“And he won’t drink whisky; so what is he to expect?” Johnny Eyre said.
“Come along up to a little hut here,” Lavender said, “and we’ll try to get a fire lit. And I have some brandy there.”
“And you have plenty of water to mix with it,” said the boy, looking mournfully around. “Very good. Let us have the fire and the warm drink; and then—you know the story of the music that was frozen in the trumpet, and that all came out when it was thawed at a fire? When we get warm we have very great news to tell you—oh, very great news indeed.”
“I don’t want any news—I want your company. Come along, like good fellows, and leave the news for afterward. The men are going on with a pony to fetch a stag that has been shot; they won’t be back for an hour, I suppose, at the soonest. This is the sheiling up here where the brandy is secreted. Now, Neil, help us to get up a blaze. If any of you have newspapers, letters, or anything that will set a few sticks on fire—”
“I have a box of wax matches,” Johnny said, “and I know how to light a peat-fire better than any man in the country.”
He was not very successful at first, for the peats were a trifle damp; but in the end he conquered, and a very fair blaze was produced, although the smoke that had filled the sheiling had nearly blinded Mosenberg’s eyes. Then Lavender produced a small tin pot and a solitary tumbler, and they boiled some water and lit their pipes, and made themselves seats of peat around the fire. All the while a brisk conversation was going on, some portions of which astonished Lavender considerably.
For months back, indeed, he had almost cut himself off from the civilized world. His address was known to one or two persons, and sometimes they sent him a letter; but he was a bad correspondent. The news of his aunt’s death did not reach him till a fortnight after the funeral, and then it was by a singular chance that he noticed it in the columns of an old newspaper. “That is the only thing I regret about coming away,” he was saying to those two friends of his. “I should like to have seen the old woman before she died; she was very kind to me.”
“Well,” said Johnny Eyre, with a shake of the head, “that is all very well; but a mere outsider like myself—you see, it looks to me a little unnatural that she should go and leave her money to a mere friend, and not to her own relations.”
“I am very glad she did,” Lavender said. “I had as good as asked her to do it long before. And Ted Ingram will make a better use of it than I ever did.”
“It is all very well for you to say so now, after all this fuss about those two pictures; but suppose she had left you to starve?”