A Lame Dog's Diary

by S. Macnaughtan

CHAPTER XVIII.

When Mrs. Fielden came to stay at the Melfords we saw a good deal of her. Their yacht used to steam up in the early morning, and they would take us off for a day's cruise on the loch or for a trip round to Oban. Mrs. Fielden used to sit on deck with a big red umbrella over her head and a white yachting gown on, and seemed serenely unconscious that she was looking very pretty and very smart. My sister tells me she never feels badly dressed till she meets Mrs. Fielden.

The Melfords have very pleasant people stopping with them always, and there are very jolly little parties on board their yacht. Mrs. Fielden, however, is in her most provoking and wilful mood. Every day it is the same thing—laughter and smiles for every one. But she has absolutely no heart. All the beautiful, kindly things she does are only the whim of the moment. They bespeak a generous nature, as easily moved to tears as to laughter; but she loves every one a little, and probably has no depth of affection or constancy in her. Lately, she has added another provoking habit to the many she already possesses. She exaggerates her pretence of having no memory, and indeed it may be she has not any.

When I left home, rather a wreck as regards health, and drove to the station in Mrs. Fielden's luxurious carriage, it was her hand that piled the cushions, as no one else can, behind me. And the last thing I saw was her smile as she waved her hand to me from my own door.

Last week, when we met again at the Melfords', she nodded to me in a little indifferent sort of way. She sat under a big cedar-tree on one of the lawns, and laughed, and talked a sort of brilliant nonsense the whole afternoon.

By-and-by I said to her—probably clumsily, certainly at the wrong time—"I never half thanked you for being so good to me when I was ill;" for she had come in like some radiant vision, day after day, in her beautiful summer gowns and rose-garlanded hats, and had sat by my couch, reading to me sometimes, talking to me at others in a voice as gentle as a dove's. Why will she not allow one to admire her? One only wants to do so humbly and at a distance. It was so pleasant up here in the Highlands, with the dear memory of those long days to look back upon. But Mrs. Fielden ruthlessly robbed me and sent me away empty the very first day of our meeting.

"Was I kind to you? I don't believe I was, really. If I was, I'm sure I forget all about it. Let me see, how long were you ill? It can't have been a bit amusing for you," and so on, laughing at my dull face and serious ways.

And this has gone on for a whole week. At the Melfords' parties she selects, quite indiscriminately, and in a royal way which she has, this man or that to be her escort or her companion. Now it is a mere boy whom she bewilders with a few of her radiant smiles, and now one of her elderly colonels whom she reduces to a state of abject admiration in a few hours. One man goes fishing with her, and another rows her on the loch. A third, hearing that Mrs. Fielden's life will be a blank if she does not possess a certain rare fern which may be found sometimes on the hillsides of Scotland, spends a whole day scrambling about looking for it, and returns triumphant in the evening. Mrs. Fielden has forgotten that she ever wanted it. When we sulk she does not notice it. When her colonels offer her their fatuous admiration she goes to sleep, and then, waking up, is so very, very sorry. "But you can't have amused me properly," she says, "or I should have stayed awake." When any one tries by avoiding her to show displeasure, Mrs. Fielden is oblivious of the fact. And when the penitence and boredom which immediately ensue when one has deprived Mrs. Fielden of one's company have led to ending the one-sided quarrel with an apology, it is only to find that Mrs. Fielden has been blissfully unconscious of one's absence. Summer and the air of the Highlands seem to be in her veins. Her happiness, like the quality of mercy, is twice blessed, making her, through her talent for enjoyment, diffuse something beautiful and gay about her.

After all, why should she care? Life was evidently made to give her pleasure. Why should a woman always be blamed for being loved? Mrs. Fielden's charm is of the irresponsible sort. To live and to be lovely are all one ought to demand of her, and at least she is without vanity. She seems to be entirely unconscious of the admiration she receives, or perhaps she is simply indifferent to it.

The Melfords adore her, and allow her to see it. They say no one knows her as they do. Probably we all feel that. This is one of Mrs. Fielden's most maddening charms. We have all found something in her that seems to belong to ourselves alone.

Lately I have discovered that she loves to wander up the hillside by herself, and listen to the plover's solitary cry, and sit in the sunshine with no companion near her. And one wonders why so frivolous a woman should care for this, and why when she comes back amongst us again her eyes should wear the wistful look which covers them like a veil sometimes.

When she left the Melfords' Palestrina asked her to come and stay with us; and rather to my surprise, Mrs. Fielden came. It seems to me she must find us a very dull lot after the Melfords' cheery house-parties. She arrived late one afternoon in the yacht, and the whole party came up to dine with us before returning to the castle. The little house was taxed to its utmost capacity, even to provide teacups for our guests. But the Melfords have a happy knack of seeming to find pleasure in everything. Mrs. Fielden's gaiety was infectious, and her lightheartedness knocked all one's serious world to pieces, while her beauty seemed almost extravagant in the plain setting of the little house.

She began to give us some of her experiences in Scotland. "Do you know," she said, putting on a charming gravity and lifting her eyebrows in a provoking, childish way, "that every single person in Scotland gets up at five o'clock in the morning? and all the coaches and excursions start at daybreak, and when you want to hit off what they call a 'connection' anywhere, you have to get up in the middle of the night?"

"I am afraid you had a horribly early start to join the yacht the other day," said Lord Melford, "but it was the only way we could manage to get to the Oban Gathering in time."

"I was there before you," said Mrs. Fielden; "and I had to rouse up the people at the inn to take me in and give me breakfast. Even they were not up at that hour! But after ringing twice, such a nice boots came and opened the door to me, and brought me some breakfast."

"The gathering was very good this year," said Lord Melford. "Why didn't some of you come? By-the-bye, your friend Mrs. Macdonald was there. Indeed, it was she who insisted on taking Mrs. Fielden to the Gaelic concert."

"Gaelic is rather an alarming language," said Mrs. Fielden. "I always feel as if I were being sworn at when I hear it."

One of Mrs. Fielden's admirers who had reached the savage and sarcastic stage here interposed, and said: "Poor Mrs. Fielden! I saw you at the concert. How did you manage to sit throughout a whole evening between Mrs. Macdonald and a wall?"

"Mrs. Macdonald is quite a dear!" said Mrs. Fielden. (Whom, in the name of Fortune, would Mrs. Fielden not find charming?)

"I don't know what you and Mrs. Macdonald can have found to talk about," said Palestrina, laughing.

"We discussed the training of servants most of the time," said Mrs. Fielden simply.

Every one laughed; and my sister, with a recollection of our visit to Mrs. Macdonald, said at once, "Did she give you any useful household recipes?"

"It is very odd that you should have asked me that," said Mrs. Fielden. "Do you know, that the whole of to-day I have been puzzling over a letter which I received this morning? I did not know the handwriting, and it was merely headed, 'Two recipes for boiling a ham, as requested.' Now, I cannot really have asked Mrs. Macdonald for recipes for boiling a ham, can I?"

We thought it highly probable that she had done so, and had done it, too, with an air of profound interest; and I think we said this, which Mrs. Fielden did not mind in the least.

"There is something rather horrible, don't you think so," she said, "in knowing how a thing is cooked?"

The minister, who is assiduous in calling, walked up after tea with his friend Evan Sinclair; and as we were already far too large a party for dinner, we asked them to stay too.

Mr. Macorquodale has frequently described himself to us as a grand preacher. He and Evan Sinclair live quite close to each other, and they are friends whose affection is rooted and maintained in warfare. For the minister and Sinclair to meet is one strenuous contest as to who shall have the last word. Politeness is not a strong motive with either of them—indeed, one would imagine that from the first it has been ruled out of place. The friendship and the warfare began at the Edinburgh High School years ago, and both the friendship and the warfare have lasted without intermission ever since. They meet every day, and often twice a day; they fish together, and in the winter they spend every evening with each other. Scottish people seem to have a sneaking liking for those who dislike them, and a certain pity mingled with contempt for those who show them favour and affection. The friendship of Evan and the minister is based upon feelings of the most respectful admiration for their mutual antipathy.

To keep alive this laudable and self-respecting warfare is the highest effort of genius of both Mr. Sinclair and the Reverend Alexander. To foster it they apply themselves to what they call "plain speaking" whenever they meet, and they conceal as much as possible from each other every single good quality that they possess.

The minister, who is a big man, always talks of Evan as "Wee Sinkler," and sneers at "heritors;" and Evan invariably addresses Macorquodale as "Taurbarrels," a name which he considers appropriate to the minister's black clothes and portly figure.

"The minister," said Evan, when he had walked up the hill to see us, "has been reading Josephus. We shall have some erudite learning from the pulpit for the next Sunday or two."

The minister was announced a moment later, and, before taking the trouble to shake hands with us, he looked Evan Sinclair over from top to toe, and remarked, "Ye're very attentive in calling upon ladies."

"I was just talking about your fine preaching," said Evan.

"I admit my gift," said the minister; "but I fear that I very often preach to a deaf adder which stops its ears." He nodded triumphantly at us, and it then occurred to him to shake hands.

Evan said at once that he got a better sleep in kirk on Sundays than he got during the whole of the week.

"Evan Sinclair," said the minister, "if I find you sleeping under me I'll denounce you from my pulpit, as a minister has the right to do."

"And we'll settle it in the graveyard afterwards," said Evan dryly. "And ye're not in very good training, my man."

Palestrina broke in gently to discuss a theological point which had puzzled us for several Sundays. On each Lord's Day as it came round we had prayed that we might become "a little beatle to the Lord." Doubtless the simile is a beautiful one, but its immediate bearing upon our needs was not too grossly evident. And it seemed almost dangerous to those who believe in the efficacy of prayer to put up this petition in its literal sense. We had decided for some time past that we should ask Mr. Macorquodale what it was exactly for which we made petition, when we prayed that we might become "a little beatle to the Lord."

"Similes," said Palestrina in her serious way, "are beautiful sometimes, but we can't quite understand one of the references that you make in your prayers on Sundays."

"We have prayed so fervently," said Mrs. Fielden, "without perhaps entirely understanding the portent of the petition, that we might become 'a little beatle to the Lord.'"

The thing was out now, and our curiosity, we hoped, would be gratified. There was a pause which suggested that our hearers were puzzled, and then Mr. Sinclair put a large pocket-handkerchief into his mouth and roared with laughter, and Mr. Macorquodale turned to my sister, who was trembling now, and remarked in an awful voice that he wondered that we didn't understand plain English.

Of course she apologized, and an explanation came afterwards from Evan Sinclair, who told us that the minister's prayer was that we—the church—might become a little Bethel, and that Beethel was his Doric pronunciation of the word.

It began to rain on Sunday, as it often does in Scotland—Nature itself seems to put on a more serious expression on the Sabbath—and it continued raining for four whole days. The rain came down steadily and mercilessly, shutting out the view of the hills, and turning the whole landscape into a big damp gray blanket. "I suppose," said Mrs. Fielden, who is never affected by bad weather, "that we shall all get very cross and quarrel with each other if the rain continues much longer."

"I think I shall write a number of unnecessary letters to absent friends," said Palestrina. "And Mr. Ellicomb and Sir Anthony Crawshay will arrive to-morrow, and we must tell them to amuse us."

It was a disappointment to find that Mr. Ellicomb's nerves and temper were seriously affected by the weather, and in moments of extreme depression his low spirits vented themselves in a rabid abuse of the Presbyterian Kirk. I cannot understand why Ellicomb should elect to wear a brown velvet shooting-jacket, and a pale-green tie, and neat boots laced half-way up his legs, in Scotland. He went to the village church in the rain on Sunday, and he has not been the same man since.

"Don't call it a church!" he cried as we went homewards up the hill, where the road was a watercourse and each tree poured down moisture. He seemed to think that he had done his soul an irreparable injury by entering a Presbyterian kirk.

Anthony said, "Oh! don't be an ass, Ellicomb." But even on Monday morning poor Ellicomb was still suffering from the weather and the effects of his churchgoing.

"Can he be in love?" said Palestrina; "and if so, as the Jamiesons would say, which is it?"

Palestrina is prettier than ever since her marriage. She still says, "Oh, that will be delightful!" to whatever Thomas and I suggest, and she never seems to have any occupation except to be with us when we want her, and to accede to everything we say, which of course, from a man's point of view, is a very delightful trait in a woman.

"I rather wonder," said Palestrina, "that I have not heard from any of the Jamiesons lately. They are usually such good writers."

"Depend upon it, there is a great bit of news coming," said Thomas. "The Jamiesons always maintain a dramatic silence just before announcing some tremendous piece of intelligence."

Thomas had hardly spoken the words before a telegram was handed to Palestrina, containing the following enigmatical words:—-

"Engaged Cuthbertson. Greatly surprised. Deeply thankful.—ELIZA."

This rather mysterious message was followed, later in the day, by a letter four pages in length, and marked on the outside, for some reason best known to Eliza, "Immediate." The letter explained more fully the cause of Eliza's thankfulness, and who it was that was greatly surprised.

"If you had told me," wrote Eliza, "six weeks ago that I should now be engaged to Mr. Cuthbertson, I should hardly have believed it. I really had not a notion that he cared for me until he actually said the words. Is it not too strange to think that perhaps, after all, Maud may be one of the last of us to get married?"

Here followed the usual descriptive catalogue, so characteristic of the Jamiesons' letters. "Mr. Cuthbertson looks like a widower, though he is not one." Strangely enough, I could never think of any other words, when I came to know Mr. Cuthbertson, that described him so well as these, and I can only account for it by saying that the man's deep melancholy and the crape band that he habitually wore round his hat must have given one the feeling that at some time Mr. Cuthbertson had suffered a heavy bereavement. "I have only known him," Eliza's letter went on, "for six weeks, but even that time has shown me his worth. He has a very straight nose and a black beard, and his forehead is distinctly intellectual. I met him first at Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs', where, as you know, I had gone to stay to catalogue their library, and to do a little typewriting for her. You know, of course, that she has become a member of the S.R.S., and their library is a mine of information.

"At first I was afraid to say, or even to allow myself to think, he showed me any preference, but Maud thought from the first that he was struck, and I asked her not to appear at all until everything was settled, for you know how attractive she is. But I really don't think that even then I thought that there was anything serious in it." (For an intelligent woman Eliza's letter strikes one as being strangely lacking in concentration.) "I have just been to the meeting of the Browning Society—our first appearance in public together—and I read my paper on "The Real Strafford," but I could hardly keep my voice steady all the time. I wear his own signet-ring for the present, but we are going up to London next week, when he will buy me a hoop of pearls. I am sure that you will be glad to hear that he is comfortably off. When the right man comes preconceived objections to matrimony vanish, but it must be the right man."

Palestrina said that she was "thrilled" to hear of Eliza's engagement, because an engagement was always thrilling, and she instantly went to tell the news to Mr. Ellicomb. She told me afterwards that when she had said that one of the Jamiesons was engaged Mr. Ellicomb became suddenly very pale in his complexion, and exclaimed, in a most anxious tone of voice, "Which?"

The cold weather has set in very suddenly, and already there is a sprinkling of snow on some of the distant hills. The robins still sing cheerily, but the gulls on the shore, flying over the yellow seaweed, call to each other plaintively in the gray of the early twilight. The heavy-winged herons stand in an attitude of serious thought for hours on the cold rocks; then, as if suddenly making up their minds to something, they stretch out their red legs behind them, and flop with large wings over the waters of the loch. The red Virginian creeper has begun to drop its leaves regretfully, after a night or two of white frost, and the dahlias hang their heads, heavy with the moisture which their cups contain. The sun wakes late in the mornings now, but shines strong and warm when it does get up. Cottage lights and fires burn cheerily o' nights, and within the cottages the old folks and the young ones draw round the fires and speak eerily of wraiths and whaurlochs, and some will tell of death-lights which they have seen on the lonely shore road. The herring fishers who sail away in the early twilight wear good stout jerseys now, and red woollen "crauvats" which the "wumman at hame" has knitted. The Lord has sailed away to Dunoon to lay up for the winter, and the shepherds have gone away down South "to winter the hogs." The shepherds' wives sit alone in the little hillside cottages away up on the face of the brae, and "mak dae" with their slender money till their men come home again.

The old women in the village have begun their winter spinning, and the tap, tap, tap of the treadle on the floor gives a pleasant sound as one passes outside on the dark road. Old men tell tales of snow in the passes in winter-time, and of death on the bleak hillsides, and some wife, shuddering, will say, "Ay, I mind I saw his corp-licht the very evening he was lost." And then they tell tales of fantasy and signs and premonitions of death.

The Finlaysons are going to wind up their very successful autumn in the Highlands by giving what they insist upon calling a gillies' dance, though probably the revels will mostly be indulged in by their large retinue of English servants. Good-natured old Finlayson has more than once said that he hopes we shall all come to the gillies' dance, and that it will give ourselves and our guests a chance of seeing some Highland customs. A good many of us come to Scotland most years, and have seen gillies and pipers before, but our good-natured neighbours certainly out-distance any one I know in their Highland sympathies.

They invited us to dine with them before the dance should begin, and six of us went, feeling very like the Jamiesons, and resolved that when we got home we should never put a limit to their numbers when we send them an invitation again.

We talk of returning home at the end of next week, and Mrs. Fielden and our other two guests are leaving on Monday, I believe.

Mrs. Fielden looks much prettier in the Highlands, I think, than anywhere else. Young Finlayson is in love with her, and I believe has offered her his heart and the ironmongery business with it; but I think of all her lovers Anthony Crawshay is the one she likes best. He is the only one for whom her moods never alter, and to whom she is always gracious and charming and sweet. Perhaps it is in a quiet, less radiant way than that in which she treats others, but it is with an unvarying loving-kindness which I have not seen her bestow elsewhere. And Anthony Crawshay is a good fellow—one of the best.

Old Mr. Finlayson actually donned a kilt for the gillies' dance; young Finlayson also wore the national dress, and Thomas tells me that they have sported the Macdonald tartan, and wants to know why. Old Finlayson met us at the door of his baronial hall in a clannish, feudal sort of way, and seizing his glengarry bonnet from his head he flung it down upon the oak settle in the hall, and exclaimed in hearty accents, "Welcome to the Glen." The Misses Finlayson wore sashes of royal Stuart tartan put plaid-wise across their shoulders. Mrs. Finlayson was dressed in a very regal manner which I cannot attempt to describe, and her platform voice was in use throughout the entire evening.

Ellicomb said the dance was barbaric, but Thomas enjoyed the evening immensely, and so did Crawshay, who said in his hearty way, "The Finlaysons did us uncommonly well," and shouted out, "Not at all bad people, not at all bad."

After dinner old Finlayson showed us all the pictures in the hall by the light of a long wax taper which he held above his head, and he pointed out the beauties of the house in a proprietary way, even to Evan himself, to whom the place belongs. Evan Sinclair, in a shabby green doublet, accepted all Mr. Finlayson's wildest statements about his own house with a queer, humorous grin on his face, and submitted to being patronized by the Miss Finlaysons, whose commercial instincts, no doubt, caused them to despise a young man who was obliged to let his place.

One of the Highland axioms which the Finlaysons have accepted is that "a man's a man for a' that," and they shook hands with every one in an effusive way, and condescended to a queer sort of familiarity with the boatmen and keepers about the place. The daughters of the house, with flying tartan ribbons, swung the young gillies about in the intricate figures of the hoolichan, and talked to them with a heartiness which one would hardly have thought possible of the Clarkham young ladies. The Finlaysons had a large number of English guests staying in the house for the dance. These all made the same joke when the pipes began to play. "Is the pig being killed?" they asked, and looked very pleased with their own ready wit.

Red-headed Evan Sinclair carried his old green doublet and battered silver ornaments very well, and his neat dancing was in pleasant contrast to the curious bounds and leaps of the Finlaysons. Old Mr. Finlayson spent his evening strutting about in a kindly, important fashion, and in making Athole Brose after a recipe supplied by Tyne Drum, who superintended the brewing of it himself.

I hope I am not fanciful when I say that the pipes when I hear them have to me something irresistibly sad about them, and that they conjure up many fantasies in my head which I am half ashamed to put down on paper. They seem to me to gather up in their bitter sobbings all the sorrows of a people who have suffered much and have said very little about it. There is the cry in them of children dying in the lonely glens in winter-time, when the wind howls round the clachan and the snow fills the passes. One almost sees the little procession of black-coated men bearing away a tiny burden from the cottage door into the whiteness beyond, with its one heaped-up patch of brown earth on either side of the little grave. They wail, too, of the Killing Time, when the Covenanters were crushed but never broken under persecution; and one seems to see the defiant gray-haired old men, with their splendid obstinacy, unmoved by threats—not defiant, but simply unbreakable. Thinking of the Covenanters as they pass slowly before one to the sighing of the pipes, one wonders if it is possible to punish by death the man who is content to die.

The tuneful reeds sob out, too, the story of the Prince for whom so many brave men bled, and they tell again of the days of song, and of noble legends and deeds of daring when the nation spent its passionate love on its King. "Come back! come back!" The desolate cry of the times. Almost one hears it sounding across the hills, and it seems to me that all that it is so hard to speak, so hard even to look, may perhaps be told in music. And I think loyalty and love speak very beautifully in the old Jacobite airs.

Again, as Evan's piper marches up and down in the moonlight playing a lament, the romance of life seems lost in the hardness of it, its stress and its loss. "Hame, hame, hame!" the pipes sob forth, crying for the homes that are sold to strangers, and for the hills and the glens which pass away from the old hands. It is "Good-bye, good-bye," an eternity of farewells. And still, wherever life is most difficult, wherever comforts are fewest and work is most hard, in the distant parts of the world are the Scottish exiles. But I know that all the world over the sons of the heather and the mist, in however distant or alien lands they may be, feel always, as they steer their way through life, that there is a pole-star by which they set their compass; and that some day, perhaps, they or their children may steer the boat to a haven on some rocky shore, where the whaup calls shrilly on the moors above the loch, and the heather grows strong and tough on the hillside, and the peat reek rises almost like the incense of an evening prayer, against a gray, soft sky in the land of the North.

I suppose that even in a diary I have no business to mix this up with an account of the Finlaysons' dance.

Palestrina came up to me after conscientiously dancing reels with Thomas, looking very pink and pretty, and thoughtful of me, as usual.

"Don't stay longer than you feel inclined," she said. "I told them to come for you in the dog-cart, and to wait about for you between twelve and one."

"I will take a turn down on the shore," I said, "and have a cigar, and then I will come back and see how you are getting on."

Palestrina gave me my crutch, and I went down towards the loch, which looked like a sheet of silver in the moonlight, and I found Anthony and Mrs. Fielden sitting on a garden bench beneath some wind-torn beeches by the shore. To-night there was not a breath of air stirring, and Mrs. Fielden had only thrown a light wrap round her.

"Have you come to tell me that I am to go in and dance reels with old Mr. Finlayson?" she said. "It is really so much pleasanter out here. Do sit down and talk to Sir Anthony and me."

She would never have allowed one to know that one was in the way, even if one had interrupted a proposal of marriage.

Anthony made room for me on the bench, and said heartily, "I am awfully glad to see you able to sit up like this, Hugo. Why, man, you're getting as strong as a horse!"

"Oh. I'm all right again," I said. "I'll begin to grow a new leg soon. And the first thing I mean to do when that happens is to dance reels like the Finlaysons."

"I believe I ought to be going in to supper now with Mr. Finlayson," said Mrs. Fielden. "Does any one know what time it is? He said he would 'conduct me to the dining-hall' at twelve o'clock."

"It is a quarter past now," said Anthony, looking at his watch in the moonlight. "Don't go in, Mrs. Fielden. Wait out here, and talk to Hugo and me."

But old Finlayson in his kilt had tracked us to our seat underneath the beech-trees, and he took instant possession of our fair neighbour, and told us to follow presently. He thought all the supper-tables were full just now.

"We shan't eat everything before you come," said hospitable old Finlayson, walking away with his beautiful partner on his arm.

Mrs. Fielden was dressed in white satin, with some pretty soft stuff about her, and she wore some white heather in her hair.

"What a good sort she is!" said Anthony in a loud voice, almost before Mrs. Fielden was out of hearing.

It wasn't, perhaps, the most poetical way in which he could have put it, but one didn't want or expect Anthony to express himself poetically.

"Utterly spoilt!" I replied, because at that moment I happened to be feeling supremely miserable, and I did not want Anthony to know it.

"Not a bit," he replied; "and you know that as well as I do, old chap."

"Allow me, Anthony," I said, "to be as savage as I like; it is one of the privileges of a cripple."

"Oh, blow cripples!" said Anthony. "You will be shooting next autumn, man."

"And what will you be doing?" I said. After all, we have been pals all our lives, and I think Anthony might tell me about it if there is anything to tell.

"Oh, I'll be shooting too, I suppose," said Anthony.

We smoked for some time in silence.

And then Anthony began, and said that he had enjoyed himself amazingly up here in the North, and he went on to say a good word for every one. Old Finlayson had been a brick about his shooting and deer-stalking, and it was beastly hard luck that I hadn't been able to come too. The minister wasn't a bad fellow, even when he was jocose; and Evan Sinclair was one of the best; and so on.

"What shall you be doing when you go back, Anthony?" I said, harking back to my old question, and hoping for more information than I actually asked for. "Are you going straight home?"

"I'll be at the first shoot at Stanby. Shall you be there?"

"I'm afraid not," I said. "I haven't learned to do cross-stitch yet, and I'm sure all the women would think me a great bore, sitting about in their morning-rooms all day. Except Mrs. Fielden, of course! Mrs. Fielden would probably persuade me into thinking that the only thing that made her house-party successful, or saved herself from boredom, was the presence of a lame man in the house."

"I don't think you are quite just about Mrs. Fielden, Hugo," said Anthony, moving rather resentfully on the garden bench.

"That doesn't matter much," I replied. "One voice will not be missed from the general chorus of praise that follows Mrs. Fielden wherever she goes."

"No; but still——" began Anthony; and then he stopped, and we smoked on for some time without speaking. "You see," he began at last, "she is the best friend I ever had." He did not lower his voice, because I suppose Anthony finds it impossible to do so, but went on steadily: "You see, I once cared for a little cousin of hers, and she died when she was eighteen. I don't think anybody ever knew about it, except Mrs. Fielden. But she knows how much cut up I was, and I suppose that is why she is so nice to me always."

"I'm awfully sorry!" I said.

"I never meant to speak about it," said Anthony in a brisk, cheerful voice. "Oh, don't you bother about it, Hugo! I mean I'm awfully keen about hunting, and I have an excellent time, only I don't suppose I shall ever care for any one else."

"Thanks for telling me, Tony."

"I wouldn't have said anything about it," said Anthony, "if it hadn't been for what you said about Mrs. Fielden. Y'see, she has been so awfully good to me, and I don't think you quite understand all she is really."

"Why, man," I cried, "I love her with every bit of my heart! And I worship her—how does one say one worships a woman?—as if she were the sun!"

And I think that was the very first moment that I told myself that I loved Mrs. Fielden.