Part 11 (1/2)

'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.

'French, my lord.'

'The only school for teaching.'

'The simplest--has the most rational method. Italians are apt to be tricky. But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a fencer the French can't touch.'

'How would you account for it?'

'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve, quick brain.'

'Hum. Where are we, then?'

'We don't s.h.i.+ne with the small sword.'

'We had men neatly pinked for their slas.h.i.+ngs in the Peninsula.'

'We've had clever Irishmen.'

'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with him?'

'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found wary enough.'

My lord hummed. 'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over steel.'

'He can be dangerous.'

The word struck on something, and rang.

Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye met Aminta's and pa.s.sed it.

'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble a.s.sent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at school under shadow of the master.

She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a lesson? They want it.'

His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic att.i.tude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of s...o...b..a.l.l.s flying, the vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to n.o.ble young manhood.

Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild at his games.

My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'

Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants exercise.'

'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at cricket.'

'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,'

Mrs. Pagnell remarked.

He nodded to her and rose.