VC -- A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea | Page 5

had risen so hastily that he had overturned half a set of chessmen from the board on which he had been playing, into the lap of a pretty girl, his partner in the game; but he had listened so intently, from the General's first question, that he was unconscious of that slight mishap. He walked into the broader light which shone beneath the central lamp, and asked eagerly:
'There's no mistake about that, Dad? There's no mistake about it?'
The speaker was Jervase's son, as a stranger seeing them under the same roof would have been ready to swear at sight. He was taller than his father by a good four inches; and the family resemblance, striking as it was, did not pierce so deep as the expression of the face. The father's blunt features were softened in the boy's, and though the look of energy was there, it was altogether lifted and spiritualised--possibly, perhaps, by the intense feeling of the moment.
'And there'll be no mistake about my commission?' the young man asked. 'There's no fear of any delay, or any official nonsense?'
'I sent my cheque to the agent before I left the town,' his father answered, 'and I expect you'll get your call to boot and saddle within a day or two at the outside.'
The pretty girl who had been playing chess with the young man in the corner laid down the pieces which had fallen in her lap. She placed them on the board, with a meaningless precision, and looked straight before her with wide eyes, and a face which had slowly grown paler and more pale.
'Polson, my boy,' said the General, 'I congratulate you. You are a lucky fellow.' He held out his right hand, and as the young man grasped it, he laid his left upon his shoulder. 'They won't keep you long at the Depot,' he said, 'for a man who can shoot straight, and ride to hounds, is half a soldier already. God bless you, my lad. You'll do your duty well, I know.'
There was silence in the room, and the noise of the storm outside, which nobody had hitherto thought about, fell upon the ears of all four, as if it had not been a familiar tone for hours, but as if it had but awakened at that instant. They all stood listening, for by this time the girl also had risen from her seat, and had made an indeterminate movement forward towards the centre of the room. And out of the boom and thunder of the storm there suddenly came a wild clatter of horses' feet, and a heavy gate was heard to fall back upon its fastening. An instant later there was a mad tugging at the front door bell, and an insaner clatter at the knocker. Jervase himself rushed to answer this sudden and unexpected summons, and opening the door unguardedly, was blown back into the hall, from the walls of which every hanging picture and every garment were swept by the incoming blast, like leaves. It sounded as if the house were coming down.
A drenched, bareheaded figure staggered into the hall, wind-driven, and would have fallen had not Jervase clutched at it. The newcomer and the master of the house held on to each other, and Jervase panted hoarsely:
'You? What's the matter?' 'The matter?' said the new arrival. 'The matter's ruin!'
CHAPTER II
The clatter of the tumbling objects in the hall brought out the General and Jack Jervase's son. The girl peered with a whiter face than ever from the parlour doorway, and a fourth auditor came upon the scene in the person of an elderly woman in black satin and old lace, who rushed into the hall with frightened eyes and upraised hands, in time to hear the question and the answer.
To make clear what the question and the answer meant to the four people who heard them, I must go back a step.
Jack Jervase ran away from home when the nineteenth century was in its teens. He had left behind him a harum-scarum reputation, and, save for his father and mother, but a solitary relative of his own name. When he came back, with coin in pouch, and the story of a life of strange adventure behind him, the old folks had been dead a dozen years, and the solitary cousin, whom he had always derided as a pious sneak, had so far prospered in the world's affairs that he had left the old-fashioned conventicle in which he had had his spiritual upbringing, and had become a pillar of the Established Church. The cousin had been christened Jacob and Noakes; but he had embroidered himself into James Knock Jervoyce; the Knocks being a family of some distinction in his neighbourhood, and the name Jervoyce having, to his fancy, a Norman-French