"Why, you haven't eaten anything," remonstrated Miss Peasey, breaking in upon his vision. "And I've made you a rice pudding for a little variety."
The shadowy drawing-room faded with the old chintz curtains and fragile almost immaterial silver; the china bowls of Lowestoft; the dull white panelling and faintly aromatic sweetness. Instead remained a rice pudding that smelt and looked as solid as a pie.
However, that very afternoon Guy was greatly encouraged to get an invitation to dinner at the Rectory from the hands of the gardener. Birdwood was one of those servants who seem to have accepted with the obligations of service the extreme responsibilities of paternity; and Guy hastened to take advantage of the chance to establish himself on good terms with one who might prove a most powerful ally.
"Not much of a garden, I'm afraid," he said deprecatingly to Birdwood, as they stood in colloquy outside. The gardener shook his head.
"It wouldn't do for the Rector to see them cabbages and winter greens. 'I won't have the nasty things in my garden,' he says to me, and he'll rush at them regular ferocious with a fork. 'I won't have them,' he says. 'I can't abear the sight of them,' he says. Well, of course I knows better than go for to contradict him when he gets a downer on any plant, don't matter whether it's cabbage or calceolaria. But last time, when he'd done with his massacring of them, I popped round to Mrs. Grey, and I says, winking at her very hard, but of course not meaning any disrespectfulness, winking at her very hard, I says, 'Please, mum, I want one of these new allotments from the glebe.' 'Good Heavings, Birdwood,' she says, 'whatever on earth can you want with for an allotment?' With that I winks very hard again and says in a low voice right into her ear as you might say, 'To keep the wolf from the door, mum, with a few winter greens.' That's the way we grow our vegetables for the Rectory, out of an allotment, though we have got five acres of garden. Now you see what comes of being a connosher. You take my advice, Mr. Hazlenut, and clear all them cabbages out of sight before the Rector comes round here again."
"I will certainly," Guy promised. "But you know it's a bit difficult for me to spend much money on flowers."
"We don't spend money over at the Rectory," said Birdwood, smiling in a superior way.
"No?"
"We don't spend a penny. We has every mortal plant and seed and cutting given to us. And not only that, but we gives in our turn. Look here, Mr. Hazlenut, I'm going to hand you out a bit of advice. The first time as you go round our garden with the Rector, when you turn into the second wall-garden, and see a border on your right, you catch hold of his arm and say, 'Why, good Heavings, if that isn't a new berberis."
"Yes, but I don't know what an old berberis looks like," said Guy hopelessly. "Let alone a new one."