The facts of the matter are simple enough in their way. Each of the
ladies occupies a small house of her own, fully, and not semi-detached,
with a small patch of green in front and a small garden at the back;
but the combined needs of front and back are not considered sufficiently
great to take up all the time of a gardener working six days in the week
during the summer. There is enough work, however, to take up three days
of the six, with window-cleaning thrown in, in slack seasons. As the
conditions of labour are identical in the case of the gardens of both
ladies--only Miss Mercer throws in the washing of her pug to balance
Mrs. Lingard's window-cleaning--John Bingham, the jobbing gardener of
Thurswell, suggested several years ago that he should divide his time
between the two gardens, and this plan, to all appearances, worked very
satisfactorily in regard to every one concerned.
[Illustration: 0051]
Only John Bingham was aware of the trouble involved in keeping both
gardens on precisely the same level of “getting on”--only John Bingham
was aware of the difficulty of preventing either of the ladies from
seeing that anything in the garden of the other was “getting on” better
than the same thing in her own patch. It might have been fancied that
as they were in complete agreement respecting the necessity for a strict
censorship upon the visiting lists of the neighbourhood as regards
strangers, there could not possibly exist any rivalry between them on so
insignificant a matter as the growth of a petunia or the campanile of
a campanula; but John Bingham knew better. It had been his task year
by year to minimise to the one lady his success with the garden of
the other--to say a word of disparagement on Thursdays, Fridays, and
Saturdays of all that he had been praising on Mondays, Tuesdays, and
Wednesdays. But sometimes Nature is stronger even than her greatest
enemy, a jobbing gardener, and so it was that when Mrs. Lingard chanced
to pay a visit to Miss Mercer on a Thursday, she found the garden of the
latter, just recovering from the hand of John Bingham's attention on the
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, obviously superior in some respects to
her own, and John found his diplomatic resources quite unable to meet
with the demand for an explanation when she got home. It was in vain
that he tried to make her understand, what she certainly should have
known already from her experience of the ministrations of John--namely,
that not he, but the superior soil and aspect of Miss Mercer's
herbaceous border, should be regarded accountable for the marvellous
growths which had attracted her attention in the garden of her rival.
His Thursday, Friday, and Saturday patron declared herself far from
satisfied with such an explanation. Soil! Had she ever shown herself
to be close-fisted in the matter of soil? she inquired. And as for
aspect--had he not chosen the aspect of the herbaceous border at which
he was now working? No, she knew very well, she affirmed, that what
made a garden beautiful was loving care. She professed herself unable to
understand why John should lavish all his affection upon Miss Mercer's
border rather than upon her own; all that she could do was to judge by
results, and, viewed from this basis, it could not but be apparent
to every unprejudiced observer that he had been giving Miss Mercer's
borders such loving touches as he had never bestowed upon her own: the
flowers spoke for themselves.
John had heard of the Language of Flowers, but he had never mastered the
elements of their speech. As a matter of fact, he took no interest in
flowers or their habits. He had “dratted” them times without number for
their failure to do all that the illustrated catalogues declared they
would do, and now he found reason to drat those of Miss Mercer for
having done much more than he had meant them to do. It was with a view
to restore the balance of mediocrity between the gardens, which had been
through no fault of his, disturbed by a sudden outbreak of “Blushing
Brides” in Miss Mercer's parterre, that he gave some extra waterings
to Mrs. Lingard's verbinas, trusting to convince her that he was
a thoroughly disinterested operator in both the gardens--which was
certainly a fact. But in that arid summer the response of the verbinas
was but too rapid, and Miss Mercer, calling upon her friend (and rival),
was shown the bed with the same pride that she had displayed when
exhibiting her petunias.
She said nothing--the day was Saturday--but she perceived, with that
unerring intuition which in some persons almost takes the place of
genius, that petunias had been supplanted (literally) by verbinas in the
affections of John Bingham.
She spent the Sunday rehearsing an interview which she had arranged in
her mind to have with John Bingham when he should arrive the next day.
But Monday came, and John Bingham failed to arrive. She waited at the
back entrance to the garden until ten o'clock, but still he did not
appear. Then she sent a messenger to his cottage to inquire the cause
of his absence. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were her days for his
services, and never once had he failed her. She could not guess what was
the matter. She had always regarded him as a sober man and one for whom
Monday morning had no terrors. The mystery of his first failure was
rendered all the more unfathomable when the tweeny maid returned saying
that Mrs. Bingham had told her positive that John had gone out to work
as usual that same morning, and that Mrs. Bingham had taken it for
granted that he was in Miss Mercer's garden.
For a quarter of an hour Miss Mercer pondered over the whole incident,
and then she suddenly put on another hat, discarding the garden specimen
with which she had begun the day, and went down the road and round by
the Moated Manor House to where Mrs. Lingard's villa was situated, just
beyond the knoll of elms. The hall door was wide open to the morning
air, and through the glass door at the farther end of the hall she
distinctly saw Mrs. Lingard standing on the edge of one of the beds of
the garden with John Bingham kneeling at her feet.
And this on a Monday morning!
John Bingham had actually attended morning ser-vice in the church the
day before--Miss Mercer had seen him there--and yet on Monday he
had broken faith with her, and now, at ten-thirty, he was engaged in
planting out the contents of the capacious basket which Mrs. Lingard was
doling out to him.
And Mrs. Lingard was wearing her garden hat just as if the day was
Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, when she was entitled to his services.
And Mrs. Lingard had also been at church the previous day and had
repeated the responses in her ordinary tone of voice, and without
faltering, though beyond a doubt her heart had been full of this scheme
of suborning a faithful, if somewhat weak, servant from his allegiance
to the mistress who had an undisputed claim to his services the next
day!
Without a moment's hesitation Miss Mercer passed into the hall, opened
the glass door beyond, and stood beside the guilty pair before either
of them was aware of her presence. She saw that the man was planting
asters--the finest aster cuttings she had ever seen.
“John Bingham, are you aware that this is Monday morning?” she said in
an accusing voice, and so suddenly that a cry of surprise--it may have
been with guilt--came from Mrs. Lingard, and John Bingham let drop his
trowel and wiped his forehead.
“Good gracious, Lucy! Where did you drop from without warning?” cried
the lady in the garden hat.
“I am addressing John Bingham, madam,” said Miss Mercer in icy tones.
“And once again I ask John Bingham what he means by being here when his
place should be in my garden.”
“I can easily explain, my good woman,” said Mrs. Lingard, lapsing, under
the “madam” of the other, into the tone of voice she had found effective
with the native servants in the West Indian island of St. Lucia when her
husband had been stationed there.
“I am not addressing you, madam,” said Miss Mercer hotly: her glacial
period had passed and had given place to the volcanic--the
suppressed volcanic. “I wish to be informed why this man--this
traitor--this--this----”
“Don't be a greater fool than you are by nature, my good creature,” said
Mrs. Lingard. “But I might have known that you could be disagreeable
over even such a trifle as my sending to John Bingham to assist me
for an hour in planting out the asters which were only delivered this
morning when they should have been here on Saturday. If I had not begged
him to come to my help for a couple of hours the lot would have been
spoiled. In justice to him I will say that he was very unwilling to
come.”
“And what does that mean, pray?” asked Miss Mercer sneeringly.
“It means that he knew you better than I did,” responded Mrs. Lingard.
“He has had more experience of your narrow-mindedness than I have had.
Now, go on with your work, John. Don't mind her.”
But John did not go on with his work. He touched his forehead with the
drooping aster that he held rather limply, saying, in the direction of
Miss Mercer--“I can easy make up the extra however, ma'am--mortal easy,
in the evenin', and so I thought or I wouldn't be here now.”
“There, let that satisfy you, make your mind easy; you'll not be
defrauded of the shilling for his two hours,” said Mrs. Lingard.
“You will be good enough to dictate to your inferiors, if such exist,
madam; you need not dictate to me. You may keep your John Bingham now
that you have him; I have made other arrangements for the future of my
garden.”
She turned with a mock courtesy. Mrs. Lingard also turned.
“Lucy Mercer, go back to your--your--your hen-run,” she cried, pointing
dramatically to the place of exit. “Go on with your work, John Bingham.
Mrs. Hopewell will only be too glad to take on your Thursdays, Fridays,
and Saturdays. _She_ has a garden--_a garden_.”
That is the true and circumstantial account of how Mrs. Lingard and Miss
Mercer ceased to be on speaking terms, and that is how it is that many
people are becoming more hopeful of the future of Thurswell as the
centre of a social neighbourhood. Each lady still arrogates to herself
the right of veto in respect of the claims of any strange family to be
visited on taking up their residence within reasonable visiting distance
of Thurswell; but the people who formerly had been ready to accept the
dictum of the two in such social matters are now beginning not only to
assert their own independence of action, but even to dictate to others
on all points on which they themselves had been dictated to--in no mild
way--by Mrs. Lingard and Miss Mercer. But a mistake that was recently
made by one of these immature dictators has done much to chasten their
longing to take up the responsibilities attached to such a position. She
had spoken with that definiteness which marks the amateur on the subject
of the visiting of a certain Mrs. Judson Hyphen Marks who had taken
Higham Lodge for a year, and accordingly quite a number of people left
cards upon her. But suddenly the name of Judson Hyphen Marks appeared
rather prominently in the columns devoted to the Law Court proceedings
in the daily papers, and some curious information respecting the
_ménage_ of the Judson Hyphen Marks was brought under the notice of the
people of Thurswell and, indeed, of England generally; and those who had
left cards upon them consulted together as to whether it was possible or
not for them to ask for their cards to be returned to them.
The general opinion that prevailed after several long discussions on
this question was that no social machinery existed by which so desirable
an object might be effected, and no move was made in that direction; but
ever afterward the dictation of the feeble amateur who thought to take
the social reins out of the hands of Mrs. Lingard and Miss Mercer
when it was found that they were pulling them in opposite directions,
threatening to upset the social apple-cart, was received for what it was
worth, not for what it claimed to be worth.