Suddenly the scream of some animal came from the near thicket. The women started and asked what it was.
“It was a hill-fox,” said Maitland to Claire. “They used to keep me awake at nights on the hill. They come and bark close to your ear and give you nightmare.”
The lady shivered. “Thank Heaven for the indoors,” she said. “Now, if I had been the daughter of one of your old Donalds of the Isles, I should have known that cry only too well. Wild nature is an excellent background, but give me civilisation in front.”
Maitland was looking into the wood. “You will find it creep far into civilisation if you look for it. There is a very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors.”
“There are miles of luxuries,” the girl cried, laughing. “People who are born in the wrong century have to hunt over half the world before they find their savagery. It is all very tame, but I love the tameness. You may call yourself primitive, Mr. Maitland, but you are the most complex and modern of us all. What would Donald of the Isles have said to politics and the Stock Exchange?”
They had strolled back to the house. “Nevertheless I maintain my belief,” said the man. “You call it miles of rampart; I call the division a line, a thread, a sheet of glass. But then, you see, you only know one side, and I only know the other.”
“What preposterous affectation!” the girl said, as with a pretty shiver she ran indoors. Maitland stood for a moment looking back at the darkness. Within the firelit hall, with its rugs and little tables and soft chairs, he had caught a glimpse of Despencer smoking a cigarette. As he looked towards the hills he heard the fox’s bark a second time, and then somewhere from the black distance came a hawk’s scream, hoarse, lonely, and pitiless. The thought struck him that the sad elemental world of wood and mountain was far more truly his own than this cosy and elegant civilisation. And, oddly enough, the thought pained him.
III
The day following was wet and windy, when a fire was grateful, and the hills, shrouded in grey mist, had no attractions. The party read idly in armchairs during the morning, and in the afternoon Maitland and Clanroyden went down to the stream-mouth after sea-trout. So Despencer remained to talk to Claire, and, having played many games of picquet and grown heartily tired of each other, as teatime approached they fell to desultory comments on their friends. Maitland was beginning to interest the girl in a new way. Formerly he had been a great person who was sensible enough to admire her, but something remote and unattractive, for whom friendship (much less love) was impossible. But now she had begun to feel his power, his manhood. The way in which other men spoke of him impressed her unconsciously, and she began to ask Despencer questions which were gall and wormwood to that young man. But he answered honestly, after his fashion.
“Isn’t he very rich?” she asked. “And I suppose he lives very plainly?”
“Rich as Croesus, and he sticks in his ugly rooms in the Albany because he never thinks enough about the thing to change. I’ve been in them once, and you never saw such a place. He’s a maniac for fresh air, so they’re large enough, but they’re littered like a stable with odds and ends of belongings. He must have several thousand books, and yet he hasn’t a decent binding among them. He hasn’t a photograph of a single soul, and only one picture, which, I believe, was his father. But you never saw such a collection of whips and spurs and bits. It smells like a harness room, and there you find Maitland, when by any chance he is at home, working half the night and up to the eyes in papers. I don’t think the man has any expenses except food and rent, for he wears the same clothes for years. And he has given up horses.”
“Was he fond of horses?” Claire asked.
“Oh, you had better ask him. I really can’t tell you any more about him.”
“But how do his friends get on with him?”
“He has hardly any, but his acquaintances, who are all the world, say he is the one great man of the future. If you want to read what people think of him, you had better look at the Monthly.”
Under cover of this one ungenerous word Despencer made his escape, for he hated the business, but made it the rule of his life “never to crab a fellow.” Claire promptly sought out the Monthly, and found twenty pages of superfine analysis and bitter, grudging praise. She read it with interest, and then lay back in her chair and tried to fix her thoughts. It is only your unhealthy young woman who worships strength in the abstract, and the girl tried to determine whether she admired the man as a power or disliked him as a brute. She chose a compromise, and the feeling which survived was chiefly curiosity.
The result of the afternoon was that when the fishermen returned, and Maitland, in dry clothes, appeared for tea, she settled herself beside him and prepared to talk. Maitland, being healthily tired, was in an excellent temper, and he found himself enticed into what for him was a rare performance—talk about himself. They were sitting apart from the others, and, ere ever he knew, he was answering the girl’s questions with an absentminded frankness. In a little she had drawn from him the curious history of his life, which most men knew, but never from his own lips.
“I was at school for a year,” he said, “and then my father died
