Sweethearts at Home Part 14

"Ah, Nipper!" said Hugh John lazily, handing up another sorrel stem to Elizabeth; "glad to see you, Nipper. Sit down and help to look for fat ones!"

"You are mocking me, both of you!" cried poor Nipper blackly. His face was hot and angry, his eyes injected like his father's when in wrath, and his hands were clinched tight.

"You came here to talk about me," he said hoa.r.s.ely, bending forward towards them like a beast ready for the spring.

"Nonsense!" said Hugh John; "we met by pure accident. I did not want any dinner, and Elizabeth wanted a breath of fresh air."

"You lie! I do not believe you!" cried Nipper.

"You will have to, Nipper," said Hugh John, who had not moved an inch.

"_And_ why?"

"Because _I_ say it!" said Hugh John quietly. "I do not tell lies!"

"A likely story!" growled Nipper. "You were talking about me! I heard you. You will have to fight me--Hugh John Picton Smith!"

"That we shall see," said Hugh John coolly. "What must be, must be. But there is a word or two to say first."

"Talk!" cried Nipper. "Oh, that does no good to a fellow like me. You shall fight me, I tell you!"

"Not before Elizabeth Fortinbras!" said Hugh John, taking off his cap with a quick, instinctive gesture of respect. "You and I can't behave like two angry dogs before her!"

"You're afraid!"

"Possibly," said Hugh John, "but not in any way _you_ would understand."

Then Elizabeth Fortinbras took up speech.

"Nipper Donnan," she said, "I won't pretend I don't know what you mean.

You are driving me from the single happy place of refuge I have on earth. I cannot stay with your father and mother unless you stop pestering me. And then you talk about fighting. Why, Hugh John is nearly five years younger than you are----"

"He is as tall!" growled Nipper.

"Taller!" corrected Elizabeth coolly. "But if you behave like a whole menagerie of brutes, that won't make me care more about you. Hugh John is my brother; I have no other!"

"_Umph!_" snorted Nipper, "he doesn't come and sit out by Esk-waterside with his sisters."

I know that at that moment Hugh John's eye sought the deep purple stain of the Cave of Mystery, where he and I so often sat together. But he said nothing at all to his adversary. It might have been mistaken. It was to Elizabeth he spoke.

"I have something to say to Nipper which you had better not hear," he remarked quietly. "Here is a special handful of sorrel to take home with you. Let me see you as far as the first lamp-post on my cycle. Then I will come back and speak with Nipper."

They went, and Nipper sat on the empty log, gloomily cursing fate--but, educated by the experience of many years, never for a moment doubting that Hugh John would keep his word.

He even timed him. He knew to within half-a-minute when the bright bull's-eye of his acetylene lantern would turn the corner of the Gypsies' Tryst. He saw it come. He stood up on his feet, and jerked his clenched hands once or twice forward into the gloaming.

Then Hugh John leaped from his cycle by the wall.

"Sit down, Nipper," he said. "I have something to say to you."

"Oh, I dare say," said Nipper; "you want to get out of fighting."

"Very well--you think so. I shall show you!" said Hugh John. "But first you have got to listen. You are troubling Elizabeth Fortinbras. She does not mean to be troubled. She will go away if you do not stop going into the shop. She told me so. She has always been my friend, and my sister's friend. Her father and mother are no use to such a girl. That is why I have tried to be a brother to her----"

"Brother, is it?" shouted Nipper, clenching his fists. "I will show you what it is to take a girl from Nipper Donnan. You were making love to her."

"I am her brother. She is my sister," Hugh John repeated, with his usual quiet persistency. "She is not yours in any way. Therefore I cannot take from you what you never possessed."

"I love her, and I will kill you, Hugh John Picton Smith!" moaned poor Nipper, his whole body shaking with impotent anger.

"Very well, you can try, though you are older," said Hugh John; "only, if I win, you will let Elizabeth Fortinbras alone."

"All right," said Nipper, "I agree. And if I lick you, you will stop prejudicing her against me!"

"You won't win!" prophesied Hugh John still more quietly.

And that is why Elizabeth Fortinbras' afternoons and evenings at New Erin Villa were thenceforward full of peace. Also why no young butcher hung any more over the counter, and why Mr. Nipper Donnan spent his evenings in the kitchen with Meg Linwood. It explains also why, when he came to say good-by to Elizabeth Fortinbras, Hugh John had a split lip.

Yet the girl asked no questions of her champion. She did not appear to notice the slight wound, and she sent away Hugh John with a single token of (sisterly) grat.i.tude, and the curious reflection that a split lip does not spoil kissing nearly so much as a fellow might think.

XIII

"UNTO US AS A DAUGHTER"

_November 2. The same Age._

[It is really the first of the month, but I date it the second, because the first is a Sunday, you see.]

After the fine weather of July came a horrid rainy spell. Now I don't mind so much when the days are short, the trees bare, and the time for winter lamps and winter fires is come. Then you can just shut yourself up, get some books you have been promising yourself for a long time to look at--and there you are.

But deluged park, dripping shrubbery, Esk-water growling turbidly at the foot of the Low Park, all the n.o.ble marine architecture of the two Torres Vedrases deep under swirling froth--that is what I hate, and especially with light to see it by--oh, good fourteen to sixteen hours of it. Pitter, patter on the roof, a sprinkle of broad drops on the window-panes from the trees swis.h.i.+ng in the wind outside. After the first three days it grows unbearable.

It was a weary time, and a mockery for any one to call "holidays,"

especially after such a n.o.ble summer and autumn. But it cleared after Hugh John had been a week or two at college. During the wet weather I often went into the shop to see Elizabeth Fortinbras. I could now, you see, because Nipper Donnan was not always there.

More than once, however, I encountered his father, Butcher Donnan, who went about smiling and rubbing his hands--as if _he_ had stopped the whole business. Of course I let him think so. For it is no good setting Grown-ups right. They always know better.

Well, and do you know, every time I went Elizabeth asked all about Hugh John, and if I had heard from him. At first I thought, as, of course, any girl would, that Elizabeth was only foxing to take me in. But afterwards I found out that they really did not write to one another.

She owned, though, to having kissed him good-by. But that was only on account of his split lip and what he had done about Nipper.

Hugh John's explanation of his silence, given later, was that there were no sorrel stalks near the college, and that if Elizabeth really wanted anything, he knew that she would write and ask him.