Laura Prothero was sitting with Jane in the garden at Wendover one day
in that spring. It was a day of sudden warmth and stillness that brought
back vividly to both of them the hour of Owen's death.
They were touched by the beauty and the peace of this place where Nicky
lived his perfect little life. They had just agreed that it was Nicky's
life, Nicky's character, that had given to his garden its lucent,
exquisite tranquillity. You associated that quality so indivisibly with
Nicky that it was as if he flowered there, he came up every spring,
flaming purely, in the crocuses on the lawn. Every spring Nicky and a
book of poems appeared with the crocuses; the poems as Nicky made them,
but Nicky heaven-born, in an immortal innocence and charm.
It was incredible, they said, how heaven sheltered and protected Nicky.
He, with his infallible instinct for the perfect thing, had left them
together, alone in the little green chamber on the lawn, shut in by its
walls of yew. He was glad that he had this heavenly peace to give them
for a moment.
He passed before them now and then, pacing the green paths of the lawn
with Nina.
"No, Jinny, I am _not_ going on any more," Laura said, returning to the
subject of that intimate communion to which they had been left. "You
see, it ended as a sort of joke, his and mine--nobody else saw the point
of it. Why should I keep it up?"
"Wouldn't he have liked you to keep it up?"
"He would have liked me to please myself--to be happy. How can I be
happy going on--giving myself to the people who rejected _him_? I'm not
going to keep _that_ up."
"What will you do?"
Laura said that she would have enough to do, editing his poems and his
memoirs. Jane had not realized the memoirs. They were, Laura told her,
mainly a record of his life as a physician and a surgeon, a record so
simple that it only unconsciously revealed the man he was. George
Tanqueray had insisted on her publishing this first.
"I hated doing it for some things," she said. "It looks too like a
concession to this detestable British public. But I can't rest, Jinny,
till we've made him known. They'll see that he didn't shirk, that he
could beat the practical men--the men they worship--at their own game,
that he did something for the Empire. Then they'll accept the rest.
There's an awful irony in it, but I'm convinced that's the way his
immortality will come."
"It'll come anyway," said Jane.
"It'll come soonest this way. They'll believe in him to-morrow, because
of the things he did with his hands. His hands were wonderful. Ah,
Jinny, how could I ever want to write again?"
"What will you _do_, dear child? How will you live?"
"I'll live as he did." She said it fiercely. "I'll live by journalism.
It doesn't matter how I live."
"There are so many things," she said, "that don't matter, after all."
Nicky and Nina passed.
"Do you think," said he, "she's happy?"
"Who? Jane? Or Laura?"
"You can't think of Laura," said Nicky, gravely, "without _him_."
"That's it. She isn't without him. She never will be. He has given her
his certainty."
"Of immortality?" Nicky's tone was tentative.
"Of the thing he saw. That _is_ immortality. Of course she's happy."
"But I was thinking," Nicky said, "of Jane."