Her horse, as if he perfectly understood, tossed his
head, and she drew attention to it with a deprecatory
little gesture of her hand and then said, “Shall
we come down now? Is your dance quite finished,
Tony? Are you content, Marko? All right.
We’ll descend. This is us descending.
Lady Tybar, who is a superb horsewoman, descending
a precipice on her beautiful half-bred Derry and Toms,
a winner at several shows.”
Derry and Toms stepped down off the bank with complete
assurance and superb dignity. With equal precision,
moving his feet as though there were marked for them
certain exact spots which he covered with infinite
lightness and exactitude, he turned about and stood
beside his partner in exquisite and immobile pose.
Thus the two riders faced Sabre, smiling upon him.
He stood holding his bicycle immediately in front
of them. The mare continued to quiver her beautiful
nostrils at him; every now and then she blew a little
agitated puff through them, causing them to expand
and reveal yet more exquisitely their glorious softness
and delicacy.
Sabre thought that the riders, with their horses,
made the most striking, and somehow affecting picture
of virile and graceful beauty he could ever have imagined.
Lord Tybar, who was thirty-two, was debonair and attractive
of countenance to a degree. His eyes, which were
grey, were extraordinarily mirthful, mischievous.
A supremely airy and careless and bold spirit looked
through those eyes and shone through their flashes
and glints and sparkles of diamond light. His
face was thin and of tanned olive. His face seemed
to say to the world, challengingly, “I am here!
I have arrived! Bring out your best and watch
me!” There were people—women—who
said he had a cruel mouth. They said this, not
with censure or regret, but with a deliciously fearful
rapture as though the cruel mouth (if it were cruel)
were not the least part of his attraction.
Lord Tybar’s lady, who was twenty-eight, carried
in her countenance and in her hair the pleasing complement
of her lord’s tan and olive hue and of his cropped
black poll. She was extraordinarily fair.
Her skin was of the hue and of the sheen of creamy
silk, and glowed beneath its hue. It presented
amazing delicacy and yet an exquisite firmness.
Children, playing with her, and she delighted in playing
with children (but she was childless), often asked
to stroke her face. They would stare at her face
in that immensely absorbed way in which children stare,
and then ask to touch her face and just stroke it;
their baby fingers were not more softly silken.
Of her hair Lady Tybar had said frequently, from her
girlhood upwards, that it was “a most sickening
nuisance.” She bound it tightly as if to
punish and be firm with the sickening nuisance that
it was to her. And these close, gleaming plaits
and coils children also liked to touch with their
soft fingers.
