Part 4 (1/2)

He gasped, looking down upon me from his lean height. ”My dear fellow--it's the very last thing I want to do. I've told you because I let the thing out a day or two ago--in peculiar circ.u.mstances--but it's in confidence.”

”Confidence be hanged,” said I.

Heaven sent me Evadne--just escaped from morning lessons with her governess, and scuttling across the lawn to visit her Sealyhams. I whistled her to heel. She raced up.

”If you were a soldier what would you do if you were made a General?”

She countered me with the incredulous scorn bred of our familiarity.

”You haven't been made a General?”

”I haven't,” I replied serenely. ”But Colonel Lackaday has.”

She looked wide-eyed up into Lackaday's face.

”Is that true?”

I swear he blushed through his red sun-glaze.

”Since Captain Hylton says so----”

She held out her hand with perfect manners and said:

”I'm so glad. My congratulations.” Then, before the bewildered Lackaday could reply, she tossed his hand to the winds.

”There'll be champagne for dinner and I'm coming down,” she cried and fled like a doe to the house. At the threshold of the drawing-room she turned.

”Does Cousin Auriol know?”

”n.o.body knows,” I said.

She shouted: ”Good egg!” and disappeared.

I turned to the frowning and embarra.s.sed Lackaday.

”Your modesty doesn't appreciate the pleasure that news will give all those dear people. They've shown you in the most single-hearted way that they're your friends, haven't they?”

”They have,” he admitted. ”But it's very extraordinary. I don't belong to their world. I feel a sort of impostor.”

”With this--and all these?”

I flourished the letter which I still held, and with it touched the rainbow on his tunic. His features relaxed into his childish ear-to-ear grin.

”It's all so incomprehensible--here--in this old place--among these English aristocrats--the social position I step into. I don't know whether you can quite follow me.”

”As a distinguished soldier,” said I, ”apart from your charming personal qualities, you command that position.”

He screwed up his mobile face. ”I can't understand it. It's like a nightmare and a fairy-tale jumbled up together. On the outbreak of war I came to England and joined up. In a few months I had a commission. I don't know...” he spread out his ungainly arm--”I fell into the metier--the business of soldiering. It came easy to me. Except that it absorbed me body and soul, I can't see that I had any particular merit. Whatever I have done, it would have been impossible, in the circ.u.mstances, not to do. Out there I'm too busy to think of anything but my day's work. As for these things”--he touched his ribbons--”I put them up because I'm ordered to. A matter of discipline. But away from the Army I feel as though I were made up for a part which I'm expected to play without any notion of the words.

I feel just as I would have done five years ago if I had been dressed like this and planted here. To go about now disguised as a General only adds to the feeling.”