Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [8]
‘I was thinking of the Roman augurs too.’
‘They also scrutinized the entrails of animals for prophecy.’
He added that with a certain relish.
‘Sometimes – as the Bard remarks – the sad augurs mocked their own presage.’
One had to fight back. Murtlock made no comment. I hoped the quotation had floored him. The rest of the walk back to where the caravan was parked took place in silence and without incident. At the caravan our ways would divide, if the four of them were not to enter the house. Separation was delayed by the appearance of Mr Gauntlett advancing towards us.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Gauntlett.’
Mr Gauntlett, wearing a cowslip in his buttonhole, greeted us. He showed no sign whatever of thinking our guests at all unusually dressed, nodding to them in a friendly manner, without the least curiosity as to why the males should be wearing blue robes.
‘Happen you’ve seen my old bitch, Daisy, this way, Mr Jenkins? Been gone these forty-eight hours, and I don’t know where she’s to.’
‘We haven’t, Mr Gauntlett.’
A farmer, now retired as close on eighty, Mr Gauntlett lived in an ancient tumbledown farmhouse not far away, where – widower, childless, sole survivor of a large family – he ‘did for himself’, a life that seemed to suit him, unless rheumatics caused trouble. His house, associated by local legend with a seventeenth-century murder, was said to be haunted. Mr Gauntlett himself, though he possessed a keen sense of the past, and liked to discuss such subjects as whether the Romans brought the chestnut to Britain, always asserted that the ghosts had never inconvenienced him. This taste for history could account for a habit of allowing himself archaisms of speech, regional turns of phrase, otherwise going out of circulation. In not at all disregarding the importance of style in facing life – even consciously histrionic style – Mr Gauntlett a little resembled General Conyers. They both shared the same air of distinction, firmness, good looks that resisted age, but above all this sense of style. Mr. Gauntlett had once told me that during service (in the first war) with the Yeomanry, he had found himself riding through the Khyber Pass, a background of vast mountains, bare rocks, fierce tribesmen, that seemed for some reason not at all out of accord with his own mild manner.
‘Maybe Daisy’s littered in the woods round here, as she did three years gone. Then she came home again, and made a great fuss, for to bring me to a dingle down by the water, where she’d had her pups. The dogs round about knew of it. They’d been barking all night for nigh on a week to drive foxes and the like away, but I haven’t heard ‘em barking o’ nights this time.’
‘We’ll keep an eye out for Daisy, Mr Gauntlett. Tell her to go home if we find her, report to you if we run across a nest of her pups. We’ve all been crayfishing.’
I said that defensively, speaking as if everyone under thirty always wore blue robes for that sport. I felt a little diminished by being caught with such a crew by Mr Gauntlett.
‘Ah?’
‘We landed four.’
Mr Gauntlett laughed.
‘Many a year since I went out after crayfish. Used to as a boy. Good eating they make. Well, I must go on to be looking for the old girl.’
He was already moving off when Murtlock addressed him.
‘Seek the spinney by the ruined mill.