“Nay; up-along yon villa. T’inn be nowt fur t’ young leddies.”
Smilingly she indicated a grey stone cottage standing high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill; its blind patient eyes looking steadily across the bay, past the toy fishing-fleet, to where sea and sky merged in a blue quivering haze.
They followed their guide into the tiny sitting-room of the “villa.” And there Peter cast herself with a sigh of voluptuous content upon a slippery slithery horsehair sofa; and Merle threw open the lid of a wheezy harmonium—and broke it; and Stuart remained transfixed before two black ivory elephants, which stood upon the mantelpiece. And they each and all declared their intention of remaining in their new quarters, never again to return to the disapproving atmosphere of the Ocean Hotel.
Mrs. Trenner beamed. They did not realize then that her rosy good-humour concealed the will of a Napoleon. For Mrs. Trenner was the autocrat of Carn Trewoofa; its leader and counsellor; by virtue of her unfailing prosperity and the excellence of her cooking. She owned the inn, and property besides; and she owned her husband and son and husband’s brother’s wife and their offspring, even as she now owned Merle and Peter and Stuart. The sons and husbands of other women might drown at sea; not so Mrs. Trenner’s. The chickens of other women might cross the road and be run over on the occasion of the fortnightly visit of the butcher’s cart; never Mrs. Trenner’s chickens. Therefore she wore her cricket-cap jauntily. On her indeed had fallen some of the radiance of that Star of Good Fortune under whose mellow auspices Stuart had been born. She and Stuart became, in consequence, excellent friends, though the language they spoke was mutually uncanny and perplexing.
“I’m not going to budge from here,” quoth Peter again. “J’y suis et j’y reste. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Trenner?”
Mrs. Trenner hesitated: “Well, theere t’es,” she ejaculated at last; her favourite expression in moments of emergency.
Peter continued: “Merle shall go upstairs and feel the beds, and see if the mattress is clay soil, or whatever has to be done under those circs. And Stuart can return to the hotel and pack our suit-cases.”
Stuart demurred. He might cope with the Corsair, he said, were it not for the Five Females. So they all returned to the hotel, telling Mrs. Trenner to have their dinner on the table that very evening. And they said this in all innocence, knowing nothing of the dinner, nor of what lay before them.
Before quitting Carn Trewoofa, Merle dashed through the tiny doorway marked “Mrs. Nanvorrow, Grocer,” just to see what lay hidden in its murky depths. She returned with a pennyworth of peardrops, and a fearsome account of an old ancient crone sitting in the kitchen, surrounded on floor, ceiling and walls, by china; a frenzied orgy of china; a veritable Bacchanal of china; china that sprouted and multiplied and literally asked for the destroying bull. “She squawked at me like a parrot,” Merle related in awestruck whispers, “and called me ‘dearie.’” She paused impressively. They were trudging up the cliff-path towards the Coastguard Station.