The Unknown Ajax

anything but his own pleasure, pandered to his favourite grandson’s every extravagant whim. If coaxing did not move him, it was seldom that Richmond failed to bring him round his thumb by falling into a fit of despondency. That was how Richmond had come by the beautiful headstrong colt he had himself broken and trained. He had coaxed in vain. “Do you think I’ll help you to break your neck, boy?” had demanded his lordship. Richmond had not persisted, and even so clear-sighted a critic as his elder sister had been unable to accuse him of sulkiness. He was as docile as ever, as attentive to his grandfather, and quite uncomplaining. But he made it very evident that his spirits were wholly cast down; and within a week his dejection, besides throwing Mrs. Darracott into high fidgets, had won the colt for him. Anything, said Lord Darracott, was better than to have the boy so languid and listless.

It had been to cajole him out of silent despair at being told that under no circumstances would my lord buy him a pair of colours that his yacht had been bestowed on him. Suddenly Anthea wondered if the possession of a sailing vessel had been what he had all the time desired. She turned her eyes towards him, and said abruptly: “Do you still wish for a military career, Richmond?”

He had picked up one of the weekly journals from the table at his elbow, and was glancing through it, but he looked up quickly at that, his expressive eyes kindling. “I don’t care for anything else!”

‘Then—”

“You needn’t go on! Why don’t I persist? Why don’t I do this—or that—or the other? Because I know when my grandfather can’t be persuaded by anything I could do or say! That’s why! I’m under age—and if you are thinking that I might run off and take the King’s shilling, it’s the sort of hubble-bubble notion a female would get into her head! That’s not how I wish to join! I—oh, stop talking about it! I won’t talk about it! It’s over and done with! I daresay I shouldn’t have liked it, after all!”

He turned back to his journal, hunching an impatient shoulder, and Anthea said no more, knowing that it would be useless. She was deeply troubled, however, and not for the first time. He was spoilt, and wilful, but she loved him, and was wise enough to realize that his faults sprang from his upbringing and were to be laid at Lord Darracott’s door.

He had been a sickly, undersized baby, succumbing to every childish ailment: not at all the sort of grandson that might have been expected to occupy Lord Darracott’s heart. His lordship, indeed, had paid scant heed to him until it was forcibly borne in upon him that the frail scrap whom he despised was possessed of a demon of intrepidity. But from the day when a terrified groom had carried into the house a baby who screamed: “Put me down, put me down! I can ride him! I can!” and had learned from this trembling individual that his tiny grandson had (by means unknown and unsuspected) got upon the back of one of his own hunters and put this great, rawboned creature at the gate that led out of the stableyard, he had adored Richmond. There had been no bones broken, but the child had been stunned by the inevitable fall, and shockingly bruised. “Let me go!” he had commanded imperiously. “I will ride him, I will, I will, I will! ”

Nothing could have made a greater hit with my lord. Himself a man of iron nerve, he was at once surprised and exultant to discover in the weakling of the family a fearlessness that matched his own. There was no more talk of puling brats or miserable squeeze-crabs: thenceforward little Richmond figured in his grandfather’s conversation as a right one, game as a pebble; and my lord, who had suffered scarcely a day’s illness in his life, very soon became more morbidly anxious about the state of his darling’s health than was Richmond’s fond mama. Poor Mrs. Darracott, labouring for six years under the stigma of being a doting idiot who cosseted her whelp to death, suddenly, and to her considerable bewilderment, underwent a transformation, changing, almost overnight, into an unnatural parent to whose callous neglect every one of her son’s ailments could be attributed. She bore the slur with fortitude, too thankful for my lord’s change of heart to resent the injustice to herself. She had dreaded the day when she would be forced to send her delicate son to Eton, but when that day dawned it had been my lord, not she, who had decreed that Richmond must be educated at home. At the time, Anthea, four years older than her brother, had been as glad as she that Richmond was not to be subjected to the rigours of boarding-school; it was not until several years had passed that she realized, looking back, that by the time he was eleven Richmond had largely outgrown his delicacy of constitution. Today, a little more than eighteen years old, he was certainly a thin youth, but he seemed to have no other weakness than a tendency towards insomnia. As a child, the slightest stir in his room had jerked him wide-awake, and this idiosyncrasy had remained with him, causing him to choose for his own a bedchamber as far removed from the main body of the house as was possible; to bolt his door; and to forbid his solicitous family to come near him once he had retired for the night. None of them ever did so, but it was only Anthea who suspected that the prohibition sprang from a strong dislike of being teased by offers of hot bricks, drops of laudanum, supporting broths, or saline draughts, rather than from an inability to drop off to sleep again once he had been roused. No one, she thought (but privately), who suffered from disturbed nights could be as energetic as Richmond.

He was certainly looking heavy-eyed this evening, yawning from time to time, as he flicked over the pages of the journal; but as he had begun to bring his hunters into condition, and had spent the morning at trotting exercise, following this up by soundly beating his sister in several games of battledore-and-shuttlecock, before going off to shoot rabbits in a turnip-field, it would have been surprising had he not looked weary at the end of the day.

He glanced up presently from the journal, as a thought occurred to him, and said, with a gleam of decidedly impish amusement: “I wouldn’t be in that fellow’s shoes for a fortune, would you?”

“Our unknown cousin? No, indeed I wouldn’t! If he’s not up to the rig, Grandpapa will behave abominably, and we shall all be put to the blush. What do you think he will be like, Richmond? It seems to me that if he’s a military man he can’t be very vulgar. Unless—Good God, he isn’t just a common soldier, is he?”

“Rifleman. No, of course he—Lord, I never thought of that!” said Richmond, in an awed tone. He grinned appreciatively. “Well, if that is the way of it it will mean the devil to pay, won’t it? I wonder if my uncle knows what Grandpapa has in store, or whether—Vincent, too! I’ll tell you what Anthea, I don’t give a fig for Uncle Matthew, but I think it’s a curst shame that Vincent should be cut out by this mushroom!”

She did not answer, for at that moment Mrs. Darracott came back into the room.

Chapter 2

It was instantly apparent to her children that Mrs. Darracott had not been summoned by her father-in-law to discuss such trivialities as the arrangements to be made for the reception of his heir. She was looking slightly dazed; but when Anthea asked her if my lord had been unkind, she replied in a flustered way: “No, no! Nothing like that! Well, that is to say—Except for—Not that I regarded it, for it was nothing out of the ordinary, and I hope I know better than to take a pet over a trifle. I must own, too, that I can’t be astonished at his being vexed to death over this business. It is excessively awkward! However, he doesn’t lay the blame at my door: you mustn’t think that!”

“I should think not indeed!” exclaimed Anthea between amusement and indignation. “How could he possibly do so?”

“No, very true, my love!” agreed Mrs. Darracott. “I thought that myself, but it did put me on the fidgets when Richmond said he wanted to see me, because, in general, you know, things I never even heard about turn out to be my fault. However, as I say, it wasn’t so today. Now, where did I put my thimble? I must finish darning that shocking rent before your aunt arrives tomorrow.”

“No, that you shan’t!” declared Anthea, removing the work-box out of her mother’s reach. “You are big with news, Mama!”

“I am—sure I haven’t the least guess why you should think so. And you shouldn’t say things like that! It is most improper!”

“But not by half as improper as to try to bamboozle your children! Now, Mama, you know you can’t do it! What has Grandpapa disclosed to you? Instantly tell us!”

“Nothing at all!” asserted the widow, looking ridiculously guilty. “Good gracious, as though he ever told me anything! How can you be so absurd?”