“Was it against the hill, sir? ’Cos that’s Cranston ’All—Gen’ral Dorrien’s. Yes, that is a fine place, sir.”
“Dorrien did you say? Dorrien? Now that’s strange. Fact is, I used to know someone of that name, but I’m certain he hadn’t ever been in the army. Has this one any sons?”
“Oh, yes, sir. There’s—”
“Ah! The one I knew hadn’t. He was a bachelor.”
“That must ’ave been the old squire, sir—the Gen’ral’s brother. ’E was a bachelor. But this one—well, sir, I don’t mind tellin’ you, ’e’s a terribly cross-tempered gentleman, and they do say as how none of his fam’ly can live with him.”
“Indeed? How’s that?”
“Well, sir, I believe it’s this way,” went on the loquacious waiter, delighted at the prospect of whiling away a goodly portion of this dull Sunday afternoon at his favourite pastime. Here, too, was a stranger, one who seemed to listen to him with interest. So he plunged at once into his lecture, with the utter disregard of his class for sequence or order in narration, and the stranger was favoured among other incidents with a highly-coloured version of the fracas which had taken place in the Dorrien family some months earlier.
“And then, you see, sir, the General was that savage with the poor young Squire, ’cos he not only wanted to marry the parson’s young lady, but it seemed he hadn’t been playing quite on the square with a gal in Cranston village—Steve Devine’s gal, that was—he as is now keeper at Colonel Neville’s. And now they say he’s took up with her in London. She’s a play-actress up there, they say.”
If the slightest possible change came over the listener’s countenance at this announcement, to have discovered it would have taken a very close observer indeed, which the waiter was not.
“H’m! A sort of Don Juan this young Dorrien seems to have been,” remarked the stranger more to himself than to the other, and pronouncing the name in the usual British and erroneous way.