Master of Melincourt

by Susan Barrie

  She was astonished by the slight harshness of his tone, and her astonishment looked out of her eyes.

  “For my part, I shall simply hate it when the day comes when I have to leave here,” she stated impetuously. “But it would be foolish of me to pretend that that day won’t ever arrive.”

  “Why would it be foolish?” watching her as if he was determined to wrest the truth out of her.

  “Well...” She felt curiously helpless, not certain whether she ought to reveal that she had seen Miss Fleming’s engagement ring, and not wanting the slight inquisition to be continued, when, after all, it wasn’t a very fair inquisition. She handed back the puppy to him. “I think you ought to restore this to Strawberry.”

  “You can bring Tina over to-morrow and hear her go into rhapsodies.” He knelt once more by the basket and lowered the puppy gently on to the soft blanket that filled it. “But at the same time you can remember that I’ve given it to you. There will be no dispute about its ownership in future.”

  “Th-thank you, Mr. Errol,” she stammered, and wondered what her landlady would say when she returned—as she inevitably must return—to London and her one-roomed flat and asked permission to keep her new pet there.

  She doubted very much whether the permission would ever be granted.

  Jervis Errol rose from his kneeling position and indicated by his attitude that the interlude was over. As they descended the stairs he said that there was something else he wanted to show her, and she must not be at all nervous.

  His words caused Edwina immediately to suspect what was going to happen next, and she wasn’t at all surprised when he stopped beside the half-door on the other side of which the handsome grey, Marquis, was making restless, champing noises and viewing the world beyond the stable door with a distinctly jaundiced expression in its equine eyes, and invited her to get really acquainted with his distinguished-looking mount.

  “The first thing you have to realise about horses is that they know when you’re nervous of them, and that’s when they’re inclined to play you up,” he said. “Now, I’m not for one moment suggesting that one day you’ll sit astride a horse like Marquis—he’d look upon you as an irritating feather if you ever landed in his saddle, and get rid of you before you’d time to grasp the reins—but in order to overcome your timidity I do suggest that you say how do you do to him.”

  He asked Bennett to hand him a lump of sugar, and passed it on to Edwina.

  “Let it lie on the palm of your hand and hold it out to him,” he said. “Don’t flinch—don’t look as if you’re about to run away, and in any case you’re half scared out of your wits. Just say something soothingly in that pretty voice of yours, and I give you my word Marquis will behave like the gentleman he is. And no gentleman ever willingly hurt a lady.”

  Edwina realised that this was one time in her life when she had to obey the instruction that had been given to her. If she displayed cowardice those dark blue eyes that were watching her—to say nothing of Bennett, who was also watching her with interest—would almost certainly cloud over with contempt, and whatever happened to her in the future she couldn’t bear that.

  Especially after the chat they had had that morning, and the present he had made her of Strawberry’s pup.

  At the risk of losing life and limb she took a few steps forward and approached the side of the stall. She thought that Marquis, from his superior height, looked down at her with surprised contempt, and then he was nosing the sugar. She was surprised, when she heard him disposing of it with gigantic crunching noises, that her hand was still intact, and she herself seemed to be more or less in one piece.

  She breathed a shuddering sigh of relief, and her employer laughed at her.

  He first patted her shoulder, and then slipped an arm behind both her shoulders as if he might hug them openly, only second thoughts caused him to refrain. Instead he smiled and spoke approvingly.

  “Good girl! I know you had to summon up all your courage to do that, and it struck you as rather like putting your head into the lion’s den. But I was right about Marquis, wasn’t I?”

  Edwina nodded breathlessly.

  “Yes,” she said, “you were perfectly right.”

  Jervis patted the grey’s arched and quivering neck.

  “If you’d disgraced me, Marquis,” he observed, with a note of extreme affability in his voice, “I’d have had you shot!”

  CHAPTER IX

  THE next day Edwina took Tina to see Strawberry’s puppy, and as her uncle had predicted the child went into ecstasies over it. She wanted to have it removed from the stables to the schoolroom, but Jervis declined to permit this ... and, in any case, as he pointed out, the puppy was Edwina’s property.

  As soon as Edwina felt she would like to have it over in the schoolroom, and Strawberry would not be tempted to carry it back to the stables, she could do so.

  Tina seemed to think it somewhat odd that the puppy was not be handed over to her, but after a somewhat reflective look at Edwina—and another rather more curious one at her uncle—she decided to say no more on the subject and Edwina gathered that she didn’t really mind being passed over in favour of her governess. All she did ask, in order to avoid confusion in the future, was what Edwina proposed to call her new possession.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t given the matter any real thought,” Edwina admitted. “But something edible like strawberries might do. What about Honey?”

  And Honey was the name that was bestowed upon the puppy.

  Two days after being taken to the stables to see it Jervis again sent a note to Edwina via the housemaid. But this time she received it in the evening, after dinner, and it had plainly been written in a hurry, and was again simply signed. The note said:

  Put on a thick sweater and a tweed skirt tomorrow morning and be over at the stables by six o’clock. If you’re late I won’t wait for you.

  Edwina was considerably surprised by the note, but although she pondered the matter until she went to bed she couldn’t think why Jervis desired her presence at the stables so early in the morning. If he had said ‘borrow a pair of jodhpurs from somewhere’—and although that would have proved very difficult unless she approached Miss Fleming or Miss Shaw—she would have understood clearly that he intended to give her her first lesson in equestrian management. But in a tweed skirt she could hardly be expected to mount into the saddle ... and the very thought of doing so turned her slightly sick in her inside.

  In the end she could only arrive at the conclusion that her employer required her presence for some purpose of his own, and although it very possibly had something to do with horses it couldn’t mean that she was to be taught to ride.

  But six o’clock ... It was a very early hour, and it was the hour at which he usually rode. And when Tina was bidden to accompany him it was the hour at which she had to present herself at the stables.

  Without saying anything at all to Tina, Edwina prepared for the early morning appointment. She laid out a thick sweater—luckily she was very good at knitting thick sweaters, and she had several—and a pair of slacks in place of the tweed skirt, and took a bath last thing at night in order to save time in the morning.

  Normally she arose about seven o’clock, but it was not difficult to awaken early on a summer morning when the sun was already high in the sky. But to avoid over-sleeping she set her alarm clock for half-past five, and at ten minutes to six she was crossing the stable yard in search of her employer, who appeared to be nowhere about when she first arrived. Then she heard him running down the stairs from the flat above the stables where Strawberry had had her litter, and she realised that he had been up to have a word with the mother and probably make a fuss of the puppy.

  He was wearing a thick white sweater himself, and riding cords and well-polished boots. It was quite chilly at that early hour, although the sky was blue and there was a lovely rose flush in the sky where the sun had arisen, and Edwina was hugging herself with her arms to keep warm ... but
Jervis Errol looked as if he was thoroughly invigorated, with his blood well circulated, and although Edwina had heard his voice on the terrace around about midnight his blue eyes were bright and alive and he certainly did not look as if he had had such a few hours’ sleep.

  He saluted Edwina with obvious pleasure, and then grinned at her and asked her whether she was shivering in her shoes because she must have some suspicion concerning the reason why he had asked her to join him so early.

  “As a matter of fact, I couldn’t really think what you wanted me for,” Edwina admitted, feeling suddenly acutely shy under the interested gaze of his eyes. Her sweater was a slim dark navy one, and her slacks were navy blue, also, and they emphasised the willowy grace of her small, slender shape, and made her complexion seem startlingly clear by comparison.

  Her large brown eyes were a trifle uncertain, but since she had gone to bed very early they were quite as alert as his own.

  He smiled at her, and approached the stable door. There was no sign of Bennett at that hour, and it was he who eventually led Marquis out into the yard and proceeded to give him a quick but efficient grooming. Once again he patted the grey’s neck, talked into his ear and generally proved that he had a deep attachment for the horse. Then, as there was no one else to do it, he saddled him and swung himself up into the saddle, warning Edwina to keep clear while he took the grey for a trot round the yard.

  Edwina needed no second warning. She practically retreated into the stable—where no animal more fearsome than Mothball was in occupation at that time—and looked on anxiously as the iron-shod hooves raced past her, and the whole of the stable quarters echoed to the metallic ring on uneven cobbles, and the grey proved that he was so full of bottled-up energy and vitality that some of it, at least, had to be got rid of before Errol could concentrate once more on the young woman he had aroused from her bed at such an early hour, and who was still shivering in the sharpness of the atmosphere and wishing she was anywhere but where she was at that particular moment.

  When, at last, the master of Melincourt judged that his mount was sufficiently docile he cantered back to the half-door and swung himself down and stood with the reins over his shoulder while he made his purpose clear to Edwina.

  “I tried to run to earth a suitable mount for you,” he told her—“one,” casting another appreciative glance at the slenderness of her figure, “that would carry you nicely, and behave well. But in the time at my disposal I simply couldn’t find anything I could trust you on, so I thought the best thing to do to get you accustomed to the feel of horseflesh was to take you up in front of me.”

  His white teeth flashed at her dazzlingly in the bright sunlight. For the first time, despite a tremendous sensation of shock, she noticed that his smile was just a little bit one-sided, and when he smiled his eyes narrowed themselves, and their arresting blueness gleamed between black-lashed slits rather like blue water glimpsed for the first time between dark reeds or very dark foliage.

  But she heard herself stammering:

  “Y-take me up in front of you—?”

  “Yes.” His smile grew more amused. “In Spain, you know, few ladies actually ride, and most of them travel pillion on the backs of their male escorts’ mounts. I’m not asking you to do that, because—” grinning widely—“you’d probably fall off. But if I have you up in front of me, where I can keep my eye on you, you won’t have an opportunity to fall off, and I certainly think you’ll enjoy it more. Now! Once I’ve mounted, I’ll hold out my hand to you, you’ll grasp it as quickly as you know how, place your foot—your right foot!—over mine in the stirrup, and I’ll swing you up. There’s absolutely nothing to it. It’s perfectly easy, and you don’t need to look as if I’m asking you to commit suicide, or something of the sort!”

  Her colour was coming and going in a fascinating manner, but her teeth actually chattered as she asked him:

  “Won’t M-Marquis object? I mean, the d-double weight...?”

  “My weight and a feather’s weight,” Errol replied, looking down smilingly on to the top of her head. “Of course Marquis won’t object.”

  “But what if I ... don’t manage to catch hold of your hand?” ‘In time,’ she could have added, while her frightened gaze travelled upwards over the tremendous bulk of the grey horse, and then downward to its restless, plunging, wicked-looking feet.

  “You won’t,” Errol assured her. He leaned out of his saddle towards her. “When I count ten! On the count of ten, that is!” He began counting, “One, two, three, four—” when he said four the horse made a wild move, and Edwina only narrowly resisted the impulse to turn back into the stables and hide herself up in the loft. But the merciless voice of her employer went on, “Five, six...”

  And then, at ‘ten,’ in sheerest desperation, she fairly leapt up on to his booted foot and he swung her without the smallest amount of effort right up on to the back of the plunging grey, and holding her tightly in the crook of his arm set off on a complete circuit of the stable yard, and then out through the gate and across another yard and so on to one of the gravel paths that encircled the house and finally on to the main drive.

  At first Edwina simply clung to him in abject terror—it was rather like being on a heaving ship with nothing to cling to save the man who had such a magnificent seat in the saddle, and felt like the Rock of Gibraltar when she clutched at him—and then an extraordinary sensation like exhilaration took possession of her.

  They tore down the drive towards the distant, white main gates, with the wind singing past their ears and the freshness of the morning all about them, and then as the gates were fortunately wide open, they shot between the uprights and out on to a stretch of lonely deserted road that would have eventually brought them to the nearer of the two villages had not Jervis entered the park on the far side of the road, and after that they seemed to be entirely lost in a wilderness of trees which Marquis negotiated as if he knew every one of them by heart ... which he probably did.

  Every time Edwina was absolutely certain they were about to have a headlong crash with a tree-trunk Marquis avoided it. His owner seemed to be more or less letting him have his head, and in this way they went on and on until they were several miles from Melincourt, and practically on the fringe of the moor. Only then did Jervis swing the grey’s head round, and they started returning by the way they had come.

  It had been an astonishing experience for Edwina ... astonishing because after the first half mile or so she had found herself enjoying the experience utterly. When she ceased to bother about falling off, and the iron-hard feel of Jervis’s arm convinced her that, whatever else happened, he wouldn’t allow her to fall off, she was able to put back her head and look about her.

  Her hair blew into Jervis’s eyes, and much of it strayed constantly across his chest. Far from it incommoding him, however, he laughed softly from time to time, and seemed to appreciate the delicate smell of it so much that he actually inhaled it occasionally, without Edwina’s knowledge. He held her, she was inclined to think—once her initial fears appeared to have evaporated—unnecessarily firmly, and the whole of her weight was taken by the stalwart front of his body.

  At one stage of the outward canter it confused her so much that she found it impossible to meet his eyes, and then when she heard him laughing she coloured brilliantly. She sought to hide her face against him, and demanded:

  “Do you really think this is the ideal way of teaching a person to ride?”

  “I think it’s the only way to teach you to ride.”

  “But I’d never dare to stay on a horse alone.”

  “You will.”

  On the homeward journey he brought the horse to a standstill in a rich green glade of what looked in that early morning light like a medieval forest, and invited her appreciation of the tall trunks that soared all round them, and the great boughs that drooped above them.

  “Some of these trees were standing when my earliest forebears were alive,” he told her, his voice warm
with love of the land ... his own land. “Doesn’t it make you feel humble when you think of trees standing for that length of time?”

  With an excited catch in her voice she answered: “I should always feel humble if I lived at Melincourt all my life.”

  “Why?”

  The word was like a pistol-shot. It was so insistent that it startled her.

  “Because I love everything about it, and I’ve only been here a short while.”

  He swung himself down from the saddle and lifted her down. He indicated a fallen tree-trunk, and they sat down side by side, while Marquis, without being tethered in any way, stood patiently cropping the grass.

  “Tell me—” the man produced his cigarette-case and offered it to her, but she refused, and he lit one himself—“tell me more than you’ve ever told me about yourself. Tell me about your parents—the way you lived before you came here ... everything!”

  As if she was under some sort of compulsion—almost as if she was mesmerised by him—she complied with his request. Although she normally never talked about these things—certainly not to a comparative stranger such as he was—she told him about the loneliness of her life without parents, and with only a very few friends. She told him about her little bed-sitting-room to which—when she returned to it—she would take Honey, and about the wild excitement she had felt when she first arrived at Melincourt and proved to be so very many times more wonderful, more beautiful, and more rural than she had anticipated. She even talked about Tina, and confessed dreamily that she was growing quite fond of the child.

  “I’ll hate it when I have to leave her,” she admitted. “That’s the worst thing about being a governess. Sooner or later children grow up, and then you have to leave them.”

  He looked astounded.

  “But surely you are not seriously contemplating devoting the whole of your life to other people’s children?” he demanded.