Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the gallant womanly figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver spangles and displayed in the frank unreticence of fashion by the semi-transparent sheath of glistening white, a pair very blue, very shiningly alert and interested, drew nearer until the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform mingled upon the sunlit turf with the longer shadow of Patrine.
His thumping heart had said to him: "You know her!" It was Pat and yet not Pat. Her tall, rounded figure. Her walk. The same face—and another woman's hair. The white gown and the long stole of black cock's feathers he had seen before, and the hat had previously fascinated him. He had asked Pat if it were not made of the twinkly stuff with which they covered the Bobby-dazzlers on Christmas trees? She had cried "Yes!" and assured him that she would always hereafter call it her "Bobby-dazzler chapper." ... And his Cousin Irma, whom Bawne secretly abominated, had said it was too bad to talk costermonger slang to the child. "The child." ... A man must be ready to pardon an insult from the unpunchable female. But Bawne found himself wishing that Cousin Irma had been a boy.
He loved Pat. You had to love a person who could keep secrets as faithfully as Dad or Mother, and play tennis and hockey better than a great many grown-up fellows. Bowl you out at cricket, too, middle bail, before you could wink. She could cycle all day without getting knocked up, and swim a mile, easily. For these reasons Bawne knew he loved her. But he loved her most for the reasons that he did not understand.
"Pat!"
He had screwed up his courage to touch his crusher felt and speak the name, but the tall lady with the electrifying hair did not seem to hear. Her long eyes looked at him in a blind way without seeing him. He had never kissed this frozen, stranger's face.
"I thought you knew me! I most awfully beg your pardon!" he stammered, in scarlet anguish, and the dull eyes suddenly came to life, and the stiff lips smiled:
"It's Bawne. My sweet, I'm glad! How did you come here?"
"Dad brought me because he'd promised," the boy said joyously as they shook hands.
"Where is Uncle Owen?"
"Over there." Bawne pointed to two men talking apart beyond the straggling line of spectators, and Patrine recognised the great frame and scholarly stoop of the Doctor, standing with his side-face towards her, a half-consumed cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his stick, a weighty ivory-topped Malacca, loosely gripped in both hands behind his back.
"And the man he is talking to? Why—of course! It's Sir Roland—how is it I didn't recognise him?"
"The Chief Scout!" Bawne's tone was one of incredulous wonder. "But you couldn't have forgotten him! It—isn't possible!"
Nor even to a stranger did he appear a personality to be easily forgotten, the bright-eyed, falcon-beaked, middle-aged man, whose feather-weight crusher felt was worn at an inimitable angle, and whose slight, active figure set off his well-cut morning suit of thin blue serge in a way to arouse envy in a military dandy of twenty-five.
"You see," Bawne explained, "he was talking business with Father, so I just took myself out of the way." He added: "They hadn't told me to, but they might have forgotten. And so"—the big word came out of the childish mouth quaintly—"I acted on my initiative—you understand?"
"I understand." The formal handshake once over, their fingers had not separated. She held in her large, strong, womanly palm the hand that was little, and hard, and boyish. It squeezed her fingers, and the squeeze was an apology. It said:
"I'd like you to have kissed me if there hadn't been lots of people looking. For, of course, you know I love you, Pat!"
"And I love you, Bawne. We'll always love each other, whatever happens," said the answering pressure. Her spoken utterance was:
"So these are your holidays! ... How did you leave them all at Charterhouse? And—are you still tremendous pals with young Roddy Wrynche?"
He said, with a naive, adorable gravity:
"Boys don't squabble like girls—and Wrynche is a frightfully decent fellow. We passed together from Shell into Under Fourth, and we've promised always to stand by each other!"
"Good egg! And now, how is it you're here? Has Uncle Owen given in at last about the flying?"
"Really and truly! Man alive!"—Bawne's characteristic expletive—"I've been up to-day in the air-'bus and—wasn't it first-class!"
"Honour?"
"Honour! Twice round the aërodrome with the Instructor—and presently I'm to have a longer flight with Mr. Sherbrand in his monoplane."
"'Mr. Sherbrand' ..." Patrine repeated rather vaguely. "Sherbrand" had somehow a ring that was familiar. Bawne explained:
"He's a great friend of Father's. He's splendid. A regularly topping chap!"
"And you've actually flown?"
"I've flewed—and I mean to go on with it." He repeated the assurance more sedately: "It's the profession I have chosen. They say you've got to begin young. And my legs wobbled and the ground rocked a bit when I got down on it. But I wasn't air-sick at all."
"Air-sick.... Are people...?"
Bawne said from the pedestal of superior knowledge:
"Oh, aren't they just, like anything! The Calais-Dover steamer-crossing's nothing to it sometimes—the Instructor told me."
Patrine laughed. The latest circulating-library novel, Love in the Clouds, had omitted to mention this fact. The heroine had donned an aviator's cap and pneumatic jacket, and "leapt nimbly on board" the aëroplane in half a gale of wind. As the machine dipped and rose gracefully upon the heaving element that cradled it, Enid had experienced merely a delicious exhilaration. Then a crisp moustache had brushed her rosy ear. The voice of Hubert, attuned to deepest melody of passion, had murmured in the shell-like organ of hearing: "Little girl. At last I have you! ... Mine, mine, my bride of the swan-path!—mine for ever and aye!"
Bawne continued, innocently discounting further statements on the part of the author of Love in the Clouds:
"He told me before we went up, you know. Of course, when you're flying you can't hear anything but the racket of the propeller. It goes roaring through you till your bones buzz, and the very ends of your teeth hum. So the other man has to yell at you through a trumpet, or write to you on bits of paper, unless he's switched off the engine for diving, and then you don't feel like talking—that's if you're a beginner, you know.... But man alive! it's splendid. You must try it, Pat!"
She declared, laughingly:
"While a single flight costs a brace of my hard-earned guineas, the sport is not for me! Why haven't I got a pal like your wonderful Mr. Sherbrand? I'm getting envious—you lucky infant, you!"
It didn't hurt to be called an infant by Pat, because she never would have done it in a stranger's hearing. And it was ripping to have her here, sharing his hour of joy.
He told her: "Father brought me here as a reward for making a model aëroplane. Reminds me!—I've got to tell you all about that. But it's only a toy and this is the Real Thing. There's nothing worth having in the whole world," added the unconscious philosopher "unless it's real and true!"
"Am I not real?" Patrine asked, squeezing his shoulder.
"Now you are!" He said it with an effort of candour. "But when I saw you a minute ago, I wasn't—quite sure." He glanced up at her and asked shyly: "Why are you different since you have been away in Paris?"
"Different, how different?" She whipped her hand from his shoulder. Her black eyebrows knitted, and her face stiffened into the strange mask that had puzzled him, under the scrutiny of his clear blue eyes. "Do I seem changed?" she queried. And Bawne answered:
"A little. I was afraid at first you were somebody else, because of"—he said it shyly—"because of your hair."
"My hair?" she repeated blankly, and then said awkwardly: "The air of Paris did that, darling, but it will soon be its old colour again!"
"Will it ever be just like it was before?" asked Bawne, looking innocently up at her, and something broke in Patrine's heart just then. She gave a sudden gasping sigh, and a sudden spate of tears rolled over her thick underlids, streamed down her pale cheeks, and fell upon her broad bosom, heaving under its thin covering of filmy white voile.
"Pat! You're—crying!" Bawne had never yet seen his friend weep, and he was wrung between pity and bewilderment. "Who has vexed you? Who has been hurting you?" he begged, and she answered brokenly:
"No one! ... Someone.... It doesn't matter!" adding: "Would you punch him, if anyone had—done as you say?"
"Wouldn't I?"
"My sweet!" Her arm went round his slight, square shoulders. She doted on the little amber freckles on his pure, healthy skin, the little drake's tail of silky red-brown hair at the nape of his brown neck, the half-shy, half-bold curve of his mouth as he smiled, the blue sparkle of his eye glancing sidewise up at her. She found in the pure warmth and sweetness of the slight young body leaning against her, a healing, comforting balm.
"Why aren't you my little brother, Bawne?" she said, hugging him closer. He answered after an instant's thought:
"If my mother could be your mother too, it would be jolly! Not unless! ..."
He was not going to take on Mildred for anybody. Patrine sighed pensively.
"That's what I used to cry for when I was a little pig-tailed girl, my sonny. More than anything I wanted to belong to Aunt Lynette. But she's so young—only thirty-three. She couldn't be my mother."
"No." His eyes considered her face gravely. "Of course not. You're far too old. How old are you, Cousin Pat?"
"How old am I?" A shudder went through her. "Nineteen in August. And I feel about a hundred and one."
"That's 'cos you're not well!" His eyes were anxious and a little pucker showed between his reddish eyebrows. "You're not going to be ill—are you?" he asked in alarm.
"Not I!" She murmured it caressingly in her deep, soft voice. "My pet, don't worry. Everything's all right with me!—perfectly all right and O.K.! Only talk to me. Don't let me keep on thinking. Things are never so—bally rotten if you can stop brooding over them."
Why did she look like that? What had somebody done to hurt her? His boyish hand clenched, the thumb well turned in over the knuckles. Instinctively Bawne knew that the Enemy, who had stamped that dreadful look of frozen misery on the face of his beloved, white as ivory or old snow in its strange setting of flaming tresses—was of his own sex.
All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of Panshaw's, the song of the air-screw had not been absent from her ears. The tractor of the practice-engine roared fitfully, like a tiger being prodded in its den by a spiteful keeper's meat-fork. The propellers of the double-engined passenger-buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's pilots followed the pointing arms of the red, white, and blue pylons marking the limits of the air-circuit, or were silent as the machines dropped to earth within the huge white circles where a giant T indicated "Land."
This was not a show day when visitors' half-crowns rattled unceasingly into the boxes at the turnstile. The rows of green-painted chairs behind the whitewashed iron railings of the spectators' enclosure were but thinly patronised by friends of people taking passenger-flights. No man with a megaphone announced events forthcoming or imminent. No white flag fell for the start, no pistol cracked signifying the conclusion of a race.
Three men occupied the Judge's stand behind the Committee enclosure. One, small and dapper, in a frock-coat and topper, kept his eye on what was probably a stop-watch. Another, stout, bearded, and straw-hatted, was absorbedly gazing at the sky through a big pair of Zeiss binoculars. The third, in the uniform of a commissionaire, was an employé of the School. No one manifested any particular interest in them or their occupation. The sparse general public were not enlightened as to the reason of their presence on the Judge's stand.
"Talk," Patrine said, clinging to Bawne, her slender plank in moral shipwreck. "Tell me what Sir Roland and the Doctor are waiting to see. What is that thin man doing with the stop-watch and the note-book? And the fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the sky through those big field-glasses. Nothing is billed to happen—there are no numbers up on the pylons—yet something seems to be going on!"
"Rather!"
The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and began to dance up and down under the arm that rested on his neck.
"Rather! Didn't you know? How funny! Why, man alive, we're waiting for him!"
"For him?"
"For Mr. Sherbrand. Father's friend. The Flying Man I've told you about."
"Mr.—— Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking all about her. In the tumult of her thoughts the name that had been upon a crumpled card suggested no association with that so rapturously uttered by the boy.
"There!" Bawne pointed upwards with another of the excited laughs. "Carrying out a hovering-test. The man with the stop-watch is timing him, and the other with the binnocs is observing him. He's French—no end of an official swell! The French Government sent him," went on the boy, with infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his invention. He thought they didn't catch on, but the hoverer has fetched them. If he hovers for twenty minutes, ten thousand feet up, his fortune's made!—I heard a fellow say so to the Instructor. Man alive! isn't it topping that you and I should be here to-day!"