“The kindest man,
The best conditioned and unwearied spirit
In doing courtesies.-Shakespeare.
They met on the threshold.
Swinging back the door to let Leonie
and her aunt out, Ellen, the middle-aged maid, almost
an heirloom in the family of Cuxson, bristling in
starched cap and apron, let in the erstwhile plague
of her life, but now as ever the light of her eyes,
Jonathan Cuxson, Junior.
He took Lady Hetth’s hand in
a mighty and painful grip when after a moment’s
hesitation she introduced herself.
“Why, of course! You must
be Jan! Except for being bigger you haven’t
changed a bit since I saw you years ago one Speech
Day at Harrow!” She looked with open admiration
at the very personable young man before her who loomed
large in the hall with his height of six feet two and
a tremendous width of shoulder. His eyes were
grey, and as honest as a genuine fine day; the jaw
was just saved from a shadow of brutality in its strength
by a remarkably fine mouth; the ears were splendid
from an intellectual point of view, and the set of
the head on the neck, and the neck on the shoulders,
perfect. The nose was a good nose, rather broad
at the top, with those delicate sensitive nostrils
which usually spell trouble for the owner.
“I don’t believe you remember me!”
Happily the reply which must have
been untrue or given in the negative was averted by
the hilarious arrival of a puppy.
Having heard the deep voice associated
in its canine mind with bits of cake and joyous roughs-and-tumbles,
it had forsaken the happy though forbidden hunting
ground of the upper storeys and negotiated the stairs
in a series of bumps and misses.
Arrived in the hall it hurled itself
blindly against Leonie’s ankles, and ricocheted
on to its master’s boots, where it essayed a
pas seul on its hind legs in its efforts to
reach the strong brown hand.
“Oh!” said Leonie, as
she fell on her knees with her arms outstretched to
the rampaging ball of white fluff and high spirits,
the which thinking it some new game squatted back
on its hind legs with the front ones wide apart, gave
an infantile squeak, and whizzed round three times
apparently for luck, as tears welled up in the child’s
large eyes and trickled down the white face.
“Hello, kiddie! You’re
crying!” said Jan Cuxson, who like his father
had a positive mania for protecting and helping those
in trouble, which mania got him into an infinite and
varied amount of trouble himself, and led him into
unexpected boles and corners of the earth. “I’m-I’m
not crying weally!” choked Leonie, “it’s-it’s
my kitten!”
“Oh! do stop, Leonie!”
said her aunt, leaning down to catch the child’s
hand and pull her to her feet. “She’s
coming to stay with you,” she added, as Leonie
stood quite still with that piteous jerk of the chin
which comes from suppressed and overwhelming grief,
as she watched the puppy play a one-sided game of
bumblefoot in a corner.
“That’s jolly,” said the young man.
“Oh! she’s coming as a
case. She walks a good deal in her sleep, and
as my brother-in-law, Colonel Hetth, if you remember,
was such a-
But Jan Cuxson was not listening.
He too had put his hand on the curly
head and tilted it back gently so that the light shone
into the sorrow-laden eyes encircled by shadows.
Then he smiled suddenly down at the
mite, and she, perceiving that a ray of light had
suddenly pierced the all-pervading gloom, smiled back,
and catching his left hand in both of hers pressed
it to her forehead.
“Good Lord!” he muttered,
as a thrill ran through him at the unexpected and
oriental action.
And Fate, plucking in senile fashion
at the loose ends which lay nearest her old hand,
knotted two tightly together with a bit of rare golden
strand she kept tucked away in her bodice.
“And what shall we do when you
come? Can you ride? I know of a lovely
pony a little boy rides!”
Leonie shook her head mournfully,
feeling unconsciously but acutely the penalty of her
sex for the first time in her life.
“I can’t wide astwide,”
she sighed, “I haven’t any bweeches.
Jill and Maudie Wetherbourne always wide in skirts.
But I can swim,” she added quickly, “an’
jump in out of my depff. I learnt in the baff
at the seaside!”
“Oh! come along, child, do!”
broke in her aunt to her own undoing.
“Auntie jumps in too, though
she says she doesn’t,” proceeded Leonie
in a gallant effort to shore up her family’s
sporting reputation.
“I do not, Leonie!
I can’t imagine how you ever got such an idea
into your head!”
But Leonie, nothing daunted, shook
back her russet mop of hair and gave direct answer,
to the confusion of the domestic who happily stood
out of Lady Hetth’s eye-range.
“But, Auntie! I’ve
often heard Wilkins tell Nannie that you’ve
been in off the deep end before bweakfast! Oh!
do let me hold him just for ever such a little while!”
To save the expression of his face
Jan Cuxson had bent and lifted the pup by the scruff
of its neck, and upon the piteous appeal put it squirming
and wriggling in the outstretched arms.
Great tears dripped all over the animal
though Leonie stood on one foot, bit her underlip,
and squeezed the puppy to suffocation in a valiant
effort to restrain this appalling sign of weakness.
“Tell me what makes you cry like that?”
“My-my kitten was-was
stwangled by-by someone this morning, an’-an’
she was all soft an’-an’ fluffy
like-
The words ended in a paroxysm of sobs
muffled in the puppy’s coat whereupon it ecstatically
licked every visible part of the child’s neck,
whilst Ellen, throwing decorum to the winds, knelt
down and drew the shaking little figure into her arms.
“Anybody in there!” suddenly
and very gruffly asked Jan Cuxson, jerking his head
in the direction of the room where the few and favoured
awaited the pleasure of the specialist.
“No, Sir,” replied Ellen,
as she disentangled one of the puppy’s claws
from the lace on Leonie’s sleeve. “I’m
going to call my father! I don’t think
you understand your little girl very well!”
He spoke quite gently but his face
was white with anger, that almost terrifying rage
which surges over and through the mentally and physically
strong at the sight, or thought, of cruelty to the
small and weak.
He whistled two exceedingly sharp
notes and plunged his hands into his pockets, where
he scrunched up his keys and some loose change.