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by Percival Christopher Wren

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Title: Snake and Sword
       A Novel

Author: Percival Christopher Wren

Release Date: January 10, 2004 [EBook #10667]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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SNAKE AND SWORD

_A NOVEL_

BY

PERCIVAL CHRISTOPHER WREN




DEDICATED TO MY WIFE ALICE LUCILLE WREN




CONTENTS


PART I.

THE WELDING OF A SOUL

   I. The Snake and the Soul


PART II.

THE SEARING OF A SOUL

  II. The Sword and the Snake

 III. The Snake Appears

  IV. The Sword and the Soul

   V. Lucille

  VI. The Snake's "Myrmidon"

 VII. Love--and the Snake

VIII. Troopers of the Queen

  IX. A Snake avenges a Haddock and Lucille behaves
      in an un-Smelliean Manner

   X. Much Ado about Almost Nothing--A Mere
      Trooper

  XI. More Myrmidons


PART III.

THE SAVING OF A SOUL

 XII. Vultures and Luck--Good and Bad

XIII. Found

 XIV. The Snake and the Sword

      Seven Years After




PART I.


THE WELDING OF A SOUL.




CHAPTER I.

THE SNAKE AND THE SOUL.


When Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne, V.C., D.S.O., of the Queen's
Own (118th) Bombay Lancers, pinned his Victoria Cross to the bosom of
his dying wife's night-dress, in token of his recognition that she was
the braver of the twain, he was not himself.

He was beside himself with grief.

Afterwards he adjured the sole witness of this impulsive and emotional
act, Major John Decies, never to mention his "damned theatrical folly"
to any living soul, and to excuse him on the score of an ancient
sword-cut on the head and two bad sun-strokes.

For the one thing in heaven above, on the earth beneath, or in the
waters under the earth, that Colonel de Warrenne feared, was breach of
good form and stereotyped convention.

And the one thing he loved was the dying woman.

This last statement applies also to Major John Decies, of the Indian
Medical Service, Civil Surgeon of Bimariabad, and may even be
expanded, for the one thing he ever _had_ loved was the dying
woman....

Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne did the deed that won him his
Victoria Cross, in the open, in the hot sunlight and in hot blood,
sword in hand and with hot blood on the sword-hand--fighting for his
life.

His wife did the deed that moved him to transfer the Cross to her, in
darkness, in cold blood, in loneliness, sickness and silence--fighting
for the life of her unborn child against an unseen foe.

Colonel de Warrenne's type of brave deed has been performed thousands
of times and wherever brave men have fought.

His wife's deed of endurance, presence of mind, self-control and cool
courage is rarer, if not unique.

To appreciate this fully, it must be known that she had a horror of
snakes, so terrible as to amount to an obsession, a mental deformity,
due, doubtless, to the fact that her father (Colonel Mortimer Seymour
Stukeley) died of snake-bite before her mother's eyes, a few hours
before she herself was born.

Bearing this in mind, judge of the conduct that led Colonel de
Warrenne, distraught, to award her his Cross "For Valour".

One oppressive June evening, Lenore de Warrenne returned from church
(where she had, as usual, prayed fervently that her soon-expected
first-born might be a daughter), and entered her dressing-room. Here
her Ayah divested her of hat, dress, and boots, and helped her into
the more easeful tea-gown and satin slippers.

"Bootlair wanting ishweets for dinner-table from go-down,[1] please,
Mem-Sahib," observed Ayah, the change of garb accomplished.

"The butler wants sweets, does he? Give me my keys, then," replied
Mrs. de Warrenne, and, rising with a sigh, she left the dressing-room
and proceeded, _via_ the dining-room (where she procured some small
silver bowls, sweet-dishes, and trays), to the go-down or store-room,
situate at the back of the bungalow and adjoining the
"dispense-khana"--the room in which assemble the materials and
ministrants of meals from the extra-mural "bowachi-khana" or kitchen.
Unlocking the door of the go-down, Mrs. de Warrenne entered the small
shelf-encircled room, and, stepping on to a low stool proceeded to
fill the sweet-trays from divers jars, tins and boxes, with
guava-cheese, crystallized ginger, _kulwa_, preserved mango and
certain of the more sophisticated sweetmeats of the West.

It was after sunset and the _hamal_ had not yet lit the lamps, so that
this pantry, a dark room at mid-day, was far from light at that time.
But for the fact that she knew exactly where everything was, and could
put her hand on what she wanted, she would not have entered without a
light.

For some minutes the unfortunate lady stood on the stool.

Having completed her task she stepped down backwards and, as her foot
touched the ground, she knew _that she had trodden upon a snake._

Even as she stood poised, one foot on the ground, the other on the
stool, both hands gripping the high shelf, she felt the reptile
whipping, writhing, jerking, lashing, flogging at her ankle and
instep, coiling round her leg.... And in the fraction of a second the
thought flashed through her mind: "If its head is under my foot, or
too close to my foot for its fangs to reach me, I am safe while I
remain as I am. If its head is free I am doomed--and matters cannot be
any the worse for my keeping as I am."

_And she kept as she was,_ with one foot on the stool, out of reach,
and one foot on the snake.

And screamed?

No, called quietly and coolly for the butler, remembering that she had
sent Nurse Beaton out, that her husband was at polo, that there were
none but native servants in the house, and that if she raised an alarm
they would take it, and with single heart consider each the safety of
Number One.

"Boy!" she called calmly, though the room swam round her and a deadly
faintness began to paralyse her limbs and loosen her hold upon the
shelf--"Boy! Come here."

Antonio Ferdinand Xavier D'Souza, Goanese butler, heard and came.

"Mem-Sahib?" quoth he, at the door of the go-down.

"Bring a lamp quickly," said Lenore de Warrenne in a level voice.

The worthy Antonio, fat, spectacled, bald and wheezy, hurried away and
peremptorily bade the _hamal_[2], son of a jungle-pig, to light and
bring a lamp quickly.

The _hamal_, respectfully pointing out to the Bootlair Sahib that the
daylight was yet strong and lusty enough to shame and smother any
lamp, complied with deliberation and care, polishing the chimney,
trimming the wick, pouring in oil and generally making a satisfactory
and commendable job of it.

Lenore de Warrenne, sick, faint, sinking, waited ... waited ... waited
... gripping the shelf and fighting against her over-mastering
weakness for the life of the unborn child that, even in that awful
moment, she prayed might be a daughter.

After many cruelly long centuries, and as she swayed to fall, the good
Antonio entered with the lamp. Her will triumphed over her falling
body.

"Boy, I am standing on a snake!" said she coolly. "Put the lamp--"

But Antonio did not stay to "put" the lamp; incontinent he dropped it
on the floor and fled yelling "Sap! Sap!" and that the Mem-Sahib was
bitten, dying, dead--certainly dead; dead for hours.

And the brave soul in the little room waited ... waited ... waited ...
gripping the shelf, and thinking of the coming daughter, and wondering
whether she must die by snake-bite or fire--unborn--with her unhappy
mother. For the fallen lamp had burst, the oil had caught fire, and
the fire gave no light by which she could see what was beneath her
foot--head, body, or tail of the lashing, squirming snake--as the
flame flickered, rose and fell, burnt blue, swayed, roared in the
draught of the door--did anything but give a light by which she could
see as she bent over awkwardly, still gripping the shelf, one foot on
the stool, further prevented from seeing by her loose draperies.

Soon she realized that in any case she could not see her foot without
changing her position--a thing she would _not_ do while there was
hope--and strength to hold on. For hope there was, inasmuch as _she
had not yet felt the stroke of the reptile's fangs_.

Again she reasoned calmly, though strength was ebbing fast; she must
remain as she was till death by fire or suffocation was the
alternative to flight--flight which was synonymous with death, for, as
her other foot came down and she stepped off the snake, in that
instant it would strike--if it had not struck already.

Meantime--to call steadily and coolly again.

This time she called to the _hamal_, a Bhil, engaged out of
compassion, and likely, as a son of the jungle's sons, to be of more
courage than the stall-fed butler in presence of dangerous beast or
reptile.

"_Hamal_: I want you," she called coolly.

"Mem-Sahib?" came the reply from the lamp-room near by, and the man
approached.

"That stupid butler has dropped a lamp and run away. Bring a pail of
water quickly and call to the _malli_[3] to bring a pail of earth as
you get it. Hasten!--and there is baksheesh," said Mrs. de Warrenne
quietly in the vernacular.

Tap and pail were by the door of the back verandah. In a minute the
_hamal_ entered and flung a pail of water on the burning pool of oil,
reducing the mass of blue lambent flames considerably.

"Now _hamal_," said the fainting woman, the more immediate danger
confronted, "bring another lamp very quickly and put it on the shelf.
Quick! don't stop to fill or to clean it."

Was the pricking, shooting pain the repeated stabbing of the snake's
fangs or was it "pins and needles"? Was this deadly faintness death
indeed, or was it only weakness?

In what seemed but a few more years the man reappeared carrying a
lighted lamp, the which he placed upon a shelf.

"Listen," said Mrs. de Warrenne, "and have no fear, brave Bhil. I have
_caught_ a snake. Get a knife quickly and cut off its head while I
hold it."

The man glancing up, appeared to suppose that his mistress held the
snake on the shelf, hurried away, and rushed back with the cook's big
kitchen-knife gripped dagger-wise in his right hand.

"Do you see the snake?" she managed to whisper. "Under my foot!
Quick! It is moving ... moving ... moving _out_."

With a wild Bhil cry the man flung himself down upon his hereditary
dread foe and slashed with the knife.

Mrs. de Warrenne heard it scratch along the floor, grate on a nail,
and crush through the snake.

"Are!! Dead, Mem-Sahib!! Dead!! See, I have cut off its head! Are!!!!
Wah!! The brave mistress!----"

As she collapsed, Mrs. de Warrenne saw the twitching body of a large
cobra with its head severed close to its neck. Its head had just
protruded from under her foot and she had saved the unborn life for
which she had fought so bravely by just keeping still.... She had won
her brief decoration with the Cross by--keeping still. (Her husband
had won his permanent right to it by extreme activity.) ... Had she
moved she would have been struck instantly, for the reptile was, by
her, uninjured, merely nipped between instep and floor.

Having realized this, Lenore de Warrenne fainted and then passed from
fit to fit, and her child--a boy--was born that night. Hundreds of
times during the next few days the same terrible cry rang from the
sick-room through the hushed bungalow: "It is under my foot! It is
moving ... moving ... moving ... _out!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

"If I had to make a prophecy concerning this young fella," observed
the broken-hearted Major John Decies, I.M.S., Civil Surgeon of
Bimariabad, as he watched old Nurse Beaton performing the baby's
elaborate ablutions and toilet, "I should say that he will _not_ grow
up fond of snakes--not if there is anything in the 'pre-natal
influence' theory."




PART II.


THE SEARING OF A SOUL.




CHAPTER II.

THE SWORD AND THE SNAKE.


Colonel Matthew Devon De Warrenne, commanding the Queen's Own (118th)
Bombay Lancers, was in good time, in his best review-order uniform,
and in a terrible state of mind.

He strode from end to end of the long verandah of his bungalow with
clank of steel, creak of leather, and groan of travailing soul. As the
top of his scarlet, blue and gold turban touched the lamp that hung a
good seven feet above his spurred heels he swore viciously.

Almost for the first time in his hard-lived, selfish life he had been
thwarted, flouted, cruelly and evilly entreated, and the worst of it
was that his enemy was--not a man whom he could take by the throat,
but--Fate.

Fate had dealt him a cruel blow, and he felt as he would have done had
he, impotent, seen one steal the great charger that champed and pawed
there at the door, and replace it by a potter's donkey. Nay,
worse--for he had _loved_ Lenore, his wife, and Fate had stolen her
away and replaced her by a squealing brat.

Within a year of his marriage his wife was dead and buried, and his
son alive and--howling. He could hear him (curse him!).

The Colonel glanced at his watch, producing it from some mysterious
recess beneath his belted golden sash and within his pale blue tunic.

Not yet time to ride to the regimental parade-ground and lead his
famous corps to its place on the brigade parade-ground for the New
Year Review and march-past.

As he held the watch at the length of its chain and stared,
half-comprehending, his hand--the hand of the finest swordsman in the
Indian Army--shook.

Lenore gone: a puling, yelping whelp in her place.... A tall,
severe-looking elderly woman entered the verandah by a distant door
and approached the savage, miserable soldier. Nurse Beaton.

"_Will_ you give your son a name, Sir?" she said, and it was evident
in voice and manner that the question had been asked before and had
received an unsatisfactory, if not unprintable; reply. Every line of
feature and form seemed to express indignant resentment. She had
nursed and foster-mothered the child's mother, and--unlike the
man--had found the baby the chiefest consolation of her cruel grief,
and already loved it not only for its idolized mother's sake, but with
the devotion of a childless child-lover.

"The christening is fixed for to-day, Sir, as I have kept reminding
you, Sir," she added.

She had never liked the Colonel--nor considered him "good enough" for
her tender, dainty darling, "nearly three times her age and no better
than he ought to be".

"Name?" snarled Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne. "Name the little
beast? Call him what you like, and then drown him." The tight-lipped
face of the elderly nurse flushed angrily, but before she could make
the indignant reply that her hurt and scandalized look presaged, the
Colonel added:--

"No, look here, call him _Damocles_, and done with it. The Sword hangs
over him too, I suppose, and he'll die by it, as all his ancestors
have done. Yes--"

"It's not a nice name, Sir, to my thinking," interrupted the woman,
"not for an only name--and for an only child. Let it be a second or
third name, Sir, if you want to give him such an outlandish one."

She fingered her new black dress nervously with twitching hands and
the tight lips trembled.

"He's to be named Damocles and nothing else," replied the Master, and,
as she turned away with a look of positive hate, he added
sardonically:--

"And then you can call him 'Dam' for short, you know, Nurse."

Nurse Beaton bridled, clenched her hands, and stiffened visibly. Had
the man been her social equal or any other than her master, her
pent-up wrath and indignation would have broken forth in a torrent of
scathing abuse.

"Never would I call the poor motherless lamb _Dam_, Sir," she
answered with restraint.

"Then call him _Dummy!_ Good morning, Nurse," snapped the Colonel.

As she turned to go, with a bitter sigh, she asked in the hopeless
tone of one who knows the waste of words:--

"You will not repent--I mean relent--and come to the christening of
your only son this afternoon, Sir?"

"Good morning, Nurse," observed Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne, and
resumed his hurried pacing of the verandah.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not enough that a man love his wife dearly and hold her the
sweetest, fairest, and best of women--he should tell her so, morning
and night.

There is a proverb (the unwisdom of many and the poor wit of one) that
says _Actions speak louder than Words_. Whether this is the most
untrustworthy of an untrustworthy class of generalizations is
debateable.

Anyhow, let no husband or lover believe it. Vain are the deeds of dumb
devotion, the unwearying forethought, the tender care, the gifts of
price, and the priceless gifts of attentive, watchful guard and guide,
the labours of Love--all vain. Silent is the speech of Action.

But resonant loud is the speech of Words and profitable their
investment in the Mutual Alliance Bank.

"_Love me, love my Dog?_" Yes--and look to the dog for a dog's
reward.

"_Do not show me that you love me--tell me so._" Far too true and
pregnant ever to become a proverb.

Colonel de Warrenne had omitted to tell his wife so--after she had
accepted him--and she had died thinking herself loveless, unloved, and
stating the fact.

This was the bitterest drop in the bitter cup of the big, dumb,
well-meaning man.

And now she would never know....

She had thought herself unloved, and, nerve-shattered by her terrible
experience with the snake, had made no fight for life when the
unwanted boy was born. For the sake of a girl she would have striven
to live--but a boy, a boy can fend for himself (and takes after his
father)....

Almost as soon as Lenore Seymour Stukeley had landed in India (on a
visit with her sister Yvette to friends at Bimariabad), delighted,
bewildered, depolarized, Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne had burst
with a blaze of glory into her hitherto secluded, narrow life--a great
pale-blue, white-and-gold wonder, clanking and jingling, resplendent,
bemedalled, ruling men, charging at the head of thundering
squadrons--a half-god (and to Yvette he had seemed a whole-god).

He had told her that he loved her, told her once, and had been
accepted.

_Once_! Only once told her that he loved her, that she was beautiful,
that he was hers to command to the uttermost. Only once! What could
_she_ know of the changed life, the absolute renunciation of pleasant
bachelor vices, the pulling up short, and all those actions that speak
more softly than words?

What could she know of the strength and depth of the love that could
keep such a man as the Colonel from the bar, the bridge-table, the
race-course and the Paphian dame? Of the love that made him walk
warily lest he offend one for whom his quarter of a century, and more,
of barrack and bachelor-bungalow life, made him feel so utterly unfit
and unworthy? What could she know of all that he had given up and
delighted to give up--now that he truly loved a true woman? The
hard-living, hard-hearted, hard-spoken man had become a gentle
frequenter of his wife's tea-parties, her companion at church, her
constant attendant--never leaving the bungalow, save for duty, without
her.

To those who knew him it was a World's Marvel; to her, who knew him
not, it was nothing at all--normal, natural. And being a man who spoke
only when he must, who dreaded the expression of any emotion, and who
foolishly thought that actions speak louder than words, he had omitted
to tell her daily--or even weekly or monthly--that he loved her; and
she had died pitying herself and reproaching him.

Fate's old, old game of Cross Purposes. Major John Decies, reserved,
high-minded gentleman, loving Lenore de Warrenne (and longing to tell
her so daily), with the one lifelong love of a steadfast nature;
Yvette Stukeley, reserved, high-minded gentlewoman, loving Colonel de
Warrenne, and longing to escape from Bimariabad before his wedding to
her sister, and doing so at the earliest possible date thereafter:
each woman losing the man who would have been her ideal husband, each
man losing the woman who would have been his ideal wife.

Yvette Stukeley returned to her uncle and guardian, General Sir Gerald
Seymour Stukeley, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., at Monksmead, nursing a broken
heart, and longed for the day when Colonel de Warrenne's child might
be sent home to her care.

Major John Decies abode at Bimariabad, also nursing a broken heart
(though he scarcely realized the fact), watched over the son of Lenore
de Warrenne, and greatly feared for him.

The Major was an original student of theories and facts of Heredity
and Pre-natal Influence. Further he was not wholly hopeful as to the
effect of all the _post_-natal influences likely to be brought to bear
upon a child who grew up in the bungalow, and the dislike of Colonel
Matthew Devon de Warrenne.

Upon the infant Damocles, Nurse Beaton, rugged, snow-capped volcano,
lavished the tender love of a mother; and in him Major John Decies,
deep-running still water, took the interest of a father. The which
was the better for the infant Damocles in that his real father had no
interest to take and no love to lavish. He frankly disliked the
child--the outward and visible sign, the daily reminder of the cruel
loss he so deeply felt and fiercely resented.

Yet, strangely enough, he would not send the child home. Relations who
could receive it he had none, and he declined to be beholden to its
great-uncle, General Sir Gerald Seymour Stukeley, and its aunt Yvette
Stukeley, in spite of the warmest invitations from the one and earnest
entreaties from the other.

Nurse Beaton fed, tended, clothed and nursed the baby by day; a
worshipping ayah wheeled him abroad, and, by night, slept beside his
cot; a devoted sepoy-orderly from the regiment guarded his cavalcade,
and, when permitted, proudly bore him in his arms.

Major John Decies visited him frequently, watched and waited, waited
and watched, and, though not a youth, "thought long, long thoughts".

He also frequently laid his views and theories on paternal duties
before Colonel de Warrenne, until pointedly asked by that officer
whether he had no duties of his own which might claim his valuable
time.

Years rolled by, after the incorrigible habit of years, and the infant
Damocles grew and developed into a remarkably sturdy, healthy,
intelligent boy, as cheerful, fearless, impudent, and irrepressible as
the heart of the Major could desire--and with a much larger
vocabulary than any one could desire, for a baby.

On the fifth anniversary of his birthday he received a matutinal call
from Major Decies, who was returning from his daily visit to the Civil
Hospital.

The Major bore a birthday present and a very anxious, undecided mind.

"Good morrow, gentle Damocles," he remarked, entering the big verandah
adown which the chubby boy pranced gleefully to meet his beloved
friend, shouting a welcome, and brandishing a sword designed, and
largely constructed, by himself from a cleaning-rod, a tobacco-tin
lid, a piece of wood, card-board and wire.

"Thalaam, Major Thahib," he said, flinging himself bodily upon that
gentleman. "I thaw cook cut a fowl's froat vis morning. It squorked
boofly."

"Did it? Alas, that I missed those pleasing-er-squorks," replied the
Major, and added: "This is thy natal day, my son. Thou art a man of
five."

"I'm a debble. I'm a _norful_ little debble," corrected Damocles,
cheerfully and with conviction.

"Incidentally. But you are five also," persisted the senior man.

"It's my birfday to-day," observed the junior.

"I just said so."

"_That_ you didn't, Major Thahib. This is a thword. Father's charger's
got an over-weach. Jumping. He says it's a dam-nuithanth."

"Oh, that's a sword, is it? And 'Fire' has got an over-reach. And
it's a qualified nuisance, is it?"

"Yeth, and the mare is coughing and her _thythe_ is a blathted fool
for letting her catch cold."

"The mare has a cold and the _syce_[4] is a qualified fool, is he?
H'm! I think it's high time you had a look in at little old England,
my son, what? And who made you this elegant rapier? Ochterlonie Sahib
or--who?" (Lieutenant Lord Ochterlonie was the Adjutant of the Queen's
Greys, a friend of Colonel de Warrenne, an ex-admirer of his late
wife, and a great pal of his son.)

"'Tithn't a waper. It'th my thword. I made it mythelf."

"Who helped?"

"Nobody. At leatht, Khodadad Khan, Orderly, knocked the holes in the
tin like I showed him--or elthe got the Farrier Thargeant to do it,
and thaid _he_ had."

"Yes--but who told you how to make it like this? Where did you see a
hand-part like this? It isn't like Daddy's sword, nor Khodadad Khan's
_tulwar_. Where did you copy it?"

"I didn't copy it.... I shot ten rats wiv a bow-and-arrow last night.
At leatht--I don't think I shot ten. Nor one. I don't think I didn't,
pwaps."

"But hang it all, the thing's an Italian rapier, by Gad. Some one
_must_ have shown you how to make the thing, or you've got a picture.
It's a _pukka_[5] mediaeval rapier."

"No it'th not. It'th my thword. I made it.... Have a jolly
fight"--and the boy struck an extraordinarily correct fencing
attitude--left hand raised in balance, sword poised, legs and feet
well placed, the whole pose easy, natural, graceful.

Curiously enough, the sword was held horizontal instead of pointing
upward, a fact which at once struck the observant and practised eye of
Major John Decies, sometime champion fencer.

"Who's been teaching you fencing?" he asked.

"What ith 'fenthing'? Let'th have a fight," replied the boy.

"Stick me here, Dam," invited the Major, seating himself and
indicating the position of the heart. "Bet you can't."

The boy lunged, straight, true, gracefully, straightening all his
limbs except his right leg, rigidly, strongly, and the "sword" bent
upward from the spot on which the man's finger had just rested.

"Gad! Who _has_ taught you to lunge? I shall have a bruise there, and
perhaps--live. Who's behind all this, young fella? Who taught you to
stand so, and to lunge? Ochterlonie Sahib or Daddy?"

"Nobody. What is 'lunge'? Will you buy me a little baby-camel to play
with and teach tricks? Perhaps it would sit up and beg. Do camelth lay
eggth? Chucko does. Millions and lakhs. You get a thword, too, and
we'll fight every day. Yeth. All day long----"

"Good morning, Sir," said Nurse Beaton, bustling into the verandah
from the nursery. "He's as mad as ever on swords and fighting, you
see. It's a soldier he'll be, the lamb. He's taken to making that
black orderly pull out his sword when he's in uniform. Makes him wave
and jab it about. Gives me the creeps--with his black face and white
eyes and all. You won't _encourage_ the child at it, will you, Sir?
And his poor Mother the gentlest soul that ever stepped. Swords! Where
he gets his notions _I_ can't think (though I know where he gets his
language, poor lamb!). Look at _that_ thing, Sir! For all the world
like the dressed-up folk have on the stage or in pictures."

"You haven't let him see any books, I suppose, Nurse?" asked the
Major.

"No, Sir. Never a book has the poor lamb seen, except those you've
brought. I've always been in terror of his seeing a picture of a
you-know-what, ever since you told me what the effect _might_ be. Nor
he hasn't so much as heard the name of it, so far as I know."

"Well, he'll see one to-day. I've brought it with me--must see it
sooner or later. Might see a live one anywhere--in spite of all your
care.... But about this sword--where _could_ he have got the idea?
It's unlike any sword he ever set eyes on. Besides if he ever _did_
see an Italian rapier--and there's scarcely such a thing in
India--he'd not get the chance to use it as a copy. Fancy his having
the desire and the power to, anyhow!"

"I give it up, Sir," said Nurse Beaton.

"I give it upper," added the Major, taking the object of their wonder
from the child.

And there was cause for wonder indeed.

A hole had been punched through the centre of the lid of a tobacco tin
and a number of others round the edge. Through the centre hole the
steel rod had been passed so that the tin made a "guard". To the other
holes wires had been fastened by bending, and their ends gathered,
twisted, and bound with string to the top of the handle (of bored
corks) to form an ornamental basket-hilt.

But the most remarkable thing of all was that, before doing this, the
juvenile designer had passed the rod through a piece of bored stick so
that the latter formed a _cross-piece_ (neatly bound) within the tin
guard--the distinctive feature of the ancient and modern Italian
rapiers!

Round this cross-piece the first two fingers of the boy's right hand
were crooked as he held the sword--and this is the one and only
correct way of holding the Italian weapon, as the Major was well
aware!

"I give it most utterly-uppermost," he murmured. "It's positively
uncanny. No _uninitiated_ adult of the utmost intelligence ever held
an Italian-pattern foil correctly yet--nor until he had been pretty
carefully shown. Who the devil put him up to the design in the first
place, and the method of holding, in the second? Explain yourself, you
two-anna[6] marvel," he demanded of the child. "It's _jadu_--black
magic."

"Ayah lothted a wupee latht night," he replied.

"Lost a rupee, did she? Lucky young thing. Wish I had one to lose. Who
showed you how to hold that sword? Why do you crook your fingers round
the cross-piece like that?"

"Chucko laid me an egg latht night," observed Damocles. "He laid it
with my name on it--so that cook couldn't steal it."

"No doubt. Look here, where can I get a sword like yours? Where can I
copy it? Who makes them? Who knows about them?"

"_I_ don't know, Major Thahib. Gunnoo sells 'Fire's' gram to the
_methrani_ for her curry and chuppatties."

"But how do you know swords are like this? _That_ thing isn't a
_pukka_ sword."

"Well, it'th like Thir Theymour Thtukeley's in my dweam."

"What dream?"

"The one I'm alwayth dweaming. They have got long hair like Nurse in
the night, and they fight and fight like anything. Norful good
fighters! And they wear funny kit. And their thwords are like vis.
_Egg_zackly. Gunnoo gave me a ride on 'Fire,' and he'th a dam-liar. He
thaid he forgot to put the warm _jhool_ on him when Daddy was going to
fwash him for being a dam-fool. I thaid I'd tell Daddy how he alwayth
thleepth in it himthelf, unleth he gave me a ride on 'Fire'. 'Fire'
gave a _norful_ buck and bucked me off. At leatht I think he didn't."

Major Decies' face was curiously intent--as of some midnight worker in
research who sees a bright near glimpse of the gold his alchemy has so
long sought to materialize in the alembic of fact.

"Come back to sober truth, young youth. What about the dream? Who are
they, and what do they say and do?"

"Thir Theymour Thtukeley Thahib tellth Thir Matthew Thahib about the
hilt-thwust. (What _is_ 'hilt-thwust'?) And Lubin, the thervant, ith a
_white_ thervant. Why ith he white if he ith a Thahib's 'boy'?"

"Good Gad!" murmured the Major. "I'm favoured of the gods. Tell me all
about it, Sonny. Then I'll undo this parcel for you," he coaxed.

"Oh, I don't wemember. They buck a lot by the tents and then Thir
Theymour Thtukeley goes and fights Thir Matthew and kills him, and
it'th awful lovely, but they dreth up like kids at a party in big
collars and silly kit."

"Yes, I know," murmured the Major. "Tell me what they say when they
buck to each other by the tents, and when they talk about the
'hilt-thrust,' old chap."

"Oh, I don't wemember. I'll listen next time I dweam it, and tell you.
Chucko's egg was all brown--not white like those cook brings from the
bazaar. He's a dam-thief. Open the parcel, Major Thabib. What's in
it?"

"A picture-book for you, Sonny. All sorts of jolly beasts that you'll
_shikar_ some day. You'll tell me some more about the dream to-morrow,
won't you?"

"Yeth. I'll wemember and fink, and tell you what I have finked."

Turning to Nurse Beaton, the Major whispered:--

"Don't worry him about this dream at all. Leave it to me. It's
wonderful. Take him on your lap, Nurse, and--er--be _ready_. It's a
very life-like picture, and I'm going to spring it on him without any
remark--but I'm more than a little anxious, I admit. Still, it's _got_
to come, as I say, and better a picture first, with ourselves present.
If the picture don't affect him I'll show him a real one. May be all
right of course, but I don't know. I came across a somewhat similar
case once before--and it was _not_ all right. Not by any means," and
he disclosed the brilliantly coloured Animal Picture Book and knelt
beside the expectant boy.

On the first page was an incredibly leonine lion, who appeared to have
solved with much satisfaction the problem of aerial flight, so far was
he from the mountain whence he had sprung and above the back of the
antelope towards which he had propelled himself. One could almost hear
him roar. There was menace and fate in eye and tooth and claw, yea, in
the very kink of the prehensile-seeming tail wherewith he apparently
steered his course in mid-air. To gaze upon his impressive and
determined countenance was to sympathize most fully with the
sore-tried Prophet of old (known to Damocles as Dannle-in-the-lines-den)
for ever more.

The boy was wholly charmed, stroked the glowing ferocity and observed
that he was a _pukka Bahadur_.[7]

On the next page, burning bright, was a tiger, if possible one degree
more terrible than the lion. His "fearful cemetery" appeared to be
full, judging by its burgeoned bulge and the shocking state of
depletion exhibited by the buffalo on which he fed with barely
inaudible snarls and grunts of satisfaction. Blood dripped from his
capacious and over-furnished mouth.

"Booful," murmured Damocles. "I shall go shooting tigerth to-mowwow.
Shoot vem in ve mouth, down ve froat, so as not to spoil ve wool."

Turning over the page, the Major disclosed a most grievous grizzly
bear, grizzly and bearish beyond conception, heraldic, regardant,
expectant, not collared, fanged and clawed proper, rampant, erect,
requiring no supporters.

"You could thtab him wiv a thword if you were quick, while he was
doing that," opined Damocles, charmed, enraptured, delighted. One by
one, other savage, fearsome beasts were disclosed to the increasingly
delighted boy until, without warning, the Major suddenly turned a page
and disclosed a brilliant and hungry-looking snake.

With a piercing shriek the boy leapt convulsively from Nurse Beaton's
arms, rushed blindly into the wall and endeavoured to butt and bore
his way through it with his head, screaming like a wounded horse. As
the man and woman sprang to him he shrieked, "It'th under my foot!
It'th moving, moving, moving _out_" and fell to the ground in a fit.

Major John Decies arose from his bachelor dinner-table that evening,
lit his "planter" cheroot, and strolled into the verandah that looked
across a desert to a mountain range.

Dropping into a long low chair, he raised his feet on to the long
leg-rest extensions of its arms, and, as he settled down and waited
for coffee, wondered why no such chairs are known in the West; why the
trunks of the palms looked less flat in the moonlight than in the
daylight (in which, from that spot, they always looked exactly as
though cut out of cardboard); why Providence had not arranged for
perpetual full-moon; why the world looked such a place of peaceful,
glorious beauty by moonlight, the bare cruel mountains like diaphanous
clouds of tenderest soothing mist, the Judge's hideous bungalow like a
fairy palace, his own parched compound like a plot of Paradise, when
all was so abominable by day; and, as ever--why his darling, Lenore
Stukeley, had had to marry de Warrenne and die in the full flower and
promise of her beautiful womanhood.

Having finished his coffee and lighted his pipe (_vice_ the over-dry
friable cheroot, flung into the garden) the Major then turned his mind
to serious and consecutive thought on the subject of her son, his
beloved little pal, Dammy de Warrenne.

Poor little beggar! What an eternity it had seemed before he had got
him to sleep. How the child had suffered. Mad! Absolutely stark,
staring, raving _mad_ with sheer terror.... Had he acted rightly in
showing him the picture? He had meant well, anyhow. Cruel phrase,
that. How cuttingly his friend de Warrenne had observed, "You mean
well, doubtless," on more than one occasion. He could make it the most
stinging of insults.... Surely he had acted rightly.... Poor little
beggar--but he was bound to see a picture or a real live specimen,
sooner or later. Perhaps when there was no help at hand.... Would he
be like it always? _Might_ grow out of it as he grew older and
stronger. What would have happened if he had encountered a live snake?
Lost his reason permanently, perhaps.... What would happen when he
_did_ see one, as sooner or later, he certainly must?

What would be the best plan? To attempt gradually to inure him--or to
guard him absolutely from contact with picture, stuffed specimen,
model, toy, and the real thing, wild or captive, as one would guard
him against a fell disease?

_Could_ he be inured? Could one "break it to him gently" bye and bye,
by first drawing a wiggly line and then giving it a head? One might
sketch a suggestion of a snake, make a sort of dissimilar clay model,
improve it, show him a cast skin, stuff it, make a more life-like
picture, gradually lead up to a well-stuffed one and then a live one.
Might work up to having a good big picture of one on the nursery wall;
one in a glass case; keep a harmless live one and show it him daily.
Teach him by experience that there's nothing supernatural about a
snake--just a nasty reptile that wants exterminating like other
dangerous creatures--something to _shikar_ with a gun. Nothing at all
supernatural....

But this was "super"-natural, abnormal, a terrible devastating agony
of madness, inherited, incurable probably; part of mind and body and
soul. Inherited, and integrally of him as were the colour of his eyes,
his intelligence, his physique.... Heredity ... pre-natal influence
... breed....

Anyhow, nothing must be attempted yet awhile. Let the poor little chap
get older and stronger, in mind and body, first. Brave as a little
bull-dog in other directions! Absolutely devoid of fear otherwise, and
with a natural bent for fighting and adventure. Climb anywhere,
especially up the hind leg of a camel or a horse, fondle any strange
dog, clamour to be put on any strange horse, go into any deep water,
cheek anybody, bear any ordinary pain with a grin, thrill to any story
of desperate deeds--a fine, brave, manly, hardy little chap, and with
art extraordinary physique for strength and endurance.

Whatever was to be attempted later, he must be watched, day and
night, now. No unattended excursions into the compound, no uncensored
picture-books, no juggling snake-charmers.... Yet it _must_ come,
sooner or later.

Would it ruin his life?

Anyhow, he must never return to India when he grew up, or go to any
snake-producing country, unless he could be cured.

Would it make him that awful thing--a coward?

Would it grow and wax till it dominated his mind--drive him mad?

Would succeeding attacks, following encounters with picture or
reality, progressively increase in severity?

_Her_ boy in an asylum?

No. He was exaggerating an almost expected consequence that might
never be repeated--especially if the child were most carefully and
gradually reintroduced to the present terror. Later though--much later
on.

Meanwhile, wait and hope: hope and wait....




CHAPTER III.

THE SNAKE APPEARS.


The European child who grows up in India, if only to the age of six or
seven years, grows under a severe moral, physical, and mental
handicap.

However wise, devoted, and conscientious its parents may be, the evil
is great, and remains one of the many heavy costs (or punishments) of
Empire.

When the child has no mother and an indifferent father, life's
handicap is even more severe.

By his sixth birthday (the regiment being still in Bimariabad owing to
the prevalence of drought, famine, and cholera elsewhere) Damocles de
Warrenne, knowing the Urdu language and _argot_ perfectly, knew, in
theory also, more of evil, in some directions, than did his own
father.

If the child who grows up absolutely straight-forward, honest,
above-board and pure in thought, word, and deed, in England, deserves
commendation, what does the child deserve who does so in India?

Understanding every word they spoke to one another, the training he
got from native servants was one of undiluted evil and a series of
object-lessons in deceit, petty villainy, chicanery, oppression,
lying, dishonesty, and all immorality. And yet--thanks to his equal
understanding of the words and deeds of Nurse Beaton, Major Decies,
Lieutenant Ochterlonie, his father, the Officers of the Regiment, and
the Europeans of the station--he had a clear, if unconscious,
understanding that what was customary for native servants was neither
customary nor possible for Sahibs....

But he knew too much....

He knew what percentage of his or her pay each servant had to hand to
the "butler-sahib" monthly--or lose his or her place through false
accusation.

He knew why the ayah was graciously exempted from financial toll by
this autocrat. He knew roughly what proportion of the cook's daily
bill represented the actual cost of his daily purchases. He knew what
the door-peon got for consenting to take in the card of the Indian
aspirant for an interview with Colonel de Warrenne.

He knew the terms of the arrangements between the head-syce and the
grain-dealer, the lucerne-grass seller, the _ghas-wallah_[8] who
brought the hay (whereby reduced quantities were accepted in return
for illegal gratifications). He knew of retail re-sales of these
reduced supplies.

He knew of the purchase of oil, rice, condiments, fire-wood and other
commodities from the cook, of the theft (by arrangement) of the
poultry and eggs, of the surreptitious milking of the cow, and of the
simple plan of milking her--under Nurse Beaton's eye--into a
narrow-necked vessel already half full of water.

He knew that the ayah's husband sold the Colonel's soda-water,
paraffin, matches, candles, tobacco, cheroots, fruit, sugar, etc., at
a little portable shop round the corner of the road, and of the terms
on which the _hamal_ and the butler supplied these commodities to the
ayah for transfer to her good man.

He knew too much of the philosophy, manners, habits, and morals of the
dog-boy, of concealed cases of the most infectious diseases in the
compound, of the sub-letting and over-crowding of the servants'
quarters, of incredible quarrels, intrigues, jealousies, revenges,
base villainies and wrongs, superstitions and beliefs.

He would hear the hatching of a plot--an hour's arrangement and
wrangle--whereby, through far-sighted activity, perjury, malpractice
and infinite ingenuity, the ringleader would gain a _pice_ and the
follower a _pie_ (a farthing and a third of a farthing respectively).

Daily he saw the butler steal milk, sugar, and tea, for his own use;
the _hamal_ steal oil when he filled the lamps, for sale; the _malli_
steal flowers, for sale; the coachman steal carriage-candles; the cook
steal a moiety of everything that passed through his hands--every one
in that black underworld stealing, lying, back-biting, cheating,
intriguing (and all meanwhile strictly and stoutly religious, even
the sweeper-descended Goanese cook, the biggest thief of all, purging
his Christian soul on Sunday mornings by Confession, and fortifying
himself against the temptations of the Evil One at early Mass).

Between these _nowker log_, the servant-people, and his own _jat_ or
class, the _Sahib-log_, the master-people, were the troopers, splendid
Sikhs, Rajputs, Pathans and Punjabis, men of honour, courage,
physique, tradition. Grand fighters, loyal as steel while properly
understood and properly treated--in other words, while properly
officered. (Men, albeit, with deplorably little understanding of, or
regard for, Pagett, M.P., and his kind, who yearn to do so much for
them.)

These men Damocles admired and loved, though even _they_ were apt to
be very naughty in the bazaar, to gamble and to toy with opium, bhang,
and (alleged) brandy, to dally with houris and hearts'-delights, to
use unkind measures towards the good _bunnia_ and _sowkar_ who had
lent them monies, and to do things outside the Lines that were not
known in the Officers' Mess.

The boy preferred the Rissaldar-Major even to some Sahibs of his
acquaintance--that wonderful old man-at-arms, horseman, _shikarri_,
athlete, gentleman. (Yet how strange and sad to see him out of his
splendid uniform, in sandals, _dhotie_, untrammelled shirt-tails,
dingy old cotton coat and loose _puggri_, undistinguishable from a
school-master, clerk, or post-man; so _un_-sahib-like.)

And what a fine riding-master he made for an ambitious, fearless
boy--though Ochterlonie Sahib said he was too cruel to be a good
_horse_-master.

How _could_ people be civilians and live away from regiments? Live
without ever touching swords, lances, carbines, saddles?

What a queer feeling it gave one to see the regiment go past the
saluting base on review-days, at the gallop, with lances down. One
wanted to shout, to laugh--to _cry_. (It made one's mouth twitch and
chin work.)

Oh, to _lead_ the regiment as Father did--horse and man one welded
piece of living mechanism.

Father said you couldn't ride till you had taken a hundred tosses,
been pipped a hundred times. A hundred falls! Surely Father had
_never_ been thrown--it must be impossible for such a rider to come
off. See him at polo.

By his sixth birthday Damocles de Warrenne, stout and sturdy, was an
accomplished rider and never so happy (save when fencing) as when
flogging his active and spirited little pony along the "rides" or over
the dusty _maidans_ and open country of Bimariabad. To receive a
quarter-mile start on the race-course and ride a mile race against
Khodadad Khan on his troop-horse, or with one of the syces on one of
the Colonel's polo-ponies, or with some obliging male or female early
morning rider, was the joy of his life. Should he suspect the
competitor of "pulling" as he came alongside, that the tiny pony might
win, the boy would lash at both horses impartially.

People who pitied him (and they were many) wondered as to how soon he
would break his neck, and remonstrated with his father for allowing
him to ride alone, or in charge of an attendant unable to control him.

In the matter of his curious love of fencing Major John Decies was
deeply concerned, obtained more and more details of his "dweam,"
taught him systematically and scientifically to fence, bought him
foils and got them shortened. He also interested him in a series of
muscle-developing exercises which the boy called his "dismounted
squad-dwill wiv'out arms," and performed frequently daily, and with
gusto.

Lieutenant Lord Ochterlonie (Officers' Light-Weight Champion at
Aldershot) rigged him up a small swinging sand-bag and taught him to
punch with either hand, and drilled him in foot-work for boxing.

Later he brought the very capable ten-year-old son of a boxing
Troop-Sergeant and set him to make it worth Dam's while to guard
smartly, to learn to keep his temper, and to receive a blow with a
grin.

(Possibly a better education than learning declensions, conjugations,
and tables from a Eurasian "governess".)

He learnt to read unconsciously and automatically by repeating, after
Nurse Beaton, the jingles and other letter-press beneath the pictures
in the books obtained for him under Major Decies' censorship.

On his sixth birthday, Major John Decies had Damocles over to his
bungalow for the day, gave him a box of lead soldiers and a
schooner-rigged ship, helped him to embark them and sail them in the
bath to foreign parts, trapped a squirrel and let it go again, allowed
him to make havoc of his possessions, fired at bottles with his
revolver for the boy's delectation, shot a crow or two with a
rook-rifle, played an improvised game of fives with a tennis-ball,
told him tales, and generally gave up the day to his amusement. What
he did _not_ do was to repeat the experiment of a year ago, or make
any kind of reference to snakes....

A few days later, on the morning of the New-Year's-Day Review, Colonel
Matthew de Warrenne once again strode up and down his verandah,
arrayed in full review-order, until it should be time to ride to the
regimental parade-ground.

He had coarsened perceptibly in the six years since he had lost his
wife, and the lines that had grown deepest on his hard, handsome face
were those between his eyebrows and beside his mouth--the mouth of an
unhappy, dissipated, cynical man....

He removed his right-hand gauntlet and consulted his watch.... Quarter
of an hour yet.

He continued the tramp that always reminded Damocles of the restless,
angry to-and-fro pacing of the big bear in the gardens. Both father
and the bear seemed to fret against fate, to suffer under a sense of
injury; both seemed dangerous, fierce, admirable. Hearing the clink
and clang and creak of his father's movement, Damocles scrambled from
his cot and crept down the stairs, pink-toed, blue-eyed, curly-headed,
night-gowned, to peep through the crack of the drawing-room door at
his beautiful father. He loved to see him in review uniform--so much
more delightful than plain khaki--pale blue, white, and gold, in full
panoply of accoutrement, jackbooted and spurred, and with the great
turban that made his English face look more English still.

Yes--he would ensconce himself behind the drawing-room door and watch.
Perhaps "Fire" would be bobbery when the Colonel mounted him, would
get "what-for" from whip and spur, and be put over the compound wall
instead of being allowed to canter down the drive and out at the
gate....

Colonel de Warrenne stepped into his office to get a cheroot.
Re-appearing in the verandah with it in his mouth he halted and thrust
his hand inside his tunic for his small match-case. Ere he could use
the match his heart was momentarily chilled by the most blood-curdling
scream he had ever heard. It appeared to come from the drawing-room.
(Colonel de Warrenne never lit the cheroot that he had put to his
lips--nor ever another again.) Springing to the door, one of a
dozen that opened into the verandah, he saw his son struggling on the
ground, racked by convulsive spasms, with glazed, sightless eyes and
foaming mouth, from which issued appalling, blood-curdling shrieks.
Just above him, on the fat satin cushion in the middle of a low
settee, a huge half-coiled cobra swayed from side to side in the Dance
of Death.

"_It's under my foot--it's moving--moving--moving out_," shrieked the
child.

Colonel de Warrenne attended to the snake first. He half-drew his
sword and then slammed it back into the scabbard. No--his sword was
not for snakes, whatever his son might be. On the wall was a trophy of
Afghan weapons, one of which was a sword that had played a prominent
part on the occasion of the Colonel's winning of the Victoria Cross.

Striding to the wall he tore the sword down, drew it and, with raised
arm, sprang towards the cobra. A good "Cut Three" across the coils
would carve it into a dozen pieces. No. Lenore made that cushion--and
Lenore's cushion made more appeal to Colonel de Warrenne than did
Lenore's son. No. A neat horizontal "Cut Two," just below the head,
with the deadly "drawing" motion on it, would meet the case nicely.
Swinging it to the left, the Colonel subconsciously placed the sword,
"resting flat on the left shoulder, edge to the left, hand in front of
the shoulder and square with the elbow, elbow as high as the hand," as
per drill-book, and delivered a lightning stroke--thinking as he did
so that the Afghan _tulwar_ is an uncommonly well-balanced, handy
cutting-weapon, though infernally small in the hilt.

The snake's head fell with a thud upon the polished boards between the
tiger-skins, and the body dropped writhing and twitching on to the
settee.

Damocles appeared to be dead. Picking him up, the callous-hearted
father strode out to where Khodadad Khan held "Fire's" bridle, handed
him to the orderly, mounted, received him again from the man, and,
holding him in his strong right arm, cantered to the bungalow of Major
John Decies--since it lay on the road to the parade-ground.

Would the jerking hurt the little beggar in his present comatose
state? Well, brats that couldn't stand a little jerking were better
dead, especially when they screamed and threw fits at the sight of a
common snake.

Turning into Major Decies' compound and riding up to his porch, the
Colonel saw the object of his search, arrayed in pyjamas, seated in
his long cane chair beside a tray of tea, toast, and fruit, in the
verandah.

"Morning, de Warrenne," he cried cheerily.

"How's little--" and caught sight of the inanimate child.

"Little coward's fainted after throwing a fit--over a common snake,"
observed the Colonel coolly.

"Give him here," answered the Major, taking the boy tenderly in his
arms,--"and kindly--er--clear out."

He did not wish to strike his friend and senior. How the black rage
welled up in his heart against the callous brute who had dared to
marry Lenore Seymour Stukeley.

Colonel de Warrenne wheeled his horse without a word, and rode out of
Major Decies' life and that of his son.

Galloping to the parade-ground he spoke a few curt words to his
Adjutant, inspected the _rissala_, and then rode at its head to the
brigade parade-ground where it took up its position on the left flank
of the Guns and the Queen's Greys, "sat at ease," and awaited the
arrival of the Chief Commissioner at the saluting-base. A British
Infantry regiment marched to the left flank of the 118th (Bombay)
Lancers, left-turned and stood at ease. Another followed and was
followed in turn by Native Infantry Regiments--grand Sikhs in scarlet
tunics, baggy black breeches and blue putties; hefty Pathans and
Baluchis in green tunics, crimson breeches and high white gaiters,
sturdy little Gurkhas in rifle-green, stalwart Punjabi Mahommedans.

The great double line grew and grew, and stood patiently waiting,
Horse, Foot, and Guns, facing the sun and a dense crowd of spectators
ranked behind the rope-encircled, guard-surrounded saluting-base over
which flew the Flag of England.

The Brigadier and his Staff rode on to the ground, were saluted by
the mile of troops, and took up their position.

Followed the Chief Commissioner in his state carriage, accompanied by
a very Distinguished Guest, and surrounded by his escort. The mile of
men again came to attention and the review began. Guns boomed, massed
bands played the National Anthem, the crackling rattle of the
_feu-de-joie_ ran up the front rank and down the rear.

After the inspection and the salutes came the march-past by the
regiments.

Now the Distinguished Visitor's wife had told the Chief Commissioner
that she "did not want to see the cavalry go past at the gallop as it
raised such a dreadful dust". But her maid bungled, her toilette
failed, and she decided not to accompany her husband to the Review at
all. Her husband, the Distinguished Visitor, _did_ desire to see the
cavalry go past at the gallop, and so the Chief Commissioner's
Distinguished Visitor's wife's maid's bungling had a tremendous
influence upon the fate of Damocles de Warrenne, as will be seen.

Passed the massed Guns at the walk, followed by the Cavalry at the
walk in column of squadrons and the Infantry in column of companies,
each unit saluting the Chief Commissioner by turning "eyes right" as
it passed the spot where he sat on horseback surrounded by the civil
and military staffs.

Wheeling to the left at the end of the ground the Guns and Cavalry
again passed, this time at the trot, while the Infantry completed its
circular march to its original position.

Finally the Cavalry passed for the third time, and now at the gallop,
an orderly whirlwind, a controlled avalanche of men and horses, with
levelled lances, and the hearts of all men were stirred at one of the
most stirring sights and sounds in the world--a cavalry charge.

At the head of the leading squadron galloped Colonel de Warrenne,
cool, methodical, keeping a distant flag-staff in line with a still
more distant church spire, that he might lead the regiment in a
perfectly straight line. (Few who have not tried it realize the
difficulty of leading a galloping line of men absolutely straight and
at true right-angles to the line of their ranks.)

On thundered the squadrons unbending of rank, uncrowded, unopened,
squadron-leaders maintaining distance, the whole mass as ordered,
shapely, and precisely correct as when at the walk.

Past the saluting-base thundered the squadrons and in full career
Colonel de Warrenne's charger put his near fore into ground
honey-combed by insect, reptile, or burrowing beast, crashed on its
head, rolled like a shot rabbit, and Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne
lay dead--killed by his own sword.

Like his ancestors of that fated family, he had died by the sword, but
unlike them, he had died by the _hilt_ of it.

Major John Decies, I.M.S., Civil Surgeon of Bimariabad, executor of
the will of the late Colonel de Warrenne and guardian of his son,
cabled the sad news of the Colonel's untimely death to Sir Gerald
Seymour Stukeley at Monksmead, he being, so far as Major Decies knew,
the boy's only male relative in England--uncle of the late Mrs. de
Warrenne.

The reply, which arrived in a day or two, appeared from its redundancy
and incoherence to be the composition of Miss Yvette Seymour Stukeley,
and bade Major Decies either send or bring the infant Damocles to
Monksmead _immediately_.

The Major decided to apply forthwith for such privilege-leave and
furlough as were due to him, and to proceed to England with the boy.
It would be as well that his great-uncle should hear from him,
personally, of the matter of the child's mental condition resultant
upon the tragedy of his own birth and his mother's death. The Major
was decidedly anxious as to the future in this respect--all might be
well in time, and all might be very far indeed from well.

Nurse Beaton absolutely and flatly refused to be parted from her
charge, and the curious party of three set sail for England in due
course.

"Hm!--He's every inch a Stukeley," remarked the General when Damocles
de Warrenne was ushered into his presence in the great library at
Monksmead. "Hope he's Stukeley by nature too. Sturdy young fella!
'Spose he's vetted sound in wind and limb?"

The Major replied that the boy was physically rather remarkably
strong, mentally very sound, and in character all that could be
desired. He then did his best to convey to the General an
understanding of the psychic condition that must be a cause of
watchfulness and anxiety on the part of those who guarded his
adolescence.

At dinner, over the General's wonderful Clos Vougeot, the Major again
returned to the subject and felt that his words of advice fell upon
somewhat indifferent and uncomprehending ears.

It was the General's boast that he had never feed a doctor in his
life, and his impression that a sound resort for any kind of invalid
is a lethal chamber....

The seven years since the Major had last seen her, seemed to have
dealt lightly with the sad-faced, pretty Miss Yvette, gentle, good,
and very kind. Over the boy she rhapsodized to her own content and his
embarrassment. Effusive endearments and embraces were new to Dam, and
he appeared extraordinarily ignorant of the art of kissing.

"Oh, how like his dear Father!" she would exclaim afresh every few
minutes, to the Major's slight annoyance and the General's plain
disgust.

"Every inch a Stukeley!" he would growl in reply.

But Yvette Seymour Stukeley had prayed for Colonel de Warrenne nightly
for seven years and had idealized him beyond recognition. Possibly
Fate's greatest kindness to her was to ordain that she should not see
him as he had become in fact, and compare him with her wondrous mental
image.... The boy was to her, must be, should be, the very image of
her life's hero and beloved....

The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and
truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast
quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower
middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and
orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows
of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses,
a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles,
butlerless and _ghari_[9]-less sahibs, and an utter absence of
"natives," sepoys, _byle-gharies_,[10] camels, monkeys, kites,
squirrels, bulbuls, _minahs_,[11] mongooses, palm-trees, and temples.
Cattle appeared to have no humps, crows to have black heads, and trees
to have no fruit. The very monsoon seemed inextricably mixed with the
cold season. Fancy the rains coming in the cold weather! Perhaps there
was no hot weather and nobody went to the hills in this strange
country of strange people, strange food, strange customs. Nobody
seemed to have any tents when they left the station for the districts,
nor to take any bedding when they went on tour or up-country. A queer,
foreign land.

But Monksmead was a most magnificent "bungalow" standing in a truly
beautiful "compound"--wherein the very _bhistis_[12] and _mallis_ were
European and appeared to be second-class sahibs.

Marvellous was the interior of the bungalow with its countless rooms
and mountainous stair-cases (on the wall of one of which hung _the
Sword_ which he had never seen but instantly recognized) and its army
of white servants headed by the white butler (so like the Chaplain of
Bimariabad in grave respectability and solemn pompousness) and its
extraordinary white "ayahs" or maids, and silver-haired Mrs. Pont,
called the "house-keeper". Was she a _pukka_ Mem-Sahib or a
_nowker_[13] or what? And how did she "keep" the house?

A wonderful place--but far and away the most thrilling and delightful
of its wonders was the little white girl, Lucille--Damocles' first
experience of the charming genus.

The boy never forgot his first meeting with Lucille.

On his arrival at Monksmead he had been "vetted," as he expressed it,
by the Burra-Sahib, the General; and then taken to an attractive place
called "the school-room" and there had found Lucille....

"Hullo! Boy," had been her greeting. "What's your name?" He had
attentively scrutinized a small white-clad, blue-sashed maiden, with
curling chestnut hair, well-opened hazel eyes, decided chin, Greek
mouth and aristocratic cheek-bones. A maiden with a look of blood and
breed about her. (He did not sum her up in these terms at the time.)

"Can you ride, Boy?"

"A bit."

"Can you fight?"

"A bit."

"Can you swim?"

"Not well."

"_I_ can--ever so farther. D'you know French and German?"

"Not a word."

"Play the piano?"

"Never heard of it. D'you play it with cards or dice?"

"Lucky dog! It's music. I have to practise an hour a day."

"What for?"

"Nothing ... it's lessons. Beastly. How old are you?"

"Seven--er--nearly."

"So'm I--nearly. I've got to be six first though. I shall have a
birthday next week. A big one. Have you brought any ellyfunts from
India?"

"I've never seen a nellyfunt--only in pictures."

A shudder shook the boy's sturdy frame.

"Why do you go like that? Feel sick?"

"No. I don't know. I seemed to remember something--in a book. I dream
about it. There's a nasty blue room with a mud floor. And _Something_.
Beastly. Makes you yell out and you can't. You can't run away either.
But the Sword dream is lovely."

Lucille appeared puzzled and put this incoherence aside.

"What a baby never to see ellyfunts! I've seen lots. Hundreds. Zoo.
Circuses. Persessions. Camels, too."

"Oh, I used to ride a camel every day. There was one in the compound
with his _oont-wallah_,[14] Abdul Ghaffr; and Khodadad Khan used to
beat the _oont-wallah_ on cold mornings to warm himself."

"What's an _oont-wallah_?"

"Don't you _know_? Why, he's just the _oont-wallah_, of course. Who'd
graze the camel or load it up if there wasn't one?"

At tea in the nursery the young lady suddenly remarked:--

"I like you, Boy. You're worth nine Haddocks."

This cryptic valuation puzzled Damocles the more in that he had never
seen or heard of a haddock. Had he been acquainted with the fowl he
might have been yet more astonished.

Later he discovered that the comparison involved the fat boy who sat
solemnly stuffing on the other side of the table, his true baptismal
name being Haddon.

Yes, Lucille was a revelation, a marvel.

Far quicker of mind than he, cleverer at games and inventing "make
believe," very strong, active, and sporting, she was the most
charming, interesting, and attractive experience in his short but
eventful life.

How he loved to make her laugh and clap her hands! How he enjoyed her
quaint remarks, speculations, fairy-tales and jokes. How he yearned to
win her approval and admiration. How he strove to please her!

In Lucille and his wonderful new surroundings he soon forgot Major
Decies, who returned to live (and, at a ripe old age, to die) at
Bimariabad, where had lived and died the woman whom he had so truly
and purely loved. The place where he had known her was the only place
for him.

On each of his birthdays Damocles received a long fatherly letter and
a handsome present from the Major, and by the time he went away to
school at Wellingborough, he wondered who on earth the Major might be.

To his great delight Damocles found that he was not doomed to
discontinue his riding, fencing, boxing, and "dismounted drill without
arms".

General Seymour Stukeley sent for a certain Sergeant Havlan (once a
trooper in his own regiment), rough-rider, swordsman, and boxer, now a
professional trainer, and bade him see that the boy learned all he
could teach him of arms and horsemanship, boxing, swimming, and
general physical prowess and skill. Lucille and Haddon Berners were to
join in to the extent to which their age and sex permitted.

The General intended his great-nephew to be worthy of his Stukeley
blood, and to enter Sandhurst a finished man-at-arms and horseman, and
to join his regiment, Cavalry, of course, with nothing much to learn
of sword, lance, rifle, revolver, and horse.

Sergeant Havlan soon found that he had little need to begin at the
beginning with Damocles de Warrenne in the matter of riding, fencing
or boxing, and was unreasonably annoyed thereat.

In time, it became the high ambition and deep desire of Dam to
overcome Sergeant Havlan's son in battle with the gloves. As young
Havlan was a year his senior, a trained infant prodigy, and destined
for the Prize Ring, there was plenty for him to learn and to do.

With foil or sabre the boy was beneath Dam's contempt.

Daily the children were in Sergeant Havlan's charge for riding and
physical drill, Dam getting an extra hour in the evening for the more
manly and specialized pursuits suitable to his riper years.

He and Lucille loved it all, and the Haddock bitterly loathed it.

Until Miss Smellie came Dam was a happy boy--but for queer sudden
spasms of terror of Something unknown; and, after her arrival, he
would have been well content could he have been assured of an early
opportunity of attending her obsequies and certain of a long-postponed
resurrection; well content, and often wildly happy (with Lucille) ...
but for the curious undefinable fear of Something ... Something about
which he had the most awful dreams ... Something in a blue room with a
mud floor. Something that seemed at times to move beneath his foot,
making his blood freeze, his knees smite together, the sunlight turn
to darkness....




CHAPTER IV.

THE SWORD AND THE SOUL.


One of the very earliest of all Dam's memories in after life--for in a
few years he forgot India absolutely--was of _the Sword_ (that hung on
the oak-panelled wall of the staircase by the portrait of a cavalier),
and of a gentle, sad-eyed lady, Auntie Yvette, who used to say:--

"Yes, sonny darling, it is more than two-hundred-and-fifty years old.
It belonged to Sir Seymour Stukeley, who carried the King's Standard
at Edgehill and died with that sword in his hand ... _You_ shall wear
a sword some day."

(He did--with a difference.)

The sword grew into the boy's life and he would rather have owned it
than the mechanical steamboat with real brass cannon for which he
prayed to God so often, so earnestly, and with such faith. On his
seventh birthday he preferred a curious request, which had curious
consequences.

"Can I take the sword to bed with me to-night, Dearest, as it is my
birthday?" he begged. "I won't hurt it."

And the sword was taken down from the oak-panelled wall, cleaned, and
laid on the bed in his room.

"Promise you will not try to take it out of the sheath, sonny
darling," said the gentle, sad-eyed lady as she kissed him "Good
night".

"I promise, Dearest," replied the boy, and she knew that she need have
no fear.

He fell asleep fondling and cuddling the sword that had pierced the
hearts of many men and defended the honour of many ancestors, and
dreamed, with far greater vividness and understanding, the dream he
had so often dreamt before.

Frequently as he dreamed it during his chequered career, it was
henceforth always most vivid and real. It never never varied in the
slightest detail, and he generally dreamed it on the night before some
eventful, dangerful day on which he risked his life or fought for it.

Of the early dreamings, of course, he understood little, but while he
was still almost a boy he most fully understood the significance of
every word, act, and detail of the marvellous, realistic dream.

It began with a view of a camp of curious little bell-tents about
which strode remarkable, big-booted, long-haired, bedizened
men--looking strangely effeminate and strangely fierce, with their
feathered hats, curls, silk sashes, velvet coats, and with their long
swords, cruel faces, and savage oaths.

Some wore steel breastplates, like that of the suit of armour in the
hall, and steel helmets. The sight of the camp thrilled the boy in
his dream, and yet he knew that he had seen it all before actually,
and in real life--in some former life.

Beside one of a small cluster of tents that stood well apart from the
rest sat a big man who instantly reminded the boy of his dread
"Grandfather," whom he would have loved to have loved had he been
given the chance.

The big man was even more strangely attired than those others who
clumped and clattered about the lower part of the camp.

Fancy a great big strong man with long curls, a lace collar, and a
velvet coat--like a kid going to a party!

The velvet coat had the strangest sleeves, too--made to button to the
elbow and full of slits that seemed to have been mended underneath
with blue silk. There was a regular pattern of these silk-mended slits
about the body of the coat, too, and funny silk-covered buttons.

On his head the man had a great floppy felt hat with a huge feather--a
hat very like one that Dearest wore, only bigger.

One of his long curls was tied with a bow of ribbon--like young
Lucille wore--and the boy felt quite uncomfortable as he noted it. A
grown man--the silly ass! And, yes! he had actually got lace round the
bottoms of his quaint baggy knickerbockers--as well as lace cuffs!

The boy could see it, where one of the great boots had sagged down
below the knee.

Extraordinary boots they were, too. Nothing like "Grumper's"
riding-boots. They were yellowish in colour, and dull, not nicely
polished, and although the square-toed, ugly foot part looked solid as
a house, the legs were more like wrinkled leather stockings, and so
long that the pulled-up one came nearly to the hip.

Spurs had made black marks on the yellow ankles, and saddle and
stirrup-leather had rubbed the legs....

And a sash! Whoever heard of a grown-up wearing a sash? It was a great
blue silk thing, wound round once or twice, and tied with a great bow,
the ends of which hung down in front.

Of all the Pip-squeaks!

And yet the big man's face was not that of a Pip-squeak--far from it.
It was very like Grumper's in fact.

The boy liked the face. It was strong and fierce, thin and
clean-cut--marred only, in his estimation, by the funny little tuft of
hair on the lower lip. He liked the wavy, rough, up-turned moustache,
but not that silly tuft. How nice he would look with his hair cut, his
lower lip shaved, and his ridiculous silks, velvet, and lace exchanged
for a tweed shooting-suit or cricketing-flannels! How Grumper, Father,
Major Decies, and even Khodadad Khan and the sepoys would have laughed
at the get-up. Nay, they would have blushed for the fellow--a Sahib, a
gentleman--to tog himself up so!

The boy also liked the man's voice when he turned towards the tent and
called:--

"Lubin, you drunken dog, come hither," a call which brought forth a
servant-like person, who, by reason of his clean-shaven face and red
nose, reminded the boy of Pattern the coachman.

He wore a dark cloth suit, cotton stockings, shoes that had neither
laces nor buttons, but fastened with a kind of strap and buckle, and,
queer creature, a big Eton collar!

"Sword and horse, rascal," said the gentleman, "and warn Digby for
duty. Bring me wine and a manchet of bread."

The man bowed and re-entered the tent, to emerge a moment later
bearing _the Sword_.

How the cut-steel hilt sparkled and shone! How bright and red the
leather scabbard--now black, dull, cracked and crumbling. But it was
unmistakeably _the_ Sword.

It hung from a kind of broad cross-belt and was attached to it by
several parallel buckled straps--not like Father's Sam Browne belt at
all.

As the gentleman rose from his stool (he must have been over six feet
in height) Lubin passed the cross-belt over his head and raised left
arm so that it rested on his right shoulder, and the Sword hung from
hip to heel.

To the boy it had always seemed such a huge, unwieldy thing. At this
big man's side it looked--just right.

Lubin then went off at a trot to where long lines of bay horses pawed
the ground, swished their tails, tossed their heads, and fidgeted
generally....

From a neighbouring tent came the sounds of a creaking camp-bed, two
feet striking the ground with violence, and a prodigious, prolonged
yawn.

A voice then announced that all parades should be held in Hell, and
that it was better to be dead than damned. Why should gentlemen drill
on a fine evening while the world held wine and women?

After a brief space, occupied with another mighty yawn, it loudly and
tunefully requested some person or persons unknown to superintend its
owner's obsequies.

"Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true.
My love was false, but I was firm
From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lie
Lightly, gentle earth...."


"May it do so soon," observed the tall gentleman distinctly.

"What ho, without there! That you, Seymour, lad?" continued the voice.
"Tarry a moment. Where's that cursed ..." and sounds of hasty search
among jingling accoutrements were followed by a snatch of song of
which the boy instantly recognized the words. He had often heard
Dearest sing them.

"Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine:
Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine."

Lubin appeared, bearing a funny, fat, black bottle, a black cup (both
appeared to be of leather), and a kind of leaden plate on which was a
small funnily-shaped loaf of bread.

"'Tis well you want none," observed the tall gentleman, "I had asked
you to help me crush a flask else," and on the word the singer emerged
from the tent.

"Jest not on solemn subjects, Seymour," he said soberly, "Wine may
carry me over one more pike-parade.... Good lad.... Here's to thee....
Why should gentlemen drill?... I came to fight for the King, not to
... But, isn't this thy day for de Warrenne? Oh, ten million fiends!
Plague and pest! And I cannot see thee stick him, Seymour ..." and the
speaker dashed the black drinking-vessel violently on the ground,
having carefully emptied it.

The boy did not much like him.

His lace collar was enormous and his black velvet coat was embroidered
all over with yellow silk designs, flowers, and patterns. It was like
the silly mantel-borders and things that Mrs. Pont, the housekeeper,
did in her leisure time. ("Cruel-work" she called it, and the boy
quite agreed.)

This man's face was pink and fair, his hair golden.

"Warn him not of the hilt-thrust, Seymour, lad," he said suddenly.
"Give it him first--for a sneering, bullying, taverning, chambering
knave."

The tall gentleman glanced at his down-flung cup, raised his eyebrows,
and drank from the bottle.

"Such _would_ annoy _you_, Hal, of course," he murmured.

A man dressed in what appeared to be a striped football jersey under a
leather waistcoat and steel breast-plate, high boots and a steel
helmet led up a great horse.

The boy loved the horse. It was very like "Fire".

The gentleman (called Seymour) patted it fondly, stroked his nose, and
gave it a piece of his bread.

"Well, Crony Long-Face?" he said fondly.

He then put his left foot in the great box-stirrup and swung himself
into the saddle--a very different kind of saddle from those with which
the boy was familiar.

It reminded him of Circuses and the Lord Mayor's Show. It was big
enough for two and there was a lot of velvet and stuff about it and a
fine gold _C.R._--whatever that might mean--on a big pretty cloth
under it (perhaps the gentleman's initials were C.R. just as his own
were D. de W. and on some of his things).

The great fat handle of a great fat pistol stuck up on each side of
the front of the saddle.

"Follow," said the gentleman to the iron-bound person, and moved off
at a walk towards a road not far distant.

"Stap him! Spit him, Seymour," called the pink-faced man, "and warn
him not of the hilt-thrust."

As he passed the corner of the camp, two men with great axe-headed
spear things performed curious evolutions with their cumbersome
weapons, finally laying the business ends of them on the ground as the
gentleman rode by.

He touched his hat to them with his switch.

Continuing for a mile or so, at a walk, he entered a dense coppice and
dismounted.

"Await me," he said to his follower, gave him the curb-rein, and
walked on to an open glade a hundred yards away.

(It was a perfect spot for Red Indians, Smugglers, Robin Hood,
Robinson Crusoe or any such game, the boy noted.)

Almost at the same time, three other men entered the clearing, two
together, and one from a different quarter.

"For the hundredth time, Seymour, lad, _mention not the hilt-thrust_,
as you love me and the King," said this last one quietly as he
approached the gentleman; and then the two couples behaved in a
ridiculous manner with their befeathered hats, waving them in great
circles as they bowed to each other, and finally laying them on their
hearts before replacing them.

"Mine honour is my guide, Will," answered the gentleman called
Seymour, somewhat pompously the boy considered, though he did not know
the word.

Sir Seymour then began to remove the slashed coat and other garments
until he stood in his silk stockings, baggy knickerbockers, and jolly
cambric shirt--nice and loose and free at the neck as the boy thought.

He rolled up his right sleeve, drew the sword, and made one or two
passes--like Sergeant Havlan always did before he began fencing.

The other two men, meantime, had been behaving somewhat
similarly--talking together earnestly and one of them undressing.

The one who did this was a very powerful-looking man and the arm he
bared reminded the boy of that of a "Strong Man" he had seen recently
at Monksmead Fair, in a tent, and strangely enough his face reminded
him of that of his own Father.

He had a nasty face though, the boy considered, and looked like a
bounder because he had pimples, a swelly nose, a loud voice, and a
swanky manner. The boy disapproved of him wholly. It was like his
cheek to resemble Father, as well as to have the same name.

His companion came over to the gentleman called Will, carrying the
strong man's bared sword and, bowing ridiculously (with his hat, both
hands, and his feet) said:--

"Shall we measure, Captain Ormonde Delorme?"

Captain Delorme then took the sword from Sir Seymour, bowed as the
other had done, and handed him the sword with a mighty flourish, hilt
first.

It proved to be half an inch shorter than the other, and Captain
Delorme remarked that his Principal would waive that.

He and the strong man's companion then chose a spot where the grass
was very short and smooth, where there were no stones, twigs or
inequalities, and where the light of the setting sun fell sideways
upon the combatants--who tip-toed gingerly, and rather ridiculously,
in their stockinged feet, to their respective positions. Facing each
other, they saluted with their swords and then stood with the right
arm pointing downwards and across the body so that the hilt of the
sword was against the right thigh and the blade directed to the rear.

"One word, Sir Matthew de Warrenne," said Sir Seymour as they paused
in this attitude. "If my point rests for a second on your hilt _you
are a dead man_."

Sir Matthew laughed in an ugly manner and replied:--

"And what is your knavish design now, Sir Seymour Stukeley?"

"My design _was_ to warn you of an infallible trick of fence, Sir
Matthew. It _now_ is to kill you--for the insult, and on behalf of ...
your own unhappy daughter."

The other yawned and remarked to his friend:--

"I have a parade in half an hour."

"On guard," cried the person addressed, drawing his sword and
striking an attitude.

"Play," cried Captain Delorme, doing similarly.

Both principals crouched somewhat, held their swords horizontal, with
point to the adversary's breast and hilt drawn back, arm sharply
bent--for both, it appeared, had perfected the Art of Arts in Italy.

These niceties escaped the boy in his earlier dreamings of the
dream--but the time came when he could name every pass, parry,
invitation, and riposte.

The strong man suddenly threw his sword-hand high and towards his left
shoulder, keeping his sword horizontal, and exposing the whole of his
right side.

Sir Seymour lunged hard for his ribs, beneath the right arm-pit and,
as the other's sword swooped down to catch his, twist it over, and
riposte, he feinted, cleared the descending sword, and thrust at the
throat. A swift ducking crouch let the sword pass over the strong
man's head, and only a powerful French circular parry saved the life
of Sir Seymour Stukeley.

As the boy realized later, he fought Italian in principle, and used
the best of French parries, ripostes, and tricks, upon occasion--and
his own perfected combination of the two schools made him, according
to Captain Delorme, the best fencer in the King's army. So at least
the Captain said to the other second, as they amicably chatted while
their friends sought to slay each other before their hard,
indifferent-seeming eyes.

To the boy their talk conveyed little--as yet.

The duellists stepped back as the "phrase" ended, and then Sir Seymour
gave an "invitation," holding his sword-arm wide to the right of his
body. Sir Matthew lunged, his sword was caught, carried out to the
left, and held there as Sir Seymour's blade slid inward along it. Just
in time, Sir Matthew's inward pressure carried Sir Seymour's sword
clear to the right again. Sir Matthew disengaged over, and, as the
sudden release brought Sir Seymour's sword springing in, he thrust
under that gentleman's right arm and scratched his side.

As he recovered his sword he held it for a moment with the point
raised toward Sir Seymour's face. Instantly Sir Seymour's point
tinkled on his hilt, and Captain Delorme murmured "Finis" beneath his
breath.

Sir Stukeley Seymour's blade shot in, Sir Matthew's moved to parry,
and the point of the advancing sword flickered under his hand, turned
upward, and pierced his heart.

"Yes," said Captain Delorme, as the stricken man fell, "if he parries
outward the point goes under, if he anticipates a feint it comes
straight in, and if he parries a lunge-and-feint-under, he gets
feint-over before he can come up. I have never seen Stukeley miss when
once he rests on the hilt. _Exit_ de Warrenne--and Hell the worse for
it----" and the boy awoke.

He kissed the sword and fell asleep again.

One day, when receiving his morning fencing and boxing lessons of
Sergeant Havlan, he astonished that warrior (and made a bitter enemy
of him) by warning him against allowing his blade to rest on the
Sergeant's hilt, and by hitting him clean and fair whenever it was
allowed to happen. Also, by talking of "the Italian school of fence"
and of "invitations"--the which were wholly outside the
fencing-philosophy of the French-trained swordsman. At the age of
fifteen the boy was too good for the man who had been the best that
Aldershot had known, who had run a _salle d'armes_ for years, and who
was much sought by ambitious members of the Sword Club.

The Sword, from the day of that newly vivid dream, became to the boy
what his Symbol is to the religious fanatic, and he was content to sit
and stare at it, musing, for hours.

The sad-eyed, sentimental lady encouraged him and spoke of Knights,
Chivalry, Honour, _Noblesse Oblige_, and Ideals such as the nineteenth
century knew not and the world will never know again.

"Be a real and true Knight, sonny darling," she would say, "and live
to _help_. Help women--God knows they need it. And try to be able to
say at the end of your life, 'I have never made a woman weep'. Yes--be
a Knight and have 'Live pure, Speak true, Right wrong' on your shield.
Be a Round Table Knight and ride through the world bravely. Your dear
Father was a great swordsman. You may have the sword down and kiss it,
the first thing every morning--and you must salute it every night as
you go up to bed. You shall wear a sword some day."

(Could the poor lady but have foreseen!)

She also gave him over-copiously and over-early of her simple,
fervent, vague Theology, and much Old and New Testament History, with
the highest and noblest intentions--and succeeded in implanting a deep
distrust and dislike of "God" in his acutely intelligent mind.

To a prattling baby, _Mother_ should be God enough--God and all the
angels and paradise in one ... (but he had never known a mother and
Nurse Beaton had ever been more faithfully conscientious in deed than
tenderly loving in manner).

She filled his soul with questionings and his mouth with questions
which she could not answer, and which he answered for himself. The
questions sometimes appalled her.

If God so loved the world, why did He let the Devil loose in it?

If God could do _anything_, why didn't He lay the Devil out with one
hand?

If He always rewarded the Good and punished the Bad, why was Dearest
so unhappy, and drunken Poacher Iggulsby so very gay and prosperously
naughty?

He knew too that his dead Father had not been "good," for he heard
servant-talk, and terrible old "Grandfather" always forgot that
"Little Pitchers have Long Ears".

If God always answered devout and faith-inspired prayer, why did He
not

1. Save Caiaphas the cat when earnestly
prayed for--having been run over by
Pattern in the dog-cart, coming out of
the stables?

2. Send the mechanical steam-boat so long
and earnestly prayed for, with Faith and
Belief?

3. Help the boy to lead a higher and a better
life, to eat up his crusts and fat as directed,
to avoid chivvying the hens, inking his
fingers, haunting the stables, stealing
green apples in the orchard, tearing his
clothes, and generally doing evil with
fire, water, mud, stones and other tempting
and injurious things?

And was it entirely decent of God to be eternally spying on a fellow,
as appeared to be His confirmed habit?

As for that awful heart-rending Crucifixion, was that the sort of
thing for a Father to look on at.... As bad as that brutal old Abraham
with Isaac his son ... were _all_ "Good" Fathers like that ...?

And nightmare dreams of Hell--a Hell in which there was a
_Snake_--wrought no improvement.

And the Bible! How strangely and dully they talked, and what people!
That nasty Jacob and Esau business, those horrid Israelites, the
Unfaithful Steward; the Judge who let himself be pestered into
action; those poor unfortunate swine that were made to rush violently
down the steep place into the sea; Ananias and Sapphira. No--not a
nice book at all.

The truth is that Theology, at the age of seven, is not
commendable--setting aside the question of whether (at any age)
Theology is a web of words, ritual, dogma, tradition, invention,
shibboleth; a web originally spun by interested men to obscure God
from their dupes.

So the boy worshipped Dearest and distrusted and disliked the God she
gave him, a big sinister bearded Man who hung spread-eagled above the
world, covering the entire roof of the Universe, and watched, watched,
watched, with unwinking, all-seeing eye, and remembered with
unforgetting, unrelenting mind. Cruel. Ungentlemanly. _Jealous!_ Cold.

Also the boy fervently hoped it might never be his lot to go to
Heaven--a shockingly dreary place where it was always Sunday and one
must, presumably, be very quiet except when singing hymns. A place
tenanted by white-robed Angels, unsympathetic towards dirty-faced
little sinners who tore their clothes. Angels, cold, superior,
unhuggable, haughty, given to ecstatic throes, singers of _Hallelujah_
and other silly words--always _praising_.

How he loathed and dreaded the idea of Dearest being an Angel! Fancy
sweet Dearest or his own darling Lucille with silly wings (like a
beastly goose or turkey in dear old Cook's larder), with a long
trumpet, perhaps, in a kind of night-gown, flying about the place, it
wasn't decent at all--Dearest and Lucille, whom he adored and
hugged--unsympathetic, cold, superior, unhuggable, haughty; and the
boy who was very, _very_ tender-hearted, would throw his arms round
Dearest's neck and hug and hug and hug, for he abhorred the thought of
her becoming a beastly angel.

Surely, if God knew His business, Dearest would be always happy and
bright and live ever so long, and be ever so old, forty years and
more.

And Dearest, fearing that her idolized boy might grow up a man
like--well, like "Grumper" had been--hard, quarrelsome, adventurous,
flippant, wicked, pleasure-loving, drunken, Godless ... redoubled her
efforts to Influence-the-child's-mind-for-good by means of the
Testaments and Theology, the Covenant, the Deluge, Miracles, the
Immaculate Conception, the Last Supper, the Resurrection, Pentecost,
Creeds, Collects, Prayers.

And the boy's mind weighed these things deliberately, pondered them,
revolted--and rejected them one and all.

Dearest had been taken in....

He said the prayers she taught him mechanically, and when he felt the
need of real prayer--(as he did when he had dreamed of the Snake)--he
always began, "If you _are_ there, God, and _are_ a good, kind God"
... and concluded, "Yours sincerely, Damocles de Warrenne".

He got but little comfort, however, for his restless and logical mind
asked:--

"If God _knows_ best and will surely _do_ what is best, why bother
Him? And if He does not and will not, why bother yourself?"

But Dearest succeeded, at any rate, in filling his young soul with a
love of beauty, romance, high adventure, honour, and all physical,
mental, and moral cleanliness.

She taught him to use his imagination, and she made books a necessity.
She made him a gentleman in soul--as distinct from a gentleman in
clothes, pocket, or position.

She gave him a beautiful veneration for woman that no other woman was
capable of destroying--though one or two did their best. Then the
sad-eyed lady was superseded and her professional successor, Miss
Smellie, the governess, finding the boy loved the Sword, asked Grumper
to lock it away for the boy's Good.

Also she got Grumper to dismiss Nurse Beaton for impudence and not
"knowing her place".

But Damocles entered into an offensive and defensive alliance with
Lucille, on whom he lavished the whole affection of his deeply, if
undemonstratively, affectionate nature, and the two "hunted in
couples," sinned and suffered together, pooled their resources and
their wits, found consolation in each other when harried by Miss
Smellie, spent every available moment in each other's society and,
like the Early Christians, had all things in common.

On birthdays, "high days and holidays" he would ask "Grumper" to let
him have the Sword for an hour or two, and would stand with it in his
hand, rapt, enthralled, ecstatic. How strange it made one feel! How
brave, and anxious to do fine deeds. He would picture himself bearing
an unconscious Lucille in his left arm through hostile crowds, while
with the Sword he thrust and hewed, parried and guarded.... Who could
fear _anything_ with the Sword in his hand, the Sword of the Dream!
How glorious to die wielding it, wielding it in a good cause ...
preferably on behalf of Lucille, his own beloved little pal, staunch,
clever, and beautiful. And he told Lucille tales of the Sword and of
how he loved it!




CHAPTER V.

LUCILLE.


"If you drinks a drop more, Miss Lucy, you'll just go like my pore
young sister goed," observed Cook in a warning voice, as Lucille
paused to get her second wind for the second draught.

(Lucille had just been tortured at the stake by Sioux and
Blackfeet--thirsty work on a July afternoon.)

"And how did she go, Cookie-Bird--_Pop?_" inquired Lucille politely,
with round eyes, considering over the top of the big lemonade-flagon
as it rose again to her determined little mouth.

"No, Miss Lucy," replied Cook severely. "Pop she did not. She swole
... swole and swole."

"You mean 'swelled,' Cookoo," corrected Lucille, inclined to be a
little didactic and corrective at the age of ten.

"Well, she were _my_ sister after all, Miss Lucy," retorted Cook, "and
perhaps I may, or may not, know what she done. _I_ say she swole--and
what is more she swole clean into a dropsy. All along of drinking
water.... _Drops_ of water--_Dropsy_."

"Never drink water," murmured Dam, absentmindedly annexing, and
pocketing, an apple.

"Ah, water, but you see this is lemonade," countered Lucille.
"Home-made, too, and not--er--gusty. It doesn't make you go----" and
here it is regrettable to have to relate that Lucille made a
shockingly realistic sound, painfully indicative of the condition of
one who has imbibed unwisely and too well of a gas-impregnated liquor.

"No more does water in my experiants," returned Cook, "and I was not
allooding to wulgarity, Miss Lucy, which you should know better than
to do such. My pore young sister's systerm turned watery and they
tapped her at the last. All through drinking too much water, which
lemonade ain't so very different either, be it never so 'ome-made....
Tapped 'er they did--like a carksk, an' 'er a Band of 'Oper, Blue
Ribander, an' Sunday Schooler from birth, an' not departin' from it
when she grew up. Such be the Ways of Providence," and Cook sighed
with protestive respectfulness....

"Tapped 'er systerm, they did," she added pensively, and with a little
justifiable pride.

"Were they hard taps?" inquired Lucille, reappearing from behind the
flagon. "I hate them myself, even on the funny-bone or knuckles--but
on the _cistern!_ Ugh!"

"_Hard_ taps; they was _silver_ taps," ejaculated Cook, "and drawed
gallings and gallings--and nothing to laugh at, Master Dammicles,
neether.... So don't you drink no more, Miss Lucy."

"I can't," admitted Lucille--and indeed, to Dam, who regarded his
"cousin" with considerable concern, it did seem that, even as Cook's
poor young sister of unhappy memory, Lucille had "swole"--though only
locally.

"Does _beer_ make you swell or swole or swellow when you swallow,
Cooker?" he inquired; "because, if so, _you_ had better be--" but he
was not allowed to conclude his deduction, for cook, bridling,
bristling, and incensed, bore down upon the children and swept them
from her kitchen.

To the boy, even as he fled _via_ a dish of tartlets and cakes, it
seemed remarkable that a certain uncertainty of temper (and figure)
should invariably distinguish those who devote their lives to the
obviously charming and attractive pursuit of the culinary art.

Surely one who, by reason of unfortunate limitations of sex, age,
ability, or property, could not become a Colonel of Cavalry could
still find infinite compensation in the career of cook or
railway-servant.

Imagine, in the one case, having absolute freedom of action with
regard to raisins, tarts, cream, candy-peel, jam, plum-puddings and
cakes, making life one vast hamper, and in the other case, boundless
opportunity in the matter of leaping on and off moving trains,
carrying lighted bull's-eye lanterns, and waving flags.

One of the early lessons that life taught him, without troubling to
explain them, and she taught him many and cruel, was that Cooks are
Cross.

"What shall we do now, Dam?" asked Lucille, and added, "Let's raid
the rotten nursery and rag the Haddock. Little ass! Nothing else to
do. How I _hate_ Sunday afternoon.... No work and no play. Rotten."

The Haddock, it may be stated, owed his fishy title to the fact that
he once possessed a Wealthy Relative of the name of Haddon. With
far-sighted reversionary intent his mother, a Mrs. Berners _nee_
Seymour Stukeley, had christened him Haddon.

But the Wealthy Relative, on being informed of his good fortune, had
bluntly replied that he intended to leave his little all to the
founding of Night-Schools for illiterate Members of Parliament,
Travelling-Scholarships for uneducated Cabinet Ministers, and
Deportment Classes for New Radical Peers. He was a Funny Man as well
as a Wealthy Relative.

And, thereafter, Haddon Berners' parents had, as Cook put it, "up and
died" and "Grandfather" had sent for, and adopted, the orphan Haddock.

Though known to Dam and Lucille as "The Haddock" he was in reality an
utter Rabbit and esteemed as such. A Rabbit he was born, a Rabbit he
lived, and a Rabbit he died. Respectable ever. Seen in the Right
Place, in the Right Clothes, doing the Right Thing with the Right
People at the Right Time.

Lucille was the daughter of Sylvester Bethune Gavestone, the late and
lamented Bishop of Minsterbury (once a cavalry subaltern), a school,
Sandhurst, and life-long friend of "Grandfather," and husband of
"Grandfather's" cousin, Geraldine Seymour Stukeley.

Poor "Grandfather," known to the children as "Grumper," the ferocious
old tyrant who loved all mankind and hated all men, with him adoption
was a habit, and the inviting of other children to stay as long as
they liked with the adopted children, a craze.

And yet he rarely saw the children, never played with them, and hated
to be disturbed.

He had out-lived his soldier-contemporaries, his children, his power
to ride to hounds, his pretty taste in wine, his fencing, dancing,
flirting, and all that had made life bearable--everything, as he said,
but his gout and his liver (and, it may be added, except his
ferocious, brutal temper).

"Yes.... Let us circumvent, decoy, and utterly destroy the common
Haddock," agreed Dam.

The entry into the nursery was an effective night-attack by Blackfeet
(not to mention hands) but was spoilt by the presence of Miss Smellie
who was sitting there knitting relentlessly.

"Never burst into rooms, children," she said coldly. "One expects
little of a boy, but a _girl_ should try to appear a Young Lady. Come
and sit by me, Lucille. What did you come in for--or rather for what
did you burst in?"

"We came to play with the Haddock," volunteered Dam.

"Very kind and thoughtful of you, I am sure," commented Miss Smellie
sourly. "Most obliging and benevolent," and, with a sudden change to
righteous anger and bitterness, "Why don't you speak the truth?"

"I am speaking the truth, Miss--er--Smellie," replied the boy. "We did
come to play with the dear little Haddock--like one plays with a
football or a frog. I didn't say we came for Haddock's _good_."

"We needed the Haddock, you see, Miss Smellie," confirmed Lucille.

"How many times am I to remind you that Haddon Berners' name _is_
Haddon, Lucille," inquired Miss Smellie. "Why must you always prefer
vulgarity? One expects vulgarity from a boy--but a girl should try to
appear a Young Lady."

With an eye on Dam, Lucille protruded a very red tongue at surprising
length, turned one eye far inward toward her nose, wrinkled that
member incredibly, corrugated her forehead grievously, and elongated
her mouth disastrously. The resultant expression of countenance
admirably expressed the general juvenile view of Miss Smellie and all
her works.

Spurred to honourable emulation, the boy strove to excel. Using both
hands for the elongation of his eyes, the extension of his mouth, and
the depression of his ears, he turned upon the Haddock so horrible a
mask that the stricken child burst into a howl, if not into actual
tears.

"What's the matter, Haddon?" demanded Miss Smellie, looking up with
quick suspicion.

"Dam made a _fathe_ at me," whimpered the smitten one.

"Say 'made a grimace' not 'made a face,'" corrected Miss Smellie.
"Only God can make _faces_."

Dam exploded.

"At what are you laughing, Damocles?" she asked sternly.

"Nothing, Miss Smellie. What you said sounded rather funny and a
little irrevilent or is it irrembrant?"

"Damocles! Should _I_ be likely to say anything Irreverent? Should _I_
ever dream of Irreverence? What _can_ you mean? And never let me see
you make faces again."

"I didn't let you see me, Miss Smellie, and only God can make faces--"

"Leave the room at once, Sir, I shall report your impudence to your
great-uncle," hissed Miss Smellie, rising in wrath--and the bad
abandoned boy had attained his object. Detention in the nursery for a
Sunday afternoon was no part of his programme.

Most unobtrusively Lucille faded away also.

"_Isn't_ she a hopeless beast," murmured she as the door closed.

"Utter rotter," admitted the boy. "Let's slope out into the garden and
dig some worms for bait."

"Yes," agreed Lucille, and added, "Parse _Smellie,_" whereupon, with
one voice and heart and purpose the twain broke into a paean, not of
praise--a kind of tribal lay, and chanted:--

"_Smellie_--Very common noun, absurd person, singular back number,
tutor gender, objectionable case governed by the word _I_," and so _da
capo_.

And yet the poor lady strove to do her duty in that station of life in
which it had pleased Providence (or a drunken father) to place
her--and to make the children "genteel". Had she striven to win their
love instead, her ministrations might have had some effect (other than
infinite irritation and bitter dislike).

She was the Compleat Governess, on paper, and all that a person
entrusted with the training of young children should not be, in
reality. She had innumerable and admirable testimonials from various
employers of what she termed "aristocratic standing"; endless
certificates that testified unto her successful struggles in Music,
Drawing, Needlework, German, French, Calisthenics, Caligraphy, and
other mysteries, including the more decorous Sciences (against
Physiology, Anatomy, Zoology, Biology, and Hygiene she set her face as
subjects apt to be, at times, improper), and an appearance and manner
themselves irrefragible proofs of the highest moral virtue.

She also had the warm and unanimous witness of the children at
Monksmead that she was a Beast.

To those who frankly realize with open eyes that the student of life
must occasionally encounter indelicacies upon the pleasant path of
research, it may be revealed, in confidence, that they alluded to
Miss Smellie as "Sniffy" when not, under extreme provocation, as
"Stinker".

She taught them many things and, prominently, Deceit, Hate, and an
utter dislike of her God and her Religion--a most disastrous pair.

Poor old "Grumper"; advertising, he got her, paid her highly, and gave
her almost absolute control of the minds, souls, and bodies of his
young wards and "grandchildren".

"The best of everything" for them--and they, at the average age of
eight, a band of depressed, resentful babes, had "hanged, drawed, and
quartered" her in effigy, within a month of coming beneath her stony
ministrations.

In appearance Miss Smellie was tall, thin, and flat. Most exceedingly
and incredibly flat. Impossibly flat. Her figure, teeth, voice, hair,
manner, hats, clothes, and whole life and conduct were flat as
Euclid's plane-surface or yesterday's champagne.

To counter-balance the possession, perhaps, of so many virtues, gifts,
testimonials, and certificates she had no chin, no eyebrows, and no
eyelashes. Her eyes were weak and watery; her spectacles strong and
thick; her nose indeterminate, wavering, erratic; her ears large, her
teeth irregular and protrusive, her mouth unfortunate and not
guaranteed to close.

An ugly female face is said to be the index and expression of an ugly
mind. It certainly was so in the case of Miss Smellie. Not that she
had an evil or vicious mind in any way--far from it, for she was a
narrowly pious and dully conscientious woman. Her mind was ugly as a
useful building may be very ugly--or as a room devoid of beautiful
furniture or over-crowded with cheap furniture may be ugly.

And her mind was devoid of beautiful thought-furniture, and
over-crowded with cheap and ugly furniture of text-book facts. She was
an utterly loveless woman, living unloving, and unloved--a terrible
condition.

One _could not_ like her.

Deadly dull, narrow, pedantic, petty, uninspiring, Miss Smellie's
ideals, standards, and aims were incredibly low.

She lived, and taught others to live, for appearances.

The children were so to behave that they might appear "genteel". If
they were to do this or that, no one would think they were young
ladies or young gentlemen.

"If we were out at tea and you did that, I _should_ be ashamed," she
would cry when some healthy little human licked its jarnmy fingers,
and "_Do_ you wish to be considered vulgar or a little gentleman,
Damocles?"

Damocles was profoundly indifferent on the point and said so plainly.

They were not to be clean of hand for hygienic reasons--but for fear
of what people might "think"; they were not to be honourable, gentle,
brave and truthful because these things are fine--but because of what
the World might dole out in reward; they were not to eat slowly and
masticate well for their health's sake--but by reason of "good
manners"; they were not to study that they might develop their powers
of reasoning, store their minds, and enlarge their horizons--but that
they might pass some infernal examination or other, _ad majorem
Smelliae gloriam_; they were not to practise the musical art that they
might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace,
delight, and self-expression--but that they might "play their piece"
to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride,
expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other
reason than that it was the recommended way to Eternal Bliss and a
Good Time Hereafter--the whole duty of canny and respectable man being
to "save his soul" therefore.

Her charges were skilfully, if unintentionally, trained in hypocrisy
and mean motive, to look for low reward and strive for paltry ends--to
do what looked well, say what sounded well, to be false, veneered,
ungenuine.

And Miss Smellie was giving them the commonly accepted "education" of
their class and kind.

The prize product of the Smellie system was the Haddock whose whole
life was a pose, a lie, a refusal to see the actual. Perhaps she
influenced him more strongly than the others because he was caught
younger and was of weaker fibre. Anyhow he grew up the perfect and
heartless snob, and by the time he left Oxford, he would sooner have
been seen in a Black Maria with Lord Snooker than in a heavenly
chariot with a prophet of unmodish garment and vulgar ancestry.

To the finished Haddock, a tie was more than a character, and the cut
of a coat more than the cutting of a loving heart.

To him a "gentleman" was a person who had the current accent and
waistcoat, a competence, the entree here and there--a goer unto the
correct places with the correct people. Manners infinitely more than
conduct; externals everything; let the whitening be white and the
sepulchre mattered not.

The Haddock had no bloodful vice, but he was unstable as water and
could not excel, a moral coward and weakling, a liar, a borrower of
what he never intended to return, undeniably and incurably mean, the
complete parasite.

From the first he feared and blindly obeyed Miss Smellie, propitiated
while loathing her; accepted her statements, standards, and beliefs;
curried favour and became her spy and informer.

"What's about the record cricket-ball throw, Dam?" inquired Lucille,
as they strolled down the path to the orchard and kitchen-garden,
hot-houses, stream and stables, to seek the coy, reluctant worm.

"Dunno," replied the boy, "but a hundred yards wants a lot of doing."

"Wonder if _I_ could do it," mused Lucille, picking up a tempting
egg-shaped pebble, nearly as big as her fist, and throwing it with
remarkably neat action (for a girl) at the first pear-tree over the
bridge that spanned the trout-stream.

_At_, but not into.

With that extraordinary magnetic attraction which glass has for the
missile of the juvenile thrower, the orchid-house, on the opposite
side of the path from the pear-tree, drew the errant stone to its
hospitable shelter.

Through the biggest pane of glass it crashed, neatly decapitated a
rare, choice exotic, the pride of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith,
head gardener, released from its hold a hanging basket, struck a large
pot (perched high in a state of unstable equilibrium), and passed out
on the other side with something accomplished, something done, to earn
a long repose.

So much for the stone.

The descending pot lit upon the edge of one side of the big glass
aquarium, smashed it, and continued its career, precipitating an
avalanche of lesser pots and their priceless contents.

The hanging basket, now an unhung and travelling basket, heavy,
iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude
upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head
gardener, and dour, irascible child and woman hater.

"Bull's-eye!" commented Dam--always terse when not composing
fairy-tales.

"Crikey!" shrieked Lucille. "That's done it," and fled straightway to
her room and violent earnest prayer, not for forgiveness but for
salvation, from consequences. (What's the good of Saying your Prayers
if you can't look for Help in Time of Trouble such as this?)

The face of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith was not pleasant to see
as he pranced forth from the orchid-house, brandishing an implement of
his trade.

"Ye'll be needing a wash the day, Mon Sandy, and the Sawbath but fower
days syne," opined Dam, critically observing the moss-and-mud streaked
head, face and neck of the raving, incoherent victim of Lucille's
effort.

When at all lucid and comprehensible Mr. MacIlwraith was understood to
say he'd give his place (and he twanty-twa years in it) to have the
personal trouncing of Dam, that Limb, that Deevil, that predestined
and fore-doomed Child of Sin, that--

Dam pocketed his hands and said but:--

"_Havers_, Mon Sandy!"

"I'll tak' the hide fra y'r bones yet, ye feckless, impident--"

Dam shook a disapproving head and said but:--

"_Clavers_, Mon Sandy!"

"I'll _see_ ye skelped onny-how--or lose ma job, ye--"

More in sorrow than in anger Dam sighed and said but:--

"_Hoots_, Mon Sandy!"

"I'll go straight to y'r Grandfer the noo, and if ye'r not flayed
alive! Aye! I'll gang the noo to Himself----"

"_Wi' fower an twanty men, an' five an' thairrty pipers_," suggested
Dam in tuneful song.

Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith did what he rarely did--swore
violently.

"_Do you think at your age it is right_?" quoted the wicked boy ...
the exceedingly bad and reprehensible boy.

The maddened gardener turned and strode to the house with all his
imperfections on his head and face and neck.

Taking no denial from Butterson, he forced his way into the presence
of his master and clamoured for instant retributive justice--or the
acceptance of his resignation forthwith, and him twanty-twa years in
the ane place.

"Grandfather," roused from slumber, gouty, liverish, ferociously
angry, sent for Dam, Sergeant Havlan, and Sergeant Havlan's cane.

"What's the meaning of this, Sir," he roared as Dam, cool, smiling,
friendly ever, entered the Sanctum. "What the Devil d'ye mean by it,
eh? Wreckin' my orchid-houses, assaultin' my servants, waking me up,
annoying ME! Seven days C.B.[15] and bread and water, on each count.
What d'ye mean by it, ye young hound? Eh? Answer me before I have ye
flogged to death to teach ye better manners! Guilty or Not Guilty? and
I'll take your word for it."

"The missile, describing a parabola, struck its subjective with
fearful impact, Sir," replied the bad boy imperturbably, misquoting
from his latest fiction (and calling it a "parry-bowler," to
"Grandfather's" considerable and very natural mystification).

"_What?_" roared that gentleman, sitting bolt upright in astonishment
and wrath.

"No. It's _ob_jective," corrected Dam. "Yes. With fearful impact.
Fearful also were the words of the Mon Sandy."

"Grandfather" flushed and smiled a little wryly.

"You'd favour _me_ with pleasantries too, would you? I'll reciprocate
to the best of my poor ability," he remarked silkily, and his mouth
set in the unpleasant Stukeley grimness, while a little muscular pulse
beat beneath his cheek-bone.

"A dozen of the very best, if you please, Sergeant," he added, turning
to Sergeant Havlan.

"Coat off, Sir," remarked that worthy, nothing loath, to the boy who
could touch him almost as he would with the foil.

Dam removed his Eton jacket, folded his arms, turned his back to the
smiter and assumed a scientific arrangement of the shoulders with
tense muscles and coyly withdrawn bones. He had been there before....

The dozen were indeed of the Sergeant's best and he was a master. The
boy turned not a hair, though he turned a little pale.... His mouth
grew extraordinarily like that of his grandfather and a little
muscular pulse beat beneath his cheek-bone.

"And what do you think of _my_ pleasantries, my young friend?"
inquired Grandfather. "Feeling at all witty _now_?"

"Havlan is failing a bit, Sir," was the cool reply. "I have noticed it
at fencing too--Getting old--or beer perhaps. I scarcely felt him and
so did not see or feel the point of your joke."

"Grandfather's" flush deepened and his smile broadened crookedly. "Try
and do yourself justice, Havlan," he said. "'Nother dozen. 'Tother
way."

Sergeant Havlan changed sides and endeavoured to surpass himself. It
was a remarkably sound dozen.

He mopped his brow.

The bad boy did not move, gave no sign, but retained his rigid,
slightly hunched attitude, as though he had not counted the second
dozen and expected another stroke.

"Let that be a lesson to you to curb your damned tongue," said
"Grandfather," his anger evaporating, his pride in the stiff-necked,
defiant young rogue increasing.

The boy changed not the rigid, slightly hunched attitude.

"Be pleased to wreck no more of my orchid-houses and to exercise your
great wit on your equals and juniors," he added.

Dam budged not an inch and relaxed not a muscle.

"You may go," said "Grandfather".... "Well--what are you waiting for?"

"I was waiting for Sergeant Havlan to _begin_," was the reply. "I
thought I was to have a second dozen."

With blazing eyes, bristling moustache, swollen veins and bared teeth,
"Grandfather" rose from his chair. Resting on one stick he struck and
struck and struck at the boy with the other, passion feeding on its
own passionate acts, and growing to madness--until, as the head
gardener and Sergeant rushed forward to intervene, Dam fell to the
ground, stunned by an unintentional blow on the head.

"Grandfather" stood trembling.... "_Quite_ a Stukeley," observed he.
"Oblige me by flinging his carcase down the stairs."

"'Angry Stookly's mad Stookly' is about right, mate, wot?" observed
the Sergeant to the gardener, quoting an ancient local saying, as they
carried Dam to his room after dispatching a groom for Dr. Jones of
Monksmead.

"Dammy Darling," whispered a broken and tear-stained voice outside
Dam's locked and keyless door the next morning, "are you dead yet?"

"Nit," was the prompt reply, "but I'm starving to death, fast."

"I am so glad," was the sobbed answer, "for I've got some flat food to
push under the door."

"Shove it under," said Dam. "Good little beast!"

"I didn't know anything about the fearful fracass until tea-time,"
continued Lucille, "and then I went straight to Grumper and confessed,
and he sent me to bed on an empty stummick and I laid upon it, the bed
I mean, and howled all night, or part of it anyhow. I howled for your
sake, not for the empty stummick. I thought my howls would break or at
least soften his hard heart, but I don't think he heard them. I'm sure
he didn't, in fact, or I should not have been allowed to howl so loud
and long.... Did he blame you with anger as well as injustice?"

"With a stick," was the reply. "What about that grub?"

"I told him you were an innocent unborn babe and that Justice had had
a mis-carriage, but he only grinned and said you had got C.B. and dry
bread for insilence in the Orderly Room. What is 'insilence'?"

"Pulling Havlan's leg, I s'pose," opined Dam. "What about that _grub_?
There comes a time when you are too hungry to eat and then you die.
I--"

"Here it is," squealed Lucille, "don't go and die after all my
trouble. I've got some thin ice-wafer biscuits, sulphur tablets, thin
cheese, a slit-up apple and three sardines. They'll all come under the
door--though the sardines may get a bit out of shape. I'll come after
lessons and suck some brandy-balls here and breathe through the
key-hole to comfort you. I could blow them through the key-hole when
they are small too."

"Thanks," acknowledged Dam gratefully, "and if you could tie some up
and a sausage and a tart or two and some bread-and-jam and some
chicken and cake and toffee and things in a handkerchief, and climb on
to the porch with Grumper's longest fishing-rod, you might be able to
relieve the besieged garrison a lot. If the silly Haddock were any
good he could fire sweets up with a catapult."

"I'd try that too," announced Lucille, "but I'd break the windows. I
feel I shall never have the heart to throw a stone or anything again.
My heart is broken," and the penitent sinner groaned in deep travail
of soul.

"Have you eaten everything, Darling? How do you feel?" she suddenly
asked.

"Yes. Hungrier than ever," was the reply. "I like sulphur tablets with
sardines. Wonder when they'll bring that beastly dry bread?"

"If there's a sulphur tablet left I could eat one myself," said
Lucille. "They are good for the inside and I have wept mine sore."

"Too late," answered Dam. "Pinch some more."

"They were the last," was the sad rejoinder. "They were for Rover's
coat, I think. Perhaps they will make your coat hairy, Dam. I mean
your skin."

"Whiskers to-morrow," said Dam.

After a pregnant silence the young lady announced:--

"Wish I could hug and kiss you, Darling. Don't you?... I'll write a
kiss on a piece of paper and push it under the door to you. Better
than spitting it through the key-hole."

"Put it on a piece of _ham_,--more sense," answered Dam.

The quarter-inch rasher that, later, made its difficult entry, pulled
fore and pushed aft, was probably the only one in the whole history of
Ham that was the medium of a kiss--located and indicated by means of a
copying-ink pencil and a little saliva.

Before being sent away to school at Wellingborough Dam had a very
curious illness, one which greatly puzzled Dr. Jones of Monksmead
village, annoyed Miss Smellie, offended Grumper, and worried Lucille.

Sitting in solitary grandeur at his lunch one Sabbath, sipping his old
Chambertin, Grumper was vexed and scandalized by a series of
blood-curdling shrieks from the floor above his breakfast-room.
Butterson, dispatched in haste to see "who the Devil was being killed
in that noisy fashion," returned to state deferentially as how Master
Damocles was in a sort of heppipletic fit, and foaming at the mouth.
They had found him in the General's study where he had been reading a
book, apparently; a big Natural History book.

A groom was galloping for Dr. Jones and Mrs. Pont was doin' her
possible.

No. Nothing appeared to have hurt or frightened the young
gentleman--but he was distinctly 'eard to shout: "_It is under my
foot. It is moving--moving--moving out_...." before he became
unconscious.

No, Sir. Absolutely nothing under the young gentleman's foot.

Dr. Jones could shed no light and General Sir Gerald Seymour Stukeley
hoped to God that the boy was not going to grow up a wretched
epileptic. Miss Smellie appeared to think the seizure a judgment upon
an impudent and deceitful boy who stole into his elders' rooms in
their absence and looked at their books.

Lucille was troubled in soul for, to her, Damocles confessed the
ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward. He said that he
had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty
bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him. He lived in
subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence--nay even in
that of its counterfeit presentment--he was a gibbering, lunatic
coward. Such, at least, was her dimly realized conception resultant
upon the boy's bald, stammering confession.

But how could her dear Dammy be a _coward_--the vilest thing on earth!
He who was willing to fight anyone, ride anything, go anywhere, act
anyhow. Dammy the boxer, fencer, rider, swimmer. Absurd! Think of the
day "the Cads" had tried to steal their boat from them when they were
sailing it on the pond at Revelmead. There had been five of them, two
big and three medium. Dam had closed the eye of one of them, cut the
lip of another, and knocked one of the smaller three weeping into the
dust.

They had soon cleared off and flung stones until Dam had started
running for them and then they had fled altogether.

Think of the time when she set fire to the curtains. Why, he feared no
bull, no dog, no tramp in England.

A coward! Piffle.

And yet he had screamed and kicked and cried--yes _cried_--as he had
shouted that it was under his foot and moving out. Rum! _Very_ rum!

On the day that Dam left Monksmead for school Lucille wept till she
could weep no more. Life for the next few years was one of
intermittent streaks of delirious joy and gloomy grief, vacation time
when he was at Monksmead and term time when he was at school. All the
rest of the world weighed as a grain of dust against her hero, Dam.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SNAKE'S "MYRMIDON".


For a couple of years and more, in the lower School at Wellingborough,
Damocles de Warrenne, like certain States, was happy in that he had no
history. In games rather above the average, and in lessons rather
below it, he was very popular among his fellow "squeakers" for his
good temper, modesty, generous disposition, and prowess at football
and cricket.

Then, later, dawned the day when from this comfortable high estate a
common adder, preserved in spirits of wine, was the cause of his
downfall and Bully Harberth the means of his reinstatement....

One afternoon Mr. Steynker, the Science Master, for some reason and
without preliminary mention of his intent, produced a bottled specimen
of a snake. He entered the room with the thing under his arm and
partly concealed by the sleeve of his gown. Watching him as he
approached the master's desk and spoke with Mr. Colfe, the
form-master, Dam noted that he had what appeared to be a long oblong
glass box of which the side turned towards him was white and opaque.

When Mr. Steynker stepped on to the dais, as Mr. Colfe took up his
books and departed, he placed the thing on the desk with the other
side to the class....

And there before Dam's starting, staring eyes, fastened to the white
back of the tall glass box, and immersed in colourless liquid was the
Terror.

He rose, gibbering, to his feet, pale as the dead, and pointed,
mopping and mowing like an idiot.

How should a glass box restrain the Fiend that had made his life a
Hell upon earth? What did Steynker and Colfe and these others--all
gaping at him open-mouthed--know of the Devil with whom he had
wrestled deep beneath the Pit itself for ten thousand centuries of
horror--centuries whose every moment was an aeon?

What could these innocent men and boys know of the living Damnation
that made him pray to die--provided only that he could be _really_
dead and finished, beyond all consciousness and fear. The fools!... to
think that it was a harmless, concrete thing. It would emerge in a
moment like the Fisherman's Geni from the Brass Bottle and grow as big
as the world. He felt he was going mad again.

"Help!" he suddenly shrieked. "_It is under my foot. It is moving ...
moving ... moving out_." He sprang to his astounded friend, Delorme,
and screamed to him for help--and then realizing that there was _no_
help, that neither man nor God could save him, he fled from the room
screaming like a wounded horse.

Rushing madly down the corridor, falling head-long down the stone
stairs, bolting blindly across the entrance-hall, he fled until
(unaware of his portly presence up to the moment when he rebounded
from him as a cricket-ball from a net) he violently encountered the
Head.

Scrambling beneath his gown the demented boy flung his arms around the
massy pillar of the Doctor's leg, and prayed aloud to him for help,
between heart-rending screams.

Now it is undeniable that no elderly gentleman, of whatsoever position
or condition, loves to be butted violently upon a generous lunch as he
makes his placid way to his arm-chair, cigar, book, and ultimate
pleasant doze. If he be pompous by profession, precise by practice,
dignified as a duty, a monument of most stately correctness and, to
small boys and common men, a great and distant, if tiny, God--he may
be expected to resent it.

The Doctor did. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he struck the
sobbing, gasping child twice, and then endeavoured to remove him by
the ungentle application of the untrammelled foot, from the leg to
which, limpet-like, he clung.

To Dam the blows were welcome, soothing, reassuring. Let a hundred
Heads flog him with two hundred birch-rods, so they could keep him
from the Snake. What are mere blows?

Realizing quickly that something very unusual was in the air, the
worthy Doctor repented him of his haste and, with what dignity he
might, inquired between a bleat and a bellow:--

"What is the matter, my boy