The next day saw us landed at a small wayside station in the rich flat land of Meath, where we were met by a charming old-fashioned “turn out,” a handsome waggonette and a sturdy pair of carriage horses. At least we thought the waggonette old-fashioned and delightful, in these motor times; but it seems it was on the contrary new and wonderful.
The coachman surveyed us tentatively two or three times while our divers small goods were being collected, magisterially directing the footman with the butt end of his whip. Presently he broke into speech:
“Will you be noticing the carriage, sir?” he remarked, addressing the head of the party. “Her Ladyship’s just bought it. I chose it for her meself, so I did. It’s a grand contrivance. You can have it the way it is now, and it’s real comfortable, isn’t it, sir? But sure, you can turn it into an omnibus. And you’d never believe now, how many it would hold. I drove six ladies to a ball in it the other night, and not one of them crushed on me—And fine large ladies they were,” he observed admiringly.
“We do wish he would not tell every one that,” observed one of the “large ladies” a little later. “Every time he’s gone to the station in the new waggonette this summer he’s told that story.”
But she was quite good-humoured and amused. Indeed, her largeness was of the beautiful order. It was no wonder the coachman was proud of conveying it uncrushed.
The gardens where these hostesses dwelt were pleasantly green and flowery. There was the usual high-walled garden. Villino Loki, with its absurd terraces, can never dream of attaining to such an enclosure of antique charm. For if we walled in the Kitchen and Reserve Garden at the foot of our hill we should wall out the moor from below, and obstruct our sweeping vision from above. But my heart yearns to an old walled garden. A place quite apart, with its mingled odours of herb and flower and ripening fruit; with its perpetual murmur of bees, its tangled walks, its old bushes of Rosemary and Lavender, its mossy Apple-trees, its crisp Parsley beds, its tumble-down greenhouses.
CURBED AMBITIONS
This particular walled garden was a very good specimen of its kind. It was here that our ignorance first made acquaintance with the invaluable Cosmia; that treasure of the herbaceous border that keeps on blooming in the face of adversity from June till November. There was also a huge bed of Salvias, one sheet of gentian blue. ‹Why cannot we grow Salvias like that?› It ran at the foot of an overgrown, very old rose plot, the trees of which had developed into fairy-tale luxuriance. And opposite, across the gravelled path, which from old associations we prefer to any other species of walk, was a field of Snap-dragon against the high wall where the leaves of the plum branches were reddening as they clung. Duly mossed was this old wall, and richly lichened; overtopped by the great trees without. These swayed to the mild Irish wind, with long, pleasant, choiring sounds, the rooks cawing as they circled in them. It was small wonder that I should have felt content and at peace as I stood there—if only my heart had not swelled with envy over those Salvias! But one can’t be the owner of an Italian Villino on a Surrey Highland and encompass the antique peace of a centuries-old Irish home. One must be reasonable—as a French governess of our youth used to say to us when she began her most lengthy harangues. “Voyons—de deux choses l’une ...”
The park was typically Irish, and possessed some wonderful trees. Amongst others a chestnut, four or five immense branches of which, sweeping to the ground, had taken root again and started fresh trees, forming a singular tropical-looking grove. How children would have delighted in such a leafy palace, roofed in and pillared of its own stateliness!