Next to Jerrold and little Colin Anne loved Eliot. He seemed to know
when she was thinking about her mother and to understand. He took her
into the woods to look for squirrels; he showed her the wildflowers and
told her all their names: bugloss, and lady's smock and speedwell,
king-cup, willow herb and meadow sweet, crane's bill and celandine.
One day they found in the garden a tiny egg-shaped shell made of
gold-coloured lattice work. When they put it under the microscope they
saw inside it a thing like a green egg. Every day they watched it; it
put out two green horns, and a ridge grew down the middle of it, and one
morning they found the golden shell broken. A long, elegant fly with
slender wings crawled beside it.
When Benjy died of eating too much lettuce Eliot was sorry. Aunt Adeline
said it was all put on and that he really wanted to cut him up and see
what he was made of. But Eliot didn't. He said Benjy was sacred. That
was because he knew they loved him. And he dug the grave and lined it
with moss and told Aunt Adeline to shut up when she said it ought to
have been lettuce leaves.
Aunt Adeline complained that it was hard that Eliot couldn't be nice to
her when he was her favorite.
"Little Anne, little Anne, what have you done to my Eliot?" She was
always saying things like that. Anne couldn't think what she meant till
Jerrold told her she was the only kid that Eliot had ever looked at. The
big Hawtrey girl from Medlicote would have given her head to be in
Anne's shoes.
But Anne didn't care. Her love for Jerrold was sharp and exciting. She
brought tears to it and temper. It was mixed up with God and music and
the deaths of animals, and sunsets and all sorrowful and beautiful and
mysterious things. Thinking about her mother made her think about
Jerrold; but she never thought about Eliot at all when he wasn't there.
She would run away from Eliot any minute if she heard Jerrold calling.
It was Jerrold, Jerrold, all the time, said Aunt Adeline.
And when Eliot was busy with his microscope and Jerrold had turned from
her to Colin, there was Uncle Robert. He seemed to know the moments when
she wanted him. Then he would take her out riding with him over the
estate that stretched from Wyck across the valley of the Speed and
beyond it for miles over the hills. And he would show her the reaping
machines at work, and the great carthorses, and the prize bullocks in
their stalls at the Manor Farm. And Anne told him her secret, the secret
she had told to nobody but Jerrold.