Charles Templeton's difficulty in determining his initial date is in smaller degree my difficulty. I could give long introductory accounts of David O'Rane's wanderings before he reached England, or of Jim Loring's boyhood in Scotland, or the early phases of the Dainton fortunes. To do so, however, would involve a sacrifice of the unities of time and place; and when the work was done I should be left with the feeling that it would have been better done at first hand by O'Rane himself, or Lady Loring, or Sir Roger Dainton. It is equally difficult to know where the final line is to be drawn. Nearly a year has already passed since the events recorded in the last chapter, yet that same chapter brings no sort of finality to the career of O'Rane, and, should another hand care to use them, the materials for another volume are rapidly accumulating.
I place my first chapter in the late summer of 1898, my last in August 1915. Neither date has been arbitrarily chosen.
I
In 1898 the month of September found me a guest of Roger Dainton at Crowley Court in the County of Hampshire.
In the guide-books the house is described as a "stately Elizabethan mansion," but at the time of which I am writing it was still a labyrinth of drainage cuttings and a maze of scaffolding and ladders. Suddenly enriched by the early purchase of tied-houses, the Daintons had that year moved five miles away from Melton town, school and brewery. Even in those early days I suppose Mrs. Dainton was not without social aspirations, and when her husband was elected Unionist member for the Melton Division of Hampshire, she seized the opportunity of moving at one step into a house where her position was unassailable and away from a source of income that was ever her secret embarrassment.
Roger Dainton, affluent, careless and indolent, accepted the changed life with placid resignation. The syndicate shoot was left behind with the humdrum Melton Club and the infinitely small society that clustered in the precincts of the cathedral. Mrs. Dainton, big, bustling and indefatigably capable, fought her way door by door into South Hampshire society, while her husband shot statedly with Lord Pebbleridge at Bishop's Cross, yawned through the long mornings on the Bench, and, when Parliament was not sitting, lounged through his grounds in a shooting jacket with perennially torn pocket, his teeth gripping a black, gurgling briar that defied Mrs. Dainton's utmost efforts to smarten his appearance.
The atmosphere of the rambling old house was well suited to schoolboy holidays, for we rose and retired when we pleased, ate continuously, and were never required to dress for dinner. The so-called library, admirably adapted to stump cricket on wet days, contained nothing more arid than "The Sportsman," "Country Life," and bound volumes of "The Badminton Magazine," while Mrs. Dainton's spasmodic efforts to discuss the contents of her last Mudie box met with prompt and effective discouragement. The society, in a word, was healthily barbarian, from our host, aged forty-three, to his over-indulged only daughter, Sonia, aged eleven. Since the days when Tom Dainton and I were fellow-fags, it had been part of my annual programme to say good-bye to my mother and sister a week before the opening of the Melton term, cross from Kingston to Holyhead, call on Bertrand Oakleigh, my guardian, in London, and proceed to Crowley Court for the last week of the summer holidays. It was an unwritten law of our meetings that none but true Meltonians should be invited, and, though the party grew gradually in size, the rule was never relaxed.
In 1898 six of us sat down to dinner with our host and hostess on the first night of our visit. Sutcliffe, the captain of the school, sat on Mrs. Dainton's right hand—a small-boned, spectacled boy with upstanding red hair and beak-shaped nose, who was soon to be buried in Cambridge with a Trinity Fellowship rolled against the mouth of the tomb. On the other side sat Jim Loring, the Head of Matheson's, as ever not more than half awake, his sleepy grey eyes and loosely-knit big frame testifying that for years past he had overgrown his strength and would require some years more of untroubled leisure before he could overcome his natural lethargy. He had reached the school as "Loring," and though an uncle had died in the interval and his father was now the Marquess Loring, no one troubled to remember that he was in consequence Earl of Chepstow,—or indeed anything but "old Jim Loring,"—imperturbable, dreamy, detached and humourous, with quaint mediaeval ideals and a worldly knowledge somewhat in advance of his years. To me he occasionally unbent, but the rest of the microcosm—his parents and masters included—found him as enigmatic and unenthusiastic as he was placid and good-looking. "There is nothing he cannot or will do"—as Villiers, the master of the Under Sixth, had written in momentary exasperation some terms before.
At the other end of the table I sat on one side of Dainton with Draycott, the house captain of football, opposite me—a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy with a confounding knowledge of early Italian painting and a remarkable pride in his personal appearance. The two remaining chairs were occupied by Tom and Sam Dainton. Tom was at this time of Herculean build, with arms and shoulders of a giant—a taciturn boy with a deep voice, and no idea in his head apart from cricket, of which he was now captain. He and I had stumbled into the friendship of propinquity, and there had never been any reason for dropping it, though I cannot flatter myself he found my company more enlivening than I found his. On the opposite side of the table sat Sam, as yet a Meltonian only in embryo, though we expected him to be of the elect in a week's time.