Read Online Three-Cornered Halo by Christianna Brand - Free Book Online Page A

by tourists though formerly, and rightly, considered only fit for feeding pigs; a gentleman had had an experience some evenings before which he was confiding to a fellow guest—the words, ‘charming creature,’ ‘nothing but cry,’ ‘cruel stepfather,’ ‘promised not to tell the Patranne’ floated up to Miss Cockrill in a pot pourri of, to her, meaningless sound. The drivers of the long line of carriages were paid off, the horses clip-clopped merrily away, a figure detached itself from the shadows where the paying and tipping had gone on and walked with short, purposeful strides to the big front door. She was about to turn and go into her room when something about that stubby figure in its stout grey flannels and dark-blue, brass-buttoned blazer, caught her attention. She turned back to the rail; and she must have exclaimed for a red face and large white moustache were suddenly raised and a voice said, “God bless my soul! It’s Hat!”
    In unalloyed pleasure? Or had there been an almost imperceptible note of despondency and alarm?
    It was twenty-five years since first Major Bull—he was Captain Bull then—had met Miss Cockrill and, puffing and blowing a little for he was even then of a full habit, had offered her his heart. Why she had refused him, she would probably, for she was not given to self-examination, never know. The plain woman’s defence, perhaps, against the jealous mockery of her narrow little world: ‘Good heavens—Harriet Cockrill got off, and at her age! Then there’s hope for us all.…’ And the corollary, ‘But she’s got a bit of money, of course.’ Dick Bull had had no money, only his army pay; and he had taken that and offered it to the first pretty woman he met on leaving Hat; as the next best, he had later assured her, to going off and shooting big game. It had come to rather the same thing in the end, as matters turned out for, out with the guns in Bangalore one day, the Major’s lady, as she had then become, had been shot by her husband in mistake for a bird—and not a bad shot either, in any respect. Stricken with remorse—for he was too honest to pretend a grief he could not possibly feel and which, moreover, must be shared with his Colonel, two subalterns and several woman-starved members of the I.C.S., the widower had come home to England and, eventually, to Hat. Miss Cockrill, in uneasy double harness with her ward, Winsome Foley, had received with gratitude and regrets a subdued renewal of his suit: once more the defence mechanism went into action and—she could not leave poor Winsome, she had promised her dead sister, she did not feel it right to saddle him with two women, etcetera, etcetera. The gallant major withdrew to the heights a little above Heronsford, in Kent, where his lady resided, and from thence, his face growing larger and redder, his moustache larger and whiter as the years went by, made dabbing little sorties as occasion offered or thwarted devotion ordained. And Miss Cockrill henceforward met the scorn which, nowadays at any rate, existed only in her own mind, by hugging to herself the secret knowledge that an she would she could; and allowed herself more and more to resent poor Winsome for ‘standing in her way.’
    She went in through her room and down the wide central staircase to the hall. “My dear Dick—what on earth are you doing here?”
    The Major puffed and blew. “My dear Hat—I might ask you the same thing!” But his face was wreathed in smiles, the moment of doubt—if moment there had been—was past. “Came out with a ‘party.’ Funniest joke in the world. Courier. Me!”
    â€œA courier ?”
    â€œHush, not so loud, old girl, all these people respect me, think I’m the cat’s whiskers. Conducted tour, you know, conducted ’em all the way from England—France, Italy, bit of Switzerland,