And the twinkle in his eyes seemed to endow his question with a suggestion of daring naughtiness, so that when Jasmine told him that she did type, she felt that she was admitting the presence of a lighter side to her nature.
"Come up to my study to-morrow morning about half-past nine. I'll have a chair cleared for you by then."
And thus it was that Jasmine found herself booked to help Uncle Arnold every morning of the week. Yet in helping him she was not in the least aware of being made use of; on the contrary the work had a delicious flavour of impropriety. The machine itself was a good one, so good that it had survived Ethelred's attempted dissection of it; and Uncle Arnold, who when a difficult Anglo-Saxon problem required solution used to tap upon the table with his fingers, did not seem to mind the noise the typewriter made any more than a nuthatch on one branch might object to the pecking of a yaffle at another. Jasmine, remembering that her aunt had alluded in her first letter to the Dean's dislike of constantly changing typists, asked him one day on their way down to lunch why he had had so much trouble with his secretaries.
"One used a particularly vicious kind of scent. Another was continually scratching at her garter. One used to breathe over my head when she came across to give me what she had been doing. Another thought she knew how to punctuate. And one who had studied history at Lady Margaret's quoted Freeman against me! My clerical position forbade me to swear at them. My brain in consequence became surcharged with blood. So I used to work them to death, and when one of them who refused to be worked to death and refused to give notice ... Jasmine! this must never go beyond you and me...."
"No, Uncle Arnold," she promised eagerly. "But do tell me how you got rid of her."
"I used to put drawing pins on her chair. Not a word to a soul! My wife would suspect me of being a papist like yourself if she found out, and the Bishop, who now thinks I'm mad, would then be sure of it. Never let a bishop be sure of anything. He thrives on ambiguity."
Apart from her work with the Dean, Jasmine enjoyed herself immensely in garden games with the three youngest boys. The Deanery garden was a wonderful place, and to Jasmine it afforded a complete explanation of the affection that English people had for England. She had been so unhappy all this past year that she had come to think of Italy as having the monopoly of earth's beauty. But this garden was as beautiful as anything in Italy, this garden with wide green lawns, bird-haunted when she looked out of her window in the lucid air of the morning, bird-haunted when at dusk she would gaze at them from the candle-lit dining-room. The shrubberies here were glossy and thick, not at all like the shrubbery at Rouncivell Lodge. A high wall bright with snapdragon bounded the garden on the side of the Cathedral, and beyond it loomed the south transept and a grove of mighty elms. There was a lake in which floated half a dozen swans that puffed themselves out with esteem of their own white grace, while in the water they regarded those mirrored images of themselves, the high-sailing clouds of summer, or perhaps more proudly their own splendid ghosts. There was an enclosed garden where fat vegetables were girdled with familiar flowers, blue and yellow and red, an aromatic garden loud with bees. Finally there was an ancient tower, the resort of owls and bats, which the Dean sometimes spoke of restoring. But he never did; and the mouldering traceries, the lattices long empty of glass, and the worm-eaten corbels of oak grey with age went on decaying all that fine July. It would have been a pity to restore the tower, Jasmine thought, and replace with sharp modern edges that dim and immaterial building in its glade of larches. The dead lower branches of the trees wove a mist for the paths, on the pallid grass of which grew clusters of orange and vermilion toadstools; it would be a pity to intrude on such a place with the tramp of restoring workmen.
Jasmine's zest in the middle ages, her absorption in pre-Norman days, her surrender to the essential England were at first faintly troubled by having to attend mass at a little Catholic mission chapel built of corrugated iron. But from being pestered by Aunt Ellen to compare the facilities for worship in Silchester Cathedral with those in the church of the Immaculate Conception, Bog Lane, she began to wonder if the externals of history could effect as much as she had supposed. If the Cathedral was spacious, the mind of Aunt Ellen was not; if the church of the Immaculate Conception was tawdry ... but why make comparisons? She had never noticed in Sirene how ugly sham flowers looked upon the altar; when she made this discovery in Silchester, she was instantly ashamed of herself; and when she looked again, it seemed as if the gilt daisies in their tarnished vases were alive, as if they were nosegays gathered in Italy. If the church of the Immaculate Conception, Bog Lane, was hideous, what about the English church at Sirene? That was a poky enough affair. But again, why make comparisons? There were rich relatives and poor relations in churches just as much as in everything else.
Jasmine was fighting loyally against her inclination to criticize, when one blazing day at the end of July the Dean proposed a visit to the remains of Roman Silchester, at which his three sons expressed horror and dismay.
"Why, what's the matter with Old Silchester?" she asked.