Miss Antonia drew the carving knife across the pheasant's breast firmly. She cut two slices and laid them on a plate. Deftly the footman whipped it from her, and old Miss Rashleigh raised her knife. Shots rang out in the wood under the window.
"Coming?" said old Miss Rashleigh, suspending her fork.
The branches flung and flaunted on the trees in the Park.
She took a mouthful of pheasant. Falling leaves flicked the window pane; one or two stuck to the glass.
"The Home Woods, now," said Miss Antonia. "Hugh's lost that." "Shooting." She drew her knife down the other side of the breast. She added potatoes and gravy, brussel sprouts and bread sauce methodically in a circle round the slices on her plate. The butler and the footman stood watching, like servers at a feast. The old ladies ate quietly; silently; nor did they hurry themselves; methodically they cleaned the bird. Bones only were left on their plates. Then the butler drew the decanter towards Miss Antonia, and paused for a moment with his head bent.
"Give it here, Griffiths," said Miss Antonia, and took the carcase in her fingers and tossed it to the spaniel beneath the table. The butler and the footman bowed and went out.
"Coming closer," said Miss Rashleigh, listening. The wind was rising. A brown shudder shook the air; leaves flew too fast to stick. The glass rattled in the windows.
"Birds wild," Miss Antonia nodded, watching the helter-skelter.
Old Miss Rashleigh filled her glass. As they sipped their eyes became lustrous like half precious stones held to the light. Slate blue were Miss Rashleigh's; Miss Antonia's red, like port. And their laces and their flounces seemed to quiver, as if their bodies were warm and languid underneath their feathers as they drank.
"It was a day like this, d'you remember?" said old Miss Rashleigh, fingering her glass. "They brought him home-a bullet through his heart. A bramble, so they said. Tripped. Caught his foot. . . ." She chuckled as she sipped her wine.
"And John . . ." said Miss Antonia. "The mare, they said, put her foot in a hole. Died in the field. The hunt rode over him. He came home, too, on a shutter. . . They sipped again.
"Remember Lily?" said old Miss Rashleigh. "A bad 'un." She shook her head. "Riding with a scarlet tassel on her cane. . . ."
"Rotten at the heart!" cried Miss Antonia.
"Remember the Colonel's letter. Your son rode as if he had twenty devils in him-charged at the head of his men. Then one white devil-ah hah!" She sipped again.
"The men of our house," began Miss Rashleigh. She raised her glass. She held it high, as if she toasted the mermaid carved in plaster on the fireplace. She paused. The guns were barking. Something cracked in the woodwork. Or was it a rat running behind the plaster?
"Always women . . ." Miss Antonia nodded. "The men of our house. Pink and white Lucy at the Mill-d'you remember?"
"Ellen's daughter at the Goat and Sickle," Miss Rashleigh added.
"And the girl at the tailor's," Miss Antonia murmured, "where Hugh bought his riding breeches, the little dark shop on the right . . ."
". . . that used to be flooded every winter. It's his boy," Miss Antonia chuckled, leaning towards her sister, "that cleans the Church."
There was a crash. A slate had fallen down the chimney. The great log had snapped in two. Flakes of plaster fell from the shield above the fireplace.
"Falling," old Miss Rashleigh chuckled. "Falling."
"And who," said Miss Antonia, looking at the flakes on the carpet, "who's to pay?"
Crowing like old babies, indifferent, reckless, they laughed; crossed to the fireplace, and sipped the sherry by the wood ashes and the plaster, until each glass held only one drop of wine, reddish purple, at the bottom. And this the old women did not wish to part with, so it seemed; for they fingered their glasses, as they sat side by side by the ashes; but they never raised them to their lips.
"Milly Masters in the still room," began old Miss Rashleigh. "She's our brother's . . ."
A shot barked beneath the window. It cut the string that held the rain. Down it poured, down, down, down, in straight rods whipping the windows. Light faded from the carpet. Light faded in their eyes, too, as they sat by the white ashes listening. Their eyes became like pebbles, taken from water; grey stones dulled and dried. And their hands gripped their hands like the claws of dead birds gripping nothing. And they shrivelled as if the bodies inside the clothes had shrunk.
Then Miss Antonia raised her glass to the mermaid. It was the last drop; she drank it off. "Coming!" she croaked, and slapped the glass down. A door banged below. Then another. Then another. Feet could be heard trampling, yet shuffling, along the corridor towards the gallery.
"Closer! Closer!" grinned Miss Rashleigh, baring her three yellow teeth.
The immensely high door burst open. In rushed three great hounds and stood panting. Then there entered, slouching, the Squire himself in shabby gaiters. The dogs pressed round him, tossing their heads, snuffling at his pockets. Then they bounded forward. They smelt the meat. The floor of the gallery waved like a windlashed forest with the tails and backs of the great questing hounds. They snuffed the table. They pawed the cloth. Then, with a wild neighing whimper, they flung themselves upon the little yellow spaniel who was gnawing the carcass under the table.
"Curse you, curse you!" howled the Squire. But his voice was weak, as if he shouted against a wind. "Curse you, curse you!" he shouted, now cursing his sisters.
Miss Antonia and Miss Rashleigh rose to their feet. The great dogs had seized the spaniel. They worried him, they mauled him with their great yellow teeth. The Squire swung a leather knotted tawse this way and that way, cursing the dogs, cursing his sisters, in the voice that sounded so loud yet so weak. With one lash he curled to the ground the vase of chrysanthemums. Another caught old Miss Rashleigh on the cheek. The old woman staggered backwards. She fell against the mantelpiece. Her stick, striking wildly, struck the shield above the fireplace. She fell with a thud upon the ashes. The shield of the Rashleighs crashed from the wall. Under the mermaid, under the spears, she lay buried.
The wind lashed the panes of glass; shots volleyed in the Park and a tree fell. And then King Edward, in the silver frame, slid, toppled, and fell too.
The grey mist had thickened in the carriage. It hung down like a veil; it seemed to put the four travellers in the corners at a great distance from each other, though in fact they were as close as a third class railway carriage could bring them. The effect was strange. The handsome, if elderly, the well dressed, if rather shabby woman, who had got into the train at some station in the midlands, seemed to have lost her shape. Her body had become all mist. Only her eyes gleamed, changed, lived all by themselves, it seemed; eyes without a body; eyes seeing something invisible. In the misty air they shone out, they moved, so that in the sepulchral atmosphere-the windows were blurred, the lamps haloed with fog-they were like lights dancing, will o' the wisps that move, people say, over the graves of unquiet sleepers in churchyards. An absurd idea? Mere fancy! Yet after all, since there is nothing that does not leave some residue, and memory is a light that dances in the mind when the reality is buried, why should not the eyes there, gleaming, moving, be the ghost of a family, of an age, of a civilization dancing over the grave?
The train slowed down. Lamps stood up. They were felled. Up they stood again as the train slid into the station. The lights blazed. And the eyes in the corner? They were shut. Perhaps the light was too strong. And of course in the full blaze of the station lamps it was plain-she was quite an ordinary, rather elderly, woman, travelling to London on some ordinary piece of business-something connected with a cat, or a horse, or a dog. She reached for her suit case, rose, and took the pheasants from the rack. But did she, all the same, as she opened the carriage door and stepped out, murmur "Chk., Chk." as she passed?