Lamia's Winter-Quarters

by Alfred Austin

But Veronica had no monopoly of success in the swift adornment of our new wing. I, too, had a little triumph of my own, but, I need scarcely say, out-of-doors. I do not often sing my own praises, do I, preferring to extol the Poet and Veronica, who are more deserving of eulogy. But, on this occasion, I think I really did deserve the congratulations that were lavished on me. For, with a truly foreseeing mind, I had been growing on, to use a gardener’s phrase, a certain number of climbing roses, clematis, jessamine, and other creepers, and had given the strictest injunctions that they were to be planted against the new building the very instant the masons had finished it, and were to be fostered and trained with constant and unremitting attention; and, as they were then already robust in growth and vigorous at the root, they were well on their way up the new wing on our arrival. A legend has since grown up that I did not leave England at all, but remained on the spot with barrow, trug, and trowel, and that, fast as the work-people laid a course of stone or brick, I planted a creeper. But, as a fact, it happened as I have said.

As for the garden, the garden that the too kindly sympathy of others permits one to say we all love, I can only say I wish the whole of Italy could have seen it. The Tea Roses, more numerous and more beautiful than ever, seemed smilingly to say, ‘Has Tuscany roses to show more fair?’ Larkspurs, of every imaginable shade of blue, from azure to cerulean; lupines, white, purple, and yellow; foxgloves, snowy-white and without a freckle; seemed to challenge each other as to which would tower highest in the summer air. The Pæony Poppies, some purposely some accidentally sown, were a garden in themselves, fair but fugitive, yet making up by their number and infinite variety for the briefness of their existence. They were everywhere in the beds and borders, and, as it seemed, where they had chosen to be; there, by the right of supreme loveliness, and the Swan-neck Poppies, the Caucasian, and the Victoria Cross, rocked more humbly beside them. No other plant of such supreme beauty has so solid a stem and such imposing foliage for so fragile a flower; and this it is, I think, which mainly constitutes its fresh charm. Every one now loves flowers, and I have no need to weary you with a catalogue of those in the Garden that I Love. But I doubt if there be any perennial plant of real beauty and value that will grow in our latitude which is not to be found there; and I can say with truth, of every bed and border, that you could not see the ground for flowers. As for the winding turf walk, which perhaps you remember as the South Enclosure, it is not I who will say what it looked like when we returned. For one who has justly acquired honour, not only by the beauty of her own home, but by her charming pages concerning all that appertains to a garden, and who had visited it the day before our arrival, left a little line for Veronica, in which she generously said it was the loveliest she had ever seen. I should hesitate to repeat so flattering an opinion, were it not for some injustice to myself that followed. ‘As for the winding turf walk and its glow of bloom and colour on either side,’ said the kindly writer, ‘nowhere, I am sure, is there anything like it; and only the Poet could have conceived it.’ As if it was the Poet who had conceived it! It was I who,—but so it is in this unfair world, where everybody bows down before prestige. Lamia herself could not have been more partial or more unjust.

LARKSPURS

I made some observation of the kind to Veronica, imagining we were alone, and got for reply,—

‘My dear, you will never understand women.’

‘How is it possible,’ I asked, a little nettled by the implied rebuke, ‘when no two women are alike?’

‘No one woman is alike,’ said Lamia, suddenly emerging from a luxuriance of leaf and flower that had concealed her from view; and, though Veronica was there to disprove the universal application of her aphorism, I think she spoke from the very depths of her own inner consciousness.

Not even the novelty of the fresh wing, though we kept returning to it again and again in the course of that to us memorable evening, could keep us indoors. Lilac, hawthorn, and laburnum had of course flowered and faded, and the glory of the rhododendrons was fast passing away. But the air was fragrant with the newly-made but yet uncarted hay; the scent of the elder was wafted from the lane; the smell of sweet-briar, with its profusion of little pink rosebuds, was everywhere in the garden; and we kept stopping ever and again to inhale the penetrating perfume of the freshly-opened tassels of the lime. Longer and darker grew the shadows on the lawn, then gradually drew themselves in, and vanished. The Tea Roses, no longer languid from the heat of the long summer day, lifted their fair faces freshened with evening dew; the streaks of crimson that point the pathway of departed days gradually faded from the west, and the lingering love-song of the missel-thrush at length came to end, absorbed into the general silence. It was twilight still, but a twilight slowly succumbing to the Midsummer night, if night it could be called to which the darkness never wholly came. Elsewhere, on shrub and sward the deepening dusk brought its beneficent tribute of abounding moisture; but, under the manifold foliage of the Oak, the ground retained the dryness of noon. Under its protecting canopy therefore, as many a time before, satisfied and silent we sate; till Lamia, moved by the influence of the hour, once again liberated her fresh young voice, and wedded to notes of almost austere simplicity the no less simple measure of this Vesper Hymn.