II
She came downstairs in due course, dressed in a brown holland dress with a big black straw hat tied with black ribbons under her chin. Her fresh old face looked soft and powdered, her white hair escaped in puffs from under her hat, on her nose she wore a pair of round horn spectacles, and on her hands a pair of big brown leather gauntlets. Over her arm she carried a garden basket, a pair of garden scissors dangling by a ribbon from the handle. She was going to do the flowers first; one never knew, at this time of year, whether a sudden shower might not come down and dash their beauty.
In the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, the grandfather clock ticked quietly. The doors all stood open; looking to the left she could see into the sitting-room, with its deep, chintz-covered chairs and sofas; looking to the right, down the passage, into the dining-room, where presently luncheon would be laid for two; and straight ahead of her, facing the stairs, was the front door, which opened on to the little forecourt and the flagged path leading up to the porch. She went out. Some white pigeons were sunning themselves on the roof of the great barn; its doors were propped open, and a farm-hand came out, followed by two farm horses, their hoofs going clop-clop after him, their harness clanking loosely, and their blinkers and the high peaks of their collars studded with shining brass nails. Their tails and manes were plaited up with straw and red braid. Mrs. Martin nodded to the man, as he touched his cap to her, and stood looking after the horses lumbering their way out towards the lane. She liked having the farm so close at hand, and had never thought of putting the barn, although it stood so near the house, forming one side of the forecourt, to any other than farm uses. She went across the court now, and looked into it. A smell of dust and sacking; gold motes in a shaft of sunlight; two farm waggons with red and blue wheels; a pile of yellow straw, and some trusses of hay. She was very well content. Behind the barn stood the rickyard, and here were the garnered stacks, pointed like witches’ hats, a double row of them: the farm was doing well. When the time came, she would have a prosperous inheritance to bequeath to her son.
She turned away from the shadows of the barn, and went through the door in the wall that led into the garden. It was quite warm; the ground steamed slightly, so that a faint mist hung low, and everything was wet, with but a dangerously narrow margin between the last splendour of autumn and its first sodden decay. She walked slowly up the garden path, looking at the bronze, red, yellow and orange flowers that were bent down towards the ground by the moisture; she walked up to the path, swinging her scissors, till she came to the clump of Scotch firs at the top of the garden, and stood surveying the country that swept down to the valley, rising to the Downs beyond, the woods in the valley golden through the mist, and blue smoke hanging above the deep violet pools of shadow, between the woods and the hills; all unstirred by any breath; rust-colour and blue in every shade from the pale tan of the stubble to the fire of the woods, from the wreathing smoke-blue to the depths of amethyst driven like wedges into the flanks of the Downs. Below the clump of Scotch firs the ground fell away rapidly; in the valley gleamed a sudden silver twist of the river. The river was Mrs. Martin’s boundary, the natural frontier to her eight hundred acres. They had not always been eight hundred acres. Once they had only been five hundred, and only thanks to stringent frugality and a certain astuteness on Mrs. Martin’s part had they been extended to that natural frontier which was the river. She could not think of that astuteness now without a measure of discomfort. Had she been quite as fair as she might have been—quite as scrupulous? Would she ever have persuaded Mr. Thistlethwaite to part with the required three hundred if she hadn’t canvassed for him quite so enthusiastically before the poll? Was she quite sure that she agreed with all his political convictions? Was she even sure that she understood them? She dismissed these qualms, hurriedly and furtively, when they nudged her. Anyway, the three hundred acres were hers, and whatever she had done, she had done it for her son; let that be her defence in everything. She would bring him out here after luncheon, and he would stand looking over the valley, and possibly he would say, as he had said once before, years ago, “I wish our land went down as far as the river, don’t you?” And then in a great moment she would reply “It does!” For she had never told him about the extra three hundred acres; she had kept that secret out of the long weekly letter she had written to him overseas during all the five years of his absence. There was no detail of her life that she hadn’t told him; she had told him, separately, about each of her dinner parties; about the work on the farm, and about the agricultural experiments that she and Lynes, the bailiff, were making, their failure or their success; she had kept him informed of all the events in the village; but the three hundred acres she had hugged to herself as a secret and a surprise. Lynes was her accomplice; she had had to warn him that he must never let out the secret should he have occasion to write to Mr. Henry. It had created a great link between herself and Lynes. There had, of course, been the danger that somebody or other in the district would be writing to Henry on other matters, and would mention his mother’s purchase; but up to the present it was clear from Henry’s letters that no one had done so. He had written to her with fair regularity, though not so often as she could have wished; but then she would have liked a letter by every mail, as he received from her, and that was unreasonable; and though sometimes his letters were brief, and clearly written in a hurry, she was too loyal to ask herself what he could possibly have to do with his evenings on a ranch where work would be finished by dusk.
She turned back along the path, and began cutting flowers wherewith she filled her basket. She cut very carefully where it would not show. No one else was allowed to cut the flowers. She was especially proud of this, her autumn border. On either side of the path, until it was brought up short at the end by the grey walls of the manor-house, it smouldered in broad bands that repeated the colours of the autumn woods. Orange snapdragon, marigold, and mimulus flowing forward on to the flagged path; then the bronze of coreopsis and helenium, stabbed by the lance-like spires of red-hot poker; and behind them the almost incredible brilliance of dahlias reared against the background of dark yew hedge. The border streamed away like a flaming tongue from the cool grey of the house. She had worked very hard and studied much to bring it to its present perfection; ten years of labour had at last been rewarded. Behind the yew hedges, to either side, were squares of old orchard, and the bright red apples nodded over the hedges like so many bright eyes peeping at the borders. In the grass under the apple-trees the bulbs lay dormant, that in the spring speckled the orchards with grape-hyacinths, anemones, and narcissi; but Mrs. Martin had forgotten about the spring. She was thinking, as she cut sheaves from the coreopsis and, more sparingly, from the snapdragons, that the autumn border was really the finest sight of the year, and that she was glad Henry should be coming now, and at no other time.
In the house, where she had everything conveniently arranged in the garden-room—a sink, taps, cloths for wiping the glasses, and a cupboard full of flower vases—she proceeded leisurely to do the flowers. No one had ever known Mrs. Martin be anything but leisurely; she always had plenty to occupy her time, but she was never hurried or ruffled. It was one of her greatest charms. She selected the flower vases with nice care; some were of rough pottery, but those now stood on one side, for she consecrated them to the spring flowers and to the roses; others were of glass, like green bubbles, glaucous and iridescent, light to the hand—for Mrs. Martin could not bear glasses that were not delicately blown, and as no one ever touched them except herself, they never got broken. She had a genius for handling fragility, quick and deft, and curiously tender. She was now wondering whether Henry’s wife would some day stand in her place at the sink in the garden-room. She often wondered this, for Henry’s wife was a personage she had long since absorbed into her thoughts. She thought of her without bitterness or jealousy, simply as a part of Henry, and consequently as another person to whom she would, in due course, have to hand over the house, the garden, and the estate—to render an account of her stewardship. Mrs. Martin was thinking about her as she snipped the ends off stalks that were too long, and lifted the vases that were already filled on to the tray standing ready to receive them. It made no difference that Henry should not yet have come across his wife; she was not thereby entitled, in Mrs. Martin’s eyes, to any separate existence of her own. She was Henry’s wife; the future mistress, when Mrs. Martin was dead, of the house and all it contained. It had taken a very long time for Mrs. Martin’s mind to grow accustomed to this idea, but now that it was there she accepted it quite placidly, and it came up in its turn for examination amongst the other ideas, or was taken out when she wanted something to think about. She had even got into the way of saying to Lynes, or to the gardener, “I’m sure that Mrs. Henry would approve of that,” and if, at first, they had been a little surprised, they had quickly come to take Mrs. Henry quite for granted. She had even an affection for Henry’s wife. She liked to think of them living here together in the country, so far away from London—the country that was England although London forgot about it—and of Henry tramping over the eight hundred acres with a gun and a spaniel, while his wife stooped over the flowers in the walled garden, and she never doubted that they would frequently recall her, who had made the place what it was; recall her with a sort of grudging tenderness—she was too humanly wise a woman to expect more than that—and say, “The old lady ought to rest quietly in her grave....” She carried the tray of flowers into the hall, and from there distributed them; a big vase of coreopsis on each window sill in the sitting-room, a bowl of marigolds on the table where the light of the lamp would fall straight on to them in the evening, a bowl of snapdragons in the centre of the hall, red and yellow nasturtiums on the dining-room table. There remained two little pots of snapdragon, which she took upstairs and put on the dressing-table in his bedroom. She came down again. The bronze of the flowers, she thought, suited the house, with its bits of oak panelling, the polished stairs of a golden-brown, and the pile carpet of mouse-brown in the sitting-room. She was pleased with her survey, though a little tired. She heaved the sigh of happy tiredness. Five years alone here, alone except for the neighbours; and although she liked being alone, and was quite content between Lynes and her garden in the daytime, and her books in the evening, she was very glad that Henry—who was really her unseen and constant companion, at the back of her mind in everything she did—should be coming back to her at last.