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Page 4
"No excuses, Henry," he said; and turned to a young man lounging
in an easy-chair outside the fireside circle.
The youth started. His eyes had been fixed on a woman sitting
beside the fire, with her hand in a man's. It was such an attitude
as sophisticated lovers would only assume in private but the pair
were not sophisticated and lovers still, though married. They
lacked self-consciousness, and the husband liked to feel his wife's
hand in his. After all, a thing impossible until you are married
may be quite seemly afterwards, and none of their amiable elders
regarded their devotion with cynicism.
"All right, uncle!" said Henry Lennox.
He rose--a big fellow with heavy shoulders, a clean-shaven,
youthful face, and flaxen hair. He had been handsome, save for a
nose with a broken bridge, but his pale brown eyes were fine, and
his firm mouth and chin well modelled. Imagination and reflection
marked his countenance.
Sir Walter claimed thirty points on his scoring board, and gave a
miss with the spot ball.
"I win to-night," he said.
He was a small, very upright man, with a face that seemed to belong
to his generation, and an expression seldom to be seen on a man
younger than seventy. Life had not puzzled him; his moderate
intellect had taken it as he found it, and, through the magic
glasses of good health, good temper, and great wealth, judged
existence a desirable thing and quite easy to conduct with credit.
"You only want patience and a brain," he always declared. Sir
Walter wore an eyeglass. He was growing bald, but preserved a pair
of grey whiskers still of respectable size. His face, indeed,
belied him, for it was moulded in a stern pattern. One had guessed
him a martinet until his amiable opinions and easy-going
personality were manifested. The old man was not vain; he knew that
a world very different from his own extended round about him. But
he was puzzle-headed, and had never been shaken from his life-long
complacency by circumstances. He had been disappointed in love as
a young man, and only married late in life. He had no son, and was
a widower--facts that, to his mind, quite dwarfed his good fortune
in every other respect. He held the comfortable doctrine that
things are always levelled up, and he honestly believed that he had
suffered as much sorrow and disappointment as any Lennox in the
history of the race.
His only child and her cousin, Henry Lennox, had been brought up
together and were of an age--both now twenty-six. The lad was
his uncle's heir, and would succeed to Chadlands and the title;
and it had been Sir Walter's hope that he and Mary might marry.
Nor had the youth any objection to such a plan. Indeed, he loved
Mary well enough; there was even thought to be a tacit
understanding between them, and they grew up in a friendship which
gradually became ardent on the man's part, though it never ripened
upon hers. But she knew that her father keenly desired this
marriage, and supposed that it would happen some day.
They were, however, not betrothed when the war burst upon Europe,
and Henry, then one-and-twenty, went from the Officers' Training
Corps to the Fifth Devons, while his cousin became attached to the
Red Cross and nursed at Plymouth. The accident terminated their
shadowy romance and brought real love into the woman's life, while
the man found his hopes at an end. He was drafted to Mesopotamia,
speedily fell sick of jaundice, was invalided to India, and, on
returning to the front, saw service against the Turks. But chance
willed that he won no distinction. He did his duty under dreary
circumstances, while to his hatred of war was added the weight of
his loss when he heard that Mary had fallen in love. He was an
ingenuous, kindly youth--a typical Lennox, who had developed an
accomplishment at Harrow and suffered for it by getting his nose
broken when winning the heavy-weight championship of the public
schools in his nineteenth year. In the East he still boxed, and
after his love story was ended, the epidemic of poetry-making took
Henry also, and he wrote a volume of harmless verse, to the
undying amazement of his family.
For Mary Lennox the war had brought a sailor husband. Captain
Thomas May, wounded rather severely at Jutland, lost his heart to
the plain but attractive young woman with a fine figure who nursed
him back to strength, and, as he vowed, had saved his life. He
was an impulsive man of thirty, brown-bearded, black-eyed, and
hot-tempered. He came from a little Somerset vicarage and was the
only son of a clergyman, the Rev. Septimus May. Knowing the lady
as "Nurse Mary" only, and falling passionately in love for the
first time in his life, he proposed on the day he was allowed to
sit up, and since Mary Lennox shared his emotions, also for the
first time, he was accepted before he even knew her name.
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