Part 101 (1/2)
”Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so--of nights in bed at Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?”
”There were people ready to tell you--years before we saw Gueldersdorp--that the one you'd got was as good as none....”
”Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their opinions!” She felt his great muscles swell as the big hand tightened on her waist. ”Though, mind you, there have been times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other women----”
”Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win distinction as War Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and b.l.o.o.d.y bones”--she shook with a nervous giggle--”and all that sort of thing.... Would it please you to know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last quill--that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement of the coop?”
”You've said as much before!” he objected.
”But now I mean it! Put me to the test. Let the house in Wilton Place--we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if you think you won't be bored?”
He bellowed joyously!
”Me bored! With ten thousand acres arable and wood and moorland to farm and preserve and shoot over, two first-cla.s.s packs meetin' within a fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo a.s.sociation shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin' me with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieutenant!
'Bored'--I like that!”
”If you would like it, be it!” she flashed. ”Trust me to back you up. I can and I will! I'll help you entertain the military authorities and their women, keep the Rolls, sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief Magistrate, and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to one man--and you shall be the man! Only”--she laughed hysterically, her face hidden against his big shoulder--”I don't quite know how far these things are compatible with my new role!”
”Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop.” His big hand patted her almost paternally. ”Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you suppose I'm such a pachydermatous a.s.s that I can't understand that home is a make-believe to a real woman, when--when there isn't even one chicken to tuck under her wing! Worse luck for me and you!”
She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. Her black eyes were s.h.i.+ning through the tears that rose and brimmed over and fell.
”If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make you happy?”
He cried out with a great oath:
”Yes, by G----!” and caught her to his leaping heart.
LXVIII
In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many interviews held with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch and dinner, learned much anent the difficulty of obtaining fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as regards the Satanic duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist butcher will subst.i.tute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still more about Saxham.
Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the Doctor's grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's worth of Master Owen, from the first time she set eyes on him in a white frock, with a sausage-roll curl and diamond-patterned socks. She had a venerable and spotty photograph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand, taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own pocket-money, to send to Janellan, who had nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And regularly had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said Janellan, until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain--mentioned by Janellan with the ringing sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement--had turned her and her old man out of the Plas ”without as much as that!”--here Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth--in recognition of their forty years of faithful service.
But Master Owen, coming to his own again, ”and 'deed an' 'deed, but the Plas ought to have been his from the beginning!” had sought out the old couple, living in decent poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in their old home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the points of a pig than any man in Herion--or in all Wales for the matter of that--well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never made a better man than Dr. Owen Saxham! What grand things they had said of him in the papers! No doubt the young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not got into print?
”I can tell you many things of the Doctor,” said Lynette, smiling in the black-eyed, streaky-apple face ”that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad to hear.”
She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule but this morning she stooped and kissed the red-veined, wrinkled cheek within Janellan's white-quilled cap-border. Then, her household duties done, she pinned a rough, shady straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose chamois-leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were, perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the hall-rack, ran down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the spidery, red-rusted iron foot-bridge that spanned the railway-line, descended upon the farther side of the wood of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base of the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulating gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless line of white breakers that rose and fell a mile away.
She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-company; a new hope gave her strength. She drank in long draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant air, and as it filled her lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight in the beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy of life made music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her heart.
She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter of this sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that line of white frothing breakers washed the sh.o.r.es of the Mother's beloved green island, Emerald Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel spanned--then straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County, King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild mallard's flight; and there would be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers, the grey-green mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy valleys and wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castleclare rising from its mossed lawns studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne among the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron Harbour, with its t.i.tanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun-brown islands bidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken by the voices of hidden waters roaring in their secret caves.
A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden eyes dreamed as she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed in a plain skirt of rough grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight waist belted with a silver-mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle of silver chatelaine appendages accompanying her steps.