The Black Benedicts

by Anita Charles

  But Serena, for all her precociousness, was quite a natural nine-year-old, and if there was any delicacy in her make-up it did not prevent her from running like the wind when the fancy took her, and climbing over gates and fences without much thought for her hand-made brogues and finely-pleated skirt.

  Serena’s clothes were made specially for her in London, and one or two of her finer frocks had been bought in Paris. Her wardrobe had astonished Mallory when she saw it for the first time, whilst waiting for Darcy to get her ready for her outing. She had as many changes as a film-star, and she took the keenest delight in the possession of so much rather unsuitable finery—or Mallory, who had been brought up on the principle of ‘handing down’ to the next comer, could not quite persuade herself that it was suitable. And she wondered just how important a part her obviously much admired Uncle Raife played in the life of his niece.

  They were turning for home, and Serena was slightly ahead, still looking for wild flowers under every bush and shrub, when Mallory became aware of the man sitting absolutely still on the back of a big, statuesque-looking, black horse, watching them from beneath the brim of a soft felt hat pulled rather well down over his eyes.

  Despite the hat Mallory recognized him immediately as the man who had filled her with some moments of completely unreasoning panic a few nights before.

  The trees in that part of the park grew like the pillars of a cathedral soaring to the unseen grey of the winter sky. They were mostly beech, with granite-smooth trunks, growing in serried ranks, and they offered but little protection to anyone wishing for some reason to remain unseen while acting the part of an onlooker. And in the case of Raife Benedict, owner of all that goodly timber and many hundreds of acres of fertile land beyond, it mattered little indeed—in fact, not at all!—whether he was seen or not.

  His horse was steaming, for he had evidently been riding it hard, and that it was of a nervous temperament was betrayed by its uneasy, dilated nostrils and the eyes which rolled restlessly. Mallory came to an abrupt halt when she caught sight of its rider, and Serena, looking back, gave a sudden, eager shout.

  “Uncle Raife ... Oh, Uncle Raife, is that your new horse?”

  “Keep away, Infant,” he ordered her, as her flying feet took her close to him. “My new horse, as you call it, is not in the best of moods.”

  “Come here, Serena,” Mallory called, and the child returned to her reluctantly.

  “It’s as well to begin as you mean to go on,” Raife Benedict observed, looking closely at Mallory. With her pale curls escaping from under a blue cape, a blue suede windcheater zipped up to her smooth and shapely throat, warm colour in her cheeks and eyes sparkling after exercise, she still bore a sufficient resemblance to the slight and ghostly young woman who had appeared in the gallery on the night of her arrival, but he gave no slightest sign that he had recognized her, or had even seen her in the gallery. “Obedience is a virtue which can and must be inculcated in the young, and with Serena it is doubly important, for she has always been inclined to flout authority.” Mallory did not reply, and he said coolly:

  “Miss Gower, I presume? My name is Benedict—Raife Benedict!”

  Mallory made a very slight inclination of her head.

  “Good morning, Mr. Benedict.”

  She realized that although his hands appeared to be lying idly on his! horse’s neck they were iron hard, and that it was as much as he could do—and more a matter of an iron-hard will as well—to maintain his nervous mount in that immobile attitude while he addressed her smoothly at the same time.

  She noticed that his eyes were not as dark as his brother’s—not as dark as she had imagined them the other night—and they reminded her a little of rich brown sherry overcast by a shadow. The shadow was the shadow of his black, wiry eyelashes, unusually long and thick for a man, and the queer golden lights she had either seen or imagined were queer greenish flecks in daylight. His mouth was thin and close-set and looked as if it might sneer easily, and, in fact, his whole expression was slightly repellent. His voice had the chill of ice floes in it without being particularly hostile. She had to admit that he had a magnificent seat on a horse, and his figure was both upright and elegant. He wore a pale primrose sweater with a high polo collar beneath a perfectly fitting tweed jacket, and his buff breeches and riding boots were quite faultless.

  She noticed also that the horse he bestrode was a really splendid animal, with a touch of the Arab in its svelte lines and snaky head and long undocked tail. As one who loved animals and had been accustomed to horses from her earliest days, she did not in the least approve that tail, but she was very much attracted to the horse itself. She looked at it consideringly.

  “I should advise you, too, not to come any nearer,” Raife Benedict said to her rather sharply. “Saladin is not a sweet-tempered brute.”

  “Saladin?” she echoed. “What a very suitable name!”

  “Mephistopheles would be even more suitable!”

  As if she had intended to do so from the first, she took an almost unnoticeable step forward, followed by another quiet, gliding movement, and her hand went out and caressed the velvet muzzle of the uncertain-tempered black. Instantly a kind of quiver ran through it, and for an instant the white teeth gleamed, and then it was absolutely still again. Mallory spoke to it in low, soothing, crooning tones.

  “You beauty!—you perfect beauty...!”

  She looked up and met the blazing eyes above her, and almost she quailed for an instant. Whereas before there had been greenish flecks in the light brown pupils, they were now completely swallowed up by a display of red fireworks, and the thin lips were almost gnashed together.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, “but I’m used to horses!”

  “Used to pomeranians, I should imagine!” he returned furiously. “You little idiot, haven’t you any idea what might have happened to you for your audacity? Even I don’t know the potentialities of this beast, and you deserve to have been kicked! Get back—and take that infant back to the house. It’s beginning to rain.”

  “Yes,” Mallory said, with deceptive meekness, and turned to retrace her steps.

  “And come and see me in the library at a quarter past two this afternoon,” he called after her. “I want to talk to you. I’m catching a train at three o’clock, so whatever you do don’t be late!” Mallory did not answer, but she stooped and scooped up Belinda, who was about to disappear down another rabbit-hole, and then looked round for Serena, who was standing pouting and looking thoroughly displeased. It always annoyed her when her uncle did not condescend to pay very much attention to her.

  “Come along, Serena,” Mallory called. “We’ll have to run, or you’ll get wet, and Darcy will be cross.”

  “Bother Darcy!” Serena exclaimed petulantly. “Uncle Raife,” cupping her hands over her mouth and trying to make her voice carry after the now rapidly disappearing horseman, “can I ride Shamrock while you’re away?”

  “No—you—can—not!” came back his voice, harsh as a whip-lash. “You’ll ride nothing at all until I get back!”

  “Isn’t he hateful to-day?” Serena said, addressing Mallory, but thrusting out her lower lip farther ever while she gazed after the black horse and its rider who were crashing away down the empty ride. “He can be quite detestable sometimes, and after all you only just touched, his horse.”

  “Disobedience is not a virtue,” Mallory reminded her, catching her by the arm preparatory to starting to run with her. “And I flagrantly disobeyed an order, setting a bad example to you as well, so I think he was probably justifiably angry. Come along!”

  At a quarter past two she knocked on the library door, and was instantly bidden to enter. Her employer was seated behind a big roll-topped desk and rapidly clearing it of an accumulation of letters, bills, circulars, etc., by the simple process of sweeping them into the various drawers and turning his keys in the locks. He had changed into a dark town suit and was decidedly immaculate as to the collar and cuff
s and meticulously tied tie.

  “Ah, Miss Gower!” he said, looking up at her, his expression no less grim than in the morning. “So you’re a good time-keeper, anyway.”

  “You said a quarter past two,” Mallory returned in her smoothest tones, “and it is exactly a quarter past two.”

  “Exactly.” He consulted his watch, and when he looked up at her again she could have sworn that a gleam of ironic humour shone in his strange brown eyes. “All the same, there’s little enough time to say what I want to say to you, so I’d better get started without any delay.”

  He stood up, hands thrust into the pockets of his beautiful creased trousers and started to pace up and down the room. She decided that his movements were graceful and rather pantherish, and out of the corner of her eye she noticed the portrait above the fireplace which was undoubtedly the one mentioned by Serena a few nights earlier. But for the dissimilarity in the styles of dress it would have been difficult to tell the two men apart, and they were both distinguished by the hawk-like look of arrogance and a forbidding determination to have things as much their own way as possible in a world which was very much their world—or, in the case of the Elizabethan gentleman, the world which had once been his!

  “How long have you been a governess, Miss Gower?” he suddenly shot at her.

  “For precisely three days,” Mallory replied truthfully.

  “A somewhat limited experience,” he remarked, his eyebrows ascending a little.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” Mallory agreed quietly.

  His eyes raked her from the crown of her head to the toe of her shoe. There was something quite merciless in that regard, and she realized that beneath it she should have felt uncomfortable, but oddly enough she did not. She did not even feel discomposed. His arrogance aroused in her a feeling of resentment, but it did not make her quail. She once read a book called At the Mercy of Tiberius, and Tiberius, she thought, must have had characteristics in common with this man. At least they both sought to intimidate.

  “And so this is your first job!” There was a note like mockery in his voice. “Your first job as a governess, anyway. What have you been doing up till now?—or haven’t you been doing anything at all? Taking an interest in horses, perhaps?”

  That, at least, made her flush a little. He could see the faint wave of carmine rise up in her cheeks, and her grey eyes retreated for an instant behind their long eyelashes.

  “I suppose I ought to apologize for what I did this morning,” she managed at last, a little stiffly, “but I wasn’t conscious at the time of doing anything particularly outrageous. You see, I am used to horses, and in our family animals of every sort and kind have always played a very prominent part. We probably don’t think enough before we approach them—the more spirited kind, that is—but I’ve never been bitten or mauled or kicked by any animal. My grandfather shot tigers, and my father could tame the ‘heart out of a wild cat.”

  “That’s most interesting,” he observed drily.

  “But your Saladin, of course, is different.”

  “I don’t know enough about my Saladin,” he admitted, “to be able to tell you whether he is merely different, or whether he is possessed of a kind of devil, or whether it is simply nervousness and in the end he will prove tameable. I only bought him a little over a week ago, and as yet I haven’t discovered that he possesses any real virtues, apart from his looks, which are obvious. However,” glancing at his watch, “I didn’t ask you to come here to discuss Saladin, and, as I’ve already told you, my time is short.”

  He continued to pace up and down the room, reminding her more and more of a restless animal himself.

  “I don’t want to know what you’ve been doing before you came here,” he said shortly. “You look to me as if you might be good for Serena—and I don’t think you can do her very much harm,” glancing at her obliquely.

  Really, thought Mallory, he was insufferable...

  “You are young, and that is what she needs—someone who can keep her amused, and give her a reasonable amount of instruction, and keep her in order, too, when necessary. She is slightly precocious...”

  “Have you thought of sending her to school?” Mallory asked.

  “I have, but I don’t intend to do so—at least, not yet awhile.”

  “I see,” said Mallory quietly.

  “I don’t believe in packing young children off to boarding-school when a home can be provided for them, especially during their most impressionable years. I suffered from that sort of thing myself—most boys do—but a girl is a very different proposition. A girl should be handled with less brutality.”

  “A girl is more easily spoiled,” Mallory murmured, thinking that these expressed sentiments of his were somewhat surprising. “And boarding-schools for girls are sometimes excellent. I went to one myself.”

  “And you survived?” with a kind of irony.

  “Certainly I survived. They were the happiest days of my life.”

  “My dear girl,” he told her brusquely, “you are only at the very beginning of your life, and know nothing at all about happiness—as yet!”

  He swept up a camel greatcoat from the back of a chair and also a dispatch-case.

  “Mrs. Carpenter tells me that you have already met my brother, Serena’s father?” His voice was suddenly pitched in a lower key, and she detected a new note of seriousness in it. “I think I’d better explain to you that my brother Adrian was the victim of an accident a few years ago which deprived him not only of his wife but of his health, and even to-day he is not an entirely fit man. He has few interests in life save this house and its surroundings and his piano-playing, and even Serena has never meant very much to him. I should be glad, Miss Gower—perhaps grateful would be a better word—if, should he show any disposition to talk to you at times, possibly on such a subject as his music, you would not feel inclined to snub him. It is not often that he betrays any interest in anyone, but the housekeeper seems to think you made an impression...”

  “Oh, really?” said Mallory, considerably surprised.

  The cold, sarcastic look crept back into his eyes. “Does that astonish you so much? Do modern young women under-value themselves?”

  He moved towards the door.

  “I must go. I’ve already told you I’ve a train to catch...” And then he stepped briskly back to her side, and his eyes this time were hard and keen. “But before I go I want to be sure you will not inveigle my niece on to the back of Saladin, or even Shamrock, while I am away! I want your word for it that you recognize your responsibility where she is concerned.”

  “Really, Mr. Benedict,” Mallory almost gasped, “as if I would!” She was affronted at last, and the shock of what he must think of her turned her quite white. “I am not irresponsible...”

  “Well, perhaps you are not...”

  There came a quick tap at the door and Mrs. Carpenter put her head round it.

  “The car is waiting, Mr. Raife, and you have not a great deal of time.”

  “I’m coming, Carpie,” he told her. He looked again at Mallory, nodded his head curtly, and then said: “Very well!”

  When he had swept from the room, and the sound of Fardyce, the chauffeur, closing upon his master the rear door of the expensive silver-grey car which had brought her from the station reached her ears, she went out into the hall and stood beside Mrs. Carpenter, who was gazing with strange thoughtfulness out through the open front door.

  “I suppose it’s because I never go up to Town these days,” the housekeeper remarked, almost as if she was communing with herself, “and it’s quite a few years now since Mr. Raife gave up the town house and took a flat instead—one of those flats they call a service flat—but living in the country I’ve become used somehow to peace and quiet, and when we have visitors I feel as if our peace no longer exists. There’s always so much bustle and upset, and in a few days that’s what we shall have to put up with.”

  Mallory glanced at her for explanation.
>
  “Do you mean that Mr. Benedict will be bringing friends back with him when he returns?”

  “Miss Sonia Martingale, the ballet dancer, and possibly one or two others as well. Miss Martingale has been ill recently and ordered to rest. Mr. Raife is bringing her back by road.” She paused. “Of course, he is going on business as well, but ... I’ve been ordered to get the yellow guest chamber ready. The yellow guest chamber has been recently redecorated and furnished at great expense...” The significance of this did not fail to sink into Mallory’s brain.

  “Then Miss Martingale is rather a—particular friend of Mr. Benedict’s?”

  “I didn’t think so at one time, but it certainly does begin to look rather like it...!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mallory went upstairs slowly and found her way along the now slightly more familiar corridor to the school-room, where she discovered Serena curled up on the window-seat. She was not reading, or employing herself in any way, and she looked as if she had not yet fully recovered from her rebuff of the morning. Darcy had insisted that she ‘rest’ for half an hour after lunch, but Mallory had already made up her mind while ascending the stairs that this was an unnecessary indulgence which would very shortly be stopped. She was not anxious to come to grips with Darcy so very soon after her arrival, but there were many things which, in her opinion, would have to be revised and gone into, and a nine-year-old girl being, ordered to withdraw to her room and lie down on her bed for half an hour after lunch was one of them.