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