The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris Read Free

“Harris is a real genius and he’s my best friend. I’m so excited I could jump and shout and kick the grass. Something’s going to happen. I don’t know how to keep still. Who can I tell about it? I must . . . no, I mustn’t. I wish I could think. Oh, I’m so horribly excited and Harris looks so calm. I wish I could stop thinking. Someone might hear me . . .”
    Harris’s thoughts, though no less turbulent, were of a more advanced nature and concerned the youngest person ever to read a learned paper before the Royal Society. Faintly, in his inner ear, he heard the bravos peal out like a storm of church bells on Judgment Sunday, and he bowed his head to hide his happy tears . . .
    Suddenly the two friends grew still in mind and body. A sound had petrified them. A faint, but unmistakable panting and snuffling and crackling of bramble. Then there was a crunching of dry twigs. Harris’s face, briefly blossoming in the long grass, was ashy with expectation.
    Little Adelaide, deep in her blind sleep, chuckled and dreamed she was about to be fed again.
    It was coming, it was coming! The vixen—the vixen with full dugs!

Two
    YOUNG, PRETTY AND in yellow muslin, Tizzy Alexander, daughter of the fiery Major who taught arithmetic, was in a condition of terrified excitement. Her heart was thumping half out of her bodice and she kept clutching at her scarf to hide it. She must have been mad to have put herself in Ralph Bunnion’s way, but wild curiosity had at last overpowered her. Ralph Bunnion—cricketer, horseman and hero of the school. What was he like, this terrible, handsome, heartless breaker of hearts? Tall, fashionable, and so far as could be judged from the ends of them, clean-limbed.
    The use of this last expression had given her a brief feeling of maturity, but it had gone when she’d stolen glance after glance at Dr. Bunnion’s dashingand notorious son. It was said he’d once fought a duel—and everyone knew he drank prodigious quantities of claret at the Old Ship Inn with three young men almost as famous as himself.
    Oh Tizzy, why ain’t you back in the school, safe with your ma and pa? She shook her head. In her heart of hearts she knew she’d always have regretted it. She knew that if she missed this chance, she’d have dreamed and wondered all her life long what it would have been like to have been swept off her feet by a Ralph Bunnion. Only once in a lifetime did such an adventure befall a young girl.
    With a start she felt his hand on her arm and she realized they’d walked all the way from the school to the beginning of the Downs. All her instincts bade her fly back home, but she could not. The sun was dropping down and warning shadows were pooling in the rough, tufted ground like treacherous black pits. Tizzy! Tizzy! When will it begin? Oh, Tizzy, what a little fool you are! Thus her fears and hopes raced hand in hand.
    He was talking to her, had been for some time, but she’d been too engrossed in her own confused sensations to know what he’d been saying. All she’d noticed was that as he laughed his teeth flashed like bayonets.
    Lord, he was handsome! He wore a mouse-colored coat with smart tails and a waistcoat embroidered with a design of love-lies-bleeding.
    â€œD’you know,” he said, laughing gently, “the last time I walked this way was with poor Maggie Hemp?”
    â€œOh, dear,” said Tizzy. “I saw her only yesterday in Bartholomew’s. I didn’t know aught was amiss.”
    â€œThen—then she’s not—not drowned?”
    â€œOh, no—”
    â€œThank God!” breathed Ralph fervently. “I say thank God for that!”
    â€œI never knew,” began Tizzy, when Ralph shook his head as if the subject was painful to him. But in a little while he overcame his distress and admitted to Tizzy that Maggie Hemp had threatened to throw herself off Black Rock and