The boy jumped out of the boat hastily.

"There, don't be frightened," he said. He had caught a glimpse of Mary's face. "Lady Anne won't mind. She's a good sort. You should see the hampers she sends me. The mater doesn't approve of school hampers. You must put the blame on me. It was my fault entirely, for I had a watch."

They hurried along the path leading back to the open s.p.a.ce in front of the house. When they emerged into the open a breathless maid came towards them.

"I've been looking everywhere for you and the young lady, Sir Robin,"

she said. "Lady Anne Hamilton is waiting for Miss Gray."

Poor Mary! When they arrived in the drawing-room it was not with Lady Anne she had to count. Lady Anne sat with an air of humorous patience on her face, but Lady Drummond's brow was thunderous. The haughty indignation in her pale eyes terrified the very soul in Mary. She shrank away from it in terror.

"I had no idea you were with Miss Gray, Robin," she heard the lady say in glacial accents.

"I discovered Miss Gray trying to find her way out of the library. No one could find those doors without knowing something about them. And we went to see the puppies and the pony and the other beasts."

"We'd better be going, Mary," Lady Anne said, standing up. "You and Robin have made my visit quite a visitation."

"The horses had to rest and the coachman to have his tea," said Sir Robin, st.u.r.dily.

"You take too much care of your horses, Anne," Lady Drummond said. "They are too fat; they can't be healthy. And your coachman is very fat, too."

"Oh, they take it easy, they take it easy," Lady Anne said, laughing; "they've only my temper to worry them."

They left Lady Drummond looking as black as thunder in the drawing-room.

Sir Robin escorted them to their carriage.

"So sorry, Lady Anne," he said, apologetically. "It was my fault. I hope you won't be angry with Miss Gray."

"It is your mother's annoyance has to be considered, my dear boy,"

answered Lady Anne, while he tucked the rug about her.

"All the same, Miss Gray and I had a rippin' time," he said, flinging back his head with an air of humorous defiance. "And--I say--you're too good to me, you know, you really are." Lady Anne had pressed something into his palm. "The mater doesn't see what boys want with so much pocket-money. Sometimes I don't know what I'd do only for you. There are so many things a fellow has to subscribe to."

The carriage rolled off, leaving him bare-headed on the drive in front of the house.

"That's a good boy," said Lady Anne, emphatically. "He has his father's heart. He's getting the ways of the master about him, too. I can tell by Jennings' back that he's had a good tea. He'll be a good son, but the time will come when he'll choose for himself. Well, Mary, I hope you've enjoyed yourself. Matilda won't want to see me for a month of Sundays again. Nor I her, for the matter of that. Dear me, she can make herself unpleasant."

Mary sat in a conscience-stricken silence during that homeward drive.

Yet Lady Anne was not angry with her--that was very obvious. She seemed to be enjoying herself, too, judging by the smile that played about her lips. Now and again she cast a humorous glance on Mary. Once she chuckled aloud.

"Never mind me, my dear," she said, in answer to Mary's glance. "I was only thinking of something Denis Drummond, Gerald Drummond's elder brother, said of her Ladyship. Ah, poor Denis! He'd face a charge of the guns more readily than he would her Ladyship. Odd, isn't it, Mary, how those thoroughly disagreeable women can make themselves feared?"

CHAPTER V

"OLD BLOOD AND THUNDER"

Sir Denis Drummond had been his brother Gerald's senior by some seven or eight years. He, too, was a soldier, and had inherited the baronetcy from his father, upon whom the t.i.tle had been bestowed by a grateful country for services in the field. A second baronetcy in the family had been specially created for Sir Gerald. It would not have been easy to say which was the finer soldier of the two brothers; for while Sir Gerald had made his name famous by the most dare-devil and brilliant feats, Sir Denis was rather the old type of soldier--cool as well as daring, always reliable and steady. Worshipped by his men, his name was one to be held in constant regard by the British public, which calls its heroes by their Christian names abbreviated, if they do not happen, indeed, to have a nickname for them.

"Old Blood and Thunder" was the name by which Sir Denis was known to his men, and that from a certain violence of speech of which he had never been able, or perhaps had never desired, to divest himself. This violence had somewhat annoyed his brother Gerald, who could get as much exhortation out of a verse of Scripture as ever he needed. Sir Denis, like many old soldiers, was quite a devout man in his way; but he had none of the zealot pa.s.sion of his younger brother. The hidden fires which had given Sir Gerald a certain haggardness of aspect, as though a sculptor had hewed him roughly in marble, had never burned in Sir Denis's breast. He was a red-faced, white-moustached veteran, as bl.u.s.tering as the west wind, but with a heart as soft as wax in the hands of his daughter Nelly, and, indeed, in the hands of anyone else who knew the way to it.

His servants adored him, as did the dogs and all animals and children.

He was beautiful in his manner to women of high and low degree, with perhaps one exception. He was as simple as a child, and loved the popular applause which fell to him whenever he made any kind of public appearance, for he had been so long a Londoner that now the London crowd knew him and had a sense of possession in him. His rosy face would beam all over when the crowd shouted itself hoa.r.s.e for "Old Blood and Thunder." He did not at all object to the name, which had filtered from regimental into common use. The crowd was always "Boys!" to him. He had a most amiable feeling towards it, were it ever so frowsy and undersized and sallow. But he loved a soldier-man, and could hardly bear to pa.s.s one in the street without stopping to speak to him.

One delightful thing about Sir Denis was the esteem in which he held his own calling of arms. It might be questioned whether he held the Church even in higher honour. He was no subscriber to the belief that the army must necessarily be a refuge of rapscallions. "Straighten your shoulders, sir; hold your head high; for, remember that you are now a soldier!" he would say to the newest recruit who had just sc.r.a.ped through with a margin of chest. His thunderous wrath and sorrow when one of his "boys" was guilty of conduct unbecoming a soldier were something which, in time, impressed even the least impressionable. His old regiment, which he delighted to talk about, he had left a model regiment.

"There's a deal of good in the soldier-man," he would say to his daughter Nelly. "The poor fellows, they're good boys, they're very good boys."

Sir Denis had married, as he was approaching middle age, a very beautiful young girl, who had fallen in love at first with the soldier, and afterwards with the man.

His Nell had left him in his daughter Nelly a replica of herself. During the years of service that remained to him the child was always as near to him as might be. Fortunately, by this time the period of his foreign service was all but at an end. Wherever he had his command the child and her nurse were always within riding distance. He did not believe in barracks and towns for the rearing of anything so fresh and tender. His Nelly must have the fields and the woods and the waters. In later years her milkmaid freshness owed, perhaps, something to this upbringing.

Later, she went to school. Sir Gerald's widow, to whom Sir Denis always referred as the Dowager, who had taken an unasked-for interest in the motherless child from her birth, had found the ideal school for Nelly--a school where the daughters of the aristocracy were kept in a conventual seclusion while they learnt as little as might be of the simpler virtues, but a deal of the way to step in and out of a carriage, to comport themselves with dignity, to bear themselves in the presence of their sovereign, and so on.

Sir Denis, who had not been consulted, made a pretence of interviewing the Misses de Crespigny, by whom this aristocratic preserve was safeguarded.

He had listened to Miss Selina de Crespigny's eloquent exposition of the system adopted at De Crespigny House. Then he had torn it all to pieces as one might the delicate fabric of a spider's web, constructed at infinite cost.

"And, tell me now, do you teach them to be good daughters and wives and mothers?" he asked, with his air of convincing simplicity. "Do you teach them their duties to their husbands and children, ma'am, may I ask?"

Miss de Crespigny positively gasped. There was an indelicacy about the General's speech, to her manner of thinking.

"We expect our young ladies' mothers to teach them all that," she said, stiffly.

"And they don't. In nine cases out of ten they don't. They've too much to do otherwise. Whether it is philanthropy or politics, or just amusing themselves, they've all got too much to do," Sir Denis said, with a simple air that made it doubtful if this criticism of Society's ways was adverse or not.

Nelly did not go to De Crespigny House. She went, instead, to a much less pretentious school, kept by a family of four sisters, for whom the dry bones of teaching had been clothed with life. The house was perched on a high, windy cliff. The sisters, Miss Stella and Miss Clara, Miss Lucy and Miss Marianne, did their own teaching, and did it in a perfectly unconventional way to the twenty or so girls who made up their school.

When Nelly came home to her father at seventeen years of age, it would not have been easy to find a fresher, franker specimen of young girlhood. In fact, to her father's eyes she was somewhat alarmingly bright and fair.

"The young fellows will be about her thick as bees," he said to himself in a frightened way. "I won't have any nonsense about Nelly. I want my girl to myself for a little while. Afterwards there is that arrangement of the Dowager's about Nelly and Robin. I don't care for the marriage of first cousins. And I'm not sure that I care for Robin; still, he is poor Gerald's son. There can be nothing against poor Gerald's son."

He was so afraid of possible lovers for Nelly that he actually suggested to her that she should go to a smart finishing school for the couple of years that separated him from the sixty-five limit.

"After that," he said, faintheartedly, for there was a sparkle in Nelly's eye which discouraged him, "we shall settle down in London, and you shall see all you want to see. There are quiet nooks and corners to be had, even in London. I think I know the one I shall choose. Be a good girl, Nelly, and go to Madame Celeste's. A garrison town is no place for you. Unless, indeed, you would like to go to the Dowager, as she wishes."

"I shan't go to the Dowager, and I shan't go to Madame Celeste's," said Nelly, dimpling and sparkling. "I shall stay with my old Dad and take care of him."

"What, Nell? 'Shan't'! You forget you're talking to your commanding officer. Rank insubordination--that is what I call it!"

"Call it what you like," Miss Nelly replied. "I'm going to stay. A finishing school at seventeen! I never heard the like!"

With that she put her arms round the General's neck, and that was the final argument. Secretly, indeed, he was not altogether sorry to be worsted. He had done his best to ward off the things that might happen.

Now he was going to trust in Providence and keep his little girl with him. To be sure, he had known that she would never go to the Dowager's.

Nelly had never considered that possibility. After all, it was a relief that they were not going to be parted.

During the two years Nelly, indeed, had many admirers and lovers, but she was not attracted by any of them. She was kind and friendly and engaging; but she was unconscious with her lovers, or so it seemed to the jealous, fatherly eyes, to the verge of coldness.