David had settled down very happily at Plasencia, and had proved himself to be a highly domesticated creature—always ready to do odd jobs about the house or garden.
Shortly after his arrival Concha had gone up to Scotland to stay with Colonel Dundas, so it fell upon Teresa to entertain him.
They would go for long walks; and though they talked all the time, never, after that first conversation, did they touch on religious matters.
Sometimes he would tell her of his childhood in Scotland, and it soon became almost a part of her own memories: the small, dark, sturdy creature in a shabby kilt, a “poke of sweeties” in his sporran, at play with his brothers and sisters, dropping, say, a worm-baited bootlace into the liquid amber of the burn—their chaff, as befitted children of the Manse, with a biblical flavour, “Now then David, my man, no so much lip—_Selah, change the tune_, d’ye hear?” And the hillsides tesselated with heather and broom, and the sheep ruddled red as deer, and the beacon of the rowans flashed from hill to hill; while down the bland and portly Spey floated little dreams, like toy boats, making for big towns, and the sea, and over the sea.... Then all would melt into the tune of the “Old Hundred”:
What time James Grant, the precentor with the trombone-voice, rocked his Bible up and down, as though it were a baby whose slumbers he was soothing with an ogre lullaby.
All this was a far cry from his Holiness, the Immaculate Conception, the Sacred Heart of Jesus ... and yet ... it was not quite Plasencia; there was something different about it all: again she remembered the incongruity of the minarets of the Sacré-Cœur.
Sometimes, too, he would tell her of his years in South Africa—for instance, how, after a long day of riding up and down the fields of sugar-cane, he would lie out on the veranda of his little bungalow and read Dumas’s novels, while the plangent songs of the indentured Indians, celebrating some feast with a communal curry, would float up from their barracks under the hill; or else the night would shiver to the uncanny cry of a bush-baby: “It’s a wee beastie that wails at night. There’s no other sound like it in the world—beside it the owl’s and the nightjar’s cries are homely and barn-door like.”