The Sirdar's Oath: A Tale of the North-West Frontier. Mitford Bertram

But she had a temper, a very decided temper – which, it was whispered, was accountable for the fact that now, at very much nearer thirty than twenty, her recent engagement to Herbert Raynier was by no means her first.

      Now the offender entered, characteristically careless.

      “Morning, Cynthia. Hallo, you look disobliged. What’s the row? Morning, Vicar.”

      This was not the best way of throwing oil upon the troubled sea, but then the whole thing was so incomprehensible to Raynier. He could not understand how people could make a fuss over such a trifle as whether one man ate a bit of toast, and played the fool with a boiled egg, half an hour sooner or half an hour later. There was no train to catch, no business of vital importance to be transacted, here in this sleepy little country place. His fiancée could have had precious little experience of the graver issues of life if that sort of thing disturbed her.

      “You’ve only yourself to thank if everything’s cold,” answered Cynthia, snappishly.

      “I don’t mind – even if there isn’t anything to get cold. Feeding at this end of the day isn’t in my line at all. I hardly ever touch anything between chota hazri and tiffin over there.”

      “Well, but over here you might try to be a little more punctual.”

      “Too old. Besides, I’m on furlough,” returned Raynier, maliciously teasing. It was the only way of veiling his resentment. He did not take kindly to being perpetually found fault with, and still less so the first thing in the morning. “Don’t you agree with me, Vicar? A man on furlough should be allowed a few venial sins?”

      “Oh, I think so,” said Mr Daintree, with a laugh. And then he began to discuss the war news in that morning’s paper, which soon led round to the events wherewith our story opens.

      “That must have been after the fashion of our old Town and Gown rows at Oxford,” said the Vicar. “They are a thing of the past now, I’m told.”

      “And a good thing too,” struck in his daughter. “What horrid savage creatures men are. Never happy unless they are fighting.”

      “Don’t know. I much prefer running away,” said Raynier.

      “Pity you didn’t carry out your preference. Then you wouldn’t have come down here looking such a sight,” with a glance at his somewhat disfigured visage.

      “And there’d have been one Oriental the less in the world. Phew! that was a vicious mob if ever there was one. By the way there’s a saying that if you rescue anybody he’s bound to do you a bad turn. Wonder if it’ll hold good here, and if in the order of fate that chap and I will meet again out there. Stranger things have come off.”

      “Only in books,” said Cynthia, contemptuously.

      “No – in real life. I could tell you of at least three remarkable if not startling circumstances of the kind that have come to my knowledge, but I won’t, for two reasons – one that they wouldn’t interest you – two, that you wouldn’t believe a word of them.”

      “What are you going to do to-day, Herbert?” said the Vicar.

      “Fish. You coming with me, Cynthia?”

      “No.”

      “Meaning I’m not fit to be seen with,” answered Raynier, interpreting her glance.

      “If you will go getting yourself disfigured in common street brawls you must expect to suffer for it. So low, I call it.”

      She was in a horrible humour that morning – so much was evident. Raynier wondered how she would receive the news of the loss of the malacca cane, and felt steeled to tell her about it then and there. In another moment he would have done so when an interruption occurred. A girl’s voice came singing down the passage, and its owner burst into the room.

      “Hallo, Herbert. You’re jolly late again. I expect you have been catching it,” with a glance at the thunder-cloud on her elder sister’s face. This was the Vicar’s youngest daughter, aged nineteen; there were two between her and the other, both married, likewise sons, helping to buttress up the Empire in divers colonies.

      “Right you are. I have. I’m going to try for a trout or two, Silly. Feel like coming along?”

      “I sha’n’t if you call me that,” answered the girl, with a shade of her sister’s expression coming over her face; “that,” however, not being an epithet but a teasing abbreviation of her own name – Sylvia.

      “All right. I withdraw the Silly.”

      “Then I’ll go. But isn’t Cynthia going?”

      “She says I’m too ugly just at present,” returned Raynier, tranquilly. “And I believe I am.”

      “Yes. You’re rather a sight,” with a deliberate glance at his damaged figurehead. “Never mind. There’s no one to see us here. Where are we going?”

      “How about the hole below Blackadder Bridge?”

      “That’s it,” returned Sylvia. “There was a regular ‘boil’ on there the day before you came, but that was in the evening. I took out seven trout in twenty-five minutes. Then the ‘boil’ stopped and you couldn’t move a fish. But we’d better start soon.”

      “All right. I’ll go and get my rod.”

      The Vicar went out on to the lawn to see them off, and smoke his after-breakfast pipe.

      “Cynthia, my dear,” he called. “Come outside and walk up and down a bit.”

      She made some excuse about seeing to the things being cleared away. However she soon joined him.

      “That nest of young thrushes is gone,” he said, peering into the ivy which hid the garden wall. “Some cat has found them, I expect. By the way, Cynthia, do you really intend to marry Herbert Raynier?”

      “Why, what on earth do you mean, father?” she answered, resentment and astonishment being about evenly divided in her tone.

      “Precisely what I say, dear – no more and no less. Because if you don’t you’re going the right way to work to let him see it.”

      “If I don’t. But I do – of course I do. I can’t think what you’re driving at.”

      “Oh, it’s simple enough. Couldn’t you manage now and then, if only for a change, to give him a civil word? Men don’t like to be perpetually found fault with and hauled over the coals,” pronounced the Vicar, speaking with some feeling, moved thereto by sundry vivid recollections of his own, for he was a widower. Cynthia coloured.

      “But they require it – and – it’s only for their good,” she answered.

      “No deadlier motive could be adduced,” returned her father, drily. “Because, you see, if you use the whip too much they’re apt to kick. And I descry symptoms of such a tendency on the part of Herbert I thought I’d give you a hint, that’s all. It would be a pity to lose him. His position is excellent and his prospects ditto; besides, he’s a thoroughly good fellow into the bargain.”

      The pool beneath Blackadder Bridge was wide enough for a rod on each side, so that neither interfered with the other, but Raynier and his future sister-in-law had met with scant sport. The surroundings, however, were lovely: the soft roll of the wooded hills resounding with the joyous shout of the cuckoo, the blue haze of spring beneath the cloudless sky, and meadows spangled with myriad butter cups; while, hard by, skipping perkily in and out of their knob-like nest against the hoary mossiness of the buttressed bridge, a pair of water-ouzels took no count whatever of their human disturbers. The bleating of young lambs was in the air, mingling with the tuneful murmur of the brown water purling out from the breadth of the deep pool into a miniature rapid.

      “Well, you two? What have you got to show for yourselves?”

      Raynier looked up, almost startled, so amazed was he. For the voice was Cynthia’s – and it was quite pleasant, even affectionate. And there was Cynthia herself, looking exceedingly attractive in her plain, and therefore tasteful, country attire.