“Ah! You refuse to rise?”
“The trout, Master Lionel, are fairly on the feed now.”
He pointed to the river, with many rippling circles upon its surface. Lionel had tact enough to say no more. He picked up his rod, sticking out of the ground beside him.
“Try a May fly,” suggested Fishpingle.
Lionel did so. The pair separated, Fishpingle taking the upper reaches, above the village. Lionel fished diligently without much success, possibly because his heart was not in his work. From time to time he glanced down stream at a spot where the road shone white above the meadowsweet and rushes. Joyce Hamlin might float into sight at any minute, but she didn’t. Lionel felt slightly piqued as the sun rose to the zenith. Surely, upon his first day at home, she might have come. His Colonel, a man of the world, had impressed this maxim, upon his subaltern: “Women do what they like. Many of ’em undertake thankless jobs. That is because the spirit of self-sacrifice warms ’em to the core.”
Was Joyce that sort of woman?
He began to think of her as a woman. A pal, so he interpreted the word, would have joined another pal. And if some definite duty kept her from him, she would have mentioned it before breakfast. Deliberately, she had let him think that she would come. And she hadn’t. Some woman’s reason accounted for her absence.
At luncheon Lady Pomfret joined the anglers. Fishpingle had grassed two brace of fat trout. Lionel had only one fish. The luncheon was very jolly, the sort of thing you gloated over during hot, sleepless nights in India. Below the willows, where the lobster and other good things were spread upon a snowy cloth, gurgled the weirs to the north of the village. Lionel remembered a famous run of the buckhounds from Bramshaw Telegraph to Nether-Applewhite, an eight-mile point. The buck had swum the Avon and the big hounds followed. Half a dozen had just escaped drowning in the sluices. Lionel helped to rescue them. Behind the willows stretched the water-meadows, where he had learnt to hit snipe. He recalled the Squire’s injunction: “Say to yourself—Snipe on toast—before you pull trigger. That’ll steady your nerves.” On the rising ground bordering the park, just where hill met sky, was a low belt of firs, the best stand of that particular partridge beat, where the “guns” could take the birds as they topped the belt. Lionel had covered himself with glory at that stand, downing two in front and two behind, a notable performance in any company. And when his father had acclaimed this feat with proud insistence, Lionel had to confess that the two behind had fallen to one shot! Look, in fine, where he would, the young man could recall some happy or amusing incident of his youth, and never once, during those rosy hours, had he reflected that he was amazingly fortunate, that the lines of his life meandered, like the placid Avon, through pleasant places. As he put it to Fishpingle, he had taken things and persons for granted. He had ranked sport as a pursuit of the first magnitude.
Fishpingle, you may be sure, was asked to join the party at luncheon. Lionel, watching him, noted his good manners, or rather his unstudied ease of manner. He displayed, too, for Lady Pomfret’s benefit, a remarkable fund of Arcadian lore, that intimate knowledge of wild birds and beasts gained at first hand. Lionel decided that he talked better than the Squire, who prided himself upon his powers of speech.
Why had such a man been content to serve the Pomfrets?