by Sara Seale
Uriah lay in the snow, very still, very quiet, a little trickle of blood seeping slowly from his nostrils, making a small brilliant pattern in the snow. His eyes were still bright with the desire to please and obey as Harriet knelt beside him, and his ill-favoured tail moved feebly in greeting. She tried to gather him into her arms, but he gave a little moan of pain, and she laid him back on the snow, thinking with the strange detachment of shock how queer it was that Uriah, who went into paroxysms of craven terror at the pulling of crackers or the hint of a scrap, should when mortally hurt make no sound.
She was unaware of voices shouting and feet hurrying and slipping on the icy paving stones; she was unaware which of the two men she resisted when someone tried to lift her up, but it was Duff kneeling beside the dog, probing and examining with skilled hands, and Duff’s voice that said: “Take her inside, Rory. I’ll fetch a gun.”
“No!” she cried. “No, you can’t kill him ... he’ll get well ... he must get well...” But she could see for herself now that the bright look was dimming, the eyes which only a moment ago had been filled with loving recognition for her held only one bewildered question, and she remembered that strange look of the morning and Kurt’s puzzling behaviour.
“It’s kinder, my love—he’s nearly gone, and there’s no need to prolong his suffering,” she heard Duff say, but it was not until long afterwards that she remembered and wondered at that unfamiliar endearment.
“Yes,’ she said, and Rory helped her up gently and took her into the house.
She heard the shot distinctly as she sat by the fire in the snug, and she said to Rory with a total absence of emotion or even resentment:
“Perhaps it’s a good thing. Duff never liked him.”
“Now, Princess—don’t go building up fresh misunderstandings,” Rory said, thinking this final episode was quite enough to effect an estrangement that could have permanent results. “I would have done it myself to save Duff the necessity for being the one to give you pain, but he’s a dead shot and I’m not.”
“I’m not building up anything that wasn’t already there,” she said quite calmly. “Duff couldn’t help his aversion any more than he can help having nothing more than a fondness for me, because one can’t love to order.”
“I think, you know, that we’ve all been very much mistaken in Duff’s feelings,” he said, but she only smiled at him, replying gently:
“It doesn’t matter any more. Nothing matters any more. I wish, though, I hadn’t laughed at Uriah. One should never ridicule anybody in case it’s the last thing you have to offer them.”
Rory was relieved when his cousin returned to the house and made an excuse to leave them together. If Duff handled the situation cleverly, it could be the moment, he thought, to resolve emotional difficulties and arrive at a better understanding.
But when he had gone, Duff made no move to touch her. He knew, with weary acceptance, that his act of mercy must drive her further from him and only implement that revealing bitterness of the morning. He could do no more for the present, he thought, than express sympathy and leave open his willingness to meet her more than half-way should she need anything else of him, but he looked at her a little curiously as she sat by the fire listening politely to his rather stilted condolences. Harriet, who wept so easily and often so foolishly, had shed no tears at all for Uriah.
“I’m sorry it had to be me, my dear, to destroy the one thing you loved,” he said, hoping, perhaps, for a word of understanding to ease his own pain, even for tears and an excuse to gather her close and take the simple way of nursery comfort to break down this new resistance in her.
“It didn’t matter who, so long as it was quick and painless, and you weren’t fond of Uriah, so you wouldn’t have minded,” she said, and he turned away to look out of the window, observing how the white-clad countryside seemed to hold off the gathering darkness, remembering the bright drops of blood in the snow.
“I minded very much, as it happens. I often teased you about the poor old boy, but I was quite fond of him,” he replied, but he spoke with a careful avoidance of any plea for tolerance, and when she said nothing, he came back and sat down in his chair.
“How did it happen?” he asked in the brisk impersonal tones he used when dealing with matters among his employees which required explanation, and it seemed to be the right way, for she began to lose that unnatural calm, and anger at least made her vulnerable again.
“She did it deliberately. She drove straight at him,” she said, and a little colour came into her cheeks.
“Are you sure she didn’t skid? We heard her revving the engine and shooting off much too fast for safety in this weather, but as she didn’t stop it’s possible she hadn’t realised that she’d hit him.”
She turned her head slowly to look at him, and now her anger was for him.
“If you like to excuse your mistress, it’s only to be expected, I suppose,” she said very clearly, and his own anger was sparked off so suddenly that he had no time to control himself.
“Good God, Harriet! How dare you suggest such a thing!’ he exclaimed furiously. “Do you suppose, even if it were true, that I would make excuses if you’re telling the truth?”
“I always tell the truth,” she said.
“Yes, you do. And were you telling the truth, or was she lying, when she said you were tired of your marriage and wished she would take me off your hands?”
“I said I was tired of being pushed around and I wished you’d both make up your minds, which isn’t quite the same thing, but perhaps it’s had the same result.”
“What in hell do you mean by that?”
“That you’ve decided to continue as you were knowing that at least I won’t make trouble.”
He took a pull at his temper, remembering that after a sudden shock one can hardly be expected to act completely rationally.
“Continuing as we were amounted to no more than an armed truce, a preservation of civilised social relationship when it became necessary to meet,” he said. “But Samantha is not civilised under all that glossy finish and elegance, and I’d forbidden her this house even before today. Does that satisfy you?”
“But she came just the same, didn’t she?”
“She came to see you, as it happens—said you had a date. If you remember, I told you I didn’t wish you to see her. It was her bad luck that you were out and I was in. Now let’s go back, if you don’t mind. She left here in a flaming temper, I’ll admit, and when Samantha’s really roused she’s capable of anything, so please be very explicit.”
She told him in detail, but as she relived that dreadful moment, the hardness began to go out of her and she seemed to crumple.
“Why would she?” she asked him in bewilderment, and her eyes began to fill. “Why would anyone deliberately run a dog down like that? The car was practically stationary because she’d already had to brake, and I shouted to her to wait ... but I saw a sort of perverted pleasure on her face as she trod on the accelerator and drove right over Uriah...”
He half rose from his chair to go to her, but she drew back quickly, whether unconsciously or with deliberation he could not tell, but he sat down again and thrust his suddenly unsteady hands in his pockets.
“Yes ... yes ... I see,” he said in flat, unemotional tones. “Samantha’s reasons, I’m afraid, are perfectly clear to me. If her own desires are denied, she satisfies them by smashing the desires of others. She’s successfully poisoned my own hopes, and, just for good measure because you were in her way, she destroyed your most precious possession. Well, that’s the end, I hope, for she knows she’s shot her bolt. The tragedy is, though, that some things can be broken beyond repair, so the day’s mischief lives on.”
Harriet barely took in what he was saying, for reaction was setting in and she felt numbed. Although her eyes had filled with tears as she spoke of her dog she still did not cry, but began to shiver, and Duff, after a sharp look at her, got up and poured her a stiff brandy.
>
“You’d better have an early night and I’ll bring you up a sedative,” he said. “I won’t disturb you in the morning as Rory and I are starting early in case the roads are tricky. Will you try to think of me more kindly while I’m gone, Harriet?”
“Yes, Duff,” she said with the old compliance, and Rory came back into the room, followed by the two Alsatians. He raised an enquiring eyebrow at his cousin, who gave an imperceptible shake of the head, and Kurt walked stiffly round Harriet, sniffing at her skirt, then sat on his haunches making that plaintive little cry in his throat and offered a paw.
The two men exchanged glances and Rory said very softly: “I think Kurt did know. Animals do sometimes have a prerecognition of death—in themselves, and others of their kind. Was that what you sensed in Uriah this morning, Harriet, when you said you had a funny feeling about him?”
“Yes...” said Harriet slowly. “He must have had that queer moment of knowing ... he looked at me so strangely ... such a wise look of knowledge and acceptance ... and I’d been laughing at him—I’d hurt his feelings horribly and he was going to d-die...”
All at once she was weeping, covering her face and choking on great tearing sobs, and Duff was by her side in a moment holding her, comforting her, while Rory looked on with a wry little smile of something that might have been regret. She turned to Duff instinctively, then, as if she had suddenly become aware of him as a person, she pushed him away and got up.
“No ... I don’t want you...” she said, and ran out of the room.
They had gone long before she had awakened from her drugged sleep in the morning, and her first conscious feeling was one of emptiness and abandonment. They had all gone, Uriah, Rory, Duff, for somehow she thought of them in that order. Rory had said his farewells last night at the foot of the stairs, refusing her tentative plea to stop on until Duff returned, and later, Duff had come upstairs with hot milk and the promised sedative, and talked prosaically on a number of dull topics, made up the fire for the night, and gone away. Just when she was dropping off to sleep a strange thing had happened. She thought she heard something scratching at the door, and told herself it was only her imagination trying to persuade her that Uriah was waiting to be let in, but it came again, more impatiently, accompanied by a little whine, and she sprang out of bed and opened the door. Kurt stood there, ears pricked, tail slowly waving, eyes shining green in the lamplight. He had walked gravely into the room, smelt everything with deliberation, gave her a stately nod in passing, then lay down by the bed with his nose between his paws, heaved a deep sigh and went to sleep.
“Kurt is a very extraordinary animal,” she said to Nonie in the morning. “He seems to know things in a most uncanny fashion. If I’d been a little younger I’d have thought he was enchanted.”
“Alsatians have a very high I.Q.” Nonie told her with the kindly tolerance of the already initiated. “They’re more sensitive than ordinary dogs and of course they’re a working breed, so when you think of how they track and guard and lead the blind and find dead bodies—in the war, that was—it’s not surprising that Kurt should show a little intelligence over poor Uriah.”
“No, I suppose not, if you put it like that,” Harriet said meekly, accepting rebuke for her lack of knowledge of the canine world and Alsatians in particular.
“Besides, he was jealous. He’s been wanting to make friends for ages, but you rather spurned him. Now Uriah’s out of the way, he knows he can have a clear field,” Nonie went on with that candid heartlessness of childhood, then catching Harriet’s rather sad little smile, added hastily: “I didn’t mean that nastily, Harriet. I was very sorry Cousin Samantha ran over him, but he wasn’t a terrible loss to the fancy, was he?”
“The fancy?”
“The dog-breeding world. It’s a name they have.”
“Oh, I see. No, I suppose he wouldn’t be, but he was a loss to me.”
“Oh, yes, I know, and I’m sorry, but you’ll have Kurt. He’s adopted you, you see.”
Indeed, it seemed that he had. He followed Harriet everywhere, never very demonstrative as if he was still weighing her up before deciding to present her with his heart, but always there. At first she thought he had merely attached himself to her because he was missing his master, but Delsa, though she plainly felt bereft and friendless, curled up on her blanket all day and couldn’t even be enticed out for a walk.
“What shall we do?” asked Nonie, feeling, evidently, as aimless as Harriet now her father’s familiar authority was removed, and indeed, thought Harriet, there was little to do that would occupy them for a whole day without the focal point at mealtimes and the masculine comings and goings which lent a pattern and a kind of solidity to the day.
“Let’s build that snowman,” Harriet suggested, but although the morning was as bright and invigorating as yesterday, the sparkle had gone out of things for her, and Nonie soon tired of shovelling up snow, and kicked the half-finished effigy to pieces with ominous petulance. Nonie, Harriet thought, no less than she, was troubled by undigested facts and fancies, and she returned more than once to the curious plea for assurance that Harriet was not going away. She made several attempts during the day to acquaint Harriet with details of what she described as a terrible row between her father and her Cousin Samantha, but since her information must have been arrived at by listening at doors, Harriet felt obliged to discourage her.
So the day wore on to a close and for Harriet the evening brought the thoughts which she had pushed aside all day into sharper focus. She could no longer ignore Duff’s absence when she ate alone in the breakfast-room, and afterwards faced his empty chair in the snug. The huge house seemed more silent than ever, Rory’s gay laughter a ghost that mocked her, and the pain in Duff’s face as she had accused him of not minding that it was he who had to end poor Uriah’s sufferings became a nagging pain in her own heart.
She tried to remember those things he had said when she flung her accusations at him, but she could scarcely remember her own bitter words, or that she had made it impossible for him to afford the comfort she had so much needed. Tired out in mind and body, she could only cling childishly to a growing sense of outrage that he should have left her summarily in her moment of distress. That business trip could surely have been postponed. Any husband who loved his wife would have put off his affairs for a day or so to cherish and comfort, but she had to remind herself at this point that there had never been any question of love between them, and that the trip to Dublin had been connected with Samantha however true it might have been that he had forbidden her his house.
Well, she had asked for it, Harriet supposed, eyeing the dying fire but not disposed to replenish it and prolong an unrewarding evening. She had known when she married him that Duff had no more to offer than tolerance and the protection of his name; it was not his fault if she had so far forgotten her own role as to fall in love with him.
There was a fresh fall of snow in the night, and Molly, when she brought up the morning tea, observed: “I don’t envy that felly on the run if he’s still hidin’ up in the hills.”
“He must have got away from here, besides, it’s five days now—how would he get food in the hills?” Harriet said, and Molly shrugged, no longer very interested now the first excitement of an escape had worn off.
“They say he had a gurrl hereabouts who’d maybe bring him food an’ get him away when things are quiet again, but meself, I’d say you were right an’ he’s away an’ out of the country by now. Isn’t it the foine thing the way Kurt has taken to you, ma’am? ‘Tis as if he knows you have the sore heart, the craythur.”
“Yes, I have the sore heart, Molly,” Harriet said, and the girl looked at her with a hint of mischief.
“You’d be missm’ himself more than, the poor little dog, I’m thinkin’. A house without a master’s like an egg without salt, Agnes says, an’ the same goes for a woman without her man. Well, he’ll be home tomorrow, so you’ll not need to mope much longer,” she said, and went
cheerfully away with the tray, spilling the milk as usual.
Rory had said it was time to take stock. Harriet took stock, examining her emotions carefully, retaining some, discarding others, remembering that a new year was upon them, and resolutions were expected. Molly had been right. She had been moping as much for Duff as for poor Uriah, but her bitterness and sense of rejection had stood in the way of acceptance. Agnes, too, was right with her curious analogy; Clooney without a master was indeed like an egg without salt, and she, without the familiar if sometimes intimidating pattern of Duff’s protection, was anchorless and lost. She saw now that Rory had been right to go, that her innocent pleasure in his company might well have hurt a man who, although unable to offer love himself, had even without that shown fondness and moments of tenderness.
He had said; Perhaps some of your faith in miracles will rub off on me ... Was it too much of a miracle to expect that in time a little of her love might rub off on him, too? It was then that she remembered his words as she had knelt by Uriah in the snow ... he had called her his love, like any other concerned lover, and afterwards she had said bitter things, pushed him away and thrown his comfort in his face...
Nonie came into the room as she finished dressing and stood fingering the things on the dressing-table, aimlessly opening and shutting drawers, clearly still in yesterday’s mood of petulance.
“What can we do today?” she kept asking, and Harriet, who had just brought herself to a more sensible state of mind, felt irritated at the prospect of having to cope with Nonie’s indecisions.
“What do you do when you go off on your own and only appear at mealtimes?” she asked briskly. “Today’s no different from any other.”
“Father’s not here.”
“Well, when he is, you don’t see much of him—neither do I when he’s busy about the estate. Are you missing your Uncle Rory?”
