Part 8 (1/2)

He had almost reached the doors of his club--Grogan might eat the curry for him, and be hanged to him!--when he saw advancing towards him the spare, elegant figure that sat its horse in front of the regiment below the General's window every morning. The oddest gleam came into his eyes.

The young man had recognised him, and was blus.h.i.+ng like a girl as he came towards him. He had velvety brown eyes and regular features, was a handsome lad, the General said to himself as young Langrishe lifted his hat from his sleek, well-shaped head. He had the barest acquaintance with Sir Denis, and he would have pa.s.sed by if the old soldier had not stopped him.

”How do you do, Captain Langrishe?” he said. ”I am very much obliged to you for the pleasure you give me every morning. I take it as uncommonly kind of you to bring 'the boys' past my house. I a.s.sure you I quite look forward to it--I quite look forward to it.”

Langrishe stammered something about the regiment delighting to do honour to its old General, growing redder and redder as he did so. His confusion became him in the General's eyes. He was certainly a pleasant-looking, well-mannered boy, the General decided, and the confusion of the young soldier in the presence of the old soldier an entirely natural and creditable thing.

”I'll tell you what, my lad,” said Sir Denis, putting his arm within the other's: ”if you've nothing better to do, supposing you come and lunch with me. I'm just going in to the club. And you--on your way to it? I thought so. You'll give me the pleasure of your company?”

The General was half an hour late, yet he found a small table in a window recess unappropriated. It was set for two, and a screen was drawn about it so that the two could be as retired as they wished. More--the General had not been forgotten in the distribution of the curry. Their portions came up piping hot. From where they sat the General could see Sir Rodney Vivash and Grogan b.u.t.ton-holing each other. They were the bores of the club, and for once they had foregathered, willingly or unwillingly.

After all, there were compensations--there were compensations; and the General was hungry. His manner towards young Langrishe had an air of fatherly kindness. There was a gratified flush on the young fellow's lean, dark cheek. What was it the General had heard about Langrishe? Oh, yes, that he had had rough luck--that his old uncle. Sir Peter--the General remembered him for a curmudgeon--had married and had a son, after rearing the young fellow as his heir. No wonder the lad looked careworn. The regiment was an expensive one; not too expensive for Sir Peter Langrishe's heir, but much too expensive for a poor man.

However, it was no business of the General's--not just yet.

”You have met my daughter, I think?” he said. They were at the cheese by this time, and the General was apparently divided between the merits of Gruyere and Stilton. He did not glance at Captain Langrishe, but he knew quite as well as if he had that the colour came again to his cheek, that the brown eyes looked unhappily conscious.

”I have met Miss Drummond several times,” he answered.

”Ah, you must dine with us one evening.”

Young Langrishe looked at him in a startled way.

”Thank you very much, sir,” he said, ”but, as a matter of fact, I am negotiating a change into an Indian regiment. I don't know how long I shall be here. And I shall be very busy, I'm afraid.”

”Ah! Just as you like--just as you like.” The General, by the easiest of transitions, pa.s.sed on to the subject of soldiering in India. He had an unwontedly exhilarated feeling which later had its reaction in a consciousness of guilt.

”What would poor Gerald have said?” he thought, as he walked homewards that evening. ”And I've nothing against Robin--I've nothing really against Robin, except his Peace Societies and all the rest of it. And the Dowager--yes, there's always the Dowager. I should like to know what on earth ever induced poor Gerald to marry the Dowager.”

CHAPTER VIII

GROVES OF ACADEME

After that keen disappointment about the baby's forgetting her, although she excused it to herself, arguing that at twenty months one cannot be expected to have a long memory, Mary was more reconciled to the changed conditions of her life.

”I hope we are going to be together for a good many years,” Lady Anne said, ”and presently you must be able to play and sing to me, to read to me and take an interest in the things in which I am interested. You are to go to school, Mary.”

So Mary went to school, first to the Queen's Preparatory School, then to the Queen's College. Her years there were very happy ones, especially those years at the College, after she had found her feet and made friends, and gained confidence in herself and the world.

”She sucks up knowledge as a sponge sucks up water,” was the report of the Princ.i.p.al, Miss Merton, to the delighted Lady Anne. ”I hope Lady Anne, that you will permit her to go in for her B.A. I should not be surprised, indeed, if she captured a fellows.h.i.+p.”

”No fellows.h.i.+ps,” Lady Anne said, firmly. ”What would she do with a fellows.h.i.+p? I propose, as soon as she has done with you, to take her abroad. I have a mind to see the world again through young eyes. And it will put the coping-stone on her education. I shouldn't dare leave her too long with you. Learning so often destroys a woman's imagination.

They work too hard, I suppose. It doesn't seem to come natural to them yet as it does to men.”

”There's no question of Mary's working too hard,” the Lady Princ.i.p.al said, bearing these hard sayings of Lady Anne's with composure. ”She has fine brains. Whatever she wants in an intellectual way she can come at easily.”

Mary, indeed, took her B.A. without over-much burning of the midnight oil. Afterwards she always spoke with the tenderest affection of her old school-days. She recalled with delight the s.p.a.cious cla.s.s-rooms, the old garden with its great woodland trees, and the tiny rooms of the girls who were in residence at the College, with their quaint and pretty adornments--the place of so much young _camaraderie_ and soaring ambition and happy emulation. ”I can hardly remember that anyone was ever unkind,” she used to say long afterwards.

As a matter of fact, the band of elder students with whom Mary was connected in her latter days at the College had a generous enthusiasm for her beauty, taking it as in a sense a credit to themselves.

”You will be a living answer to them,” said Jessie Baynes, who was small and plain-looking, ”when they say that learned women are always ugly.”