‘A skull!’ cried Mrs Bryce Harringay, seizing upon what was, to her mind, the essential point of the discourse. She shuddered delicately. ‘But, Reginald! How Extraordinarily Unpleasant!’
She withdrew herself hastily from the bundle wrapped round with the bishop’s gaily striped towel.
‘Pray keep it as far from my person as the strictly limited confines of this Inadequate Vehicle will allow,’ she commanded him.
The inadequate vehicle passed over a large stone at the side of the road, and she was flung forward a little in her seat. Her hand came in contact with the loathsome protuberance she had anathematized. Mrs Bryce Harringay gave a little shriek of distaste and withdrew her hand hastily. The bishop, more careful for his treasure than for his sister-in-law’s feelings, removed the towel containing the antiquity to a safer place in the car.
‘I think Broome ought to see this before I hand it over to Brown,’ he said. ‘We could drive round that way, couldn’t we? He knows quite a lot about the Celtic era. Far more than I do, as a matter of fact.’
They reached the Vicarage at Wandles Parva just as Mary Kate Maloney was carrying in the tea.
‘Are there any more scones?’ whispered Felicity, when the visitors had been announced.
‘There will be a few more in the kitchen,’ replied Mary Kate in a sibilant tone, ‘but you’d sooner stop up the great cave of Kentucky with little apples than you would be filling the bishop’s stomach when there’s scones to his tea!’
With this dark prophecy she retired to the kitchen. The scones, however, to Felicity’s almost visible relief, proved more than equal even to the demands made upon them by the bishop.
When the meal was over, and Mary Kate, to use her own expression, had ‘made them more room to their elbows’ by clearing away the tea-things, the bishop triumphantly produced his treasure and it was reverently handed round.
‘But look here, sir,’ said the Reverend Stephen Broome, who had been in the bishop’s form when the latter was a junior master, ‘this looks too good to be true.’
‘To be sure,’ interpolated Mary Kate, who, with a dish of jam poised perilously above the bishop’s bald head, was leaning against the back of her employer’s chair and breathing heavily down the inside of his collar, ‘if a nice set of false teeth wouldn’t improve the appearance of the creature entirely! I mind when me Auntie Molly Ann Maloney that’s own sister to me father and him an orphan down in County Cork –’
The vicar looked up at her, and she subsided. Then he felt the skull all over gingerly with his fine strong hands, and gave it back to the bishop, after taking a final glance at the deep cleft.
‘Where did you say you got it?’ he asked.
‘A young fellow camping near Rams Cove found it and gave it me. Very fine, don’t you think?’
The vicar stroked his chin.
‘I should say that skull is less than a hundred years old,’ he said.
‘Rubbish, man!’ retorted the bishop spiritedly. ‘Use your eyes!’
‘I am doing so,’ returned the vicar mildly. ‘Probably the skull of somebody who tumbled down the cliffs there in our grandfathers’ time, I should say. It’s a nasty place just there, you know. And landslips are fairly frequent. I dare say if you searched about you’d find something more of the skeleton.’
The bishop looked annoyed. Mrs Bryce Harringay was slightly but, to her brother-in-law’s way of thinking, exasperatingly amused.
The pause which followed was broken by the irrepressible Mary Kate, who had no intention of allowing the Reverend Stephen to interfere with her enjoyment of ‘the company’.
‘I declare to God entirely,’ she remarked conversationally, ‘if the look of that same there is not calling into me mind the bones of the pig’s face me mother would be boiling the meat off for a dish of collared head. Just so do them lads of butchers chop the head down, the way the meat will boil nice and tender off the bones of it!’
The vicar turned his head and-glared at her. Mary Kate started precipitately, and saved the jam only by a dexterous flick of her free hand underneath the dish as the glutinous sticky compound came surging over the edge. Surreptitiously licking a somewhat grimy palm, she departed hastily in the direction of the kitchen.
‘Well, there is nothing to be gained by argument in this case,’ said the bishop. ‘But I shall certainly present it to Brown as a museum specimen of a brachycephalic skull of the late Celtic period.’
‘I hope he will accept it in the same spirit,’ said the Reverend Stephen with delicate irony. ‘I say, though,’ he broke off, ‘I know what would be rather a joke! Let’s send for young Wright and see if he can reconstruct the thing. He’s very clever at modelling. May I send over and get him to do it?’
‘With pleasure, so far as I am concerned,’ said the bishop stiffly.
‘Felicity,’ said her father, ‘send Mary Kate over to the Cottage and ask her to get Mr Wright to come over here for a few minutes.’
‘I’ll go myself. I promised to take Mrs Bradley’s dog for a run this evening, so I can call there and go on to the Cottage.’
Her father chuckled.
‘I was under the impression that you didn’t like Mrs Bradley,’ he said.
Felicity flushed and tossed her head.
‘Oh, well, when you’ve been there to lunch and been there to dinner, as we have, you can’t go on feeling unkindly disposed,’ she said.
Mrs Bradley was in.
‘But Boller doesn’t like strangers,’ she said. ‘You don’t think he’ll bite them, do you, child?’
Felicity giggled.
‘I hope not. But I’m not going up there if you won’t allow me to take the dog,’ she said. ‘I don’t like those people. There’s something funny about them. They are Londoners. What did they want to come and bury themselves alive down here for?’
‘Take the dog if you like,’ remarked Mrs Bradley. ‘May I come with you and see the fun?’
‘Then I needn’t take the dog,’ said Felicity, laughing.
‘Impudence,’ said Mrs Bradley severely, ‘is the weapon of the very young. Chastisement’ – she seized Felicity in a grip of iron and smacked her hard – ‘is the reply of the extremely old.’
She released her victim, and together they went out at the side gate into the lane which led to the Cottage on the Hill.
‘You’re horribly strong,’ said Felicity, ‘aren’t you?’
‘I am,’ replied Mrs Bradley with enormous complacence.
It was Lulu who opened the door. After a little delay, while he washed his hands and struggled into a collar, Wright joined them.
He was a short, thick-set, cheerful young man of twenty-eight, and looked more like a ploughboy than an artist. His hair was thick and dark and his eyes were bright blue with long lashes. He slid his arm familiarly through Felicity’s and grinned at Mrs Bradley like an impudent faun. Felicity, hating him because he stirred her blood in some queer, exciting, vaguely improper way – or so she felt – released her arm and talked to Mrs Bradley all the way down the hill.
‘It’s a pity she doesn’t like me,’ said Wright, when he could manage to interpolate a word. ‘I’m such a nice lad really.’
As they passed Mrs Bradley’s house, her dog came to the gate and greeted them. Maliciously, Felicity opened the gate and let him out. The Airedale sniffed suspiciously round Wright’s grey-flannelled legs, and Felicity chuckled.
‘Mind! He doesn’t like strangers!’ she said mockingly.
‘Doesn’t he?’ Wright bent down, took the dog’s muzzle between his hands, and stared into the clear brown eyes. ‘He’s afraid of them, though.’
The dog’s stump of a tail drooped. Unable to meet the quizzically smiling gaze, he turned his head piteously aside.
Wright released him, wiped his hands on the seams of his trousers, and laughed.
When he saw the skull at the Vicarage he laughed again more joyously.
‘Can I take it away with me?’ he said. ‘I’ll let you have it back to-morrow afternoon with any luck.’
‘Oh, can’t you slap a bit of clay over it now?’ asked the vicar.
‘’Fraid not. All my stuff’s up at the Cottage, you see. I’ll bring it over to-morrow, sure as sure.’
Mrs Bryce Harringay interposed.
