The day after Christmas dawned bright and clear, as clear as any day
dawned in the Flats where at sunrise the smoke turned the sun into a
great copper disk rising indolently toward the zenith of the heavens.
The false warmth of the January thaw, precocious that year, brought
gentle zephyrs that turned the icicles on the sweeping eaves of the
house into streams of water which added their force to the rivulets
already coursing down the long drive to leave the gravel bare and
eroded, swelling with the upheaval of the escaping frost. But the false
warmth brought no beauty; no trees burgeoned forth in clouds of bright
green and no crocuses thrust forth their thin green swords and errant
blossoms. The January thaw was but a false hope of the northern winter.
When the sun of the early afternoon had destroyed all traces of the snow
save drifts which hid beneath the rhododendrons or close against the
north wall of the stable, it left behind an expanse of black and
dessicated lawn, in spots quite bare even of dying grass. The garden
stripped of its winter blanket at last stood revealed, a ravaged
fragment of what had once been a glory.
Lily, drawn from the house by the warmth of the sun, wandered along the
barren paths like a lovely hamadyrad enticed by deceitful Gods from her
winter refuge. She ran from clump to clump of shrubbery, breaking off
the tender little twigs in search of the green underbark that was a sign
of life. Sometimes she found the green; more often she found only dead,
dry wood, bereft of all vitality. In the flower garden she followed the
brick path to its beginning in the little arbor covered with wistaria
vine. Here too the Mills had taken their toll; the vine was dead save a
few thin twining stalks that clung to the arbor. In the border along the
walk, she found traces of irises--hardy plants difficult to kill--an
occasional thick green leaf of a companula or a foxglove hiding among
the shelter of leaves provided by the careful Hennery. But there were
great gaps of bare earth where nothing grew, stretches which in her
childhood had been buried beneath a lush and flowery growth of sky-blue
delphinium, scarlet poppies, fiery tritomas, blushing peonies, foxglove,
goosefoot, periwinkle, and cinnamon pinks.... All were gone now,
blighted by the capricious and fatal south wind with its burden of gas
and soot. It was not alone the flowers which suffered. In the niches
clipped by Hennery in the dying walls of arbor vitæ, the bits of white
statuary were streaked with black soot, their pure bodies smudged and
defiled. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cydnos were no longer
recognizable.
In the course of her tour about the little park, her red hair became
loosened and disheveled and her cheeks flushed with her exertion. When
she again reentered the house, she discovered that her slippers,
high-heeled and delicate, were ruined. She called the mulatto woman and
bade her throw them away.
On the stairs she encountered her mother, whom she greeted with a little
cry of horror. “The garden, Mama, is ruined.... Nothing remains!”
The expression on the old woman’s face remained unchanged and stony.
“Nothing will grow there any longer,” she said. “Besides, it does not
matter. When I die, there will be no one to live in the house. Irene
hates it. She wants me to take a house in the Town.”
Lily, her feet clad only in the thinnest of silk-stockings, continued on
her way up the long stairs to her room. If Willie Harrison had ever had
a chance, even the faintest hope, the January thaw, revealing the
stricken garden a fortnight too soon, destroyed it once and for all.