The Enchanted April · Chapter 9 (2/2)

“I expect what would really be best for her,” said another voice, “is to be left quiet.”

How sensible, thought Scrap; and raised the eyelashes of one eye just enough to peep through and see who was speaking.

It was the freckled original. The dark one, then, was the one with the hand. The freckled one rose in her esteem.

“But I can’t bear to think of you with a headache and nothing being done for it,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot. “Would a cup of strong black coffee⁠—?”

Scrap said no more. She waited, motionless and dumb, till Mrs. Arbuthnot should remove her hand. After all, she couldn’t stand there all day, and when she went away she would have to take her hand with her.

“I do think,” said the freckled one, “that she wants nothing except quiet.”

And perhaps the freckled one pulled the one with the hand by the sleeve, for the hold on Scrap’s forehead relaxed, and after a minute’s silence, during which no doubt she was being contemplated⁠—she was always being contemplated⁠—the footsteps began to scrunch the pebbles again, and grew fainter, and were gone.

“Lady Caroline has a headache,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, reentering the dining-room and sitting down in her place next to Mrs. Fisher. “I can’t persuade her to have even a little tea, or some black coffee. Do you know what aspirin is in Italian?”

“The proper remedy for headaches,” said Mrs. Fisher firmly, “is castor oil.”

“But she hasn’t got a headache,” said Mrs. Wilkins.

“Carlyle,” said Mrs. Fisher, who had finished her omelette and had leisure, while she waited for the next course, to talk, “suffered at one period terribly from headaches, and he constantly took castor oil as a remedy. He took it, I should say, almost to excess, and called it, I remember, in his interesting way the oil of sorrow. My father said it coloured for a time his whole attitude to life, his whole philosophy. But that was because he took too much. What Lady Caroline wants is one dose, and one only. It is a mistake to keep on taking castor oil.”

“Do you know the Italian for it?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.

“Ah, that I’m afraid I don’t. However, she would know. You can ask her.”

“But she hasn’t got a headache,” repeated Mrs. Wilkins, who was struggling with the macaroni. “She only wants to be let alone.”

They both looked at her. The word shovel crossed Mrs. Fisher’s mind in connection with Mrs. Wilkins’s actions at that moment.

“Then why should she say she has?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.

“Because she is still trying to be polite. Soon she won’t try, when the place has got more into her⁠—she’ll really be it. Without trying. Naturally.”

“Lotty, you see,” explained Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling to Mrs. Fisher, who sat waiting with a stony patience for her next course, delayed because Mrs. Wilkins would go on trying to eat the macaroni, which must be less worth eating than ever now that it was cold; “Lotty, you see, has a theory about this place⁠—”

But Mrs. Fisher had no wish to hear any theory of Mrs. Wilkins’s.

“I am sure I don’t know,” she interrupted, looking severely at Mrs. Wilkins, “why you should assume Lady Caroline is not telling the truth.”

“I don’t assume⁠—I know,” said Mrs. Wilkins.

“And pray how do you know?” asked Mrs. Fisher icily, for Mrs. Wilkins was actually helping herself to more macaroni, offered her officiously and unnecessarily a second time by Francesca.

“When I was out there just now I saw inside her.”

Well, Mrs. Fisher wasn’t going to say anything to that; she wasn’t going to trouble to reply to downright idiocy. Instead she sharply rapped the little table-gong by her side, though there was Francesca standing at the sideboard, and said, for she would wait no longer for her next course, “Serve me.”

And Francesca⁠—it must have been wilful⁠—offered her the macaroni again.