"It's easy seen it wasn't cracking blind nuts made Lucy Hodnett and Louisa the size they are!" remarked Flurry, as the party, feeling more piratical than ever, embarked upon this collation. "Mrs. Yeates, do you think I am bound to dance with the pair of them to-night? You are, Major, anyway! But I might get off with Louisa."

"Oh, Sinclair's card is full," said my wife, who was engaged in trying to decipher the marks on the cream jug without upsetting the cream; "he and the General are plighted to one another for the evening."

"I wonder if the claret has stained the carpet!" said Mrs. Flurry, diving under the table. "It has! How awful!" Mrs. Flurry's voice indicated the highest enjoyment. "Never mind, they'll never see it!

They're too fat to get under the table!"

"If they did, it'd be the first time old Looshy's claret ever put anyone there!" said Flurry.

We have never known the precise moment in this speech at which "Old Looshy's" butler entered the room; we only know that while Mrs. Flurry, much hampered by habit and boots, was in the act of struggling from beneath the table, he was there, melancholy and righteous, with a telegram on a salver.

It was from Flavin, the livery stableman, and its effect upon the spirits of the company was that of a puncture in a tyre.

"Regret horses not available; am trying to procure others; will send by next train if possible."

We said that there was no answer, and we finished our breakfasts in a gravity scarcely lightened by Flurry's almost religious confidence in Flavin's infallibility, and in his power of making horses out of rushes, like the fairies, if need be.

I was, I may admit, from the first thoroughly pessimistic. I almost went up and got into ordinary clothes; I at least talked of doing so, as a means of preparing Philippa for the worst. I said it was a mere waste of time to send the Butler-Knox coachman to the station, as had been arranged, and I did my best to dissuade Flurry from his intention of riding to the meet by way of the station to help in unboxing animals that could not possibly be there.

In abysmal dejection my wife and I surveyed the departing forms of Mr.

and Mrs. Florence Knox; the former on the Dodger, a leggy brown four-year-old, the planting of whom upon General Porteous had been the germ of the expedition; while Sally skipped and sidled upon a narrow, long-tailed chestnut mare, an undefeated jumper, and up to about as much weight as would go by; parcel post for ninepence. There then ensued a period of total desolation, in which we looked morosely at old photograph books in the drawing-room, and faced the prospect of a long day with the Butler-Knoxes, while heavy footsteps overhead warned us that our entertainers were astir, and that at any moment the day's conversation might begin.

I was engaged, not, I fancy, for the first time, in telling Philippa that I had always said that the entire expedition was a mistake, when Colonel Newcome again entered the room.

"The Master sent me to ask you, sir, if you'd like to have the pony-phaeton to drive down to the station to meet the half-past ten train. Flavin might be sending the horses on it, and it'd save you time to meet them there."

We closed with the offer; at its worst, the pony-carriage could be smoked in, which the drawing-room could not; at its best, it might save half-an-hour in getting to the meet. We presently seated ourselves in it, low down behind an obese piebald pony, with a pink nose, and a mane hogged to the height of its ears. As I took up the whip it turned and regarded us with an unblinkered eye, pink-lidded and small as a pig's.

"You should go through Fir Grove, sir," said the boy who had brought the equipage to the door, "it's half a mile of a short cut, and that's the way Tom will come with the horses. It's the first gate-lodge you'll meet on the road."

The mud was deep, and the piebald pony plodded through it at a sullen jog. The air was mild and chilly, like an uninteresting woman; the fore-knowledge of fiasco lay heavily upon us; it hardly seemed worth while to beat the pony when he sank into a walk; it was the most heart-broken forlorn hope that ever took the field.

The gate-lodge of Fir Grove fulfilled the a.s.signation made for it by the stable boy, and met us on the road. The gates stood wide open, and the pony turned in as by an accustomed route, and crawled through them with that simulation of complete exhaustion that is the gift of lazy ponies. Loud narrative in a male voice proceeded from the dark interior of the lodge, and, as we pa.s.sed, a woman's voice said, in horrified rejoinder:

"The Lord save us! She must be Anti-Christ!"

Here, apparently, the speaker became aware of our proximity, and an old woman looked forth. Her face was apprehensive.

"Did ye see the police, sir?" she asked.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "DID YE SEE THE POLICE?"]

We replied in the negative.

"Please G.o.d, she'll not come our way!" she said, and banged the door.

We moved on, heavily, in the deep gravel of the avenue.

"Isn't this rather awful? Shall we go on?" said Philippa.

I replied with truth that there was no room to turn. On either side of the narrow drive laurels and rhododendrons were crammed as thickly as they could be planted, their dark foliage met overhead; if the inexpressible "She" referred to by the lodge-keeper did come our way, retreat would be out of the question. The tunnel ran uphill, and I drove the pony up it as one drives a hoop, by incessant beating; had I relaxed my efforts he would probably, like a hoop, have lain down.

Presently, and still uphill, we turned a corner, the tunnel ceased, and we were face to face with a large pink house.

As we advanced, feeling to the full the degradation of making a short-cut past a strange house, in tall hats and a grovelling pony-carriage, we beheld figures rushing past the windows of one of the rooms on the ground floor, as if in headlong flight. Was this the fulfilment of the dark sayings of the lodge-keeper, and was "She"

"coming our way?" The bouncing strains of a measure, known, I believe, as "Whistling Rufus," came forth to us hilariously as we drew nearer.

The problem changed, but I am not sure that the horror did not deepen.

Divining the determination of the piebald pony to die, if necessary, rather than pa.s.s a hall door without stopping at it, yet debarred by the decencies from thrashing him past the long line of windows, I administered two or three rousing tugs to his wooden mouth. At the third tug the near rein broke. The pony stopped dead. Simultaneously the hall door was flung open, and a young and lovely being, tall, and beautifully dressed, fluttered out on to the steps and peered at us through long-handled eye-gla.s.ses.

"Oh! I thought you were the police!" exclaimed the being, with unaffected disappointment.

The position seemed, from all points, to demand an apology. I disengaged myself from the pony-carriage and proffered it; I also volunteered any help that a mere man, not a policeman, might be capable of rendering.

The young lady aimed her gla.s.ses at the pie-bald, motionless in malign stupor, and replied irrelevantly:

"Why! That's the Knoxes' pony!"

I made haste to explain our disaster and the position generally, winding up with a request for a piece of string.

"You're staying at the Butler-Knoxes!" exclaimed the lady of the house.

"How funny that is! Do you know you're coming to our dance to-night, to meet your old friend the General! I know all about it, you see!"

She advanced with a beaming yet perturbed countenance upon Philippa, "I'm so glad to meet you. Do come in! We've got an infuriated cook at bay in the kitchen, and things are rather disorganised, but I think we can rise to a bit of string! The pony's all right--he'll sleep there for months, he always does."

We followed her into a hall choked with the exiled furniture of the drawing-room, and saw through an open door the whirling forms of two or three couples of young men and maidens.

"They're polishing the floor," said our hostess, swiftly shutting the door, "they make a hideous noise, but it keeps them quiet--if you know what I mean. It's most disastrous that my husband has gone out hunting," she pursued; "this odious cook only arrived two days ago, and----"

At this juncture a door at the end of the hall burst open, disclosing a long pa.s.sage and a young and crimson housemaid.

"She's coming, my lady! She's coming! Mr. Ralph's sent me on to get the door open!" she panted.

At the same moment a loud and wrathful voice arose in the pa.s.sage and a ma.s.sive form, filling it from wall to wall, appeared; the capitulating cook, moving down upon us with the leisurely and majestic truculence of a traction-engine. As she came she chanted these words in measured cadence:

"Lady Flora, Gets her brother To do her dirty work."

By the time this rune had been repeated three times she was in the hall, shepherded by a tall young man, obviously the brother referred to, and by the butler, the vista being filled in the rear by a wavering a.s.sortment of female domestics. As the cook tacked to weather a sofa, there was something about her that woke a vague and unpleasant chord of memory. Her ranging eye met mine, and the chord positively tw.a.n.ged as I recognised the formidable countenance of a female, technically known as a "job-cook," who for two cyclonic weeks had terrorised our household while Mrs. Cadogan was on leave. I backed convulsively into Lady Flora, in futile and belated attempt to take cover, but even as I did so the chanting ceased and I knew the worst had happened.

"Is that my darlin' Major Yeates?" shouted the cook, tacking again and bearing down on me full-sailed. "Thanks be to G.o.d I have the gentleman that'll see I get justice! And Mrs. Yeates, a n.o.ble lady, that'd never set foot in my kitchen without she'd ask my leave! Ah, ha! As Shakespeare says, I'd know a rale lady as soon as I'd put an eye on her, if she was boiling cabbage!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IS THAT MY DARLIN' MAJOR YEATES?" SHOUTED THE COOK]

She caught my reluctant hand and waved it up and down, and the m.u.f.fled triumphings of "Whistling Rufus" in the drawing-room filled up the position.

Through them came a sound of wheels on the gravel, and through this again a strangled whisper from behind:

"Take her out to the steps; I hear the car with the police!"

Holding the fervid hand of the job-cook, I advanced with her through the furniture, skew-wise, as in the visiting figure of the Lancers; there was an undoubted effort on her part to keep time to the music, and she did not cease to inform the company that Major and Mrs. Yeates were the real old n.o.bility, and that they would see she got her rights.