“But the trees and flowers!”
“That is just another thing,” she smiled at him. “Oh, why won’t you believe? I have had to teach them hardly anything. They know. No branch is ever torn down. Never will you find those pathetic little bunches of picked and thrown-away flowers here. The birds are just as tame. I teach them very little. I’m afraid of spoiling my clumsy help. It is so wonderful. They bring crumbs of any special bit of cake they get, for the birds, and plant funny little bits of roots and sow seeds. Come down and see them with me. I don’t take, or tell, other people. I am so afraid of it getting spoilt.”
North extracted his long frame from his chair.
“All right,” he said, with that odd smile of his as of one humouring a child. “But you are mad, you know, quite mad.”
“You said that to me before.”
And then North remembered suddenly that he had often said it to Dick Carey.
Their way led across the flower garden, and under the cherry-orchard trees where the daisies shone like snow on the green of the close-cut grass. Here they found Bertram Aurelius lying on his back talking in strange language to the whispering leaves above him, and curling and uncurling his bare pink toes in the dappled sunlight. His mother sat beside him, her back against a tree trunk, mending the household linen when she could keep her eyes off him for more than a minute. The dogs fell upon Bertram Aurelius, who took them literally to his bosom, fighting them just as a little puppy fights, and his mother smiled up at them with her big blue eyes and foolish loose-lipped red mouth.
“Have you ever heard anything of the father?” said North, when they were out of earshot.
“Killed at Bullecourt,” Ruth answered. “I could not help feeling it was perhaps best. He will be a hero to her now always.”
The lower field was steeped in the afternoon sunshine, and the children were chirping like so many birds. Two sat by the stream blowing dandelion clocks, which another small child carried to them with careful footsteps, his tongue protruding in the anxious effort to convey the fragile globes in safety before they floated away. Two bigger boys were planting busily in a clearing in the wood. Another slept, seemingly just as he had fallen, with all the lissom grace of childhood, and on the bank beside him a small girl crooned to something she nursed against her flat little chest.