Part 21 (1/2)

'The bustard?' asked Logan.

'It is a big fluffy fly, like a draggled mayfly, fished wet, in the dark.

I used to be fond of it, but age,' sighed the Earl, 'and fear of rheumatism have separated the bustard and me.'

'I should like to try it very much,' said Logan. 'I often fished Tweed and Whitadder, at night, when I was a boy, but we used a small dark fly.'

'You must be very careful if you fish at night here,' said Lady Mary. 'It is so dark in the valley under the woods, and the Coquet is so dangerous.

The flat sandstone ledges are like the floor of a room, and then a step may land you in water ten feet deep, flowing in a narrow channel. I am always anxious when anyone fishes here at night. You can swim?'

Logan confessed that he was not dest.i.tute of that accomplishment, and that he liked, of all things, to be by a darkling river, where you came across the night side of nature in the way of birds, beasts, and fishes.

'Mr. Logan can take very good care of himself, I am sure,' said Lord Embleton, 'and Fenwick knows every inch of the water, and will go with him. Fenwick is the water-keeper, Mr. Logan, and represents man in the fis.h.i.+ng and shooting stage. His one thought is the destruction of animal life. He is a very happy man.'

'I never knew but one keeper who was not,' said Logan. 'That was in Galloway. He hated shooting, he hated fis.h.i.+ng. My impression is that he was what we call a ”Stickit Minister.”'

'Nothing of that about Fenwick,' said the Earl. 'I daresay you would like to see your room?'

Thither Logan was conducted, through a hall hung with pikes, and guns, and bows, and clubs from the South Seas, and Zulu s.h.i.+elds and a.s.segais, while a few empty figures in tilting armour, lance in hand, stood on pedestals. Thence up a broad staircase, along a little gallery, up a few steps of an old 'turnpike' staircase, Logan reached his room, which looked down through the trees of the cliff to the Coquet.

Dinner pa.s.sed in the silver light of the long northern day, that threw strange blue reflections, softer than sapphire, on the ancient plate--the amba.s.sadorial plate of a Jacobean ancestor.

'It should all have gone to the melting-pot for King Charles's service,'

said the Earl, with a sigh, 'but my ancestor of that day stood for the Parliament.'

Logan's position at dinner was better for observation than for entertainment. He sat on the right hand of Lady Mary, where the Prince ought to have been seated, but Lady Alice sat on her father's left, and next her, of course, the Prince. 'Love rules the camp, the court, the grove,' and Love deranged the accustomed order, for the Prince sat between Lady Alice and Logan. Opposite Logan, and at Lady Mary's left, was the Jesuit, and next him, Scremerston, beside whom was Miss Willoughby, on the Earl's right. Inevitably the conversation of the Prince and Lady Alice was mainly directed to each other--so much so that Logan did not once perceive the princely eyes attracted to Miss Willoughby opposite to him, though it was not easy for another to look at anyone else. Logan, in the pauses of his rather conventional entertainment by Lady Mary, _did_ look, and he was amazed no less by the beauty than by the spirits and gaiety of the young lady so recently left forlorn by the recreant Jephson. This flower of the Record Office and of the British Museum was obviously not destined to blush unseen any longer.

She manifestly dazzled Scremerston, who seemed to remember Miss Bangs, her charms, and her dollars no more than Miss Willoughby appeared to remember the treacherous Don.

Scremerston was very unlike his father: he was a small, rather fair man, with a slight moustache, a close-clipped beard, and little grey eyes with pink lids. His health was not good: he had been invalided home from the Imperial Yeomanry, after a slight wound and a dangerous attack of enteric fever, and he had secured a pair for the rest of the Session. He was not very clever, but he certainly laughed sufficiently at what Miss Willoughby said, who also managed to entertain the Earl with great dexterity and _aplomb_. Meanwhile Logan and the Jesuit amused the excellent Lady Mary as best they might, which was not saying much. Lady Mary, though extremely amiable, was far from brilliant, and never having met a Jesuit before, she regarded Father Riccoboni with a certain hereditary horror, as an animal of a rare species, and, of habits perhaps startling and certainly perfidious. However, the lady was philanthropic in a rural way, and Father Riccoboni enlightened her as to the reasons why his enterprising countrymen leave their smiling land, and open small ice-shops in little English towns, or, less ambitious, invest their slender capital in a monkey and a barrel-organ.

'I don't so very much mind barrel-organs myself,' said Logan; 'I don't know anything prettier than to see the little girls dancing to the music in a London side street.'

'But do not the musicians all belong to that dreadful Camorra?' asked the lady.

'Not if they come from the North, madam,' said the Jesuit. 'And do not all your Irish reapers belong to that dreadful Land League, or whatever it is called?'

'They are all Pap---' said Lady Mary, who then stopped, blushed, and said, with some presence of mind, 'paupers, I fear, but they are quite safe and well-behaved on this side of the Irish Channel.'

'And so are our poor people,' said the Jesuit. 'If they occasionally use the knife a little--_naturam expellas furca_, Mr. Logan, but the knife is a different thing--it is only in a homely war among themselves that they handle it in the East-end of London.'

'_Coelum non animum_,' said Logan, determined not to be outdone in cla.s.sical felicities; and, indeed, he thought his own quotation the more appropriate.

At this moment a great silvery-grey Persian cat, which had sat hitherto in a stereotyped Egyptian att.i.tude on the arm of the Earl's chair, leaped down and sprang affectionately on the shoulder of the Jesuit. He shuddered strongly and obviously repressed an exclamation with difficulty, as he gently removed the cat.

'Fie, Meriamoun!' said the Earl, as the puss resumed her Egyptian pose beside him. 'Shall I send the animal out of the room? I know some people cannot endure a cat,' and he mentioned the gallant Field Marshal who is commonly supposed to share this infirmity.

'By no means, my lord,' said the Jesuit, who looked strangely pale. 'Cats have an extraordinary instinct for caressing people who happen to be born with exactly the opposite instinct. I am like the man in Aristotle who was afraid of the cat.'

'I wish we knew more about that man,' said Miss Willoughby, who was stroking Meriamoun. 'Are _you_ afraid of cats, Lord Scremerston?--but you, I suppose, are afraid of nothing.'

'I am terribly afraid of all manner of flying things that buzz and bite,'