Читать книгу The Lucky Number - Major General John Hay Beith - Страница 8

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Excalibur was heavily overworked in his new rôle of chaperon during the next three or four weeks, and any dog less ready to oblige than himself might have felt a little aggrieved at the treatment to which he was subjected.

There was the case of the tennis-lawn, for instance. He had always regarded this as his own particular sanctuary, dedicated to reflection and repose. But now the net was stretched across it, and Eileen and the Curate performed antics all over the court with rackets and small white balls which, though they did not hurt Excalibur, kept him awake. It did not occur to him to convey himself elsewhere, for his mind moved slowly; and the united blandishments of the players failed to bring the desirability of such a course home to him. He continued to lie on his favourite spot upon the sunny side of the court, looking injured but forgiving, or slumbering perseveringly amid the storm that raged around him. It was quite impossible to move Excalibur once he had decided to remain where he was, so Eileen and the Curate agreed to regard him as a sort of artificial excrescence—like the buttress in a fives court. If the ball hit him—as it frequently did—the player waiting for it was at liberty either to play it or claim a let. This arrangement added a piquant and pleasing variety to what is too often—especially when indulged in by mediocre players—a very dull game.

But worse was to follow. One day Eileen and the Curate conducted Excalibur to a neighbouring mountain-range—at least, so it appeared to Excalibur—and played another ball game. This time they employed long sticks with iron heads, and two balls, which, though they were much smaller than the tennis balls, were incredibly hard and painful. Excalibur, though willing to help and anxious to please, could not supervise both these balls at once. As sure as he ran to retrieve one the other came after him and took him unfairly in the rear. Excalibur was the gentlest of creatures, but the most perfect gentleman has his dignity to consider. After having been struck for the third time by one of these balls, he whipped round, picked it up in his mouth, and gave it a tiny pinch—just for a warning. At least, he thought it was a tiny pinch. The ball retaliated, with unexpected ferocity. It twisted and turned. It emitted long snaky spirals of some elastic substance, which clogged his teeth and tickled his throat and wound themselves round his tongue and nearly choked him. Panic-stricken, he ran to his mistress, who, with weeping and with laughter, removed the writhing horror from his jaws and comforted him with fair words.

After that Excalibur realised that it is wiser to walk behind golfers than in front of them. But it was boring business, and very exhausting, for he loathed exercise of any kind; and his only periods of repose were the occasions upon which the expedition came to a halt on certain small flat lawns, each of which contained a hole with a flag in it. Here Excalibur would lie down with the contented sigh of a tired child, and go to sleep. As he almost invariably lay down between the hole and the ball, the players agreed to regard him as a bunker. Eileen putted round him; but the Curate, who had little regard for the humbler works of creation, Excalibur thought, used to take his mashie and attempt a lofting shot—an enterprise in which he almost invariably failed, to Excalibur’s great inconvenience.

Country walks were more tolerable, for Eileen’s supervision of his movements, which was usually marked by an officious severity, was sensibly relaxed in these days; and Excalibur found himself at liberty to range abroad amid the heath and through the coppices, engaged in a pastime which he imagined was hunting.

One hot afternoon, wandering into a clearing, he encountered a hare. The hare, which was suffering from extreme panic owing to a terrifying noise behind—the blast of something quite exceptional in the way of profiteers’ motor-horns, to be precise—was bolting right across the clearing. After the manner of hares where objects directly in front of them are concerned, the fugitive entirely failed to perceive Excalibur, and indeed ran right underneath him on its way to cover. Excalibur was so unstrung by this adventure that he ran back to where he had left Eileen and the Curate.

They were sitting side by side upon the grass, and the Curate was holding Eileen’s hand.

Excalibur advanced upon them thankfully, and indicated by an ingratiating smile that a friendly remark or other recognition of his presence would be gratefully received. But neither took the slightest notice of him. They continued to gaze straight before them, in a mournful and abstracted fashion. They looked not so much at Excalibur as through him. First the hare, then Eileen and the Curate! Excalibur began to fear that he had become invisible—or at least transparent. Greatly agitated, he drifted away into a neighbouring plantation, full of young pheasants. Here he encountered a keeper, who was able to dissipate his gloomy suspicions for him without any difficulty whatsoever.

But Eileen and the Curate sat on.

“A hundred pounds a year!” repeated the Curate. “A pass degree, and no influence! I can’t preach, and I have no money of my own. Dearest, I ought never to have told you.”

“Told me what?” inquired Eileen softly. She knew quite well, but she was a woman; and a woman can never let well alone.

The Curate, turning to Eileen, delivered himself of a statement of three words. Eileen’s reply was whispered tu quoque.

“It had to happen, dear,” she added cheerfully, for she did not share the Curate’s burden of responsibility in the matter. “If you had not told me, we should have been miserable separately. Now that you have told me, we can be miserable together. And when two people who—who——” She hesitated.

The Curate completed the relative sentence. Eileen nodded her head in acknowledgment.

“Yes; who are—like you and me, are miserable together, they are happy! See?”

“I see,” said the Curate gravely. “Yes, you are right there. But we can’t go on living on a diet of joint misery. We shall have to face the future. What are we going to do about it?”

Then Eileen spoke up boldly for the first time.

“Gerald,” she said, “we shall simply have to manage on a hundred a year.”

But the Curate shook his head.

“Dearest, I should be an utter cad if I allowed you to do such a thing,” he said. “A hundred a year is less than two pounds a week.”

“A lot of people live on less than two pounds a week,” Eileen pointed out longingly.

“Yes, I know. If we could rent a three-shilling cottage, and I could go about with a spotted handkerchief round my neck, and you could scrub the doorstep, coram populo, we might be very comfortable. But the clergy belong to the black-coated class, and people in the lower ranks of the black-coated class are the poorest people in the whole wide world. They have to spend money on luxuries—collars, and charwomen, and so on—which a working-man can spend entirely on necessities. It wouldn’t merely mean no pretty dresses and a lot of hard work for you, Eileen. It would mean Starvation. Believe me, I know! Some of my friends have tried it, and I know!”

“What happened to them?” asked Eileen fearfully.

“They all had to come down in the end—some soon, some late, but all in time—to taking parish relief.”

“Parish relief?”

“Yes. Not official, regulation, rate-aided charity, but the infinitely more humiliating charity of their well-to-do neighbours. Quiet cheques, second-hand dresses, and things like that. No, little girl, you and I are too proud—too proud of the Cloth—for that. We will never give a handle to the people who are always waiting to have a fling at the improvident clergy—not if it breaks our hearts we won’t!”

“You are quite right, dear,” said Eileen quietly. “We must wait.”

Then the Curate said the most difficult thing he had said yet.

“I shall have to go away from here.”

Eileen’s hand turned cold in his.

“Why?” she whispered; but she knew.

“Because if we wait here, we shall wait for ever. The last curate in Much Moreham—what happened to him?”

“He died.”

“Yes—at fifty-five; and he had been here for thirty years. Preferment does not come in sleepy villages. I must go back to London.”

“The East End?”

“East or South or North—it doesn’t signify. Anywhere but West. In the East and South and North there is always work to be done—hard work. And if a parson has no money and no brains and no influence and can only work—run clothing-clubs and soup-kitchens, and reclaim drunkards—London is the place for him. So off I go to London, my beloved, to lay the foundations of Paradise for you and me—for you and me!”

There was a long silence. Then the pair rose to their feet, and smiled upon one another extremely cheerfully, because each suspected the other (rightly) of low spirits.

“Shall we tell people?” asked the Curate.

Eileen thought, and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Nicer not. It will make a splendid secret.”

“Just between us two—eh?” said the Curate, kindling at the thought.

“Just between us two,” agreed Eileen. And the Curate kissed her, very solemnly. A secret is a comfortable thing to lovers, especially when they are young and about to be lonely.

At this moment a leonine head, supported upon a lumbering and ill-balanced body, was thrust in between them. It was Excalibur, taking sanctuary with the Church from the vengeance of the Law.

“We might tell Scally, I think,” said Eileen.

“Rather!” assented the Curate. “He introduced us.”

So Eileen communicated the great news to Excalibur.

“You do approve, dear, don’t you?” she said.

Excalibur, instinctively realising that this was an occasion upon which liberties might be taken, stood upon his hind legs and placed his fore-paws on his mistress’s shoulders. The Curate supported them both.

“And you will use your influence to get us a living wage from somewhere, won’t you, old man?” added the Curate.

Excalibur tried to lick both their faces at once—and succeeded.