The girl winced, quietly, between herself and the blind-cord.
"And in the meantime," she said lightly, "I suppose he is fully engaged in buying swords and guns and bomb-sh.e.l.ls, or whatever the Goorkhas use in warfare."
"He is coming home to-morrow for Sunday," replied Jem Agar"s stepmother absently. She was thinking of her own son, and therefore did not hear the quick sigh which was almost a gasp; did not note the sudden light in the girl"s eyes.
Dora Glynde was rather a solitary-minded young person. The only child of elderly parents, she had never learnt in the nursery to indulge in the indiscretions of confiding girlhood. She had the good fortune to be without a bosom-friend who related her most sacred secrets to other bosom friends and so on, as is the way of maidens. From her father she had inherited a discriminating mind and a most admirable habit of reserve.
She was quite happy when alone, which, according to La Bruyere, is a great safeguard against all evil.
She wanted to be alone now, and therefore pa.s.sed out of the open window with a non-committing "Good-bye, Aunt Anna!"
"Good-bye, dear," replied the lady, awaking suddenly from a reverie. But by the time she had turned round in her chair, the girl was gone.
Dora crossed the lawn, pa.s.sing between the sentinel pines and crossing the moat by the narrow footbridge. She climbed the railing with all the ease of nineteen years and struck a bee-line across the park. She never raised her eyes from the ground, never paused in her swinging gait, until she reached the brown hush of the beechwood which divided the Rectory garden from the southern extremity of the park.
Having climbed the railing again she sat on a mossy mound at the foot of a huge beech tree. Her manner of doing so subtly indicated that she did not only know the spot, but was in the habit of sitting there, possibly to think. A youthful privilege of doubtful value, for, as we get busier in life we have to do the thinking as we go along.
"Oh!" she muttered, "oh, how awful!"
A new expression had come over her face. She looked older, and all the vivacity had suddenly left her lips.
While she was still sitting there the crisp sound of footsteps on the fallen leaves approached through the wood. Looking up she saw her father, following the winding path through the spinney towards his home.
A grave man was the Rector of Stagholme in his declining years; hopelessly, wisely pessimistic, with sudden youthful returns of interest in matters literary and theological. As he came he read a book.
Instantly the expression of Dora"s face changed. She rose and went towards him, smiling contemptuously towards his lowering gravity. He looked up, gave a little grunt of recognition, and closed his book.
"Father," she said, "I"ve just heard a piece of news."
"Bad, I suppose."
She laughed.
"Well," she answered, "I suppose we shall survive it. Jem has got his commission, in a Goorkha regiment."
"Goorkha regiment? Nonsense!"
"Aunt Anna has just told me so. She is very pleased, and seems prepared for the--best."
"That is the custom of fools, to be prepared for the best--only."
The Rector gave a despairing shrug of the shoulders. He was a man who allowed himself, after the manner of the ancients with whom he lived mentally, a few gestures. He smoked a very expressive cigarette. He was smoking one at this moment, and threw it away half consumed. This divine was possessed of a rooted conviction that the Almighty made a great mistake whenever He invested temporal power in a woman, whom he was ungallantly inclined to cla.s.sify under a celebrated dictum of Mr.
Carlyle"s respecting the population of these happy Isles, who, truth to tell, care not one jot what Mr. Carlyle may think of them.
The Reverend Thomas Glynde and his daughter walked all the way home without exchanging another word. In the Rectory drawing-room they found Mrs. Glynde, small, nervous, worried. She had evidently devoted considerable thought and attention to the preservation of the hot b.u.t.tered toast. Poor humble little soul, she was quite content to minister to the bodily requirements of her spouse, having long been convinced of the inferiority of her own s.e.x in every respect except a certain limited knowledge of housekeeping matters.
She was vaguely conscious of inferiority to Dora from a literary point of view, and talked with abject humility to her own daughter of all things appertaining to books. But on all other points connected with the child of her old age this quiet little woman was absolute mistress. Years before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken East Burgen doctor put it, made an a.s.s of himself on the matter of a childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora"s half-fledged little life.
Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time forth the Rector was allowed to hold forth on symptoms to his heart"s content, to take down from his library shelf a stout misguided book of medical short-cuts to the grave, but nothing more.
He never referred to the asinine business, and in the course of years he forgave the doctor (having in view the fact that that pract.i.tioner had been carried away by a right and proper sense of the importance of the case), but he tacitly acknowledged that in the practice of home-administered medical a.s.sistance, his knowledge was second to a mother"s instinct.
"It appears," he said sharply, while he was stirring his tea, "that Jem Agar has got his commission in a Goorkha regiment."
Now Mrs. Glynde knew more about the organisation of the heavenly bands than of the administration of the Indian army. She did not know whether to rejoice or lament, and having been sharply pulled up--any time during the last twenty years--for doing one or the other in the wrong place, she meekly took soundings.
"What is that, dear?" she inquired.
"The Goorkhas are native Indian soldiers," explained the Rector. "Very good fellows, no doubt. They get all the hard knocks in small frontier wars and none of the half-pence. What the woman can have been thinking of, I don"t know."
Mrs. Glynde was anxiously glancing towards Dora, who was nicking the nose of a sportive kitten with the ta.s.sel of the tea-cosy.
"And will he go to India?" she asked, with laudable mental grovellings in the mire of her own ignorance.
"Course he will."
"And," added Dora cheerfully, "he will come home covered with glory and medals, with a weakness for strong pickles and hot language--I mean hot pickles and strong language."
"But," said Mrs. Glynde rather breathlessly, "are they never stationed in England?"
"No--never," replied her husband snappishly.
Mrs. Glynde had a pink patch on each cheek--precisely on the spot wh.o.r.e two such patches had appeared years ago when the doctor spoke so strongly. Those patches were maternal, and only appeared when Dora"s affairs, spiritual or temporal, were concerned.
"I don"t know," put in Dora again, "but I have a sort of lurking conviction that Jem will have to wear a turban and red morocco boots."
"But," pursued Mrs. Glynde, with that courage which cometh with a red patch on either cheek, "I always thought these Indian regiments were meant for people who are badly off."
The Rector gave a short laugh.
"You are not so very far wrong, my dear," he admitted. "And no one can say that Jem is badly off. He will be very rich some day."
The Rector a.s.sumed an air of superior discretion, to which he usually treated his women-folk when he thought fit to consider that they were touching on matters beyond their jurisdiction.
"Some more tea, please, mother," put in Dora appropriately. "Excuse my appet.i.te. I suppose it is the autumn air."
There was a short silence, during which Mrs. Glynde sought to propitiate her angered spouse with sodden toast and a second brew of tea.
"I always said," observed the Rector at last, "that your cousin was a fool."
And in some indefinite way Mrs. Glynde felt that she was once more responsible.
CHAPTER VI
FOR HIS COUNTRY
Shall I forget on this side of the grave?