Читать книгу The Willing Horse - Ian Hay - Страница 5

CHAPTER IV

A TRYST

I

Marjorie lay prone among the bracken in Craigfoot Wood, with her chin resting on her hands, and her insteps drumming restlessly upon the cool earth. Below her ran the road. To her left, beyond the wooded ridge which gave its name to Baronrigg, lay Craigfoot, nestling, like most small Lowland townships, in its own private valley. To her right, out of sight a mile away, ran the branch line of the railway which served that district, and which had furnished material to local humourists for a generation.

By the roadside, on the edge of the wood, stood the two-seater car which was accustomed to carry the overflow of the Clegg family to church on Sundays, and which Marjorie liked to pretend was her own special property. She was never so happy as when her arms were up to the elbows in gear-box grease. There was a good deal of the elemental small boy about Miss Marjorie.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and the month was once more August. The war which was to have been over in a few furious weeks had now been in progress for twelve months. The memory of the nightmare campaign of the first winter in Flanders had crystallised into a national epic. And now Kitchener's Army, having characteristically survived that chaotic but inevitable experiment in improvisation, its preliminary training at home during one of the worst and wettest winters ever known in England, had gone abroad. Here it had graduated, with first class honours in endurance and cheerfulness, during a season of trench warfare on the Western Front; and was now bracing itself, with incorrigible optimism, for that heroic mess afterwards known as the Battle of Loos. Everywhere the war was consolidating its position. On land the Boche, in a determined effort to recoup himself for his losses on the Western swings by a profitable exploitation of the Eastern roundabouts, had just captured Warsaw; and Hindenburg and Ludendorff were gloriously smashing their way through Russian armies in which perhaps one man in ten possessed a rifle. At sea, the battles of the Falkland Islands and the Dogger Bank had confirmed the German High Seas Fleet in a policy of watchful waiting—not to be broken, save for the disconcerting experiment of Jutland, until the final abject excursion of surrender more than three years later. Submarines and Zeppelins were beginning to function. Yarmouth and Lowestoft had been bombed, with éclat. The Lusitania had gone down, with eleven hundred souls; and a certain giant in the Far West was beginning to come out of the ether administered by Teutonic anæsthetists.

At home, the country had settled into its stride; and everyone, in camp, tube, train, and tram, argued—Heavens! how they did argue!—by a simple exercise in simple proportion, that if a mere handful of British soldiers could hold back overwhelmingly superior numbers for a whole winter, what wouldn't we do to Germany when the new British Army found their feet and got busy with the big push which everybody—friend and foe, be it said—knew was coming in September? (The possibility that the enemy might have been unsportsmanlike enough to raise a few new armies of his own did not appear to have occurred to anybody in particular.) The life of the citizen was still fairly normal. Taxicabs were plentiful: theatrical business was booming. One could still buy practically all that the heart desired, provided one had the price. The days when everybody would have money, but there would be nothing to buy, were yet to come.

Marjorie's predominant emotion during the first six months of the war had been that of fierce resentment against having been born a girl. She felt helpless; and whenever Marjorie felt helpless it made her angry. (That was why she was so frequently angry with her father.) All round her the youth of her country were on fire, both boys and girls. Yet the boys were able to stream away to fight, while Marjorie, who was quite as brave, quite as vigorous, and infinitely more capable of leadership than many young men, was debarred by the accident of her sex from doing anything at all. In the year nineteen-fifteen the great conflict was still regarded as a man's war: the inevitability of mobilised womanhood had not yet been recognised. The accepted theory was that men must work and women must weep—for the duration.

The countryside was full of soldiers, in all stages of growth. Marjorie used to encounter whole columns of them, route marching—strange creatures, clothed in apparel which by no stretch of imagination could be described as uniform. But for all their fantastic blends of khaki and tweed, glengarry and billycock, Marjorie's heart warmed to them. They were so boisterous, so childlike, so absolutely certain of what was going to happen to the Boche when they got "oot there."

At their head, as often as not, rode Major Bethune. He and Marjorie had become acquainted under circumstances which will be recorded hereafter, and his punctilious salute never failed to thrill her. He was an inspiring figure, and conspicuously solitary in his present entourage. He alone was left of all the cheery, careless brotherhood who had pursued the unexacting peace-time existence of a regular soldier at the depot of the Royal Covenanters—the prop and mainstay of every covert-shoot and tennis-party in the county. They were all in France now. Many of them would never come back. But Eric Bethune remained, to lick recruits into shape—with astonishing speed and efficiency, be it said—and send them out, draft after draft, to stiffen the ever-thinning ranks of the First and Second Battalions. He hated being kept at home, and said so. Marjorie sympathised with him deeply, for she knew exactly how he felt. One day she told him so. After that, Eric took considerable notice of her. He had the simple vanity of a spoiled child, and reacted promptly to all those who took especially deferential notice of him.

The pair met here and there—at Buckholm, whither Marjorie was sometimes bidden with her mother to war relief committee meetings; at entertainments organised for the recruits; at crossroads, where Marjorie's two-seater was frequently hung up by columns of marching men. On these occasions they exchanged greetings—even confidences. Eric was more than twenty years Marjorie's senior—a circumstance which, if anything, heightened their attraction for one another. It gratified Eric hugely to find himself frankly admired by a young girl; while Marjorie, born hero-worshipper that she was, felt pleasantly thrilled at attracting the appreciative attention of a man so distinguished in his record and so much more important than herself. Also, Eric's great age—and to twenty, forty-three and infinity are very much the same thing—made him "safe." Fortunately for Eric's self-esteem, he did not know this.

They had small chance to become really intimate. There were few opportunities for social amenity in those days, and such as survived hardly covered Netherby at all. In that bleak household itself opinion on the war was sharply divided. Albert Clegg came of a stock which had been educated to regard war as a luxury of the upper classes. He believed that all wars were started by collusion between the "military oligarchy" and the armament firms. He maintained that no war had ever been fought which could not have been avoided. The sight of a uniform filled him with horror. He was eloquent—though not quite so fluent as Uncle Fred—upon the iniquity of placing what he called a "musket" upon the shoulder of a growing boy, and setting him for a period of three years to strengthen his body by martial exercises, when he might have been earning dividends for somebody. Finally, he said that the Germans were an industrious, peace-loving, musical nation, and that it was sinful to attack—by which it is to be presumed he meant resist—an army which was merely the involuntary instrument of despotism.

So when the British nation declined, by acclamation, to break faith with France and Belgium, Albert Clegg was sincerely depressed. Moreover, being deeply interested in shipping, he foresaw ruin for the overseas trade of the country. Even when the unforeseen happened; when, as the submarines began to take toll, the market value of tramp steamers shot up a thousand per cent., and freights soared out of sight altogether, he was not entirely comforted. According to his lights he was an honest man, and it was with a twinge of conscience that he found the war accumulating for him profits on a scale which not even a swelling income-tax could altogether moderate. But he compounded with his conscience in the end. He drew his profits, but he drew them under formal protest every time. As Pooh Bah once explained, "It revolts me, but I do it!"

Of the rest of the household, Mrs. Clegg for her part found the war almost pleasantly exhilarating. None of her kith and kin were participating in hostilities, which relieved her from such trifling cares as beset old Mrs. Couper, who was interested in the matter to the extent of five sons and fourteen grandsons; or Mrs. Gillespie, the banker's wife, who had contributed all she had, the ci-devant student of divinity, to the cause; or General Bothwell, whose son Jack had arrived in Flanders from India with his Pathans in early December, and had already met the almost inevitable end of a white officer who undertakes the conspicuous task of leading dusky troops into action under modern conditions; or Lord Eskerley, both of whose sons had died at Le Cateau. Bobby Laing, of The Heughs, nephew of our autobiographical Major, had been killed in the landing of the King's Own Scottish Borderers at Gallipoli. Neither of Mrs. Clegg's sons had exhibited any leaning towards what their father described as "this fashionable military nonsense," so Mrs. Clegg's mind was at rest. She left everything, quite cheerfully—like too many of her kind—to the Willing Horse.

Of course, she admitted, there was little going on socially. Still, it was gratifying to roll bandages or pack comfort-bags in company with countesses; and though there were flies in the ointment—in the shape of common persons like Mrs. Galbraith, the chemist's wife, and the Misses Peabody, included in the same gathering by the caste-destroying processes of wartime—there were consolations. Netherby itself, with its spacious accommodation for meetings and committees, was a card which only great social strongholds like Buckholm and Baronrigg could overtrump.

It has been noted that Amos and Joshua Clegg had betrayed no disposition to join up. But while Amos in this matter followed his undoubted inclinations, Joe was restrained only by the bonds of parental discipline. For one thing, Joe was a Public-School boy, and Amos was not. Joe's school had only been a small establishment in the North of England, but in nineteen-fourteen its little Officers' Training Corps had contributed its full quota of young men. To Amos, Public Schools (to quote his father) were places where boys learned "to take care of their H's and despise their parents": to his younger brother the Public-School tradition was the ark and covenant, not to be lightly profaned by parental sneers or fraternal failure to understand. So Joe kept his own counsel, and ate his dour young Northumbrian heart out for twelve sickening months.

The climax had come that very morning, with the arrival, for Joe, of a circular from his old school, requesting that he would "be so kind as to fill up the enclosed form" with certain specific information regarding his military service, for inclusion in the School Roll of Honour—his rank, his unit, mentions in dispatches, and the like. There was no alternative column to fill in; no comfortable loophole labelled "Civilian war work of national importance"—nothing of that kind at all: nothing but a stark request for poor Joe's military status and record. It had not occurred to the editors that any Old Boy could, in these days, be elsewhere than in khaki.

Consequently, Marjorie had found Joe after breakfast, with his head in his arms, crying like a child in a corner of the unfrequented and cheerless Netherby smoking-room. (Albert Clegg did not smoke.) After comforting him in the only fashion she knew—and a very acceptable fashion any young man but a brother would have considered it—she made up her mind on the spot to accept a certain sentimental invitation somewhat shyly offered by Roy Birnie, and laughingly refused by herself, two days previously. That was why she was now lying in the bracken on the edge of Craigfoot Wood, gazing up the road to Baronrigg.

II

It was Roy's last day at home. At the outbreak of war, to his own intense indignation, he had been refused a commission. Many of his young friends, common civilians no older than himself, had been endowed with what they described as 'one pip' and set to command platoons all over the country. But Roy, as a prospective regular, had been despatched—the victim of a conspiracy in which he traced the hand of every person but the right one—to Sandhurst, where he was compelled to undergo an intensive education in the science of warfare, speculating grimly meanwhile as to the kind of mess his amateur supplanters were making of the British Expeditionary Force. Sometimes he woke at night in a cold sweat, having dreamed, as he had sometimes dreamed before a house match, that the war had come to an end before he had had his innings.

Now, at last, he was emancipated. He was a second lieutenant. He could wear a Sam Browne belt and look an A.P.M. right in the face—instead of hurriedly plunging down side streets to avoid that suspicious official's eye, as he had frequently done when up in London on leave with a crony, the pair of them decked in borrowed trappings to which a cadet's rank did not entitle them. He was an officer, holding the King's Commission; and, best of all, had been gazetted to the Second Battalion of the old regiment, of which his uncle, "Leathery Laing," was now second-in-command. He had completed his draft leave, and was to report at the Depot at six o'clock this Sunday evening, to take charge of a contingent bound overseas to reënforce the battalion at a point on the Western Front as yet unrevealed.

He had made his farewells—in the offhand, jocular fashion affected by our race in cases where the probability of return is more than doubtful. His father had shaken hands with him, and shaken his own head at the same time. Tom Birnie's heart was not in the war: he persisted in his belief that it was started by the Jingoes.

His friends—and Roy had friends in every walk of life—had loaded him with messages to fathers, brothers and sweethearts who were gone before into the pillar of cloud. Mr. Gillespie, the bank manager, entrusted him with a small package (on behalf of Mesdames Spot and Plain), containing mysterious comforts for son Robert. Jamie Leslie, the organ-blower of the parish church, buttonholed him in the street.

"Mr. Roy," he said wistfully, "you'll tell the boys oot there that I have tried, and tried, for to get ower; but they winna hae me! It's because I'm no quite richt in the heid," he added, with a candour which might well have been imitated by others occupying more exalted official positions than his own. "You'll tell them? I wouldna like them for tae think—"

Roy supplied the necessary assurance, and passed on to receive a message from old Mrs. Rorison, whose son John, a giant of six feet four inches, had abandoned the service of the post office in order to join the Scots Guards.

"Tell oor John," said the old lady—it was universally assumed that Roy would encounter the entire Craigfoot contingent, regardless of rank or unit, immediately upon landing—"tae keep his heid doon in they trenches. I ken him! And dinna go keeking ower the top yourself, Mr. Roy!" This, on the whole, was the most practical valediction that Roy received.

Lord Eskerley's farewell was quite characteristic.

"Good-bye! Don't give away any military news when you write to her. It has done a lot of harm already."

There was no one left now to say good-bye to but Marjorie. Like the young sentimentalist that he was, Roy was reserving her for the last. He wanted to bid her farewell at the very final moment—and, if possible, clandestinely. There existed no obstacle whatever to his driving openly to Netherby and delivering his farewell speech on the hearthrug in the library, or among the raspberry-canes in the kitchen garden. But war sharpens our romantic appetites to a surprising degree. At the most ordinary times lovers are accustomed to bid one another good night with an expenditure of time and intensity which takes no account of the fact that they are going to meet again directly after breakfast to-morrow morning. How much more pardonable and ecstatic, then, must that exercise be when it really is good night—when it is more than probable that before the time for reunion comes round again, one of the participants may have blown out his little candle for good.

Roy's preference for surreptitious love-making was natural enough, for another reason. He was a member of the shyest and most self-conscious brotherhood in the world—the tribe of the less-than-twenty-one's. By rights he should not have been in love—matrimonially—at all. A healthy English Public-School boy of nineteen is not entitled to such emotions as inspired Master Roy and his friends in the year of grace nineteen-fifteen. His mind should be set—and in normal times almost invariably is set—upon his biceps muscle, or his first salmon, or his college rowing colours, or (at moments of periodic festivity) the acquisition of souvenirs, like policemen's helmets or door-knockers. Permanent association with one of the softer sex should be to him, for several years yet, a delightful unattainability. He matures late, does our young Briton, and premature responsibility as husband and father usually prevents him from ever developing into the man he was meant to be. But wise old Nature is always ready to modify her own laws in an emergency. In nineteen-fifteen people, especially young people, found their perspectives considerably foreshortened. It is no use taking long views about life at a time when life promises to be more than usually short. There is just one thing to do, and that is to reach out with both hands after such of life's gifts as are normally reserved, especially in this country of ours, for those of riper years.

So, engaged couples who in nineteen-fourteen had taken it as a matter of course that their wedding must be postponed until after the war, suddenly realised that there might be no after the war for one of them, and incontinently got married. Boys and girls whose sentimental exercises in normal times would have been limited to sitting out dances behind a screen in the Christmas holidays not only became engaged, but usually plunged into matrimony a few weeks later. They were governed by forces which they did not entirely comprehend, and which few of them would have been capable of resisting if they had. They had no idea how they were going to live after the war; but they married all the same. It was essentially a case where the morrow must take thought for itself. They capitalised all their stock, both of money and of youth, these happy young gamblers, and lived ecstatically on that capital, stoically resigned to the probability that before it was exhausted their little partnership would have been dissolved. And in too many cases, poor souls, they were justified in their expectations. But who shall say that they were wrong, or improvident, to do as they did? Prudence, perhaps; commonsense, possibly. But not nature, nor patriotism, nor romance, nor the spirit of adventure.

It is not to be supposed that our impetuous Roy had reasoned out these matters with any degree of profundity. All he knew was that he had loved that glorious girl, Marjorie Clegg, from the moment he had first seen her in Craigfoot parish church a year and a half ago; and that now he was called upon to go away and relinquish even his present scanty opportunities of seeing her. Moreover, his battalion had got through twenty-three second lieutenants in the last ten months. One, obvious, course was indicated; but it was a big step for a reserved schoolboy of nineteen. To tell Marjorie, tout court, that he loved her frightened him—far more than any statistics about second lieutenants. If it had been peace-time he would have followed the natural path of a boy who falls in love with a girl of his own age. He would have decided to grow up, and become an eligible parti at the earliest possible moment. He might, possibly, have declared himself, and invited his beloved to "wait for him." It is within the bounds of probability that the damsel would have promised to do so. The affaire would then have proceeded on its innocuous course—spasmodically enough, owing to the interposition of such things as University terms, regimental duties, or vulgar office hours—to its normal end. That is to say, the girl would probably have met and married some one really eligible a few years older than herself, leaving it to the hand of Time to heal the wounds of her late cavalier and unite him in due course to another really eligible girl some years younger than himself, recently the property of a shaveling of nineteen.

But this was not peace-time. The country was at war, and for reasons already indicated waiting and seeing had gone out of fashion. The watchword of the moment, whether applied to munitions or matrimony, was, "Do It Now!" No wonder that Roy felt his heart leap to his throat as the Baronrigg car, conveying him to the Depot seven miles away, surmounted the last crest on the undulating road, and revealed to him Marjorie's two-seater standing in the hollow below, under the lee of Craigfoot Wood. For all her preliminary refusal and offhand acceptance, Marjorie had kept tryst.

CHAPTER V

THE INEVITABLE

Marjorie stood on the bank above the road, knee-deep in bracken. The Baronrigg chauffeur, an elderly gentleman with that perfect repose of manner which is given only to such members of the tribe as are promoted coachmen, drew up beside the two-seater. Roy jumped out and saluted with great smartness. He was in uniform, and was hung about with that warlike paraphernalia professionally known as "the whole Christmas Tree." Having disencumbered himself of this, he threw it into the car, climbed the bank, and joined his lady. His heart bumped.

"You do look nice," said Marjorie. "But what is the matter with your buttons?"

"I have painted them with some black stuff," replied Roy. "Quite the thing—not swank! It is always done on active service: otherwise my twinkling little buttons might attract the eye of vigilant Boche." He took her arm, a little feverishly. "What about a stroll in the shades of the forest? What about it, what?"

This was not the way in which Roy had intended to begin the interview. Upon such occasions of stress no man knows what humiliating tricks self-consciousness may not play upon him. But Marjorie, of the superior sex, appeared quite unruffled.

"All right," she said cheerfully; "come along! I am so glad you are here."

"Are you, Marjorie?" exclaimed Roy, much encouraged.

"Yes. I want to consult you about something."

Roy drew back an overhanging branch.

"Step inside the consulting room!" he suggested.

Marjorie seated herself upon a ledge of rock in the snug nook which the branch had concealed. Roy lay down on the grass at her feet. There was silence. At last Marjorie said:

"When must you be at the Depot?"

"Six." Roy glanced at his new, luminous, dust-proof, non-breakable wrist-watch. "That gives me twenty minutes. What did you want to talk to me about, Marjorie?"

"About Joe."

"Oh!" There was a certain lack of enthusiasm about the interjection, but Marjorie did not notice it. Roy looked up at her. Her brow was puckered, and her eyes were troubled. She was very fond of brother Joe. Roy, resolutely disengaging his attention from the high lights in her hair, said gently:

"Tell me."

Marjorie blazed out suddenly.

"He can't stand it any longer! He has done his best to be patient, and obedient to father, and all that; but it's breaking his heart. Why, only this morning—"

She related the pitiful incident of the school circular and the Roll of Honour. There were tears in her eyes when she had finished.

"So," she concluded, "he has made up his mind to join up."

"Good egg!" observed Roy. "Is he going to apply for a commission, or what?"

"That was what I wanted to consult you about," said Marjorie. "You are so clever about these things, Roy."

"Fire away!" replied Roy, much inflated.

"Commissions," asked Marjorie—"can you get them easily?"

"Not so easily now. The authorities are beginning to sit up and take notice. The first lot of officers in the new armies were mostly all right. They didn't know much, but they were sahibs, who played the game and handled their men properly. Now they are getting used up, and some pretty strange fish have been given commissions lately. The voice of the T.G. is heard in the land. Here is a letter from my uncle, Alan Laing—our second-in-command. You know him?"

"No, but I have seen him."

Roy chuckled.

"Yes," he said, "and he has seen you; and you fairly knocked him flat! But never mind Uncle Alan now. He's a wicked old man, anyhow. About this T.G. business. Uncle Alan wrote to me the other day. He said that some of the officers lately sent out were about the stickiest crowd he had yet handled. Here's the letter."

Of course, among ourselves in the Mess, he read, we make allowances, and try to get the best out of them; for after all, most of them are plucky enough and efficient enough. Unfortunately, the rank-and-file, with the true British passion for inequality, do not share our democratic sentiments. They say, in effect: "This blankety blighter is no better than we are. Why should we salute him, or obey him, or follow him?" The T.G. too often confirms his own sentence; I caught one of my subalterns trying to stand a corporal a drink the other day. I hear they are going to start officers' schools soon. The sooner the better!

"Of course," said Marjorie, flying, woman-like, to the personal application of the subject, "Joe wouldn't behave like that."

"Good Lord, no! Of course he wouldn't," said Roy.

"Amos probably would, though," added honest Marjorie. "He has never been to a proper school, so he has had no chance to have his Clegg manners improved. But we aren't troubling about Amos: it's Joe. Would they take him into a Cadet Officers' School, do you think?"

"I am sure they would," said Roy confidently. "Only, it might require a little time, you know."

"That's a drawback," replied Marjorie. "Once father knows what Joe is trying to do, his life at home won't be worth living. It'll be a fight all day long: he will be lectured, and badgered, and prayed over. I shouldn't wonder if they sent for Uncle Fred!"

A thought struck Roy.

"I say," he enquired, "how old is Joe?"

"Twenty."

"That hangs the crape on Joseph!" announced Roy—"for a year, at any rate. They won't give a commission to a minor without his father's consent." He wriggled. "Don't I know it! If they did, I'd have been in the show a year ago."

"In that case," said Marjorie, "we must fall back on our second plan."

"We?"

"I mean Joe and I."

"Oh, sorry. I was hoping you meant you and me! What is the plan?"

"It's a secret just now," said Marjorie. "Perhaps I'll tell you about it, when I write."

Roy looked up eagerly.

"You will write to me?" he said. "Often?"

"Of course I will!" said the girl. "It will be wonderful!"

What she meant was that it would be wonderful to have, in future, a personal interest in the British Expeditionary Force. As already indicated, the circle in which Marjorie had been born and bred was not very heavily represented in France—nor would be until conscription came. But now Roy would be there. She would have a personal outlet for her imagination, and a peg to hang her prayers on. Women hate abstract patriotism, as they hate all abstractions. Roy would supply the human, personal element, upon which a woman's visions must always be founded. Male orators might volley and thunder about the common cause and the redemption of civilization; but to most women the Great War and its issues were usually embodied in the person of a single undistinguished individual in a tin bowler.

Roy, of course, did not understand.

"How glorious of you to say that, Marjorie!" he exclaimed.

"You do not know," continued Marjorie rapturously, "how I have longed and longed to have some one to write to, and send parcels to, and everything—some one I really knew!—instead of a bundle of things to be distributed among a whole platoon!"

"And you are going to make me that particular person?" said Roy, joyfully.

"Rather! You see," explained Marjorie with fatal frankness, "I don't know anyone else. At least, I shan't, until Joe—"

Roy's face fell. "I thought there was a catch about it!" he said woefully.

"About what?"

"About what you said. I didn't understand that all you wanted was some one to write to; and any old thing would do—even me! I did hope, for a minute—"

Marjorie was all repentance at once.

"Oh!" she cried. "How hateful of me! Roy, I didn't mean it! What must you think of me? I must seem like a common little war-flapper. But I'm not, am I? Roy, you know I'm not! Will you forgive me?" She extended a hand impetuously.

It fired the train. Next moment Roy had caught it in both of his, and was kissing it rapturously.

"Marjorie—dear!" he murmured. He was kneeling before her now, with his arms crossed upon her knees. He looked up into her face, and suddenly realised what he was leaving behind. A great sob shook him. Perhaps the thought of the twenty-three second lieutenants had something to do with it. After all, he was only nineteen, and love and life were very sweet. His head sank on to his arms; his shoulders heaved.

There followed a brief interval of silence—perhaps three minutes. But within that interval something happened to Marjorie.

Presently a slim hand removed Roy's glengarry bonnet, and began to stroke his obstinately curly hair. Next, Roy was conscious of a warm splash, somewhere behind his right ear—followed by another, and another. Marjorie was shaking now. Roy looked up at her again, and the sight of her wet face suddenly braced him against his own weakness. He sprang up.

"You poor, poor, poor!" he said. "Let me—"

He produced a khaki handkerchief from his sleeve, and dried her eyes, Marjorie meekly submitting. After that, inevitably, he kissed her. It was not a very successful kiss: first kisses seldom are. Then he sat down upon the grass again with his head against her knee, and her hand against his cheek. He sighed, long and rapturously. Marjorie stroked his hair with her free hand. Children both, they were living through a moment for which others, less fortunate, have sometimes waited a lifetime, and which in no case ever comes to man or maid a second time.

Presently they began to talk, employing the two inevitable topics of the newly-betrothed—"When did it begin?" and, "Do you remember?"

They recalled their first glimpse of one another—that May morning in church, more than a year ago.

"Uncle Alan was very witty on the subject," said Master Roy. "Oh, most diverting! It's my belief the old ruffian was having a good one-time-look-see at you himself, and that was why he caught me at it. Well, I can't say I blame him!"

They wandered on to the second subject. Here they had much ground to cover.

They had not actually met until three weeks after the glimpse. During those weeks Roy religiously attended dances, tea-parties, political meetings, even a church soirée, in the hope of encountering his divinity; but in vain. Once he bought three numbered and reserved seats for an amateur theatrical entertainment in the Town Hall, and sent two of these to Netherby, "With the compliments of the committee." But Mrs. Clegg, knowing that her husband did not hold with theatrical entertainments, and that under no circumstances would she or the family be permitted to attend this one, had passed the tickets on to a more emancipated quarter, with the result that Roy witnessed the performance in the giggling company of two Netherby housemaids. He told the story to Marjorie now, and was rewarded with tears and laughter.

But they had met at last—at the local Hunt Steeplechases. Marjorie was present, privily, in the two-seater, with brother Joe. Roy had spied the pair from the regimental enclosure. He was due back at his crammer's in two days' time, and was a desperate man. Summoning his entire stock of audacity—it was considerable, but he needed it all—he left the enclosure, pushed his way through the crowd, and addressed himself to the male member of the rather forlorn couple standing by the rails.

"I say, sir, aren't you Mr. Clegg, of Netherby?"

Joe, quite unequal to the situation, murmured something inarticulate; but Marjorie came to the rescue.

"How do you do?" she said. "You are Mr. Birnie, aren't you?"

"Yes. We are your next-door neighbours—your nearest little playmates, in fact," replied Master Roy. (Netherby is some four or five miles from Baronrigg; but no matter.) "My father has been meaning to shoot cards on you for a long time. Meanwhile, would you care to come into the enclosure? Bracing air! Gravel soil! Commands a distant prospect of the Cheviot Hills, and so on! Highly recommended! Do come!" He waited breathlessly for her reply, fearful of having gone too far. But the invitation was accepted.

"What a moment!" he said. "What a moment!" He looked up at Marjorie again. "I was afraid you would turn me down, for cheek. You hesitated a bit, didn't you?"

Marjorie laughed, joyously.

"My dear, that was for manners! I wouldn't have let you go at that moment for anything in the world!" She played a gentle arpeggio on the brown cheek under her hand.

"By gum, I wish I had known that!" observed Roy, with sincerity.

Once inside the enclosure Marjorie created a profound sensation. It is true that not many of her own sex addressed themselves to her, but this omission was more than balanced by the empressement of the gentlemen.

First of all, naturally, she was introduced to the senior officer present—Major Eric Bethune, who, in the secret view of his subordinates, proceeded to take an unsportsmanlike and unduly prolonged advantage of his superior rank. Duty called him at last to the side of a lady of riper years. Thereafter, Marjorie, almost invisible for second lieutenants, was escorted about the course, shown the jumps, plied with tea, and invited to back horses at other people's expense. She had driven home in a dream, with her exhausted relative slumbering beside her.

After that a few mothers and sisters, hounded thereto by clamorous menkind, had left cards at Netherby. The calls had been duly returned, with the result that some of the sisters added themselves, quite voluntarily, to the ranks of the brothers. Marjorie possessed the supreme quality in a woman of being attractive to her own sex. Mrs. Clegg and her daughter began to be seen at subscription balls and the more comprehensive garden parties; presently at more intimate entertainments. In the end, Netherby usually received a card for any function that was going, always excepting such—formal dinner parties and the like—as necessitated inviting Albert Clegg.

"The girl is a peach," was the local verdict, "and mother does her best; but the old man merely suggests eternal punishment!"

And wherever Marjorie appeared—at ball, function, fête, bazaar, gymkhana, or tea-fight, Master Roy Birnie, home for good from the crammer's, was usually visible in respectful attendance.

Not that she had not other adherents. Even Major Bethune himself, the handsomest man and the most eligible parti in the county, did not consider it beneath his dignity to sit out a dance or two with the daughter of Albert Clegg. But Roy's devotion was marked by its unflagging and conscientious continuity. He was a regular visitor at Netherby. It was his habit to ride over every morning—usually about eleven, when the master of the house was engaged in transacting business in the library, mostly over the telephone to Newcastle—where he would play tennis, perform tricks on the billiard table, give the children riding-lessons, pick roses for Mrs. Clegg—do anything, in fact, which afforded him a reasonable excuse for remaining on the premises. Being British, and only eighteen, his passion had not declared itself in words; nor would have for many a day, but for the quickening influences already indicated. Even when the coming of war suddenly laid a man's responsibilities upon his young shoulders, and removed most of his rivals, real and imaginary, en masse, to the other side of the Channel, he did not look higher, for the present, than the foot of Marjorie's pedestal. His intention was to leave his lady perched upon the summit thereof for the duration; and then, if and when he returned safe and whole from castigating the Boche, to invite her to step down to earth and start, under his escort, upon the adventure of life. To do more at present struck him as unsportsmanlike. He would be forcing her hand unfairly; he would be taking a sentimental advantage of the military situation. But the last ten minutes had entirely upset his plan of operations. He had kissed Marjorie; Marjorie had indubitably kissed him back; and now they were sitting side by side in Craigfoot Wood, in an attitude which twelve months ago would have outraged both his susceptibilities and his sense of humour, facing the prospect of indefinite separation. What was the next step? What about it, what? Pending a decision, he saluted his lady afresh.

From the road below them came a respectful toot from the horn of the Craigfoot motor, suggestive of a faithful attendant coughing a discreet reminder behind his hand. Roy glanced at his watch, and rose to his feet with a heartrending sigh.

"Time to go!" he groaned.

He held out his hands to Marjorie, and raised her up. For a moment those two young people looked one another bravely in the face—for the last time, for aught they knew. They were very much of a height; Roy had the advantage of perhaps an inch. Then that direct young maiden, Marjorie, put both arms round Roy's neck.

"Good-bye, dear," she said. "Take care of yourself, and come back safe to me!"

"I'll come back," replied Roy stoutly, forgetting all about the twenty-three second lieutenants. He had no doubts about anything now. Then:

"Marjorie," he asked, "when will you marry me? As soon as the war is over?" He waited, expectant.

Marjorie's answer took the rather puzzling form of a little choking laugh, accompanied by two large tears.

"As soon as that?" she asked.

The young of the male species possesses no intuition.

"Yes," replied Roy earnestly, "just as soon! Or"—with the air of one conceding a point—"pretty soon after." He came closer. "Marjorie—will you?"

This time Marjorie smiled without any tears at all—a purely maternal smile.

"Leave it to me, little man!" she said.

Then she kissed him again, and sent him off to fight for her.