The Native Heath by Elizabeth Fair

Author:Elizabeth Fair [Fair, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2017-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

A wet week-end was as common in Goatstock as elsewhere, and the uninterrupted wetness of Friday, Saturday and Sunday caused no particular disappointment to anyone except Mrs. Minnis and Lady Finch.

Lady Finch was disappointed because her bees’ At-Home Day was ruined; the demonstration could not be attempted, and only six people turned up to listen to her talk on ‘Bee Stings as an antidote to Rheumatism’. (The six were all local beekeepers who dared not offend her by staying away, and who cravenly joined in her strictures on the effeminacy of the absentee Reddrod beekeepers.)

Mrs. Minnis was disappointed because she had planned to take Hugo and Sonny for a lovely picnic on Sunday; that is to say, they had talked about it at supper on Saturday, and afterwards Mrs. Minnis, with her usual optimism and a quite unusual forethought, had hard-boiled three eggs and prepared a sardine spread. These were not wasted; the Minnises ate their picnic fare in the diningroom, sitting on rugs in the window bay to make it more amusing; but even this humorous interlude could not redeem the day from failure. Mrs. Minnis was disappointed; and when she woke on Monday morning the sense of disappointment was still with her.

It was raining as hard as ever, and Hugo had to breakfast at eight, and it was Monday. Mrs. Minnis saw all the days of the week as differently coloured. Saturday was pink and Sunday was bright yellow, and Monday wasn’t black—that would have been too ordinary—but a drab greenish-brown. She was an erratic housekeeper and there were no special chores to account for Monday’s distasteful hue. Perhaps it was a relic of past Mondays in her childhood, in the fabulous country-house where each day was coloured by the moods of her autocratic papa.

At half past eight, when Mr. Minnis went out to start the car, a small patch of blue sky had appeared, and the violence of the rain was lessening. Mrs. Minnis, at the window, observed these signs and remarked to Charlton, who was finishing his breakfast, that it was going to be a fine day after all.

“What a shame it isn’t yesterday!” she said. The disappointment still rankled; and at the back of her mind there lingered another relic of childhood, the idea that a disappointment could be neutralized by the advent of a lovely surprise—a box of chocolates, or, in extreme cases, a visit to London and a matinée. This belief, and the sight of the patch of blue sky, had a powerful effect; they gave Mrs. Minnis what she called a brainwave. As she announced it she hurried across to the kitchen dresser and seized a bit of paper and a pencil and began to scribble a list of what would be needed: sausage rolls and potato crisps, gin and sherry and orange squash. “Run and stop Daddy,” she said to Charlton. “It’s lucky he’s going to Ormiston today—he can get all this stuff there. I’m not going back to Pergate and Heaton, after all that unpleasantness last time.

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