IV
All very well, but he must be quick about it if these holidays were to see him bring it off. Only three days!
Then Aunt Amy announced that she intended on this fine afternoon to pay a call on Miss Nightingale who lived in the Precincts, and to her great surprise Jeremy suggested that he should accompany her.
She was rather flattered, and when it was discovered that Miss Jones and Helen were also going that way and could pick Jeremy up and bring him home, she agreed to the plan. Jeremy and she were old, old enemies; he had insulted her again and again, played jokes upon her, had terrible storms of temper with her; but once, when a wretched little boy had laughed at her, he had fought the little boy and she had never forgotten that. As he grew older something unregenerate in her insisted on admiring him; he was such a thorough boy, so sturdy and manly. She adored the way that his mouth went up at the corners when he laughed; she liked his voice when it was hoarse with a serious effort to persuade somebody of something. Then, although he had so often been rude to her, she could not deny that he was a thorough little gentleman in all that she meant by that term. His manners, when he liked, could be beautiful, quite as good as Helen’s and much less artificial. If you cared for boys at all—which Aunt Amy must confess that she did not—then Jeremy was the sort of boy to care for. She had, in fact, both a family and an individual pride in him.
He was very funny to-day walking up the High Street; she could not understand him at all.
“Would you jump, Aunt Amy, if you suddenly saw the Black Bishop on his coal black horse, with his helmet and suit of mail, riding along down the High Street?”
“The Black Bishop? What Black Bishop?”
Was the boy being impertinent to dear Bishop Crozier, whose hair was in any case white, who had certainly never ridden a coal-black horse. . . .
Jeremy carefully explained.
“Oh! the one in the cathedral! Oh! but he was dead and buried long ago!”