The climb up to the summit of the Heath seemed endless; Jasmine was glad when they got on to level ground again and the cardboard boxes fell back into place. Every time the rays of a passing lamp splashed the brougham Jasmine felt that she ought to say something, but before she had time to think of anything to say it was dark again; and the next splash of light always came as a surprise, so that in the end she gave up trying to think of anything to say and counted the lamp-posts instead. Driving in a brougham with Aunt Cuckoo reminded her of playing hide-and-seek in a wardrobe, when, although one was delighted to have found a good place in which to hide, one hoped that the searchers would not be long in finding it out.
Half-way down the tree-shaded slope of North End Road on the far side of the Heath the brougham turned aside down a short drive and pulled up before an irregular and what appeared in the darkness a rather attractive house. When the door was opened by a sallow butler, Jasmine perceived that the reason for her aunt's prolonged silence during the drive back was a large black respirator, of which she unmuzzled herself before she asked the butler something in a language which Jasmine did not understand, but which she afterwards found was Greek. Then, turning to her niece, she divulged as if it was a family secret that Uncle Eneas had gone to dine at his club that night.
Jasmine was not sorry to be spared the anxiety of another introduction so soon, and she eagerly accepted her aunt's proposal to dine earlier than usual so that she could get a good night's rest after the tiring journey.
"I've ordered pilau for you," Aunt Cuckoo announced. Jasmine wondered what this was and hoped it would not be too rich a dish. The oriental hangings in the dining-room portended an exotic type of food, and she had been rather shaken by the train.
"But it's just like our own risotto," she exclaimed when the heap of well-greased rice sown with morsels of meat was put before her.
"Very likely," said Aunt Cuckoo, and the tone in which she accepted Jasmine's comparison was so remote and vague that if Jasmine had likened the pilau to anything in the scale of edibility between Chinese birds' nests and ordinary bread and butter, she would probably have assented with the same toneless equanimity.
Jasmine liked her bedroom at The Cedars much better than her bedroom at Strathspey House. Uncle Eneas' consular career had naturally set its mark on his possessions. Strathspey House had been furnished first with all the things that were not wanted in Harley Street and then with the new and inexpensive suites that were considered appropriate to a holiday house. Moreover, Strathspey House itself was a creation not much older than Sir Hector's baronetcy. The Cedars was a century and a half years old, a rambling irregular countrified house with a large garden leading directly to the Heath; it possessed externally a colour and character of its own which in combination with the oriental taste of Eneas Grant produced an effect that Jasmine much esteemed after the newness of Strathspey House. In this bedroom there were Turkish and Persian rugs, thread-bare, but rich in hues; photographs with cypresses and minarets along the sky-line; paintings on rice-paper of bashi-bazouks and many other elaborate old Eastern costumes; and hanging by the fireplace a horse's tail set in an ivory handle to whisk away the flies. The Cedars was not Italy, but at least it seemed to recognize that somewhere there was sunlight. Jasmine fell asleep almost happily, and coming down to breakfast next morning after a struggle with punctuality she found to her relief that breakfast at The Cedars consisted of the civilized coffee taken in bed and that she alone was expected to devour eggs and bacon at the unnatural hour of nine a.m. After this first breakfast she, like her uncle and aunt, kept to her room.
Eneas Grant was obviously the brother of Sir Hector; and when Jasmine found that there was a tendency among her relatives to insist upon the importance and value of this family likeness, so much so indeed that it was crystallized into a phrase: 'A Grant! Oh yes, he's obviously a Grant,' she realized that her father had probably alienated himself from the esteem of his family as much by his outward dissimilarity as by the divergence of his tastes. Eneas was tall and thin; but neither his tallness nor his thinness ever reached the impressive ungainliness of angularity that was Sir Hector's outstanding characteristic. Eneas, like his brother, was intensely proud of his good health, and in the contemptuous way he alluded to anybody who lacked good-health he suggested that the ill-health was due to a moral lapse. He was a non-smoker and a teetotaller, and to both abstentions he attributed the moral value that so many ascetics attribute to any abstention from life's minor comforts. He was good enough, however, to allow as much to human weakness as not to condemn any man for moderate indulgence in either nicotine or alcohol, although to any man who fell a prey to the major human failings, like women or cards, he was merciless.
"I see no reason why a man should run after women," Uncle Eneas used to declare; and there hung about Mrs. Grant after twenty years of married life such an aura of antique virginity that one felt quite sure he was speaking the truth. Like many men who boast of their immunity from all the fleshly attacks of the tempter, Eneas Grant was greedy; indeed he was more than greedy, he was a glutton. A dish of curried prawns roused the glow of concupiscence in his milky blue eyes. Jasmine found it embarrassing at first to watch her uncle's tongue rubescent with all that vaunted good-health titillate itself in anticipation along the sparse hairs of his grey moustache, just as Spot titillated his back upon the leaves of shrubberies. Uncle Hector had been greedy with the frank greed of a man who at the beginning of a meal sharpens his knife upon the steel with a preliminary bravura and gusto. This greed of Uncle Eneas was colubrine. It really did seem as if he actually were fascinating the new dish; as if the curried prawns would presently rise of their own accord and abjectly, one after another, jump into his mouth. Jasmine would look up apprehensively to see if Niko the butler were not observing contemptuously this display of greed. But Niko seemed to encourage his master; one felt that, if the curried prawns should presume to show the slightest hesitation at coming forward to be devoured, Niko would complete with his fingers what his master's snakish eyes had failed to effect.
Like most teetotallers and non-smokers Eneas was a ruthless talker. He had innumerable stories of his career which, to do him justice, were at a first hearing entertaining enough; but after one had wandered with him on his famous expedition to negotiate with the Mirdite clan in Albania, had watched the eagles soaring above the gorges of the Black Drin or the passes of the Brseshda, had noticed curiously the mediæval costumes of the inhabitants, had been regaled with gigantic feasts by hospitable chieftains, and had heard mass said by moustachioed priests whose rifles were leaning against the altar, one tired of Albania; at the third time of hearing one became as it were mentally saddle-sore and yearned to be back home. It was entertaining, for the first time, to hear him tell how once, in the old days, while walking like God in his garden at Salonika, inhaling the perfumed breeze of the Balkan dusk, there had suddenly fallen at his feet, flung over the garden wall, a matchbox which when opened was discovered to contain a human ear. That story, heard for the first time, provided a genuine shudder. But when one had heard it six or seven or eight or nine times one was stifled by the preliminary perfumes, dazzled by the preliminary sunset, and prayed for some change in the weather and some new bit of anatomy in the matchbox, a human eye or a human finger—anything rather than a human ear.