The hoof of a favourite horse mounted in silver
made an ornament upon the mantelpiece. His trophies made the room a
gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at
last to his guns and rifles.
He took them down from their racks. They were to him much what Ethne's
violin was to her and had stories for his ear alone. He sat with a
Remington across his knee and lived over again one long hot day in the
hills to the west of Berenice, during which he had stalked a lion across
stony, open country, and killed him at three hundred yards just before
sunset. Another talked to him, too, of his first ibex shot in the Khor
Baraka, and of antelope stalked in the mountains northward of Suakin.
There was a little Greener gun which he had used upon midwinter nights
in a boat upon this very creek of the Salcombe estuary. He had brought
down his first mallard with that, and he lifted it and slid his left
hand along the under side of the barrel and felt the butt settle
comfortably into the hollow of his shoulder. But his weapons began to
talk over loudly in his ears, even as Ethne's violin, in the earlier
days after Harry Feversham was gone and she was left alone, had spoken
with too penetrating a note to her.
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