Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 13

She said she couldn't quite tell. It was difficult to tell what one felt, didn't he find? Everything was so different; so exciting in a way; and when one was excited one felt, perhaps, better than one was.

Lord Ninian laughed shortly at that, and said that he didn't feel excited; he wished he could.

"I'm depressed, too, sometimes," said Miss Glover; and then he sighed.

"One gets so abominably homesick in this hole," he said.

She had never thought of such splendour as being, possibly, to anybody, a hole; but she knew what it was to feel homesick. They smiled at each other when they met after that, she and Lord Ninian, and he lent her magazines and books. When she heard that he had died,--she had not seen him for a week and had feared for him,--she felt very, very sad and her thoughts turned in great longing to Acacia Road and to her garden.

She wanted very much to live to see her garden again; but she could not help being frightened lest she should not; for, as the winter wore on, it became evident to her, and all the more because every one else was so carefully unaware of it, that one of the things that Florrie had predicted was not to come true. She was not to return cured. She was not going to get better. At first the slow burning of fever had seemed only part of the excitement, but she could not go on thinking it that when it began to leave her breathless, trembling, faint. By the time that the miracle of the Alpine flower-meadows was revealed to her and she had watched the snow recede and the jonquils and anemones advance, she knew that if she wished to die at home she must soon go. They would not consent to that at once. They said that the spring months were full of magic, and she was persuaded to stay on. They were magically beautiful and she was glad to see them, but she longed more and more to see her little garden. She dreamed sometimes of her pansies at night, and it seemed to her once that as she stooped in the moonlight and touched them she was cured; the fever fell from her; a cool white peace flowed into her veins; and when she looked up from them, the night was gone and the sun was rising over her Surrey hills.

At the beginning of June they consented that she should go. They did not tell her the truth, of course. They said that she might pa.s.s the summer in England, since she wished so much to return there, and that she must come back for next winter; but she knew that if her state had not been recognized as hopeless they would not have let her go. It was hopeless, and she summoned all her strength and resolution, that she might live until she reached Acacia Road.

IV

FLORRIE met her at Victoria. Florrie did not know that it was hopeless, though she knew that it was not as yet, a cure; but from the way that she controlled her features to a determined joviality Miss Glover could infer her shock, her grief, her consternation. The glance, too, that Jane and Florrie exchanged was revealing, had she been in need of revelations.

After a night in Florrie's flat, however, she knew that she looked so much better that poor Florrie, when she came to see her in the morning, was quite erroneously cheered. "_You're_ all right," Florrie declared.

"The journey's knocked you about a bit; but once we get you down to Surrey, Jane and I, you'll pick up in no time. After all, there's no place like home, is there?"

Miss Glover, from her pillows, smiled. She felt very fond of kind Florrie and sorry for her that she must, so soon, suffer sadness on her account.

It was difficult, in the train, to listen to Florrie's talk. After her fright of the day before, Florrie had cheered up so tremendously that she talked even more than usual, of her friends, her enterprises, of how she was going yachting that autumn with the Forestalls, and of how Di Haymouth had just had a baby.

"A splendid boy, and Mr. and Mrs. Isaacson are fairly off their heads with pride and pleasure. Such a layette, my dear, you never saw! Real lace through and through--and the cradle of a regular little prince! I gave him a silver porringer for his christening; a lovely thing, all heavy _repousse_ work with his initials on a shield at one side. Di say it's the prettiest porringer she ever saw."

It was difficult to listen to Florrie and to nod and smile at the right moment when she was thinking of her garden and wondering if Florrie had really remembered to sow the sweet peas and mignonette. Even if she hadn't, the Madame Alfred Carriere and the Prince Charlie roses would be out, and the last tulips, and the pansies, of course. And it was such a beautiful day, just such a day as that she had risen to look at when, in her dream, the pansies had cured her.

The drive from the station up to Acacia Road was a short one. The dear, foolish little porch was there, the bow-window, the laurel-bushes. Her own home. As she saw it she felt such a lift of the heart that it seemed to her, too, that she might be going to get better after all. Florrie and Jane helped her out and she and Florrie went into the sitting-room.

She looked round it, smiling, while she felt her happy, fluttering breaths like those of some wandering bird put back into its own dear cage again, safe, secure, bewildered a little in its contentment. She was like such a trivial little cage-bird; she was meant for Acacia Road, and not for Swiss mountains.

Everything was the same: even her knitting-basket stood waiting for her, and all that caught her eye with their unfamiliarity were the flowers, the profusion of flowers, standing in bowls and vases everywhere; perhaps almost too many flowers,--that was like dear, exuberant Florrie,--and all pink.

"Oh--how lovely they are!" she said, finding the fluttering breath fail her a little. "How dear of you, Florrie, to have it all arranged like this!"

"They look welcoming, don't they?" said Florrie, who laughed with some excitement. "Will you rest, dear, or come into the garden?"

"Oh, the garden, please. I'm not at all tired. I can rest later."

Florrie still led her by the arm. They went into the conservatory and there came to her then the strangest, dizziest sense of pink--everywhere pink!--shining in at her through the sea-green gla.s.s, bursting in at her through the open door.

For a moment she thought that her mind was disordered, and looked up with large, startled eyes at Florrie; but, beaming as she had never yet seen her beam, all complacency and triumphant benevolence, Florrie nodded, saying, "Now for your surprise, my dear. Now for your garden.

Just see what I've made of it to welcome you!"

They stepped out. Pink. Pink everywhere, above, below, around one. The paths were arched with swinging iron chains on which, already, the long festoons advanced. The border, heaping itself up splendidly against the wall, was splashed with white, yellow, blue and purple, a blaze of colour indeed, but pink dominated, like the sound of trumpets in an orchestra. It also made Miss Glover think, strangely, sickly, of the sound of a gramophone. There was no lawn. The centre of the garden was flagged, with a highly ornamental sun-dial in the middle and a white garden seat and a wonderful white stone basin for the birds. There were no Prince Charlie roses, no mignonette and sweet peas, there were no pansies. Her garden had disappeared.

"There!" said Florrie.

She led her to the garden seat. From here Miss Glover, as she sank down upon it, could see that the back of the house was also dappled with the incessant colour.

"Isn't it a marvel!" said Florrie. "I hardly dared hope they'd grow as they have, but Dorothy Perkins is a winner, and these latest climbers run her close. I spared nothing, my dear, nothing--manure, bone-meal, labour. The men were working here for a week last autumn. All the old soil was carted away and a rich loam put in three feet deep. I put them in big. I knew I could get them to take if I took enough pains over it.

Those chains will be covered in another month. I knew it would do you more good than any open-air cure to find such a garden waiting for you.

I'd defy anybody to have the blues in this garden! In its little way it's just an epitome of joy, isn't it? It's done _me_ good, to begin with! I've been having tea out here every day in my week-ends and every one who's seen it and heard about my plan says I'm a regular old fairy with a wand. Mrs. Isaacson motored down only last Sat.u.r.day and thought it was a perfect poem. And so it is, though I say it as shouldn't."

Florrie had paused on the deepest breath of purest satisfaction, and the time had come when Miss Glover must speak. She must find words to express grat.i.tude and astonishment. She must not burst into tears. She felt that if she began to cry she would at once be very ill. She did not want to be taken ill before dear, good, kind Florrie. And it was, of course, a beautiful garden; far more beautiful than hers had ever been, no doubt; yet it hurt her so--to find her garden gone--that she heard her voice come in gasps as she said, "Dear Florrie--you are a wonderful friend--you are indeed.--I can never thank you enough. It's a miracle."

Florrie patted her shoulder--she had her arm around her shoulders. "My best thanks will be to see you happy in it, Edie dear, and getting well and strong again in it. It's a regular surprise-packet, this garden, let me tell you, my dear. It'll go on, that border, right up till November, one thing after another: I thought it all out, pencil and paper and catalogue in hand. I went over the whole colour-scheme with Mrs.

Isaacson--there's no one who knows more about it. And since most of the herbaceous things came from her garden, it didn't cost as much as you'd think. They've always heaps of plants left over when they divide in autumn, and everything was at my disposal; and all the latest varieties, as I needn't say. Wait till you see the lilies--yes, my dear, I've found room for everything; where there's a will there's a way is my motto, you know--and the phloxes and the chrysanthemums."

She would never see them, though she was sure that they would all be very beautiful; she would never see these latest varieties from Mrs.

Isaacson's garden. And she would never see her own little garden again.

How wonderfully fortunate it was--the thought went through her mind confusedly as she sat there, feeling herself droop against Florrie's shoulder--that she was not to live with Florrie's and to go on missing her own garden. How fortunate--but her thoughts swam more and more and tears dazed her eyes--that she had not to say good-bye twice to her pansies. She had died, then, really,--that was it,--on the moonlight night when she had last seen them. And she had left the house to Florrie, dear kind Florrie, and Florrie would go on having tea happily under the festoons of roses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

PINK FOXGLOVES

THEY were only beginning to revert. Last summer they had stood, spires of fretted snow tapering at the points to jade-coloured buds, at the edge of the little copse where the garden path lost itself among young larches, birches, hazels, and poplars, black and white. The sun set behind the copse, spreading in the summer evenings a pale gold background, and often when he went to look at his foxgloves and to listen to the lonely song of the willow-wren, rippling, like a tiny rill of water, from the heart of the wood, Aubrey Westmacott had felt that there was something almost dangerous in such bliss as this. To breathe this limpid air, to hear the willow-wren, to look at white foxgloves, and to know himself free forever from the long oppression of London--if he could have sung his wistful grat.i.tude, his melancholy joy, the song might have been like the bird's.

This year the change in the foxgloves had come as a complete surprise; he was still a novice at gardening. He had left his beloved garden for a week; regretfully, for he could not bear to lose a day of it--he was like a lover with a bride, long pined for, who each day grows dearer and lovelier; but he had gone, because it seemed churlish to refuse the old don friend at Cambridge--and when he returned, at evening, and had walked down to the copse and had seen them standing there, so delicately yet so decisively altered, the shock of the surprise had seemed all delight. He had intended white foxgloves to rise, always, against the copse; but then he had not known how lovely pink foxgloves could be. He had never seen them of such a shade, each bell of palest rose brimmed with shadows of mauve, and finely freaked within. Regiments of the white flowers had remained steadfast, so that there could be no sense of loss, and he had picked an armful of the pink ones and carried them back to the house, feeling, as he looked at them against his shoulder, that he would have liked to kiss them. He spent the remaining hours of dusk in arranging them. He never allowed the parlourmaid to arrange the flowers.

That she saw him, tolerantly, if with a flavour of irony, as a very eccentric gentleman, he was aware, just as he was aware, quite cheerfully, that many of his kind neighbours found him a rather absurd one. But one of the deepest joys this new life afforded him, after the paternal bliss of seeing the darlings grow, was in disposing them about the rooms, with a loving discrimination that Ridley's skilled but cold and conventional hands could never have accomplished.

This evening he put the foxgloves in the drawing-room, a tall jar on the bureau, a taller jar on the piano, and a group in the vast white Chinese bowl, wedged cunningly into place with stones among the stems. Here he could look at them next morning as he worked at his history. He always worked in the drawing-room, for there he had the morning sun, and, if he could not see his ma.s.sed and tiered herbaceous border, could look out at the cherry tree and at the tiny squares of terraced lawns, dropping from level to level, with their stone steps and low stone walls and narrow jewelled bordering of flowers.

There was a very nice little study behind the dining-room--it was from the dining-room that one saw the herbaceous border, and he could meditate future rearrangements and harmonies while he ate his breakfast--but the study looked out on the stable shrubberies. He liked, too, to feel himself encompa.s.sed by his treasures, old and new, while he wrote of mediaeval customs; his mother's incompetent but loveable water-colours, sketches of her old home, the grey, ancient, gabled house among just such Cotswold slopes and uplands as his western windows looked out upon, though his mother's old home, pa.s.sed long since to alien hands, lay on the other side of the county; and his father's seafaring trophies, from China and j.a.pan and far Pacific islands, and all the lately acquired delightful solidities of Jacobean oak, and his maturest choice in printed linen. Here, on their background of mullioned window or dark wainscoting--such a gem of a little Jacobean house it was--the pink foxgloves greeted him next morning, set among feathery heads and sharp green spears of meadow gra.s.s, glimmering and poised on tiptoe, like groups of softly blushing nymphs, and he stood for a long time looking at them, his hands clasped behind his back.

He was forty-six, a fragile little man, blanched and stooping from the long years of imprisonment in the Government office, from which the undreamed-of inheritance had released him only three years ago, with faded gold hair hanging across his forehead and a gentle face of stifled dreams, the mouth slightly puckering as if in intentness on some task.

The eyes, of a dim yet dense pastel blue that told darkly in his faded face, were intent, too, but not acute; they dwelt; they did not penetrate. He wore a small, short moustache, and a pair of gold _pince-nez_ dangled at his coat b.u.t.ton.

Delicate as he had always been, and ineffectual, as he had always so dejectedly been aware of being, he, too, with all his relatives, had thought it very fortunate when, on leaving the university, he had secured the tiny post in the Civil Service. There, he knew, he would stay; he was not of the type that rises, and he had never during the long years that followed rebelled consciously against his fate. He was, he often told himself reproachfully, so very fortunate compared with men far abler and more deserving than himself. He found that he could not write, as he had hoped to do, after the conscientious hours at the office. He read a great deal, and crept away to the country for every week-end, sitting by meadow or river, like a dusty mouse let loose from its trap and softly panting in the sunlight. He was often ill, and the doctors always recommended a country life, but it was not on hygienic grounds that he pined for limpid s.p.a.ces and starry solitudes. There was a soft pa.s.sion in his blood, inherited from the mother whom he so much resembled, for the sights and sounds and occupations of rurality. He adored flowers. He often dreamed of them at night, and in waking hours the thought of a garden of his own haunted him. Sometimes he went to stay with friends in their gardens; but this was an ambiguous joy; it was like seeing the pink and white babies playing about their nurses and perambulators in the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, and having no claim to kiss any of them. He loved children, too.

And now he found himself transplanted to this wonderful fairy tale by Uncle Percy's legacy. He still, often, could hardly realize it. There was a haze of dizzy delight over all the memory of the last three years; the search for a house, the securing of Meadows, the furnishing and ordering of his household--he who had lived in rooms in Kensington for twenty-four years, ruled over by a flawlessly honest but relentless landlady! To think that he could have other fish for breakfast than finnan haddock, and other vegetables in winter than cabbage! This was a minor but an emphatic pleasure.

But above all, around all, the garden! He had planned and planted it all, studying books, brooding over catalogues, making lists, writing labels ever so neatly. The vegetables were given over to the gardener; but his flowers, except for deep trenching--and oh, how deep, how rich, he saw to it that it was! he tended single-handed. His seed-boxes, his cold-frames, his tools and baskets, how he adored them all, and how happy he was in any small personal economies, so that extravagance in manure and bone-meal and leaf-mould should be well justified. The history of mediaeval customs was also a long-cherished ideal, but it remained of secondary interest; his heart, always, was in the garden, meditating mulchings, waterings, or hoeings. Every dream had come true, had more than realized itself. Was it any wonder that he should feel himself going softly in his amazed grat.i.tude, should sometimes, as when he listened to the willow-wren at evening, feel that such happiness was dangerous.

It had not seemed to flaw the happiness, it had seemed but to add a sweeter undertone to it, melancholy yet blissful, that into the new Paradise there should have stolen a new longing, and that, as of old, he should find himself haunted by an unattainable loveliness. He thought of this as he looked at the pink foxgloves, for they made him think of the face of Leila Pickering. "Yes, yes, yes," he said to himself, as he turned to the mediaeval history, for he had the habit, caught from his long loneliness, of speaking much to himself and with a quaint repet.i.tion of words that stole into his social speech, "it is she they are like; she they are like. Lovely, lovely, like her."

Later in the morning, privileged as she was to interrupt even the history, it was Mrs. Pomfrey who informed him that the strange, delicate beauty was transitory, an unfixed type, and that, next year, or in a very few years, the palely rosy nymphs would be purple.

"They'll revert. You can get pink ones, you know, from the seedsmen; rosy carmine they call it; but not at all this colour. I've never seen a colour quite like this. Your soil must do it. I've always thought the soil of Meadows had magic in it."

Mrs. Pomfrey was the late rector's widow, and lived in a thicket of roses half a mile away in the village. She was tall, black-robed, majestic, and melancholy, with a deep voice and black eyes and a high, hooked nose and large false teeth that shifted slightly and slightly clashed together when she spoke. She had survived all emotions except the grief of having to grow her roses on a clayless soil, and to this grief she often returned. A girlhood friend of Aubrey Westmacott's mother, she had been his link with Windbury. His week-ends with her there had been the very comets of his dark London sky, and for years he had seen Meadows inadequately tenanted, with an eye of brooding love.

"Oh! they'll revert to purple, then," he said, somewhat distressed; and he repeated "purple, purple," several times, as if to familiarize himself with the sound and very sight of it, while Mrs. Pomfrey answered him, "Give 'em time and they'll all revert. You must dig 'em up and sow again from year to year if you want to keep 'em pure."