Читать книгу Leonie of the Jungle - Joan Conquest - Страница 10

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"The kindest man,

The best conditioned and unwearied spirit

In doing courtesies."—Shakespeare.

They met on the threshold.

Swinging back the door to let Leonie and her aunt out, Ellen, the middle-aged maid, almost an heirloom in the family of Cuxson, bristling in starched cap and apron, let in the erstwhile plague of her life, but now as ever the light of her eyes, Jonathan Cuxson, Junior.

He took Lady Hetth's hand in a mighty and painful grip when after a moment's hesitation she introduced herself.

"Why, of course! You must be Jan! Except for being bigger you haven't changed a bit since I saw you years ago one Speech Day at Harrow!" She looked with open admiration at the very personable young man before her who loomed large in the hall with his height of six feet two and a tremendous width of shoulder. His eyes were grey, and as honest as a genuine fine day; the jaw was just saved from a shadow of brutality in its strength by a remarkably fine mouth; the ears were splendid from an intellectual point of view, and the set of the head on the neck, and the neck on the shoulders, perfect. The nose was a good nose, rather broad at the top, with those delicate sensitive nostrils which usually spell trouble for the owner.

"I don't believe you remember me!"

Happily the reply which must have been untrue or given in the negative was averted by the hilarious arrival of a puppy.

Having heard the deep voice associated in its canine mind with bits of cake and joyous roughs-and-tumbles, it had forsaken the happy though forbidden hunting ground of the upper storeys and negotiated the stairs in a series of bumps and misses.

Arrived in the hall it hurled itself blindly against Leonie's ankles, and ricocheted on to its master's boots, where it essayed a pas seul on its hind legs in its efforts to reach the strong brown hand.

"Oh!" said Leonie, as she fell on her knees with her arms outstretched to the rampaging ball of white fluff and high spirits, the which thinking it some new game squatted back on its hind legs with the front ones wide apart, gave an infantile squeak, and whizzed round three times apparently for luck, as tears welled up in the child's large eyes and trickled down the white face.

"Hello, kiddie! You're crying!" said Jan Cuxson, who like his father had a positive mania for protecting and helping those in trouble, which mania got him into an infinite and varied amount of trouble himself, and led him into unexpected boles and corners of the earth. "I'm—I'm not crying weally!" choked Leonie, "it's—it's my kitten!"

"Oh! do stop, Leonie!" said her aunt, leaning down to catch the child's hand and pull her to her feet. "She's coming to stay with you," she added, as Leonie stood quite still with that piteous jerk of the chin which comes from suppressed and overwhelming grief, as she watched the puppy play a one-sided game of bumblefoot in a corner.

"That's jolly," said the young man.

"Oh! she's coming as a case. She walks a good deal in her sleep, and as my brother-in-law, Colonel Hetth, if you remember, was such a——"

But Jan Cuxson was not listening.

He too had put his hand on the curly head and tilted it back gently so that the light shone into the sorrow-laden eyes encircled by shadows.

Then he smiled suddenly down at the mite, and she, perceiving that a ray of light had suddenly pierced the all-pervading gloom, smiled back, and catching his left hand in both of hers pressed it to her forehead.

"Good Lord!" he muttered, as a thrill ran through him at the unexpected and oriental action.

And Fate, plucking in senile fashion at the loose ends which lay nearest her old hand, knotted two tightly together with a bit of rare golden strand she kept tucked away in her bodice.

"And what shall we do when you come? Can you ride? I know of a lovely pony a little boy rides!"

Leonie shook her head mournfully, feeling unconsciously but acutely the penalty of her sex for the first time in her life.

"I can't wide astwide," she sighed, "I haven't any bweeches. Jill and Maudie Wetherbourne always wide in skirts. But I can swim," she added quickly, "an' jump in out of my depff. I learnt in the baff at the seaside!"

"Oh! come along, child, do!" broke in her aunt to her own undoing.

"Auntie jumps in too, though she says she doesn't," proceeded Leonie in a gallant effort to shore up her family's sporting reputation.

"I do not, Leonie! I can't imagine how you ever got such an idea into your head!"

But Leonie, nothing daunted, shook back her russet mop of hair and gave direct answer, to the confusion of the domestic who happily stood out of Lady Hetth's eye-range.

"But, Auntie! I've often heard Wilkins tell Nannie that you've been in off the deep end before bweakfast! Oh! do let me hold him just for ever such a little while!"

To save the expression of his face Jan Cuxson had bent and lifted the pup by the scruff of its neck, and upon the piteous appeal put it squirming and wriggling in the outstretched arms.

Great tears dripped all over the animal though Leonie stood on one foot, bit her underlip, and squeezed the puppy to suffocation in a valiant effort to restrain this appalling sign of weakness.

"Tell me what makes you cry like that?"

"My—my kitten was—was stwangled by—by someone this morning, an'—an' she was all soft an'—an' fluffy like——"

The words ended in a paroxysm of sobs muffled in the puppy's coat whereupon it ecstatically licked every visible part of the child's neck, whilst Ellen, throwing decorum to the winds, knelt down and drew the shaking little figure into her arms.

"Anybody in there!" suddenly and very gruffly asked Jan Cuxson, jerking his head in the direction of the room where the few and favoured awaited the pleasure of the specialist.

"No, Sir," replied Ellen, as she disentangled one of the puppy's claws from the lace on Leonie's sleeve. "I'm going to call my father! I don't think you understand your little girl very well!"

He spoke quite gently but his face was white with anger, that almost terrifying rage which surges over and through the mentally and physically strong at the sight, or thought, of cruelty to the small and weak.

He whistled two exceedingly sharp notes and plunged his hands into his pockets, where he scrunched up his keys and some loose change.