Mannington, like most old-fashioned English towns, is built in a
wood-sheltered hollow, and screened from the inclemencies of northern
and easterly winds by the big chalk towns of Wiltshire. Before the days
of railways and the decentralisation of local centres that followed, it
had been a county town of some importance, but situated as it was only
on a branch line of the Great Western, the mercantile and manufacturing
life, never very vigorous, was sucked out of it into Swindon, and for
the last fifty years or more it had been a place of singular sedateness
and most leisurely life. In olden times the “county” and local gentry
used to foregather there in considerable numbers for Christmas
festivities, such as county and hunt balls, and the town is full of
charming old red-brick residences, now for the most part let to wealthy
and retired tradesfolk, or less wealthy but equally retired colonels and
captains of the services, who, surrounded by their wives and families,
live a very quiet and pleasant existence, warding off the gout which
port and advancing years threaten them with by golf or gentle horse
exercise on the downs. To the south and west the country is flat and
open, the line of downs holding the town itself as if the base of the
fingers of some huge grass-clad hand, while across the palm of it below,
following, so to speak, the “line of heart,” the Kennet makes a
loitering half-circle before wandering on again through its low-lying
water-meadows, starred with red ragged-robin and the burnished gold of
the marsh marigolds, to join the Thames at Reading. But though the
vigour and stress of competitive manufacturing, as has been said, had
left it, it still grew slowly, not in the way of small houses inhabited
by the lower trading class, but of villas for those who had finished
their trading, and it was now nearly joined by means of such an artery
of gentility with the little village of St. Olaf’s, some miles distant
from the streets of Mannington itself, of which Canon Alington was so
assiduous a vicar. The church, gray, Norman, and of wonderful quiet
dignity, stood with the vicarage and its acre or two of garden on the
furthest edge of the village itself, and from there the Swindon road,
which had curved downwards from the hills behind Mannington to collect
the traffic of the town, began to climb the downs again, shaking off the
houses from its margin, and, after passing a couple more larger
residences, screened behind trees of fine growth from the dust and
passage of carts, started on its lonely journey to the next village.
It was in the last of these, standing on a plateau, just above the
water-meadows of the Kennet, that Mrs. Allbutt had just settled. It had
been built in Jacobean times, and the trees which surrounded it, planted
probably at the same date, were towers of leaf and spreading bough; but
southward, toward the river, the view was open, and here lay the lawns
and flower garden. The kitchen garden was at the back of the house,
separated from the livelier and more ornamental part by a huge boxhedge,
and beyond that again was the disused chalk quarry, now a place of
grassy hollow and luxuriances of straggling bramble bushes, from which
no doubt the old name of Chalkpits, so unromantically revived again by
Mrs. Allbutt, was derived. Beyond again came an acre or two of
beech-wood that even in this hot midsummer of the year retained
something of the freshness and milky green of spring, and a wooden
fence that shut off the little estate from the down and the road.
Edith’s determination to settle in the country had, though Peggy had
tried to dissuade her from it, been made with perfect deliberation and
foresight. She alone knew how deeply the past years had seared and
burned her, and though, as she had told Peggy, she did not in the least
cease to expect much pleasure from life and many agreeable days, she did
not even now, though three years had passed since her torture had ended,
feel up to making those incessant efforts, to racing with the rest, that
were so essential a feature in the lives of those she would have lived
among had she chosen to go to London. But she no longer felt those vital
and exquisite anticipations of desires for happiness that are the
distinguishing characteristics of youth. Youth for her in that sense,
she believed, when she put into effect her determination to live quietly
here, away from the boil and froth of life, to be definitely over. Nor
had she even those memories and recollections of life and love which are
sufficient to keep a woman alive and alert till the end of her days. She
had missed that and the opportunity of those days would not come to her
again.
But there were other ways apart from the love of husband and the love of
children by which she could keep her soul alive, and keep also in touch
with things that lived. Nature, the wonder of growing things, the
miracle of running water, the flame of sunset and the white splendour of
moon-rise were all things that spoke to her with that intimacy known
only to the real lover of Nature. She realised how big a part in her
healing had the silent, mystical touch of the great mother contributed:
birds and beasts and trees and flowers had all had their hand in it,
and it was they who still kept her power of living alive. It seemed to
her now as she superintended and took active part in the making of the
garden, which had been allowed to run riot in the unoccupied year before
she had taken this house, a matchless miracle that when she dabbed seeds
into the ground, a little rain that fell, a little sun that shone, a
little darkness of night should cause the slender weak spikes of the
plant to pierce the earth. A thrush built a nest in the box-hedge that
separated the flower garden from the other, and it was with almost
incredulous delight that one day in late spring, when she was down here
superintending the arrangement of her furniture, she had seen in the
wattled dome of the nest the unfledged birds, all gaping mouths that
would make music on her lawns in another year. All this, the flaming of
the Oriental poppies, the incense of the mignonette, the carpets of wild
flowers, cistus and thyme and harebell on the downs above, she knew to
be a voice that spoke to her. Humbly, reverently she listened to it, to
its words of healing; but, oh, how much more passionately could she have
loved it had it been the accompaniment, the setting of the human love
which so few missed, but which in her case had been blurred and marred
and could never come back again in splendour of banners!
Then again--and this, too, was so much more attainable in the country
than in London--there was still intellectual achievement possible to
her, by which she could speak intimately with others, and perhaps be a
living and moving force in the world. For that, and for the long patient
concentration of thought that it demanded, London seemed to her an
impossible home; she was still too much in love with life not to be
continually distracted by the bewildering fury of it there. The
spectacle of that to her, as to Peggy, was absorbing; it was impossible
to live one’s own life in town; all the hours belonged, as if in small
allotments, to others, and there it was impossible to lead that detached
life which to her at any rate seemed to be an essential condition of
creative work. For she was no quick and nimble worker for whom the
briskness of town life seems somehow congenial and natural; it was
rather in solitude, in quiet, solitary evenings, in rambles alone over
that open and exhilarating down that her thought matured and ripened
best. It had been thus, though not here, that “Gambits” had been
evolved; it would be here in this green, pleasant home of hers that she
would work out and elaborate the new play which was already beginning to
take form in her mind. As she had said to Hugh before on that night at
Cookham, she marvelled at his not caring to set his mark on the world,
to make people listen to him, for this to her was something of a passion
which she could not imagine unshared by others, and the fact that she
had done it, had tasted the intoxication of brilliant success, made her
but more eager to drink of it again. But she had no intention of living
a hermit’s existence, and, just as she wished to avoid the riot and rush
of the world, so she had no idea of being a recluse. Solitary hours and
many of them she wished for, but she filled up much of the day in the
quiet, unexciting life of the place, for it was part of her plan to be
busy, though not at the break-neck, runaway pace of Peggy. For she still
had to keep her head turned in the direction of the future and averted
from the past, and when she was not at work it was just in these
cheerful little local employments that she could pass the time
pleasantly but unemotionally. Then, too, there was the garden, which
like some hungry animal swallowed at a gulp all the time she could give
to it, though that time was considerable. For here the two main strands
of her life as she had planned it were interwoven; Nature, grateful for
and eagerly responding to her ministrations, spoke to her from the
garden-beds, while some separate compartment of her brain, so it seemed,
was brooding and busy, unconsciously for the most part, turning over in
the cool darkness of it the scenes, the combinations, the characters of
the next play. Sometimes out of that darkness would leap a sudden flash
that she was wholly conscious of, and showed her how that subconscious
self had been busy sorting, turning over, accepting and rejecting till a
definite point, a clenched situation was struck out.
On this Saturday morning, the day following that on which Hugh had come
down to St. Olaf’s, there was grim and deadly work before her, and with
much misgiving and an almost fanatical honesty she had determined that
she had to do it herself, since the kitchen garden was still much
behindhand, and the heavy digging to be done there was a work that would
employ the efforts of both her gardeners. So this morning she sallied
out, with thick gloves on, and armed with a jar of brine and a small
wooden peg, for even with gloves she could not bring herself to touch
the slugs that she hoped and yet feared she would find on the traps she
had put for them. For the evening before she had laid down at small and
hospitable intervals a whole bushel of thinly-sliced potato: then came
in the little wooden peg to transfer them to the jar of brine. When she
looked at her nibbled seedlings she hardened her heart, but when she
looked at the spread feast of sliced potato she dreaded to find the
guests for whom she had spread it. Of course, she might have ordered a
gardener away from the kitchen garden to do it for her, but it was only
the weakness of the flesh that suggested that. She wanted to do things
herself, and not be lily-handed. But she sincerely hoped there would not
be many slugs.
She turned over the first piece of potato and found to her inexpressible
relief that the purpose for which she had put it there was quite
unfulfilled. But at the second there was a huge one, tortoise-shell
coloured.
She put the brine-pot down on the garden path and, suppressing a
shudder, tried to steel herself by thinking of the pansies whose faces
had been eaten, of the _Phlox drummondii_ which she had sown in such
profusion, but which had never arrived at greater maturity than small
spikes of leafless stem. She told herself, on the other side, that it
was far better and wiser to spend the morning in work, to answer all the
letters that certainly did want answering. Did she not pay two
iron-nerved gardeners to do that sort of thing? At this moment she
positively loathed Canon Alington, who had recommended to her this most
deadly plan of entrapping slugs, simply because it was so brilliantly
successful. Yet how mean and treacherous an operation! She spread the
bounteous table on her garden-beds, and when her guests came, even while
the flesh was yet in their mouths, their host arrived with death in the
brine-pot! And all the time she knew this was false sentimentality, and
not the least real even to herself. She was pumping it up in order to
find some excuse for not putting that dreadful tortoise-shell slug in
the brine, not because she loved or respected his life in the smallest
degree or felt really any duties of a host towards him, but because the
operation was so disgusting. And “Oh, this is not kindness, my poor
Edith,” she said to herself; “it is sheer cowardice!”
For the moment, however, she was given a respite, for from the open
French window of the drawing-room her butler appeared carrying a salver
on which was a card. She tried to think to herself that it was very
tiresome being interrupted in the morning, and knew that it was not.
Then she took the card.
“Oh, yes, ask Mr. Grainger to come out into the garden!” she said.
Hugh came out, hatless, from the house, and she advanced to meet him,
pulling off one of her heavy leather gloves.
“Ah, this is delightful, Mr. Hugh!” she said. “Canon Alington told me
last week that you would be down here some day soon, though he did not
then know the exact date. And you have remembered your promise to come
to see me. You’ll stop for lunch, won’t you?”
“Why, yes, please,” said Hugh, “if you are sure you can bear me till
then.”
He looked at his watch.
“I am bound to tell you it is only just half-past eleven,” he said.
“Yes, I really can bear you till then. This dear place is like a new toy
to me still, and I have to show everything to everybody who comes, down
to the wood-shed where a very fierce cat with kittens will fly at you if
you go too close, and a half-built hen-yard where at present five
mournful hens are putting dust on their heads in the manner of Oriental
widows because their husband is no more.”
“Did you have a funeral?” asked Hugh. “Daisy and I had a beautiful
funeral yesterday over a dead mouse.”
“No; you weren’t here to help, and, like Peggy, I’m not good at playing.
Besides, the corpse was missing. It had been eaten.”
She, too, was hatless, and the breeze and the sun of summer seemed to
shine in her face. Young as she always looked in this superb noon of her
beauty, this fortnight of open-air life seemed to have flushed and
flooded her with its freshness. Quickly and easily as they had made
friends, it seemed to Hugh that in this moment and over their trivial
words a great step toward further intimacy had been taken. Though this
impression was as instantaneous a result as some drowsy flash of summer
lightning, it had been there; far away in those clouds the authentic
fire of the heavens had gleamed.
“Ah, I am sure you could play beautifully,” he said, “because you said
that so seriously! And were you playing all by yourself here when I came
out? What are you playing with?” he added, looking at the brine-pot.
Edith groaned.
“You wouldn’t call it play if you knew,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Hugh, be a
true friend and help a woman in distress! Just this once, and then we’ll
go and walk round the place.”
“What am I to do?” he asked. “And are you the distressed woman?”
“Yes. Take this small wooden peg, and look at the second piece of potato
there. You will find an immense slug. Gather it somehow on to the peg
and drop it into that pot, which contains salt and water, and kills
them, I am told, quite instantaneously and even pleasantly.”
“Why, certainly,” said Hugh cheerfully. “And do we have to examine all
these bits of potato? My gracious, what an elephant! Do you know, I
really don’t think I can do it.”
Edith heaved a sigh of relief.
“Oh, I’m so glad you can’t!” she said. “Because I was afraid I was being
a coward.”
“Oh, we’re both cowards!” said Hugh.
“And aren’t you ashamed of us?”
“Not in the least. It would disgust you and me in a disproportionate
manner to do it, and it wouldn’t disgust a gardener at all. So it is
clearly a case for coöperative labour.”
“You exhibit a mind full of true grasp, Mr. Hugh,” said she. “Let us go
and find a gardener. The slug has dined; he will not go away.”
“When he dines he sleeps,” remarked Hugh.
“And you are staying at St. Olaf’s?” she asked, as they walked off down
the border, leaving the unused apparatus of death behind. “Now, to be
candid: am I a little in disgrace with Canon Alington?”
“Yes,” said Hugh promptly.
“And is it because I asked them to dine on Sunday evening? Ah, I knew it
was! How stupid and unadaptable one is! I put dinner at half-past eight
on purpose so that it would be quite free of church, and it never
occurred to me at the time that very likely he did not dine out on
Sunday. When will one learn to put oneself in the position and
environment of other people?”
“Are you very lacking in that?” asked he.
“Yes. Oh, I can see other points of view to a certain extent when I am
taken by the scruff of the neck, and held down to them, but I never
anticipate or imagine them. And how is one to learn that sort of thing?
And what of Peggy and town generally?”
“I dined with her two nights ago, and we went to ‘Gambits’ again. It is
still crammed.”
“Ah, one wondered whether the enthusiasm of the first night was likely
to last. It seems as if it would now. And have you been more than that
twice?”
Hugh made a short, silent calculation.
“I’ve been either seven or eight times,” he said. “Oh, do let’s go again
together! I don’t believe you really appreciated it. Of course you liked
it, but I don’t think you saw, in fact nobody can the first time, how
heavenly it is, how fine! There is no play like it; it has a peculiar
quality quite different from anything else. What a mind Andrew’s--I call
him Andrew now because I feel I know him so well--must be. How I’ve
intrigued to find out who he is. Perhaps, after all, he is some gray
wise old Scotchman, like the people in the kail-yard school, who really
has thought out the truth of things all alone up in Inverness or
somewhere dreadful. And yet I don’t know; there are things in it that
must have been written by a woman. But, on the other hand, there are
things that must have been written by a man. Also Andrew Robb must be
quite young, or he couldn’t have seen into the girl’s heart like that,
and he must be quite old, or he couldn’t tell you what he saw.”
For one moment, Edith felt as if she had been overhearing remarks about
herself, and was in honour bound to make her presence known. But she
simply could not; she felt herself unable to stop Hugh, so irresistible
was the desire to hear him talk to her so candidly with such huge
appreciation, while she, listening, drinking it in, decking herself, as
it were, in his phrases and praise, sat all the time secret.
“Oh, you should have heard my brother-in-law on the subject last night!”
he continued. “His upper lip grew longer and longer, like Alice when she
ate the mushrooms, as he talked about it. And he hadn’t seen the play,
I may tell you, he had read a review of it. But----”
Hugh stopped, with amusement breaking from his eyes and the corners of
his mouth. The impulse grew irresistible, and he threw back his head and
gave a great crack of laughter.
“I know I can say these things to you,” he said, “because you will
understand. If I didn’t tell somebody about it and laugh over it, I
should get angry, which would be a pity. I nearly got angry last night,
but then I promised myself to tell you this morning, and so instead I
treasured it all up, occasionally drawing him on, though he didn’t need
much of that.”
The infection of Hugh’s merriment could not but capture her, too, for
Hugh’s description of the upper lip was gloriously apt.
“But you haven’t told me what he said yet,” she remarked.
“I know I haven’t. Oh, I wish laughing did not hurt so! Well, down came
the upper lip, and he kindly sketched the outline of the play to me, to
_me_, so that I should see, when the trappings and embellishments of
scenery and character were removed, what the spirit of it really was.
You may not believe he used that phrase, but he did. Trappings and
embellishments of character! Just think it over. To proceed; it was
quite unnecessary, and in this case it would be harmful to see the play,
because he could read what it was about, and could also read between the
lines. The moral of the play was that wives should fall in love with
other men than their husbands, and that their husbands should commit
suicide in order to allow them to gratify their passions. He said it in
those very words, because I have an extraordinary memory when I
attend.”
Mrs. Allbutt frowned.
“But it’s ludicrous,” she said. “I never heard anything so unfair and
malicious.”
“No, he’s not that,” said Hugh. “He is only very, very much in
character. You see he is a clergyman, and, whereas a judge isn’t judging
all the time, but can get off the bench and commit, if he likes, the
crimes for which he sentences other people, and Parliament rises for the
M. P., and everybody else has their Saturday afternoons out and their
Sundays off, the clergyman goes on all the time. And, do you know, I
think being any one thing quite all the time tends to make people a
little narrow.”
“You don’t really mean that?” asked Edith, with immense gravity.
“I do, indeed! Up to this point I hadn’t been able to get a word in
edgeways, but here I plunged and told him I went several times a week.
Oh, and I haven’t told you what Andrew Robb has done for me!”
“No; what except make you spend a good deal of time at the theatre?”
“Well, he’s made me determine to spend more,” said Hugh. “Can’t you
guess?”
Edith’s face flushed, and she stood quite still.
“The opera, do you mean?” she asked.
“Yes. He, and the sight of the theatre crammed every night with silent,
eager people made me feel what I hadn’t ever really felt when you spoke
to me once about it at Cookham, namely, what a big and wonderful thing
it must be to impress yourself on other people. Also, in my small way, I
began to see what Reuss meant by its not being fair on him. For suppose
Andrew, capable of writing that play, had not done so, how rightly
indignant we should have been. So, perhaps in our own little ways, we
all have to do our tricks. I wrote to Reuss three days ago, and heard
from him this morning, and so I have to go to Frankfort early in
October, and study there all winter, unless I can induce Reuss to come
to London. I wish to heaven I had a voice like a crow. I shan’t have
time for anything all winter except singing and singing and never
satisfying Reuss. And what does it all come to, compared to the fact
that months and months will have gone, and I shall have nothing, nothing
out of them except a slightly better pronunciation of German, and a
rather more finished way of leaving off loud on a top-note. All in order
to sing to a lot of people who are merely waiting till the end of the
act in order to see who it is in the box opposite with the diamonds.
Mrs. Allbutt, do you really think it is worth while?”
She shook her head at him.
“But what a foolish question!” she said. “As if it wasn’t worth while
spending all one’s life to do anything well. Most people can’t! They are
incapable of excellence. But, Mr. Hugh, I assure you there are masses of
people who adore excellence, only they can’t attain it themselves. Of
course there are heaps of foolish and flippant creatures who, as you
say, only wonder who is wearing those diamonds, but what do they matter?
You don’t mind because the cab-horses in the street don’t know what an
artist you are.”
Hugh sighed, and pulled down his upper lip with a ludicrous resemblance
to his brother-in-law.
“London is a very wicked place,” he said, “and makes a business of its
pleasures, whereas we here in Mannington make a pleasure of our
business. Oh, I forgot, it was my sister who said that! Let’s talk about
something else. I should like Andrew Robb to know what a difference he
has made to me, and how, just because of him, I am going to make a fool
of myself at Covent Garden.”
“You haven’t done that yet,” remarked Edith.
“No, but I shall. I told Dick and my sister, by the way, about it, but
they rather disapproved. They don’t think that it is a serious career.
Dick urged me very strongly to send in my name as a candidate for the
Education Department, in addition to taking this engagement. Education
Department--me! There is quiet humour about that, don’t you think? The
hours, as he pointed out, were only from eleven till five, so that I
should have plenty of time to keep up my singing. Also, as he justly
observed, I should not be singing more than a couple of nights a week,
and that only while Wagner opera was being given. We are going to have a
talk about it all this evening. He strongly advises the Education
Department, and dissuades me from the opera, but he doesn’t see why they
shouldn’t be worked together. Lord, how I jaw about myself! I apologise.
Only I am so dreadfully interested in it all this minute. Where’s the
cat and the woodshed?”
Edith sat down firmly on a garden bench.
“The woodshed will wait,” she said, “and the cat will fly at you just
the same in ten minutes from now. I want to tell you how delighted I am
with your decision, and, indeed, that is not wholly selfish on my part,
though I anticipate the most enormous pleasure from hearing you sing in
opera. But for other reasons also; you see I am Peggy’s sister, and I
think we are very much alike in some ways. We both want people to screw
the utmost ounce out of themselves, and it seemed to us both that you
had masses of ounces that were not being screwed out. You sang to us
divinely: you sang that shepherd’s lullaby just as divinely to
Daisy----”
“How did you know I sang it?” asked Hugh quickly.
Edith was honest; that was as essential a characteristic of her as was
the absence of self-consciousness in Hugh.
“Because I listened,” she said. “Also I spied through the chink of the
nursery door. You left it open. I also apologise--no, I don’t. I didn’t
do any harm. I’m not ashamed.”
Once again intimacy, like the flash of summer lightning, broke the
cloud. It had moved nearer.
“Yes, I listened to you singing that bad child to sleep,” she continued;
“and I saw you through the chink of the door. I thought it very nice of
you. I liked you for it.”
Hugh had sat down on the edge of the grass when she took the
garden-seat. And at that he looked up at her quickly, and met those dark
kind eyes.
“Thank you,” he said.
At that moment she also knew that the flash of summer lightning was
there. She knew that there was attraction and fire in the atmosphere.
And she behaved as one who wished to get home, out of range of these
elements, before the storm came nearer. Alone, in the house, with the
blinds drawn down, she would be secure, with the security that she had
sought in coming down to this peaceful, meadow-encompassed house, where
the nearest and loudest sounds of life were the drowsy drone of the folk
in Mannington who were so unabsorbingly busy over provincial interests.
Here she could be busy herself over her garden and her writing, wanting
no more, and quite content with this calm sunrise on her wreck. Yet even
at the moment when she said to herself that she wished just to pull the
blinds down and sit by her solitary fireside, she knew that she wanted
to pull them up, and look, nothing more, into the open night. In any
case she did not show her desire to him.
“Yes, that is what Peggy and I both felt,” she said. “We both wanted you
to use your time. Of course people like to see you, and ask you to
dinner and to Saturdays till Mondays, and it is all so pleasant, and
there is amusing talk, and plans, and another party next Tuesday week.
But I do feel that anybody who can do something, ought to do it, and not
make the mere distraction and froth of life into life. Most people can’t
do anything particular. Well?”
Hugh had looked up again, clearly with words on his tongue.
“But you,” he said. “Of course you could do something; one feels that
every moment that one is with you. You have just as much force as
Peggy--she told me to call her Peggy, by the way; don’t you hate people
who allude to others by their Christian names, when they don’t use them
to them?”
“Yes, I loathe them. About me?”
“You, you have force; you understand, which is force. If we have all got
to do something, why not set us an example. You don’t even kill slugs.”
“Nor do you,” said she.
“Because gardening isn’t my plan. Hang it all, I’ve had a plan now for
twenty-four hours. I am in the first head of missionary enterprise.”
The blinds were not quite drawn down yet; once again she had to peer
into the night.
“That is a fair question,” she said. “I answer that you don’t yet know,
and I hope you may never know, how great a task it is to forget. There
are years of my life which need to be forgotten before I could begin to
live again. That has occupied me very completely. Forgiveness, I think,
is included in that; to forget implies it.”
Hugh stared a moment.
“Why, in ‘Gambits’----” he began.
“Yes, I remember it was phrased like that in the play. Amherst said that
death would mean forgetting, and therefore forgiving. It seemed to me
very true. But I have not the slightest intention of committing
suicide.”
She got up as she spoke, but Hugh from the ground was standing before
she had risen from her seat.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean----”
“Ah, no, I know that! But even if you had meant it, why not? For a great
point of forgetting is that any allusion--though you did not
allude--cannot hurt one. Besides----”
She paused a moment; then looked at him with those level kindly eyes.
Then she checked what was in her mind before it came to the tongue.
“Besides, we have to see the woodshed,” she added instead.
Thereafter the time till lunch was very fully occupied. A vixen of a cat
flew at Hugh, who, in spite of warning, had entered the dangerous
woodshed, and he retreated with cries of dismay, leaving a globe of
spitting, scowling motherhood in possession of the doorway. Then the
unhusbanded hen-yard gave rise to philosophic reflection arising from
the fact that if a man practises polygamy his death, if he is loved, is
polygamously painful, and in any case must result in widows’ disputation
of the property. On the other hand, in the case of hens, it was easy--in
fact, it was going to be done this afternoon--to substitute another
husband for the lately deceased, and nobody would know the difference.
Then the kitchen garden was visited, and from thence a gardener, even
in the very act of nailing up a peach-tree, was sent to look for a
tortoise-shell slug on the second slice of potato counting from the far
end, and for any other slugs. The pot of brine, Mrs. Allbutt told him,
was in the middle of the gravel walk and could not be missed. Then they
skirted the bramble-grown chalk-pit, passed through the beech-wood, and
went out of the gate in the wooden fence to walk a little way up the
steep down-side from where they could get a comprehensive view of house,
garden, and wood. All the myriad wild flowers of downland were in bloom
and fragrance--cistus, hairbell, thyme, and dwarf meadow-sweet, and the
company of low-growing clovers. From where they paused they could see
over the pale green beech-wood through which they had just come to where
the red house, with just a thin coil of blue smoke going up from one
chimney and soon vanishing in the gold-suffused blue of the noon, stood
sunning itself, and looking from under the sun-blinds of its windows, as
if from half-shut eyes, on to the jewelled flower-garden and the level
sea of vivid green that bordered the chalk-stream. The white riband of
the road, dusty and sun-grilled, that passed by its fence was quite cut
off from it by the belt of trees that grew within, and it stood
embowered in boughs and green, alone with its enchanting company of
quiet living things.
She stopped when they had climbed this hundred feet or so of down.
“There,” she said, “that is my favourite view of my dear home, for
though I have been here so few weeks, it has become wonderfully homey to
me. I come up here every day, and really envy the fortunate person who
lives there. Though she is so cut off, I feel sure she cannot be
lonely. She ought indeed to be very busy, and find every day much too
short, if she takes the least pleasure in or care for all her trees and
flowers.”
Hugh moved a step nearer.
“Ah, go on,” he said; “I like hearing about her! Tell me more about
her.”
“Well, she has been very busy all the time she has been here, out of
doors most of the day, and leaving a quantity of letters unanswered in
consequence. And sometimes her friends come and see her, and she finds
that very pleasant also. And sometimes she goes up to town and flies
about as if she were quite young still, but it rather tires and confuses
her, and finds she is glad to get back. And when autumn comes she will
see her trees flame in the sunset of their year, and she will still be
busy, putting her flowers to bed for the winter, and tucking them up,
and seeing that all is comfortable. Indoors, too, she has another garden
of books, and when winter comes and days are short and dark, with
weeping skies overhead and fretful angry rain flung against her
window-panes, she will be busy with her indoor garden, and again find
the days too short. There will be fine days as well, and she hopes to
walk over these downs that will be all gray and flowerless in those
crystal winter suns, and often too she will have things to do in
Mannington, for she really is a friendly person, and no doubt will find
friends there; and perhaps some day, out of the years that have passed
and out of what she has learned and is still learning, her mind will put
out a little flower of its own. And often too in the winter she hopes
her friends will still come and see her, and consent to bury themselves
for a day or two now and then in the country.”
Again she paused and smiled at Hugh, who was looking at her with his
eager boyish gaze. And since he, with all the rest of the world, would
soon know what she had in her mind, it did not matter whether he knew it
a little earlier than the rest or not. Besides, the impulse to tell him
somehow was irresistible--and in a way, since what she had written had
indirectly anyhow decided his career, he had a certain right to know.
But for the moment he interrupted her.
“Oh, but what a heavenly story you are telling me!” he cried. “And the
little flower of your own--what do you mean? Are you writing something,
or painting, or what?”
“Yes, the fortunate woman who lives down there is hoping to make a
little flower of ink. She has already made one, such as it is, and her
friends, and even other people as well, like that little ink-flower;
though, of course, tastes differ, and others say it is a disgraceful,
horrid weed. She has heard several people talk about it. But nobody,
except Peggy, knows that it came from her own garden, and though you are
going to know this minute, dear Mr. Hugh, you musn’t tell anybody till I
give you leave. Because at present everybody thinks that it came from
the garden of Andrew Robb. Yes, it is called ‘Gambits.’”
Hugh stood quite silent; then he gave a long sigh, and let his eyes
wander over the down, over the trees and house that lay below, the
still, sky-reflecting streak of the Kennet through the water-meadows.
Then, still quite grave, he looked at her again, as if half dazed by the
news that he felt instinctively was big with import for him.
Then he took her hand and kissed it.
“Ah, dear Andrew Robb,” he said, “at last I have found you; at last I
can thank you.”
Then suddenly a huge wave of exultation swept over him, though he did
not at the moment know its significance, nor from what fathomless and
mighty sea it came, and he threw his hat high in the air and caught it
again.
“I never heard of anything so splendid in all my life!” he cried.