Mrs. Pomfrey was the late rector’s widow, and lived in a thicket of roses half a mile away in the village. She was tall, black-robed, majestic, and melancholy, with a deep voice and black eyes and a high, hooked nose and large false teeth that shifted slightly and slightly clashed together when she spoke. She had survived all emotions except the grief of having to grow her roses on a clayless soil, and to this grief she often returned. A girlhood friend of Aubrey Westmacott’s mother, she had been his link with Windbury. His week-ends with her there had been the very comets of his dark London sky, and for years he had seen Meadows inadequately tenanted, with an eye of brooding love.
“Oh! they’ll revert to purple, then,” he said, somewhat distressed; and he repeated “purple, purple,” several times, as if to familiarize himself with the sound and very sight of it, while Mrs. Pomfrey answered him, “Give 'em time and they’ll all revert. You must dig 'em up and sow again from year to year if you want to keep 'em pure.”
“Not that I don’t care very much for the purple ones,” said Aubrey; “they are most beautiful flowers, most beautiful; but it’s wild in woods, that I like best to see them. It will be a business to replant; dear me! It took me a day of hard work to establish my white ones in that haphazard-looking little colony down there.”
“Gardening is all hard work,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, “and all disappointment, for the most part, too. It’s only the things you didn’t expect to succeed that ever do, and any effect you particularly count on is pretty sure to fail you.” She tempered her grimness by a slight, bleak smile, however, for she and Aubrey Westmacott understood each other and had the gardener’s soul, for which no work is too hard and no disappointments too many.
“It will be very wonderful to have the intervals of pink to look forward to, though,” Aubrey found the atonement. “They are singularly lovely, aren’t they? Will you think me very silly, now, I wonder, or sillier than you always think me?”
“I don’t think you silly, my dear Aubrey,” Mrs. Pomfrey interposed, “only guileless; you are very guileless; I’ve thought that ever since you were taken in by that dreadful cook of yours, who had red hair, and got drunk and rubbed the whitebait through a sieve.”
“Well,” Aubrey continued, smiling his gentle, tentative smile, “my foxgloves, at all events, can’t take me in, and since they are so very unusual and so lovely I thought I’d ask a few people in to-day to see them. The Carews, you know, and Barton, and Mrs. and Miss Pickering. And you—if you can come. I’ll put it off till to-morrow, if that will secure you, only the foxgloves may not be quite so lovely by then.”
“I will come with pleasure, my dear Aubrey,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, “and though nobody will appreciate your foxgloves as you do, we shall all enjoy your tea.”
“Miss Pickering cares very much for flowers, you know, very much. We’ve talked a great deal about flowers,” said Aubrey, swinging his eyeglass and nodding as he looked at his old friend.
“Does she? She doesn’t know much about 'em though.”