However, what he did say was: “You don’t get cake like that at school—do you, young man?”
And Lady Cust, with her light rippling laugh and her observant eyes—noticing the cut of one’s skirt and whether one asked her if she took sugar in her tea—when her face was in repose it was sad, like that of a Christian slave in the land of the Saracens.
“Oh yes, when we were in Pau we motored over to Lourdes, when one of the pilgrimages was on. Some of them ... well, really, they were like goblins, poor creatures ... appalling!” and she actually smiled reminiscently.
Teresa remembered Guy’s having told her that the favourite amusement of his Brabazon uncles when they were drunk had been potting with their revolvers at the village idiot.
She looked at Colonel Dundas: solemn, heavy, with a walrus moustache, and big, owl-like spectacles, each glass bisected with a straight line; at Sir Roger Cust, a dapper “hard-bitten” little man, with small, sharp gray eyes—surely they were not sinister.
“Old Tommy Cunningham!” Sir Roger was saying; “that takes one a long way back. Wasn’t he Master at one time of the Linlithgowshire?”
“Yes ... from eighteen ... eighteen seventy-five, I think, to eighty ... eighty-six, I think. I couldn’t tell you for certain, off-hand, but I’ll look it up in my diary,” said Colonel Dundas; “he was a first-rate shot, too,” he added.
“Magnificent!” agreed Sir Roger, “Aye, úhu, aye, úhu. D’you remember how he used always to say that?”
“So he did! Picked it up from the keepers and gillies, I suppose.”
“He was the coolest chap I’ve ever known. Do you remember his mare White Heather?”