Chapter XX (1)

Dinner at Detchworth Grange was most amusing that evening. One of the chief reasons--in fact, it would not be too venturesome to say _the_ chief reason--for Captain Palliser’s frequent presence in very good country houses was that he had a way of making things amusing. His relation of anecdotes, of people and things, was distinguished by a manner which subtly declined to range itself on the side of vulgar gossip. Quietly and with a fine casualness he conveyed the whole picture of the new order at Temple Barholm. He did it with wonderfully light touches, and yet the whole thing was to be seen--the little old maid in her exquisite clothes, her unmistakable stamp of timid good breeding, her protecting adoration combined with bewilderment; the long, lean, not altogether ill-looking New York bounder, with his slight slouch, his dangerously unsophisticated-looking face, and his American jocularity of slang phrase.

“He’s of a class I know nothing about. I own he puzzled me a trifle at first,” Palliser said with his cool smile. “I’m not sure that I’ve ‘got on to him’ altogether yet. That’s an expressive New York phrase of his own. But when we were strolling about together, he made revelations apparently without being in the least aware that they were revelations. He was unbelievable. My fear was that he would not go on.”

“But he did go on?” asked Amabel. “One must hear something of the revelations.”

Then was given in the best possible form the little drama of the talk in the garden. No shade of Mr. Temple Barholm’s characteristics was lost. Palliser gave occasionally an English attempt at the reproduction of his nasal twang, but it was only a touch and not sufficiently persisted in to become undignified.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “None of us can really do it. When English actors try it on the stage, it is not in the least the real thing. They only drawl through their noses, and it is more than that.”

The people of Detchworth Grange were not noisy people, but their laughter was unrestrained before the recital was finished. Nobody had gone so far as either to fear or to hope for anything as undiluted in its nature as this was.

“Then he won’t give us a chance, the least chance,” cried Lucy and Amabel in unison. “We are out of the running.”

“You won’t get even a look in--because you are not ‘ladies,’ said their brother.

“Poor Jem Temple Barholm! What a different thing it would have been if we had had him for a neighbor!” Mr. Grantham fretted.

“We should have had Lady Joan Fayre as well,” said his wife.

“At least she’s a gentlewoman as well as a ‘lady,’” Mr. Grantham said. “She would not have become so bitter if that hideous thing had not occurred.”

They wondered if the new man knew anything about Jem. Palliser had not reached that part of his revelation when the laughter had broken into it. He told it forthwith, and the laughter was overcome by a sort of dismayed disgust. This did not accord with the rumors of an almost “nice” good nature.

“There’s a vulgar horridness about it,” said Lucy.

“What price Lady Mallowe!” said the son. “I’ll bet a sovereign she began it.”

“She did,” remarked Palliser; “but I think one may leave Mr. Temple Barholm safely to Lady Joan.” Mr. Grantham laughed as one who knew something of Lady Joan.

“There’s an Americanism which I didn’t learn from him,” Palliser added, “and I remembered it when he was talking her over. It’s this: when you dispose of a person finally and forever, you ‘wipe up the earth with him.’ Lady Joan will ‘wipe up the earth’ with your new neighbor.”

There was a little shout of laughter. “Wipe up the earth” was entirely new to everybody, though even the country in England was at this time by no means wholly ignorant of American slang.

This led to so many other things both mirth-provoking and serious, even sometimes very serious indeed, that the entire evening at Detchworth was filled with talk of Temple Barholm. Very naturally the talk did not end by confining itself to one household. In due time Captain Palliser’s little sketches were known in divers places, and it became a habit to discuss what had happened, and what might possibly happen in the future. There were those who went to the length of calling on the new man because they wanted to see him face to face. People heard new things every few days, but no one realized that it was vaguely through Palliser that there developed a general idea that, crude and self-revealing as he was, there lurked behind the outward candor of the intruder a hint of over-sharpness of the American kind. There seemed no necessity for him to lay schemes beyond those he had betrayed in his inquiries about “ladies,” but somehow it became a fixed idea that he was capable of doing shady things if at any time the temptation arose. That was really what his boyish casualness meant. That in truth was Palliser’s final secret conclusion. And he wanted very much to find out _why_ exactly little old Miss Temple Barholm had been taken up. If the man wanted introductions, he could have contrived to pick up a smart and enterprising unprofessional chaperon in London who would have done for him what Miss Temple Barholm would never presume to attempt. And yet he seemed to have chosen her deliberately. He had set her literally at the head of his house. And Palliser, having heard a vague rumor that he had actually settled a decent income upon her, had made adroit inquiries and found it was true.

It was. To arrange the matter had been one of his reasons for going to see Mr. Palford during their stay in London.

“I wanted to fix you--fix you safe,” he said when he told Miss Alicia about it. “I guess no one can take it away from you, whatever old thing happens.”

“What could happen, dear Mr. Temple Barholm?” said Miss Alicia in the midst of tears of gratitude and tremulous joy. “You are so young and strong and--everything! Don’t even speak of such a thing in jest. What _could_ happen?”

“Anything can happen,” he answered, “just anything. Happening’s the one thing you can’t bet on. If I was betting, I’d put my money on the thing I was sure _couldn’t_ happen. Look at this Temple Barholm song and dance! Look at T. T. as he was half strangling in the blizzard up at Harlem and thanking his stars little Munsberg didn’t kick him out of his confectionery store less than a year ago! So long as I’m all right, you’re all right. But I wanted you _fixed_, anyhow.”

He paused and looked at her questioningly for a moment. He wanted to say something and he was not sure he ought. His reverence for her little finenesses and reserves increased instead of wearing away. He was always finding out new things about her.

“Say,” he broke forth almost impetuously after his hesitation, “I wish you wouldn’t call me Mr. Temple Barholm.”

“D-do you?” she fluttered. “But what could I call you?”

“Well,” he answered, reddening a shade or so, “I’d give a house and lot if you could just call me Tem.”

“But it would sound so unbecoming, so familiar,” she protested.

“That’s just what I’m asking for,” he said--“some one to be familiar with. I’m the familiar kind. That’s what’s the matter with me. I’d be familiar with Pearson, but he wouldn’t let me. I’d frighten him half to death. He’d think that he wasn’t doing his duty and earning his wages, and that somehow he’d get fired some day without a character.”

He drew nearer to her and coaxed.

“Couldn’t you do it?” he asked almost as though he were asking a favor of a girl. “Just Tem? I believe that would come easier to you than T. T. I get fonder and fonder of you every day, Miss Alicia, honest Injun. And I’d be so grateful to you if you’d just be that unbecomingly familiar.”

He looked honestly in earnest; and if he grew fonder and fonder of her, she without doubt had, in the face of everything, given her whole heart to him.

“Might I call you Temple--to begin with?” she asked. “It touches me so to think of your asking me. I will begin at once. Thank you--Temple,” with a faint gasp. “I might try the other a little later.”

It was only a few evenings later that he told her about the flats in Harlem. He had sent to New York for a large bundle of newspapers, and when he opened them he read aloud an advertisement, and showed her a picture of a large building given up entirely to “flats.”

He had realized from the first that New York life had a singular attraction for her. The unrelieved dullness of her life--those few years of youth in which she had stifled vague longings for the joys experienced by other girls; the years of middle age spent in the dreary effort to be “submissive to the will of God,” which, honestly translated, signified submission to the exactions and domestic tyrannies of “dear papa” and others like him--had left her with her capacities for pleasure as freshly sensitive as a child’s. The smallest change in the routine of existence thrilled her with excitement. Tembarom’s casual references to his strenuous boyhood caused her eyes to widen with eagerness to hear more. Having seen this, he found keen delight in telling her stories of New York life--stories of himself or of other lads who had been his companions. She would drop her work and gaze at him almost with bated breath. He was an excellent raconteur when he talked of the things he knew well. He had an unconscious habit of springing from his seat and acting his scenes as he depicted them, laughing and using street-boy phrasing:

“It’s just like a tale,” Miss Alicia would breathe, enraptured as he jumped from one story to another. “It’s exactly like a wonderful tale.”

She learned to know the New York streets when they blazed with heat, when they were hard with frozen snow, when they were sloppy with melting slush or bright with springtime sunshine and spring winds blowing, with pretty women hurrying about in beflowered spring hats and dresses and the exhilaration of the world-old springtime joy. She found herself hurrying with them. She sometimes hung with him and his companions on the railing outside dazzling restaurants where scores of gay people ate rich food in the sight of their boyish ravenousness. She darted in and out among horses and vehicles to find carriages after the theater or opera, where everybody was dressed dazzlingly and diamonds glittered.

“Oh, how rich everybody must have seemed to you--how cruelly rich, poor little boy!”

“They looked rich, right enough,” he answered when she said it. “And there seemed a lot of good things to eat all corralled in a few places. And you wished you could be let loose inside. But I don’t know as it seemed cruel. That was the way it _was_, you know, and you couldn’t help it. And there were places where they’d give away some of what was left. I tell you, we were in luck then.”

There was some spirit in his telling it all--a spirit which had surely been with him through his hardest days, a spirit of young mirth in rags--which made her feel subconsciously that the whole experience had, after all, been somehow of the nature of life’s high adventure. He had never been ill or heart-sick, and he laughed when he talked of it, as though the remembrance was not a recalling of disaster.

“Clemmin’ or no clemmin’, I wish I’d lived the loife tha’s lived,” Tummas Hibblethwaite had said.

Her amazement would indeed have been great if she had been told that she secretly shared his feeling.

“It seems as if somehow you had _never_ been dull,” was her method of expressing it.

“Dull! Holy cats! no,” he grinned. “There wasn’t any time for being anything. You just had to keep going.”

She became in time familiar with Mrs. Bowse’s boarding-house and boarders. She knew Mrs. Peck and Mr. Jakes and the young lady from the notion counter (those wonderful shops!). Julius and Jim and the hall bedroom and the tilted chairs and cloud of smoke she saw so often that she felt at home with them.

“Poor Mrs. Bowse,” she said, “must have been a most respectable, motherly, hard-working creature. Really a _nice_ person of her class.” She could not quite visualize the “parlor,” but it must have been warm and comfortable. And the pianola--a piano which you could play without even knowing your notes--What a _clever_ invention! America seemed full of the most wonderfully clever things.

Tembarom was actually uplifted in soul when he discovered that she laid transparent little plans for leading him into talk about New York. She wanted him to talk about it, and the Lord knows he wanted to talk about himself. He had been afraid at first. She might have hated it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn’t understood. But she did. Without quite realizing the fact, she was beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it. Her Somerset vicarage imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the daring wish that sometime she _might_ see it.

But Tembarom’s imagination was more athletic.

“Jinks! wouldn’t it be fine to _take_ her there! The lark in London wouldn’t be ace high to it.”

The Hutchinsons were not New Yorkers, but they had been part of the atmosphere of Mrs. Bowse’s. Mr. Hutchinson would of course be rather a forward and pushing man to be obliged to meet, but Little Ann! She did so like Little Ann! And the dear boy did so want, in his heart of hearts, to talk about her at times. She did not know whether, in the circumstances, she ought to encourage him; but he was so dear, and looked so much dearer when he even _said_ “Little Ann,” that she could not help occasionally leading him gently toward the subject.

When he opened the newspapers and found the advertisements of the flats, she saw the engaging, half-awkward humorousness come into his eyes.

“Here’s one that would do all right,” he said--“four rooms and a bath, eleventh floor, thirty-five dollars a month.”

He spread the newspaper on the table and rested on his elbow, gazing at it for a few minutes wholly absorbed. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

“There’s a plan of the rooms,” he said. “Would you like to look at it? Shall I bring your chair up to the table while we go over it together?”

He brought the chair, and side by side they went over it thoroughly. To Miss Alicia it had all the interest of a new kind of puzzle. He explained it in every detail. One of his secrets had been that on several days when Galton’s manner had made him hopeful he had visited certain flat buildings and gone into their intricacies. He could therefore describe with color their resources--the janitor; the elevator; the dumb-waiters to carry up domestic supplies and carry down ashes and refuse; the refrigerator; the unlimited supply of hot and cold water, the heating plan; the astonishing little kitchen, with stationary wash-tubs; the telephone, if you could afford it,--all the conveniences which to Miss Alicia, accustomed to the habits of Rowcroft Vicarage, where you lugged cans of water up-stairs and down if you took a bath or even washed your face, seemed luxuries appertaining only to the rich and great.

“How convenient! How wonderful! Dear me! Dear me!” she said again and again, quite flushed with excitement. “It is like a fairy-story. And it’s not big at all, is it?”

“You could get most of it into this,” he answered, exulting. “You could get all of it into that big white-and-gold parlor.”

“The white saloon?”

He showed his teeth.

“I guess I ought to remember to call it that,” he said, “but it always makes me think of Kid MacMurphy’s on Fourth Avenue. He kept what was called a saloon, and he’d had it painted white.”

“Did you _know_ him?” Miss Alicia asked.

“Know him! Gee! no! I didn’t fly as high as that. He’d have thought me pretty fresh if I’d acted like I knew him. He thought he was one of the Four Hundred. He’d been a prize-fighter. He was the fellow that knocked out Kid Wilkens in four rounds.” He broke off and laughed at himself. “Hear me talk to you about a tough like that!” he ended, and he gave her hand the little apologetic, protective pat which always made her heart beat because it was so “nice.”

He drew her back to the advertisements, and drew such interesting pictures of what the lives of two people--mother and son or father and daughter or a young married couple who didn’t want to put on style--might be in the tiny compartments, that their excitement mounted again.

This could be a bedroom, that could be a bedroom, that could be the living-room, and if you put a bit of bright carpet on the little hallway and hung up a picture or so, it would look first-rate. He even went into the matter of measurements, which made it more like putting a puzzle together than ever, and their relief when they found they could fit a piece of furniture he called “a lounge” into a certain corner was a thing of flushing delight. The “lounge,” she found, was a sort of cot with springs. You could buy them for three dollars, and when you put on a mattress and covered it with a “spread,” you could sit on it in the daytime and sleep on it at night, if you had to.

From measurements he went into calculations about the cost of things. He had seen unpainted wooden tables you could put mahogany stain on, and they’d look all you’d want. He’d seen a splendid little rocking-chair in Second Avenue for five dollars, one of the padded kind that ladies like. He had seen an arm-chair for a man that was only seven; but there mightn’t be room for both, and you’d have to have the rocking-chair. He had once asked the price of a lot of plates and cups and saucers with roses on them, and you could get them for six; and you didn’t need a stove as there was the range.

He had once heard Little Ann talking to Mrs. Bowse about the price of frying-pans and kettles, and they seemed to cost next to nothing. He’d looked into store windows and noticed the prices of groceries and vegetables and things like that--sugar, for instance; two people wouldn’t use much sugar in a week--and they wouldn’t need a ton of tea or flour or coffee. If a fellow had a mother or sister or wife who had a head and knew about things, you could “put it over” on mighty little, and have a splendid time together, too. You’d even be able to work in a cheap seat in a theater every now and then. He laughed and flushed as he thought of it.

Miss Alicia had never had a doll’s house. Rowcroft Vicarage did not run to dolls and their belongings. Her thwarted longing for a doll’s house had a sort of parallel in her similarly thwarted longing for “a little boy.”

And here was her doll’s house so long, so long unpossessed! It was like that, this absorbed contriving and fitting of furniture into corners. She also flushed and laughed. Her eyes were so brightly eager and her cheeks so pink that she looked quite girlish under her lace cap.

“How pretty and cozy it might be made, how dear!” she exclaimed. “And one would be so high up on the eleventh floor, that one would feel like a bird in a nest.”

His face lighted. He seemed to like the idea tremendously.

“Why, that’s so,” he laughed. “That idea suits me down to the ground. A bird in a nest. But there’d have to be two. One would be lonely. Say, Miss Alicia, how would you like to live in a place like that?”

“I am sure any one would like it--if they had some dear relative with them.” He loved her “dear relative,” loved it. He knew how much it meant of what had lain hidden unacknowledged, even unknown to her, through a lifetime in her early-Victorian spinster breast.

“Let’s go to New York and rent one and live in it together. Would you come?” he said, and though he laughed, he was not jocular in the usual way. “Would you, if we waked up and found this Temple Barholm thing was a dream?”

Something in his manner, she did not know what, puzzled her a little.

“But if it were a dream, you would be quite poor again,” she said, smiling.

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d get Galton to give me back the page. He’d do it quick--quick,” he said, still with a laugh. “Being poor’s nothing, anyhow. We’d have the time of our lives. We’d be two birds in a nest. You can look out those eleventh-story windows ’way over to the Bronx, and get bits of the river. And perhaps after a while Ann would do--like she said, and we’d be three birds.”

“Oh!” she sighed ecstatically. “How beautiful it would be! We should be a little _family_!”

“So we should,” he exulted. “Think of T. T. with a family!” He drew his paper of calculations toward him again. “Let’s make believe we’re going to do it, and work out what it would cost--for three. You know about housekeeping, don’t you? Let’s write down a list.”

If he had warmed to his work before, he warmed still more after this. Miss Alicia was drawn into it again, and followed his fanciful plans with a new fervor. They were like two children who had played at make-believe until they had lost sight of commonplace realities.

Miss Alicia had lived among small economies and could be of great assistance to him. They made lists and added up lines of figures until the fine, huge room and its thousands of volumes melted away. In the great hall, guarded by warriors in armor, the powdered heads of the waiting footmen drooped and nodded while the prices of pounds of butter and sugar and the value of potatoes and flour and nutmegs were balanced with a hectic joy, and the relative significance of dollars and cents and shillings and half-crowns caused Miss Alicia a mild delirium.

By the time that she had established the facts that a shilling was something like twenty-five cents, a dollar was four and twopence, and twenty-five dollars was over five pounds, it was past midnight.

They heard the clock strike the half-hour, and stopped to stare at each other.

Tembarom got up with yet another laugh.

“Say, I mustn’t keep you up all night,” he said. “But haven’t we had a fine time? I feel as if I’d _been_ there.”

They had been there so entirely that Miss Alicia brought herself back with difficulty.

“I can scarcely believe that we have not,” she said. “I feel as if I didn’t like to leave it. It was so delightful.” She glanced about her. “The room looks _huge_,” she said--“almost too huge to live in.”

“Doesn’t it?” he answered. “Now you know how I feel.” He gathered his scraps of paper together with a feeling touch. “I didn’t want to come back myself. When I get a bit of a grouch I shall jerk these out and go back there again.”

“Oh, do let me go with you!” she said. “I have so enjoyed it.”

“You shall go whenever you like,” he said. “We’ll keep it up for a sort of game on rainy days. How much is a dollar, Miss Alicia?”

“Four and twopence. And sugar is six cents a pound.”

“Go to the head,” he answered. “Right again.”

The opened roll of newspapers was lying on the table near her. They were copies of “The Earth.” The date of one of them by merest chance caught her eye.

“How odd!” she said. “Those are old papers. Did you notice? Is it a mistake? This one is dated--” She leaned forward, and her eye caught a word in a head-line.

“The Klondike,” she read. “There’s something about the Klondike.” He put his hand out and drew the papers away.

“Don’t you read that,” he said. “I don’t want you to go to bed and dream about the Klondike. You’ve got to dream about the flat in Harlem.”

“Yes,” she answered. “I mustn’t think about sad things. The flat in Harlem is quite happy. But it startled me to see that word.”

“I only sent for them--because I happened to want to look something up,” he explained. “How much is a pound, Miss Alicia?”

“Four dollars and eighty-six cents,” she replied, recovering herself.

“Go up head again. You’re going to stay there.”

When she gave him her hand on their parting for the night, he held it a moment. A subtle combination of things made him do it. The calculations, the measurements, the nest from which one could look out over the Bronx, were prevailing elements in its make-up. Ann had been in each room of the Harlem flat, and she always vaguely reminded him of Ann.

“We are relations, ain’t we?” he asked.

“I am sure we often seem quite near relations--Temple.” She added the name with very pretty kindness.

“We’re not distant ones any more, anyhow,” he said. “Are we near enough--would you let me kiss you good night, Miss Alicia?”

An emotional flush ran up to her cap ribbons.

“Indeed, my dear boy--indeed, yes.”

Holding her hand with a chivalric, if slightly awkward, courtesy, he bent, and kissed her cheek. It was a hearty, affectionately grateful young kiss, which, while it was for herself, remotely included Ann.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever said good night to any one like that,” he said. “Thank you for letting me.”

He patted her hand again before releasing it. She went up-stairs blushing and feeling rather as though she had been proposed to, and yet, spinster though she was, somehow quite understanding about the nest and Ann.

(To be continued)

MANNERING’S MEN

BY MARJORIE L. C. PICKTHALL

“In that town,” said Blake to himself, peering cautiously through the scrub, “is Mannering’s grave, and the wreck of a brave man’s life-work. Oh, Sergeant, if those two beggarly Nyam-Nyams try to run away; deal with them straightly. At moonset we will go down.”

“O sons of Eblis,” murmured the Haussa sergeant with a grin, “scum of the market-place, little frogs of the mud-puddles of Wakonda, in that town is good soured milk, much grain, and chickens and goats as many as the prayers of the prophet. At moonset we will go down.”

The command gurgled pleasantly to itself and lay closer. Blake crawled nearer Macartney, who was raking the silver-patched blackness with a pair of night-glasses wrapped in dark cloth.

“I can make out a tin roof,” whispered Macartney at last; “that will be the roof of the residency.”

“Where Mannering was speared on his own door-step,” said Jim Blake, taking the glasses. “Dead, down and dead, wiped out, an absolute failure, Mannering. I can’t get over that, you know. He was such a keen old beggar, so wrapped up in his work. He simply spent himself on this beastly country. And he cleared out Wakonda, as far as mortal eye can see, on purpose to make room for seven other devils worse than the late king.”

“Couldn’t be,” put in Macartney.

“It’s not being speared that’s the worst part of it,” persisted Blake; “we all come to that sooner or later. It’s having absolutely nothing to show for his life or his death. Nothing even for the next man to build on. It’s that,” he continued, shivering as the dawn chill blew up the valley, “which I fancy must worry old Mannering--still.”

“What you need is chlorodyne,” whispered Macartney, indignantly.

They lay silent in the dank, upland grass, and the dew beaded and dripped on the thorns overhead. The command hunted for prickles in its feet, tightened belts, and babbled softly of stewed fowl.

From immense spaces, as spun out and thin as a thread, came the hunting-cry of a lion. The Haussa sergeant crept up and touched Blake’s foot.

“The moon sets, O Effendi, and it is not yet the dawn.”

Blake rose to his feet and looked at the sky. “We be ready,” he said.

The command moved as one man, eyes glinting whitely under the tarbooshes. The last few days had been hungry ones. Below in the valley was good food; it was only to fight a little, and all would be full. “_Ya Illah_, brethren, let us go down.”

They went down. Blake was no tactician, and his plan in such cases was simple. You took the main gate, held it, and swept the obstructionists out of the other gates or over the mud walls, broom fashion. He had worked with his present command for a year, and they followed him like a foot-ball team. The sergeant at his elbow presently touched his sleeve.

“There is made ground here.”

“Made ground?”

“Yes. The road built by Mannering Bimbashi.”

Already the road built by Mannering for the grain dealers and spice merchants was no more than a track in the undergrowth, and the grass swept to the thigh. Their way dipped sharply, and a river valley swirling in mist took them like shadows. Blake felt under his feet the rotten piles of a bridge, and a rifle clanged against rusted iron.

“I think these cattle of Wakonda have the alarm,” said the sergeant as they grunted up the opposite slope.

“Why?”

“There was a watchman at the bridge end; we should have crossed by the ford farther down. But these Wakondai cannot fight, and all is as Allah wills. O Ibrahim, son of Suleiman, keep thy rifle dry and remember to get under the walls.”

The town was clattering like a frightened hen-roost when a company of shadows flitted through the fog, and flung themselves under the walls and against the main gate. Five minutes of noisy, scrambling, hit-or-miss fighting followed, and they were inside, with their hardest work before them. Their fire had driven back the defenders, but they themselves had for the moment no cover. Presently the slugs began to flop on the walls behind them, and two men fell. Blake felt a stinging blow on the knee, and went down on all fours. He rose, laughing rather shakily into Macartney’s scared face.

“A spent bullet,” he cried in the din; “can’t put my foot to the ground. Clear those houses, old man; I’ll hold the gate.”

Macartney nodded and was gone, his men after him. Blake and his handful took cover behind a mud buttress and a dead camel, and prepared to hold the gate. It was only then that Blake saw the sergeant.

“Why art thou here?”

“I stay with thee, O Effendi. Besides,”--he sniffed wistfully,--“in that house they have been cooking good mutton. I would not go too far.”

The din and turmoil of the narrow ways rose and fell like the froth of a sea. The roofs were beginning to burn in a dozen places as Macartney, in rough-and-ready fashion, cleared out the slug-shooters. The red light of burning thatch danced in the fog and the thinning dark, and by this light Blake saw a score of white-wrapped figures leap from the reek and rush for the gate, shouting as they came.

“Steady, men, steady!”

“By the prophet’s beard!” cried the Haussa sergeant, flinging himself flat behind the camel, “these be no Wakondai, but ghazis of the far desert. Shoot well, O my children!”

It was all happening with the jerky rapidity of a cinematograph film, and the noise passed hearing. The command, inspired with visions of buttered mutton, loaded and fired as one man. Two, three close-range volleys swept between the walls, and the alley was blotched with whitish bundles that were the bodies of the desert men. But the others came on, and suddenly Blake was on his feet in the shadow of the gate, fighting hand to hand for his life.

“Stand firm, O my children!”

The sergeant’s voice echoed his. He was the center of an indescribable confusion. Under the gate the smoke of the volleys hung heavily. Through this broke first one fierce face, then another, the gleam of arms, the surge and retreat of the attack, the blows and outcries of men. Ibrahim, the son of Suleiman, fell across Blake’s feet and coughed his life out in ten seconds. Another of his best men was down, speared through the heart. And then, as suddenly as they had come, the desert men retreated to the shelter of the huts, and Blake, looking up, saw that it was day.

“They are gone,” said the sergeant, looking at the dead, “but they will come again. O Effendi, this is no good place.”

“I should have kept more men,” Blake was thinking clearly and rapidly. “If Mac doesn’t come back inside ten minutes, it will be too late for us, and he’ll have to cut his way out.”

A moment’s dreamlike quiet had succeeded the dreamlike noise. Over his head the sky was clear and growing gold, barred with the black flocks of wild-fowl that flew to their feeding-grounds in the valley. The sun rose with the hard flash of metal, and the blink of metal answered from the ruined roof of Mannering’s house. Blake’s breath drew cold. Was he also to die uselessly, wastefully, his work unfinished, under the spears of Wakonda? “Steady, men, steady, and fire slowly! It is ours to hold the gate.”

The Haussa sergeant leaped to his feet.

“They come again! O jackals of the sands, we men are ready--”

“Silence--and lie down!”

Again with that dreaming sense of unreality Blake watched the rush of fluttering figures up the alley. The men were loading and firing as fast as they could, but the rush was scarcely checked. Someone behind him began to croon a wild death-song. A thrown spear flickered before his eyes and struck his head a glancing blow. He looked at it curiously as it clattered down on his boots, and wondered why his hands felt so weak, and why the earth reeled under his feet like an out-rolled ribbon. Then everything was lost in a warm, red mist through which savage faces seemed to peer and yell. Blinded and dizzy, he braced himself for the shock of the charge, the while some voice in his head was buzzing busily, “You will go down as Mannering did, a failure, a failure--”

An utter pity for Mannering filled him. He leaned back against the wall, leveled his revolver as well as he could on his knee, and waited--as Mannering had waited.

“_Ya Illah!_” shouted the sergeant hoarsely. “Who be these?”

Blake cleared the blood from his eyes and looked. The attack had wavered and had turned upon itself, for a compact little force of ten had filed out from behind a house and fallen upon the desert men in the rear. They were in all degrees of dress and undress. Their leader was very tall and very thin, with a great bush of hair, upon which he wore the remains of a tarboosh, and he had an empty bandoleer round his neck. He and his men were armed variously, ranging from a damaged Martini to an inlaid jezail from the North. These weapons they were using variously, but effectively, in disciplined silence. So much Blake saw in a photographic flash of amazement. Then strength came back to him, and he and the sergeant flung themselves across the dead camel.

“Come on, you black rascals!” shouted Blake, staggering as he stood.

“Follow me, sons of darkness!” yelled the sergeant.

The men obeyed with howls. Caught between two forces, the enemy, fighting like wolves, were driven down alleys, cut down in corners, scattered and broken. In five minutes Blake’s men and their unknown allies were staring and panting under the gate, their work done.

“Now,” suggested the Haussa, patting Blake all over with his delicate black hands in a search for fatal injuries--“now I go and picket that street whence came the good cooking smell.”

“Wait!” commanded Blake. He looked at the gate, at the dead lying in the light and the black shadow. Even now the gold had scarcely gone from the faint, hot blue of the sky; scattered bands of birds still flew across it, and the high air seemed stirred with a multitude of wings. He looked at the leader of the allies, who was standing on one leg and grinning anxiously.

“Who art thou?”

The man drew his dusty heels together and carefully saluted.

“We be the men of Mannering Bimbashi.”

“Of Mannering Bimbashi?”

“Yea, master. I was a policeman of the force wherewith he policed this town. He said to us, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and we went and punished the evil-doers. Twice and thrice have I fought under Mannering Bimbashi.” He gazed contemptuously at his command. “These others are also of his force, or of his house--warriors, as I am, or gardeners and herders of goats; but all Mannering Bimbashi’s men.”

“Go on,” said Blake, quietly.

“Mannering Bimbashi was slain, and many of his folk; but I was left. I remembered. I gathered these others together, and bade them remember also. Mannering Bimbashi was dead, but we were not freed from our service. We had to live. I was a seller of rock-salt in the market-place, and these others did work after their kind. Sometimes we met and spoke together. None knew us for his men, and his name might not be upon our lips; but we laid our hands upon our mouths--so--and then we remembered.”

“Go on.”

“There is no more. It is very difficult to remember. But I knew the English would come in the footsteps of our bimbashi, and I held these of his together in readiness, as thou hast seen. But our bimbashi--on whom be peace!--has been dead a long time, and now we would take service with thee, O master.”

“Thou hast done well.” Blake’s voice shook a little as he thought how well. “Thou hast done very well. But why?”

The man was very ugly and very black, but all the poetry and sadness of the Arab were in his face as he answered:

“We were his men. We loved him.”

Blake’s eyes were dim as he looked across at the ruined house. There Mannering had gone down, and his hope, his work, his deeds--all these had gone down with him into dust.

“But even here there was love left,” said Blake aloud, with a kind of wonder; “even here there was love left!”

Then he took his men and Mannering’s and went to join Macartney in the ordering of Wakonda.

VERITA’S STRATAGEM

BY ANNE WARNER[7]

Author of “Susan Clegg,” “Seeing France with Uncle John,” etc.

There were very many people who gave a good deal of time to wondering whether Lady Verita Veritas would really ever marry Captain Adair. Many were the opinions on the subject, and some fair-sized bets, one man even proposing to take out the risk at Lloyd’s that she would not. The general view was that marrying Captain Adair was about the only thing that her very original ladyship had _not_ done so far; but on the heels of this undeniable proposition followed the query as to whether her very original ladyship would ever do anything that even the wildest imagination might have accidentally predicted. It was felt that the chances were all against this possibility, and good society was preparing to return to its old favorite topic of how very curiously the young lady treated the young man if she _did_ mean to marry him, and how much more curious was her course of action if she _didn’t_, when suddenly, one fair May morning, on every news-stall in England appeared a well-known magazine, displaying upon its cover list of contributors the name of our heroine, and upon its pages a terrible tale, entitled, “The Dowager Marchioness doesn’t Think,” which clearly owed its inception and development to the quick wit and ready pen of that same blue-blooded young woman.

Here was a fresh sensation in good earnest, the more pronounced from the fact that there was a very thoughtless dowager marchioness in the Veritas family. It was not many hours before all London was buzzing, and none of the buzzing was louder than that set up by the wheels of the irate aunt’s car as they hummed round and round, spinning her rapidly toward her niece. For the earl’s eldest sister lived near Windsor and was very, very rich, quite rich enough to have a good and legal right to a thoughtless disposition, the latter combined, be it added, with a most uncertain temper.

The marchioness had the magazine with her, but the speed she had commanded was so great and the purchase of her pince-nez so uncertain that she could only glance casually from time to time at the iniquities portrayed therein. It was easy to see, however, that it was a frightful story and calculated to incite to riot and bloodshed, or, at the very least, to upset all discipline in the servants’ hall. The plot seemed to hint at some vague system of retribution (here the marchioness held the page very close), and in one spot there were certain vicious passages about downing--or was it drowning?--all aristocrats; but just at that moment the car struck a stone, and the noble lady lost her place, in fact, both her places. By the time that she had readjusted herself, the leaf had turned over, and her eye fell on another and yet more absorbing horror, for an old villager in the story predicted death to all who had oppressed him, and following immediately upon this bloodthirsty prophecy came a style of invective that quite shocked one, and made Verita’s aunt suspect that her dear niece had been slumming in Limehouse.

“I wonder what her father will--” reflected the ancient lady of ten times more ancient lineage, shutting tight her thin-lipped mouth; but there the car, making ever more and more violent efforts to save time at the expense of every other consideration, skidded, and again the dowager marchioness was forced to give up thinking.

She gave it up for so long a time that the next thing of which she became aware was the pillared entrance to Veritas House and the green-and-silver footman who was brother to her own maid. He took her out with a solicitude that showed that he also was fully aware of the tragic happening which had just shaken the august family.

“The duchess is up-stairs, your Ladyship,” he whispered respectfully, as she clung to his arm, “and Captain Adair, too.”

The dowager marchioness nodded with jelly-like faintness. Then she mounted the staircase in real agitation, and was announced by a second footman, this one being a son of her own cook.

The countess was “laid up with her head,” so Verita was pouring the tea; no one else was present except the duchess and the captain.

“Not a copy to be had,” the captain was saying excitedly; “I tried everywhere. I tried at Paddington and at the club, and then I took a taxi to Gray’s Inn. There’s a news-stall just across the way, don’t you know; but not a beastly one could I find.”

“Too bad,” said the author, going to kiss the new arrival; “but it doesn’t matter so much now, because here’s one.” She took the dowager marchioness’s magazine as she spoke, and gave it to the duchess, who opened it eagerly.

“O Vera, how _could_ you?” began her aunt at once. “Or if you wanted to do it, why did you drag us all in this terrible way? _This_ is something much more dreadful than walking in processions and being arrested; this is the _most_ dreadful thing that you’ve done yet.”

“The worst of it is,” said the captain, “that it breaks down all the sense of _noblesse oblige_ and _entre nous_--all that kind of thing, you know. If it were anybody else, it wouldn’t so much matter, for we seem to be baited from every side just now; but I don’t think that _she_ ought to join in, and what worries me especially is that their being sold out at Paddington shows that the magazine has gone out on the afternoon trains in every direction.” He drew a hard breath and glared. Just to look at him, any casual observer would have declared on the Bible that here was a man with great force of character.

“The Paddington trains go only as far as Oxford,” said Lady Verita in a soothing tone, but Captain Adair was clearly in no easily soothed mood.

“They go to Reading, too,” he said with an uncommon air of real opposition, “and to Banbury.”

“And to Stratford--they go to Stratford, too,” interposed the dowager marchioness. “Oh, I’m sure, if you looked into the matter, you’d find that quite a number of places are reached from Paddington. Else why shouldn’t those trains have gone from some other station?” She paused at this bit of constructive London logic, and reverted to her usual condition.

“I wish that they did go from some other station,” said Captain Adair, irately, “it took me so long to get to Paddington. To-day was the first time in ages that I’d gone there, and I wouldn’t have gone there to-day only I was right in the neighborhood.”

Lady Verita looked at him in a way that she had, and he ceased speaking. There was no special quality in her glance, but it was of a kind that one frequently encounters in the best English circles, and it always causes some one to cease speaking. Captain Adair would become a duke some day if one man should die and another should never marry; but it must be confessed that Lady Verita, whether she did or did not have his interest at heart, frequently chose that he should cease speaking.

“I wish that you hadn’t put your name to it,” said the dowager marchioness, suddenly awakened to life and their family grievance by the duchess’s turning a page with a smart snap; “there’s a place there where a man shrieks that he will fight until not one drop of blue blood is left running beside another. That is really very terrible, my dear, that”--She was stopped abruptly, for the duchess threw the book violently from her, gathered up her feather boa, and, rising abruptly, started toward the door.

“What is it?” asked Lady Verita, rising also.

Without a word of explanation or adieu, her grace sailed out of the room. Captain Adair having jumped to open the door for her.

The dowager marchioness sat open-mouthed.

“She must be mad,” said the man as he returned to his seat; “but you know that you really shouldn’t have written it, Vera; really you shouldn’t. People don’t do such things.”

“So revolutionary!” expostulated the dowager marchioness, finding her tongue. “You ought to consider the times. We might as well have Tolstoy in the family, or that horrid little man who led the French strike. Think of your country. Think of her need. Think of our ships.”

“Think of the docks,” the captain added, “or don’t write. That would do just as well.”

“Or, if you must write,” said the aunt, “why not write about the cottage industries? We’ve such a nice cottage industry near us.”

“You might as well be a socialist,” continued the captain; “think of the danger _then_. Think of the taxes.”

“Think of all the men who are continually being killed,” said the dowager, warming to her argument.

“Think of the condition of your party,” said the captain; and then, having picked up the magazine and hunted out the offending matter, he ceased speaking and carefully adjusted his glass.

Lady Verita leaned back in her chair and seemed to resign herself to the inevitable.

“And if I were not kindness itself,” went on the marchioness, after a slight somnolent pause, “I should feel outraged over your taking your title from me. That”--

“Well, by George!” cried the captain.

“_What_ is it?” asked the marchioness.

Lady Verita began to laugh.

“I declare!” The captain began to laugh, too.

“_What_ is it?” cried the marchioness again.

“The whole thing is about the French Revolution!”

“Of course,” said the author, laughing more.

“The French Revolution!” stammered her aunt.

“It doesn’t mean us at all,” said Adair, dropping his glass and staring at both ladies.

“Naturally not.” Lady Verita began crumbling bread for the poodle. “How could any of you suppose that I would make a story out of you?”

“The French Revolution!” repeated the dowager.

“I’ll wager that’s why the duchess bolted,” said the captain, suddenly. “She’d seen through it.”

“_Selbstverständlich_,” said Lady Verita, pouring cold tea over the crumbs, to the end that the poodle might enjoy some truly kind attention.

“I’m going straight to her!” announced the marchioness, rising with dignity. “I wish to let her know that _I_ know, too.”

In less than two minutes the lady and the captain were left alone together.

“I believe you wrote it for a sell,” the man said then. He did occasionally beam brightly through his own fog, and he was anxious now to be on good terms again; “you knew how it would be taken.”

“Perhaps,” said Lady Verita, calmly; “but do ring for them to take away the tea, and then run along yourself. I’m tired.”

“You treat me like a dog,” grumbled the captain, “and I never rebel. Do kiss me once before I go, anyhow, and say you love me just once. Do!”

She kissed him, and that so sweetly that she was barely through with it when the men came in for the tea-things. The men going out with the tea-things were barely on the other side of the door when she said “I love you,” and that sweetly, too. The captain went away in raptures. If only--if only--

It was this sort of happenings that kept so much gossip afloat about the young couple.

* * * * *

There are only two short months between the first of May and the first of July; it follows therefore that there were only two short months between the publication of “The Dowager Marchioness doesn’t Think” and that of “The Earl’s Own County.” Every one who had been shocked by the title of “The Dowager Marchioness doesn’t Think” had become quickly calmed upon discovering that it concerned nothing nearer home than the French Revolution, and so could not have meant anything invidious in relation to either our particular dowager marchioness, or yet her times, or yet her class. But there was quite another tale to tell about “The Earl’s Own County,” and both the earl and his county were so well known and so dreadful, the description of them was so vividly accurate, and the language so painful and so glowing, that those who knew the whole truth stood open-mouthed and aghast, wondering what the noble father would do with his noble daughter _now_.

The noble father was off yachting and thus altogether removed from the field of immediate retribution. But his noble brother, the bishop, came trundling up from his bishopric as fast as, first, a pair of cobs, second, a first-class ticket, and third, a taxi, could be induced to bring him. Arriving at Veritas House, he found his sister-in-law, the countess, laid up with her head, as usual; but the youthful culprit received her uncle with an outstretched hand and a beaming smile. It was hard to believe her so great a sinner as she had proved, but the bishop was ready to believe anything of a daughter and an aristocrat who would write “The Earl’s Own County.”