"Ah yes, a little variety."
But in the evening the taste of hot tin that represented Miss Peasey's curry made him for ever afterwards leave the variety to her own fancy, thereby preserving henceforth that immutable alternation of roast beef and roast mutton which was the horizon of her housekeeping.
These solitary meals were lightened by the thought of the Rectory. Neither beef nor mutton seemed of much importance when his mind's eye could hold that shadowy drawing-room. There was Monica with her pale-gold hair in the stormy sunlight, cold and shy, but of such a marble purity of line that but to sit beside her was to admire a statue whose coldness made her the more admirable. There was Margaret, carved slimly out of ivory, very tall, with weight of dusky hair, and slow, fastidious voice that spoke dreamily of the things Guy loved best. There was Pauline sitting away from the others in the window-seat, away in her shyness and wildness. Was not the magic of her almost more difficult to recapture than any? A brier rose she was whose petals seemed to fall at the touch of definition, a brier rose that was waving out of reach, even of thought. Guy wished he could visualize the Rector in his own drawing-room; but instead he had to set him in Plashers Mead, of which no doubt he had thought the owner a young ass; and Guy blushed to remember the nervous idiocy which had let him take the Rector solemnly into the kitchen to look at dish-covers in a row, and deaf Miss Peasey sitting by as much fire as the table would yield to her chair. But if the Rector were missing from the picture, at any rate he could picture Mrs. Grey, shy like her daughters and with a delicious vagueness all her own. She was most like Pauline, and indeed in Pauline Guy could see her mother, as the young moon holds in her lap the wraith of the old moon....
"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 paneling and faintly aromatic sweetness. Instead remained a rice pudding that smelled 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.