The great family at Mundham were about to entertain the county. That was the whisper, which was presently to be spoken aloud as a pure fact. It ran over the land with “At last!” hissing at its heels, and a still more sinister whisper chased the pair of them; for the Dromards might have entertained the county months before; a house-warming had been expected of them in the winter, but they had chosen to warm Mundham with their own friends from a distance; and since then the general election had become a moral certainty for the following spring, and — the point was — Viscount Manister had declared his willingness to stand for the division. The corollary was irresistible, but so, it appears, was Countess Dromard’s invitation, which few are believed to have declined — for those that did so made it known. Some disgust, however, was expressed at the kind of entertainment, which, after all, was to be nothing more than a garden party. But nearly all who were bidden accepted. The notice, too, was shorter than other people would have presumed to give; but other people were not the Dromards. The countess’ invitation conveyed to a hundred country homes a joy that was none the less keen for a certain shame or shyness in showing any sort of satisfaction in so small a matter. Nevertheless, though not adorned by a coronet, as it might have been, nor in any way a striking trophy, the card obtained a telling position over many a rectory chimney-piece, where in some instances it remained, accidentally, for months. In justice to the residents, however, it must be owned that not one of them read it with a more poignant delight, nor adjusted it in the mirror with a nicer care and a finer show of carelessness, nor gazed at it oftener while ostensibly looking at the clock, than did Mrs. Erskine Holland during the next ten days.
But when it came she acted cleverly. There was occasion for all her cleverness, because in her case the invitation was a complete surprise; she had not dared to expect one; and you may imagine her peculiar satisfaction at receiving an invitation that embraced her “party.” Yet she was able to toss the card across the breakfast table to Erskine, merely remarking, “Should we go?” And when Tiny at once stated that for her part she was not keen, Ruth gave her a sympathetic look, as much as to say, “No more am I, my dear,” which might have deceived a less discerning person. But Tiny saw that her sister was holding her breath until Erskine spoke his mind.
“Have we any other engagement?” said he directly. “If not, it would hardly do to stick here playing tennis within sight of their lodge. I’m no more keen than you are, Tiny, but that would look uncommon poor. It was very kind of them to think of asking us; I’m afraid we must go; but I am sure you will find it amusing.”
“Thanks,” replied Christina, to whom this assurance was addressed, “but you needn’t send me there to be amused; you see, I have plenty to amuse me here,” she added, with a smile that had been slow to come. “I’ll go, of course, and with pleasure; but there would be more pleasure in some hard sets with you, Erskine, or in taking your photograph.”
“Ah, you don’t know what you’d miss, Tiny! I can promise you some sport, if you keep your eyes and ears open. Then you knew Lord Manister in Melbourne. In any case, you oughtn’t to go back there without a glimpse of some of our fine folks at home, when you can get it.”
“Oh, I’ll go; but not for the sport of seeing your clergy and gentry on their knees to your fine folks, nor yet to be amused. As for Lord Manister, he was well enough in Melbourne; he didn’t give himself airs, and there he was wise. But on his native heath! One would be sorry to set foot on the same soil. It must be sacred.”
“Come, I say, I don’t think you’ll find the parsons on their knees. We think a lot of a lord, if you like; but we try to forget that when we’re talking to him. We do our best to treat him as though he were merely a gentleman, you know,” said Erskine, smiling, but giving, as he felt, an informing hint.
“Ah, you try!” said Christina. “You do your best!”
“Our best may be very bad,” laughed Erskine; “if so, you must show us how to better it, Tiny.”
“I should get Tiny to teach you how to treat a lord, dear,” said Ruth, who saw nothing to laugh at, and seemed likely to lend her husband a severer support than the occasion needed.
“Say Lord Manister!” suggested Erskine. “Will you show me on him?”
“I may if you’re good — you wait and see,” said Tiny lightly. And lightly the matter was allowed to drop. For Herbert, as usual, was late for breakfast, which was for once a very good thing; and as for Ruth, it was merely her misfortune to have a near sight for the line dividing chaff from earnest, but now she saw it, and on which side of it the others were, for she had joined them and was laughing herself.
But Herbert would not have laughed at all; indeed, he had not a smile for the subject when he did come down and Ruth gave him his breakfast alone. It seemed well that Christina was not in the room. Her brother took the opportunity of saying what he thought of Manister, and what Manister had once called him behind his back, and what he would have done to Manister’s eye had half as much been said to his face. His personal decision about the garden party was merely contemptuous. He was not going. Nor did he go when the time came. Meanwhile, however, something happened to modify for the moment his opinion of the young viscount whom it was Herbert’s meager satisfaction to abuse roundly whenever his noble name was spoken.
Having been provided with two rooms at the rectory, in one of which he was expected to read diligently every morning, Herbert entered that room only when his pipe needed filling. He kept his tobacco there, and also, to be sure, his books; but these he never opened. He read nothing, save chance items in an occasional sporting paper; he simply smoked and pottered, leaving the smell of his pipe in the least desirable places. When he took photographs with Tiny, that was pottering too, for neither of them knew much about it, and Herbert was too indolent to take either pains or care in a pursuit which essentially demands both. He had rather a good eye for a subject; he could arrange a picture with some judgment. That interested him, but the subsequent processes did not, and these invariably spoilt the plate. All his actions, however, suggested an underlying theory that what is worth doing is not necessarily worth doing well. This applied even to his games, about which Herbert was really keen; he played lawn tennis carelessly, though with a verve and energy somewhat surprising in the loafing, smoking idler of the morning. He had been fond of cricket, too, in Australia; it was a disappointment to him that no cricket was to be had at Essingham. He looked forward to Cambridge for the athletic advantages. He had no intention of reading there; so what, he wanted to know, was the good of his reading here? Certainly Herbert had entered at an accommodating college, which would receive young men quite free from previous knowledge; but he might have been reading for his little-go all this time; and he never read a word.
But one morning he loitered afield, and came back enthusiastic about a place for a photograph; the next, Tiny and the implements were dragged to the spot; and really it was not bad. It was a scene on the little river just below Mundham bridge. The thick white rails of the bridge standing out against a clump of trees in the park beyond, the single arch with the dark water underneath and some sunlit ripples twinkling at the further side, seemed to call aloud for a camera; and Herbert might have used his to some purpose, for a change, had he not forgotten to fill his slides with plates before leaving home. This discovery was not made until the bridge was in focus, and it put young Luttrell in the plight of a rifleman who has sighted the bull’s-eye with an empty barrel. It was a question of returning to the rectory to load the slides or of giving up the photograph altogether. On another occasion, having forgotten the lens, Herbert had packed up the camera and gone back in disgust. But that happened nearer home. To-day he had carried the camera a good mile. Two journeys with something to show for them were preferable to one with a tired arm for the only result. Within a minute after the slides were found empty Christina was alone in the meadow below the bridge; Herbert had found it impossible to give up the photograph altogether.
Th
e girl had not lost patience, for she was herself partly to blame. There were, however, still better reasons for her resignation. She happened to have the second volume of “The Newcomes” in her jacket pocket, and the little river seemed to ripple her an invitation from the bridge to make herself comfortable with her book in its shade. There was no great need for shade, but the idea seemed sensible. With her hand on the book in her pocket, and her eyes hovering about the bridge for the coolest corner, she felt perhaps a little ashamed as she thought of Herbert making a cool day hot by running back alone for what they had both forgotten. It was hardly this feeling, however, that kept her standing where she was.
She had known no finer day in England. The light was strong and limpid, the shadows abrupt and deep. The sky was not cloudless, but the clouds were thin and clean. There was a refreshing amount of wind; the tree tops beyond the bridge swayed a little against the sky; the focusing cloth flapped between the tripod legs, and for some minutes the girl stood absently imbibing all this, without a thought in her head.
Presently she found herself wondering whether there was enough movement in the trees to mar a photograph; later she tucked her head under the cloth to see. As she examined the inverted picture on the ground glass, she held the cloth loosely over her head and round her neck. But suddenly she twitched it tighter. For first the sound of wheels had come to her ears. Then a dogcart had been pulled up on the bridge. And now on the focusing screen a figure was advancing upside down, like a fly on the ceiling, and doubling its size with each stride, until there occurred a momentary eclipse of the inverted landscape by Lord Manister, who had stalked in broad daylight to our Tiny’s side.
CHAPTER VI. A MATTER OF ANCIENT HISTORY.
The focusing cloth clung to her head like a cowl as she raised it and bowed. There must have been nervousness on both sides, for the moment, but it did not prevent Lord Manister from taking off his hat with a sweep and swiftness that amounted almost to a flourish, nor Christina from noticing this and his clothes. He was so admirably attired in summer gray that she took pleasure in reflecting that she was herself unusually shabby, her idea being that contact with the incorrect was rather good for him. Correctness of any kind, it is to be feared, was ridiculously wrong in her eyes. Otherwise she might have been different herself.
“I knew it was you!” Lord Manister declared, having shaken her hand.
“How could you know?” said Christina, smiling. “You must be very clever.”
“I wish I was. No; I met your brother running like anything with some wooden things under his arm. He wouldn’t see me, but I saw him. I was going to pull up, but he wouldn’t see me.”
Miss Luttrell explained that her brother had gone back for plates, which they had both very stupidly forgotten; she added that she was sure he could not have recognized Lord Manister.
“Plates!” said this nobleman. “Ah, they’re important, I know.”
“Well, they’re your cartridges; you can’t shoot anything without them.”
Lord Manister gave a louder laugh than the remark merited; then he studied his boots among the daisies. Christina smiled as she watched him, until he looked up briskly, and nearly caught her.
“I say, Miss Luttrell, I should like immensely to be on in this scene, if you would let me! I mean to say I should like to see the thing taken. Perhaps you could do with the trap and my mare on the bridge; she’s something special, I assure you. And I have been thinking — if you think so too — that my man might go back for your brother and give him a lift. It must be monstrous hot walking. It’s a monstrous hot day, you know.”
This was not only an exaggeration, but a puff of smoke revealing hidden fires within the young man’s head. Christina fanned the fire until it tinged his cheek by willfully hesitating before giving him a gracious answer. For when she spoke it was to say, with a smile at his anxiety, “Really, you are very considerate, Lord Manister, and I am sure Herbert will be grateful.” They walked to the bridge, and stood upon it the next minute, watching the dogcart swing out of sight where the road bent.
“Your brother is very likely halfway back by this time,” remarked Lord Manister, who would have been very sorry to believe what he was saying. “I dare say my man will pick him up directly; if so, they’ll be back in a minute.”
“I hope they will,” said Christina— “the light is so excellent just now,” she was in a hurry to add.
“Ah, the light in Australia was better for this sort of thing.”
“As a rule, yes; but it would surely be difficult to beat this morning anywhere; the great thing is, over here, that you are so free from glare.”
“Then you like England?”
“Well, I must say I like this corner of England; I haven’t seen much else, you know.”
“Good! I am glad you like this corner; you know it’s ours,” said the young fellow simply. Then he paused. “How strange to meet you here, though!” he added, as if he could not help it, nor the slight stress that laid itself upon the personal pronoun.
“It should rather strike me as strange to meet you,” Miss Luttrell replied pointedly; “for I am sure I told you that my sister and her husband had taken Essingham Rectory for August. You may have forgotten the occasion. It was in London.”
“Dear me, no, I’m not likely to forget it. To be sure you told me — at Lady Almeric’s.”
“Then perhaps you remember saying that you knew of Essingham?”
It was not, perhaps, because this was very dryly said that Lord Manister smiled. Nor was the smile one of his best, which were charming; it was visibly the expression of his nervousness, not his mirth.
“Yes, I am sorry to say I do remember that,” he confessed with an awkwardness and humility which made Christina tingle in a sudden appreciation of his position in the world. “It was very foolish of me, Miss Luttrell.”
“I wonder what made you?” remarked Christina reflectively, but in a friendlier tone.
“Ah! don’t wonder,” he said impatiently. His eyes fell upon her for one moment, then wandered down the road, as he added strangely: “You do and say so many foolish things without a decent why or wherefore. They’re the things for which you never forgive yourself! They’re the things for which you never hope to be forgiven!”
The girl did not look at him, but her glance chased his down the road to the bend where the dogcart had vanished and would reappear. She, however, was the next to speak, for something had occurred to her that she very much desired to explain.
“You see, I didn’t know you lived here. I had never heard of Mundham when we met in town; if I had I shouldn’t have known it was yours. I never dreamt that I should meet you here. You understand, Lord Manister?”
“My dear Miss Luttrell,” cried Manister earnestly, “anybody could see that!”
So Christina lost nothing by her little exhibition of anxiety to impress this point upon him; for his reply was a triumphant flourish of the opinion she desired him to hold, to show her that he had it already; and his anxiety in the matter was even more apparent than her own.
“Thank you, Lord Manister,” said Christina, looking him full in the face. Then her glance dropped to his hand; and his fingers were entangled in his watch-chain; and in the knowledge that the greater awkwardness was on his side she raised her eyes confidently, and met the dogged stare of a young Briton about to make a clean breast of his misdeeds.
“Do you want to know why I didn’t mention our having taken this place — that time in town?”
“That depends on whether you want to tell me.”
“I must tell you. It was because I feared — I mean to say, it crossed my mind — that perhaps you mightn’t care to come here if you knew.”
He paused and watched her. She was looking down, with her chin half buried in the focusing cloth, which had slipped from her head and fallen round her shoulders. The coolness of her face against the black velvet exasperated him, and the more so because he felt himself flushing as he added, “I see I
was a fool to fear that.”
“It was certainly unnecessary, Lord Manister,” said the girl calmly, and not without a note of amusement in her voice.
“So you don’t mind meeting one!”
“Lord Manister, I am delighted. Why should I mind?”
“You know I behaved like a brute.”
“You did, I’m afraid.” He winced. “You went away without saying good-by to your friends.”
“I went away without saying good-by to you.”
“Among others.”
“No!” he cried sharply. “You and I were more than friends.”
Christina drummed the ground with one foot. Her glance passed over Lord Manister’s shoulder. He knew that it waited for the dogcart at the bend of the road.
“We were more than friends,” he repeated desperately.
“I don’t think we ever were.”
“But you thought so once!”
The girl’s lip curled, but her eyes still waited in the road.
“I wonder what you yourself thought once, Lord Manister?” she said quietly. “Whatever it was, it didn’t last long; but I forgive that freely. Do you know why? Why, because it was exactly the same with me.”
“Do you forgive me for getting you talked about?” exclaimed Lord Manister.
“Yes — because it is the only thing I have to forgive,” returned Christina after a moment’s hesitation. “The rest was nonsense; and I wish you wouldn’t rake it up in this dreadfully serious way.”
We know what Christina might mean by nonsense. Lord Manister was not the first of her friends whom she had offended by her abuse of the word. “It was not nonsense!” he cried. “It was something either better or worse. I give you my word that I honestly meant it to be something better. But my people sent for me. What could I do?”
His voice and eyes were pitiable; but Christina showed him no pity.
“What, indeed!” she said ironically. “I myself never blamed you for going. I was quite sure that you were the passive party, though others said differently. All I have to forgive is what you made other people say; but the whole affair is a matter of ancient history — and do you think we need talk about it any more, Lord Manister?”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 20
