Henry followed and shut the door behind them.
‘Well!’ said Miss Campanula. ‘Well!’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Miss Prentice. ‘Isn’t it?’
III
Dinah, left alone with them, knew that the battle of the music was postponed in order that the two ladies might unite in the abuse of Mrs Ross. That it was postponed and not abandoned was evident in their manner, which reminded Dinah of stewed fruit on the turn. Its sweetness was impregnated by acidity.
‘Of course, Eleanor,’ said Miss Campanula, ‘I can’t for the life of me see why you didn’t show her the door. I should have refused to receive her. I should!’
‘I was simply dumbfounded,’ said Miss Prentice. ‘When Taylor announced them, I really couldn’t believe my senses. I am deeply disappointed in Dr Templett.’
‘Disappointed! The greatest piece of brazen effrontery I have ever encountered. He shan’t have my lumbago! I can promise him that.’
‘I really should have thought he’d have known better,’ continued Miss Prentice. ‘It isn’t as if we don’t know who he is. He should be a gentleman. I always thought he took up medicine as a vocation. After all, there have been Templetts at Chippingwood for –’
‘For as long as there have been Jernighams at Pen Cuckoo,’ said Miss Campanula. ‘But of course, you wouldn’t know that.’
This was an oblique hit. It reminded Miss Prentice that she was a new-comer and not, strictly speaking, a Jernigham of Pen Cuckoo. Miss Campanula followed it up by saying, ‘I suppose in your position you could do nothing but receive her; but I must say I was astonished that you leapt at her play as you did.’
‘I did not leap, Idris,’ said Miss Prentice. ‘I hope I took the dignified course. It was obvious that everybody but you and me was in favour of her play.’
‘Well, it’s a jolly good play,’ said Dinah.
‘So we have been told,’ said Miss Campanula. ‘Repeatedly.’
‘I was helpless,’ continued Miss Prentice. ‘What could I do? One can do nothing against sheer common persistence. Of course she has triumphed.’
‘She’s gone off now, taking every man in the room with her,’ said Miss Campanula. ‘Ha!’
‘Ah, well,’ added Miss Prentice, ‘I suppose it’s always the case when one deals with people who are not quite. Did you hear what she said about our not calling?’
‘I was within an ace of telling her that I understood she received men only.’
‘But, Miss Campanula,’ said Dinah, ‘we don’t know there’s anything more than friendship between them, do we? And even if there is, it’s their business.’
‘Dinah, dear!’ said Miss Prentice.
‘As a priest’s daughter, Dinah –’ began Miss Campanula.
‘As a priest’s daughter,’ said Dinah, ‘I’ve got a sort of idea charity is supposed to be a virtue. And, anyway, I think when you talk about a person’s family it’s better not to call him a priest. It sounds so scandalous, somehow.’
There was dead silence. At last Miss Campanula rose to her feet.
‘I fancy my car is waiting for me, Eleanor,’ she said. ‘So I shall make my adieux. I am afraid we are neither of us intelligent enough to appreciate modern humour. Good-night.’
‘Aren’t we driving you home?’ asked Dinah.
‘Thank you, Dinah, no. I ordered my car for six, and it is already half-past. Good-night.’
The next morning was fine. Henry woke up at six and looked out of his window at a clear, cold sky with paling stars. In another hour it would begin to get light. Henry wide awake, his mind sharp with anticipation, leapt back into bed and sat with the blankets caught between his chin and his knees, hugging himself. A fine winter’s dawn with a light frost and then the thin, pale sunlight. Down in the stables they would soon be moving about with lanthorns to the sound of clanking pails, shrill whistling, and boots on cobblestone. Hounds met up at Moorton Park today, and Jocelyn’s two mounts would be taken over by his groom to wait for his arrival by car. Henry spared a moment to regret his own decision to give up hunting. He had loved it so much: the sound, the smell, the sight of the hunt. It had all seemed so perfectly splendid until one day, quite suddenly as if a new pair of eyes had been put into his head, he had seen a mob of well-fed expensive people, with red faces, astraddle shiny quadrupeds, all whooping ceremoniously after a very small creature which later on was torn to pieces while the lucky ones sat on their horses and looked on, well satisfied. To his violent annoyance, he had found that he could not rid himself of this unlovely picture and, as it made him feel slightly sick, he had given up everything but drag-hunting. Jocelyn had been greatly upset and had instantly accused Henry of pacifism. Henry had just left off being a pacifist, however, and assured his father that if England was invaded he would strike a shrewd blow before he would see Cousin Eleanor raped by a foreign mercenary. Hugging his knees, he chuckled at the memory of Jocelyn’s face. Then he gave himself four minutes to revise the conversation he had planned to have with Dinah. He found that the thought of Dinah sent his heart pounding, just as it used to pound in the old days before he took his first fence. ‘I suppose I’m hunting again,’ he thought, and this primitive idea gave him a curiously exalted sensation. He jumped out of bed, bathed, shaved and dressed by lamplight, then he stole downstairs out into the dawn.
It’s a fine thing to be abroad on Dorset hills on a clear winter’s dawn. Henry went round the west wing of Pen Cuckoo. The gravel crunched under his shoes and the dim box-borders smelt in a garden that was oddly remote. Familiar things seemed mysterious as if the experience of the night had made strangers of them. The field was rimmed with silver, the spinney on the far side was a company of naked trees locked in a deep sleep from which the sound of footsteps among the dead leaves and twigs could not awaken them. The hillside smelt of cold earth and frosty stones. As Henry climbed steeply upwards, it was as if he left the night behind him down in Pen Cuckoo. On Cloudyfold, the dim shapes took on some resolute form and became rocks, bushes and posts, expectant of the day. The clamour of faraway cock-crows rose vaguely from the valley like the overlapping echoes of dreams, and with this sound came the human smell of woodsmoke.
Henry reached the top of Cloudyfold and looked down the vale of Pen Cuckoo. His breath a small cold mist in front of his face, his fingers were cold and his eyes watered, but he felt like a god as he surveyed his own little world. Half-way down, and almost sheer beneath him, was the house he had left. He looked down into the chimney-tops, already wreathed in thin drifts of blue. The servants were up and about. Farther down, and still drenched in shadow, were the roofs of Winton. Henry wondered if they really leaked badly and if he and Dinah could ever afford to repair them. Beyond Winton his father’s land spread out into low hills and came to an end at Selwood Brook. Here, half-screened by trees, he could see the stone façade of Chippingwood which Dr Templett had inherited from his elder brother who had died in the Great War. And separated from Chippingwood by the hamlet of Chipping was Miss Campanula’s Georgian mansion, on the skirts of the village but not of it. Farther away, and only just visible over the downlands that separated it from the Vale, was Great Chipping, the largest town in that part of Dorset. Half-way up the slope, below Winton and Pen Cuckoo, was the church, Winton St Giles, with the rectory hidden behind it. Dinah would strike straight through their home copse and come up the ridge of Cloudyfold. If she came! Please God make it happen, said Henry’s thoughts as they used to do when he was a little boy. He crossed the brow of the hill. Below