If Lord Plowden's guest had no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant keeper.
Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears, punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!"These cries, and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own. He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then, taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a plummet.
He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never have been a cleaner "kill."In the warming glow of his satisfaction in himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel delight of indescribable charm.
There came to him, from the woods, the shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and again the cry of "mark!" rose, strenuously addressed to him.
Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest of the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game carried by two of the boys;their combined prizes were eight birds and a rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.
"Well, Thorpe?" asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his mood. "I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?"Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note.
"Let some of the boys run over," he said slowly.
"There are nine birds within sight, and there are two or three in the bushes--but they may have got away.""Gad!" said Balder.
"Magnificent!" was his brother's comment--and Thorpe permitted himself the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.
The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything that remained of Thorpe's visit.
He set down to it without hesitation the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants.
The temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him, but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally at arm's length as a stranger to their caste.
Of course, his own restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the man of the pheasants.
Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was much in their company.
It was like no other day he had ever imagined to himself.
On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town, his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day. He had been so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were some things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out.
Of what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music of the voice lingered in his ears.
"And she is old Kervick's daughter!" he said to himself more than once.
