CHAPTER I
MRS. CUTHBERT MERRICK, erect in her shining dogcart, watched the stout pony’s indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance. The road was steep and the day hot.
Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness.
Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy of her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the hill-top was a grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and trees of an orderly dulness, that didn’t even make Constable effects, to look at, below there, about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes resolutely from the unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and a minute’s quick trot brought her to her destination.
Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the south-western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant summer woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the house, though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with contented serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the beech-woods, the rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon the other to the splendid line of the horizon.
So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the half-clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers about it. The independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs. Merrick thought, as she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house, too large for a cottage, too classic, with its pillared door-way and balanced proportions, for its diminutiveness. It made one think of a tiny Greek temple incongruously placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it symbolized an attitude that had always bewildered and irritated her. The garden, too, irritated her and made her envious. Even at this late summer season its beauty was abundant. Her well-trained gardener at Trensome Hall, with the two boys under him, produced no such effects with all his wide opportunities. Her garden was like an official report; this was like a poem. Mrs. Merrick did not use the simile; she merely felt, as before, irritating comparisons.
Flowers grew in long lines from the house to the garden wall, eddying into broad pools of colour. In the delicate green shadow of the limes were Canterbury-bells, frail bubbles, purple and white, making in the shade a soft radiance, as though they held light within them. Beds of white pansies, thickly growing, looked like cream poured upon the ground; near them nasturtiums, a disordered host, dashed waves of colour against the wall.
As Mrs. Merrick sat looking, with some visible sourness, at the garden, a girl, carrying a spade and a watering-pot came round the corner of the house. She was dressed in a white cotton dress and wore, over smooth but loosened hair, a flapping white hat. She gave one an impression of at once flower-like freshness and most human untidiness. The black ribbon at her neck was half untied, her hat was battered; her dress was askew and dabbled with water. Unabashed by these infelicities, she set down her burdens, drew off her heavy gloves, and advanced through the purple and white and flame; smiling indifferently.
Mrs. Merrick’s smile as she put out her hand was obviously decorative. She presented an amusing contrast to the graceful disarray that greeted her. Her thin dry face was flushed above a rigid collar; a sharply tonged fringe and a netted miracle of twists and convolutions seemed appendages of the sailor hat—tilted forward and fastened to her head by a broad elastic band, a spotted veil and two accurate pins. She could but sit erect; her meagre body in its tightly buttoned bodice, was box-like. Her figure was her chief vanity; its “neatness” her aim, and the word with her signified a careful, unrelaxing compression.
“Gardening, Felicia?” she asked, glancing down at her niece’s earth-dogged shoes.