The Hermit of Far End | Page 9

tended gardens, and along one of these Sara took her way, quickening her steps to a run as the booming summons of a gong suddenly reverberated on the air.
She reached the house, flushed and a little breathless, and, tossing aside her hat as she sped through the big, oak-beamed hall, hurried into a pleasant, sunshiny room, where a couple of menservants were moving quietly about, putting the finishing touches to the breakfast table.
An invalid's wheeled chair stood close to the open window, and in it, with a rug tucked about his knees, was seated an elderly man of some sixty-two or three years of age. He was leaning forward, giving animated instructions to a gardener who listened attentively from the terrace outside, and his alert, eager, manner contrasted oddly with the helplessness of limb indicated by the necessity for the wheeled chair.
"That's all, Digby," he said briskly. "I'll go through the hot-houses myself some time to-day."
As he spoke, he signed to one of the footmen in the room to close the window, and then propelled his chair with amazing rapidity to the table.
The instant and careful attention accorded to his commands by both gardener and servant was characteristic of every one in Patrick Lovell's employment. Although he had been a more or less helpless invalid for seven years, he had never lost his grip of things. He was exactly as much master of Barrow Court, the dominant factor there, as he had been in the good times that were gone, when no day's shooting had been too long for him, no run with hounds too fast.
He sat very erect in his wheeled chair, a handsome, well-groomed old aristocrat. Clean-shaven, except for a short, carefully trimmed moustache, grizzled like his hair, his skin exhibited the waxen pallor which so often accompanies chronic ill-health, and his face was furrowed by deep lines, making him look older than his sixty-odd years. His vivid blue eyes were extraordinarily keen and penetrating; possibly they, and the determined, squarish jaw, were answerable for that unquestioning obedience which was invariably accorded him.
"Good-morning, uncle mine!" Sara bent to kiss him as the door closed quietly behind the retreating servants.
Patrick Lovell screwed his monocle into his eye and regarded her dispassionately.
"You look somewhat ruffled," he observed, "both literally and figuratively."
She laughed, putting up a careless hand to brush back the heavy tress of dark hair that had fallen forward over her forehead.
"I've had an adventure," she answered, and proceeded to recount her experience with Black Brady. When she reached the point where the man had fired off his gun, Patrick interrupted explosively.
"The infernal scoundrel! That fellow will dangle at the end of a rope one of these days--and deserve it, too. He's a murderous ruffian--a menace to the countryside."
"He only fired into the air--to frighten me," explained Sara.
Her uncle looked at her curiously.
"And did he succeed?" he asked.
She bestowed a little grin of understanding upon him.
"He did," she averred gravely. Then, as Patrick's bushy eyebrows came together in a bristling frown, she added: "But he remained in ignorance of the fact."
The frown was replaced by a twinkle.
"That's all right, then," came the contented answer.
"All the same, I really /was/ frightened," she persisted. "It gave me quite a nasty turn, as the servants say. I don't think"--meditatively --"that I enjoy being shot at. Am I a funk, my uncle?"
"No, my niece"--with some amusement. "On the contrary, I should define the highest type of courage as self-control in the presence of danger --not necessarily absence of fear. The latter is really no more credit to you than eating your dinner when you're hungry."
"Mine, then, I perceive to be the highest type of courage," chuckled Sara. "It's a comforting reflection."
It was, when propounded by Patrick Lovell, to whom physical fear was an unknown quantity. Had he lived in the days of the Terror, he would assuredly have taken his way to the guillotine with the same gay, debonair courage which enabled the nobles of France to throw down their cards and go to the scaffold with a smiling promise to the other players that they would continue their interrupted game in the next world.
And when Sara had come to live with Patrick, a dozen years ago, he had rigorously inculcated in her youthful mind a contempt for every form of cowardice, moral and physical.
It had not been all plain sailing, for Sara was a highly strung child, with the vivid imagination that is the primary cause of so much that is carelessly designated cowardice. But Patrick had been very wise in his methods. He had never rebuked her for lack of courage; he had simply taken it for granted that she would keep her grip of herself.
Sara's thoughts slid back to an incident which had occurred during their early days together. She