Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/21

 And now in the scalding heat of the August mid-afternoon Mr. Winnery was driving in a decrepit fiacre up the long winding road that led to the heights of Monte Salvatore. He cursed the heat and himself and Mrs. Weatherby, Miss Annie Spragg, the coachman and Brinoë itself—sacred, beautiful, romantic Brinoë, surrounded by blue hills covered with clouds of blue violets and fragrant narcissus. Of course, thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, the poetic temperament always chose to write about Brinoë in May and never in August. Now if a scientist, a realist, had written of Brinoë, it would have been another story. He hated Brinoë, not because it actually lacked all the miraculous qualities attributed to it by Browning, Longfellow and the advertisements of the tourist agencies, but because he had to live there. Poverty and inertia had chained him to Brinoë for twenty-nine years and now at fifty-two he saw no prospect of escaping from it even in death. In the end he would be laid to rest, after a service read by Mr. Binnop (who read the service so badly) in the Protestant cemetery. It would have to be the Protestant cemetery because there was no special cemetery for agnostics. He would rest in death among all the poets, spinsters, retired colonels, widows, decayed clergymen and adulteresses who since the eighteenth century had lived and died among the exaggerated beauties of Brinoë. Probably he would be laid to rest beside old Mrs. Whitehead. Perhaps even in her grave she would rattle her false teeth over her dish of tea. Doubtless she would be buried with a collected edition of "Ouida" placed at the head of her coffin. 