Towards the end of May 1886—against professional advice, to which we opposed our private opinion that the best way to get well was to get rid of the homesick cravings that were beyond doctor's reach—I was transferred from my hospital bed to one in the house of a dear Melbourne friend, where I lay in all the luxury that love and money could provide, and with portions of family around me, for a few more weeks; until at last it was considered that I might make the long journey to my home in safety. I had a bed in the railway carriage, and reached the goal of my desires at midnight, when the long-motherless bairns were asleep. Thereafter, although weighed down at times with the thought of my supposed impending doom—never really out of my mind, and constantly spurring me to extreme efforts to turn the available time to the best account, in the interests of my prospective orphans—I persisted in getting well and in enjoying myself accordingly. Indeed, the charm of life at this period—only to be understood by those in like case, who have been so near to losing it—is a bloom upon the retrospect that is likely to misrepresent it in these pages. Beauty is in the eye and heart of the beholder more than in the thing beheld. However, I can only paint as I have seen, and the reader will make allowances.
Certainly Home No. 7, which was in the near neighbourhood of Homes 1, 2, and 3, was a trifle dilapidated. G.'s successor there, when he first saw it, called it a "shanty"—he came from the modern suburban villa which we now occupy, and was used to high ceilings and electric bells—and he thought (until the rain ceased and the sun came out) that it would be impossible to bring his family to quarters so mean by comparison with what they were accustomed to. But they were good enough for us. The most we asked of the vestry was to keep roofs weather-tight; for the rest, we felt ourselves equal to making a satisfactory abode out of a far worse shanty than that. Indeed, we had done so more than once.
All the paint was off it, and the soft grey of the dissolving wood-work was in perfect harmony with every other detail of the composition; I used to dread to turn my back on the place, lest the parish should take a notion to smarten up while I was away, although I knew that the time was near when something would have to be done. They could only have put staring patches on their old garment, which would have made it hideous. It was so beautifully, mellowly "all of a piece" now, that I begged G., who rather hankered after painters and carpenters, to keep their hands off, if he loved me. "It will last our time," I said, as he drove the amateur nail, and I saw to it that old age did not mean dirt; and we made it do that—barely. The back of the house was level with the ground, but the front was in the air, so that its verandah was a balcony and you descended from it to the garden by a flight of twelve steps; before we left we had abandoned the front entrance because it had become impossible by our unaided efforts to keep those steps in place. Also the verandah floor in places was dangerous to walk upon; the constant watering of flower-pots and palm-tubs had rotted it through. And the ivy, cut into a hood round one of the drawing-room windows, rioted out of bounds. On the whole, I was glad to go when the time came—to our sunny, airy, far-too-public villa with the high ceilings and the electric bells, which will never suit me as well. We had grown too dilapidated to keep tidy, too picturesque for health.
After our time—and soon after—an opportune legacy to the parish was devoted to the work of restoration, and enabled the restorers to make what they called a good job of it. I saw the place the other day, and it is now almost like a common house. The ivy is all cleared away; so are some of the trees which, while I knew they were too many, I could not bear to have touched; the verandahs are sound and painted, the rooms light. My æsthetic soul grieved over some details of the change, but my hygienic conscience admitted that the whole change was a good one.
Many things were gone from the garden, which in our time had sheltered us from every prying eye. The thinning of the trees and bushes had left spaces bare but for pine-needles and cones, and exposed the house to the gaze of the passer-by. Great screens of laurel used to stand this way and that, and some had been taken down; a magnificent lemon-tree had disappeared—but I think that was our fault. We sunk a kerosene tin, with small holes in the bottom, in the earth beside it, and filled the cavity with water whenever we thought of it, so that moisture was always percolating to the roots; and the result of this treatment was such splendid growth that the tree doubled and trebled its size in two or three seasons. The fruit was enormous and weighed it down. I used to break off a branch bearing a cluster of half a dozen or more, and by the time I had carried it to a friend in the town my arm would feel as if I had been carrying a pail of milk; and I was ready to teach anybody the true art or lemon-growing. But after a few splendid years the tree suddenly got tired: I suppose it had worked itself out; and then it dwindled steadily, despite our care, and we left it ragged and sick. It must have died of that illness. Another lemon-tree, treated in the same way, lives still, in a sticky, threadbare fashion, but this bears a small, half-sweet fruit, whereas its neighbour was Lisbon of the finest quality. Evidently lemons do not object to that vigorous climate, where it snows in winter, for our doctor up there, whose recreation is fruit-farming, has a fine grove of young trees, the produce of which has already gained top prices in the market; but oranges will not climb so high. Within a few miles, however—at W——, near Home No. 1—they grow to perfection.
The two things in the parsonage garden which make it unique are there still—the avenue and the slabbed pathways. The avenue, from the front door to the front gate, is of some kind of pine that runs up in a straight mast to a great height and then branches like an umbrella; here it makes a roof to the descending aisle. And the aisle is paved with shallow steps of the silvery granite which is the very substance of the hills. No one step matches another; all are rough-hewn and of about the same width, but they are long or short, thick or thin, just as it happens, dropping down and down in a manner as informal as the architecture of Nature herself; and the same arrangement obtains where it has been necessary to make footholds round steep corners. Those original alley-and-stairways were an inspiration of the designer, who probably had no design but to face his tracks with something that the rain would not wash away; but how often has the amiable Philistine urged us to get the vestry to "make proper paths!" They will do it some day, and then I hope no reader of these pages, touring in the locality, will look for Home No. 7 in the expectation of finding it. But, all the same, that garden was a trap to the stranger on a dark night.
I remember on one occasion being awakened from my first sleep—my hours are early at both ends of the day—by terrifying bumpings and crashes amongst the thick bushes and down the treacherous paths. G. was at a meeting in the town; maid and lady-help had both followed the children to bed; it was nine o'clock or thereabouts, when any other house would have been still alive. My fears of burglars or stray cattle were dispelled by the voices of lost and floundering men calling to each other. Supposing the servant about, I left her to attend to them, but it was a long time before they brought up at the dining-room verandah. There she argued with them at length, and presently tapped at my door.
"It's two gentlemen from Melbourne, ma'am." Like Maria, she was most particular in giving me that title so rare in this country.
"Didn't you tell them Mr C. was out?" I called.