"Oh? What is he doing now?"
"Still playing roue parts in dreadful little comedies and farces. You know: four characters, five doors, and one bed. I didn't see him, but Nancy said he had improved."
"In what way?"
"Oh, more interested in other people. Kindlier. He even made efforts to get on with George. Nancy thought age was beginning to tell. He was quite happy to sit for hours with a book in George's study when George was out. And when George was in they would yarn quite happily. Nancy was delighted. She has always been fond of Alec, but she used to dread his visits. The country bored him and George bored him even more, and he never bothered to hide it. So it was a pleasant change."
Half-way through the village they turned into the lane that led to Wigsell.
"You don't remember Emmy Vidler, do you?" she asked Brat. "She was brought up at Wigsell, and married Gates when he had a farm the other side of Bures. When her father died, Gates put a bailiff into his farm and took over Wigsell. And, of course, the butcher's shop. So they are very comfortably off. The boy couldn't stand his father, and got himself a job in the Midlands somewhere; engineering. But the girl lives at home, and is the apple of her father's eye. She went to an expensive boarding school, where I understand she was known as Margot. Her name is Peggy."
They swung into the farm entrance and came to rest on the small old cobbles of the yard. Two dogs rushed at them in wild self-importance, yelling their arrival to the world.
"I do wish Gates would train his dogs," said Bee, whose dogs were as well-trained as her horses.
The clamour brought Mrs. Gates to the front door. She was a faded and subdued little woman who must once have been very pretty.
"Glen! Joy! Be quiet!" she called, ineffectually, and came forward to greet them. But before she reached them Gates came round the corner of the house, and in a few strides had anticipated her. His pompous welcome drowned her more genuine pleasure, and she stood smiling gently at Brat while her husband trumpeted forth their satisfaction in seeing Patrick Ashby on their doorstep again.
Gates was a large, coarse individual, but Brat supposed that once he had had the youthful vigour and assurance that appealed to pretty, fragile little women like Emmy Vidler.
"They tell me that you've been making money in horses over there," he said to Brat.
"I've earned my living from them," Brat said.
"You come and see what I've got in my stable." He began to lead the way to the back of the house.
"But Harry, they must come in and sit down for a little," his wife protested.
"They'll sit down presently. They'd much rather look at a piece of good horseflesh than at your gewgaws. Come along, Mr. Patrick. Come along, Miss Ashby. Alfred!" he bellowed as they went down the yard. "Turn out that new horse for Miss Ashby to see."
Mrs. Gates, tailing along behind, found herself side by side with Brat. "I am so happy about this," she said quietly. "So happy about your coming back. I remember you when you were little; when I lived here in my father's day. Except for my own son I've never been so fond of a small boy as I was of you."
"Now then, Mr. Patrick, have a look at this here, have a look at this! Tell me if that doesn't fill the eye for you."
Gates swept his great limb of an arm at the stable door where Alfred was leading out a brown horse that looked oddly out of place in the small farmyard, even in a region where every small farmer kept a mount that would carry him across country in the winter. There was no denying it, the brown horse was something exceptional.
"There! what do you think of that, eh? What do you think of that?"
Bee, having looked, said: "But that, surely, is the horse that Dick Pope won the jumping on at the Bath Show last year."
"That's the horse," Gates said complacently. "And not only the jumping. The cup for the best riding horse in the show. Cost me a pretty penny, that did, but I can afford it and nothing's too good for my girl. Oh ah! It's for Peggy I bought it. That wouldn't carry me, that wouldn't." He gave an abrupt shout of laughter; at least Brat supposed it was laughter. "But my girl, now, she's a feather in the saddle. I don't have to tell you, Miss Ashby; you've seen her. There's no one in the county deserves a good horse better than my Peggy, and I don't grudge the money for it."
"You've certainly got a good horse, Mr. Gates," Bee said, with an enthusiasm in her voice that surprised Brat. He looked across at her and wondered why she was looking so pleased. After all, this brown horse was a potential rival to Timber, and all the other Latchetts' animals.
"Got a vet's certificate with it, I need hardly say. I don't buy pigs in pokes."
"Is Peggy going to show it this year?"
"Of course she is, of course she is. What did I buy it for but for her to show?"
Bee's face was positively blissful. "How nice!" she said, and she sounded rapturous.
"Do you like it, Miss Ashby?" Peggy Gates said, appearing at Brat's side.
Peggy was a very pretty creature. Pink and white and gold. Brat thought that if it were possible to cross Miss Parslow and Eleanor the result would probably be Peggy Gates. She accepted her introduction to Brat with composure, but managed to convey the impression that it was personally delightful to her to have Patrick home again. Her small hand lay in his with a soft pressure that was intimate rather than friendly. Brat shook it heartily and resisted a temptation to wipe his palm down his hip.
She accepted Bee's congratulations on her possession of the horse, allowed a decent interval for further contemplation of it, and then with an admirable display of social dexterity, lifted the whole family from the yard into the drawing-room of the house. It was called the drawing-room, and was furnished as such, but Bee, who remembered it as old Mrs. Vidler's parlour, thought the water-colours and wistaria wallpaper a poor exchange for the lustre jugs and framed engravings of Mrs. Vidler's day.
They drank very good madeira and talked about the Bures Agricultural Show.
And they drove home with Bee still looking as if someone had left her a fortune. She caught Brat's considering look at her and said: "Well?"
"You look like a cat that has been given cream," he said.
She gave him her sideways, amused glance. "Cream and fish and liver," she said; but did not tell him the translation.
"When all the fuss of Friday is over, Brat," she said, "you must go up to town and get yourself a wardrobe. Walters will take weeks to make your evening things, and you'll need them for the celebration when Uncle Charles comes home."
"What shall I get?" he asked, at a loss for the first time.
"I should leave it to Walters, if I were you."
"Outfit for a young English gentleman," Brat said.
And she looked sideways again, surprised by the twist in his voice.
18
Eleanor came into the sitting-room as Bee was opening the midday post, and said: "She bumped!"
Bee looked up hazily, her mind still on the contents of her mail.
"She bumped, I tell you. For a whole fifty yards she bumped like a good 'un."
"The Parslow girl? Oh, congratulations, Nell, dear."
"I never thought I'd live to see this day. Is no one having sherry?"
"Brat and I have drunk sufficient strange liquids this morning to last us for the rest of the week."
"How did it go, Brat?" Eleanor asked, pouring herself some sherry.
"Not as badly as I'd been prepared for," Brat said, watching her thin capable hand manipulating the glasses. That hand wouldn't lie soft and confidential and insinuating in one's own.
"Did Docket tell you how he got his wound?"
"Docket was at market," Bee said. "But we had hot buttered scones from Mrs. Docket."