Tell England | Page 4

Colonel, who seldom spoke to her much, abruptly murmured:
"He has that Rupert's eyes."
For a moment she was quite taken aback, and then timorously replied:
"Yes, they are very blue."
"Very blue," repeated the Colonel.
Mrs. Ray thereupon felt she must obviate an uncomfortable silence, and
began with a nervous laugh:
"He was born when we were in Geneva, you know, and we used to call
him 'our mountain boy,' saying that he had brought a speck of the
mountain skies away in his eyes."
The Colonel conceded a smile, but addressed his reply to the child: "A
mountain boy, is he?" and, placing his hand on Rupert's head, he turned
the small face upward, and watched it break into a smile. "Well, well.
A mountain boy, eh?--from the lake of Geneva. H'm. _Il a dans les
yeux un coin du lac._"
At this happy description the tears of pleasure sprang to the foolish
eyes of Mrs. Ray, while Rupert, thinking with much wisdom that all the
conditions were favourable, gazed up into the Colonel's face, and fired
his last shot.
"What really was the fair-haired knight's name?"
"Perhaps you will know some day," answered the Colonel, half
playfully, half wearily.
§2
In the course of the same summer Master Archibald Pennybet, of
Wimbledon, celebrated his eighth birthday. He celebrated it by a
riotous waking-up in the sleeping hours of dawn; he celebrated it by a
breakfast which extended him so much that his skin became unbearably

tight; and then, in a new white sailor-suit and brown stockings turned
over at the calves to display a couple of magnificent knees, he
celebrated some more of it in the garden. There on the summer lawn he
stood, unconsciously deliberating how best to give new expression to
the personality of Archibald Pennybet. He was dark, gloriously built,
and possessed eyes that lazily drooped by reason of their heavy lashes;
and, I am sorry to say, he evoked from a boudoir window the gurgling
admiration of his fashionable mother, who, while her hair was being
dressed, allowed her glance to swing from her hand-mirror, which
framed a gratifying vision of herself, to the window, which framed a
still more gratifying vision of her son. "He gets his good looks from
me," she thought. And, having noticed the drooping of his eyelids,
over-weighted with lashes, she brought her hand-mirror into play again.
"He is lucky," she added, "to have inherited those lazy eyes from me."
Soon Archie retired in the direction of the kitchen-garden. The
kitchen-garden, with its opportunities of occasional refreshment such as
would not add uncomfortably to his present feeling of tightness, was
the place for a roam. Five minutes later he was leaning against the
wire-netting of the chicken-run, and offering an old cock, who asked
most pointedly for bread, a stone. To know how to spend a morning
was no easier on a birthday than on any ordinary day.
Suddenly, however, he overheard the gardener mentioning a murder
which had been committed on Wimbledon Common, a fine tract of
wild jungle and rolling prairie, that lay across the main road. Without
waiting to prosecute inquiries which would have told him that,
although the confession was only in the morning papers, the murder
was twenty years old, he escaped unseen and set his little white figure
on a walk through the common. He was out to see the blood.
But, for a birthday, it was a disappointing morning. He discovered for
the first time that Wimbledon Common occupied an interminable
expanse of country; and really there was nothing unusual this morning
about its appearance, or about the looks of the people whom he passed.
So he gave up his quest and returned homeward. Then it was that his
lazy eyes looked down a narrow, leafy lane that ran along the high wall
of his own garden. Now all Wimbledon suspects that this lane was
designed by the Corporation as a walk for lovers. There is evidence of
the care and calculation that one spends on a chicken-run. For the

Corporation, knowing the practice of lovers, has placed in the shady
recesses of the lane a seat where these comical people can intertwine.
At the sight of the lane and the seat, Master Pennybet immediately
decided how he would occupy his afternoon. He would move that seat
along his garden wall, till it rested beneath some ample foliage where
he could lie hidden. Then he would wait the romantic moments of the
evening.
This idea proved so exciting that the luncheon of which he partook was
(for a birthday) regrettably small. And no sooner was it finished than he
rushed into the lane, and addressed his splendid muscles to removing
the seat.
To begin with he tried pushing. This failed. The more he