Larry was staring at Christian as he spoke. He, like her was searching
for his former comrade; but, unlike her, was doing so unconsciously,
as Larry did most things: What he believed himself to be doing was
appraising her appearance from a painter's point of view. He found he
had forgotten her eyes. He tried to think of them in terms of paint;
_Brun de Bruxelles_, and a touch of cadmium, or was it _Verte
Émeraude_? Hang it! How can paint do more than suggest the colours of
a sunlit moorland pool? Was it the white hunting-tie that gave that
special "value" to her face He had forgotten how delicious in tone was
the faint colour that just tinted her cheek; so hopeless a word as
pink was not to be thought of; just a hint of _Rose Garance doré_,
might do it. And to get the drawing of those subtle outlines the
ineffable refinement of all her features. Larry put his head on one
side, and screwed up his eyes (remembering faithfully the injunctions
of "dear old Chose," _en clignant bien les yeux_) and said to himself
that she would put dear old Chose himself to his trumps, and then
maybe he wouldn't get her right!
Aloud he said, peremptorily and professionally:
"Christian, I'm going to paint you! Eight o'clock at the studio
to-morrow morning, _Ma'mselle, s'il vous plaît_!"
Christian's response was closured by a wild outcry from the wood,
hounds and horn lifting up their voices together in sudden delirium.
Old horses pricked their ears, and young ones, and notably, Nancy,
began to fret and to fidget. Some one said, unnecessarily: "That's
him!" A man, farther down the road, turned his horse, and standing in
his stirrups, stared over the wall into the thick covert, rigid as a
dog setting his game. Then he held up his hat, and, a moment later,
something brown glided, with the fluent swiftness of a fish in a
stream, across the road and over the opposite wall. The scream that
followed him was not needed; was, indeed, hardly heard in the
crashing, clashing clamour of the back, as they came pitching headlong
over the wall of the wood, and hurling themselves at the opposite
wall. It was high, and had a coped, top, and the yelling hounds broke
against it, and fell, like waves against a cliff. A couple achieved
it, and the anguish of their comrades, as they heard them go away,
full-cry, on the line, redoubled. In the same instant, Larry was off
his tall bay. He flung his reins to Christian, and was into the
struggling pack. It is no easy matter to heave a hound over a high
wall, but Larry and a young farmer had somehow shoved over four
couple, before Bill Kirby and his whipper-in came and swept the
remainder to a place of possible entrance a little further on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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