CHAPTER XIII
A LETTER
George Grafton got up one morning in August at six o'clock, as was his now almost invariable custom, and went to the window. The rain, which had begun on the evening before, was coming down steadily. It looked as if it had rained all night and would continue to rain all day. Pools had already collected in depressions of the road, the slightly sunken lawn under his window was like a marsh, and the trees dripped heavily and dismally.
He was greatly disappointed. For nearly a month now he had been hard at work on the rock-garden and the stream that had been led into it. It had been a fascinating occupation, planning and contriving and doing the work himself with no professional guidance, and only occasional extra labour to lift or move very heavy stones. He had worked at it nearly every morning before breakfast, with Caroline and Barbara, Bunting, and Beatrix when she had been at home, and Maurice Bradby, Worthing's pupil, as an ardent and constant helper both with brain and with hands. They had all enjoyed it immensely. Those early hours had been the best in the day. The hard work had made him as fit as he had ever been in his life, and he felt like a young man again.
As he stood at the window, Bradby came splashing up the road in mackintosh and heavy boots. He was as keen as the rest, and generally first in the field.
"Hallo!" Grafton called out to him. "I'm afraid there's nothing doing this morning. I don't mind getting a little wet, but this is a bit too much."
Bradby looked round him at the leaden sky, which showed no signs of a break anywhere. "Perhaps it will clear up," he said. "I didn't suppose you'd be out, but I thought I might as well come up. I want to see what happens with the pipes, and where the water gets to with heavy rain."
"Well, you go up and have a look, my boy," said Grafton, "and if you're not drowned beforehand come to breakfast. We might be able to get out afterwards. I'm going back to bed now."
He went back to bed and dozed intermittently until his servant came in to call him. The idle thoughts that filled his brain, waking and half-sleeping, were concerned with the rock-garden, with the roses he and Caroline had planted, with other plantings of flowers and shrubs, and the satisfaction that he had already gained or expected to gain from them. The garden came first. In the summer it provided the chief interest of the country, and the pleasure it had brought was at least as great as that to be gained from the sports of autumn and winter. But it was not only the garden as giving these pleasures of contrivance, expectation and satisfaction, that coloured his thoughts as he lay drowsily letting them wander over the aspects of the life he was so much enjoying. It was the great playground, in these rich summer months, when he had usually shunned the English country as lying in its state of quiescence, and affording none of the distractions to be found elsewhere. Lawn tennis and other garden games, with the feeling of fitness they induced, the companionship they brought in the long afternoons when people came to play and talk and enjoy themselves, and the consequent heightening of the physical satisfaction of meals, cool drinks, baths, changing of clothes; the lazy hours in the heat of the day, with a book, or family chat in the shade of a tree, with the bees droning among the flowers in the soaking sunshine, and few other sounds to disturb the peace and the security; the intermittent wanderings to look at this or that which had been looked at a score of times before, but was always worth looking at again—those garden hours impressed themselves upon the memory, sliding into one another, until the times of rain and storm were forgotten, and life seemed to be lived in the garden, in the yellow sunshine or the cool green shade.
The influence of the garden extended itself to the house in these summer days. This room in which he was lying—it was a joy to wake up in it in the morning—to be awakened by the sun pouring in beams of welcome and invitation; it was a satisfaction to lie down in it at night, flooded with the fragrant air that had picked up sweetness and freshness from the trees and the grass. The stone hall was cool and gratefully dim, when one came in out of the heat and glare of the hottest hours of the day. The long low library between the sunk lawn and the cloister court, whose calf-bound treasures, which he never looked into, gave it a mellow retired air, was a pleasant room in which to write the few letters that had to be written or do the small amount of business that had to be done; or, when there were men in the house, to give them their refreshments or their tobacco in. The long gallery was a still pleasanter room, facing the setting sun and the garden and the trees, with a glimpse of the park, and nothing to be seen from its deep-recessed windows but those surrounding cultivated spaces. All the rooms of the house were pleasant rooms, and pervaded with that sense of retired and gracious beauty which came from their outlook, into garden or park or ancient court.