The Little White Horse (10 page)

The man laughed and swung up his cudgel again, and it might have gone ill with the hare, and perhaps with Maria too, had it not been for the sudden appearance upon the scene of Someone Else.

Maria, bewildered by her fear, still all in a fury of love and anger, was aware of a slim brown figure bounding towards her, of a curly head lowered like that of a butting goat, and then over went the man in black flat on his back, well and truly winded, while there rang through the hollow a laugh as merry and carefree as a cuckoo’s cry, a boy’s laugh, clear as a bell, a Puck’s laugh, full of impish glee.

‘Quick! Quick!’ cried a joyous voice that was as familiar to Maria as the answering beat of her own heart, in equal joy. ‘Hold the hare while I unfasten the trap. Then run! There’ll be more of them about. The Men from the Dark Woods never hunt alone. Quick!’

They ran to the trap, and Maria, her slim hands clasped about the panting body of the poor hare, in her bewilderment saw no more of her companion than strong brown fingers skilfully loosing the hideous rings of steel that had closed upon the hare’s left hind leg. But those brown fingers were as familiar to her as her own white ones.

‘Now run!’ said the boy, and they ran, the boy going first with the hare in his arms, leaping nimbly up the slope in the direction from which Maria had come, Maria following after, panting and stumbling in her efforts to keep him in sight. They reached the top of the hollow, and there was Periwinkle still waiting with Wiggins. Wrolf was there too, but he was not lying down now, he was standing planted firmly on his four feet, lashing his tail and growling like a thunderstorm, his great blazing eyes fixed upon the shadows beneath the pine-trees, where dark figures skulked, tall thin nightmare figures that were hardly distinguishable from the pine-trees, yet made one afraid, like the yew-tree men in the garden.

Now Maria knew why Wrolf had not come down with
her into the hollow; he had stayed up here to keep those nightmare figures at bay. He had known better than she did how he could best be of service to her.

‘Canter for home!’ commanded the boy, and Maria scrambled into the saddle and they were off, the boy running on one side of her with the hare in his arms, and Wiggins running on the other . . . Wrolf stayed behind.

Within sight of the manor, Periwinkle stopped cantering and slipped into a gentle ambling trot, for the danger, it seemed, was left behind now. Maria had got her breath back and her wits about her again and was gazing wonderingly and joyfully at the boy beside her, and he was looking back at her and laughing.

He was just the same, just as he had been in her dream the night before. He had not changed at all since those days when he had come to play with her in the Square garden; except that he had grown, even as she had, so that he was still a head taller than she was.

His dark eyes still sparkled with fun when he looked at her. His thick chestnut hair still curled tightly all over his head, with the final curl making a comic twist in the back of his neck, like a drake’s tail. His rough brown coat was still the colour of fallen beech leaves, and the battered old hat that he swung in one hand still flaunted the long green feather.

‘Robin!’ she cried reproachfully. ‘Why did you leave off coming to the Square garden?’

‘We were getting too old for those children’s games,’ he said. ‘Soon you would have been bored with them, and as soon as you had begun to be bored you wouldn’t have believed in me any more. People only believe when they are interested. It was better to go away before you began to be bored. I knew you’d come to Moonacre. I knew I’d see you again. You won’t be bored by what we have to do together here — my word, you won’t! You’ll be frightened, but you won’t be bored.’

‘What
are
we going to do together here?’ demanded Maria.

‘You’ll soon know,’ said Robin.

Maria choked down her curiosity, for Robin had always hated being asked questions, and if she asked too many would just disappear, and she did not want him to disappear just yet.

They went together to the stable-yard, sat on the parapet of the well, and attended to the hare. It was frightened no longer, but nestled up to Robin with complete confidence. He bathed its hurt leg with water from the well and bandaged it with Maria’s handkerchief torn into strips. And he did it all so skilfully that the hare did not seem to feel any pain.

‘There!’ he said when he had finished and put the creature into Maria’s arms. ‘There you are. She’s your hare.’

‘Hare!’ exclaimed Maria. ‘Why, I thought she was an extra-large rabbit!’

Robin laughed. ‘Rabbits are all right,’ he said. ‘Rabbits are jolly little beggars, and they’re fun to keep as pets. But a hare, now, is a different thing altogether. A hare is not a pet but a person. Hares are clever and brave and loving, and they have fairy blood in them. It’s a grand thing to have a hare for a friend. One doesn’t often, because they have a lot of dignity and keep themselves to themselves; not like rabbits, who are always underfoot; but if you
do
win the love of a hare — well — it’s a fine thing for you . . . And you’ve done it.’

Maria looked down at the beautiful creature lying in her lap, still and tranquil, and very tenderly she stroked the long silky ears. Now that she looked at her hare attentively, she saw that it was almost an insult to compare her with a rabbit. She was of a far more substantial build and had a regal air. Her fur was silver-grey, soft and fine, and her ears were so large that they were more like banners than ears; but though large they were beautiful
and graceful, and lined with superfine pink velvet. Her tail was not an absurd little white bobble of a thing, like a rabbit’s, but an exquisite fountain of white fur that drew attention to the strength and grandeur of her finely shaped hind legs. Her front legs were fine legs too, but lacked the poise of the hind ones. Her eyes were large and dark and lustrous, and her silver whiskers twice the length of Wiggins’s . . .

Wiggins eyed the hare with profound disfavour . . . She was slightly larger than he was, and her beauty constituted a challenge to his own that he was not disposed to take lightly. He sat down abruptly and, with his back to the hare, scratched himself. The action was a studied insult, but she seemed not to mind. She was obviously a hare of a serene disposition.

‘I shall call her Serena,’ said Maria. ‘Do you know, Robin, I loved Serena on sight, and when I saw her in the trap I was so angry at the way she had been treated that I wasn’t afraid any more.’

There was no answer, and looking up she saw that Robin had disappeared, even though so far as she knew she had not asked a single question. But though annoyed she was not upset, because she knew he would come back again . . . They had that job of work to do together . . .

She handed Periwinkle over to Digweed, who appeared at this point, grinning from ear to ear, and went round into the garden, and up the stairs to the front door, with Serena in her arms and Wiggins at her heels. Sir Benjamin was standing at the front door, smoking a long clay pipe. Behind him in the hall the table was laid for breakfast and the fire was burning brightly, and before the fire lay Wrolf, fast asleep.

‘I felt a bit anxious when he came in without you,’ said Sir Benjamin.

‘We came home separately,’ explained Maria. ‘We fell in with some poachers. Wrolf stayed behind to chase them away while I came on with Serena my hare, whom we rescued from them.’

Maria did not say a word about Robin. She had made up her mind not to mention him to any of the grown-ups. They would only tell her she had imagined him.

At the mention of the poachers Sir Benjamin looked a bit worried, but he said nothing. Then he gazed at Serena, and Serena gazed at him.

‘Serena is not to be put in a pie,’ said Maria firmly. ‘She is my friend, and is never, never to be eaten. Eating rabbit is bad enough, but eating hare is a crime.’

‘My dear,’ said Sir Benjamin, ‘I seldom eat hare, and when I do I have it not in a pie but jugged in port wine — my best port wine — a royal mode of cookery that befits so regal an animal.’

‘You’re not to jug Serena,’ said Maria.

‘My dear, I wouldn’t dream of jugging Serena,’ said Sir Benjamin very humbly indeed.

And the respect with which he gazed at Serena was only equalled by the respect with which he now gazed at Maria. His young ward, he realized, would not need much managing. She was much more likely to manage him.

M
ARIA
had expected to find it dreadfully difficult, that morning, to concentrate upon lessons with Miss Heliotrope in the parlour. The out-of-doors of Moonacre was so wonderful, so full of mystery and adventure, that while she had been eating her breakfast she had felt that every minute that she spent indoors would be a torment.

Yet when she and Miss Heliotrope were seated before the log fire in the cool parlour, the west window wide open to the rose-garden, all feeling of restlessness left her, and a lovely feeling of peace took its place. To please Miss Heliotrope, she had taken off her riding-habit after breakfast and had put on a full-skirted green linen gown that echoed the green of the chair-seats and the carpet, and so she felt in place in this lovely room and a part of it. Wiggins had followed them in and was sleeping upon one side of the hearth, and Serena, accommodated in a rush basket that Sir Benjamin had found for her, was sleeping upon the other. Wrolf, Maria knew, was still asleep before the fire in the hall, though they had left the door ajar so that he could come in if he wanted to. Digweed was at work in the formal garden, and Sir Benjamin had ridden out to visit one of his tenants at an outlying farm. So far as Maria knew, she and Miss Heliotrope were the only people in the house — apart from the animals, who were so deeply asleep that they hardly counted.

Maria looked round the room. The harpsichord, from which she had liberated that lovely tune, looked alive now it had been played upon, but the chessmen and
the workbox were still frozen. The workbox in particular drew her like a magnet. She simply must lift the lid and find out what was inside.

‘Please, Miss Heliotrope, may I sew this morning?’ she asked.

‘Certainly not,’ said Miss Heliotrope severely. ‘You sew on Fridays. Today is Monday. On Mondays you study the art of reading verse aloud — an art in which you are by no means as proficient as you should be.’

Maria opened her mouth to protest and then, glancing up at the strange dim picture over the hearth, shut it again. Patience. Patience. The little white horse and the tawny animal, galloping together along that forest glade, seemed in no hurry to arrive. They had perhaps been galloping for years, yet the happiness that breathed from the picture was untarnished by the least shadow of impatience. One did not hurry in the country. She got up, fetched the poetry books from the pile that had been stacked in the corner of the window-seat, and spread them out on the rosewood table.

First she read aloud from a little book with a worn olive-green cover, a volume of French poetry that belonged to Miss Heliotrope. It had been given to her in her youth, she had told Maria, by a French refugee who had fled to England to escape one of the revolutions France was always having, and had taken rooms in the Cornish village of which Miss Heliotrope’s father had at that time been rector.

Miss Heliotrope had taught him English and had given him a book of English poetry, and he in return had taught her French and given her this French poetry book. Her name, Jane Heliotrope, was written on the flyleaf in most beautiful handwriting, and beneath it he had put his own name, Louis de Fontenelle. Today it occurred to Maria to ask Miss Heliotrope what he had been like.

‘He was a very handsome young man, tall and dark,’ Miss Heliotrope said, ‘and very aristocratic — a marquis. Very gifted also, a skilled linguist and musician,
a scholar and scientist. And he was a man of action too — in his early youth he had been a cavalry officer. But, alas, like so many Frenchmen, he was that terrible thing, an atheist, a man who did not believe in God. When my father found that out, he would not permit him to come to the Rectory again.’

‘What happened to him?’ Maria asked.

‘He just went away,’ Miss Heliotrope replied with a gentle sigh and, though burning to ask a thousand questions, Maria held her tongue between her teeth and said no more, for there was a finality about Miss Heliotrope’s sigh that forbade them.

Usually Miss Heliotrope listened intently while her pupil read aloud and corrected her mistakes very severely indeed, but this morning she seemed a little inattentive, as though the revival of old memories had made her want to go away and be by herself.

‘That will be enough reading for today, my dear,’ she said when Maria reached the end of a poem. ‘Now I should like you to compose a little poem yourself. Meanwhile, dear, I’ll just slip upstairs and mend the curtains of that four-poster of mine. As we noticed upon the evening of our arrival, no one ever seems to do any patching or darning in this house.’

‘I know what I’d like to write,’ said Maria. ‘There’s a tune that I played the other morning. It came out of the harpsichord when I opened it. May I write words for it?’

‘You may, dear,’ said Miss Heliotrope. ‘I can, I know, trust you not to idle, but to remain in that chair in a decorous ladylike position, feet together, back straight, until your composition is completed to the best of your ability.’

Then, picking up her skirts upon either side, she disappeared through the little door to the turret staircase.

Maria fetched pen and paper and settled herself once more in her chair before the fire. But though obedient up to a point, she was perhaps not altogether obedient,
her position being hardly decorous. For though she kept her back straight she swung her feet angrily, making a swishing sound among her petticoats. She disliked being thwarted in this way. She had wanted to see the kitchen, the cat, and the sea before breakfast, and she hadn’t been allowed to see any of them. And now she wasn’t allowed to lift the lid of the workbox. It was too bad of Moonacre.