Anne Severn and the Fieldings | Page 3

to see my new buck rabbit?"
"Rather!"
He held out his hand and she ran on with him, along the terrace, down
the steps at the corner and up the drive to the stable yard where the
rabbits were. Colin followed headlong.
And as she went Anne heard Eliot saying, "I've sense enough to
remember that her mother's dead."
In his worst tempers there was always some fierce pity.
iii
Mrs. Fielding gathered herself together and rose, with dignity, still
smiling. It was a smile of great sweetness, infinitely remote from all
discussion.
"It's much too hot here," she said. "You might move the cushions down

there under the beech-tree."
That, Eliot put it to himself, was just her way of getting out of it. To
Eliot the irritating thing about his mother was her dexterity in getting
out. She never lost her temper, and never replied to any serious
criticism; she simply changed the subject, leaving you with your
disapproval on your hands.
In this Eliot's young subtlety misled him. Adeline Fielding's mind was
not the clever, calculating thing that, at fifteen, he thought it. Her one
simple idea was to be happy and, as a means to that end, to have people
happy about her. His father, or Anne's father, could have told him that
all her ideas were simple as feelings and impromptu. Impulse moved
her, one moment, to seize on the faithful, defiant little heart of Anne,
the next, to get up out of the sun. Anne's tears spoiled her bright world;
but not for long. Coolness was now the important thing, not Anne and
not Anne's mother. As for Eliot's disapproval, she was no longer aware
of it.
"Oh, to be cool, to be cool again! Thank you, my son."
Eliot had moved all the cushions down under the tree, scowling as he
did it, for he knew that when his mother was really cool he would have
to get up and move them back again.
With the perfect curve of a great supple animal, she turned and settled
in her lair, under her tree.
Presently, down the steps and across the lawn, Anne's father came
towards her, grave, handsome, and alone.
Handsome even after fifteen years of India. Handsomer than when he
was young. More distinguished. Eyes lighter in the sallowish bronze.
She liked his lean, eager, deerhound's face, ready to start off, sniffing
the trail. A little strained, leashed now, John's eagerness. But that was
how he used to come to her, with that look of being ready, as if they
could do things together.

She had tried to find his youth in Anne's face; but Anne's blackness and
whiteness were her mother's; her little nose was still soft and vague;
you couldn't tell what she would be like in five years' time. Still, there
was something; the same strange quality; the same forward-springing
grace.
Before he reached her, Adeline was smiling again. A smile of the
delicate, instinctive mouth, of the blue eyes shining between curled lids,
under dark eyebrows; of the innocent white nose; of the whole soft,
milk-white face. Even her sleek, dark hair smiled, shining. She was
conscious of her power to make him come to her, to make herself felt
through everything, even through his bereavement.
The subtle Eliot, looking over the terrace wall, observed her and
thought, "The mater's jolly pleased with herself. I wonder why."
It struck Eliot also that a Commissioner of Ambala and a Member of
the Legislative Council and a widower ought not to look like Mr.
Severn. He was too lively, too adventurous.
He turned again to the enthralling page. "The student should lay open
the theoracic cavity of the rabbit and dissect away the thymous gland
and other tissues which hide the origin of the great vessels; so as to
display the heart..."
Yearp, the vet, would show him how to do that.
iv
"His name's Benjy. He's a butterfly smut," said Jerrold.
The rabbit was quiet now. He sat in Anne's arms, couching, his
forepaws laid on her breast. She stooped and kissed his soft nose that
went in and out, pushing against her mouth, in a delicate palpitation.
He was white, with black ears and a black oval at the root of his tail.
Two wing-shaped patches went up from his nose like a moustache.
That was his butterfly smut.

"He is sweet," she said.
Colin said it after her in his shrill child's voice: "He is sweet." Colin
had a habit of repeating what you said. It was his way of joining in the
conversation.
He stretched up his hand and stroked Benjy, and Anne felt the rabbit's
heart beat sharp and quick against her breast. A shiver went through
Benjy's body.
Anne kissed him again. Her heart swelled and shook