part leading to the back of the stables, and they took the horses to the yard, leaving them with the groom, and Fanny-Rosa dismounted, and slipped in at the back door of the castle to go upstairs and change her habit. She came down again within five minutes, looking more enchanting than ever, and, her arm linked in John's with a possessive air that delighted him, they wandered into the dining-room to inspect the portrait.
The room was filled with people, eating, and drinking, and admiring Jane's likeness, and it amused John to see how Fanny-Rosa's manners in public differed from those when she was alone with him or amongst her own family in Andriff. For there, at home, she would be careless, impatient, the wild and wayward Fanny-Rosa who was so close to his heart, but here she was courteous, gracious, with even a hint of the great lady in her bearing.
'Clonmere looks very fine under these conditions,' she said to John. 'I like to see the people about the grounds, and the house full. It makes for life, and gaiety.
Why does your manservant not wear livery? Ours always does. It would look so much better than that black coat.'
'We are too far from civilisation here to entertain much,' answered John, with a smile. 'Listen, there is Dan Sullivan striking up on his fiddle.
Let us go and watch the fun.'
The drawing-room had been cleared, and Barbara, seated at the spinet, with Dan Sullivan beside her, was launching forth into the opening bars of the quadrille.
Her partner, more used to the merry strains of a country jig than the stately measure demanded of him, strove to keep in slow time with Miss Brodrick, and the result, though hardly worthy of the Assembly Rooms in Bath, had a certain liveliness that was not unpleasant to the ear. Jane, flushed and happy, had forgotten her invitation to John, and stood at the top of the room facing the irrepressible Lieutenant Fox, and John, laughing, held out his hand to Fanny-Rosa. The sight of the youth and beauty displayed before him, the fine dresses of the ladies and the scarlet coats of the young officers from the garrison, proved too much for Dan Sullivan.
His fiddle ran away with him entirely. The quadrille, after the first figure, was forgotten, and the strains of a lilting dancing jig soon hummed upon the air, so infectious in its call to caper that quickly decorum and propriety were flung to the winds, the young officers seized their partners by the waists, and there was a general stampede upon the floor, with whistles, and song, and laughter, 'for all the world,' as old Martha said, watching from the open doorway, 'like the boys and girls at Kileen fair.' The older generation, shaking their heads, retired downstairs to the dining-room. Copper John, feeling that nothing positively disgraceful could occur while Barbara remained at the spinet, retired to the library with one or two friends, and closed his door upon the sounds of revelry.
The shadows of the summer evening crept upon the castle walls, and a great moon came up behind Hungry Hill and shone upon the creek, and still Dan Sullivan played like one possessed, the sound of his merry music coming from the open drawing-room windows to the grounds below. The madness spread to the tenants outside, already well-primed with food and liquor, and before long the girls had thrown aside their shawls and their shoes, the young men had discarded their coats, and one and all were dancing in the moonlight before the grey walls of the castle.
One of the officers observed them first from the window.
'Come here,' he cried to his partner, 'look what our example has done,' and in a moment the window was crowded with laughing faces and waving hands, and Fanny-Rosa, flushed, andwiththe wicked look in her eyes that John had seen before, turned to him and said, 'Let us go down and join them, let us all dance barefoot upon the grass,' Doctor Armstrong murmured that perhaps everyone had danced enough for the evening, and to go and caper in the moonlight would hardly be the thing.
'Bother 'the thing,'
' said Fanny-Rosa, dragging at John's hand, 'it plagues the existence of every one of us. Come on, follow me, everyone.' And they ran down the stairs and through the hall into the open, party dresses crushed against uniforms, mittened hands held in white-gloved palms, and so mingled with the excited tenants on the grass, that shone like a silver carpet, magic and mysterious, under the white moon. They danced, guest and tenant, man and maiden, stiff young officers and haughty young ladies, like wild things from beyond the mountains, as though the moon had cast a spell upon every one of them, and it was not until the moon itself was high in the heavens, shining down upon Doon Island, that Dan Sullivan, the sweat pouring from his face, laid down his fiddle and rested his head upon his drooping arms, and the fairy people he had conjured with his wand became mortal once more, with weary backs, and aching feet, dishevelled hair, and scarlet faces.
One by one the tenants disappeared, laughing, scolding, sighing, with the memory of 'Miss Jane's coming of age' to be fuel for gossip for many a long day to come. The carriages were ordered for the guests, the boats were summoned for the officers of the garrison, and John Brodrick of Clonmere, who had seen his castle for the space of a few hours revert to barbarism, stood at his front door bidding his friends God-speed with more sincerity than cordiality.
'Never again,' he said firmly, 'never again.'
And Barbara and Eliza, chastened and drooping, pulled themselves together sufficiently to bow and smile to those who were departing, while Jane, a rebel still, vanished over the grass to say goodnight to Lieutenant Fox.
In the stable-yard John and Fanny-Rosa bent over the sleeping figure of the Castle Andriff groom. He was quite drunk, and equally helpless.
'He will never be able to ride back with me tonight,' laughed Fanny-Rosa, who, dressed once more in her green habit, trailed her bonnet by its strings.
'I shall ride home with you instead,' said John, 'and the moon will light us all the way.'
She looked up at him and smiled.
'I shall be home,' she said, 'before you are even in the saddle.'
And leading her horse to the block, she mounted and seized the reins, and nourishing the little whip in John's face, she rode out of the stable-yard, looking back at him, and laughing over her shoulder.
John shouted to Tim to saddle his horse, and in a few minutes he was after her, leading the groom's animal beside him, and Fanny-Rosa, when she saw she was pursued, set her horse to a canter and laughed the louder. He chased her up the drive, past the gate-house, down the road and through Doonhaven, and it was not until she slackened rein beneath Hungry Hill that he was able to come up with her.
'You might have broken your neck,' he said, 'riding at that devil's pace.'
'The devil looks after his own,' she said, 'he would not let me go astray. Oh, John, the moon…?
Mundy Bay lay beneath them like a sheet of silver, and Hungry Hill itself loomed mysterious and white above the road.
'Let's take the horses up there in the heather,' said John.
They left the road, and wandered upon the track they had followed once before, nearly two years ago, on the day of the picnic. Then the sun had burnt the grass of Hungry Hill, and the warmth of the day had clung about the rocks and the heather. Tonight all was silent and still in the soft moonlight. John climbed from his horse, and put up his arms to lift Fanny-Rosa to the ground. She laid her cheek against his, and put her arms about his neck. He carried her to the heather and lay beside her, watching the silver in her hair.
'Have you been happy today?' he said to her.
She did not answer. She touched his face with her hand and smiled.
'Will you love me one day?' he asked her.
She pulled him down close to her, and her hands pressed against his shoulders.
'I want to love you now,' she said.
He kissed her closed eyes, and her hair, and the corner of her mouth, and as she sighed and clung to him the thought of Henry came to him once again, ghostly, and unbidden, and even as he held her there against him in the moonlight he said to her: 'Did you kiss Henry thus before he left Naples and went to die in Sens?'
She opened her eyes and stared at him, and he read passion there, and wanting, and strange bewilderment.
'Why should you ask me that?' she said. 'What has your brother Henry got to do with you and with me? He is dead, and we are alive.'
She hid her face against his shoulder, and all the doubt and jealousy that possessed him were swept aside in the great love and tenderness he felt for her, so that nothing mattered, he thought, but the longing that was theirs alone upon this night under the moon on Hungry Hill. The past should be something buried and forgotten, the future
