It is superfluous to this simple tale to narrate the conversation that befel on the departure of Nora. It was chiefly of a retrospective character, with disquisitions on such abstractions as the consolations that sometimes follow on the loss of a wealthy great-aunt, the difficulties of shaving with a "tennis elbow," the unchanging quality of certain emotions. This later topic was still under discussion when Nora burst into the room.

"Here's Sir Thomas!" she panted. "Muriel, fly! There's no time to get downstairs, but Mary Ann Whooly said we could go into the room off this sitting-room till he's gone."

Flight is hardly the term to be applied to the second Miss Purcell's retreat, and it says a good deal for the Inspector's mental collapse that he saw nothing ludicrous in her retreating back, clad as it was in his own covert coat, with a blanket like the garment of an Indian brave trailing beneath it. Nora tore open a door near the fireplace, and revealed a tiny room containing a table, a broken chair, and a heap of feathers near an old feather bed on the floor.

"Get in, Muriel!" she cried.

They got in, and as the door closed on them Sir Thomas entered the room.

During the morning the ident.i.ty of the stranger on whom he had poured the vials of his wrath, with the Local Government Board Inspector whom he was prepared to be delighted to honour, had been brought home to Sir Thomas, and nothing could have been more handsome and complete than the apology that he now tendered. He generously admitted the temptation endured in seeing hounds get away with a good fox on a day devoted to cubbing, and even went so far as to suggest that possibly Captain Clarke--

"Hamilton-Clarke," said the Inspector.

"Had ridden so hard in order to stop them."

"Er--quite so," said the Inspector.

Something caused the dressing-room door to rattle, and Captain Hamilton-Clarke grew rather red.

"My wife and I hope," continued Sir Thomas, urbanely, "that you will come over to dine with us to-morrow evening, or possibly to-night."

He stopped. A trap drove rapidly up to the door, and Lady Purcell's voice was heard agitatedly inquiring "if Miss Muriel and Miss Nora were there? Casey had just told her--"

The rest of the sentence was lost.

"Why, that _is_ my wife!" said Sir Thomas. "What the deuce does she want here?"

A strange sound came from behind the door of the dressing-room: something between a stifled cry and a laugh. The Inspector's ears became as red as blood. Then from within there was heard a sort of rush, and something fell against the door. There followed a wholly uncontrolled yell and a crash, and the door was burst open.

It has, I think, been mentioned that in the corner of the dressing-room in which the Misses Purcell had taken refuge there was on the floor the remains of a feather bed. The feathers had come out through a ragged hole in one corner of it; Nora, in the shock of hearing of Lady Purcell's arrival, trod on the corner of the bed and squeezed more of the feathers out of it. A gush of fluff was the result, followed by a curious and unaccountable movement in the bed, and then from the hole there came forth a corpulent and very mangy old rat. Its face was grey and scaly, and horrid pink patches adorned its fat person. It gave one beady glance at Nora, and proceeded with hideous composure to lope heavily across the floor towards the hole in the wall by which it had at some bygone time entered the room. But the hole had been nailed up, and as the rat turned to seek another way of escape the chair upon which Muriel had incontinently sprung broke down, depositing her and her voluminous draperies on top of the rat.

I cannot feel that Miss Purcell is to be blamed that at this moment all power of self-control, of reason almost, forsook her. Regardless of every other consideration, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the blankets and the covert-coat skirts into one ma.s.sive handful, and with, as has been indicated, a yell of housemaid stridency, flung herself against the door and dashed into the sitting-room, closely followed by Nora, and rather less closely by the rat. The latter alone retained its presence of mind, and without an instant's delay hurried across the room and retired by the half-open door. Immediately from the narrow staircase there arose a series of those acclaims that usually attend the progress of royalty, and, in even an intenser degree, of rats. There came a masculine shout, a shrill and ladylike scream, a howl from Mary Ann Whooly, accompanied by the clang and rattle of a falling coal box, and then Lady Purcell, pale and breathless, appeared at the doorway of the sitting-room.

"Sure the young ladies isn't in the house at all, your ladyship!" cried the pursuing voice of Mary Ann Whooly, faithful, even at this supreme crisis, to a lost cause.

Lady Purcell heard her not. She was aware only of her daughter Muriel, attired like a scarecrow in a cold climate, and of the attendant fact that the arm of the Local Government Board Inspector was encircling Muriel's waist, as far as circ.u.mstances and a brown woollen shawl would permit. Nora, leaning half-way out of the window, was calling at the top of her voice for Sir Thomas's terrier; Sir Thomas was very loudly saying nothing in particular, much as an angry elderly dog barks into the night. Lady Purcell wildly concluded that the party was rehearsing a charade--the last scene of a very vulgar charade.

"Muriel!" she exclaimed, "_what_ have you got on you? And who--" She paused and stared at the Inspector. "Good gracious!" she cried, "why, it's Aubrey Hamilton!"

THE BAGMAN'S PONY

When the regiment was at Delhi, a T.G. was sent to us from the 105th Lancers, a bagman, as they call that sort of globe-trotting fellow that knocks about from one place to another, and takes all the fun he can out of it at other people's expense. Scott in the 105th gave this bagman a letter of introduction to me, told me that he was bringing down a horse to run at the Delhi races; so, as a matter of course, I asked him to stop with me for the week. It was a regular understood thing in India then, this pa.s.sing on the T.G. from one place to another; sometimes he was all right, and sometimes he was a good deal the reverse--in any case, you were bound to be hospitable, and afterwards you could, if you liked, tell the man that sent him that you didn't want any more from him.

The bagman arrived in due course, with a rum-looking roan horse, called the "Doctor"; a very good horse, too, but not quite so good as the bagman gave out that he was. He brought along his own gra.s.s-cutter with him, as one generally does in India, and the gra.s.s-cutter's pony, a sort of animal people get because he can carry two or three more of these beastly clods of gra.s.s they dig up for horses than a man can, and without much regard to other qualities. The bagman seemed a decentish sort of chap in his way, but, my word! he did put his foot in it the first night at mess; by George, he did! There was somehow an idea that he belonged to a wine merchant business in England, and the Colonel thought we'd better open our best cellar for the occasion, and so we did; even got out the old Madeira, and told the usual story about the number of times it had been round the Cape. The bagman took everything that came his way, and held his tongue about it, which was rather damping. At last, when it came to dessert and the Madeira, Carew, one of our fellows, couldn't stand it any longer--after all, it _is_ aggravating if a man won't praise your best wine, no matter how little you care about his opinion, and the bagman was supposed to be a _connoisseur_.

"Not a bad gla.s.s of wine that," says Carew to him; "what do you think of it?"

"Not bad," says the bagman, sipping it, "Think I'll show you something better in this line if you'll come and dine with me in London when you're home next."

"Thanks," says Carew, getting as red as his own jacket, and beginning to splutter--he always did when he got angry--"this is good enough for me, and for most people here--"

"Oh, but n.o.body up here has got a palate left," says the bagman, laughing in a very superior sort of way.

"What do you mean, sir?" shouted Carew, jumping up. "I'll not have any d----d bagmen coming here to insult me!"

By George, if you'll believe me, Carew had a false palate, with a little bit of sponge in the middle, and we all knew it, _except the bagman_.

There was a frightful shindy, Carew wanting to have his blood, and all the rest of us trying to prevent a row. We succeeded somehow in the end, I don't quite know how we managed it, as the bagman was very warlike too; but, anyhow, when I was going to bed that night I saw them both in the billiard room, very tight, leaning up against opposite ends of the billiard table, and making shoves at the b.a.l.l.s--with the wrong ends of their cues, fortunately.

"He called me a d----d bagman," says one, nearly tumbling down with laughing.

"Told me I'd no palate," says the other, putting his head down on the table and giggling away there "best thing I ever heard in my life."

Every one was as good friends as possible next day at the races, and for the whole week as well. Unfortunately for the bagman his horse didn't pull off things in the way he expected, in fact he hadn't a look in--we just killed him from first to last. As things went on the bagman began to look queer and by the end of the week he stood to lose a pretty considerable lot of money, nearly all of it to me. The way we arranged these matters then was a general settling-up day after the races were over; every one squared up his books and planked ready money down on the nail, or if he hadn't got it he went and borrowed from some one else to do it with. The bagman paid up what he owed the others, and I began to feel a bit sorry for the fellow when he came to me that night to finish up. He hummed and hawed a bit, and then asked if I should mind taking an I.O.U. from him, as he was run out of the ready.

Of course I said, "All right, old man, certainly, just the same to me,"

though it's usual in such cases to put down the hard cash, but still--fellow staying in my house, you know--sent on by this pal of mine in the 11th--absolutely nothing else to be done.

Next morning I was up and out on parade as usual, and in the natural course of events began to look about for my bagman. By George, not a sign of him in his room, not a sign of him anywhere. I thought to myself, this is peculiar, and I went over to the stable to try whether there was anything to be heard of him.

The first thing I saw was that the "Doctor's" stall was empty.

"How's this?" I said to the groom; "where's Mr. Leggett's horse?"

"The sahib has taken him away this morning."

I began to have some notion then of what my I.O.U. was worth.

"The sahib has left his gra.s.s-cutter and his pony," said the _sais_, who probably had as good a notion of what was up as I had.

"All right, send for the gra.s.s-cutter," I said.

The fellow came up, in a blue funk evidently, and I couldn't make anything of him. Sahib this, and sahib that, and salaaming and general idiotcy--or shamming--I couldn't tell which. I didn't know a n.i.g.g.e.r then as well as I do now.

"This is a very fishy business," I thought to myself, "and I think it's well on the cards the gra.s.s-cutter will be out of this to-night on his pony. No, by Jove, I'll see what the pony's good for before he does that. Is the gra.s.s-cutter's pony there?" I said to the _sais_.

"He is there, sahib, but he is only a _kattiawa tattoo_," which is the name for a common kind of mountain pony.

I had him out, and he certainly was a wretched-looking little brute, dun with a black stripe down his back, like all that breed, and all bony and ragged and starved.

"Indeed, he is a _gareeb kuch kam ki nahin_," said the _sais_, meaning thereby a miserable beast, in the most intensified form, "and not fit to stand in the sahib's stable."

All the same, just for the fun of the thing, I put the gra.s.s-cutter up on him, and told him to trot him up and down. By George! the pony went like a flash of lightning! I had him galloped next; same thing--fellow could hardly hold him. I opened my eyes, I can tell you, but no matter what way I looked at him I couldn't see where on earth he got his pace from. It was there anyhow, there wasn't a doubt about that. "That'll do," I said, "put him up. And you just stay here," I said to the gra.s.s-cutter; "till I hear from Mr. Leggett where you're to go to. Don't leave Delhi till you get orders from me."

It got about during the day that the bagman had disappeared, and had had a soft thing of it as far as I was concerned. The 112th were dining with us that night, and they all set to work to draw me after dinner about the business--thought themselves vastly witty over it.