Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.
'It reminds me I have a mission,' she said. 'There's a fencing match down at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select: Soldier and Civilian; I forget who challenged--Civilian, one judges; Soldiers are the peaceful party. They want you to act “umpire,” as they call it, on the military side, my dear lord; and you will?--I have given my word you will bring Lady Ormont. You will?--and not let me be confounded! Yes, and we shall make a party. I see consent. Aminta will enjoy the switch of steel. I love to see fencing. It rouses all that is diabolical in me.'
She sent a skimming look at the opposite.
'If you must speak modestly! Are you in practice?'
'I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo's fencing rooms generally every evening before dinner. I heard there the first outlines of the match proposed. You are right; it was the civilian.'
She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield!
'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.
'The simplest--has the most rational method. Italians are apt to be tricky. But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a fencer the French can't touch.'
'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve, quick brain.'
'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'
'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with him?'
'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found wary enough.'
My lord hummed. 'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over steel.'
Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye met Aminta's and passed it.
'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.
'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at school under shadow of the master.
She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a lesson? They want it.'
His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood. Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild at his games.