Master and Maid. L. Allen Harker

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СКАЧАТЬ by there came the twins, who were known as "the Balliol Babies."

      Fitz, to the disappointment of all his friends, was called to the Irish, not the English, Bar. But he was Irish before all else, and declared that his brilliant abilities were far too precious and illuminating to be taken out of his own country.

      He practised with some success in Dublin. People began to talk of him as a young lawyer who had arrived, when Alice met with the carriage accident which caused her death.

      Fitz threw up all his prospects at the Bar, left Ireland, and, with the two children and their old nurse, wandered about Europe for a while, finally settling them in a tiny hill-side villa near the village of Veulettes, in Normandy, with an old French lady, in charge as governess. It happened at that time that his own little property near Cahirciveen in County Kerry, which had been let on a long lease during his minority, fell vacant, and Fitz went back there for the spring months, taking Madame, his French cook, and his children with him. He kept on the villa at Veulettes, and the family lived alternately in Kerry and in Normandy, as it happened to suit its erratic head. Fitz was a keen fisherman, and a good shot. The fishing at Cahirciveen was beyond reproach. When he wanted good hunting he took a little house for the season either in Kildare or some hunting county in England, and wherever he went Madame and Lallie, the Irish nurse and Celestine the French cook, went in his train, and they were joined in the vacations by Paddy, who had been sent to preparatory school at a very tender age.

      Tony's pipe went out as he sat thinking of the innumerable vacations he had spent with the Clonmells; of their warm-hearted and tireless hospitality shown to him wherever that somewhat nomadic family happened to be. No one knew better than Tony Bevan that Fitzroy Clonmell would gladly share all he possessed with him, to the half of his kingdom; and looking back down the long valley of years that lay behind him, Tony could not see one that was not brightened by a thousand kindnesses from Fitz. From the time he came as an ugly little fourth-form boy to Hamchester, where Fitz was the idol of the lower school, the admiration of all the bloods, and the trial and terror of most of the masters, he had nothing to remember of him but good-nature, good feeling, and good friendship. Fitz was casual, erratic, eccentric; nothing was stable about him except his affections. The affections of his friends he often strained almost to the snapping point by his irritating incapacity for observing regular days or hours or ordinary conventions; but somehow the strained affections always contracted into place again, and people shrugged their shoulders and exclaimed, "Just like Fitz!" and forgave him in the long run, till he made them angry again, when a precisely similar process was repeated.

      Tony saw as in a vision innumerable pictures of Lallie as an elf-like small girl who always responded with enthusiastic affection to the rather shy advances of the strong ugly young man who was so good at games, so popular with his fellow sportsmen, so extremely shy in any other society.

      Every stranger noticed handsome Paddy, even as a baby; but for the most part they passed Lallie by in her childhood, and Tony's notice and affection were very precious to her. He and the quaint, pale-faced little girl had much in common: they understood one another. He hadn't seen Lallie for over a year, and during that time she had changed and developed. Her manner had acquired a certain poise and balance wholly lacking to the wild, shy nymph of Irish river and Norman hillside that he knew so well.

      Old Madame's death had made her not only more than ever the companion of her father, but it had also made her mistress of his house, and Lallie had found in herself all sorts of latent powers and possibilities, hitherto wholly unsuspected, and these had crystallised into qualities. Tony realised that while she was temperamentally the same Lallie--subtle, sensitive, responsive to every smallest change in the mental atmosphere--a new Lallie had arisen, who would be by no means so easily dealt with, and a shrewd suspicion flashed across his mind that Fitzroy Clonmell was equally aware of the change, and that with his customary cleverness he had shifted the responsibility on to other shoulders than his own.

      Tony sat so still that Val came from under the chair, stretched himself, and laid his head softly on his master's knees, regarding him with tenderly inquiring eyes. The clock on the mantelpiece struck twelve, and Tony arose.

      "Time for bed, old chap," he said, "but we'll have a look at the night first."

      He and the dog went out into the garden, and Tony looked up at the black bulk of the house against the moonlit sky. The great dormitories in the wing lay stark and silent, all their teeming life wrapped in the silence of healthy boyhood's slumber; and there too, in Miss Foster's room above his own study, lay Lallie--Lallie, with her bodyguard of fifty boys. He smiled at the quaint fancy. Val rubbed himself against his master's legs.

      "Well, Val, we must do our best to take care of her," said Tony, "but I can't have her flirting with my boys and upsetting them. That would never do. However, it isn't as if she was one of those flaringly pretty girls that every fellow turns round to look at."

      Somehow this reflection did not seem to afford much comfort to Tony. A vision of Lallie's face lifted to his as she said good-night came between him and the comfortable assurance that she, at all events, was not pretty. How soft her dark hair was!--and it smelt of violets. Poor little motherless, warm-hearted Lallie!

      He saw Val comfortably settled in his basket, and went quietly up the dark staircase. He paused outside Lallie's door to listen; all was perfectly still. In another half-hour every soul in B. House was fast asleep.

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