In the Winter one last beauty comes. The day has been leaden, sad-coloured, bitterly cold. All the cabmen on the rank stamp with their feet, and swing their arms to keep themselves warm, and there is a little mist where all the horses breathe. And people coming through the square have forgotten the Almond tree, and the look of the big trees when the hot sun splashed gold on their leaves, and they say, looking at the sky, “See how dark it is, it is going to snow.” The snow comes; the sky is darker; the trees stick up looking black, like drawings in pen and ink. Flakes, white flakes, twenty, forty, then a rush—a thousand; the sky full of tiny white flakes, the air full of them whirling down. All sounds begin to be muffled. Horses hoofs beat with a thud on the ground. The sound of voices in the air is deadened. The voices of men encouraging horses sound sharp now and again, or a whip cracks like a shot. The square is covered with snow, every twig is outlined in white, black patches of bark show here and there, and emphasise the dead whiteness. When it has stopped snowing and a watery light comes from the sun all the trees gleam wonderfully, looking like fairy trees. And people passing through the square making beaten tracks in the snow saying, “It is Winter.”
In a country garden there is a tree stands on the end of a lawn. It is an Acacia tree, old, gnarled, and twisted, with Ivy round it, deep Ivy in which thrushes build year after year; there is a stone near by on which the thrushes break the shells of snails, the “tap, tap,” of the birds at work is one of the peaceful sounds that break the silence of the garden.
Under the tree is an oblong mark of pressed grass greener than the rest of the lawn, where the garden-roller rests. And there is a seat under the tree, and a wooden foot-rest by it.
Touch the tree and you go back at once to a picture of a boy, the boy who helped to plant it over a hundred and fifty years before. If you look from the tree across the lawn to the house you will see the very door by which he came out with his father to plant the tree.
The house and the tree have grown old together, both of them have mellowed with the garden and wear a look of old security and calm, and have an air of wise old age.
Up and down the five white steps from the garden path to the house more than five generations have passed, men in wide-skirted coats and full wigs hanging about their ears in great corkscrew curls, men in powdered wigs, rolled stockings, square buckled shoes, men in stocks and immense collars, and big frills to their shirts making them look like gentlemanly fish, down to the man who comes out to day who looks a little old-fashioned, and is square-built like the house, and who parts his hair like the men in Leech’s pictures, and who wears a rim of whisker round his face. And troops of ladies have passed out by that door into the garden in hoops, and sacques, and towers of hair, and crinolines. But no lady comes out now to cut the Lavender hedge, or snip at the Roses. The man is alone. But when he sits alone under the tree, with a spud by his side ready to uproot Plantains from his lawn, he can see troops of the garden ghosts sitting round him under the Acacia tree.
Sometimes there seems to be a sound of the ghostly click of bowls on the lawn, for it is a bowling-green banked up on three sides (the fourth bank has been done away with long ago), and there is a company of gentlemen in their wide shirt sleeves playing bowls. Above them, on the raised terrace next to the house where there is a broad path, a group of old people sit by little tables and drink wine, and smoke, and gossip. And behind them are tall Hollyhocks, and Roses and a tangle of old-fashioned flowers such as Periwinkles and Sweet Williams, and Pinks. The Acacia tree, which grows on the lawn beyond the bowling green, is quite small.
The old man who dreams of these ghosts in his garden recognises them readily because they have stepped out of pictures on his walls, and when they are not haunting the garden are demurely hanging on the oak panels in the old rooms.
Then he can see, if he chooses, a picture of the garden when the acacia tree is quite tall, but still elegant and slender, and in this picture an old, old lady walks down the garden paths. She is dressed in a large hooped skirt with panniers, and has high-heeled shoes, and a perfect tower of hair on her head, and over that a calash hood like the hood over a waggon except that it is black. She carries an ebony stick in a silk-mittened hand, a hand knotted with gout and covered with the mourning rings of her friends. She it was who added largely to the garden, and took in two acres more of land, and planted a row of Elms and Beech trees. She kept the garden as bright and gay as the samplers she worked herself. She had a mania for set beds, and her Tulips were the talk of the county. A long bed of them ran from the house along one bank of the bowling-green to the orchard, and it was arranged in pattern of colours, lines, squares, interlaced geometrical designs of flaming red and scarlet, pink and yellow and white and dull purple. She it was who caused the sundial to be placed in the garden and who found the motto for it, and designed the four triangular beds to go round it, and placed a hedge of Lavender and Rosemary all about it in a square.