The Unknown Ajax

She had, in fact, seized the excuse afforded by Lord Darracott’s asking Richmond some question, across Lady Aurelia, to try to draw into conversation the poor young man who was being, she felt, shamefully neglected. She wanted to know if he had found all he needed in his bedchamber, and to tell him, with a motherly smile, that he had only to ask her, or the housekeeper, if there was anything he wished for. He thanked her, but assured her that there was nothing: he would be very comfortable.

Claud, satisfied that his grandfather’s attention was being engaged by Vincent, shook his head. “You won’t,” he said. “Couldn’t be. I don’t know where they’ve put you, but it don’t signify: there ain’t a comfortable room in the house.”

“Nonsense!” said Matthew impatiently.

“Why, you said so yourself, sir!” exclaimed Claud. “What’s more, you always say it. The last time you had to come down here you said—”

“Oh, be quiet!” interrupted his father. “It is a very old house, and naturally—”

“Yes, and falling to bits,” corroborated Claud.

Matthew, eyeing him almost with dislike, said: “That remark, my good boy, is as false as it is foolish!”

“Well, if it ain’t falling to bits you can’t deny it’s being eaten to bits,” said Claud, quite unabashed. “The last time I had to come here, I was kept awake half the night by rats chewing the wainscoting.”

“Oh, not rats, Claud!” protested Mrs. Darracott. “Only a mouse! Not but what it’s perfectly true that the house does need repairing, while as for the linen, and some of the hangings, I declare I feel positively ashamed! Well, you know what it is, Matthew! Nothing I can say will induce your father—However, we won’t talk of that now! Though I do sometimes feel that if I have to spend another winter here, which, of course, I shall, I shall be crippled with rheumatism! None of the windows fits as it should, and the draught whistles through the house!”

“More like a hurricane,” said Claud. He nodded at Hugo. “You’ll find it out, coz. Of course, it’s summer now, so it ain’t so bad, but you wait for the winter! Take my advice, and don’t let ’em light a fire in your room: all the bedroom chimneys smoke, so you’re worse off than before.”

“Not all of them!” said Mrs. Darracott. “At least, not very much! Only when the wind is in the wrong quarter. I do hope—for it has begun to get so chilly in the evening now that Mrs. Flitwick is having a fire kindled in your room, Hugh! Oh, dear, I wonder if the wind is in the wrong quarter?”

“Nay, don’t fidget yourself on my account, ma’am!” Hugo said, laughing. “I’m not so nesh as my cousin! I’ve been used to sleep in a room that had a fire in the middle of the floor, and not so much as a vent to off the smoke, so it will need more than a puff or two blown down the chimney to make me uncomfortable.”

His voice, which was a deep one, had a carrying quality. His words were heard by everyone in the room, and were productive of a sudden, shocked silence. He glanced innocently round the table, and added: “A mud floor, of course.”

“How—how horrid for you!” said Mrs. Darracott faintly.

Chollacombe, with great presence of mind, refilled the Major’s glass at this moment, contriving, as he did so, to give him a warning nudge. The Major, not susceptible to hints, said cheerfully: “Oh, it was noan so bad! I was glad to have a roof over my head in those days!”

Mrs. Darracott looked wildly round for help, and received it from an unexpected quarter.

“Don’t look so dismayed, my dear aunt!” said Vincent. “The locality of this dismal dwelling-place was not, as I apprehend, Yorkshire, but Spain.”

“Portugal,” corrected Hugo, as impervious to insult as to hints.

“Most interesting!” pronounced Lady Aurelia majestically. “No doubt you have seen a great deal of the world during the course of your military service?”

“I have and-all!” agreed Hugo.

“The billeting arrangements in the Peninsula,” stated her ladyship, “left much to be desired.”

“Ay, sometimes they did, but at others, think on, they were better nor like,” said Hugo reflectively. “After Toulouse I shared quarters with the Smiths in a chateau, and lived like a prince. That was in France, of course. A chateau,” he explained, “is what the Frogs call a castle—though it wasn’t a castle, not by any means. You might call it a palace.”

“Our ignorance is now enlightened,” murmured Vincent.

“We all know what a chateau is!” snapped Lord Darracott.

“Ay, you would, of course,” said Hugo, on a note of apology. “Eh, but I thought myself in clover! I’d never been in such a place before—except when I was in prison, but you can’t reetly count that.”

James, the first footman, let a fork slide from the plate he had just removed from the table, but Charles, deftly nipping away the plate before Lady Aurelia, maintained his equilibrium. James was shocked, but Charles was storing up these revelations with glee. A rare tale to recount to his Dad, so niffy-naffy as he was about the Quality! Properly served out was old Stiff-Rump, with a jail-bird for his grandson!

“What?”thundered his lordship, glaring at his heir. “Do you tell me that you have been in prison?”

“Ay, but it wasn’t for long, sir,” replied Hugo. “Of course, I was nobbut a lad then, and it seemed a terrible thing to me. I had the fever, too, mortal bad!”

Claud, perceiving that the rest of the company was deprived of speech, made a gallant attempt to respond. “Nasty thing, jail-fever,” he said chattily. “Not had it myself, but so they tell me! Very glad you recovered from it, coz!”

“It was being transported set me to reets,” said Hugo. “A rare, tedious voyage we had of it, but—”

“Transported?”interjected his lordship, gripping the arms of his chair till his knuckles shone. “You were transported, sir?”

“We all were,” said Hugo. “The most of us three parts dead with fever, and that ashamed—! Eh, it doesn’t bear thinking on! Such a voyage as it was, too! Close on five months it was before we landed, for the transport I was on carried away its rudder in a gale, and we ran four hundred miles out of our course before the Swallow towed us into Falmouth, and then we had to sail on to the Downs before they’d let us ashore.”

A delightful chuckle broke from Richmond. “I thought that was it! You are the most complete hand, Cousin Hugo!”

“I collect,” said Matthew coldly, “that when you speak of having been imprisoned, and—er—transported, you mean that you were a prisoner-of-war?”

‘‘Why, what did you think I meant?” asked Hugo, much astonished.

“You must forgive us!” said Vincent, leaning forward to speak to him across Anthea. “The thought that you had been imprisoned for poaching, perhaps, did, I fancy, occur to some of us.”

“Nay! I’ve always been respectable!” countered Hugo.

At this point, Anthea, who had been surprised into turning her head to stare at him, lowered her eyes rather swiftly to her plate again, and took her underlip between her teeth. Matthew, far more conscious than his parent of the presence of the servants, said, with a tolerable assumption of amusement: “You are, as Richmond says, a complete hand. From the length of time your voyage lasted I am led to suppose that you took part in our ill-fated expedition to South America?”

“That’s reet,” nodded Hugo. “I joined as soon as I left—as soon as I was seventeen. I was gazetted to the 1st Battalion just in time to set sail with Whitelock. A rare piece of good fortune I thought it, but all I got out of it was a fever that mighty near carried me off, and a horse. I paid three dollars for him, I remember. Eh, but I was a Johnny Raw! I could have had him for two.”

“Did you take part in the assault on Buenos Ayres?” asked Richmond.

“I wouldn’t, myself, call it an assault,” replied Hugo.

“A disgracefully mismanaged affair!” said Matthew.

“Ay, we suffered a bad back-cast. Our people wrote up that General Whitelock was a coward, or a traitor, or maybe both, on all the street-corners in Montevideo, but, myself, I think he was no more than a sacklass hodgobbin.” He drank off his wine, and grinned. “The men used to drink success to greybeards but bad luck to white locks,” he disclosed.

“And then?” Richmond prompted.