To-night, from the habit of it, his mind braced itself as he came into the room, and he was aware, as he had been for nearly a year now, that Ronnie’s face was waiting, as it were, on the outskirts of consciousness, to seize upon him. But, after he had lighted the candles on his dressing-table and the candles on the mantelpiece, taken off his coat, and started undressing, he found that his thoughts, quite effortlessly, were engaged with his new surroundings, old Mr. Haseltine’s beard and eyeglasses occupying them, and the clucking noise he made in drinking the glass of hot ginger and water that had been brought to them on a tray while they played; Mrs. Baldwin’s accounts, her fowls, and the colour of her eyes. He decided that the colour was Wedgwood, or perhaps periwinkle blue—some very dense, quiet colour.
As he moved about the room, this protective interest came to him from the little objects he made acquaintance with: the round Venetian box, dim gilt and blue and red, on the chest of drawers in which he found a handful of tiny shells—shells, no doubt, that Mrs. Baldwin had picked up during a seaside outing; the faded old blue leather blotter on the writing-table, marked E. H., which had probably been hers since maiden days (and did E stand for Ethel or Edith or Ellen?); the pretty lettering in fine black script of the writing-paper so pleasantly stacked; the dear old Dutch coffee-pot and jug on the mantelpiece, and the bowl of mignonette that she, of course, had arranged. He sank his face into its fragrance, and peace seemed breathed upon him from the flowers.
He was wondering, as he got into bed, with a glance, before he blew out the candle, at the birds and branches, the whites and blacks and roses of the voile-de-Gènes, whether he would find the autumn crocuses open in the meadows next morning; it had looked like the evening of another fine day. Then, the candle out, his thoughts, for a little while, were tangled in the magical dreamland of the voile-de-Gènes, and the breath of the mignonette seemed to lie upon his eyelids with a soft compulsion to peace, until, all thought sliding suddenly away, he dropped into delicious slumber.
III
HT found the crocuses open, before breakfast. Only Cathy was in the living-room, sweeping, when he crossed it, though he thought he heard Mrs. Baldwin in the kitchen. A robin was singing on a spray over the summer-house. The sky arched pale and high; and though there was no mist in the air, its softness made him think of milk.
From the garden he passed into the meadows, and, almost at once, saw, everywhere, the fragile, purple flowers about him, if purple were not too rich a word for their clear, cold tint. Lower down, near the stream, they made him think of the silver bobbins set playing by great rain drops when they fall heavily upon wide, shallow pools of water; and they seemed to grow even more thickly in the farther meadow beyond the wooden bridge. A sense of bliss was upon him as he walked among the flowers. He had never seen anything more lovely, and all but the darker buds were open, showing pale golden hearts to the sun.
Yet, by the time that he had crossed the bridge, leaning on the high rail to look down into the limpid, sliding water, he knew that it could never stay at that or mean that for him. He had seen fields of flowers in France, and, while the horrors there had been enacted, these fields of crocuses, year after year, had bloomed. What they meant for his mind was the unbridged chasm between nature and the sufferings of man. Only when one ceased to be a man, ceased to remember and to think, could such a day, such sights, bring the unreasoning joy.
Walking back, he saw, as he approached the house, that Mrs. Baldwin was standing at the garden-gate, and, bare-headed, in the linen dress of pale lavender, she made him at once think of the crocuses, or they of her. Their gentleness was like her, their simplicity, and something, too,—for he felt this in her,—of unearthliness. More perhaps, than any other flower they seemed to belong to the air rather than to the ground, and, with their faint, pale stalks, their fragile petals unconfined by leaf or calyx, to be rising like emanations from the sod and ready to dissolve in mist into the sunlight.
“You’ve had a little walk?” Mrs. Baldwin asked him as they met.
He said he had been looking at the crocuses. “Are they really crocuses?” he questioned. “I’ve never seen them wild before.”