And, looking before her, seeming not to follow their definitions, she answered coldly:
“I think Antonia describes it very beautifully.”
After lunch Antonia said that Miss Latimer must show them the garden. He saw that she intended to keep this companion near them and would not, for the present, be alone with him.
In the flagged hall, wide and light, there were oaken chests and tables and large framed engravings of cathedrals. Antonia selected a sunshade from the stand. None were black; they were all pre-war sunshades, and the one she found made her lovely head, when they went out into the sunlight, seem still paler and darker against its faded poppy-red.
She led them first into the little walled garden of her fears. One stepped out into it from a door in the hall, and, wondering if she had put a wholesome compulsion upon herself, he expressed an indirect approval of her good sense by pausing to look about him and to say, “How delightfully planned this is.”
He had never seen so many white fritillaries growing together; their jade green and alabaster white, rising from narrow beds among the flags, seemed like another expression of the stone. The fountain was musical, and the stone bench under the great cedar invited to poetical reverie. “That cedar is the oldest thing here, isn’t it?” he asked.
Antonia stood, gently turning the handle of the sunshade on her shoulder, and she, too, looked about her, her eyes meeting his for a moment as if, with a grateful humour, acknowledging his approbation. “I’m not quite as foolish as you may think,” they told him.
“It’s the only old thing in the place,” she said--“except for the bits of ruin in the garden walls. There was a border castle here, long ago, and the cedar must have belonged to its later days. I’m glad it’s all so new, aren’t you? I don’t like old places. Not to live in.”
It was, perhaps, only as looked down at from the third window that the flagged garden had its uncanniness for her. She seemed quite content to stand there in the sunlight and admire it with him. Any distaste or reluctance was Miss Latimer’s, and he did not know why it was that he divined it beneath her air of detachment. It was she who, presently, moved away, passing out into the high-walled kitchen garden, and they followed her.
There were cordon fruit-trees round the vegetable-beds, and daffodils, at one end, grew thickly against the walls. Wide, herbaceous borders ran on either side of the central path, showing already their clumps and bosses of green and bronze.