A Sheaf of Corn Part 30

"The guests sat down thirteen to table----"

"Well, so they did!" Nell recalled. "Now, that is really very clever of you, Ted. I'd quite forgotten. I was horribly frightened then--but I'd as clean as clean forgotten!"

"Well, there you are!" Ted said. "There's your moral."

"Where? Where?"

"Why, here we are, all alive and well and kicking; you and me, your daddy and mummy, your uncles and your cousins and your aunts."

"But supposing one of us wasn't!" Nell remarked sagely. "When you ask your thirteen to dinner and one dies it must be horrid; and I should think your guests might--might bring an action against you."

She was holding the hand he had just put up to meet hers, which was round his neck now, and a thought suddenly struck her. "But the year isn't up yet, Ted," she said.

The dinner had been an epoch in their young lives; they both remembered the date was the eighteenth of October. He pointed to the silver calendar on the chimney-piece, to which the parlour-maid attended.

"This is the eighteenth again," Ted said. "There aren't two eighteenths of October in one year."

Elinor was back in memories of the event. "Do you remember Aunt Carrie, and how ill she was? At the very verge of the grave. And how afraid mummy was she should notice there were thirteen? Now, here she is as well as any of us, and going to get married again. Ah! What are you doing, Ted?

"No, Ted! Oh, no, please! My hair will come down!"

"I'm getting another hairpin."

It was such pretty hair, he was always pleased to see it hanging about her ears, as had been its fas.h.i.+on when he had first met her--not so long ago. So he fought her for the hairpin while she ducked her head and threw it backwards, and laughed, and struggled in his grasp; to submit, of course, at last, to yield up the hairpin, to roast it, red hot in the fire, to watch it burn its malodorous pa.s.sage through his pipe.

That ceremony over, she got him his boots, and would have laced them for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings for him.

"You _have_ got nice calves, Ted!" she told him. "I don't think I could love even you if you had sticks of things like Robert Anstey's."

"Oh, Bob's legs'll do all right," Ted said, loyally. He stamped a foot into the second boot, and in doing so ground some of the broken vase beneath his heel. He filliped her cheek, then, smiling into her eyes--

"You and your old woman's superst.i.tions!" he said. "Perhaps you don't know I've a--what d'ye call it?--a portent in my own family--or had when I had a family," he told her, bending again over his boot. "Well, I have, then!"

"And what's a portent, silly? I daresay it's nothing to boast of."

"It's a little--white--DOG!"

He barked the last word at her, loud and sharp, his face suddenly projected into hers. She fell backward and sat on her heels.

"Ted! How horrid of you! What does it do?"

"I haven't the faintest notion."

"Are you making it up?"

"Not I. They all made it up. My father, and my grandfather, and the whole tribe. They stuck it into each other, and tried to stick it into me, that whenever one of us is going to die he sees this beastly little hound."

"Ted!" she was clinging to the calf she admired now, in an agreeable ecstasy of shuddering. "I wish I had a ghost, too."

"You shall have mine, with pleasure."

"But why didn't you tell me before?"

"I clean forgot it till this minute. My father told me about it when I was quite a little chap."

"But is it true, Ted?"

"Of course it isn't."

"And did they really see it?"

"They said they did. You may bet your life they didn't."

When he was ready to walk round the little domain he had inherited from his father, Elinor accompanied him to the gate. "I wouldn't have a little white dog for a ghost!" she said to him, slightingly, as they parted. "Anyone could have as good a ghost as that if they tried!"

"Everyone couldn't have an ancestor who had tortured one to death to spite his wife!" he said.

"You can see a dozen little white dogs any day," she taunted him.

"I saw one more than I wanted yesterday when I was out with my gun," he admitted. "That new little beast of Anstey's ran in front of me into every field and frightened the birds. I hardly had a shot."

"Tell Bob to keep it at home," advised Nell.

"I must," Ted acquiesced, and went.

In the course of the morning Bob Anstey, who always appeared some time during each day, came in. Elinor found him standing up by the chimney-piece, manipulating the silver calendar.

"You're a day too previous in your calculation," he said. "This isn't the eighteenth, but the seventeenth, madame."

"Well, how funny!" Elinor cried. "Now I wonder how Aunt Carrie is! I shall have to tell Ted the year isn't up, after all."

To Anstey that was rather a cryptic utterance, but he asked for no explanation. These two were full of little jokes, of allusions, of reminiscences, interesting to them, in which he had no part, close friends as they were.

"Can you spare Ted to me for an hour or two this afternoon?" he asked.

"She could not," she said, smiling; "she could never spare Ted."

"Then come along with us yourself, madame. I want Ted's opinion of that mare I've got my eye on at Wenderling. Your ladys.h.i.+p's opinion would be of value, too."

"Ted has nothing to ride. Did you hear that his horse had wrenched its shoulder yesterday? A wretch of a little dog ran out of a cottage and got mixed up with Starlight's feet. Ted jerked the horse round to spare the dog--and Starlight is as lame as a tree."

They would bicycle then, he decided. The roads were good. They would get into Wenderling in time for tea, and take it easy, coming home in the dusk. They must remember to take lamps. They would start at three.

She agreed to all arrangements, swaying herself idly in the rocking-chair Ted had bought for her; a pretty slip of a girl with a happy, almost childish face. Anstey little thought as he looked at her how often and often through all his life he would with his mind's eye see her so again!

As he was going through the door she called a laughing reproach to him.

"Your abominable dog spoilt my husband's sport yesterday, Mr Anstey.

Why do you keep such a wretch?"