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Prince was a shire-horse of gigantic proportions and exquisite grace, nine, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty hands high, noble as his name denoted and of a beauty not to be expressed in words – except by Shakespeare. Alas! He was out working, but for some minutes we worshipped at the shrine where Prince was not.
Heaton showed that the rest was anti-climax; the introduction to Kathleen, Faith, Mercy and to five lesser brothers and sisters too numerous to be bothered with, and to Mrs Rhodes who could not be so easily dismissed even by Heaton. She was plump and motherly with great dignity and a capacity for affection which did not altogether conceal an air that she was not to be trifled with. She came, as did Mr Rhodes, from an old Yorkshire family, both sides of the family tracing their descent in a line unbroken for some three or four hundred years.
Heaton did not disguise his dislike of wasting time on these members of the family and their several occupations about the house when it could be spent on Prince, but he went through with it – visiting the larder first.
Mrs Rhodes would express a shrill, explosive, but immediately muted laugh; this she did as she gave me a welcoming kiss. She asked after my parents whom I had forgotten; thinking of them was inseparable from homesickness. To all such inquiries I used to reply that they were “very well thank you”; no more ‘summer suns are glowing’ for me. In fact they were in India, my mother having returned with my sister at the beginning of the year; they were a nuisance – the cause of having to write a letter once a week.
Life at Archer Hall was austere in a way that was new to me. I always picture the Hamiltons in summer time with the lawns
brooded over by their magnificent cedar. With the Rhodes family, loving and comfortable though it was, life seemed easier to imagine in hard, bitter winds of winter. On the exposed hilltop the winds were keen, except in the height of summer when on occasion Heaton and I cycled over from scho