“This is most fortunate,” he said to me solemnly. “Now if it should turn out that he does know her, we can call there Christmas day after dinner. Or perhaps he will take you.”
This came a little regretfully, I think, for Gerard Barfleur accounted himself an equal master with his cousin in the matter of the ladies, and was not to be easily set aside. So Christmas eve it was decided that Gerard should, on the morrow, reconnoiter the Churchill country house early, and report progress, while we went to church. Fancy Barfleur and me marching to church Christmas morning with the children!
Christmas in England! The day broke clear and bright, and there we all were. It was not cold, and as is usual, there was little if any wind. I remember looking out of my window down into the valley toward Bridgely, and admiring the green rime upon the trees, the clustered chimneys of a group of farmers’ and working-men’s cottages, the low sagging roofs of red tile or thatch, and the small window panes that always somehow suggest a homey simplicity that I can scarcely resist. The English milkmaid of fiction, the simple cottages, the ordered hierarchy of farmers are, willy nilly, fixtures in my mind. I cannot get them out.
First then, came a breakfast in our best bibs and tuckers, for were we not to depart immediately afterwards to hear an English Christmas service? Imagine Barfleur—the pride of Piccadilly,—marching solemnly off at the head of his family to an old, gray abbey church. As the French say, “I smile.” We all sat around and had our heavy English breakfast,—tea, and, to my comfort and delight, “Mr. Jones’s sausages.” Barfleur had secured a string of them from somewhere.
“Think of it,” commented Berenice sardonically. “‘Mr. Jones’s sausages’ for breakfast. Aren’t they comic! Do you like them?”
“I most assuredly do.”
“And do you eat them every day in A-máy-reeka?” queried Charles Gerard with a touch of latent jesting in his voice.
“When I can afford them, yes.”
“They’re quite small, aren’t they?” commented five-year-old James Herbert.
“Precisely,” I replied, unabashed by this fire of inquiry. “That’s their charm.”