THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed.
Thorpe found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined himself seated with four ladies at a table--three of them, moreover, ladies of title--and doing it all so well.
For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their deportment the previous evening.
They seemed now to be as simple and fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.
The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well, accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything he said as amusing.
"Oh, when we're by ourselves," the kindly little old hostess explained to him, "my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of habits. Why we do it Icouldn't say--because he never comes down in any event.
He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining.
We're only too glad--for his sake."
"And Balder," commented the sister, "he's as bad the other way.
He gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we never see him till luncheon.""I've been on the point of asking so many times,"Miss Madden interposed--"is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in Matthew Arnold's poem?""It was his father's choice," Lady Plowden made answer.
"I think the Viking explanation is the right one--it certainly isn't in either family. I can't say that it attracted me much--at first, you know.""Oh, but it fits him so splendidly," said Lady Cressage.
"He looks the part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier names--and you have only to look at him to see that he was predestined for a soldier from his cradle.""I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then," put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. "The poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous, as his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition with the Army, and he's mad about everything military--and surely he's as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and yet that suffices to prevent his serving his Queen.
And all over England there are young gentlemen like that--the very pick of the hunting-fields, strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men England wants to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief over last time?--because they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran that's the capital of Persia.
"They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the point of the bayonet--and find out their names afterward--but it seems that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages--and much good they will do us when the time of trouble comes!""Then you think the purchase-system was better?"asked the American lady. "It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously.""Prefer it?" said Lady Plowden. "A thousand times yes! My husband made one of the best speeches in the debate on it--one do I say?--first and last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it would have been those speeches.
He pointed out all the evils that would follow the change.
You might have called it prophetic--the way he foresaw what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular, of course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.
"As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do they respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his learning? Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him with the greatest contempt.
The man they will serve is the man whose birth gives him the right to command them, or else the man with money in his pockets to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders they understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace, among our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away from England, in a time of war?""But, mamma," the Hon. Winifred intervened, "don't you see how badly that might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little money, and all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people--and so on? It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and I'm sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot."Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness.
"You see so little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of its movements.
The people who make fortunes in England are every whit as important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually I'm sure they are often much more deserving.
