The trowel dropped from her hand.
"Oh no!" she said confusedly. "Neither I shall. I was forgetting. I
shall be in Australia."
She looked round the little garden which she had made with her own
hands, and back to the white cottage, up to its eyes in Michaelmas
daisies, which had become such an ideal home, and in which, poor dear!
she had taken a deeper root than she knew, and a bewildered pain passed
for a moment over her face. It was as if she had been walking in her
sleep, and had suddenly come in contact with some obstacle, and had
waked up and was not for the first moment certain of her surroundings.
"He is more to me than any cottage," she said, recovering herself
with a little gasp. "I had hoped perhaps he would have come and lived
here, and let me take care of him, after all his years of hard work.
But it was a selfish idea. He has told me that he cannot leave his
work or his uncle, who has been so kind to him, and who is very infirm
now--partially paralysed, and needing the greatest care. I shall--let
the cottage."
"What is the place in Australia like?" I said with duplicity, for of
course I knew by this time exactly what it was like. But I wanted to
change her thoughts.
She led the way indoors, and pointed to a sheaf of unmounted
photographs. I took them up, and examined them as if for the first time.
My heart sank as I looked at the inoffensive figure of the poor old
uncle in the verandah, whom Aunt Emmy was of course to nurse. The house
which that hard-working old man had built himself stood nakedly upon a
piece of naked ground. There was not a tree near it. Beyond were the
great cattle-yards and farm buildings, and what looked like an endless,
shrubless field. And on the right was the new two-windowed room, no
longer very new, which Mr. Kingston had built seventeen years ago for
Aunt Emmy. I knew how much labour that hideous addition meant, which was
a sort of degraded cousin many times removed from the pert villa
drawing-rooms, peering over portugal laurels on the road to Muddington.
I knew that Mr. Kingston had papered and painted that room with his own
hands. I knew also, but Aunt Emmy did not, that he had repapered and
repainted it several times while it waited for her. And yet by no
wildest effort of the imagination could I picture Aunt Emmy living
there, though her heart had been there all her life.
A sudden rage rose within me against the deceased Uncle Thomas, and
against this other decrepit uncle, waiting to be nursed.
I laid down the photographs, and went a turn in the forest, leaving Aunt
Emmy sitting idle in her gardening gloves. My foolish words had stopped
her happy activity. I was angry with myself, with Fate, with Australia,
with everything, and not least with Mr. Kingston.
Everywhere in the bare glades little orphaned families of bracken held
their arched necks a few inches from the ground. Even in their
bereavement they too had remembered that it was autumn, and their tiny
curled fronds protecting their downcast faces were golden and ruddy. As
I turned a corner I suddenly caught sight of Mr. Kingston a few paces
from me, looking earnestly at one of these little groups. I did not want
to meet him just then, and I half turned aside; but he had already seen
me, and he gave a gesture of welcome, and I had to stop.
My anger subsided somewhat as he came up. He looked harassed, and as if
he had not slept.
"And so you are back," he said. "I was just wishing that you were at the
moment I caught sight of you. If you think it possible that a word or
two could be dragged out of such a silent enigmatical person as
yourself, I should like to have a little talk with you."
I could not help liking him. His keen eyes were kindly, though his face
was grave.
"What do you want to talk about?" I said bluntly.
"What an unnecessary question. What can I want to talk about except
Emmy?"
I was silent. I felt more uncomfortable about the whole affair than I
had done yet, and that was saying a good deal.
Mr. Kingston led the way down a little track to a place where the trees
grew so close together that the murderous scythes had not been able to
get in among them. Here the bracken had been unmolested, and was going
unharassed through all its most gorgeous pageant. Great fronds of ivory
white, of palest gold, of brownest gold, of reddest gold upreared
themselves among the purple waves of the heather, wearing the stray
flecks of the sunshine like jewels on their breasts. We sat down on a
fallen tree round which the bracken had wrapped its splendour.
"How extraordinarily beautiful it is!" he said, more to himself than to
me, putting out his long, artistic hand, gnarled and hardened with work,
and touching a pale frond with a reverent finger. "I am glad to have
seen it once more. It is twenty-five years since I have seen an English
autumn."
There was a moment's silence, and then he went on without any change of
tone:
"And you are thinking, you sad-faced, downright little woman who are so
afraid that I am going to make your dear Aunt Emmy unhappy, you are
thinking that you did not take a precarious seat on this trunk in order
to hear a possible enemy descant on the beauties of nature."
I was astonished at his penetration. My own experience, gleaned entirely
from the genial little egotist whose wife I was, had taught me that men
never noticed anything. I had had no idea that I had shown the fear of
him which I felt.
"And yet you are my only possible ally," he went on, "my only helper, if
you are willing to help me, in the somewhat difficult task which I have
in hand."
"You mean, marrying my aunt?" I said.
"No," he said, looking at me with a kindness which made me ready to sink
into the ground with shame. "I can do _that_ without assistance. Emmy,
God bless her! has been ready to marry me any time these twenty-five
years, and, poor soul, she is ready now. She has not the faintest idea
what she would be in for if she did, but she is ready to risk it."
I was silent. I was bewildered for one thing, and I did not want "to put
my foot in it" again immediately for another. And there was really no
need for me to speak, for he went on slowly, looking full at me:
"What I have to do, if I can, is to save Emmy's romance for her."