Читать книгу The Fairy Latchkey онлайн

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Philomène’s face cleared, and she looked beseechingly at Nurse. “You are master in this house, sir,” admitted Nurse, “and it seems useless to fight against this love of dumb things. Cats especially do seem to run in families.”

So the white kitten stayed, and grew into a white cat, glossy and well-liking, that followed Philomène about the house “like a dog,” said the people who had never taken the trouble to befriend a cat.

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If Philomène had not actually a fairy godmother, she had at least the nearest possible approach to one. To begin with, Godmother was beautiful. She had the red hair that artists love, a wild-rose complexion, and a gentle, even voice, which never scolded and never sneered; she had cool white hands with twinkling rings, and her dresses made a stately silken frou-frou on the stairs, bringing with them a faint fragrance of lavender and old-world pot-pourri.

She had a dear little country house called the Cushats, which stood among pinewoods where pigeons cooed to each other all day long, and the sea was not far off. Here the summer holidays were spent by Philomène, “little cushat” as Godmother called her at times, for, as the Danish proverb says, “a dear child has many names.” She would sit by the hour in the oak-panelled drawing-room, strumming on the quaint old spinet, or in the window-seat reading, while the bees murmured perpetually in the blossoming lime-tree outside. The garden was full of what are usually called old-fashioned flowers, though for my own part I should be slow to connect anything quite so tiresome as fashion, with anything quite so sweet as flowers. There the snowdrops came at Candlemas, and the daffodils on Lady Day, and there was a whole big hedge of the rosemary that Shakespeare loved.