A Lame Dog's Diary

by S. Macnaughtan

I believe I must have grinned foolishly, but what I wanted to do was to stretch out my arms to the beautiful vision, framed in the hectic Virginian creeper round the window, and call out to her to come to me.

Mrs. Fielden came in for a minute, and said with the adorable lift of the eyebrows: "I have been educating a pair of young boots by walking through all the bogs on the hillside. Listen, they are quite full of water." She raised herself on her toes with a squelching sound of the leather, and gave one of her joyous soft laughs.

"You must change directly," I said, with an idiotic sense of proprietorship.

"When I have done so I think I shall come and have tea with you," said Mrs. Fielden. And of course then I knew that she had come home early on purpose to have tea with me, and that probably she had given up something else which she wanted to do, in order that she might sit by me when I was alone—because of course I have found Mrs. Fielden out now, and exposed her hypocrisy.

Fortunately she took nearly a quarter of an hour to change her wet boots, and this gave me time to ask myself why I was behaving like a raving idiot, because I had found out that Mrs. Fielden was absolutely perfect, and that I loved her.

It was quite the worst quarter of an hour that I have ever spent, because in it I had time to remember that I was a crippled man with one leg, and that Mrs. Fielden was a beautiful young woman whom of course every one loved, and that she owned an old historical place called Stanby, and probably—I realized this also—that she would continue to come over and sit with a dull man and bewilder him with her beauty and her kindness only so long as he did not allow her to know the supremely impertinent fact that he had fallen in love with her.

I must plead ill-health, and a certain weakness of nerve which no doubt always follows a surgical operation, for the fact that I turned round and put my face in the pillows for a moment and groaned.

Mrs. Fielden came in in my favourite pale-blue gown which she sometimes wears when she changes her frock at tea-time. She came and took a seat beside me, and as she never hurriedly plunges into a conversation we sat silent for a time. The afternoon was darkening now, and the light of a blazing fire leaped and played upon her pale-blue dress, and turned her brown hair to a sort of red-gold.

Mrs. Fielden thinks she is the only person in the world who can make up a fire. And she is perfectly right. She arranged the logs with a long brass poker, shifting them here and there, while her dear face glowed in the light of the fire. She is not a luxurious woman, in spite of being surrounded always by luxury. For instance, she stands and walks in a very erect way, and I have never seen her stuff a lot of sofa cushions at her back in a chair, nor lounge on a sofa. Her glorious, buoyant health seems to exempt her from need of support or ease, and her figure is too pretty for lounging.

When she had finished arranging the logs she put down the poker and looked at me with that dear kindliness of hers, and said in her pretty voice, "What have you been doing with yourself this afternoon?"