XI
ELIZABETH
September 11 of the same year. Going Sixteen now.
Now I suppose you think this is going to be a love-story. But it isn't—at least not so far. And I am sure the hero won't be either of the two you think—not, that is, Hugh John or Nipper Donnan.
But I am going to tell the story of the strangest, the delicatest friendship I have ever seen—that of Hugh John, my brother, and Elizabeth Fortinbras.
He is the youngest hero you can imagine, but somehow is much more like a young man who has shaved himself very close than the schoolboy he is.
Nothing puts Hugh John out. When he has some big festival to attend along with father, he sits quiet and self-possessed, doing his part without a quiver on his face. As far as looks go, he could easily be the chairman. The clean-cut outlines of his face do not denote hardness. Only he is of the Twentieth Century, and an adept at concealing his sensations—even from his parents, with whom he is great friends.
But, for all that modernity, there is something essentially knightly, and even knight-errant, about our Hugh John. An elder time has touched him. Ideas growing, alas! extinct—are natural to him. A chivalrous Cromwellian is perhaps the nearest I can come in the way of definition. For years he was the only one in the house (except Fuz, of course) who sustained Roundhead as against Cavalier. Yet all his outer man (surely a boy has an "outer man" when he is six feet high) is that of the Collegians who rallied about the King at Oxford, and swept away the train-bands with Rupert the Prince at Marston Moor. But Hugh John agrees with Mr. Prynne as to the Unloveliness of Love-Locks, and no Sergeant-Major could carry a closer cropped head of hair.
Also the mind within him is one that abhors restraint. That is, in thinking. In acting, he obeys as a principle all justly constituted authorities. Also, if he is in authority, he will insist upon obedience even unto the shedding of blood.
Only the mind is free and untrammeled. Obedience includes only acts. Thought with him is free, liberal, critical, large.