The Mountebank | Page 7

identical words.
And in the same greasy, gasping tone.

I gaped at the mimetic miracle. It was then that the memory of the
eight-year-old child's travesty of myself flashed through my mind.
"Pardon me," said I, "but haven't you turned this marvellous gift of
yours to--well to practical use?"
He grinned in his honest, wide-mouthed way, showing his
incomparable teeth.
"Don't you think," said he, "I'm the model of a Colonel of the Rifles?"
He grinned again at the cloud of puzzlement on my face, and rose
holding out his hand.
"Time for turning in. Will you do me a favour? Don't give me away
about the circus."
Somehow my esteem for him sank like thermometer mercury plunged
into ice. I had thought him, with the blazing record of achievement
across his chest, a man above such petty solicitude. His mild blue eyes
searched my thoughts.
"I don't care a damn, Captain Hylton," said he, in a tone singularly
different from any that he had used in our pleasant talk--"if anybody
knows I was born in a stable. A far better man than I once had that
privilege. But as it happens that I am going out to command a brigade
next week, it would be to the interest of my authority and therefore to
that of the army, if no gossip led to the establishment of my identity."
"I assure you, sir----" I began stiffly--I was only a Captain, he, but for a
formality or two, a Brigadier-General.
He clapped his hands on my shoulders--and I swear his ugly, smiling
face was that of an angel.
"My dear fellow," said he, "so long as you regard me as an honest cuss,
nothing matters in the world."
I went to bed with the conviction that he was as honest a cuss as I had

ever met.
Chapter II

Our hosts, the Verity-Stewarts, were pleasant people, old friends of
mine, inhabiting a Somerset manor-house which had belonged to their
family since the days of Charles the Second. They were proud of their
descent; the Stewart being hyphenated to the first name by a
genealogically enthusiastic Verity of a hundred years ago; but the
alternative to their motto suggested by the son of the house, Captain
Charles Verity-Stewart, "The King can do no wrong," found no favour
in the eyes of his parents, who had lived remote from the democratic
humour of the officers of the New Army.
It was to this irreverent Cavalier, convalescent at home from a
machine-gun bullet through his shoulder, and hero-worshipper of his
Colonel, that Andrew Lackaday owed his shy appearance at Mansfield
Court. He was proud of the boy, a gallant and efficient soldier; Lady
Verity-Stewart had couched her invitation in such cordial terms that a
refusal would have been curmudgeonly; and the Colonel was heartily
tired of spending his hard-won leave horribly alone in London.
Perhaps I may seem to be explaining that which needs no explanation.
It is not so. In England Colonel Lackaday found himself in the position
of many an officer from the Dominions overseas. He had barely an
acquaintance. Hitherto his leave had been spent in France. But one does
not take a holiday in France when the War Officer commands attention
at Whitehall. He was very glad to go to the War Office, suspecting the
agreeable issue of his visit. Yet all the same he was a stranger in a
strange land, living on the sawdust and warmed-up soda-water of
unutterable boredom. He had spent--so he said--his happiest hours in
London, at the Holborn Empire. Three evenings had he devoted to its
excellent but not soul-enthralling entertainment.
"In the name of goodness, why?" I asked puzzled.

"There was a troupe of Japanese acrobats," said he. "In the course of a
roving life one picks up picturesque acquaintances. Hosimura, the head
of them, is a capital fellow."
This he told me later, for our friendship, begun when he was eight years
old, had leaped into sudden renewal; but without any idea of exciting
my commiseration. Yet it made me think.
That a prospective Brigadier-General should find his sole relief from
solitude in the fugitive companionship of a Japanese acrobat seemed to
me pathetic.
Meanwhile there he was at Mansfield Court, lean and unlovely, but, as
I divined, lovable in his unaffected simplicity, the very model of a
British field-officer. At dinner on Saturday evening, he had sat between
his hostess and Lady Auriol Dayne. To the former he had talked of the
things she most loved to hear, the manifold virtues of her son. There
were fallings away from the strict standards of military excellence, of
course; but he touched upon them with his wide, charming smile,
condoned them with the indulgence of the man prematurely mellowed
who has kept his hold on