“Isn’t it a marvel!” said Florrie. “I hardly dared hope they’d grow as they have, but Dorothy Perkins is a winner, and these latest climbers run her close. I spared nothing, my dear, nothing—manure, bone-meal, labour. The men were working here for a week last autumn. All the old soil was carted away and a rich loam put in three feet deep. I put them in big. I knew I could get them to take if I took enough pains over it. Those chains will be covered in another month. I knew it would do you more good than any open-air cure to find such a garden waiting for you. I’d defy anybody to have the blues in this garden! In its little way it’s just an epitome of joy, isn’t it? It’s done me good, to begin with! I’ve been having tea out here every day in my week-ends and every one who’s seen it and heard about my plan says I’m a regular old fairy with a wand. Mrs. Isaacson motored down only last Saturday and thought it was a perfect poem. And so it is, though I say it as shouldn’t.”
Florrie had paused on the deepest breath of purest satisfaction, and the time had come when Miss Glover must speak. She must find words to express gratitude and astonishment. She must not burst into tears. She felt that if she began to cry she would at once be very ill. She did not want to be taken ill before dear, good, kind Florrie. And it was, of course, a beautiful garden; far more beautiful than hers had ever been, no doubt; yet it hurt her so—to find her garden gone—that she heard her voice come in gasps as she said, “Dear Florrie—you are a wonderful friend—you are indeed.—I can never thank you enough. It’s a miracle.”
Florrie patted her shoulder—she had her arm around her shoulders. “My best thanks will be to see you happy in it, Edie dear, and getting well and strong again in it. It’s a regular surprise-packet, this garden, let me tell you, my dear. It’ll go on, that border, right up till November, one thing after another: I thought it all out, pencil and paper and catalogue in hand. I went over the whole colour-scheme with Mrs. Isaacson—there’s no one who knows more about it. And since most of the herbaceous things came from her garden, it didn’t cost as much as you’d think. They’ve always heaps of plants left over when they divide in autumn, and everything was at my disposal; and all the latest varieties, as I needn’t say. Wait till you see the lilies—yes, my dear, I’ve found room for everything; where there’s a will there’s a way is my motto, you know—and the phloxes and the chrysanthemums.”
She would never see them, though she was sure that they would all be very beautiful; she would never see these latest varieties from Mrs. Isaacson’s garden. And she would never see her own little garden again. How wonderfully fortunate it was—the thought went through her mind confusedly as she sat there, feeling herself droop against Florrie’s shoulder—that she was not to live with Florrie’s and to go on missing her own garden. How fortunate—but her thoughts swam more and more and tears dazed her eyes—that she had not to say good-bye twice to her pansies. She had died, then, really,—that was it,—on the moonlight night when she had last seen them. And she had left the house to Florrie, dear kind Florrie, and Florrie would go on having tea happily under the festoons of roses.
PINK FOXGLOVES
HEY were only beginning to revert. Last summer they had stood, spires of fretted snow tapering at the points to jade-coloured buds, at the edge of the little copse where the garden path lost itself among young larches, birches, hazels, and poplars, black and white. The sun set behind the copse, spreading in the summer evenings a pale gold background, and often when he went to look at his foxgloves and to listen to the lonely song of the willow-wren, rippling, like a tiny rill of water, from the heart of the wood, Aubrey Westmacott had felt that there was something almost dangerous in such bliss as this. To breathe this limpid air, to hear the willow-wren, to look at white foxgloves, and to know himself free forever from the long oppression of London—if he could have sung his wistful gratitude, his melancholy joy, the song might have been like the bird’s.