Vera had thrown open Compton Dally to wounded Tommies and wounded officers, and the Thorntons came in that way. He’d only been back from the Boulogne hospital for a week, was badly crippled, and had a very gallant record. Most of Vera’s officers before this had been colonials who had no homes to go to. The Thorntons weren’t colonials, but they had no home and were very poor, so that the arrangement for them to spend six weeks or two months at Compton Dally while Captain Thornton got back his strength—as far as he was able to get it back, poor man!—seemed an admirable one.
They came on a hot June afternoon both very tired, while we were all having tea on the west terrace. The Tommies—there were over a dozen of them, with two Red Cross nurses to take care of them—had their tea in the billiard-room, which is made over to them for their games and meals and almost constant gramophone, and the accurate laughter of Harry Lauder is wafted out to us on various music-hall strains at most hours of the day. He was laughing loudly and richly as the Thorntons arrived. After tea Vera led them about the garden. Vera’s garden is merely a part of her toilette, and plays almost as important a part as her clothes in her general introduction of herself; and that she intended to introduce herself gracefully to Captain Thornton was evident; and that I was to pilot Mrs. Thornton, I had known after Vera’s glance at her imitation Panama hat, her blue linen skirt, of an obsolete cut and a bad one at that, and her white blouse, shrunken in washing. Vera placed her swiftly as dull and dowdy, and it was my part, always, to pilot the dowdy and the dull.
I don’t mind that, however; even now, after three years of it, I always enjoy going over Compton Dally and the gardens with newcomers. It’s such a beautiful old place, so grave and so serene, its splendid Tudor front lifted high on stone terraces, and its courts and corners behind breaking out into all sorts of unexpected and enchanting antiquities. It symbolizes, if you begin with the Saxon arches in the cellars, the whole history of England, and means so much more than any person who has ever lived there, or who ever will live there, can ever mean. It’s worth the sacrifice of generations of younger sons and myriads of marriageable daughters. What could they all do better than to keep it going? I always recalled this when I wondered how Vera could have married Percival Dixon, and felt almost as much satisfaction as she could feel in the fact that two robust little boys, still at their preparatory school, stood reassuringly behind her and Percival; the elder, too, a thorough Compton, with hardly a trail of Dixon apparent on his ingenuous young countenance. I have the whole history of Compton Dally at the tips of my fingers, and if people give me an opening and show that they care about it, I can talk to them for hours as I take them round, feeling, for my little part and share in it, that, even if Vera weren’t as decent as she is, I should put up with a great deal to stay in it and take care of it.
We didn’t go about the house to-day. The Thorntons saw the big herbaceous border and the rose-garden, the rock-garden, tinkling with its little rivulet, the moat, and the lime-tree alley; and then Vera, trailing her gossamer draperies along the flagged path between the cypresses,—for Vera, even at this epoch of shortened petticoats, manages always to trail,—murmured, as I’ve heard her murmur, when she’s at Compton Dally, at least once a week, “And this is my dream-garden, where I come and sit alone and dream dreams.”
She led Captain Thornton down among the cypress boughs. He had a splinted leg and an unaccustomed crutch, and found the steps a difficulty; but Vera put a hand under his elbow and let him lean heavily on her shoulder, and he reached the dream-garden without, I hope, too many twinges.
It is really very lovely. I don’t like hearing it called a dream-garden, naturally; but I do feel always, when I come into it, that it is like sinking into the stillness and magic of a happy dream. The gypsophila wasn’t out yet, but it made a mist, like drowsiness; white peonies, grey santolina, white roses and silver sea-thistle, the dreamy spires of white foxgloves, low, purple pansies, and tall irises, white and grey and purple—these, in their twilight colours, were massed against the grey stone walls, and there were four bay-trees in stone urns at the corners. The beautiful old stone seat (I found it in Brompton Road, but it might have been made for Compton Dally three hundred years ago in Italy) was heaped with grey and purple cushions. In the centre rose the fluent shaft of the fountain, falling, with a musical rustle and murmur into the stone basin where pale goldfish move among the water-lilies.
We sat down, and Vera went on to say, as always:
“The other gardens are for friends. I plan them for them. I see them there. This is for loneliness, for my very self; and to me it is the heart of the whole, as solitude should be the heart of life.”
Vera, as a matter of fact (you see, the phrase recurs constantly), is never alone. If she is wan and strange and wistful, it isn’t from dreaming dreams, but from not having enough sleep and doing five times too many things and seeing five times too many people in the day. Vera, too, I may say it here, isn’t in the least an ass, though she may, on occasions she finds suitable, talk like one. Occasions are often suitable, so that, as I once told her, she’s in danger of making a habit of it. She looked at me, when I told her this, with the pausing, penetrating, ironic gaze she is so capable of, and finally, with a slight grimace, said, “I’ll be careful, Judith.”
I have moments of feeling fond of her and this was one of them. She is careful; I’ve very rarely heard her talk like an ass when the occasion was unsuitable; but so many people are stupid that these are rare, and I foresee that, as she gets on and sinks by degrees into the automatism that overtakes so many artificial people, it may become a habit, just as the touch of rouge on her pale lips is already becoming more emphasized.