Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Strand Magazine, February 1929
THE poet who was spending the summer at the Anglers’ Rest had just begun to read us his new sonnet-sequence when the door of the bar-parlour opened and there entered a young man in gaiters. He came quickly in and ordered beer. In one hand he was carrying a double-barrelled gun, in the other a posy of dead rabbits. These he dropped squashily to the floor; and the poet, stopping in mid-sentence, took one long, earnest look at the remains. Then, wincing painfully, he turned a light green and closed his eyes. It was not until the banging of the door announced the visitor’s departure that he came to life again.
Mr. Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.
“You appear upset,” he said.
“A little,” admitted the poet. “A momentary malaise. It may be a purely personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather more of their contents inside them.”
“Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views,” Mr. Mulliner assured him. “My niece Charlotte did.”
“It is my temperament,” said the poet. “I dislike all dead things, particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they have so obviously, so—shall I say?—blatantly made the Great Change. Give me,” he went on, the greenish tinge fading from his face, “life and joy and beauty.”
“Just what my niece Charlotte used to say.”
“Oddly enough, that thought forms the theme of the second sonnet in my sequence—which, now that the young gentleman with the portable Morgue has left us, I will——”
“My niece Charlotte,” said Mr. Mulliner, with quiet firmness, “was one of those gentle, dreamy, wistful girls who take what I have sometimes felt to be a mean advantage of having an ample private income to write Vignettes in Verse for the artistic weeklies. Charlotte’s Vignettes in Verse had a wide vogue among the editors of London’s higher-browed but less prosperous periodicals. Directly these frugal men realized that she was willing to supply unstinted Vignettes gratis, for the mere pleasure of seeing herself in print, they were all over her. The consequence was that before long she had begun to move freely in the most refined literary circles; and one day, at a little luncheon at the Crushed Pansy (The Restaurant With a Soul), she found herself seated next to a godlike young man at the sight of whom something seemed to go off inside her like a spring.”
“Talking of Spring——” said the poet.
CUPID (proceeded Mr. Mulliner) has always found the family to which I belong a ready mark for his bow. Our hearts are warm, our passions quick. It is not too much to say that my niece Charlotte was in love with this young man before she had finished spearing the first anchovy out of the hors-d’œuvre dish. He was intensely spiritual-looking, with a broad, white forehead and eyes that seemed to Charlotte not so much eyes as a couple of holes punched in the surface of a beautiful soul. He wrote, she learned, Pastels in Prose; and his name, if she had caught it correctly at the moment of their introduction, was Aubrey Trefusis.
Friendship ripens quickly at the Crushed Pansy. The poulet rôti au cresson had scarcely been distributed before the young man was telling Charlotte his hopes, his fears, and the story of his boyhood. And she was amazed to find that he sprang—not from a long line of artists, but from an ordinary, conventional county family of the type that cares for nothing except hunting and shooting.
“You can readily imagine,” he said, helping her to brussels sprouts, “how intensely such an environment jarred upon my unfolding spirit. My family are greatly respected in the neighbourhood, but I personally have always looked upon them as a gang of blood-imbrued pluguglies. My views on kindness to animals are rigid. My impulse, on encountering a rabbit, is to offer it lettuce. To my family, on the other hand, a rabbit seems incomplete without a deposit of small shot in it. My father, I believe, has cut off more assorted birds in their prime than any other man in the Midlands. A whole morning was spoiled for me last week by the sight of a photograph of him in The Tatler looking rather severely at a dying duck. My elder brother Reginald spreads destruction in every branch of the animal kingdom. And my younger brother Wilfred is, I understand, working his way up to the larger fauna by killing sparrows with an air-gun. Spiritually, one might just as well live in Chicago as at Bludleigh Court.”
“Bludleigh Court?” cried Charlotte.
“The moment I was twenty-one and came into a modest but sufficient inheritance I left the place and went to London to lead the life literary. The family, of course, were appalled. My Uncle Francis, I remember, tried to reason with me for hours. Uncle Francis, you see, used to be a famous big-game hunter. They tell me he has shot more gnus than any other man who ever went to Africa. In fact, until recently he virtually never stopped shooting gnus. Now, I hear, he has developed lumbago and is down at Bludleigh, treating it with Riggs’s Superfine Emulsion and sun-baths.”
“But is Bludleigh Court your home?”
“That’s right. Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire.”
“But Bludleigh Court belongs to Sir Alexander Bassinger.”
“My name is really Bassinger. I adopted the pen-name of Trefusis to spare the family’s feelings. But how do you come to know of the place?”
“I’m going down there next week for a visit. My mother was an old friend of Lady Bassinger.”
Aubrey was astonished. And being, like all writers of Pastels in Prose, a neat phrase-maker, he said what a small world it was, after all.
“Well, well, well!” he said.
“From what you tell me,” said Charlotte, “I’m afraid I shall not enjoy my visit. If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s anything connected with sport.”
“It begins to look as if we were twin souls.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?”
“Two minds with but a single thought.”
“Yes.”
“LOOK here,” said Aubrey, “I’ll tell you what. I haven’t been near Bludleigh for years, but if you’re going there, why, dash it, I’ll come too—aye, even though it means meeting my Uncle Francis.”
“You will?”
“I certainly will. I don’t consider it safe that a girl of your exquisite refinement and sensibility should be dumped down at an abattoir like Bludleigh Court without a kindred spirit to lend her moral stability.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you.” His voice was grave. “That house exercises a spell.”
“A what?”
“A spell. A ghastly spell that saps the strongest humanitarian principles. Who knows what effect it might have upon you, should you go there without someone like me to stand by you and guide you in your hour of need?”
“What nonsense!”
“Well, all I can tell you is that once, when I was a boy, a high official of Our Dumb Brothers League of Mercy arrived there lateish on a Friday night, and at two-fifteen on the Saturday afternoon he was the life and soul of an informal party got up for the purpose of drawing one of the local badgers out of an upturned barrel.”
Charlotte laughed merrily.
“The spell will not affect me,” she said.
“Nor me, of course,” said Aubrey. “But, all the same, I would prefer to be by your side, if you don’t mind.”
“Mind, Mr. Bassinger!” breathed Charlotte softly, and was thrilled to note that at the words and the look with which she accompanied them this man, to whom—for, as I say, we Mulliners are quick workers—she had already given her heart, quivered violently. It seemed to her that in those soulful eyes of his she had seen the love-light.
BLUDLEIGH COURT, when Charlotte reached it some days later, proved to be a noble old pile of Tudor architecture, situated in rolling park land and flanked by pleasant gardens leading to a lake with a tree-fringed boathouse. Inside it was comfortably furnished and decorated throughout with groves of glass cases containing the goggle-eyed remnants of birds and beasts assassinated at one time or another by Sir Alexander Bassinger and his son Reginald. From every wall there peered down with an air of mild reproach selected portions of the gnus, moose, elks, zebus, antelopes, giraffes, mountain goats, and wapiti which had had the misfortune to meet Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake before lumbago spoiled him for the chase. The cemetery also included a few stuffed sparrows, which showed that little Wilfred was doing his bit.
The first two days of her visit Charlotte passed mostly in the society of Colonel Pashley-Drake, the Uncle Francis to whom Aubrey had alluded. He seemed to have taken a paternal fancy to her; and, lithely though she dodged down back-stairs and passages, she generally found him breathing heavily at her side. He was a red-faced, almost circular man with eyes like a prawn’s, and he spoke to her freely of lumbago, gnus, and Aubrey.
“So you’re a friend of my young nephew?” he said, snorting twice in a rather unpleasant manner. It was plain that he disapproved of the pastel-artist. “Shouldn’t see too much of him, if I were you. Not the sort of fellow I’d like any daughter of mine to get friendly with.”
“You are quite wrong,” said Charlotte, warmly. “You have only to gaze into Mr. Bassinger’s eyes to see that his morals are above reproach.”
“I never gaze into his eyes,” replied Colonel Pashley-Drake. “Don’t like his eyes. Wouldn’t gaze into them if you paid me. I maintain his whole outlook on life is morbid and unwholesome. I like a man to be a clean, strong, upstanding Englishman who can look his gnu in the face and put an ounce of lead in it.”
“Life,” said Charlotte, coldly, “is not all gnus.”
“You imply that there are also wapiti, moose, zebus, and mountain-goats?” said Sir Francis. “Well, maybe you’re right. All the same, I’d give the fellow a wide berth, if I were you.”
“So far from doing so,” replied Charlotte, proudly, “I am about to go for a stroll with him by the lake at this very moment.”
And, turning away with a petulant toss of her head, she moved off to meet Aubrey, who was hurrying towards her across the terrace.
“I am so glad you came, Mr. Bassinger,” she said to him, as they walked together in the direction of the lake. “I was beginning to find your Uncle Francis a little excessive.”
Aubrey nodded sympathetically. He had observed her in conversation with his relative and his heart had gone out to her.
“Two minutes of my Uncle Francis,” he said, “is considered by the best judges a good medium dose for an adult. So you find him trying, eh? I was wondering what impression my family had made on you.”
Charlotte was silent for a moment.
“How relative everything is in this world,” she said, pensively. “When I first met your father, I thought I had never seen anybody more completely loathsome. Then I was introduced to your brother Reginald, and I realized that, after all, your father might have been considerably worse. And just as I was thinking that Reginald was the farthest point possible, along came your Uncle Francis, and Reginald’s quiet charm seemed to leap out at me like a beacon on a dark night. Tell me,” she said, “has no one ever thought of doing anything about your Uncle Francis?”
Aubrey shook his head gently.
“It is pretty generally recognized now that he is beyond the reach of human science. The only thing to do seems to be to let him go on till he eventually runs down.”
They sat together on a rustic bench overlooking the water. It was a lovely morning. The sun shone on the little wavelets which the sighing breeze drove gently to the shore. A dreamy stillness had fallen on the world, broken only by the distant sound of Sir Alexander Bassinger murdering magpies, of Reginald Bassinger encouraging dogs to eviscerate a rabbit, of Wilfred busy among the sparrows, and a monotonous droning noise from the upper terrace, which was Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake telling Lady Bassinger what to do with the dead gnu.
AUBREY was the first to break the silence.
“How lovely the world is, Miss Mulliner!”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“How softly the breeze caresses yonder water!”
“Yes, doesn’t it?”
“How fragrant a scent of wild flowers it has!”
“Yes, hasn’t it?”
They were silent again.
“On such a day,” said Aubrey, “the mind seems to turn irresistibly to Love.”
“Love?” said Charlotte, her heart beginning to flutter.
“Love,” said Aubrey. “Tell me, Miss Mulliner, have you ever thought of Love?”
He took her hand. Her head was bent, and with the toe of her dainty shoe she toyed coyly with a passing snail.
“Life, Miss Mulliner,” said Aubrey, “is a Sahara through which we all must pass. We start at the Cairo of the cradle and we go travelling on to the—er—well, we go travelling on.”
“Yes, don’t we?” said Charlotte.
“Afar we can see the distant goal——”
“Yes, can’t we?”
“——And would fain reach it.”
“Yes, wouldn’t we?”
“But the way is rough and weary. We have to battle through the sand-storms of Destiny, face with what courage we may the howling simooms of Fate. And very unpleasant it all is. But sometimes in the Sahara of Life, if we are fortunate, we come upon the Oasis of Love. That oasis, when I had all but lost hope, I reached at one-fifteen on the afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-second of last month. There comes a time in the life of every man when he sees Happiness beckoning to him and must grasp it. Miss Mulliner, I have something to ask you which I have been trying to ask ever since the day when we two first met. Miss Mulliner—Charlotte—will you be my—Gosh! Look at that whacking great rat! Loo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo!” said Aubrey, changing the subject.
Once, in her childhood, a sportive playmate had secretly withdrawn the chair on which Charlotte Mulliner was preparing to seat herself. Years had passed, but the recollection of the incident remained green in her memory. In frosty weather she could still feel the old wound. And now, as Aubrey Bassinger suddenly behaved in this remarkable manner, she experienced the same sensation again. It was as though something blunt and heavy had hit her on the head at the exact moment when she was slipping on a banana-skin.
She stared round-eyed at Aubrey. He had released her hand, sprung to his feet, and now, armed with her parasol, was beating furiously in the lush grass at the waterside. And every little while his mouth would open, his head would go back, and uncouth sounds would proceed from his slavering jaws.
“Yoicks! Yoicks! Yoicks!” cried Aubrey.
And again:—
“Tally-ho! Hard For’ard! Tally-ho!”
Presently the fever seemed to pass. He straightened himself and came back to where she stood.
“It must have got away into a hole or something,” he said, removing a bead of perspiration from his forehead with the ferrule of the parasol. “The fact of the matter is, it’s silly ever to go out in the country without a good dog. If only I’d had a nice, nippy terrier with me, I might have obtained some solid results. As it is, a fine rat—gone—just like that! Oh, well, that’s Life, I suppose.” He paused. “Let me see,” he said. “Where was I?”
And then it was as though he waked from a trance. His flushed face paled.
“I say,” he stammered, “I’m afraid you must think me most awfully rude.”
“Pray do not mention it,” said Charlotte, coldly.
“Oh, but you must. Dashing off like that.”
“Not at all.”
“What I was going to say, when I was interrupted, was, Will you be my wife?”
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I won’t.”
“You won’t?”
“No. Never.” Charlotte’s voice was tense with a scorn which she did not attempt to conceal. “So this is what you were all the time, Mr. Bassinger—a secret sportsman!”
Aubrey quivered from head to foot.
“I’m not! I’m not! It was the hideous spell of this ghastly house that overcame me.”
“Pah!”
“What did you say?”
“I said Pah!’ ”
“Why did you say ‘Pah!’?”
“Because,” said Charlotte, with flashing eyes, “I do not believe you. Your story is thin and fishy.”
“But it’s the truth. It was as if some hypnotic influence had gripped me, forcing me to act against all my higher inclinations. Can’t you understand? Would you condemn me for a moment’s passing weakness? Do you think,” he cried, passionately, “that the real Aubrey Bassinger would raise a hand to touch a rat, save in the way of kindness? I love rats, I tell you—love them. I used to keep them as a boy. White ones with pink eyes.”
Charlotte shook her head. Her face was cold and hard.
“Good-bye, Mr, Bassinger,” she said. “From this instant we meet as strangers.”
She turned and was gone. And Aubrey Bassinger, covering his face with his hands, sank on the bench, feeling like a sand-bagged leper.
THE mind of Charlotte Mulliner, in the days which followed the painful scene which I have just described, was torn, as you may well imagine, with conflicting emotions. For a time, as was natural, anger predominated. But after awhile sadness overcame indignation. She mourned for her lost happiness.
And yet, she asked herself, how else could she have acted? She had worshipped Aubrey Bassinger. She had set him upon a pedestal, looked up to him as a great white soul. She had supposed him one who lived, far above this world’s coarseness and grime, on a rarefied plane of his own, thinking beautiful thoughts. Instead of which, it now appeared, he went about the place chasing rats with parasols. What could she have done but spurn him?
That there lurked in the atmosphere of Bludleigh Court a sinister influence that sapped the principles of the most humanitarian and sent them ravening to and fro, seeking for prey, she declined to believe. The theory was pure banana-oil. If such an influence was in operation at Bludleigh, why had it not affected her?
No, if Aubrey Bassinger chased rats with parasols, it could only mean that he was one of Nature’s rat-chasers. And to such a one, cost what it might to refuse, she could never confide her heart.
FEW things are more embarrassing to a highly-strung girl than to be for any length of time in the same house with a man whose love she has been compelled to decline, and Charlotte would have given much to be able to leave Bludleigh Court. But there was, it seemed, to be a garden-party on the following Tuesday, and Lady Bassinger had urged her so strongly to stay on for it that departure was out of the question.
To fill the leaden moments, she immersed herself in her work. She had a long-standing commission to supply the Animal-Lovers’ Gazette with a poem for its Christmas number; and to the task of writing this she proceeded to devote herself. And gradually the ecstasy of literary composition eased her pain.
The days crept by. Old Sir Alexander continued to maltreat magpies. Reginald and the local rabbits fought a never-ceasing battle; they striving to keep up the birth-rate, he to reduce it. Colonel Pashley-Drake maundered on about gnus he had met. And Aubrey dragged himself about the house looking licked to a splinter. Eventually Tuesday came, and with it the garden-party.
Lady Bassinger’s annual garden-party was one of the big events of the countryside. By four o’clock all that was bravest and fairest for miles around had assembled on the big lawn. But Charlotte, though she had stayed on specially to be present, was not one of the gay throng. At about the time when the first strawberry was being dipped in its cream she was up in her room staring with bewildered eyes at a letter which had arrived by the second post.
The Animal-Lovers’ Gazette had turned her poem down!
Yes, turned it down flat, in spite of the fact that it had been commissioned and that she was not asking a penny for it. Accompanying the rejected manuscript was a curt note from the editor, in which he said that he feared its tone might offend his readers.
Charlotte was stunned. She was not accustomed to having her efforts rejected. This one, moreover, had seemed to her so particularly good. A hard judge of her own work, she had said to herself, as she licked the envelope, that this time, if never before, she had delivered the goods.
She unfolded the manuscript and re-read it.
It ran as follows:—
GOOD GNUS
(A Vignette in Verse),
by
CHARLOTTE MULLINER.
When cares attack and life seems black,
How sweet it is to pot a yak
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears
And others I could mention:
But in my Animals’ Who’s Who
No name stands higher than the Gnu:
And each new gnu that comes in view
Receives my prompt attention.
When Afric’s sun is sinking low
And shadows wander to and fro
And everywhere there’s in the air
A hush that’s deep and solemn;
Then is the time good men and true
With View Haloo pursue the gnu:
(The safest spot to put your shot
Is through the spinal column).
To take the creature by surprise
We must adopt some rude disguise,
Although deceit is never sweet
And falsehoods don’t attract us:
So, as with gun in hand you wait,
Remember to impersonate
A tuft of grass, a mountain-pass,
A kopje or a cactus.
A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting’s o’er, the vigil past:
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It’s done. You’ve pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail:
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger).
Charlotte laid the manuscript down, frowning. She chafed at the imbecility of editors. Less than ever was she able to understand what anyone could find in it to cavil at. Tone likely to offend? What did the man mean about the tone being likely to offend? She had never heard such nonsense in her life. How could the tone possibly offend? It was unexceptionable. The whole poem breathed that clean, wholesome, healthy spirit of sport which has made England what it is. And the thing was not only lyrically perfect, but educational as well. It told the young reader, anxious to shoot gnus but uncertain of the correct procedure, exactly what he wanted to know.
She bit her lip. Well, if this Animal-Lovers’ bird didn’t know a red-hot contribution when he saw one, she would jolly well find somebody else who did—and quick, too. She——
At this moment something occurred to distract her thoughts. Down on the terrace below, little Wilfred, complete with air-gun, had come into her line of vision. The boy was creeping along in a quiet, purposeful manner, obviously intent on the chase; and it suddenly came over Charlotte Mulliner in a wave that here she had been in this house all this time and never once had thought of borrowing the child’s weapon and having a plug at something with it.
The sky was blue. The sun was shining. All Nature seemed to call to her to come out and kill things.
She left the room and ran quickly down the stairs.
AND what of Aubrey, meanwhile? Grief having slowed him up on his feet, he had been cornered by his mother, and marched off to hand cucumber sandwiches at the garden-party. After a brief spell of servitude, however, he had contrived to escape and was wandering on the terrace, musing mournfully, when he observed his brother Wilfred approaching. And at the same moment Charlotte Mulliner emerged from the house and came hurrying in their direction. In a flash, Aubrey perceived that here was a situation which, shrewdly handled, could be turned greatly to his advantage. Affecting to be unaware of Charlotte’s approach, he stopped his brother and eyed the young thug sternly.
“Wilfred,” he said, “where are you going with that gun?”
The boy appeared embarrassed.
“Just shooting.”
Aubrey took the weapon from him and raised his voice slightly. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen that Charlotte was now well within hearing.
“Shooting, eh?” he said. “Shooting? I see. And have you never been taught, wretched child, that you should be kind to the animals that crave your compassion? Has no one ever told you that he prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small? For shame, Wilfred, for shame!”
Charlotte had come up and was standing there, looking at them inquiringly.
“What’s all this about?” she asked.
Aubrey started dramatically.
“Miss Mulliner! I was not aware that you were there. All this? Oh, nothing. I found this lad here on his way to shoot sparrows with his air-gun, and I am taking the thing from him. It may seem to you a high-handed action on my part. You may consider me hypersensitive. You may ask, Why all this fuss about a few birds? But that is Aubrey Bassinger. Aubrey Bassinger will not lightly allow even the merest sparrow to be placed in jeopardy. Tut, Wilfred,” he said. “Tut! Cannot you see now how wrong it is to shoot the poor sparrows?”
“But I wasn’t going to shoot sparrows,” said the boy. “I was going to shoot Uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath.”
“It is also wrong,” said Aubrey, after a slight hesitation, “to shoot Uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath.”
Charlotte Mulliner uttered an impatient exclamation. And Aubrey, looking at her, saw that her eyes were glittering with a strange light. She breathed quickly through her delicately-chiselled nose. She seemed feverish, and a medical man would have been concerned about her blood-pressure.
“Why?” she demanded vehemently, “Why is it wrong? Why shouldn’t he shoot his Uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath?”
Aubrey stood for a moment, pondering. Her razor-like feminine intelligence had cut cleanly to the core of the matter. After all, now that she put it like that, why not?
“Think how it would tickle him up.”
“True,” said Aubrey, nodding. “True.”
“And his Uncle Francis is precisely the sort of man who ought to have been shot at with air-guns incessantly for the last thirty years. The moment I met him, I said to myself, ‘That man ought to be shot at with air-guns.’ ”
Aubrey nodded again. Her girlish enthusiasm had begun to infect him.
“There is much in what you say,” he admitted.
“Where is he?” asked Charlotte, turning to the boy.
“On the roof of the boathouse.”
Charlotte’s face clouded.
“H’m!” she said. “That’s awkward. How is one to get at him?”
“I remember Uncle Francis telling me once,” said Aubrey, “that, when you went shooting tigers, you climbed a tree. There are plenty of trees by the boathouse.”
“Admirable!”
For an instant there came to disturb Aubrey’s hearty joy in the chase a brief, faint flicker of prudence.
“But—I say—do you really think——? Ought we——?”
Charlotte’s eyes flashed scornfully.
“Infirm of purpose,” she said, “give me the air-gun!”
“I was only thinking——”
“Well?”
“I suppose you know he’ll have practically nothing on?”
Charlotte Mulliner laughed lightly.
“He can’t intimidate me,” she said. “Come! Let us be going.”
UP on the roof of the boathouse, the beneficent ultra-violet rays of the afternoon sun pouring down on his globular surface, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake lay in that pleasant half-waking, half-dreaming state that accompanies this particular form of lumbago treatment. His mind flitted lightly from one soothing subject to another. He thought of elks he had shot in Canada, of moufflon he had shot in the Grecian Archipelago, of giraffes he had shot in Nigeria. He was just on the point of thinking of a hippopotamus which he had shot in Egypt, when the train of his meditations was interrupted by a soft popping sound not far away. He smiled affectionately. So little Wilfred was out with his air-gun, eh?
A thrill of quiet pride passed through Colonel Pashley-Drake. He had trained the lad well, he felt. With a garden-party in progress, with all the opportunities it offered for quiet gorging, how many boys of Wilfred’s age would have neglected their shooting to hang round the tea-table and stuff themselves with cakes! But this fine lad——
Ping! There it was again. The boy must be somewhere quite close at hand. He wished he could be at his side, giving him kindly advice. Wilfred, he felt, was a young fellow after his own heart. What destruction he would spread among the really worth-while animals when he grew up and put aside childish things and exchanged his air-gun for a Winchester repeater!
Sir Francis Pashley-Drake started. Two inches from where he lay a splinter of wood had sprung from the boathouse roof. He sat up, feeling a little less affectionate.
“Wilfred!”
There was no reply.
“Be careful, Wilfred, my boy. You nearly——”
A sharp, agonizing twinge caused him to break off abruptly.
He sprang to his feet and began to address the surrounding landscape passionately in one of the lesser-known dialects of the Congo basin. He no longer thought of Wilfred with quiet pride. Few things so speedily modify an uncle’s love as a nephew’s air-gun bullet in the fleshy part of the leg. Sir Francis Pashley-Drake’s plans for this boy’s future had undergone in one brief instant a complete change. He no longer desired to stand beside him through his formative years, teaching him the secrets of shikaree. All he wanted to do was to get close enough to him to teach him with the flat of his right hand to be a bit more careful where he pointed his gun.
He was expressing a synopsis of these views in a mixture of Urdu and Cape Dutch, when the words were swept from his lips by the sight of a woman’s face, peering from the branches of a near-by tree.
Colonel Pashley-Drake reeled where he stood. Like so many outdoor men, he was the soul of modesty. Once, in Bechuanaland, he had left a native witch-dance in a marked manner because he considered the chief’s third supplementary wife insufficiently clad. An acute consciousness of the sketchiness of his costume overcame him. He blushed brightly.
“My dear young lady——” he stammered.
He had got thus far when he perceived that the young woman was aiming at him something that looked remarkably like an air-gun. Her tongue protruding thoughtfully from the corner of her mouth, she had closed one eye and with the other was squinting tensely along the barrel.
Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake did not linger. In all England there was probably no man more enthusiastic about shooting; but the fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. With an agility which no gnu, unless in the very pink of condition, could have surpassed, he sprang to the side of the roof and leaped off. There was a clump of reeds not far from the boathouse. He galloped across the turf and dived into them.
Charlotte descended from her tree. Her expression was petulant. Girls nowadays are spoiled and only too readily become peevish when balked of their pleasures.
“I had no idea he was so nippy,” she said.
“A quick mover,” agreed Aubrey. “I imagine he got that way from dodging rhinoceroses.”
“Why can’t they make these silly guns with two barrels? A single barrel doesn’t give a girl a chance.”
Nestling among the reeds, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake, in spite of the indignation natural to a man in his position, could not help feeling a certain complacency. The old woodcraft of the hunter had stood him, he felt, in good stead. Not many men, he told himself, would have had the initiative and swift intelligence to act so promptly in the face of peril.
He was aware of voices close by.
“What do we do now?” he heard Charlotte Mulliner say.
“We must think,” said the voice of his nephew Aubrey.
“He’s in there somewhere.”
“Yes.”
“I hate to see a fine head like that get away,” said Charlotte, and her voice was still querulous. “Especially after I winged him. The very next poem I write is going to be an appeal to air-gun manufacturers to use their intelligence, if they have any, and turn out a line with two barrels.”
“I shall write a Pastel in Prose on the same subject,” agreed Aubrey.
“Well, what shall we do?”
There was a short silence. An insect of unknown species crept up Colonel Pashley-Drake and bit him in the small of the back.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Aubrey. “I remember Uncle Francis mentioning to me once that, when wounded zebus take cover by the reaches of the Lower Zambezi, the sportsman dispatches a native assistant to set fire to——”
Sir Francis Pashley-Drake emitted a hollow groan. It was drowned by Charlotte’s cry of delight.
“Why, of course! How clever you are, Mr. Bassinger!”
“Oh, no,” said Aubrey, modestly.
“Have you matches?”
“I have a cigarette-lighter.”
“Then would it be bothering you too much to go and set light to those reeds—about there would be a good place—and I’ll wait here with the gun?”
“I should be charmed.”
“I hate to trouble you.”
“No trouble, I assure you,” said Aubrey. “A pleasure.”
Three minutes later the revellers on the lawn were interested to observe a sight rare at the better class of English garden-party. Out of a clump of laurel-bushes that bordered the smoothly mown turf there came charging a stout, pink gentleman of middle age who hopped from side to side as he ran. He was wearing a loincloth and seemed in a hurry. They had just time to recognize in this new-comer their host’s brother, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake, when he snatched a cloth from the nearest table, draped it round him, and with a quick leap took refuge behind the portly form of the Bishop of Stortford, who was talking to the local Master of Hounds about the difficulty he had in keeping his vicars off the incense.
CHARLOTTE and Aubrey had paused in the shelter of the laurels. Aubrey, peering through this zareba, clicked his tongue regretfully.
“He’s taken cover again,” he said. “I’m afraid we shall find it difficult to dig him out of there. He’s gone to earth behind a bishop.”
Receiving no reply, he turned.
“Miss Mulliner!” he exclaimed. “Charlotte! What is the matter?”
A strange change had come over the girl’s beautiful face since he had last gazed at it. The fire had died out of those lovely eyes, leaving them looking like those of a newly-awakened somnambulist. She was pale, and the tip of her nose quivered.
“Where am I?” she murmured.
“Bludleigh Manor, Lesser Bludleigh, Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire. Telephone, 28 Goresby,” said Aubrey, quickly.
“Have I been dreaming? Or did I really—— Ah, yes, yes!” she moaned, shuddering violently. “It all comes back to me. I shot Sir Francis with the air-gun!”
“You certainly did,” said Aubrey, and would have gone on to comment with warm approbation on the skill she had shown, a skill which—in an untrained novice—had struck him as really remarkable. But he checked himself. “Surely,” he said, “you are not letting the fact disturb you? It’s the sort of thing that might have happened to anyone.”
She interrupted him.
“How right you were, Mr. Bassinger, to warn me against the spell of Bludleigh. And how wrong I was to blame you for borrowing my parasol to chase a rat. Can you ever forgive me?”
“Charlotte!”
“Aubrey!”
“Charlotte!”
“Hush!” she said. “Listen.”
On the lawn, Sir Francis Pashley-Drake was telling his story to an enthralled audience. The sympathy of the meeting, it was only too plain, was entirely with him. This shooting of a sitting sun-bather had stirred the feelings of his hearers deeply. Indignant exclamations came faintly to the ears of the young couple in the laurels.
“Most irregular!”
“Not done!”
“Scarcely cricket!”
And then, from Sir Alexander Bassinger, a stern: “I shall require a full explanation.”
Charlotte turned to Aubrey.
“What shall we do?”
“Well,” said Aubrey, reflecting, “I don’t think we had better just go and join the party and behave as if nothing had happened. The atmosphere doesn’t seem right. What I would propose is that we take a short cut through the fields to the station, hook up with the five-fifty express at Goresby, go to London, have a bit of dinner, get married, and——”
“Yes, yes,” cried Charlotte. “Take me away from this awful house.”
“To the ends of the world,” said Aubrey, fervently. He paused. “Look here,” he said, suddenly. “If you move over to where I’m standing, you get the old boy plumb spang against the sky-line. You wouldn’t care for just one last——”
“No, no!”
“Merely a suggestion,” said Aubrey. “Ah, well, perhaps you’re right. Then let’s be shifting.”
Printer’s errors corrected above:
Magazine, p. 107a, had two dashes, before and after a line break, at “shall I say?—
—blatantly”.
Annotations to the story as collected in Mr. Mulliner Speaking are on this site.