The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
"We did." Ronnie laughed. "Delightful spot."
Explanations over, they rode three abreast past the slate-roofed
cottages, the Rev. Adrian acknowledging with perfunctory bridle-hand the
salutes of his parishioners; and veered left along a metaled road
between high telegraph-poles.
"Are you stopping at Titterton's?" asked the parson, eying Ronnie's
gray.
"No. He couldn't manage me a room. I'm putting up at the pub in Key
Hatch just for the week-end."
"Do they do you well at the Bull?"
"Not badly."
They jogged on, Adrian and Ronnie chatting. Aliette rather silent. An
open car, whose occupant waved greeting, purred past. Miracle shied,
bumping the gray.
"Dash that fellow Moss! Why can't he ride to the meet like a Christian?"
muttered the parson.
Ahead of them, on the straight white of the road, they could see various
other horsemen and horsewomen, a slow-moving dogcart, and two or three
figures a-wheel. They overhauled and passed a flaxen-haired young
farmer, very red of face and waistcoat, on an unclipped four-year-old;
they added to their cavalcade a surly-eyed woman with weatherbeaten
features who straddled a ewe-necked black, and answered to the
inappropriate name of "Lady Helen." They came upon the dogcart, and
Aliette reined alongside for a chat. The parson and Lady Helen jogged
on.
"Mr. Cavendish--Mrs. O'Riordan," introduced Aliette.
The lady in the dogcart appeared to fill it, dwarfing the man at her
side. She was a vast, voluptuous blond, full-nosed and full-lipped,
slightly too well tweeded for the country. Her blue eyes, as they
surveyed Aliette and Ronnie, held that peculiar twinkle common to all
over-sexed women; they seemed to be pondering the problem, "Has Aliette
at last found a lover?"
Mrs. O'Riordan herself, after a hectic but--with one
exception--camouflaged career, had recently settled down to her second
(and, she believed, final) adventure in matrimony. The "exception," a
semi-literary, semi-theatrical Irish land-owner who drove the dogcart,
had caused her considerable trouble to capture; trouble which involved
an elopement, a year of uncertainty, a brace of arranged divorces,
various columns of undesirable publicity in the Sunday papers, and the
loss of several influential acquaintances. During these troubles
Aliette, an old school-friend, had championed Mary O'Riordan's cause;
and earned, by so doing, if not gratitude at least a very tolerable
counterfeit thereof.
Ronnie's horse, bucking violently at a passing cyclist, interrupted
conversation. The riders trotted on.
"Nice man," commented Mary O'Riordan.
"Good-looking woman, Aliette," remarked her husband.
Mary O'Riordan eyed her new male possession jealously. He was very
attractive to the sex, this dark-haired, lantern-jowled Irishman she had
captured from his first wife. It displeased her to hear him admire other
women--especially women like Aliette, whose poised slimness set her own
hoydenish bulk at such disadvantage.
4
It is a fifty-year-old custom of the Mid-Oxfordshire Hunt--the pack,
started by old Squire Petersfield of Great Petersfield just before
Waterloo, has changed hands many times but never failed its subscribers
of their two days a week, with one "bye" monthly--that the first meet in
March should be at the Kennels, an unpretentious building of sandstone
and concrete which shelters under the black slope of Petersfield Woods.
Already, half a mile away, Ronnie could see two blobs of pink, and
hounds--a runnel of moving white--pouring out of the gate their
kennelman held open. Hounds and pink disappeared from view as Aliette
led off the road up a sandy track between high blackthorns, and kicked
Miracle into a canter.
Following, Ronnie's pulses tingled. He hunted so rarely; but always,
hunting, this zest got into his blood. Only to-day, somehow, the zest
seemed heightened. It was as though the cantering figure ahead typified
the game. He felt drawn to her, drawn after her round the bends of the
track, drawn instinctively, drawn irresistibly.
All the last four miles of highroad they had been meeting people. Now,
just for a moment, they seemed utterly alone. And he knew, abruptly,
that he wanted to be alone with this woman; that he desired her
companionship.
They came to a locked gate. He dismounted, put his back against it, and
lifted it off the hinges for her. She smiled down at him, "Thank you,
Mr. Cavendish." He noticed, for the first time, how laughter dimpled the
cream of her cheeks. They could hear other people coming up the track.
The gray waltzed to Ronnie's remounting. Aliette watched him swing to
saddle, appraising--as she imagined--only his horsemanship. But now, in
her too, zest stirred, a strange new zest not entirely attributable to
the chase.
Three other riders trotted through the gateway, dispelling illusion.
"This way," said the wife of Hector Brunton, K.C.
They ambled, side by side, diagonally across rabbit-bitten pasture;
ambled, single-file, through a gap in the hedge-rows; struck an uphill
bridle-path; and arrived, almost last, at the meet.
On the flat strip of grass behind the kennels--the direct road to them
zigzags steeply down through Petersfield Woods--Will Oakley, the
huntsman, his crab-apple face a trifle less saturnine than usual under
its cap-peak, was just getting ready to throw off. Fifteen couple of
fairly level hounds desisted from their rolling and watched him eagerly.
Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., a heavy old-fashioned soldier,
white-mustached, in a heavy old-fashioned hunting-kit (his special
low-crowned bell-toppers were the despair of a certain aristocratic
hatter in St. James's Street) had just finished his inevitable pow-wow
with the kennelman. Ross Titterton (the whippety ex-sergeant-major came
early, bent on a little profitable horse-copery) stood, bridle over arm,
by Sir Siegfried Moss, an immaculate scarlet-coated, black-mustached
young politician who rode, by horse-show standards, magnificently.
The Rev. Adrian, no thruster, was finishing an early cigar to be
followed by an early nip from his silver flask. Lady Helen had engaged
the whipper-in in a reluctant monosyllabic conversation--Jock Herbert
was a shy, moon-faced young man from the North--on the eternal question
of scent. The remainder of the field, about sixty in all, stood in
equine groups of threes and fours a little away from hounds.
Mrs. O'Riordan's dogcart, Sir Siegfried's car and second horseman ("Must
hunt in one's own constituency occasionally, even if it is a provincial
pack," pronounced that very astute young politician), three flappers and
a brace of young men on push-bikes, Mrs. Colonel Sanders and a trio of
hard-bitten daughters afoot, a farm hand or two, and the socialist
doctor of Key Hatch (who was on a walking-tour with his knapsacked wife
and had come quite by accident on this "parasitic sport-crazy gathering
of the capitalist class") completes the picture.
The M.F.H. greeted Mrs. Brunton, whom he secretly thought an adjectival
nice little woman, adjectivally too pretty for that dimmed husband of
hers, and gave orders to throw off.
Low ripple of black, white, and tan between high bobs of black and
scarlet, pack, whip, and huntsman circled the dark of Petersfield Woods
and headed down-hill in the March sunlight. Bay, black, and brown
against green turf, followed the field. Very last, fighting-mad for a
gallop, boring sideways along the slope, came the fiddle-headed gray.
And "Confound the brute!" muttered Ronald Cavendish, seeing, over one
shoulder, a slim black figure on a big chestnut; a slim black figure
which seemed suddenly more important than the business of the chase.
But Aliette, watching hounds ahead, had utterly forgotten that one
strange flash of premonition.
5
"Not much luck so far, Mrs. Brunton."
They had been at it nearly two blank hours; trotting from covert to
tenantless covert; waiting vainly at covert-side for the "welcome
whimper" of hound to scent, for the full music which follows the
whimper, for the twang of the huntsman's horn and the "view-halloo" of
fox's departure.
"We ought to find here," said Aliette.
Ronnie's gray, at last mastered to good manners, stood quietly beside
her chestnut at the west corner of Parson's Copse. To the left of them a
ditch and an elder-hedge screened the wood. All along the ditch and the
elder-hedge other horsemen and horsewomen were waiting. Through the
hedge they caught glimpses of browned bracken, of dun tree-boles, of a
green ride here and a clump of dead bramble there. In front, the
mole-heaved turf crested in shadow to a clouding sky. To the right and
below them Parson's Hill sloped to an open valley country: first a strip
of ill-fenced waste-land, a white road; then hedged grass-fields, young
wheat, brown plows, a gleam of water; beyond, a church-tower, squat
among poplars; further still, rising turf and twin hills dark with
gorse.
Now, from the other side of the wood, they heard Will Oakley's voice:
"Leu in, Ranger! Leu in." A whip cracked. They caught the soft twang of
a horn.
Life stirred in the wood: a wary pigeon rose blue through branches;
bracken rustled as a bunny sprinted to hole; a blackbird popped out of
the hedge, popped in again. They were wise to hounds moving in covert;
saw white sterns waving through brown bracken; heard a whimper, another
whimper, the horn again. Dubiously, a hound gave tongue; then a second
hound. The horses under them twitched excitement. Something red and
furtive whisked across the ride. They heard Oakley's echoing voice:
"Yooi push him up, push him up"; heard a touch of his horn; caught the
flicker of his scarlet among tree-boles.
And suddenly, the pack crashed to deep-toned melody. The copse rang to
it. The horses under them began to dance. The whole copse was a crash of
hound-music, now drawing away, now nearing them.
"Fox all right this time," said Ronald Cavendish; and even as he spoke,
Aliette, watching the rise in front, saw a low shadow streak across the
shadows and disappear.
Then, simultaneously, Jock Herbert bellowed from the south corner of the
wood: "Tally-ho! Gone away, gone away, gone away"; a hound or two in
full cry leaped down out of covert fifty yards ahead; the colonel's
voice roared, "Keep back, gentlemen, keep back," behind them; fourteen
couple of crazy hounds streamed down after one; and Will Oakley's roan
came thundering up the ride, crashed through the hedge, over the ditch,
and up the crest after a pack you could have covered under the
"pocket-handkerchief," without which no reporter considers his account
of a run complete.
The rest was a mad scurry of eight hoofs to skyline, glimpse of a low
fence, flown without thought, of the hounds pouring down-hill, of Will
Oakley, horn still in hand, tally-hoing them on.
* * * * *
"Now where, in the name of all that's holy," mused the Rev. Adrian,
"will that fox make for?" Most of the field were already away: he could
see them galloping alongside the wood, topping the fence at crest-line.
To the Rev. Adrian's eyes it looked as though they were leaping into
eternity.
Himself and a few wise ones, Ross Titterton included, had waited; and so
waiting, they saw that the fox must have circled for the valley.
Hounds, going far faster than the parson approved, crossed the white
road below him. He put his cock-throppled nag to a cautious canter, and
bumped downwards across the wasteland. Ross Titterton passed him at a
furious gallop; Lady Helen gave him a lead through a gap in the
dilapidated fencing. He could see hounds beyond the road: the master and
Will Oakley were well up; close behind him rode his brother's wife, Jock