Free The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West Page B

running past the farmyard and were going so hard that the riders could not turn aside, and looked over their shoulders with speed-glazed eyes as they were carried past the open gates. It struck Papa and Richard Quin as strange, as a little frightening that the people in the farmyard were shaken with their own huge kind of laughter because the hunt had lost their fox and their pack. These were the gentry. It served them right to have a bit of ill luck, for once.
    They were all going back to the barn to sing and drink some more when another horse came up the lane. It was rolling stiffly backwards and forwards like a rocking-horse. It was Sultan. The boys shouted and ran forward to stop him, which was not difficult, and they found their tutor unable to dismount. He went on sitting in the saddle, his eyes closed, saying, “ Je meurs, je meurs, je meurs. ” While the poor man had been searching the lanes for his charges the hunt had crossed his track, and Sultan had suddenly remembered his youth and joined the field. Nothing would stop him and he had cleared several hedges and a water-jump. It was no wonder that the French tutor, who had never hunted before, could say nothing but “ Je meurs, je meurs, je meurs. ” But it all worked out well, for the farm people had never heard of such a joke as a Frenchman who had been caught up into a hunt, and they stuffed him with food and brought him flagons of drink, and he ended by singing too. He gave them “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” and had the Welsh people la-la-ing a fine chorus to them.
    At that Papa suddenly left the past. The story stopped. He was sad, we knew it, we moved away. He sauntered about the stable, humming “La Marseillaise,” which insensibly turned into “The Wearing of the Green,” the only tune he was really sure of, and poking with the worn toe of his shoe at such evidence of decay as a rusted bucket without a bottom, a birch broom which had retained only a few of its twigs, but making no move to alter their position. He was always making such movements, which spoke of an intense but inactive fastidiousness. For a time we lost him, and Mamma found him in a little room where there were three saddles hanging on the wall, half transmuted into a blue-green mould.
    My mother slipped her arm into his. “How lovely it will be, for you to work on this newspaper,” she said. “They have been so kind. They are sending a man to put up the beds this afternoon. The manager’s wife has found us a servant.” My father said nothing. He was often kind, but he was also ungrateful. My mother went on, “If this is a success it might lead to all sorts of things. The children,” she said after a pause, her voice rising bravely to hope, but muting its hope because she had known so much disappointment— “the children might have ponies. You would like that.”
    My father did not answer. “Like Cream and Sugar,” she mildly persisted.
    He pointed at the mouldy saddles. “That stuff is wonderful for cuts,” he said.
    “What?” exclaimed my mother.
    “Yes,” said my father. “There was an old saddle like this in the saddleroom at home, and whenever any of us boys cut ourselves Micky McGuire the groom used to take us in there, and rub the mould deep into the cut, and it always healed in no time.”
    My mother sighed with impatience at what was not to sound a reasonable remark until half a century had passed, and turned away. “Children, children,” she called. “You must have some luncheon and we must find some way of getting poor Richard Quin a place to rest. Oh, how good he has been!”
    All parts of the puzzle fell into place before nightfall. The man who came in the afternoon was, as Mamma put it in the language of the day, very civil, and he hammered up our beds and put up the dining-room table and moved the bookcases into Papa’s study, so Mamma was able to get him out of the way, for she told him that the best way he could help would be to unpack