St. Mawr

forbade her to be her ordinary, commonplace self. It forbade her to be just Rico’s wife, young Lady Carrington, and all that.

Lewis straightened himself and looked at her from under the falling mop of his black hair.

“How do you think he’d be with Sir Henry?”

Lewis turned his remote, coldly watchful eyes on the young baronet. Rico was tall and handsome and balanced on his hips. His face was long and well-defi ned, and with the hair taken straight back from the brow. It seemed as well-made as his

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clothing, and as perpetually presentable. You could not imag­ine his face dirty, or scrubby and unshaven, or bearded, or even moustached. It was perfectly prepared for social purposes. If his head had been cut off, like John the Baptist’s, it would have been a thing complete in itself, would not have missed the body in the least. The body was perfectly tailored. The head was one of the famous ‘talking heads’ of modern youth, with eyebrows a trifl e Mephistophelian, large blue eyes a trifl e hold, and curved mouth thrilling to death to kiss.

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Not any raw spot at all. A battle between two worlds. She realised that St. Mawr drew his hot breaths in another world from Rico’s, from our world. Perhaps the old Greek horses had lived in St. Mawr’s world. And the old Greek heroes, even Hip­polytus, had known it.

With their strangely naked equine heads, and something of a snake in their way of looking round, and lifting their sen­sitive, dangerous muzzles, they moved in a prehistoric twilight where all things loomed phantasmagoric, all on one plane, sudden presences suddenly jutting out of the matrix. It was an­other world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fi erce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed. – “Meet him half-way,” Lewis said. But half-way across from our human world to that terrifi c equine twilight was not a small step. It was a step, she knew, that Rico could never take. She knew it. But she was prepared to sacrifi ce Rico.

Phoenix, the half Indian, was very jealous when he saw the black-bearded Welsh groom on St. Mawr.

They were a curious pair of grooms, following the correct, and yet extraordinary, pair of American mistresses. Mrs. Witt and Phoenix both rode with long stirrups and straight leg, sit­ting close to the saddle, without posting. Phoenix looked as if he and the horse were all one piece, he never seemed to rise in the saddle at all, neither trotting nor galloping, but sat like a man riding bareback. And all the time he stared around at the riders in the Row, at the people grouped outside the rail, chatting, at the children walking with their nurses, as if he were looking at a mirage, in whose actuality he never believed for a moment. London was all a sort of dark mirage to him. His wide, nervous-looking brown eyes with a smallish brown pu­pil, that showed the white all round, seemed to be focused on the far distance, as if he could not see things too near. He was watching the pale deserts of Arizona shimmer with moving light, the long mirage of a shallow lake ripple, the great pallid concave of earth and sky expanding with interchanged light. And a horse-shape loom large and portentous in the mirage, like some prehistoric beast.

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That was real to him: the phantasm of Arizona. But this London was something his eye passed over as a false mirage. He looked too smart in his well-tailored groom’s clothes, so smart, he might have been one of the satirised new rich. Per­haps it was a sort of half-breed physical assertion that came through his clothing, the savage’s physical assertion of him­self. Anyhow, he looked ‘common’, rather horsey and loud.

She looked at him from dangerous grey eyes as if she meant it indeed, in vindictive earnest. A ghost of a smile went up to his high cheek-bones, but he did not answer.

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