"_Wouldn't_ I?"
"My sweet!" Her arm went round his slight, square shoulders. She doted on the little amber freckles on his pure, healthy skin, the little drake's tail of silky red-brown hair at the nape of his brown neck, the half-shy, half-bold curve of his mouth as he smiled, the blue sparkle of his eye glancing sidewise up at her. She found in the pure warmth and sweetness of the slight young body leaning against her, a healing, comforting balm.
"Why aren't you my little brother, Bawne?" she said, hugging him closer. He answered after an instant's thought:
"If my mother could be your mother too, it would be jolly! Not unless! ..."
He was not going to take on Mildred for anybody. Patrine sighed pensively.
"That's what I used to cry for when I was a little pig-tailed girl, my sonny. More than anything I wanted to belong to Aunt Lynette. But she's so young--only thirty-three. She couldn't be my mother."
"No." His eyes considered her face gravely. "Of course not. You're far too old. How old are you, Cousin Pat?"
"How old am I?" A shudder went through her. "Nineteen in August. And I feel about a hundred and one."
"That's 'cos you're not well!" His eyes were anxious and a little pucker showed between his reddish eyebrows. "You're not going to be ill--are you?" he asked in alarm.
"Not I!" She murmured it caressingly in her deep, soft voice. "My pet, don't worry. Everything's all right with me!--perfectly all right and O.K.! Only talk to me. Don't let me keep on thinking. Things are never so--bally rotten if you can stop brooding over them."
Why did she look like that? What had somebody done to hurt her? His boyish hand clenched, the thumb well turned in over the knuckles. Instinctively Bawne knew that the Enemy, who had stamped that dreadful look of frozen misery on the face of his beloved, white as ivory or old snow in its strange setting of flaming tresses--was of his own sex.
All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of Panshaw's, the song of the air-screw had not been absent from her ears. The tractor of the practice-engine roared fitfully, like a tiger being prodded in its den by a spiteful keeper's meat-fork. The propellers of the double-engined passenger-buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's pilots followed the pointing arms of the red, white, and blue pylons marking the limits of the air-circuit, or were silent as the machines dropped to earth within the huge white circles where a giant T indicated "Land."
This was not a show day when visitors' half-crowns rattled unceasingly into the boxes at the turnstile. The rows of green-painted chairs behind the whitewashed iron railings of the spectators' enclosure were but thinly patronised by friends of people taking passenger-flights. No man with a megaphone announced events forthcoming or imminent. No white flag fell for the start, no pistol cracked signifying the conclusion of a race.
Three men occupied the Judge's stand behind the Committee enclosure. One, small and dapper, in a frock-coat and topper, kept his eye on what was probably a stop-watch. Another, stout, bearded, and straw-hatted, was absorbedly gazing at the sky through a big pair of Zeiss binoculars. The third, in the uniform of a commissionaire, was an employe of the School. No one manifested any particular interest in them or their occupation. The sparse general public were not enlightened as to the reason of their presence on the Judge's stand.
"Talk," Patrine said, clinging to Bawne, her slender plank in moral shipwreck. "Tell me what Sir Roland and the Doctor are waiting to see. What is that thin man doing with the stop-watch and the note-book? And the fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the sky through those big field-glasses. Nothing is billed to happen--there are no numbers up on the pylons--yet something seems to be going on!"
"Rather!"
The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and began to dance up and down under the arm that rested on his neck.
"_Rather_! Didn't you know? How funny! Why, man alive, we're waiting for _him_!"
"For him?"
"For Mr. Sherbrand. Father's friend. The Flying Man I've told you about."
"Mr.---- Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking all about her. In the tumult of her thoughts the name that had been upon a crumpled card suggested no association with that so rapturously uttered by the boy.
"There!" Bawne pointed upwards with another of the excited laughs. "Carrying out a hovering-test. The man with the stop-watch is timing him, and the other with the binnocs is observing him. He's French--no end of an official swell! The French Government sent him," went on the boy, with infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his invention. He thought they didn't catch on, but the hoverer has fetched them. If he hovers for twenty minutes, ten thousand feet up, his fortune's made!--I heard a fellow say so to the Instructor. Man alive! isn't it topping that you and I should be here to-day!"
*CHAPTER XXVII*
*SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY*
While yet the Bird of War hovered invisible at ten thousand feet of altitude, and the lungs of the men aboard her toiled and laboured, and foam gathered about their nostrils and lips, Saxham stood talking with the man who in his eyes ranked above all others, the tried and trusty friend of fourteen years.
In those unforgettable months of the Siege of Gueldersdorp you might have noticed a crow's foot or so at the corner of the Chief's keen falcon-eyes. To-day, their hazel brightness undiminished, they looked at Life from a network of fine criss-crossed lines. But Time, the spider, had spun no web in the fine alert brain, and the man's heart was free from crow's feet or wrinkles. Fresh and evergreen, it was as it would always be, an oasis of kindness for the downhearted or weary, watered by the twin wells of sympathy and enthusiasm. He said, speaking to Saxham of the invisible Sherbrand:
"I wish we had a million like him!"
Saxham answered:
"I wish we had several millions. He is a fine, energetic type. A bit of a hero-worshipper--a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a stoic: '_He hath seen men rise to authority without envy, and schooled himself to endure adversity, that he might bear himself the better when his time should come to rule._'"
"His time is coming, or I am no judge of capability. And you quoted from the _Encheiridion_ of Epictetus, I think? I've always found good reading-meat in that and the _Discourses_. Used to carry a little sixpenny copy about in my pocket, until I wore it to rags."
"I have often seen and noted its raggedness, and its uncompromising Isabella-hue!"
"It was negroid in complexion before the Relief of Gueldersdorp. Perhaps you won't be astonished when I tell you I have got it now." The Chief's smiling eyes narrowed in laughter. "My wife has bound it gorgeously, and with other volumes of my Siege library, it occupies a special and most sacred shelf near my writing-desk at home."
He went on:
"This fine fellow Sherbrand is an old correspondent of mine. He would say I might tell you the story, and I think it's worth hearing, in a way. It must be eight years ago, when he would be about seventeen, that he wrote to me from an engineering college at Newcastle, to say he had read some papers of mine on the subject of scouting, and proposed--if I thought it would not be presumption on his part--save the mark!--to enrol and organise a troop on the lines laid down. He wanted a definite code of Scout law to work on, and Rules and so forth, all of which I supplied him, you may be sure. Busy as I was drilling and cub-licking the North British Territorials, I couldn't find time to spare to run up and see the boy. So he commandeered a holiday and motor-cycled to Headquarters. Rode all through one night in pelters of rain, and caught me in my 5 A.M. tub."
"He meant business."
"Business--and it was up to me to encourage such grittiness and enthusiasm. So I ordered coffee for two, and bacon and eggs for half a dozen, and when I had fed him I talked. My book wasn't published, but I lent him some proof-sheets. He thanked me, but before he took them he had to disburden his mind."
The fine sunburnt hand went thoughtfully to the grizzled moustache, worn rather longer than of old.
"He had got something on his mind. He had been reading that old bogey-book, _Hales on Mental Heredity_, and the theory of the transmission of base or criminal tendencies from the parents to the children, had haunted him night and day. He said to me, standing up before me, looking about as long and thin as a fathom of pump-water: 'My father was dismissed from the Army in War-time, for not backing up his C.O. Is there a kink in _my_ brain or a bacillus lying waiting in _my_ body that will one day make a slacker of me?"
Saxham's square face was ashen, but the Chief's eyes were elsewhere.
"And you told him----?"
"I told him, that whilst physical disease and deformity are transmissible from the unhealthy parents to their unlucky offspring, no sensible Christian regarded the theory of inherited vice or crime, as anything but the most pernicious lie that the devil ever invented to spread as a net for the catching of bodies and souls. That seemed to buck him up!"