II
Theyhad been neighbours now for close on ten years and close friends for nine and a half of them.
Noel and Honor were mischievous young things of eight when the Dares took The Red House, and in their adventurous prowlings they very soon made the acquaintance of Miss Victoria Luard, aged nine and also of an adventurous disposition, who lived at Oakdene, the big white house next door with black oak beams all over its forehead,—“like Brahmin marks only the other way,”—as Honor said, which gave it a surprised, wide-awake, lifted-eyebrows look.
From the youngsters the acquaintance spread to the elder members of the two families, and grew speedily into very warm friendship, in spite of the fact that the Dares were all sturdy Liberals, and the Luards, as a family, staunch Conservatives.
Colonel Luard, V.C., C.B.—Sir Anthony indeed, but he always insisted on the Colonel, since, as he said, “That was my own doing, sir, but the other—da-ash it!—I’d nothing to do with that. It was in the family and my turn came.”
He was small made, and of late inclined to stoutness which he strove manfully to subdue, and he wore a close little muzzle of a moustache, gray, almost white now, and slight side-whiskers in the style of the late highly-esteemed Prince Consort. But though his moustache and whiskers and hair and eyebrows all showed unmistakable signs of his seventy-eight years, his little figure—except in front—was as straight as ever. He was as full of fire and go as a shrapnel shell, and his voice, on occasion, was as much out of proportion to his size as was that of the clock with the deepWestminster chimes on the breakfast-room mantelpiece at The Red House.
He looked a bare sixty-five, but as a youngster he had been through the Crimean campaign and the Indian Mutiny, and in the latter gained the coveted cross “For Valour” by exploding a charge at a rebel fort-gate which had already cost a score of lives and still blocked Britain’s righteous vengeance.
He had been on the Abyssinian Expedition and in the Zulu War, and had returned from the latter so punctured with assegai wounds that he vowed he looked like nothing but a da-asht pin-cushion. Then he came into the title, and a very comfortable income, through the death of an uncle, who had made money in the banking business and received his baronetcy as reward for party-services; and after one more campaign—up Nile with Wolseley after Gordon—the Colonel retired on his honors and left the field to younger men.
He found his brother, Geoff, just married and vicar of Iver Magnus, went to stop with him for a time, and stopped on—a very acceptable addition to the vicar’s household. When the children came, who so acceptable, and in every way so adequate, a godfather as the Colonel? And, with the very comfortable expectations incorporated in him, how resist his vehement choice of names,—extraordinary as they seemed to the hopeful father and mother?
And so he had the eldest girl christened Alma, after his first engagement; and the boy who came next he named Raglan, after his first esteemed commander; and the next girl he was actually going to call Balaclava; but there Mrs. Vicar struck, and nearly wept herself into a fever, until they compounded on Victoria, after Her Majesty.
When Vic was five, and Ray ten, and Alma twelve, their father and mother both died in an heroic attempt at combating an epidemic of typhoid, and Uncle Tony shook off the dust and smells of Iver Magnus, bought Oakdene at Willstead, and set up his establishment there, with little Miss Mitten, the sister of his special chum Major Mitten—whohad been pin-cushioned by the Zulus at the same time as himself only more so—as vice-reine.
Miss Mitten was sixty-seven if she was a day, but never admitted it even at census-time. She was an eminently early-Victorian little lady, had taught in a very select ladies’ school, and had written several perfectly harmless little books, which at the time had obtained some slight vogue but had long since been forgotten by every one except the ‘eminent authoress’ herself, as some small newspaper had once unforgettably dubbed her.
She was as small and neat as the Colonel himself, and in spite of the ample living at Oakdene her slim little figure never showed any signs of even comfortable rotundity. She was in fact sparely made, and the later fat years had never succeeded in making good the deficiencies of the many preceding lean ones. She wore the neatest of little gray curls at the side of her head, and, year in year out, they never varied by so much as one single hair.
She was very gentle, a much better housekeeper than might have been expected, and was partial to the black silk dresses and black silk open-work mittens of the days of long ago. The youngsters called her Auntie Mitt., and the Colonel they called Uncle Tony. She alone of all their world invariably addressed the Colonel as ‘Sir Anthony,’ and in her case only he raised no objection, since he saw that she thereby obtained some peculiar little inward satisfaction.
Alma, the eldest girl, was, in this year of grace 1914, twenty-six, though you would never have thought it to look at her. She was a tall handsome girl, dark, as were all the Luards, and three years before this, had suddenly shaken off the frivolities of life and gone in for nursing, with an ardour and steady persistence which had surprised her family and greatly pleased the Colonel, whose still-keen, dark eyes twinkled understandingly and approvingly.
Raglan—Ray to all his friends—was twenty-four, two inches taller than Alma, broad of shoulder and deep of chest,—he had pulled stroke in his College eight, and hisclean-shaven face, with its firm mouth and jaw and level brows, was good to look upon. He was studying the honourable profession of the law and intended to reach the Woolsack or know the reason why. Partly as a sop to the martial spirit of Uncle Tony, and also because he had deemed it a duty—though he speedily found it a pleasure also—he had joined the Territorials and was at this time a first lieutenant in the London Scottish, and a very fine figure he made in the kilt and sporran.
Victoria, who so narrowly escaped being Balaclava, was nineteen and the political heretic of the family. She was an ardent Home-Ruler, a Suffragist, a Land-Reformer, played an almost faultless game at tennis, could give the Colonel 30 at billiards and beat him 100 up with ten to spare; and held a ten handicap on the links. She was in fact very advanced, very full of energy and good spirits, and frankly set on getting out of life every enjoyable thrill it could be made to yield.
Their close intimacy with the Dares had been of no little benefit to all three of them. Accustomed from their earliest years to the atmosphere of an ample income, they had never experienced any necessity for self-denial, self-restraint, or any of the little dove-coloured virtues which add at times an unexpected charm to less luxurious lives.
They found that charm among the Dares and profited by it. To their surprise, as they grew old enough to understand it, they found their own easy lives narrower in many respects than their neighbours’, although obviously Uncle Tony’s open purse was as much wider and deeper than Mr Dare’s as Oakdene, with its well-tended lawns and beds and shrubberies and orchard and kitchen-gardens, was larger than The Red House and its trifling acre. And yet, as children, they had always had better times on the other side of the hedge, when they had made a hole large enough to crawl through; and Christmas revels and Halloweens in The Red House were things to look back upon even yet.
Perhaps it was Mrs Dare that made all the difference.Auntie Mitt was a little dear and all that, and Uncle Tony was an old dear and as good as gold. But there was something about Mrs Dare which gave a different feeling to The Red House and everything about it; and Alma very soon arrived at the meaning of it, and expressed it, succinctly if exaggeratedly, when she said to Lois one day,
“Lo, I’d give Auntie Mitt and Uncle Tony ten times over for half your mother.”
And Mrs Dare, understanding very clearly, had mothered them all alike so far as was possible. And her warm heart was large enough to take in the additional three without any loss, but rather gain, to her own four, and with benefit to the three which only the years were to prove.
The Luard youngsters, in short, had lived in circumstances so wide and easy that they had become somewhat self-centred, somewhat aloof from life less well-placed, somewhat careless of others so long as their own enjoyment of life was full and to their taste.
Auntie Mitt was not blind to it. In her precise little way she took upon herself—with justifiable misgiving that nothing would come of it—to point out to them that they were in danger of falling into the sin of selfishness. And, as she expected, her gentle remonstrances fell from them like water off lively little ducks’ backs.
Uncle Tony considered them the finest children in the world, would not hear a word against them, and spoiled them to his heart’s content and their distinct detriment.
Their association with the Dares saved them no doubt from the worst results of Uncle Tony’s mistaken kindness, but even Mrs Dare could not make angels of them any more than she could of her own four. She could only do her best by them all and leave them to work out their own salvation in their own various ways.
Connal Dare, the eldest of her own tribe, had been in the medical profession since the age of eight, when the game of his heart had been to make the other three lie down on the floor, covered up with tidies and shawls, while he inspected their tongues, and timed their pulses by a toy-watchwhich only went when he wound it, which he could not do while holding a patient’s pulse. As he invariably prescribed liquorice-water, carefully compounded in a bottle with much shaking beforehand, and acid drops, the others suffered his ministrations with equanimity so long as his medicaments lasted, but grew convalescent with revolting alacrity the moment the supply failed.
Since then, true to his instinct, he had worked hard, and forced his way up in spite of all that might have hindered.
His father would have liked him with him in the business in St Mary Axe, but, perceiving the lad’s bent, raised no objection, on the understanding that, as far as possible, he made his own way. And this Connal had succeeded in doing.
He was a sturdy, fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, several inches shorter than Ray Luard but fully his match both in boxing and wrestling, as proved in many a bout before an admiring audience of five—and sometimes six, for the Colonel liked nothing better than to see them at it and bombard them both impartially with advice and encouragement.
Connal had overcome all obstacles to the attainment of his chosen career in similar fashion; had taken scholarship after scholarship; and all the degrees his age permitted, and had even paid some of his examination fees by joining the Army Medical Corps, which provided him not only with cash, but also with a most enjoyable yearly holiday in camp and a certain amount of practice in his profession.
He had, however, long since decided that general practice would not satisfy him. He would specialise, and he chose as his field the still comparatively obscure department of the brain. There were fewer skilled workers in it than in most of the others. In fact it was looked somewhat askance at by the more pushing pioneers in research. It offered therefore more chances and he was most profoundly interested in his work in all its mysterious heights and depths.
At the moment he was the hard-worked Third Medical atBirch Grove Asylum, up on the Surrey Downs, and whenever he could run over to Willstead for half a day his mother eyed him anxiously for signs of undue depression or disturbed mentality, and was always completely reassured by his clear bright eyes, and his merry laugh, and the gusto with which he spoke of his work and its future possibilities.
With the approval and assistance of his good friend Dr Rhenius, who had attended to all the mortal ills of the Dares and Luards since they came to live in Willstead, he was working with all his heart along certain definite and well-considered lines, which included prospective courses of study at Munich and Paris. In preparation for these he was very busy with French and German, and for health’s sake had become an ardent golfer. His endless quaint stories of the idiosyncrasies of his patients showed a well-balanced humorous outlook on the most depressing phase of human life, and as a rule satisfied even his mother as to the health and well-being of his own brain.
It was just about the time that he settled on his own special course in life, and accepted the junior appointment at Birch Grove, that Alma Luard surprised her family by deciding that life ought to mean more than tennis and picnics and parties, and became a probationer at St Barnabas’s.
Lois, who came next, had a very genuine talent for music, and a voice which was a joy to all who heard it. For the perfecting of these she had now been two years at the Conservatorium at Leipsic and had lived, during that time, with Frau von Helse, widow of Major von Helse, who died in Togoland in 1890. Frau von Helse had two children,—Luise, who was also studying music, and Ludwig, lieutenant in the army. It was Ludwig’s obvious admiration for Lois, the previous summer,—when he had escorted her and his sister to Willstead for a fortnight’s visit to London in return for Frau von Helse’s great kindness to Lois during her stay in Leipsic—that had fanned into sudden flame the long-glowing spark of Ray Luard’s love for her.
Honor was Vic’s great chum and admirer. When Honor began going to St Paul’s School, Vic insisted on going also, and the experience had done her a world of good. Even Alma had been known to express regret that she had not had her chances. An exceedingly high-class and expensive boarding-school at Eastbourne had been her lot. An establishment in every respect after Auntie Mitt’s precise little heart, but comparison of Vic’s wider, if more democratic, experiences with her own eminently lady-like ones always roused in Alma feelings of vain and envious regret.
Noel had been at St Paul’s also, and on the whole had managed to have a pretty good time. He was no student, however. The playing fields and Cadet corps always appealed to him more strongly than the class-rooms. He was now having a short holiday before tackling, with such grace as might be found possible when the time came, the loathsome mysteries of St Mary Axe.
There was nothing else for it. He had shown absolutely no inclination or aptitude for any special walk in life. His father’s hope was that, under his own eye, he might in time develop into a business-man and relieve him of some portion of his at times over-taxing work.
By dint of strenuous labours Mr Dare had, in the course of years, worked up a profitable business in foreign imports and exports, but, like most businesses, it had its ups and downs, and it would be a great relief to be able to leave some of the details to one whom he knew he could trust, as he could Noel. He had had—or at all events had had the chance of—a good sound education. His father could only hope that he had taken more advantage of it than he had ever permitted to show. And experience would come with time.