“What an awful young brute I must have been in those days, Roland! By Jove! any kicks that may have travelled my way I jolly well deserved.” And Hubert Dorrien puffed out a great cloud of smoke upon the sweet evening air.
“I think we all wanted a good shaking up,” answered his brother meditatively. “We are a rum lot, you know. At any rate we seem to have got it—all round.”
At the further end of the beautiful avenue of feathery elms rose the tall chimney stacks and long windows of Cranston Hall. The air was fragrant with the multifold scents of evening, distilled dewy from flower and herb, and the dappled deer moved like antlered ghosts in the gathering twilight. From the lake, embowered in overhanging leafage, came the craking cry of a waterhen or the plash of a rising fish, and in the boskiness of the home coverts a very chorus of song, as innumerable thrushes and blackbirds poured forth a final evening warble.
“Well, if I got some kicks, at any rate I captured plenty of halfpence,” went on Hubert. “Tell you what it is, old chap: that was the best day’s work that ever happened when you launched me out into the world to fish for myself.”
“It’s rum how things do come about,” said the other queerly.
“Rather. If I hadn’t got on board the Atlanta, or if she had transhipped me on to some homeward-bound craft, I shouldn’t have got to Australia, and if I hadn’t got to Australia I shouldn’t have struck that reef, and made my pile. Not but what I didn’t have some real rough ups and downs in between.”
“To continue the ‘ifs,’” said Roland, “what if you hadn’t turned up when you did, this time last year? What if your boat had been wrecked, and you had taken another outward-bound trip on some rescuing craft? What then?”
“Don’t speak of it, old chap. It’s enough to give one the cold shivers even to think of. But that sweep who had boned my clothes and things had something to answer for, or rather those who were ‘thick’ enough not to know the difference between him and me, when they held the inquest on him.”
“At any rate he sneaked certain elaborate obsequies under false pretences,” said Roland drily, whereat the other exploded.
The change which had taken place in Hubert Dorrien had been thorough and complete. Outwardly, there was hardly a trace of the weedy, loose-hung, shifty-mannered youth in the sun-browned, well-set-up man walking here now. Mentally, too, was he no less improved, and the process by which that desirable state of things had come about was, in his own words, that his ups and downs had knocked all the nonsense out of him, and prepared him to appreciate and turn to good account his luck when it came. And this he himself heartily recognised. Roland, on the other hand, had changed but little, save that the awful tension of those terrible weeks had turned his hair nearly grey. At the conclusion of the affair he had suffered no fuss to be made, but had driven quietly back to Cranston, and resumed life there as if nothing had happened. And that had been a year ago.