The Pandervils by Gerald Bullet Read Free Book Online Page A

with his audience, the dazzling enigmatic creature hastily filled his mouth with suet pudding and munched fiercely for three silent minutes. He swallowed his pudding to the last glistening crumb of fat; took a long draught of ale; and, having sucked the froth off his moustache, he approached the root of the matter. ‘I don’t mind telling you gentlemen,’ he said, screwing up his eyes like a tipster, ‘I don’t mind telling you gentlemen that there’s a few more wanted for the Calvary.’ He rose to his feet and signed to the girl for his bill; paid it with pomp; and marched with clanking spurs to the door. There he halted, and then— on the heel of the right foot, on the ball of the left foot, and bringing the left smartly into the right —he performed an exemplary Right Turn.
    â€˜Gentlemen, it’s a chance in a lifetime! Who’s for the Calvary! Who’s for swinging his leg over an ’orse and riding to glory!’ The gentlemen sat spellbound. Undoubtedly the fellow had a way with him. And as they stared at him his manner subtly changed. A whimsical smile creased his face; the stiffness of his pose relaxed. ‘Come, boys!’ he said cajolingly, affectionately. And at once these farmers felt like boys and saw this gallant scarlet-coated fellow as the genial father ofthem all, a man like themselves, fond of his pint and his joke, and craftier only in the ways of war. A moment before, they had been admiring the man’s performance: now, with two words, he had touched their hearts. ‘Come, boys! There’s fighting and there’s fun, there’s dooty and there’s danger! Who’s for the Queen and the Queen’s shilling?’
    A chair scraped the floor. A young man stepped forward. ‘I’m with you, Sergeant!’
    â€˜And you’ve the figure for it, lad!’ said the Sergeant. ‘You’ll look a fair treat on an ’orse. A regular stachoo!’ And with that he repeated his formula: ‘Who’s for the Queen and the Queen’s shilling?’
    Egg felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Goo’bye, Eggie lad!’
    He looked up, dazedly, into the face of Willy. One queer look passed between them, and then, before Egg understood his meaning or intention, Willy was having his hand shaken by the Sergeant.
    â€˜Willy! Willy! Don’t be a gert fool!’
    Egg’s shout was the signal for uproar. The spell was broken and the enchanted tongues unloosed. But when the boy would have rushed forward to hold his brother back by main force, a friendly hand gripped him. ‘Steady, lad! Steady!’
    â€˜Let me go, damn you! Can’t you see what’s happening? It’s Willy, my brother. … ’
    But the Sergeant had already hustled his men away, and when at last Egg succeeded in forcing a passage through the excited chattering group thatremained, he reached the door just in time to see them vanish from sight at a bend in the street— that little huzza-ing crowd, by now mostly children and women, in whose midst strode Willy Pandervil, arm-in-arm with scarlet Death.
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    The Pandervil acres—which is to say the acres for which the Pandervils had paid rent for thirty years—consisted of some seven or eight fields, more grass than arable, distributed on and around a spur of the Mercester Hills know as Saffron Ridge. It had always been called the Ridge Farm, and Mr Pandervil’s fancy for writing
Fipenny Hall
at the head of his letter-paper did not for an instant threaten to break down the local custom. If Mr Pandervil was a gentleman that liked his joke, let him have it and enjoy it in private, especially a foreign joke such as a body couldn’t be expected to understand. Two centuries old, the house nestled snugly in what might be called the lap of Saffron Hill; for the shape of the hillside roughly suggested a woman asleep in a half-sitting half-recumbent attitude, with her head thrown