Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 20

He had ordered claret--a bottle of Lafitte, the best the house could produce--and the waiter, impressed a little by the choice, now appeared noiselessly, almost deferentially, at his elbow, and poured out a first gla.s.sful of the wine.

'Waiter!'

'Yessir!'

'Where does that music come from?'--for the sound of an antiquated piano had been thrumming for some minutes from a distant room.

The music was not ambitious--an old set of quadrille tunes.

The colonel did not recognise it. He had no ear at all for music, and could just distinguish the quickstep of his regiment from 'G.o.d save the Queen.' In fact, when he paid any attention at all to music (and this was rare), it gave him no sensation beyond a vague discomfort.

'It comes from the a.s.sembly Room, sir, at the back of the Court.'

'Ah! yes, I remember the old a.s.sembly Room. Some one is giving a ball to-night?'

The waiter smiled indulgently. 'Oh no, sir! It's Miss Wallas's dancing-cla.s.s breaking up--that's all.'

'Breaking up?' echoed the colonel, whose mind was sometimes a trifle slow in the uptake.

'She rents the room alternate Fridays, sir, and usually gives 'em a little treat just before Christmas. I don't know,' pursued the waiter, meditatively laying two fingers wide on his chin, 'as many people would call it a treat. But the little 'uns likes dressing up in their evening frocks, and the buns and lemonade is well enough for their time of life. There used to be a fiddle too, as well as the piano; but the cla.s.s hev fallen off considerable of late.

The management don't like it too well. But there's a notion 'twould be unfeelin' to stop it. She's been carrying it on all these years, and her aunt before her. But if it annoys you, sir, I can say a word at the office and get it stopped.'

'Heaven forbid!' said the colonel. But the music made him uncomfortable, nevertheless. It broke off, and started again upon a waltz tune. After the waltz came a mazurka, and after the mazurka another set of quadrilles. And still, as he sipped his claret, the successive tunes wove themselves into old memories haunting the coffee-room--ghostly memories! Yet he had no will to escape them.

Outside he could see the crowd jostling to and fro on the opposite pavement. The lights within a chemist's shop, s.h.i.+ning through bottles of coloured water in its window, threw splashes of colour-- green, crimson, orange--on the eager faces as they went by.

Colonel Baigent rose half impatiently, drew down the blind, and, returning to his chair, sat alone with the ghosts.

The waiter brought dessert--a plateful of walnuts and dried figs.

He cracked a walnut and peeled it slowly, still busy with his thoughts. For a while these thoughts were all in a far past; but by-and-by a stray thread carried him down to the year 'fifty-seven-- and snapped suddenly. His thoughts always broke off suddenly at the year 'fifty-seven--the Mutiny year. In that year he had won his Victoria Cross and, along with it, a curious tone in his voice, an inexpressible gentleness with all women and children, certain ineradicable lines in his face (hidden though they were by his drooping moustache and absurd old-fas.h.i.+oned whiskers); also a certain very grave simplicity when addressing the Almighty in his prayers.

But he never thought of the year 'fifty-seven if he could help it.

And as a spider, its thread snapping, drops upon the floor, so Colonel Baigent fell to earth out of his dreaming.

With a sudden impulse of his hands against the table's edge, he thrust back the chair and stood erect. His bottle of claret was all but empty, and he bethought him that he had left his cigar-case upstairs. His bedroom lay on the farther side of the courtyard and on his way to it he pa.s.sed the tall windows of the a.s.sembly Room close enough to fling a glance inside.

The dancers were all children--little girls of all ages from eight to fourteen, in pretty frocks of muslin--pink, blue, and white; with a sprinkling of awkward boys in various fas.h.i.+on of evening dress.

On his way back, having lit his cigar, he paused for a longer look.

The piano was tinkling energetically, the company dancing a polka, and with a will. The boys were certainly an awkward lot, so the Colonel decided, and forthwith remembered his own first pair of white kid gloves and the horrible self-consciousness he had indued with them. He went back to the room where the waiter had laid his coffee.

The polka, as it proved, was the last dance on the programme; for the colonel had scarcely settled himself again before the piano strummed out 'G.o.d save the Queen'--which, as has been said, was one of the tunes he knew. He stood erect, alone in the empty room, and so waited gravely for the last bar. A rush of feet followed; a pause for robing; then childish voices in the courtyard wis.h.i.+ng each other 'Good-night!' and 'A merry Christmas!' Then a very long pause, and the colonel supposed that all the young guests were gone.

But they were not all gone; for as he resumed his seat, and reached out a hand for his case, to choose another cigar, he happened to throw a glance towards the doorway. And there, in the shadow of a heavy curtain draping it, stood a little girl.

She might have pa.s.sed for a picture of Red Riding-Hood; for she wore a small scarlet cloak over her muslin frock, and the hood of it had been pulled forward and covered all but a margin of hair above the brows. The colour of her hair was a bright auburn, that of her eyebrows so darkly brown as to seem wellnigh black; and altogether she made a remarkable little figure, standing there in the doorway, with a pair of white satin dancing-shoes clutched in her hand.

'Oh!' said the colonel. 'Good-evening!'

'O-o-oh!' answered the child, and with a catch, as it were, and a thrill in the voice that astonished him. Her eyes, fixed on his, grew larger and rounder. She came a pace or two towards him on tiptoe, halted, clasped both hands over her dancing-shoes, and exclaimed, with a deeper thrill than before:--

'You are Colonel Baigent!'

'Eh?' The colonel sat bolt upright.

'Yes; and Aunt Louisa will be glad!'

He put a hand up to the crown of his head. 'Good Lord!' he murmured, staring wildly around the room, and then slowly fastening his gaze upon the child--at most she could not be more than nine years old-- confronting him. 'Good Lord! Will she?'

'Yes; and so am I!' She nodded, and her eyes seemed to be devouring while they wors.h.i.+pped him. 'But wasn't it clever of me to know you at once?'

'It's--it's about the cleverest thing I've come across in all my born days,' stammered Colonel Baigent, collapsing into his chair, and then suddenly clutching the arms of it and peering forward.

'But, of course, I've known you for ever so long, really,' she went on, and nodded again as if to rea.s.sure him.

'Oh! "of course," is it? I--I say, won't you sit down and have a nut or two--or a fig?'

'Thank you.' She gave him quite a grown-up bow, and seated herself.

'I'll take a fig; nuts give you the indigestion at this time of night.' She picked up a fig demurely, and laid it on a plate he pushed towards her. 'I hope I'm behaving nicely?' she said, looking up at him with the most engaging candour; 'because Aunt Louisa says you always had the most beautiful manners. In fact, that's what made her take to you, long--oh! ever so long--before you became famous.

And now you're the Bayard of India!'

'But, excuse me--'

She had begun to munch her fig, but interrupted him with another nod.

'Yes, I know what you are going to say. That's the name they give to another general out in India, don't they? But Aunt Louisa declares he won't hold a candle to you--though I don't know why he should want to do anything of the sort.'

'It's uncommonly kind of your Aunt Louisa--' he began again.

'Do you know her?' the child asked, with disconcerting directness.

'That's just the trouble with me' Colonel Baigent confessed.

'She is my great-aunt, really. She lives in Little Swithun, right at the back of Dean's Close; and her name is on a bra.s.s plate--a very hard name to p.r.o.nounce, "Miss Lapenotiere, Dancing and Calisthenics"--that's another hard word, but it means things you do with an elastic band to improve your figure. The plate doesn't azackly tell the truth, because she has been an invalid for years now, and Aunt Netta--that's my other aunt--had to carry on the business. But everybody knows about it, so there really is no deceit. Aunt Netta's name is Wallas, and so is mine. Her mother was sister to Aunt Louisa, and she tells us we come of very good family.

She never married. I don't believe she ever wanted to marry anybody but you, and now it's too late. But I call it splendid, your turning up like this. And on Christmas Eve, to!'

'It's beginning to be splendid,' owned the colonel, who had partly recovered himself. 'Unhappily--since you put it so--it is, I fear, a fact that I never met your Aunt Louisa.'

'Oh! but you did--in the street, and once in the post office, when you were a boy at the college.'

'Such impressions are fleeting, my dear, as you will live to prove.

Your other aunt, Miss Netta--'

'Oh! she will have been born after your time,' said the child, with calm, unconscious cruelty. 'But you will see her presently. She has gone to the bar to pay the bill, and when she has finished disputing it she is bound to call for me.'

As if it had been waiting to confirm the prophecy, a voice called, 'Charis! Charis!' almost on the instant.

'That's my name,' said the child, helping herself to another fig, as a middle-aged face, wrinkled, with a complexion of parchment under a ma.s.s of tow-coloured hair, peered in at the doorway.

The colonel rose. 'Your niece, madam,' he began, 'has been entertaining me for these ten minutes--'

With that he stopped, perceiving that, after a second glance at him, the eyes of Aunt Netta, too, were growing round in her head.

'Charis, you naughty child! Sir, I do hope--but she has been troubling you, I am sure--' stammered Aunt Netta, and came to a full stop.