CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME

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CRUMP FOLK GOING
HOME

BY
CONSTANCE HOLME

“Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams”

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.

Published 1913

TO
MY FATHER AND MOTHER

CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME

CHAPTER I

The curse of the old place was upon it—sudden death.

The servants crept quietly, starting when the boards creaked, clutching each other at shadows, and looking for ancestors at every turn. Upstairs, mother and betrothed, doctor and lawyer, convoyed “Slinkin’” Lyndesay to his latter end. The butler waited at the door, a curious expression on his face, neither of sorrow nor indifference; possibly the look of one assisting at an interesting experiment.

From the library, the only cheerful room at Crump, Christian de Lyndesay looked down to the river and over the arch of the crumbling bridge to the bay. A bitter, snarling wind had edged every hill and headland, and the cold tide came up, hungry and gray. He shivered suddenly. It was a thankless night to go out—where Slinkin’ Lyndesay was going.

The evening drew on. A flight of rooks came over the park on the fling of the wind, swept against the windows, sank, rose again, and was gone; and the heir wondered, watching them as they swung towards the woods, whether they carried the black soul of Slinkin’ Lyndesay with them.

Almost with the thought came the sound of movement overhead, and, shortly after, steps on the shallow stairs. When they reached the hall he recognised them. Nobody but the lawyer walked with one leg and ran with the other. Then came the doctor, less certain of his dignity than usual; after him, the faint, far-off whispering of silk; lastly, a light, firm step, that told nothing. Christian looked longingly at the French window.

The lawyer’s left leg walked in sedately, but was overrun by the right, which almost rushed him into Christian’s arms. The left backed promptly, and bumped him into the doctor, but he was too distracted to apologise. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand, which he shuffled continually like a pack of cards.

“Your step-brother is dead,” said the doctor, switching on the light from the door, so that the oak panelling and the windows went black, and Christian’s fair head stood out sharply like a young saint’s.

He was home barely a couple of hours ago from a long tour abroad, and both doctor and lawyer looked at him curiously, standing as he was on the threshold of a new and unexpected experience. He had not been of much account hitherto, with the master of Crump scarcely turned thirty; but now he was everything. It was astonishing how simple he looked,—and how little one knew of him.

“I know,” Christian answered, thinking of the rooks, and stopped. Not that it mattered, for the words reached neither of his companions. Looking from one to the other, he beheld the fingering of a great surprise. The face of the butler returned to him, and he wondered suddenly what Slinkin’ Lyndesay’s death could have had to say to his life.

The silk-whisper along the hall had something cruel in it, and again he looked at the window. An old keeper, passing, halted and spoke, and with a sense of relief he went out quickly into the bleak night. Doctor and lawyer exchanged glances; the former shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly; then their eyes went back to the door.

Alicia de Lyndesay came in very erect, very composed, her hands and face very still. The day’s tragedy had not softened by one whit the set line of her lips. You would never have guessed that she had laid her heart as a broken flower is laid on the breast of the slinkin’ hound upstairs.

The lawyer drew forward a chair, and the doctor surreptitiously pushed a footstool, but neither looked at her for more than a second, and they did not look at all at the girl who followed behind.

Deb entered with her head up, white but tranquil, in full command of herself, to all appearance almost unstirred. The lawyer ventured a chair in her direction also, and she took it with a brief word of thanks, folding her hands and looking straight in front of her.

Mrs. Lyndesay touched the bell and ordered tea, and there was a chilling pause, during which the two men stared uneasily at the carpet; while before the mother’s hidden gaze was nothing but a slinkin’ hound slipping away from her for ever.

“Where is Christian?” she asked at last, looking round. “They told me he had arrived.” There was no need in her voice, only desire for information.

“He was here a moment ago,” the doctor explained hurriedly. “Somebody called him. I do not know where he went.”

She poured the tea with a steady hand.

“He does not care, of course. His brother was nothing to him alive. Dead, his memory will be less than nothing. You will go home to-night, Deborah, I suppose?”

The words framed more command than interrogation, but the girl’s quiet assent was not in the very least submissively acquiescent. Deb might be poor, might have lost everything she had hoped for in the world, but she was a Lyndesay meeting Lyndesay upon equal terms, and the mistress of Crump knew it.

“Christian will go with you. I will have him sent for,” she went on, and, almost as if he had heard, Christian appeared in the doorway. He shook hands with Deborah silently and rather shyly, for they had met but seldom since they were children, and then, still without speaking, laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder, and bent to kiss her. She started violently when he touched her, twisting her head and staring up into the fair, kind face so near her own with an expression that made the onlookers catch their breath; and he withdrew his hand slowly, flushing as he stood away from her.

“Sit down!” she said coldly. “We can dispense with that sort of thing, you and I. Why were you not here to meet us?”

“Old Brathay called me,” he replied, taking a seat quietly, and handing Deborah a plate which she refused with a gesture. “One of the puppies is ill. I ought to have been here, of course. I am sorry.”

“I suppose you know your brother is dead?” she went on, in the same lifeless tone. “You would not have cared to see him, I am aware, and he did not ask for you. But before he died he gave us news of importance.”

“Of importance—to me,” Deb put in on her own account, with curious ease. “We were to have been married this year, as I believe you know. And now, it seems, he was married already.”

The elder men did look at her then—at the aloof face, and the straight, slim figure with its loosely-clasped hands; and from her to the rigid mother and Christian’s dropped eyes. It was said the Lyndesays always wore a mask.

“That alters things,” Christian observed thoughtfully, with no sign of perturbation in his quiet voice. “Slinker was always good at surprises. I suppose hounds are probably some other chap’s, now?”

“You need not be afraid!” Mrs. Lyndesay broke in sharply. “He married beneath him—one of those people who do not exist except in the eyes of Government—but at least we are spared—that!”

“He married a horse-dealer’s daughter,” the lawyer explained hastily and uncomfortably—“three years ago—a horse-dealer’s daughter in Witham. The father has been dead some time, and since she left her husband she has been living with a married sister in Canada. Mr. Lyndesay did not offer us any explanation of his extraordinary—proceedings.”

“I used to know quite a human sort of horse-dealer in Witham,” said Christian. “Gave me rides when I was a youngster, and told me tales by the hour—an interesting character, in his way. And I remember he had an uncommonly nice daughter——” he checked apologetically—“it’s a very wild night.”

Deb laughed queerly, and stood up, and Mrs. Lyndesay rang and ordered the brougham.

The departing guest did not offer her hostess a hand.

“Good-bye,” she said. “You will be glad to say good-bye. You have never been kind to me, and you will be pleased to be rid of me. We might have been friends, perhaps, for Stanley’s sake, but it seems we are not to have the chance. You need not be afraid that I shall ever trouble you again, though I shall not go away, as no doubt you expect. The county must get used to seeing me about as usual, and in time you will forget that I still live at your gates.”

“Be thankful things are no worse!” Mrs. Lyndesay’s voice, grown suddenly strident, arrested her at the door. “Be thankful you have been spared what you deserve—you who would have married my son for his property and his position, grasping at him with both hands, though caring no more for him than for his shadow on the wall!”

After the shocked hush, lawyer and doctor stood up simultaneously, saying “Madam!” in the same breath. It was a poor attempt, and she ignored it.

“You never cared! He was Lyndesay of Crump to you—no more. Lyndesay of Crump, with his money and his name and his fine old place. The man was nothing to you—you miserable parasite on a proud old house! You would have married Christian here on the same terms—isn’t that true? Answer me! Can you deny it?”

Doctor and lawyer made a desperate bid for the French window, shocked to the depths of their ceremonious souls, but in spite of their haste they could not escape Deb’s voice, the voice of a prisoner at the bar.

“It is true!” she heard herself saying, facing the hard eyes of Slinker’s mother; and then Christian slid a hand through her arm, and drew her out.

“Old Brathay’s in the kitchen with the puppy, worrying the cook out of her wits,” he informed her, as they crossed the hall. “Let’s get down to Kilne as quick as we can. I’ve always heard that your father was no end of a hand at hounds.”

Footmen hurried them into wraps. An obsequious butler all but lifted them into the carriage. The lamps flashed a moment on the wide hall as the smooth wheels bore them away. Deb cast one glance at the dark pile of the house as they passed; then sat back, silent. Crump blinds had dropped on more than a dead master.

“It’s an unforgiving sort of night!” Christian said dreamily from his corner, as they rolled down the last of the avenue, the great trees clashing overhead. “On nights like this I believe Westmorland breaks her heart for some old sin of long ago. She beats at the heavens, and they are brass. God does not hear. Brathay is like an old hen with hounds, isn’t he?”

She sat up, trying to see his face in the pale light over the river.

“You must let me tell you,” she said quickly and tensely. “I spoke the truth. I did not love your brother. But at least I loved no one else. And he was good to me.”

Christian nodded comprehendingly.

“Slinker had his moments, I suppose,” he said. “The rest of the time he was—Slinker. I’m glad he was good to you.”

They plunged into the shadow of the bridge, where other maddened giants were at strife. The full tide had swung the river far up its banks, and they could hear the weir above the shout of the wind. Deb leaned back, a growing sense of quiet upon her. Christian’s was a presence that asked nothing, took nothing, least of all sought for your miserable hidden secrets. He accepted you as you were, and, in some utterly unreasoned way, made you feel that he was glad of you. She rested a little in his shadow.

The carriage stopped at the near end of the village, by a creepered house backed by the hill and faced by the river, and Deb, in the road, held out a firm hand.

“You’re not coming in,” she said decidedly. “Brathay knows a hundred times more about hounds than father. This is good-bye between me and Crump—you don’t need telling that. You want to pat me on the head, and I won’t have it—not with all the best intentions in the world! So say good-bye quickly, and go, for there’s quite sufficient anathema in store for me, without Clark adding that I kept his horses out in the rain.”

He dislodged her gently, and opened the gate. Then he took the hand he had ignored.

“Of course I can’t come in if you won’t have me,” he said, “but you shan’t always shut me out. Please remember me very kindly to Mr. Lyndesay. And there’s no good-bye between Kilne and Crump, you know that as well as I do.”

He dismissed the brougham at the turn to the stables, and walked up the steep incline until the avenue had swallowed him whole. Above him the knit branches rocked and wrestled as the wind tore at their crests. It was pitch-dark under their swaying canopy. Now and then a sweep of rain caught him in the face round some monster trunk. He stood still in the narrow, sheathed road, looking up and thinking. How strange it was that Slinker should be gone, and he himself in his place! It was hard luck on Slinker, he thought, to have been cast out of life so soon and so sharply by the stroke of a whirling slate—to have sped his soul on a tempest-night such as this. Slinker was the sort to have crept out of existence unnoticed, leaving the world uneasily doubtful that he might not reappear at any moment. The countryside had not christened him “Slinkin’” Lyndesay for nothing.

Apart, however, from this touch of half-satiric sympathy, he felt little human sorrow for his half-brother. The bond between them had generally been strained to the snapping-point of extreme dislike. He had a hundred times more feeling for his young cousin, Lionel Lyndesay of Arevar, a mile or two over the river, on the far side of Cantacute. Slinker had been unbearable—always. Crump had meant nothing to him but the money it stood for, and the pleasure that ran with the money. He had often gloated over the amount certain fairy woods represented, speculated lightly upon the price of certain farms that he was free to sell. Christian looked through the dark to where Dockerneuk, he knew, lay in the arm of the fell, and thought of the peril that had come so near. It had been within an ace of sale, but it was saved now. Dixon of Dockerneuk, at least, would be glad that Slinker was dead.

Yet the County—(always with a capital)—had approved of Slinker. Slinker had always made a point of turning up at the right place in the right suit with the right buttonhole. He knew what was due to his position, so Christian had been told—often. Christian himself was supposed to be deficient in this quality—so-called. Christian, home from college, had been the friend of the farmers, made a name in the wrestling-ring, played football and ridden at the shows. “Lakin’” Lyndesay, they called him—the same clear-witted judges who had framed their delicate sobriquet for his brother. Slinker had merely sat on Grand Stands and distributed prizes, clapped hands and crooked an arm for the principal lady present. No wonder the County had thought a lot of Slinker! He had been so careful about his conduct—in public.

Theirs was a race with a shadow on it, cursed and foredoomed, proud with age and old in pride. Their mother came of the Devonshire branch, and had early married Egbert de Lyndesay of Crump, who had died two years later, leaving William, his cousin and former heir, as guardian of his six-weeks child. Within three years William had married the widow, and then Christian was born.

Nominal owner for so long, William never had to face the humiliation of deposition, for he died a few months before Stanley came of age, little thinking that in ten years’ time the young man would have followed him to the grave. But now Stanley, too, was gone, and Christian and his mother were left in the old house to find what other mutual ground they might.

She had always hated him, he reflected, almost unemotionally. The situation was too old for new pain. As an affectionate child he had broken his heart over her attitude, but in the end he had come to accept it. Nor had his father shown much feeling towards him, either. Occasionally he had looked at him with whimsical eyes, as if meditating some advance, but his mother’s presence had always stultified any growth of happy intimacy. He had been sent to school early, and William Lyndesay, to whom life had given most things at second hand except a certain bitter sense of humour, had been content to remain outside his child’s heart, busying himself with ordering the estate of his supplanter. Yes, they had all worn masks, Christian thought: his father, smilingly impersonal and aloof; his mother, obstinately and apparently unreasonably cruel; he, himself, puzzled and hurt but finally acquiescent; while as for Slinker—he laughed rather cynically—it would appear that Slinker had worn as many masks as a troupe of mummers!

At last the wind was dropping. He sauntered up to the top of the avenue and out by the top lodge beyond the trees, where a pale moon showed him the land sinking in a vast, watery hollow and then rising again. He thought suddenly of Deb, and wondered how she had ever come to countenance Slinkin’ Lyndesay.

Deb was one of the Kilne Lyndesays—a branch more remote from the parent stem than either that in Devonshire or at Arevar, but in many ways closest of all. Kilne Lyndesays had been Crump stewards for centuries, serving the fine estate from father to son with inherited and increasing devotion, which found in Roger, the last of the list, its most perfect expression and, alas! its culmination, also. For Roger had no son to follow him; only a daughter, to whom the heritage could not pass.

For forty years he had set all his brain, his energy and his love to the prospering of Crump, and under his hands it had touched its highest point of fortune. During Stanley’s long minority he had nursed the estate like a tender, living thing, backed by William Lyndesay in all he did, and handing it over at last with the mingled anguish of pride and pain which only those know who have given themselves whole-heartedly for what is not their own. He had wished to resign at the time, but Mrs. Lyndesay had pressed him to remain in charge, pleading Stanley’s youth and inexperience, and for two years longer he had stayed at his post. But he took badly to the new position, and the reaction of fulfilled work as well as the languor of old age was upon him, so that the end of the two years found the Crump agency gone from his branch for ever. The wrench had been cruel at first, but now the peace of evening had reached him, and his mind dwelt chiefly in the past. And at least the old home was left to him. That had been one of Slinker’s few gracious acts in his short but singularly ungracious life.

Sometime in his fifty-third year, Roger Lyndesay had withdrawn his attention momentarily from the estate, and married a Morton from Appleby, thrown by fate across his path on a visit, a quiet lady who had drifted gently into Kilne, and almost as imperceptibly out of it to her grave on the high fell-side. So Deb had been a lonely little girl in a lonely house,—a rather fierce, intensely reserved little girl, pure Lyndesay and no Morton whatever, a strange little girl who loved the woods and the silent places, and rarely made friends with anybody in her own station. She was bred in awe of Crump, and held aloof from the Lyndesay boys in a mood that was half reverence and half resentment, though for Lionel, to whom these sentiments did not apply, she had her moments of kindly condescension. Her education was represented by a series of battles royal with inadequate daily governesses until she was thirteen, when her solitary Morton aunt descended in wrath, and bore her south for five weary and interminable years. She had come back at last, however, polished and finished, a masked Lyndesay as much as any of them.

She had certainly been difficult to know, Christian reflected, looking back upon the four years since her return, and his own college vacations. He had really seen very little of her, considering the tie between the two houses, and their near situation; and for the last eighteen months he had been abroad, glad to escape from the atmosphere of his home, yet tortured always by the Lyndesay longing for his own soil.

He was in Japan when the news of the engagement reached him, and he had written a couple of congratulatory notes, wondered a little, and let the matter pass. It was fairly easy to understand, after all, whatever you might think of Slinker. She was poor, probably ambitious, and Lyndesay of Crump was the Catch of the County (always with capitals). Any girl might have done it, he had thought—in Japan; but to-night he had seen her with new eyes, and he wondered again. She had not looked that sort of girl, he reflected—not in the least the sort of girl to stand Slinker for a second after she had once really known him.

Of course it was easy for him to sneer, to call her in question. The temptation was not lightly to be despised, a Lyndesay not lightly to be said nay—if only it had been anybody but Slinker! Slinker’s face rose before him with its pale-blue gaze, colourless hair and smooth, guileless smile, and he frowned distressfully. Surely she must have shut the eyes of her soul!

He strolled back through the trees in the faint light filtering on to the muddy road at his feet. The striving arms were growing fitfully still; the land seemed to be curling itself into sleep with a tired sigh. He thought fancifully that his very passing had hushed it to rest. It had risen in storm for the flight of Slinker’s spirit; for the new master it had sunk into peace. He spread his hands over it in a sort of benediction as he came out in front of the house. He would see that it was cherished.

As he went up the steps, the first stroke of the passing bell came to him across the desolate park and the troubled water, and he stood bareheaded while it told its tale of death, each long pause between the heavy notes fraught full with listening souls that had gone home on the same music. He shivered a little as he turned at last to the empty hall. His mother was upstairs—he did not need to ask where. The land was glad of him, but he wanted a more human touch than that. The place was so lonely and yet so full of ghosts! Even Slinker would have been better than nothing. But Slinker was dead, and Christian was Lyndesay of Crump. Looking up at the eyeless windows, he wondered how long it would be before he came to lie where Slinker was lying, shot into eternity by the family fate.

CHAPTER II

The little station looked innocent enough, with its solitary platform and single line, its flower-borders and toy buildings;—innocent and sleepy, awaiting a tardy train, but to Deborah it was a veritable pillory as she stood by herself at its farthest extremity, looking westward to the sea.

Market-day in Witham was drawing its usual votaries in their various degrees, and for all Deborah was an object of interest as she turned an obstinate blue-serge shoulder upon whisper and stare alike.

She knew quite well that they were talking about her. Each little knot of folk had something to say on the subject of her late engagement. It had been such an unexpected triumph, followed by an equally unexpected downfall. The peripety had been so abrupt, so recent, that the district was still gasping. Barely had it learned to look upon Deborah with a new respect when it found her dumped back into her old obscurity, though reflecting, perhaps, a more subtle interest, lent by the atmosphere of scandal surrounding the whole affair.

There had been a Saturday, not so very long ago, when her progress along the platform had been a painful pageant of success. She scarcely knew which had hurt her most, the ill-concealed surprise or the terrible obsequiousness. Well, to-day, at least, no one troubled her. They left her alone, avoided her eyes, gathered in little groups and talked of her in whispers.

She could guess what they were saying—hear the pity and the blame so subtly intermingled. Stanley’s death alone might have earned her commiseration; his marriage along with it had branded her. It was all so “queer!” The dead man might have earned the intangible stigma of the foolish word, but the living girl was left to carry it.

Dixon of Dockerneuk drove up slowly, and sauntered on to the platform. There was interest in his reception, also, for it was well known that he had never married because of a certain horse-dealer’s daughter in Witham. He looked much the same, thought the curious—the big, slow-moving man with the quiet voice and the cloak of patient and pathetic dignity which is the hallmark of the true-bred dalesman. He could not have taken it much to heart, after all. It was only when he reached the railing overlooking the sea that he allowed the new hurt look to creep back into his eyes.

He exchanged a brief good-day with Deborah, and the spectators looked curiously at the two who had suffered so similarly under the same upheaval, whose lives had been altered by the same act of deliberate deceit. Deborah was acutely conscious of the isolation in which they stood, yet she drew a little comfort from the presence of a fellow-sufferer. She made some remark about the crops, and he answered cheerfully; and presently the leisurely train drifted in, almost as if washed up accidentally by the tide. Dixon opened a door, touched his hat, and moved on to another carriage; and her heart warmed to him, recognising his tact.

There were strangers with her by some happy accident, unaware of her personal tragedy; but in the next carriage, and all up the train, Deborah Lyndesay’s name had plenty of play.

A silver-haired, dapper little man, being rather sad at heart on the subject, had of course several sharp things to say about it.

“So tiresome!” he observed to the compartment at large. “So really tiresome of people to do these things! It placed their friends in such an awkward position. Did one bow or did one not bow? Was it kinder to pretend that they were not there? Or did one walk up, smiling, and talk about the Insurance Act?”

A mackintosh in the corner submitted that there could be no reason why one should not bow—always supposing that one wished. Most people, under similar circumstances, obliterated themselves for a long time, went away and lost themselves for their own sake and everybody else’s, till the affair was forgotten. But in this case the lady under discussion seemed to have no self-obliterating tendencies—almost appeared, one might say, to be proud of the situation.

Silver-hair seemed a little shocked by this statement. There are canons of good taste even in back-biting.

Hardly proud, surely? Of course, it was all distinctly tiresome, but, for his own part, he had gathered from—say, the droop of her left shoulder—that she was rather miserable.

Miserable? Of course she was miserable! This was smartness in blue voile and a cornflower hat, somewhat damaged by a string bag. Hadn’t she lost Crump, and gained nothing but the clinging odour of a scandal? Such luck as hers had been quite unlikely to last. And of course she would never have such another chance. Those weeks of triumph would have to last her all the rest of her life.

“So stupid!” Silver-hair murmured worriedly. “So upsetting to do these startling things! Of course she was a Lyndesay and a lady, and she played the organ quite nicely, but after all one of the professions would have been more suitable—say, a nice, quiet country solicitor. It was all very awkward for her friends. And she wasn’t even wearing mourning for him! What he wanted to know, was—what was one to do?”

“Give her time,” said Mackintosh in the corner. “We haven’t seen the end of things yet. She’s a pretty girl, and she must have had a way with her, or Stanley would never have looked at her. We all know that!” (Mackintosh’s forbears having washed for Crump, she was naturally in a position to speak familiarly.) “Give her time! There’s still a Lyndesay of Crump!”

Cornflower admired her perspicacity with a meaning smile.

“Oh, of course, that will be the next thing! She is certain to make the attempt. But Christian will not easily be caught. Christian, I have reason to know, has a fancy in quite another direction!”

Cornflower had a daughter of her own, who had had the felicity of being yanked through a hedge by Christian, out basset-hunting. What more was needed?

Silver-hair looked uncomfortable. Cornflower and Mackintosh did not appear to him to be keeping to the rules of the game.

“Of course one did not wish to be unkind,” he murmured, “but how much nicer it would be for everybody if these things didn’t happen! One felt one would like to show a little sympathy, only it was so awkward! Surely she ought to have known that he was married? It was her duty to know that sort of thing, seeing that she hadn’t a mother to make inquiries.”

A quiet little girl sitting beside him dropped a library book firmly on his feet, and he picked it up with inward reproach. After all, it wasn’t quite the thing to talk scandal in front of anybody so innocent and demure as Verity Cantacute contrived to look, in spite of her twenty-three years. He was fond of Verity, too, and valued her opinion highly in a strictly unconfessed fashion. He knew quite well why she had dropped the book, though he would not have admitted it for worlds.

“Ah!” Cornflower said meaningly. “A mother’s interference is not always particularly welcome! Occasionally, a mother can be counted a positive nuisance; and, in this case——”

Verity dropped an umbrella, this time, a sharp-pronged thing that caught Cornflower on the ankle, and hurt her horribly. An umbrella is an excellently subtle weapon of offence, if you know how to use it artistically. Silver-hair, while applauding mentally, was nevertheless of opinion that Verity had interfered somewhat arbitrarily. After all, Cornflower ought to have known, if anybody did, exactly how much of a nuisance a mother could be!

Deborah was just in front of him as they left the station in the swirl of the Saturday stream, and something about her—probably her left shoulder—smote his ridiculously soft heart a second time. He attached himself to her to observe how tiresome it was of the weather to look like drawing to thunder when he had a tennis-party at stake. Deb smiled unwillingly. She had always liked him, but she had her prickles out for the whole world, this morning.

“And the dust!” Silver-hair loved a grievance as cats love cream. “Personally, he expected an attack of appendicitis, any day, from swallowing so much ground limestone! Might he carry her basket for her, by any chance?”

Deborah gave him a real smile this time.

“You can just go and talk to somebody else,” she said. “I’m not going to have any St. Georges convoying me up the town. This is my treadmill, and I mean to keep it to myself.” She nodded at Smith’s as they passed. “You ordered a book there, last week, if you remember. Go in and ask about it.”

She stepped adroitly in front of a passing lorry, and was lost to him, and he drifted meekly into Smith’s, wondering vaguely if he could have done anything different. He had meant to be kind, and she had not really been rude—he was not sure that she hadn’t meant to be grateful. How tiresome these situations were!

It seemed to Deb that the whole of Westmorland was shopping that morning, for almost every busy car and sleek carriage held somebody she knew. Slinker had given a reception in her honour, a short time before, and an envious County had shaken her warmly by the hand. To-day, it was remarkable how many motor-folk seemed interested in the fit of their chauffeur’s coat, how many traps carried people hunting for something on the floor. Lady Metcalfe, stopping outside the fish-shop as Deb came up, discovered instantaneously that what she really wanted was stockings. The Bracewell girls, hunting hats in Miss Clayton’s, remembered in a flurry that they had been instructed to purchase tooth-powder; while the Hon. Mrs. Stalker made no bones about the matter at all, but, having walked straight into Deb’s arms, merely remarked to the sky that she desired sausages, and glided over her. Deborah, reflecting, was not sure that hers wasn’t the kindest method, after all.

Coming out into the main street, the Crump stanhope passed her, with Christian on the box, but she was very busy doing sums inside her purse, and people who didn’t know her thought she must be either blind or stupid to ignore the compliment of so gallant a salute. Apparently she had seen nothing; yet she knew that at Christian’s side had sat a dark girl in trim black, and a wave of fierce feeling swept over her—for the woman in question was Slinker’s wife.

She was at Crump, now—Deb knew that. Mrs. Lyndesay had sent for her, acknowledged her—more, insisted on keeping her! As Slinker’s wife she had taken her place in the County; as Slinker’s wife she drove at his brother’s side; while the girl he had wooed in such arrant deceit walked stubbornly alone, with a high head and eyes that looked singularly straight in front of her.

When they came back again, Slinker’s wife had the reins, and pulled up cleverly in the crowded street close to where Deb’s passage was obstructed by a wood-cart. Christian, swinging quickly down, caught her as she looked round for means of escape.

“You cut me!” he said reproachfully, taking her hand in spite of her. “I don’t deserve it, and you know I don’t. You might at least have had the decency to stop and ask after the puppy.”

“I’ll wire for the latest bulletin,” she responded, moving away instantly in a distinctly uncomplimentary fashion. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I’m chasing a scrubbing-brush.” But Christian detained her.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said hurriedly,—“oh, please! It’s just this”—his voice was uneven and embarrassed—“Nettie—Miss Stone—er—that is—Slinker’s wife, you know—wants to know if you’ll be kind enough to know her. He—she—I give you my word, she’s an awfully good sort—that is to say—you won’t regret it!”

Deb stopped short enough now, regarding him incredulously.

“You wish to introduce me to—to that woman?” she asked, her voice very low. “You ask me to speak to her—in this crowd——?”

Christian cast a glance of easy indifference round him. “These don’t count, dear old things! She’s my horse-dealer, as I thought. I’ve known her all my life. I wish you would—don’t you think——?” He saw Deb’s face, then, and stopped.

“Oh, how dare you!” she exclaimed, her voice shaking in spite of her. “How dare you even think of it? You must know that you insult me by the very suggestion!”

She swept a glance of outrage and pain from Christian’s troubled face to the figure on the box; caught the earnest gaze of a pair of bright brown eyes, then plunged into the traffic and was gone. Christian watched her disappear before he climbed back miserably, and Slinker’s wife shook the reins lightly, and proceeded down the full thoroughfare.

“That was a mistake!” she said, nodding cheerfully here and there to a well-known face. “You can’t have been very tactful, Christian, my child. But anyway it was a mistake, and I’d no business to suggest it. Still, we’ll do it yet, see if we don’t! Trust Nettie Stone for that!”

She drove on gently, smiling, very sure of herself; but at the corner of Redman Street the horses swerved without just cause, as if the hand on the reins had tightened unawares. Dixon of Dockerneuk was standing on the pavement, and he raised his eyes as she passed above him—Stanley Lyndesay’s widow. She laid her hand on Christian’s arm as he stared worriedly at his boots, and he looked up quickly, wondering at the shake in her voice.

“Laker dear,” she was saying with a smile, “I rather think Slinker was a mistake, too!”

CHAPTER III

The third thing that Verity dropped, that morning, was three pounds of salmon, right in Deborah’s blindly-descending path. She knew Deborah wouldn’t step on anything as squishy as salmon.

“I want to ask your opinion about something,” she said, leaving the salmon barrier-wise on the pavement, “so come along to the café, and be asked it like a lamb. It’s no use pretending that I’ve got scarlet fever or a new hat, or anything of that kind that you simply can’t be seen with, because I’m thoroughly bored with my own society, and I mean to have yours.”

“You want to pat me,” Deborah said fiercely, looking at her hardly with reddened eyes, “and I won’t have it! I won’t! I won’t!”

“How terribly limited you are!” Verity sighed pityingly. “I want to talk to you solely and entirely about myself. Otherwise, why should I pick you up in the pig-market on a Saturday morning, when you have pointedly cut me three times this week?”

“I shall hold you to that, if I come!” Deborah yielded weakly to the hidden strength in the demure little figure before her. “And, mind, at the first pat—I go!”

“What did you want to know?” she asked, later, seated at a table in an upstairs room, overlooking the street.

“Know?” Verity, her eyes on the traffic, was a trifle vague until Deborah’s stern gaze collected her wits with a jerk. “Oh, I wondered if by any chance you knew the author of——?”

“I don’t!” Deb got to her feet. “Good-bye!”

Verity pulled her down again.

“No, it wasn’t that. It was—let me see——” looking anxiously at the crowd—“oh, I know! Should you think red roses and green tulle——?”

“I shouldn’t!” Deb made another effort. “You’re a little wretch, Verity! You might have known I wanted to be alone.”

Verity clung to her, gazing despairingly at the stairs.

“I’ve remembered the real reason—honest Injun, I have! I just wanted to know whether the best way to manage a parson is to marry him?”

“Marry him?” Deb sank into her seat. “Now, Verity, what are you up to? Tell me at once. I won’t move till you do!”

“Oh, there’s nothing at all to worry about,” Verity replied, pouring out coffee with beautifully concealed triumph. “The question hasn’t arisen yet, in any way. I put it merely as a business proposition. Something must be done with the new parson at Cantacute, and as I’m much the bravest person in the place—sugar, dear? Here’s the cream.”

Deb opened her lips wrathfully, but got no further, for Verity was listening to somebody else,—indeed the whole café was listening,—to an intensely vitalised young person who roared directions to his chauffeur as he plunged headlong into the building, afterwards tearing up the stairs with the impetuosity of several elephants gone amok. Such was the usual advent of Larruppin’ Lyndesay.

Deb knew who was coming before the black bullet head and sturdy shoulders cannoned round the corner into Witham’s illustrious mayoress, who had looked in for an innocent glass of milk; and while he was busy picking her up and dusting her down, shooting her to the ground floor and thrusting her into his own car, she called her friend to account.

“Why did you do it?” she asked reproachfully. “You know I can’t meet any of the Lyndesays. And Larrupper will tell the whole town I am here!”

“The new parson——” Verity began innocently, and Deb leaned across the table and shook her. Then she sat down and covered her face with her hands.

“Can’t you understand,” she added, very low, “that it hurts me to meet them, seeing that I can have nothing to do with them any more?”

“Just because one berry had a grub in it, I don’t see why you need burn the whole bush!” Verity answered doggedly. “You’ve been treated abominably, scandalously! Please credit some of us with sufficient decency to realise that. You’re behaving as though we were a crowd of savages dancing round you with assegais! And the Arevar Lyndesays had nothing to do with the affair, anyhow. Larrupper’s awfully hurt because you’ve given him the cold shoulder, and I won’t have Larrupper ill-treated. It’s like being cruel to a—a donkey. And he’s quite upset enough as it is over the Mayoress.”

The mayoral catastrophe seemed to have disorganised Larrupper completely, for, upon his volcanic return, he rushed at the nearest table and shook hands with two girls he had never seen in his life, before he discovered Verity sitting with shocked eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Disgraceful!” she observed, looking like a disapproving tombstone. “I’m not sure that we ought to know you. Sit down and say the first three stanzas of the Catechism, just to let the steam off your voice before you speak to Deborah.”

But Larrupper, crimson with emotion to the thick roots of his inky hair, seized upon Deb’s hand without an instant’s hesitation.

“Oh, you’ve been cruel, Debbie dear!” he reproached her. “I called and called, an’ stood outside an’ swore an’ threw things, an’ they gave me the boot every time, an’ told me you weren’t seein’ anybody. We’ve always been pals, you and I, ever since we fell into the river together, tryin’ to be trout, an’ to shut your door in Larrupper’s pleadin’ face is what I’d never expected to get from you,—hanged if I did!”

“I’ve finished with the lot of you, Larry,” Deborah said gently. “I’m going to be a Lyndesay all by myself for the rest of my existence, so you can just keep on the other side of the road when you see me coming, for your poor relation doesn’t intend to know you. It’s no use arguing. I mean what I say.”

Larrupper upset both cream-jugs.

“That’s a footlin’ way of talkin’,” he said. “Haven’t I adored you always, an’ been ready to lift the roof off the world for you, as you don’t need tellin’? An’ just because things have gone to smoke through that bunglin’ bounder of a Slinker——”

“Larrupper!” Verity’s little voice was almost shrill.

“Just because Slinker——” (Larry, when interfered with, always erupted louder than ever)—“just because Slinker behaved like a—a—a—low-down, crawlin’ scallywag——”

“Larrupper!”

“You think the rest of us are not good enough to be seen dead with. But we’re a fairly decent lot, for all that; Laker is, anyhow, an’ Larrupper’s quite a charmin’ imitation; an’ if you’re goin’ to give us all the go-by on Slinker’s account, you’re makin’ us responsible for somethin’ we didn’t know of any more than you; an’ if that isn’t glarin’ injustice, I’d like to hear of a better sample!”

“I’ve been hurt,” said Deb, staring at the table, “so naturally I’m looking round for somebody to get back on. And you happen to be the nearest, that’s all.”

“And what about me?” asked Verity. Deb, looking up, caught a look of real pain on the small face. “If it hadn’t been for that three pounds of salmon, you’d have lost the two people who love you best in the world, and serve you jolly well right!”

“Where is the salmon?” Deb put in suddenly, her conscience smiting her, and Verity blinked away her tears and laughed.

“Somewhere on the pavement, I suppose. I forgot all about it, to tell the truth. Yours is a very expensive friendship. And, by the way, it was to pay a bet I lost to the parson.”

“What parson?” Larry interjected quickly, with interest.

“The new Cantacuter. (You have to have everything repeated to you, Larry, every time we meet!) I bet him three pounds of salmon that he couldn’t get Billy-boy Blackburn to join his Young Men’s Soul-Savers or whatever he calls them; and he did, so I have to pay up. It’s for their annual bean-feast or something of the kind.”

“He seems an individual with some strength of purpose,” Deborah observed. “But why were you so anxious to know if the best way——?”

Verity kicked her without remorse.

“He has such dreadfully ‘Fall in and follow me’ views about women,” she went on. “Expects them to take a back seat when they’re not wanted, and run and work like blaz—blacks—when they are—under him, of course. Men proudly goose-stepping in front is how he sees life; women trailing meekly behind. That’s his line throughout—though I must say he does his best to sweeten the pill with rather painfully obvious flattery. He comes to see me every other day, to ask me to join things and support things and sing in things and collect for things. He tells me I am so beloved in the village; that I have religious eyes; that my influence for good is—well, little short of the Bishop of London’s. And all the time he regards me merely as a tool for his using! I leave Voltaire and Shaw and the Pankhursts about all over the place when he calls, but he doesn’t see them—he’s too busy collecting me. It’s my face and my voice, I suppose, that make him think I’d be a fine tail to his heavenly comet. But I’ll teach him, see if I don’t!”

“You’d much better leave him alone,” Larrupper remonstrated. “What’s the use of botherin’ about him, anyway?”

“Leave him alone?” Verity’s eyes flashed. “Leave my unfortunate village to struggle with him alone? Never! I’m not a suffragette or anything else in the ironmongery line, but to have a stranger thinking he’s more influence than I in my own place is the very last thing I’ll put up with! He may have Billy-boy and the salmon; he may have his own private little gloat; but there’ll be something very wrong with the universe if Verity Cantacute doesn’t come out top in the end!”

Deb rose. “Well, I’m going,” she said. “I’m very angry with you both, but all the same you’ve warmed the cockles of my heart. No, Larry, I will not be taken home in your car like the remains of the Mayoress. You can come to see me if you insist, but I warn you that I shall not be over-polite to you. Oh, of course I love you, you inky-headed baby! That isn’t the point. The point is that Lyndesays of Crump and Arevar can no longer be on friendly terms with Lyndesays of Kilne. So good-bye.”

Larry stood up, looking pathetic.

“An’ who’s to help me with Verity an’ the sky-pilot? It’s always like this. Just as she’s thinkin’ she might possibly make up her mind to marry me, off she goes an’ starts a hobby of some kind, an’ I get shoved into the background. Parson-squashin’s all very well, but it takes so much of her energy, an’ she forgets that I’m—well, just waitin’. And nobody has the faintest influence with her but you, Debbie darlin’, as you know. Mayn’t I really take you home? I’ve got a new——”

“Yes, I know,” Deb interrupted ruthlessly. “A new carburettor or a gudgeon-pin or a ball-bearing. You always have. Thank you, Larry. I’ve given up cars. And I won’t, I won’t, I won’t be patted!”

After she had gone, Verity cried unaffectedly behind the sheltering screen, while Larry, almost weeping himself, kicked things miserably and chopped splinters off the table.

“It’s hurt her so dreadfully!” she said, “every bit of her; her pride, her affection, herself. She’ll never be the same again. And people are saying such hateful things. I could strangle them—the—the alligators! Slinker was a rotter, but he was quite decent to her—she’s bound to miss him a little. And think of all he represented! She couldn’t help but feel that. And now she’s nothing—nothing—except her name and her pride. What can we do for her? What can we? Not that it’s any use asking you!”

“There’s Christian,” said Larrupper, slowly, and Verity looked up with a start. Their eyes met across the table, and Larrupper nodded his black head.

“Laker’s a good sort,” he went on, apparently irrelevantly. “Always goin’ about pickin’ up the cryin’ an’ the crocked. It’s just meat an’ drink an’ five rounds of golf to old Laker. There’s never any knowin’, is there, dear—I mean, old girl?”

Verity looked at him almost approvingly as she thrust various parcels into his arms, preparatory to rising.

“Larry,” she observed kindly, “I do believe you’re growing a brain!”

CHAPTER IV

Larruppin’ Lyndesay, perturbed by the events of the morning, roared down Hillgate at a pace that sent peaceful marketers flying to the pavement. Dixon of Dockerneuk, coming up leisurely, watched him and smiled—for there was a dog.

The grip of the brakes swung the car close upon Jordan’s plate-glass, and several people thought they were killed, but the dog was spared; and Dixon smiled grimly a second time, both at Larry’s face and at a certain recollection. When the car pulled up beside him, he could see that the young man’s hands were shaking.

The chauffeur, exchanging a friendly wink of much understanding, sprang out and gave him his place beside his master. Dixon mounted after a brief greeting.

“You’ll be goin’ out, I suppose?” Larrupper said, moving on. “You’d better let me take you. I’m needin’ your moral support badly, Dock, old man. And I got a devil of a fright at that corner—you saw it, I expect? The dog had a silver brush to it. It reminded me——” He glanced sideways at his companion—“Sorry, old chap!”

“Lord, Dock!” he went on, presently, “if you knew what a time I’ve had, these last three years, keepin’ out of the way of things with a tail at one end and a bark at the other! I dream of them at nights. There’s times I think I’ll have to quit motorin’, an’ take to a tricycle. I’ve been punished, Dock, if it’s any comfort to you to know it.”

“Well, well,” Dixon answered thoughtfully and with admirable serenity, seeing that they were full speed on the track of a carrier’s cart which was occupying the whole of the road—“if it’s learned you to think on a bit before turning a corner, it happen wasn’t all wasted. You’re one that takes a deal of learning that way, Mr. Lionel!”

Larry chuckled, and then sighed. He did not like to think of that incident of three years ago. He had been fresh home from Eton, a hasty snatch at college and a wild rush round the world, and he had known nothing of Dixon in those days, or of all the things of the North that Dixon so adequately represented; but in one sharp lesson he had learned much, and at a price.

Dixon, too, went back in mind. It was not his way to dwell overmuch on the past; he took things as they came, ordinarily—one day with another—but he had had other memories stirred, that morning, and he was looking back in spite of himself. As the car whizzed down the white road, the two men saw the same scenes re-enacted before them.

I

Dixon of Dockerneuk came down the last slope of the fell.

Behind him, the fresh-herded sheep still cried hysterically to one another. In front, he saw the smoke of his farm and the twisted ribbon of the hedged road.

Round his knees flitted a gray and silver thing with adoring eyes hidden by a silken fringe; a silent-footed attendant whose ears lifted at the faintest whisper of command, and who dropped to heel at a raised finger.

Reaching the gate, he paused and looked down at her, and the steady seriousness of his face relaxed a little. Rain, sitting at his feet, flopped a lovely tail and reached out an insinuating tongue, but Dixon’s hand stayed at his side. A dalesman does not waste unnecessary caresses upon his dog, any more than upon his other daily companions.

Yet Rain was the pride of his heart. He had bred her himself, trained her himself, as he trained all his dogs, and she knew every shade of his whistle as a child knows the inflections of its mother’s voice. The least wave of his hand was her code; two words could give her a complete law of shepherding. The sympathy between them was the most perfect that has ever been known to exist between man and beast—the link between a shepherd and his dog.

He unsnecked the gate, and she danced out, eager for home, waving a silver tail for him to follow, but he paused again, leaning against the stoup. A sound escaped him, so soft that at the bend of the road you would not have heard it, but Rain dropped as if shot, ears cocked, body rigid; and this time Dixon of Dockerneuk smiled ever so slightly.

To-morrow he was to run her at the dog-trials at Arevar, before half the County, and he knew that there was not a dog within a fifty-mile radius that could beat her when handled by himself. Already she was famous; already “Dixon’s Rain” was a familiar phrase in the mouths of shepherds; her judgment, her intelligence, her beauty, were known in every household where a sheep-dog was a matter of serious consideration. She would be eagerly looked for, to-morrow, and he who possessed anything that could beat her would indeed be a proud man by sunset.

With another scarcely-breathed whistle he released her, and turned to hasp the gate and give a final look up the soaring fell, skirted with bracken, crowned by sullen rocks. Rain sprang round—sprang to meet a devil’s galloper of satin panels and shining brass, hurled at a criminal speed along the narrow, curving road—sprang and disappeared. She was quite dead when Dixon and the chauffeur drew her out from between the heavy wheels.

A group of those children who always appear miraculously at every untoward occurrence, thrust frightened faces through a break in the hedge. They knew Dixon and they knew Rain, and if the sky had fallen upon the appalling catastrophe they would hardly have been surprised. They said “Goy!” at intervals, and held each other’s hands, knowing the meaning of the countryman’s set face.

Dixon said briefly—“She’s done!” through set teeth, and the chauffeur, rising reluctantly from his knees, dusted his smart livery, and nodded his head, biting his lip. It was not his place to criticise his master for taking other people’s risks as cheerfully as he took his own.

A dark young face looked over the side of the car, and eyed the dead dog with a perturbed expression. It was all a beastly bore, but of course he had taken the corner far too fast, and would have to pay for his pleasure. It was a decent-looking dog, too, worse luck! He liked dogs as well as anybody—jolly, wagging things that always met you with a smile. What a fool he had been to peg along at that pace! He might have been sure there would be a dog at the corner. There always was, when he was driving.

He fumbled in his pocket, wondering vaguely why nobody said anything except the children in the hedge, who still observed “Goy!” at intervals. Grange might have helped him out, but Grange was such a fool about animals; you wondered why he had ever taken to machines. Fortunately, the owner did not seem excited about the accident, thought the boy, seeing nothing unusual in the grim face which the northern children read so plainly.

He was a gentleman; and in justice it must be admitted that he offered his apology before he offered his gold; but perhaps his curiously-worded expressions of sorrow conveyed too little to the farmer, just as the gold conveyed too much. Grange made a movement to stop him when he saw the money; he had been bred in the dales. But again it was none of his business, and he shrugged his shoulders and stood aside, awaiting events.

They were not long in arriving. As the careless hand came out, Dixon’s brown fist flew up to meet it; the gold clove a glittering path into the ditch, and the stranger subsided into his seat, nursing a damaged wrist.

Then he laughed, and motioned the chauffeur to get in.

“As you please!” he said to the farmer; and—“Take the wheel!” to his servant; and, as they moved, stopped nursing his wrist to raise his hand to his cap. Dixon stood like a block.

Opposite the children, the motorist checked the car.

“There’s somethin’ in the ditch, yonder,” he observed, leaning forward, “that will set you up in bull’s-eyes for a month of Sundays!”—and not a child stirred. Behind him, he heard his own laugh echoed sardonically by Dixon—Dixon standing like a block beside his silver-haired darling.

“Grange, you fathead,” said his master thoughtfully, as the chauffeur swung his responsibilities out of sight, “why in the name of all that’s sportin’, didn’t you warn me?”

“Sir,” answered the chauffeur, “I have always understood that you preferred to learn by experience!”

II

Bowman’s Pink trotted nervously in the wake of uncertain footsteps. Life had become a devious and dangerous thing since her master had taken to looking upon the ale when it was yellow, and she followed his erratic curves uneasily if faithfully, since a well-bred dog must always be at its master’s heels.

Not that the splendid title fitted her at first glance, as she pattered unhappily along the sticky road. Her slender, pointed limbs were plastered with mud; her black coat with the white star on the chest was rough and matted, and had lost its gloss; the fine, keen little head was shaggy and unkempt. She was underfed; she was uncared-for; and, much worse, she was cowed. A word from her lord set her trembling; a movement flattened her to the earth. Yet, she stayed, as many women stay in like case—women whom all the Divorce Commissions in the world will never reach. And so Bowman and Pink came to the Trials.

They were late. Men whose hour-glass turns with ale usually are late. But Bowman’s name was not among the first on the card, and he had not been called as yet. He pulled himself together as he made his way past the flower-show and the shooting-gallery and the brass band, and Pink drew a little closer, humbly thankful to be free from the perils of the open road. On the left, rows of hard and unattractive benches supported the honourable weight of the flower of the County. On the right, the competitors watched and chatted and compared notes. In front, the long meadow, dotted with flags, sloped upward much as a stage slopes, so that the performance regularly enacted every ten minutes was plain to every eye; while near to the Society gathering, just where sunshades and chatter might alarm sheep and distract canine intelligence, was the little pen where the last act of the round was played, the only one in which the owner of the competing dog was allowed to give definite assistance. Society always derived huge enjoyment from this crucial moment. Seventeen-stone Jackson of Dubbs, prancing cautiously around his woolly adversaries, hat in hand, was certainly a sight to be treasured in the memory. The skill of his crawling, quivering lieutenant was apt to be overlooked in the humour of the situation.

Dixon of Dockerneuk sat by himself in a corner of the big field. He had come because he could not stay away, but now that he was here, the whole business was torture to him. There was scarcely a man on the field but was asking for Rain, and annoying him with well-meant sympathy. Even the ladies had heard of her, fish-hooked each other’s hats with their sunshades, and said—“Dear me! How perfectly shocking!” as if their respective cars had never so much as slain a hen. There was an immaculate youth, nursing a bandaged wrist amid a bevy of beauty, who went hot all over at the mention of the dead dog’s name.

But Dixon would not be pitied. He shook off sympathy as a man shakes off a troublesome bluebottle. He was billed to run another dog beside Rain, a young yellow collie that had the root of the matter in him, but at present preferred to regard life in general, and sheep-dog-trials in particular, as a huge joke. Dashing up to his three victims, he greeted them with affectionate exuberance, much as some over-familiar parsons fall upon the necks of the dignified poor. Fleeing before his bouncing guidance, they were through the first flags in a rush, merely because that happened to be their line and they could not avoid it, but they ignored the rest, and were down the field and almost upon the lap of Society before Dixon’s imperious whistle could swing the culprit in front of them.

Lark went back cheerfully enough. A little energy wasted more or less made no difference to him. Another rush brought the resentful trio through the stone gap and between the second flagged limits, but there the happy fluke ended. One sheep broke off from the rest, and for the remainder of his allotted space Lark played Catch with it over every square inch of the field. Dixon wrestled with him patiently enough, while Society laughed and clapped, and the roughs in the background scoffed and called for Rain; but Lark, like the Punch ’cellist, was there to enjoy himself, and came in when dismissed from the course with a lolling tongue and a grin that reached from ear to ear. Dixon walked back to his corner without a word, feeling no resentment against the yellow dog who had made such gorgeous fools of them both. He was only a puppy; he would steady in time; and since Rain was not there—was lying under a new-turfed mound at home—nothing else really mattered.

Bowman’s name was called at last by a member of the committee, and he disengaged himself from a group of second-rate acquaintances, and slouched forward. Pink was whining ever so softly to herself as she followed him out into the field, and every nerve in her body tingled with excitement. She had played this game before, and she was wild to get away and begin.

Society laughed again as Bowman’s Pink came into view; she looked so small, so hungry, so pathetically incompetent. “The Pink of Perfection!” observed a scarlet hat, nodding poppies, and was at once fish-hooked in revenge by a Reckitt’s Blue sunshade who had been about to make the same witty remark herself.

Bowman gave the welcome signal at last—the least lift of a knotted stick—and Pink was up the long field like a black streak to the far point where three plump, puzzled sheep had been suddenly dumped to await her. She was on them quicker than Lark, but there was no scattering this time. With one smart circling movement, she clumped them together and dropped, looking for further orders, a dingy speck on the vivid green.

Bowman had gained sufficient control of himself to appear before the footlights, but, once there, he went to pieces altogether. His fuddled brain could not command the situation; his bleared eye could scarcely mark his little black servant waiting his will; the hand that waved the stick was as reliable as a weather-cock in a shifting wind. He gave orders, it is true, but they were the wrong ones. Pink, straining ear and glance alike, could make nothing of him. He dropped her when a quick rush was imperative, forced her forward when to move an inch was to court disaster, rounded up at the wrong moment, scattered and separated when close upon the flags. The resulting confusion irritated him; the suppressed mirth of Society goaded him to fury. His stick began to wave wildly; he ceased to whistle, and took to shouting, and the tone of his shouting made the bright sunshades quiver. Pink quivered, too, shamed and insulted, for no really first-class man shouts at a first-class dog; he has no need. She obeyed him, because not to obey would have been as possible to her as to have made a live-mutton dinner off the three exasperated creatures whom she was being forced to torture so unnecessarily; but under the stress of puzzling, contradictory orders, she, too, was beginning to lose her head. The whole fiasco ended in a glorious exit of sheep and sheep-dog over one of the President’s newly-laid fences, while Society rocked with laughter, and Bowman, black in the face, was removed peremptorily by the committee.

Pink came back, terrified, puzzled, shamed, but faithful—faithful even beneath the rain of knotted blows, hobnailed kicks and purple objurgations. She cried a little as she pressed her slim little body against the turf and screwed up her frightened eyes, and Dixon from his corner heard her. He stood up suddenly, and thrust himself contemptuously between executioner and victim.

“Hold on a bit, lad,” he said grimly, “and answer a civil question before you get through with your leatherin’. D’you mind yon clashy winter’s night as you nabbed Geordie Garnett’s best pup from his shippon?”

Bowman accomplished the almost incredible feat of turning blacker in the face than ever.

“That’s a—something—lie!” he stormed thickly.

Dixon stooped and turned up one of Pink’s soft ears, showing the letter “G” within, faint but still discernible.

“I know that breed as a man knows his own barns,” he said slowly. “Geordie an’ I have always been thick as inkle-weavers, you’ll think on, and I’m not like to forget what he had to say, yon night. I’ll just step up and have a crack with him. He’ll be rarely set up to have lit on his lost pup at last.”

Bowman was understood to remark that not for all the Dixons gone before to a certain unmentionable locality should Geordie Garnett lay a finger on what was not, and never had been, his. Dixon eyed him steadily. The fight was healing the hurt places in his soul.

“Look you here,” he said firmly. “I’ll make you a fair offer, and you can take it or leave it, just as suits you! You’ve shamed the poor brute before the whole countryside. She was game for the work, right enough, but you were fair maiselt. Now, I’ll do this for you. Let me take her round just once, just to show Lyndesay and all the lot of them what she can do when she’s given half a chance, and when Geordie Garnett gets her back, I’ll never let wit where I clapped eyes on her. Is it a deal?”

Bowman laughed murderously.

“A deal?” said he. “Ay, a deal, right enough! Take her, my fine lad—take her!”

Dixon bent to obey, but his fingers had barely touched Pink’s head before he stepped back with an exclamation, for her teeth had met in his wrist. She eyed him sorrowfully, even while the growl rattled in her throat. A well-bred dog could do no less for her master, however unworthy.

Bowman rolled about in drunken glee, urging his opponent to further effort, and Dixon’s temper snapped like dry kindling. He took Bowman behind a quiet hedge, and thrashed him into acquiescence. When he reappeared, Pink trotted meekly in his shadow. Together, they sought out the President, who listened a little impatiently to the demand that the dog might be run again.

“What’s the good?” he asked, watching his head shepherd making a glorious mull of things at the pen. “Having been the round once, she is no longer eligible for the prize.”

Dixon growled contempt.

“’Tisn’t the prize,” he said. “It’s the dog. She was run by a man who wasn’t fit to run her, a drunken fool who simply threw her away. She comes of the best stock in the county, and she can do better than that, I’ll lay my best heifer. She doesn’t know me, but I think I can work her. She’s been shamed before the whole county. Give her another chance.”

Arevar’s eldest son stood up and joined in the conversation. Dixon’s eyes met his without the slightest change of expression. The eldest son had a bandaged wrist.

“Let her run, Father,” he said. “It’s not harmin’ any one, and everybody should have a second chance in this world, shouldn’t they, Mr.—er—Dixon, I think? Let her run.”

Lyndesay shrugged his shoulders, and with difficulty restrained himself from rushing down to assist the head shepherd, who had at last succeeded in penning the whole of two of the sheep and half of the third.

“Very well!” he said. “Just as you like. She’ll do no good, anyway. She’s had all the intelligence beaten out of her, poor little brute!”

His son smiled gallantly into Dixon’s grim face.

“Everybody should have a second chance,” he said again. “Everybody—rich or poor, knave or fool, starvin’ sheep-dogs or—motorin’ roadhogs. Let her run!”

There was a space on the yellow programme hallowed by the name of Rain, but when Dixon came out in his order, it was not the silver-haired beauty but the cowed little tramp that trotted at his side. Pink had spent a thrilling hour gleaning new impressions. These included a tentative grooming with an old stable-brush, a few dry biscuits, a few rough caresses, a few kindly words. The sympathy and the biscuits had put fresh heart into her; the grooming had eased her self-respect. She came out gladly enough to the work she loved, though her faithful heart still yearned after the drunken, hobnailed brute slumbering behind the hedge.

Dixon dropped his hand to the dog’s head, and she cowered to the very ground. He repeated the experiment until she stood up confidently under his touch, and the two looked into each other’s eyes. Then he jerked his own head sharply, and she was gone like the wind up the edge of the slope, to be checked by a sweet, clear whistle before she was upon the fresh prey, who raised innocent eyes, unafraid of the harmless black and white patch so near. Presently there was another whistle, a languid wave of a thin ashplant, and the quartette was ambling unconcernedly towards the first of the flags.

Dixon, for all his outward calm, was conscious of a slight nervousness. He had pledged his word, so to speak, upon the dog’s worth, and would have staked his last coin, if need be; but every man handles a dog just a shade differently, and any sudden lack of sympathy between himself and his new protégée might bring fresh derision upon both. The dog was cowed, too, half-starved, home-sick for her old tyrant; but he knew the stock she came from, and the training that becomes inherited instinct after so many generations, and he counted strongly upon these. Taking a grip of himself, he concentrated all his attention upon the waif in Rain’s place, as if she had indeed been Rain herself, charged with all his hopes. And presently his confidence in the power of race changed to exultant wonder, for here was a trained intelligence answering to his will as even Rain had seldom answered. Such tact, such patience, such judgment, such skilled, gentle handling, he had never seen. There was no shouting, now, no furious waving, no volleying of oaths to scorch sensitive Society ears. The clear whistles hardly clove the air before they were obeyed; the sharp, clipped signal that means “Drop!”—the long, clear call, lifting at the end, that says “Come on!”—the shower of quick notes that telegraph “Round up!” Here were the first-class man and the first-class dog working like a single instrument. The President, his eyes glued to the little tramp, forgot that the head shepherd had never succeeded in penning the second half of the third sheep.

They had passed three of the tests—the top flags, the stone gap and the oak tree—and were making for the fourth when the first hitch occurred. Dixon, forgetting in his concentration that it was not Rain he was working, after all, employed a special call that he used on the fell to warn his dog of a precipice. It had a curious swerve in the middle, and meant—“Keep together!” and Rain would have had the sheep in a tight bunch right between the flags, but Pink was not fell-trained, and she dropped, puzzled for the first time. Dixon, cursing himself, gave her the signal she knew, but in that fatal pause one curly monster had separated itself from the rest, and taken a bee-line for home. Pink was in front of it in a flash, only to lose the other two, and there followed a pretty piece of handling which agitated the parasols into a perfect frenzy of fish-hooking, but at which Dixon frowned, for the precious minutes were flying.

The sheep were through the final flags at last, however, but their faith in their gentle conductor had been ruined by that sudden separation and breathless chase. They were in the mood to be alarmed by the smallest slip when they approached the narrow door of the uninviting fold. It was then that Dixon made his bold stroke.

Every other farmer on the field had helped to pen his sheep; it was a recognised fact that even the best of dogs could hardly accomplish the finish unaided, particularly when each of the sheep was as nervous as a cat, and would break on the slightest encouragement. But Dixon had faith in his dog, and he was playing for her reputation. He let her pen them alone.

Slowly, inch by inch, Pink crawled in rear of her charge. Slowly, inch by inch, the frightened heads turned to the pen. Something about it must have suggested safety to the first sheep, for it moved forward, and the second followed. The third, however, lost interest during the pause, and edged to the right, but Pink edged in the same direction. Tossing its head, it swung to the left, but Pink was there, also. This seemed to annoy it, for it skipped round in its own length, and faced the enemy defiantly, but Pink’s innocent muzzle was on the ground, her vivid eyes almost shut. The third sheep looked a little ashamed of itself, swung round again and lined up. The first was practically inside.

Dixon of Dockerneuk stood like stone, and Society forgot even to rustle. Pink crept nearer, nearer, and dropped for the last time; and as she did so, the first sheep, apparently disgusted with the accommodation, swerved like a shying horse in the face of its following, forcing the second sheep into the startled mouth of the third. Even then, Dixon did not stir; but there was no need, for Pink flung herself forward as the Winged Hats flung themselves at the Great Wall, and in another moment three disconsolate noses poked through barren bars, whilst a panting black and white streak stretched across the threshold of their prison.

Dixon whistled ever so softly, but she heard him and came to him gladly. He put out his hand, and she leaped to catch it joyously with her teeth. Through the cheering crowd he sought his way to his corner, but a yesterday’s enemy checked him. Larruppin’ Lyndesay faced him diffidently but courageously.

“You’ve given one dog a second chance,” he said. “Can’t you see your way to doin’ it for another?”

Dixon honoured him with a long look.

“There’s the Ring o’ Bells,” he said at last, “just across the road.”

They went off together.

CHAPTER V

Slinker’s wife drew up with a flourish at Crump steps, but she relinquished the reins rather wearily. She looked almost tired—Christian thought—a thing very foreign to her extraordinary vitality. Butler and footman were automatons of respect as she descended, and she smiled inwardly as she went in. She knew quite well what they had said about her when she first came.

Mrs. Lyndesay was standing just inside the hall, her hard face like ivory against the dark background. There was something inhuman about her to Christian, coming out of the sunlight into the frigidity of her presence. During the last month she seemed to have retired further than ever into that icy aloofness which wore, for him at least, the appearance of hatred. She turned her eyes away from him sharply as he entered, and he knew that she had looked instinctively for another form to fill the door when he crossed the threshold.

Slinker’s wife thrust a hand through her arm, and led her to the tea-table. All through the meal she talked steadily, while Mrs. Lyndesay listened with something almost like amusement in her eyes. Somewhere and somehow, Slinker’s wife had found a chord in that hidden heart which answered when she struck it.

Christian, ignored, wandered into the garden, and stood looking across the green of the sunk lawn and the glory of the flower-beds to the rising background of woods. There was a stream running flittingly from wood to garden, and he walked beside it, hearing it but not hearkening, for he was reviewing his swift and disastrous meeting with Deborah. Emphatically, he had done the wrong thing, and in the most hopelessly wrong manner. He had hurt her afresh—she, who had already suffered more hurt than one dared think of. After all, what use could Slinker’s wife be to her, on any terms? Somehow, the horse-dealer’s daughter had inspired him with a confidence in vaguely miraculous powers. You leaned with a strange trust on Slinker’s wife. Something about her made you feel that the world could never be long out of joint with her capable hands willing and ready to manipulate it. He had known her all his life, or near it, and she was older than he by several years—a million years older in everything else but age.

She joined him presently in a white gown, the faint trace of fatigue utterly vanished, and towed him into one of the mossy woodland paths.

“I’ve finished with those crow’s clothes,” she said, slipping her hand through his arm, and looking down at herself approvingly. “Parker nearly did a faint when he saw me, but who cares? I didn’t allow Slinker to be a bore to me when he was alive, and I certainly won’t have him a nuisance now he is dead. I’m only his widow by accident, so to speak, and I don’t see why I should go about making an object of myself on his account. What’s the matter, Youngest One? You seem a bit down in the mouth. Worrying about that turn-up, this morning?”

“Looking back, it seems such a rotten thing to have done!” Christian replied. “You see, I never gave her time to think, just fell upon her out of the sky and sprang the thing at her. I should have prepared her, broken it gently——”

Slinker’s wife laughed humorously.

“I do need some gentle preparation, don’t I? Oh, you needn’t apologise! And of course public opinion expects us to glare defiance at each other, as if we each had a claw upon Slinker’s dead body. It’s only natural she should hate me. But that girl’s got grit, Laker—the sort of grit you don’t meet with every day in the week. Most females left in a similar lurch would have had nervous prostration and a prolonged visit on the Continent or at the nearest rest-cure. But she goes to market slick in the chattering teeth of the whole County—snaps her fingers in their pained faces, and lets them see she isn’t ashamed of anything she’s done. Why should she be ashamed, either, I’d like to know? If Slinker asked her to marry him, she’d every right to say yes.”

Christian shook his head.

“That’s what’s wrong. And that’s what she is ashamed of, no matter how splendidly she tries to hide it. She can’t really have been able to stand Slinker. No decent girl could. And to marry him for his position—— I say, Nettie dear, I’m horribly sorry!”

Mrs. Slinker smiled with something of an effort.

“Don’t judge our rotten sex too hardly, Laker. It isn’t always sheer sordidness, even when we do marry for position; there’s a glamour it gives the man, no matter what he may be himself. He’s got all his fathers and grandfathers standing bail for him. You kind of catch your breath at all he represents, and shut your eyes to the miserable, moth-eaten bagman you might possibly find him if you weren’t blinkered by his grandeur.”

“The glamour couldn’t have lasted long; and after that had vanished, I don’t see how she could ever have dreamed of going through with it. A nice girl like that, with nice ideas, and—and—isn’t that moss a ripping colour?”

She pressed his arm affectionately.

“It’s all right, Youngest One! You can’t think of us in the same light; and, after all, why should you? I come of tougher stock, rougher stuff. I knew how to handle a man like Slinker. I could have made something of him—perhaps—something that Heaven wouldn’t have been ashamed of—if I’d tried. But I didn’t think him worth while, and I don’t doubt that the Almighty agrees with me. I didn’t even think the estate worth while, with Slinker slung round my neck like an albatross; so I went to Canada to my sister, and thought of him as seldom as possible till I got the news of his death and his charmingly-planned comédie à trois. I wonder what he meant by the whole thing?—whether he was waiting for me to hear, and come back? It would have been like Slinker’s slinkin’ way of doing things. I’d have been bound to come to the church, at any rate; not a step further! I wonder if that’s the real solution of the muddle? After all—Slinker cared.”

“Don’t!” Christian shuddered. “Don’t you see what a diabolical situation that creates for—for—the other woman?”

She looked at him curiously.

“Yes, I suppose it makes things worse, doesn’t it? It wouldn’t have been so bad if Slinker had loved her and wanted her too badly to remember that he had some wretched sort of a wife already. Well, we’ll leave it at that! What do I care? But you mustn’t blame her too much. It’s because she’s one of your own people that you feel as you do—that she shouldn’t have stooped to a man like that for a reason like that. You could forgive a stranger who had done it—a woman who wasn’t a Lyndesay born and bred; you could forgive—Nettie Stone, the horse-dealer’s daughter!”

He looked at her whimsically, knowing her too well, respecting her too much, to lie to her. He let the statement pass.

“Didn’t the place call you more than once?” he asked. “Didn’t all this—the land, the house, the things they stand for—call you ever again after that one moment when you put out your hand and took them?” He looked through the green veil of the wood to the long house lying below them, and over the house to the faint hills. “Didn’t you want it, ache for it, break your heart for it? Oh, Nettie, how did you keep away?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“That isn’t in me—how should it be? How should generations of horse-dealing draw any human soul magically to Crump? The house is dumb for me—in spite of the hundred tongues it keeps for you. The land says nothing—no more than it says to every other soul that springs from it and goes back to it. It is our mother—we others. To you, it is your child.”

“But, if you don’t feel, how do you know?” he asked, laying a hand for a moment on an ancient trunk. “And you do know!”

“Intuition, I suppose. Besides, the thing radiates from you. One has only to watch your eyes—listen to your voice. It must mean more to you than to us whose forefathers owned no more than the six feet of earth doled them for a grave. You don’t get a soul for soil out of that! No. Just once the whole thing caught me—the glamour of Lyndesay of Crump; but never again. I never felt it again.”

“What kept you—came in between? Why did you never want to take your place?”

Slinker’s wife looked up and up to where the quiet smoke of Dockerneuk chimneys curled in the pure air.

“Because I had once seen something better,” she said, “and after I had done the irrevocable thing, the remembrance of that better thing came back to me. I saw quite plainly what a good man was worth, and the worth of a good man’s love—just everything that Slinker couldn’t mean to me, in spite of Crump. I might have taken it before, and come out all right in the end. But after that I couldn’t have taken it and saved my soul alive.”

“What stopped you, Nettie dear?”

“A little thing—a very little thing. Just the sound of a two-horse grass-cutter on a summer morning. It was miles away from here, in another part of England, in an hotel in some beastly little town; but soon after dawn I woke as if some one had whispered, and, far away, ever so far, I heard the whirr and the click and the call to the horses. And the smell of the hay—that came too; and all it stood for—all it stood for! I couldn’t stop after that. I told Slinker I was going, and I went; and I never had anything to do with him afterwards. I knew then what I wanted—what I had wanted without knowing; and though I couldn’t have it, I could at least refuse anything less. Crump was less, Lyndesay of Crump was less—and Nettie Stone the most wretched, ashamed reptile that ever crawled the earth!”

Christian kissed her hand.

“Thank you for marrying Slinker,” he said. “You belong to me, now, and I shall not be so lonely any more. Thank you for marrying Slinker.”

CHAPTER VI

Deb found her father in his usual place by the window, looking out over the road and the rush-edged river, and up the slope of the park to the plantation outlined against the sky. The Estates Gazette was in his hand, but he was not reading; he was looking out at the land he loved. He was always looking out.

He turned as she entered, and she tried to smile, for in the transparent old face was a content that she had sorely missed during the last, long, trying weeks. The trouble was dying, now, and the spell which had made his chief happiness in life had hold of him once more.

He had never questioned the wisdom of his girl’s engagement, and, to the amazement of the unthinking neighbourhood, he had followed Stanley respectfully to the grave, showing no outward resentment against his daughter’s dead lover. Many people thought it strange and almost inhuman, but Deb understood. What he honoured was not the body of a wild young blackguard, but the representative of the race which he and his forefathers had served. He would have done the same had Slinker wrecked them both, body and soul.

He asked her the state of the market while she ate her late lunch, and drifted on to inquiries as to the folk she had met in the town. She mentioned several of his old cronies—that ground was safe enough—commenting on their health, business and conversation. Then at last came the question she dreaded.

“Anybody in from Crump?”

He had not meant to ask it, but you cannot put a question every Saturday for years without becoming more or less its slave. His thin hand clasped and unclasped nervously on his knee, but when once the sentence was spoken, he stood by it.

“Christian was in,” she replied, fixing an intent gaze on the mustard. “He was driving;—yes—the stanhope.” (Cars were nothing accounted of in the old man’s conservative eyes.) She tried to stop the next words, but they came in spite of her. “Stanley’s wife was with him.”

The stately old man crimsoned to his snowy hair.

“She is still there, then—that person—old Steenie Stone’s daughter? I heard she was stopping, but I did not believe it. I could not!”

“Mrs. Lyndesay would not let her go. They say she has taken a fancy to her. A somewhat embarrassing attention, I should think!” Deb smiled faintly, paused, and began again. “She—Stanley’s wife—wanted to know me.”

“To know you? You!” The old man was trembling, now. He struck his ebony stick sharply on the floor. “She presumed to demand an introduction? You did not grant it, of course?”

Deb shook her head, anathematising herself for opening the subject. “No, I did not.” Rising, she laid a hand on his shoulder, and turned him to the window. “The Highland cattle are coming down to drink. Do you remember where we got them?” (The old steward “we” still clung to the lips of both.) “Dixon says the hay crop is going to be first-rate, this year. When will you have the paddock cut?”