Part 17 (1/2)

But Jerry answered nothing. He was much too absorbed; his wide grey eyes were wider than ever, staring out at the fireworks.

'What is it, Jerry?' she asked curiously. 'What do you see?'

'Oh! nuffing yet,' answered the little lad; 'but if it was to come----'

As he spoke a sudden scream rose from a group of ladies close by. A man, running as for dear life to set and light a fresh row of fire-fountains, squibs, and crackers, had stumbled, tripped, fallen against the low parapet, and in his attempt to save himself had dropped some of the fireworks over on to the terrace. Nor was that all; the flaming, spouting gerb he carried in his left hand as a port fire, had swung round on them, and there they were in the middle of gauze and muslin--alight!

A knot of squibs was the first to explode, darting hither and thither wickedly, like snakes, amid the frills and flounces, amid the screams!

'Keep back! Keep back!' shouted the men; and some had their coats off in a second, while others held the ladies' filmy dresses back, beating the sparks off with their hands, or stamping them out with their feet.

But there was a round black something, with just a tiny glow sizzling slowly into it, which no one noticed as it lay alf hidden under a velvet gown; no one but Jerry----

The next instant he was standing with it in his hands, confused for the moment by the dense circle round him through which he saw no way for a small boy.

'Drop it, drop it!' shouted some one, and Lesley was beside him trying to s.n.a.t.c.h the detonator from him. But he dodged from her with an appealing cry.

'It's mine. It weally is my sh.e.l.l--it weally is!'

He dodged Nevill Lloyd also, who dashed at him yelling--'Drop it, you young fool'; and he might have gone on dodging others till that tiny glow sizzled in to the powder, if some one else, realising the situation and the few seconds' grace that remained, had not shouted--

'Hold tight, Jerry! Hold tight!'--and so, with that rea.s.suring request had run to the child, caught him in his arms, and forced a way through the crowd to the parapet.

'Now, my lad, heave!' came the order.

And Jerry, who had held tight, heaved, since these were reasonable orders. Heaved not an instant too soon, however, for the round black thing was still so close when it changed to a flash, a flame, a roar, that it left Jack Raymond and the child wholly dazed and half blind, all singed and powder-grimed.

They were still standing so, bewildered, the man's face and the child's close together disguised by their very griminess into quaint likeness, when Grace Arbuthnot came up to them.

'He isn't hurt,' said Jack Raymond, quickly setting down the child, partly to prove his words, partly because he wished to dissociate himself from the situation as far as possible. The action, however, brought him closer to her eyes, and something in them, something in the faint perfume of heliotrope about her dress, the perfume he remembered so well, made him feel ashamed of his own thought.

'He is really not hurt,' he continued in a low voice for her ear alone.

'And he behaved--as I should have expected your son to behave.'

He had not meant to say so much, but something of the old confidence seemed to have returned to him with the old memory; and to her also, for she shook her head and said, almost with a smile--

'He is not a bit like me--he is far more like you.' She paused, startled at her own unconsidered words, and looked at him with a sudden shrinking in her face.

'Very,' he replied, catching up the boy again. 'We are both black sheep. Come along, my hero, and scrub some of the likeness off.'

But, as he carried Jerry away on his shoulder to the dressing-room, he told himself that she was right. The boy _was_ like him. Now that it had been suggested to him, he saw it clearly. Not in face, but in the nameless ways which show a likeness in the inward stuff that has gone, possibly, to make up a very dissimilar outside.

The explanation was simple, of course. It was a case of reversion. He himself had always been counted a typical Raymond, and Jerry, through his mother, had harked back to that distant, almost-forgotten ancestor.

Something had made the current set that way once more; that was all.

But what something? Was it possible that the mind had this power as well as the body?

He swung the child to the attendant grimly, and bade him wash the _chola sahib's_ face, and be sure to take off all the black.