“His former owner found no difficulty,” said the vicar mildly, “nor have I.”
“Because you let him go where he likes at the pace he wants to,” Georgina answered.
I could see that nothing, not even living on porridge — if that were true —was going to separate Matthew Gillon from Nur Jehan. He not only adored the stallion, but had a reasonable and innocent hope of future profit.
“And eventually, Peregrine,” Georgina went on, “the vicar will have to employ a groom. Benita cannot be expected to come down here just to muck out the stable for him.”
“There’s profit in that, too,” I said, remembering Jim Melton and the ‘earse.
Cunobel glared at me; but before he had time to point out that, dammit, it wouldn’t pay for the straw, Benita Gillon joined us in the kitchen. I had been prepared for my own idea of a female commercial artist and I expected, I think, that she would either muck out the stable in garments altogether too colorful for the job, or else would consider that the rescue of a father justified a deal of unnecessary dirt. But I could see no London at all about her, except the fashionably lank fair hair which framed her delicately tanned face. She belonged where she was. I could well understand that she took every excuse to return to her village.
We had barely time for a few words before Aunt Georgina called the admiral and myself to attention and dismissed us. She had intended, I suspect, to parade Benita a couple of hours later when all three of them were coming over to dine, and she was not pleased at the girl’s arrival direct from the stable. She was quite wrong there. Benita grew deliciously out of her heavy Wellington boots like a graceful young tree from a pot.
The comfort of the admiral and his guests was assured by Frank — naturally a naval production too. He was cook, butler, valet and intelligence staff. Women were permitted aboard for laundry and floor-scrubbing, for the making of pies, jams, pickles and larder-stocking in general, which Frank insisted was their work. What he really wanted from them was more intimate village gossip than could be obtained in the pub.
When we came back I saw Frank whispering confidentially to his employer.
“Of course he hasn’t, boy!” Cunobel shouted — it was his habit to address anyone under sixty as “boy” — “What would he have a dinner jacket for? Wouldn’t want a boiled shirt for watching squirrels, eh?”
“Badgers,” I corrected him, not being sure whether he knew that the Hernsholt country was a most improbable haunt of the red squirrel.
“Badgers or rats,” he said oddly, “all one! He’s an old fool, that boy! When we’re alone I have to dress for dinner like one of those blazing idiots in the jungle whom
Benita draws for the sherry people. And lousy sherry it is! Pah! Knows very well I don’t dress when there are guests! Thinks I can’t move with the times!”
The dinner went very well, Georgina being on her Court of Franz Josef behavior, and the admiral and I having primed ourselves to a point of reasonable geniality before the arrival of the guests. Benita was extremely civil, insisting that she had heard so much about me from my aunt and had read my book on the squirrel. She had, too—for she told me that my description of the use of the tail in the gliding jump from branch to branch was misleading.
“Benita, my dear, Mr. Dennim is an authority,” said her father.
Her glance at me was delightful. It suggested, while preserving a proper demureness, that we were two professionals and must be patient with the unseemly interruptions of amateurs.
“This is what happens …” she said.
She borrowed a pencil from the admiral and an envelope from me. With a dozen swift strokes she caught the feathering of the hair and the angle of tail to body. I agreed at once that she was right and that I had very badly described what I had seen.
To describe Benita herself is even harder. Her true interest, so far as I can explain it, was a sort of sensual geography. She adored her own countryside, upland and valley, whatever the weather. If one imagines a tall fairy or wood nymph —not her appearance, but what would go on in her mind if she existed — then one comes somewhere near Benita.
I do not mean that she was a sort of Rima. Far from it. She was not at all a child of nature. She would have been pretty quickly bored watching squirrels. But if squirrel-watching had been a traditional hobby in the Cotswolds, she would have known all about the people who did it, why they did it and where.
Another example. One might almost call her a trained observer of grass. This undoubtedly started from the pleasure of a young and rather lonely child in feeling the soft Cotswold turf under foot, in watching the life of the valleys through the thin, waving stems on the edge of the escarpment. But it led her on to know the whole range of the grasses and the tastes of sheep and cattle.
And now I find myself describing a collector of scraps of useless information. That isn’t right either. And so I return to my romantic conception of her as a nymph — an entity carrying the collective soul of four square miles of country. I am told that this is all very pretty but that I do not understand parsons’ daughters. All the same, I cannot imagine what induced her to become a commercial artist in London. There was never the slightest chance of her becoming, as Georgina said, a namby-pamby old maid.
During the days which I spent cosseted by the admiral and his Frank, I naturally saw a good deal of Benita and recovered other memories of youth in the amateur schooling of Nur Jehan. I refused to consider the future at all. If the tiger had trusted to that speed of attack which had been so nearly successful at the cottage, he would have got me.
I do not say that I would have welcomed such an end; but I was very well aware that the loneliness of death would make less difference to me than to most of my fellows. The little world into which I had fallen was so superficially pleasant, so real to its inhabitants and yet so very unattainable by me. The remoteness which I felt was not wholly due to the twenty years between myself and Benita. I saw them all as beloved actors upon a stage which I, the single spectator in the vast, lonely auditorium, could never approach. I might have been a cripple. I suppose that in a way I was.
Aunt Georgina seemed in no hurry to return to our suburb. She was just as exasperated as Cunobel by the incompetence of the Gillons in dealing with so valuable and unexpected a legacy as Nur Jehan. On the other hand, she flatly refused to persuade the vicar to get rid of him. Dear Peregrine had appealed to her to come and make sense of the situation, and sense she was going to make even if it meant that she was housekeeper and head groom.
Sitting one evening with the admiral and myself at the companionable hour of the aperitif, she firmly pointed out that the church in ampler days had expected the Vicar of Chipping Marton to keep a horse and carriage and had provided him with a stable and a five-acre meadow. It was absurd to be content with using one as a henhouse and with raising and selling a single crop of hay from the other.
“But the wretched animal won’t stay in the stable except at night, Georgi!” Cunobel protested.
“Naturally he will not. The place still smells of chickens. We shall all take our meals there for a week, Peregrine, if we can attract him back in no other way. Nur Jehan is worth a little trouble. He is becoming known.”
“Great blood and bones, he’s a joke from Badminton to Banbury!”
“I have a very good mind to show him at the Bath and West.”
I ascribed this astonishing assertion to the influence of the admiral’s old Madeira. It was his insidious habit to compliment her on her palate. The old dear tried to surround her with an illusion that time had stood still since 1912. And he could do it. Although his means were limited, his possessions, accumulated during so many years of high command, were luxurious. The study in which we were sitting could have been that of a governor-general.