Read Online The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West - Free Book Online Page B

glorious, it was like being cradled by the northern lights and swung across the skies. Mamma watched us in ecstasy, when our family life was as it is supposed to be on earth she was as if lifted to heaven.
    In the room behind us Cordelia said, “Mamma, the removal men have broken a chair.”
    Mamma said absently, “If they have left us enough to sit on, do not worry, this stuff is all rubbish.”
    A chill fell. It was as if I had grown heavy in my father’s arms. Of course I had had to tell Cordelia and Mary what had happened to Aunt Clara’s furniture. But we all loved Papa so much that somehow Mamma’s saying that seemed worse than Papa’s selling the furniture, and Mamma felt that too. She turned to him with a desperate movement and cried in tearful gaiety, “Take us round the garden. Did you play here with the other Richard Quin?”
    Papa shifted me to his other shoulder and, shambling a little as if he were old, led us out into the garden. He pointed to some straggling thickets on the wall and told us they were peach trees. Their branches hung down like trailing curtains, Cordelia ran and pushed them back and underneath were the neat trunks given them by early care. My mother exclaimed in distress at the neglect which they had suffered since and expressed the fear that they would bear no fruit for us. My father did not seem concerned. He told us how large and juicy the peaches had been, and how he and his brother had always had one each with cream and sugar for dessert with their supper. “We called our ponies Cream and Sugar,” he said. “They were not really our ponies, the old man in the big house lent them to us when we were staying here for our holidays. But we stabled them here.”
    “In those very stables?” said Mamma.
    “In those very stables,” said Papa. He put back his head and looked through his narrowed eyes at the roofs we could see over the wall, the ruined roofs. “‘Change and decay in all around I see.’” He gave a sneering laugh, set me down on the ground, and strolled towards a door in the wall, and sneered again because the rusty latch broke in his hand. Beyond was a courtyard feathered green underfoot with the camomile which grew thick between the cobblestones, buildings round it which stared with the blank eyes of glass-less windows. My father pushed back a door which hung squint on its hinges, and sauntered into a stable where more motes danced in the sunlight than had danced in that room in Edinburgh which had been so empty, because Aunt Clara’s furniture had gone out of it. The floor was strewn with pale wisps of litter, and where the walls met there were hundreds of brackets made by the dark velvet of old cobwebs. There were four stalls, and a door on which my father laid his hand and said, “This was a loose-box. Grand-Aunt Willoughby had a son called George, he was a naval officer, his horse Sultan was stabled in here, it was a black gelding.” He wheeled about, looking very grave, and called urgently, “Cordelia. Mary. Rose. Do you all understand that you must never go into a loose-box? You can do nothing more dangerous. The horse can get between you and the door in a second, and if he savages you, you are done. You must always remember that. Always.”
    Every now and then he used to give us counsels of this sort, which might have been relevant to his childhood, but were not to ours, and I think, from my recollections of his bearing at such moments, that he then felt pride because for once he was properly discharging his duties as a father.
    Leaving the dangerous territory, be said to Mamma in an undertone, “By the way, I am afraid that Manchester business came to nothing.”
    Softly she answered, “I am sorry for your sake, but what does it matter? You have a good position here.”
    Circling round the stalls, he said, “Pompey and Caesar were here. They were the carriage pair. They were fat old dapple-greys and groomed like satin, they always reminded us of one