Jill the Reckless | Page 2

"Miss Mariner will be here, too. A foursome. Tell Mrs. Barker to pull
up her socks and give us something pretty ripe. Soup, fish, all that sort
of thing. She knows. And let's have a stoup of malvoisie from the oldest
bin. This is a special occasion!"
"Her ladyship will be meeting Miss Mariner for the first time, sir?"
"You've put your finger on it! Absolutely the first time on this or any
stage! We must all rally round and make the thing a success."
"I am sure Mrs. Barker will strain every nerve, sir." Barker moved to
the door, carrying the rejected egg, and stepped aside to allow a tall,
well-built man of about thirty to enter. "Good morning, Sir Derek."
"Morning, Barker."
Barker slid softly from the room. Derek Underhill sat down at the table.
He was a strikingly handsome man, with a strong, forceful face, dark,
lean and cleanly shaven. He was one of those men whom a stranger
would instinctively pick out of a crowd as worthy of note. His only
defect was that his heavy eyebrows gave him at times an expression
which was a little forbidding. Women, however, had never been
repelled by it. He was very popular with women, not quite so popular
with men--always excepting Freddie Rooke, who worshipped him.
They had been at school together, though Freddie was the younger by
several years.
"Finished, Freddie?" asked Derek.
Freddie smiled wanly.
"We are not breakfasting this morning," he replied. "The spirit was
willing, but the jolly old flesh would have none of it. To be perfectly

frank, the Last of the Rookes has a bit of a head."
"Ass!" said Derek.
"A bit of sympathy," said Freddie, pained, "would not be out of place.
We are far from well. Some person unknown has put a
threshing-machine inside the old bean and substituted a piece of brown
paper for our tongue. Things look dark and yellow and wobbly!"
"You shouldn't have overdone it last night."
"It was Algy Martyn's birthday," pleaded Freddie.
"If I were an ass like Algy Martyn," said Derek, "I wouldn't go about
advertising the fact that I'd been born. I'd hush it up!"
He helped himself to a plentiful portion of kedgeree, Freddie watching
him with repulsion mingled with envy. When he began to eat the
spectacle became too poignant for the sufferer, and he wandered to the
window.
"What a beast of a day!"
It was an appalling day. January, that grim month, was treating London
with its usual severity. Early in the morning a bank of fog had rolled up
off the river, and was deepening from pearly white to a lurid brown. It
pressed on the window-pane like a blanket, leaving dark, damp rivulets
on the glass.
"Awful!" said Derek,
"Your mater's train will be late."
"Yes. Damned nuisance. It's bad enough meeting trains in any case,
without having to hang about a draughty station for an hour."
"And it's sure, I should imagine," went on Freddie, pursuing his train of
thought, "to make the dear old thing pretty tolerably ratty, if she has
one of those slow journeys." He pottered back to the fireplace, and

rubbed his shoulders reflectively against the mantelpiece. "I take it that
you wrote to her about Jill?"
"Of course. That's why she's coming over, I suppose. By the way, you
got those seats for that theatre to-night?"
"Yes. Three together and one somewhere on the outskirts. If it's all the
same to you, old thing, I'll have the one on the outskirts."
Derek, who had finished his kedgeree and was now making himself a
blot on Freddie's horizon with toast and marmalade, laughed.
"What a rabbit you are, Freddie! Why on earth are you so afraid of
mother?"
Freddie looked at him as a timid young squire might have gazed upon
St. George when the latter set out to do battle with the dragon. He was
of the amiable type which makes heroes of its friends. In the old days
when he had fagged for him at Winchester he had thought Derek the
most wonderful person in the world, and this view he still retained.
Indeed, subsequent events had strengthened it. Derek had done the
most amazing things since leaving school. He had had a brilliant career
at Oxford, and now, in the House of Commons, was already looked
upon by the leaders of his party as one to be watched and encouraged.
He played polo superlatively well, and was a fine shot. But of all his
gifts and qualities the one that extorted Freddie's admiration in its
intensest form was his lion-like courage as exemplified by his
behaviour in the present crisis. There he sat, placidly eating toast and
marmalade, while the boat-train containing Lady Underhill already
sped on its way