Amanda was silent. She couldn"t.
"Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable," continued Laura; "salmon to eat all the year round, and the satisfaction of being able to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait for hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you"ve been dangling before them; and an elegant svelte figure-"
"Think of the otter hounds," interposed Amanda; "how dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to death!"
"Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Sat.u.r.day-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive-a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think."
"I wish you would be serious," sighed Amanda; "you really ought to be if you"re only going to live till Tuesday."
As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.
"So dreadfully upsetting," Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne. "I"ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best."
"Laura always was inconsiderate," said Sir Lulworth; "she was born during Goodwood week, with an Amba.s.sador staying in the house who hated babies."
"She had the maddest kind of ideas," said Amanda; "do you know if there was any insanity in her family?"
"Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he"s sane on all other subjects."
"She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter," said Amanda.
"One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the West," said Sir Lulworth, "that one can hardly set them down as being mad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing in an after state."
"You think she really might have pa.s.sed into some animal form?" asked Amanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint of those around them.
Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of bereavement that Laura"s demise would have been insufficient, in itself, to account for.
"Four of my speckled Suss.e.x have been killed," he exclaimed; "the very four that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged away and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I"ve been to such trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowls singled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did the deed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in a short s.p.a.ce of time."
"Was it a fox, do you think?" asked Amanda.
"Sounds more like a polecat," said Sir Lulworth.
"No," said Egbert, "there were marks of webbed feet all over the place, and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of the garden; evidently an otter."
Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth.
Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry yard defences.
"I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over," said Amanda in a scandalised voice.
"It"s her own funeral, you know," said Sir Lulworth; "it"s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one"s own mortal remains."
Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths next day; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony the remaining survivors of the speckled Suss.e.x were ma.s.sacred. The marauder"s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had also suffered.
"I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possible moment," said Egbert savagely.
"On no account! You can"t dream of such a thing!" exclaimed Amanda. "I mean, it wouldn"t do, so soon after a funeral in the house."
"It"s a case of necessity," said Egbert; "once an otter takes to that sort of thing it won"t stop."
"Perhaps it will go elsewhere now there are no more fowls left,"
suggested Amanda.
"One would think you wanted to shield the beast," said Egbert.
"There"s been so little water in the stream lately," objected Amanda; "it seems hardly sporting to hunt an animal when it has so little chance of taking refuge anywhere."
"Good gracious!" fumed Egbert, "I"m not thinking about sport. I want to have the animal killed as soon as possible."
Even Amanda"s opposition weakened when, during church time on the following Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half a salmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian rug in Egbert"s studio.
"We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet before long," said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.
On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent a solitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what she imagined to be hound noises. It was charitably supposed by those who overheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyard imitations at the forth-coming village entertainment.
It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news of the day"s sport.
"Pity you weren"t out; we had quite a good day. We found at once, in the pool just below your garden."
"Did you-kill?" asked Amanda.
"Rather. A fine she-otter. Your husband got rather badly bitten in trying to "tail it." Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had such a human look in its eyes when it was killed. You"ll call me silly, but do you know who the look reminded me of? My dear woman, what is the matter?"
When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervous prostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate. Change of scene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mental balance. The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda"s normally placid temperament rea.s.serted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her husband"s dressing-room, in her husband"s voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.
"What is the matter? What has happened?" she asked in amused curiosity.
"The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Wait till I catch you, you little-"
"What little beast?" asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh; Egbert"s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged feelings.
"A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy," spluttered Egbert.
And now Amanda is seriously ill.
THE BOAR-PIG
"There is a back way on to the lawn," said Mrs. Philidore Stossen to her daughter, "through a small gra.s.s paddock and then through a walled fruit garden full of gooseberry bushes. I went all over the place last year when the family were away. There is a door that opens from the fruit garden into a shrubbery, and once we emerge from there we can mingle with the guests as if we had come in by the ordinary way. It"s much safer than going in by the front entrance and running the risk of coming bang up against the hostess; that would be so awkward when she doesn"t happen to have invited us."
"Isn"t it a lot of trouble to take for getting admittance to a garden party?"
"To a garden party, yes; to _the_ garden party of the season, certainly not. Every one of any consequence in the county, with the exception of ourselves, has been asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far more troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren"t there than to get in by a roundabout way. I stopped Mrs. Cuvering in the road yesterday and talked very pointedly about the Princess. If she didn"t choose to take the hint and send me an invitation it"s not my fault, is it? Here we are: we just cut across the gra.s.s and through that little gate into the garden."
Mrs. Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for a county garden party function with an infusion of Almanack de Gotha, sailed through the narrow gra.s.s paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the air of state barges making an unofficial progress along a rural trout stream. There was a certain amount of furtive haste mingled with the stateliness of their advance, as though hostile search-lights might be turned on them at any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not un.o.bserved. Matilda Cuvering, with the alert eyes of thirteen years old and the added advantage of an exalted position in the branches of a medlar tree, had enjoyed a good view of the Stossen flanking movement and had foreseen exactly where it would break down in execution.