An Englishwoman's Home

by Annie S. Swan

Now perhaps you will understand, Cornelia,—the home we all loved together—though often belittling it in the grumpy Scotch way—is dead. It will never be ours any more. Its roof can never shelter those we love, nor its walls echo the happy laughter which doeth good like a medicine. I see the bewilderment gathering in your quizzical eyes, and you wonder what it is all about, and whether I have taken leave of the small modicum of sense Himself and you allotted to me the last time we discussed the question together.

The truth is, I am afraid to begin. I do not know how to tell it. The world is full of words—but there do not seem to be any to fit this case. But I must try. I have been sitting ever so long, looking out to the sea, which is no longer a pathway to the sun, but a menacing grey highway across which awful shapes may at any moment race to destroy our peace, and fill us with terror and dismay. To the left, as I turn my eyes, through the window I see the gleaming nozzle of one of the big guns, with the gunners ready beside it. They are there night and day. So even our summer home is in the grip of the war monster from which there is no escape. It is the 16th of October and the skies are very grey, the air heavy with a strange chill, the sea mists are creeping up—and the moan of the breakers against the rocks seems to presage some coming doom.

It was very lovely in Hertfordshire in October—its early weeks gave us a taste of the most beautiful Indian summer I have ever seen. Our chestnut trees were never more glorious, nor more vividly clad. Flame was the keynote of the colour scheme, and it lingered—wonderfully blent with all the undertones of departing summer, till the picture our garden presented was so entrancing, I could not attend to my ordinary tasks, grudging every moment spent away from it. We were clearing the herbaceous borders—and planning a new scheme for enhancing the beauty of the lily pond. I had long serious discussions with the gardener, an understanding creature, about economy in bulbs. The true garden-lover would do without clothes, rather than raiment for her garden; but we had to patriotically compromise, and, with a little ingenuity and extra planning, saw a very promising vista for the spring. You have noticed, indeed, it was, I think, more than once the subject of our talk, that the last summer of a person's life is often the most beautiful. It was so with our boy.

Do you remember how I told you that when our little fishing expedition at Amulree came to an end in 1910, and the children were so loth to leave the old inn and the everlasting hills, I said to him, "Never mind, son, next summer when Dad and I go to America to visit Uncle George and Aunt Cornelia, you and Effie will come here all by yourselves, or with Aunt Jack, and have it all over again."

He turned his big quiet grey eyes on mine and said very simply, "These things don't happen, Mummy." He was very young when he learned that lesson. It all came true, not in my sense, but in his.

Before the next summer came, his dear beautiful body was laid on the cliff side at the Kingdom by the Sea and his soul had stolen "away" to his appointed place in his Father's House.

That was the most beautiful summer in our lives—not in his only, but in our whole family life, of a richness and nearness and dearness, to describe which, there are no words.

Well, and this the last summer of our garden's life, in so far as it concerned us, was the most beautiful we have ever known, in a circle of many summers, all beautiful.

Never had there been such wealth of bloom. The roses! They simply flung themselves in regal magnificence at our feet. The more you cut and gave away the more persistently they insisted upon coming on; not in single spies, but in battalions.

The old walled vegetable garden which you so loved, being invariably found, when missing, between its box hedges, surpassed itself. We could not use the stuff. Our Belgian household over the way, of whose doing and being I as chairman of the Belgian Guest committee have written you so much, had access to the garden to help themselves. It is a royal memory we have; but only a memory. Sometimes it seems as if soon, all life would be only a memory.