Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (766 page)

Sol seemed mildly surprised at my having selected him as my companion, but accepted the offer with a grateful smile. His mind seemed to have been vastly relieved.

“So I haven’t lost you yet, Nell,” he murmured, as we branched off among the great tree-trunks and heard the voices of the party growing fainter in the distance.

“Nobody can lose me,” said I, “for nobody has won me yet. For goodness’ sake don’t talk about it any more. Why can’t you talk like your old self two years ago, and not be so dreadfully sentimental?”

“You’ll know why some day, Nell,” said the student reproachfully. “Wait until you are in love yourself, and you will understand it.”

I gave a little incredulous sniff.

“Sit here, Nell,” said cousin Sol, manoeuvring me into a little bank of wild strawberries and mosses, and perching himself upon a stump of a tree beside me. “Now all I ask you to do is to answer one or two questions, and I’ll never bother you any more.”

I sat resignedly, with my hands in my lap.

“Are you engaged to Lieutenant Hawthorne?”

“No!” said I energetically.

“Are you fonder of him than of me?”

“No, I’m not.”

Sol’s thermometer of happiness up to a hundred in the shade at the least.

“Are you fonder of me than of him, Nelly?” in a very tender voice.

“No.”

Thermometer down below zero again.

“Do you mean to say that we are exactly equal in your eyes?”

“Yes.”

“But you must choose between us some time, you know,” said cousin Sol with mild reproach in his voice.

“I do wish you wouldn’t bother me so!” I cried, getting angry, as women usually do when they are in the wrong. “You don’t care for me much or you wouldn’t plague me. I believe the two of you will drive me mad between you.”

Here there were symptoms of sobs on my part, and utter consternation and defeat among the Barker faction.

“Can’t you see how it is, Sol?” said I, laughing through my tears at his woe-begone appearance. “Suppose you were brought up with two girls and had got to like them both very much, but had never preferred one to the other and never dreamed of marrying either, and then all of a sudden you are told you must choose one, and so make the other very unhappy, you wouldn’t find it an easy thing to do, would you?”

“I suppose not,” said the student.

“Then you can’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame you, Nelly,” he answered, attacking a great purple toadstool with his stick. “I think you are quite right to be sure of your own mind. It seems to me,” he continued, speaking rather gaspily, but saying his mind like the true English gentleman that he was, “it seems to me that Hawthorne is an excellent fellow. He has seen more of the world than I have, and always does and says the right thing in the right place, which certainly isn’t one of my characteristics. Then he is well born and has good prospects. I think I should be very grateful to you for your hesitation, Nell, and look upon it as a sign of your good-heartedness.”

“We won’t talk about it any more,” said I, thinking in my heart what a very much finer fellow he was than the man he was praising. “Look here, my jacket is all stained with horrid fungi and things. We’d better go after the rest of the party, hadn’t we? I wonder where they are by this time?”

It didn’t take very long to find that out. At first we heard shouting and laughter coming echoing through the long glades, and then, as we made our way in that direction, we were astonished to meet the usually phlegmatic Elsie careering through the wood at the top of her speed, her hat off, and her hair streaming in the wind. My first idea was that some frightful catastrophe had occurred — brigands possibly, or a mad dog — and I saw my companion’s big hand close round his stick; but on meeting the fugitive it proved to be nothing more tragic than a game of hide-and-seek which the indefatigable Mr. Cronin had organised. What fun we had, crouching and running and dodging among the Hatherley oaks! and how horrified the prim old abbot who planted them would have been, and the long series of black-coated brethren who have muttered their orisons beneath the welcome shade! Jack refused to play on the excuse of his weak ankle, and lay smoking under a tree in high dudgeon, glaring in a baleful and gloomy fashion at Mr. Solomon Barker; while the latter gentleman entered enthusiastically into the game, and distinguished himself by always getting caught, and never by any possibility catching anybody else.

Poor Jack! He was certainly unfortunate that day. Even an accepted lover would have been rather put out, I think, by an incident which occurred during our return home. It was agreed that all of us should walk, as the trap had been already sent off with the empty basket, so we started down Thorny Lane and through the fields. We were just getting over a stile to cross old Brown’s ten-acre lot, when Mr. Cronin pulled up, and remarked that he thought we had better get into the road.

“Road?” said Jack. “Nonsense! We save a quarter of a mile by the field.”

“Yes, but it’s rather dangerous. We’d better go round.”

“Where’s the danger?” said our military man, contemptuously twisting his moustache.

“0, nothing,” said Cronin. “That quadruped in the middle of the field is a bull, and not a very good-tempered one either. That’s all. I don’t think that the ladies should be allowed to go.”

“We won’t go,” said the ladies in chorus.

“Then come round by the hedge and get into the road,” suggested Sol.

“You may go as you like,” said Jack rather testily; “but I am going across the field.”

“Don’t be a fool, Jack,” said my brother.

“You fellows may think it right to turn tail at an old cow, but I don’t. It hurts my self-respect, you see, so I shall join you at the other side of the farm.” With which speech Jack buttoned up his coat in a truculent manner, waved his cane jauntily, and swaggered off into the ten-acre lot.

We clustered about the stile and watched the proceedings with anxiety. Jack tried to look as if he were entirely absorbed in the view and in the probable state of the weather, for he gazed about him and up into the clouds in an abstracted manner. His gaze generally began and ended, however, somewhere in the direction of the bull. That animal, after regarding the intruder with a prolonged stare, had retreated into the shadow of the hedge at one side, while Jack was walking up the long axis of the field.

“It’s all right,” said I. “It’s got out of his way.”

“I think it’s leading him on,” said Mr. Nicholas Cronin. “It’s a vicious cunning brute.”

Mr. Cronin had hardly spoken before the bull emerged from the hedge, and began pawing the ground, and tossing its wicked black head in the air. Jack was in the middle of the field by this time, and affected to take no notice of his companion, though he quickened his pace slightly. The bull’s next manoeuvre was to run rapidly round in two or three small circles; and then it suddenly stopped, bellowed, put down its head, elevated its tail, and made for Jack at the very top of its speed.

There was no use pretending to ignore its existence any longer. Jack faced round and gazed at it for a moment. He had only his little cane in his hand to oppose to the half ton of irate beef which was charging towards him. He did the only thing that was possible, namely to make for the hedge at the other side of the field.

At first Jack hardly condescended to run, but went off with a languid contemptuous trot, a sort of compromise between his dignity and his fear, which was so ludicrous that, frightened as we were, we burst into a chorus of laughter. By degrees, however, as he heard the galloping of hoofs sounding nearer and nearer, he quickened his pace, until ultimately he was in full flight for shelter, with his hat gone and his coat-tails fluttering in the breeze, while his pursuer was not ten yards behind him. If all Ayoub Khan’s cavalry had been in his rear, our Afghan hero could not have done the distance in a shorter time. Quickly as he went, the bull went quicker still, and the two seemed to gain the hedge almost at the same moment. We saw Jack spring boldly into it, and the next moment he came flying out at the other side as if he had been discharged from a cannon, while the bull indulged in a series of triumphant bellows through the hole which he had made. It was a relief to us all to see Jack gather himself up and start off for home without a glance in our direction. He had retired to his room by the time we arrived, and did not appear until breakfast next morning, when he limped in with a very crestfallen expression. None of us was hard-hearted enough to allude to the subject, however, and by judicious treatment we restored him before lunch-time to his usual state of equanimity.

It was a couple of days after the picnic that our great Derby sweepstakes was to come off. This was an annual ceremony never omitted at Hatherley House, where, between visitors and neighbours, there were generally quite as many candidates for tickets as there were horses entered.

“The sweepstakes, ladies and gentlemen, comes off to-night,” said Bob in his character of head of the house. “The subscription is ten shillings. Second gets quarter of the pool, and third has his money returned. No one is allowed to have more than one ticket, or to sell his ticket after drawing it. The drawing will be at seven thirty.” All of which Bob delivered in a very pompous and official voice, though the effect was rather impaired by a sonorous “Amen!” from Mr. Nicholas Cronin.

 
I must now drop the personal style of narrative for a time. Hitherto my little story has consisted simply in a series of extracts from my own private journal; but now I have to tell of a scene which only came to my ears after many months.

Lieutenant Hawthorne, or Jack, as I cannot help calling him, had been very quiet since the day of the picnic, and given himself up to reverie. Now, as luck would have it, Mr. Solomon Barker sauntered into the smoking-room after luncheon on the day of the sweepstakes, and found the Lieutenant puffing moodily in solitary grandeur upon one of the settees. It would have seemed cowardly to retreat, so the student sat down in silence, and began turning over the pages of the Graphic. Both the rivals felt the situation to be an awkward one. They had been in the habit of studiously avoiding each other’s society, and now they found themselves thrown together suddenly, with no third person to act as a buffer. The silence began to be oppressive. The Lieutenant yawned and coughed with over-acted nonchalance, while honest Sol felt very hot and uncomfortable, and continued to stare gloomily at the paper in his hand. The ticking of the clock, and the click of the billiard-balls across the passage, seemed to grow unendurably loud and monotonous. Sol glanced across once; but catching his companion’s eye in an exactly similar action, the two young men seemed simultaneously to take a deep and all-absorbing interest in the pattern of the cornice.

“Why should I quarrel with him?” thought Sol to himself. “After all, I want nothing but fair play. Probably I shall be snubbed; but I may as well give him an opening.”

Sol’s cigar had gone out; the opportunity was too good to be neglected.

“Could you oblige me with a fusee, Lieutenant?” he asked. The Lieutenant was sorry — extremely sorry — but he was not in possession of a fusee.

This was a bad beginning. Chilly politeness was even more repulsing than absolute rudeness. But Mr. Solomon Barker, like many other shy men, was audacity itself when the ice had once been broken. He would have no more bickerings or misunderstandings. Now was the time to come to some definite arrangement. He pulled his armchair across the room, and planted himself in front of the astonished soldier.

“You’re in love with Miss Nelly Montague,” he remarked. Jack sprang off the settee with as much rapidity as if Farmer Brown’s bull were coming in through the window.

“And if I am, sir,” he said, twisting his tawny moustache, “what the devil is that to you?”

“Don’t lose your temper,” said Sol. “Sit down again, and talk the matter over like a reasonable Christian. I am in love with her too.”

“What the deuce is the fellow driving at?” thought Jack, as he resumed his seat, still simmering after his recent explosion.

“So the long and the short of it is that we are both in love with her,” continued Sol, emphasising his remarks with his bony forefinger.

“What then?” said the Lieutenant, showing some symptoms of a relapse. “I suppose that the best man will win, and that the young lady is quite able to choose for herself. You don’t expect me to stand out of the race just because you happen to want the prize, do you?”

“That’s just it,” cried Sol. “One of us will have to stand out. You’ve hit the right idea there. You see, Nelly — Miss Montague, I mean — is, as far as I can see, rather fonder of you than of me, but still fond enough of me not to wish to grieve me by a positive refusal.”