The Revellers

“You show me,” he chuckled. “I write an essay on Yorkshire moor farms, and perhaps earn a new suit of clo’es, yes? Our Cherman magazines print dose tings.”

That same afternoon a party of guns on a Scottish moor had been shooting driven grouse flying low and fast over the butts before a strong wind. The sportsmen, five in number, were all experts. Around each shelter, with its solitary marksman and his attendant loader, lay a deep crescent of game, every bird shot cleanly.

The last drive of the day was the most successful. One man, whose bronzed skin and military bearing told his profession, handed the empty 12-bore to the gillie when the line of beaters came over the crest of the hill, and betook himself, filling his pipe the while, to a group of ponies waiting on the moorland road in the valley beneath.

He joined another, the earliest arrival.

“Capital ground, this,” he said. “I don’t know whose lot is the more enviable, Heronsdale – yours, who have the pains as well as the pleasure of ownership, or that of wandering vagabonds like myself whom you make your guests.”

Lord Heronsdale smiled.

“You may call yourself a wandering vagabond, Grant – the envy rests with me,” he said. “It’s all very well to have large estates, but I feel like degenerating into a sort of head gamekeeper and farm bailiff combined. Of course, I’m proud of Cairn-corrie, yet I pine sometimes for the excitement of a life that does not travel in grooves.”

The other shook his head.

“Don’t tempt fate,” he said. “My life has been spent among the outer beasts. It isn’t worth it. For a few years of a man’s youth, yes – perhaps. But I am forty, and I live in a club. There, you have my career in a nutshell.”

“There is a fine kernel within. By Gad! Grant, why don’t you pretend I meant that pun? I didn’t, but I’ll claim it at dinner. Gad, it’s fine!”

Colonel Grant laughed. His mirth had a pleasant, wholesome ring.

“If you bribe me with as good a berth to-morrow,” he said, “I’ll give you the chance of throwing it off spontaneously during the first lull in the conversation. The best impromptus are always prepared beforehand, you know.”

Others came up. The shooters mounted, and the wise ponies picked their way with cautious celerity over an uneven track. Colonel Grant again found himself riding beside his host.

“Tell you what,” said Lord Heronsdale suddenly, “you’re a bit of an enigma, Grant.”

“I have often been told that.”

“Gad, I don’t doubt it. A chap like you, with five thousand a year, to chuck the Guards for the Indian Staff Corps, exchange town for the Northwest frontier, go in for potting Afghans instead of running a drag to Sandown; and, to crown all, remain a bachelor. I don’t understand it.”

“Yet, ten minutes ago you were growling about the monotony of existence at Cairn-corrie and half a dozen other places.”

“Not even a tu quoque like that explains the mystery.”

“Some day I’ll tell you all about it. When the time comes I must ask Lady Heronsdale to find me a nice wife, with a warranty.”

“Gad, that’s the job for Mollie. She’ll put the future Mrs. Grant through her paces. You’re not flying off to India again, then?”

“No. I heard last week that a post is to be found for me in the Intelligence Department.”

“Capital! You’ll soon have a K. before the C. B.”

“Possibly. Some fellows wear themselves to the bone in trying for those things. My scheming for years has been to avoid the humdrum of cantonment life. And, behold! I am spotted for promotion. I don’t know how the deuce they ever heard of me in Pall Mall.”

“Gad! Don’t you read the papers?”

“Never.”

“My dear fellow, they were full of you last year. That march through the snow, pulling those guns through the pass, the final relief of the fort – Gad, Molly has the cuttings. She’ll show ’em to you after dinner.”

“I sincerely hope Lady Heronsdale will do no such thing. Why on earth does she keep such screeds?”

His lordship dropped his bantering air.

“Do you really imagine, Grant,” he said seriously, “that either she or I will ever forget what you did for Arthur at Peshawar?”

The other man reddened.

“A mere schoolboy episode,” he growled.

“Yes, in a sense. Yet Arthur told me that he had a revolver in his pocket when you met him that night at the mess and persuaded him to leave the business in your hands. You saved our boy, Grant. Gad, ask Mollie what she thinks!”

“Has he been steady since?”

“A rock, my dear chap – adamant where women are concerned. His mother is beginning to worry about him; he wouldn’t look at Helen Forbes, and Madge Bolingbrooke does her skirt-dances in vain. Both deuced nice girls, too.”

Colonel Grant had navigated the talk into a safe channel, and kept it there. He never spoke of the past.

At dinner a man asked him if he was reading the Elmsdale sensation. He had not even heard of it, so the tale of Betsy and George Pickering, of Martin Bolland and Angèle Saumarez was poured into his ears.

“I am interested,” said his neighbor, “because I knew poor Pickering. He hunted regularly with the York and Ainsty.”

“Saumarez!” murmured Colonel Grant. “I once met a man of that name. He was shot on the Modder River.”

“This girl may be his daughter. The paper describes her mother as a lady of independent means, visiting the moors for her health.”

“Poor Saumarez! From what I remember of his character, the child must be a chip of the same block – he was an irresponsible daredevil, a terror among women. But he died gallantly.”

“There’s a lot about her in the local paper, which reached me this morning. Would you care to see it?”

“Newspapers are so inaccurate. They never know the facts.”

Yet the colonel, not caring to play bridge, asked later for the loan of the journal named by his informant, and read therein the story of the village tragedy. As fate willed it, the writer was the reporter of the Messenger, and his account was replete with local knowledge.

Yes, Mrs. Saumarez was the widow of Colonel Saumarez, late of the Hussars. But – what was this?

“Martin Court Bolland, a bright-faced boy, of an intelligence far greater than one looks for in rustic youth, has himself a somewhat romantic history. He is the adopted son of the sturdy yeoman whose name he bears. Mr. and Mrs. Bolland were called to London thirteen years ago to attend the funeral of the farmer’s brother. One evening while seeing the sights of the great metropolis they found themselves in Ludgate Hill. They were passing the end of St. Martin’s Court, when a young woman named Martineau – ”

The colonel laid aside his cigar and twisted his body sideways, so that the light of the billiard-room lamps should fall clearly on the paper yet leave his face in the shade.

“ – a young woman named Martineau threw herself, with a baby in her arms, from the fourth story of a house in the court, and was killed by the fall. The baby’s frock was caught by a projecting sign, and the child hung perilously in air. John Bolland, whose strong, stern face reveals a character difficult to surprise, impossible to daunt, jumped forward and caught the tiny mite as it dropped a second time. Mrs. Bolland still treasures a letter written by the infant’s unhappy mother, and prizes to the utmost the fine boy whom she and her husband adopted from that hour. The old couple are childless, though with Martin calling them ‘father’ and ‘mother,’ they would scoff at the statement. This, then, is the well-knit, fearless youngster who fought the squire’s son on that eventful night, and whose evidence is of the utmost importance in the police theory of crime, as opposed to accident.”

Colonel Grant went steadily through the neat sentences on which the Messenger correspondent prided himself. He was a man of bronze; he showed no more emotion than a statue, though the facts staring from the printed page might well have produced external signs of the tempest which sprang into instant being in his soul.

He read each line of descriptive matter and report. For the sorrows of Betsy, the final daring of George Pickering, he had no eyes. It was the boy he sought in the living record: the boy who fought young Beckett-Smythe to rescue the thoughtless child – for so Angèle figured in the text; the boy who repudiated with scorn the solicitor’s suggestion that he formed part and parcel of the crowd of urchins gathered in the hotel yard; the farmer’s adopted son, who spoke so fearlessly and bore himself so well that the newspaper noted his intelligence, his bright looks.

At last Colonel Grant laid down the sheet and lighted a fresh cigar. He smoked for a few minutes, watching the pool players, and declining an invitation to join in the game. He seemed to be planning some line of action; soon he went to the library and unrolled a large scale map of England. He found Nottonby – Elmsdale was too small a place to be denoted – and, after consulting a railway timetable, wrote a long telegram.