‘Those seeds? So shall cause appendicitis, isn’t it?’ screamed his relative. ‘Did Adam have appendicitis?’
‘Well, he did lose a rib. I wonder whether that made any difference?’
‘So not nice! You are not nice!’ shrieked Rebekah. ‘Now we shall change the subject. I look around this room, and what am I seeing?’
‘An ass-head of your own,’ muttered Bernardo. Rebekah took no notice.
‘I see upon the wall,’ she announced, ‘picture from English artist Romney, representing previous owner of this house. Is inferior copy. I offer twenty pounds.’
‘You stick to diamonds,’ retorted Bernardo. ‘You think you understand pictures? Gorblimey! Besides, that picture has been promised to me for a wedding present.’
‘I like you to have my twenty pounds. You are not forgetting the diamond ram you promised me?’
‘I promised you nothing!’
‘For my birthday, yes, you did!’
‘I’ll buy the ram if you’ll buy the thicket.’
Rebekah looked at him suspiciously. Then she said, ‘I am like King Saul. I also am among the prophets. You and I shall be finding ourselves among the thicket and it will be a long time before we are getting out of it. Put that in your pipe, silly boy!’
‘Don’t smoke a pipe,’ said Bernardo.
CHAPTER SIX
Aftermath of a Dinner Party
‘The ample heaven of fabrick sure
In cleanness does surpass
The crystal and the silver pure,
Or clearest polished glass.’
Alexander Hume
« ^ »
Breakfast at nine, madam,’ said the maid who brought Dame Beatrice’s early pot of tea, ‘unless perhaps you’d care to have it in bed.’
‘No, no, thank you, Parks,’ replied Dame Beatrice. ‘I suppose most of the family breakfast downstairs?’
‘All of them, madam, except for some of the ladies.’
Dame Beatrice noticed that Florian was again seated next to his despised aunt Opal, although there were vacant chairs. Her host invited her to sit next to him at the breakfast table and, after some desultory remarks about the weather and the crops, he said, with obvious earnestness,
‘You accepted to stay for the night, but it would give us all great pleasure if you felt you could stay longer. I know you are famous and therefore busy, much occupied with your patients and your friends, but if you could spare us even one more day…’
‘Yes, yes,’ shouted Rebekah, who had heard all this. ‘Is not economy to use sheets one night only. Should be three, four, five nights to make laundering pay.’
‘Now, don’t take it upon yourself to make these announcements,’ said Bernardo. ‘They don’t sound proper. People will think you live in the suburbs.’
‘I accept,’ said Rebekah, with a mighty and magnificent wave of a be-ringed and pudgy hand, ‘the sheets of the marriage bed.’
‘For goodness’ sake! You’re making me blush! Here, have a nice bit of cold pork,’ said Bernardo, offering the kind of red-herring which he knew would be irresistible to his grandmother. Her attention distracted, and screaming abuse at him, she ate kippers and buttered toast and demanded that he give her a second cup of coffee.
‘You are pig! Pig!’ she screamed. Bernardo shrugged.
‘Only half a pig,’ he said. ‘Now, to turn to baser but more important matters, what are you giving me for a wedding present?’
The argument which ensued was still being carried on when the rest of the party left the dining-room. Dame Beatrice looked out upon the lake and the park as she went up to her room, and decided upon a stroll. Accordingly, she arrayed herself in a voluminous cape, placed an improbable purple hat on her head and went downstairs and into the grounds.
The old house was built on a simple pattern so far as the state rooms were concerned. The door which led into the garden was directly opposite the front door, and the stairs were on the garden-entrance side of the screen, and so was the library. Nearly opposite the library door, but at the foot of a couple of shallow steps, was a large cupboard under the main staircase. It was known as the garden room, and it contained a water-tap and a sink and was a place in which freshly-gathered flowers from the garden could be stripped of unwanted leaves and put into vases.
Dame Beatrice descended the couple of steps and opened the door which led into the grounds. She stood on the stone-flagged terrace a moment to admire the prospect. Flower-beds flanked a beautifully-tended lawn, and, sloping down to a considerable stream, were oaks and elms, dominated, in the centre of the lawn, by an impressive cedar-of-Lebanon whose spreading branches over-shadowed a patch of bare ground.
To the left of this cedar was the lake. It was not large compared with the lake, for instance, in the near-by park of Holkham Hall, but it was calm and beautiful, its calmness marred, at the moment of Dame Beatrice’s inspection, by Florian, who was gathering small pebbles from the gravel path and hurling them vindictively into the water. A colony of ducks and a couple of coots were making a noisy retreat, and some swans had come out upon the bank and were taking cover behind the tall reeds.
Dame Beatrice left the vicinity of the house and walked towards the water. Florian swung round as he heard her footsteps on the gravel.
‘I say,’ he said, dropping a handful of pebbles and dusting his palms together, ‘I was hoping you’d come out here. Could I talk to you for a minute?’
‘I should be delighted,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘What a charming place this is!’
‘Yes,’ agreed Florian. ‘I don’t know who will have it when my granduncle goes. I was hoping it would come to me, but I think this wretched engagement of Binnie’s may have made a difference to all that. If, in the end, she marries that ape, bang go my chances of inheriting the property, I’m afraid. My granduncle seems insanely keen on this match, the same as he liked my aunt Maarte marrying Bernardo’s father. What do you suppose I should do? You see, after all, I do live here. Bernardo (silly name! ) doesn’t.’
‘Your sister does, though,’ Dame Beatrice pointed out. Florian (an equally silly name, Dame Beatrice thought) kicked a stone in a moody and disconsolate manner and glumly agreed.
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I can’t see what there will be in it for Binnie. She doesn’t even like Bernie. She’s scared stiff of him, I would say.’
‘One can do nothing in such a case,’ observed Dame Beatrice. ‘True love is the most extraordinary thing in the world. The loved one is not infrequently terrified by the lover.’
‘True love? There can’t be anything of that sort in this particular situation, and, anyway, I don’t care to see my sister married to a mountebank,’ argued Florian.
‘Of course not. But young Mr Rose does not seem to me to belong to that category. I think he is sincerely fond of your sister (who is, you will agree, immature), and he will make her a very good husband.’
‘I can’t see that. I think Binnie’s making a fool of herself. She is a fool, of course, as you say, but this engagement is going a bit too far. She can’t be fond of that oily, conceited brute!’
They circumnavigated the lake and came to some broad, rough, shallow steps, which led downhill to the pleasant little river.
‘Well, here we are,’ said Florian gloomily. ‘Do you want to go through the gate and on to the riverside path? It isn’t bad along there.’ He produced a key and unlocked the tall iron gate. ‘Have to keep it fastened,’ he explained, ‘because, otherwise, people could get in. We had a lot of trouble a couple of years ago. It was as bad as Hyde Park in the summer.’
Dame Beatrice ignored this unlikely comparison, and asked briskly, as they threaded their way in single file along the narrow, ill-defined path which ran deviously along the right bank of the river,