A Sovereign Remedy.
by Flora Annie Steel.
CHAPTER I
"Oh! Dash it all!... I'm so sorry...!"
"Oh! Dash it all!... I'm so sorry...!"
The coincident exclamations and their sequent apology were separated by a crash, followed by a pause, during which the two cyclists who had collided picked themselves out of the dust unhurt and looked quickly at their machines; finally turning to each other with a smiling _bienveillance_ born of relief--for there was no denying that the affair might have been serious, and they were both conscious of sin.
"It was my fault; I was looking at the view," said one of the two young men candidly. He was a trifle the taller, the broader, and distinctly the better looking; but they were both excellent specimens of clean, wholesome-looking British manhood; curiously alike also, not only in feature, but in resolute adherence to the conventional type.
"But so was I!" returned the other. His voice was the pleasanter, not perhaps so resonant, but with more modulation in it. "Besides, your machine is damaged, and mine isn't--Oh! by George! I hadn't noticed the pedal," he added, following the other's look. He bent for closer inspection, then gave a laugh which was but half rueful; in truth, he was not altogether dissatisfied with this justice of Providence.
"About equal--so we'll cry quits," he said.
"It means walking for us both," said the other with a shrug. "Are you going my way?"
He nodded towards the blue depths of the valley, which, from this gap in the wavy outline of rolling hill where they stood, dipped down to the distant sea that lay half-way up the sky like a level pale-blue cloud.
The gap was the summit level between east and west; as such, a meeting-place for much water, and many roads.
One of the latter meandered backwards over the wide stretch of pink bell-heather and tasselled cotton grass which told of a catchment bog, where, even in fine weather, the mountain mists dissolved into dew, and the dew gathered itself into dark peaty pools like brown eyes among the tufted lashes of the bents and rushes.
And on either side of this central track two others curved down the rolling moor, north and south, to turn sharply behind a patch of gorse and boulders to join hands, all three, for the steep descent before them, as if afraid of solitude in this new venture. Whence, indeed, had come the collision between the two cyclists, each intent on a suddenly disclosed view.
"There is no other way--except back on our traces--back to Blackborough--Good Lord!" came the reply.
The first speaker smiled. "So you are a Blackberry also--Well! it is an awful place--one can hardly credit up here that all the soot and dirt is only--say a hundred miles off. Here one can breathe----"
He looked as if he could do more than that, as, finally shaking himself free of the last speck of dust, he prepared to start.
"Left nothing behind, I hope," said the other, glancing back.
"Hullo! There's a letter tumbled out of somebody's pocket in the stramash--yours or mine?"
It lay address upwards between them, and the taller of the two with a brief "Mine," picked it up and put it in his pocket. His companion stared at him.
"Look here," he said, holding out his hand. "You've made a mistake--that letter belongs to me--I'm Edward Cruttenden."
It was the other's turn to stare. "The deuce you are! Why!--my name is Edward Cruttenden!"
They stood thus staring at each other with a sudden dim sense of their own similarity, until the shorter of the two shook his head whimsically.
"This is confusing," he remarked in a tone of argument. "Let's sit down and have a pipe over it--we shall have to differentiate ourselves before we start out into the world together."
Almost at their feet a tiny trickle of water, scarcely heard in its soft bed of sphagnum moss, told that already the descent had begun; but this was stayed a few feet further by a rocky hollow in which the stream gathered and brimmed, so that as you looked out over the shallowing pool, the rushes which fringed it stood out against the far distant blue of the sea beyond, and there seemed no reason why the little lakelet should not take one wild leap into the ocean, and so save itself many miles of weary journeying through unseen valleys.
On the brink of this pool, their backs against a convenient boulder, their legs on the short sweet turf that was kept like a lawn by the hungry nip of mountain sheep, the two Edward Cruttendens rested, smoked, and compared notes; somewhat dilatorily, since the afternoon was fine and the effect of a sinking sun on moor and fell absolutely soul-satisfying.
"Let's differentiate our names somehow," said the pleasant-voiced one lazily--"Did your godfathers, etc., do anything more for you than Edward--mine didn't."
The other shook his head. Something in his handsome face had already differentiated itself from the amused curiosity on his companion's.
"That's awkward--we shall be driven to abbreviations. You shall be Ted, and I Ned--both dentals but philologically uninterchangeable; so they'll do for the present. Well, Ted, since you are twenty-seven and I'm gone twenty-nine, and my father died before I was born, we can't be complicated up as long--lost brothers--can we?"
Ted turned to him frowning sharply--"No! but--but what put that into your head. I----"
Ned laughed; a laugh as musical as his voice, but with a quaint aloofness about it as if he himself were standing aside to listen.
"The position is--romantic; and novels have it so always. As if it were not frankly impossible in this England of ours to dissociate one man from another by breed--we're hopeless mongrels, kin to each other all round. Birth counts for nothing; so let's quit it--Upbringing?"
Ted interrupted shortly--"I--I never knew my father, and my mother died when I was born."
"So did mine," said Ned softly.
There was a pause in which the luring wail of a circling plover who deemed the intruders too near her nest, became insistent, and seemed to fill the mountain solitude with a sense of motherhood, until, once more, the musical, critical laugh struck in on it.
"'Come!' as Shakespeare says, 'there's sympathy for you!' So far we start fair. Education?--I was at Eton, and----"
"I was a Blue-Coat boy," interrupted Ted again, and something in his tone made Ned look the other way, and idly busy himself in trying to dissociate a tender trail of ivy-leaved mountain campanula from its coarser companions in the turf.
"A better education, I expect," he said at last, "though I admit the yellow stockings must be devilish; still"--he paused, settled himself yet more comfortably in his cleft, and with clasped hands behind his head, relapsed into smoke and silence. Even the plover, convinced of their innocence, had ceased her wheeling, luring wail.
So desultorily, sometimes in thought only, sometimes by question and answer, they sat trying to dissociate themselves from the tie of a common name. And before them the afternoon sun, slowly sinking towards extinction in the sea, began to send level rays of light to fill up the valley with a golden haze in which all things lost their individuality.
Finally Ned sat up, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"About equal, I should say; except, of course, for money."
"That means we are unequal in all things," remarked Ted shortly. "You can't deny it. A clerk as I am, out for a Whitsun holiday with ten pounds to spend on it in his pocket, isn't--isn't in the same week with--well! what shall I say----"
"A man who employs clerks," suggested Ned with a smile.
Ted gave an impatient shrug. "As you will. However you come by it, you admit having a hundred pounds."
"A hundred and ten I should say," interrupted Ned, who was counting a handful of loose gold and silver. "I've a hundred in notes besides.
However! That needn't be a difficulty!"
The level, golden sun-rays flashed on a curved gold flight, as a bright new sovereign flitted duck-and-drake fashion over the brimming pool at their feet, then disappeared, leaving a circled series of ripples like a smoke wreath on its shiny surface.
"Hold hard! I say--you know--here! stop that, will you--don't be such a blamed fool!" ...
There was imminent danger of a struggle in reality when a voice from the road behind them said with a mixture of appeal and authority:
"Do not quarrel, see you, my good fellows, but tell me the cause of your disagreement, and I will advise to the best of my ability."