“Mother heard from Captain Binning by last mail,” Susan hears Phillida say, in the tone of one communicating a piece of news of whose acceptability to its hearer there can be no doubt; and Miss Prince’s rather ostentatiously indifferent rejoinder.
“Oh, did she?”
“He told her the details of that fight near Snyman’s Post, which we saw the account of in the Times, when he was mentioned in despatches; not that he said a word about that, trust him,” in a tone of almost personal pride in the joint valour and reticence of the related fact.
“The Boers had rushed a picket, which gave them good cover to pour in a heavy fire at close range upon us, but after two hours’ hard fighting we beat them off with heavy loss.”
“Anyhow, we knocked the stuffing out of Commandant Reitz that time,” chimes in Christopher, taking up the chant of triumph.
The young Darcys have never been fond of Miss Prince; but at least, upon the all-important subject of the war, they have imagined her views to be in absolute harmony with their own. What, then, is their stupefaction at her comment upon their pieces of intelligence?
“How brutal! and how brutalizing!” she says with a delicate shudder of disgust.
“They do not know: how should they?” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice. “But Féo has lost all interest in the war. She has got a new hobby. It is music. You heard what she said about the choir singing flat. There is a young organist at Shipstone who, according to her, is something quite out of the way. He won the F.R.C.O., whatever that may be, last year; and she goes every day to hear him play. Well,” with resigned appeal, “it is a nice taste, isn’t it? and her mind is so active, that she must have something to occupy it; but she used not to know one note from another.”
* * * * *
The silence of children gone to bed, and of a rector having his final wrestle with the difficulty which he must share with many thousand clerical brothers, of saying something original upon the morrow’s anniversary, broods upon the Rectory. Half a dozen Christmas sermons of previous years lie neatly typewritten before Mr. Darcy, so that recognizable repetitions may be avoided. The double doubt as to whether he dare repeat a simile, certainly felicitous, but whose very excellence may make it remembered, and which had occurred in his discourse of ’96, coupled with the question as to whether he shall insert any allusion to Rupert Campion’s death, keeps him sitting with suspended pen at his knee-hole writing-table, though the church clock has struck ten.