Her other two children, Ruddy and Madge, didn’t interest her particularly. Ruddy was redheaded and always pulling things to pieces to see how they worked. Madge was twenty, a cross girl who loved animals and pretended to hate men.
When at the end of two months the portrait came back from the gallery, a dispute arose which brought home to Teddy the way in which Vashti was regarded. She had written none of the promised letters, so Jimmie Boy didn’t know her address. He might have asked Mrs. Sheerug, but the matter was too delicate. He made up his mind to hang the picture in his house and had set about doing so, when Dearie put her foot down.
“I won’t have it.”
“But it’s my best work. What’s got into your head, Dearie, to make you so prudish? You might as well object to all Romney’s Lady Hamiltons because she——”
“Lady Hamilton’s dead. Romney wasn’t my husband, and Nelson’s mother wasn’t my friend.”
Dearie was obstinate and so, as though it were something shameful, Vashti’s portrait was carried down to the stable. There, among the dust and cobwebs, with its face to the wall like a naughty child, The Garden Enclosed was forbidden the sunlight. Only Teddy gave it a respite from its penance when, having made certain that he was unobserved, he lifted it out to gaze at it. But because she never wrote to him, he went to gaze at it less and less. Little by little she became a beautiful and doubtful memory. He learnt to smile at his wistful faery story, as only a child can smile at his former childishness.
New interests sprang up to claim his attention; the chief of these was a gift from Mr. Sheerug of a pair of pigeons. In giving them to him he explained to Teddy, “My friend, Mr. Ooze—he’s a rum customer—drops his aitches and was born in a hansom cab, but he knows more about pigeons than any man in London. Trains mine for me—goes out into the country and throws ’em up. That’s where he’s gone now. When he lost his precious Henrietta he nearly went off his head. His hobby saved him. A hobby’s a kind of life-preserver—it keeps you afloat when your ship’s gone down.”
His pigeons, more than anything else, helped him to forget Vashti. His soul went with them on their flights through wide clean spaces. The sense gradually grew up within him that she had betrayed him; this was partly due to the hostile way in which she was regarded by others. At the time when she had tampered with his power of dreaming he had been without consciousness of sex; but as sex began to stir, he felt a tardy resentment. This was brought to a climax by Mr. Yaffon.
Looking from his bedroom window one morning across the neighbors’ walled-in strips of greenness, where crocuses bubbled and young leaves shuddered, he noticed that in Mr. Yaffon’s garden the parrot had been brought out. It was a sure sign that at last the spring had come. As he watched, Mr. Yaffon pottered into the sunlight to make an inspection of his bulbs. Several times he passed near the perch; each time the parrot jigged up and down more violently, screaming, “But I love you. I love you.”
As if unaware that he was being taunted, the old gentleman took no notice. But the parrot had been accustomed to measure success by the fear he inspired. When his master tried neither to appease nor escape him he redoubled his efforts, making still more public his shameful imitation of a falsetto voice declaring love.