The Little White Horse Read Online Free PDF Page A

looking again, more attentively, at the extraordinary little room, she saw that it suited Maria. Standing there so slender and straight in her grey dress, her room seemed to curve itself about her like the petals of a flower about its heart; they completed each other.
    ‘Well, well!’ said Miss Heliotrope. ‘So long as you are happy, my dear. And now, I think, we should go down to supper.’
    Carrying their candles, and with Wiggins following them, they made their way down the winding staircase again.
    ‘I wonder,’ said Miss Heliotrope, ‘who does the work of this house? I have seen no sign of a maidservant, and yet everything is scrupulously neat and clean. A darning needle is wanted everywhere, as no doubt you have observed, but apart from that I have no fault at all to find, so far, with the household staff . . . But where are they?’
    ‘Perhaps they’ll wait on us at supper,’ said Maria.
4
    But no one waited on them. They waited on themselves. The supper was delicious. There was home-made crusty bread, hot onion soup, delicious rabbit stew, baked apples in a silver dish, honey, butter the colour of marigolds, a big blue jug of warm mulled claret, and hot roasted chestnuts folded in a napkin.
    Miss Heliotrope confined herself to eating bread and butter and sipping a little claret, but she did it withan appetite that surprised her. Maria ate everything there was to eat, very daintily, as was her habit, but with an enjoyment surprising in one so ethereal-looking. Her cousin greeted her good appetite with a chuckle of appreciation. ‘A digestion of cast iron, like all the Merryweathers,’ he noted with approval. ‘Your little dog, also, I note, is a good trencherman.’
    Wiggins had been provided with a plateful of stew, and was doing full justice to it. He was sharing the hearth with Wrolf, if not with any show of friendship yet with no enmity now. He and Wrolf, it seemed, had decided simply to ignore each other . . . And the huge hearth was quite wide enough for them both.
    ‘I have always heard that West Country women are wonderful cooks?’ said Miss Heliotrope with a faintly questioning tone.
    ‘You and Maria are the first members of the fair sex to set foot in this house for twenty years,’ Sir Benjamin informed her.
    ‘But why, Sir?’ asked Maria, her silver spoon arrested in mid-air. ‘Don’t you like females?’
    ‘Not as a general rule,’ said Sir Benjamin. Then he bowed very gallantly, first to Miss Heliotrope and then to Maria. ‘But there is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule,’ he said.
    He spoke with such sincerity that neither Miss Heliotrope nor Maria felt any sinking of the heart at the thought that they had come to live in an anti-feminine bachelor household. Yet they looked at each other in stupefaction. It was hard to believe any mere male capable of such superb soup and such a princely stew.
    But they asked no more questions, because at this point Wiggins created a diversion. Overcome by greediness, he splashed a bit, and a small piece of carrot shot out of his dish and landed upon Wrolf’s nose. The indignity was too much for Wrolf. Outraged, he arose, and slowly and with measured gait left the room, lifting the latch of the front door with his nose. So majestic was his exit, soincomparable his dignity, that it was not so much an exit as a royal progress that compelled all eyes.
    There was a momentary cessation both of conversation and mastication as he departed, and for the first time Maria got a real good look at the whole of him. A dog? Whatever Sir Benjamin might say, she could not believe that he was a dog. She had never seen a dog with such a huge head and massive chest, so strangely combined with such a slender waist; or such a glorious flowing sable mane. His tail, too, with that queer tuft of hair at the end of it, was not like a dog’s, nor his gait, nor —
    ‘Are you a good horsewoman, Maria?’ asked Sir Benjamin abruptly,