She replied, in the simplest way possible, being a cheerful religious woman without a particle of sham in her nature, that when God called her she was ready and glad to go, and as for the garden she would only go to another one—far more beautiful.
Her faith, I found afterwards, was of a sweet simple kind, and had been with her as a child, and remained with her as a woman, untouched by the least doubt. She heard Mass every morning of her life in the little church half a mile away, and spoke in loving and familiar tones of her favourite saints as being friends of hers, though in a higher station of life. Included in her ideas of heaven was a very distinct belief that there would be many beautiful flowers and birds, and the pleasure with which she looked forward to seeing them—in a humble way, as if she might be one of a crowd in a Public Garden—gave her a quiet dignity and charm, the equal of which I have seldom met. Her brother, who was always marvelling at her, had, also, some of her dignity, but a wider, freer view of things, and the natural gaiety of a bird.
The next morning, as soon as I woke in the fresh clean bedroom they had made ready for me, I sprang from my bed and went to look out of the window. The dew was sparkling on the flowers, and their scent came up sweet and strong; a tubful of Mignonette, at which the bees were busy, was especially fragrant. As I looked, the tailor’s sister came into the garden, in a neat lavender-coloured print dress; she carried a missal in one hand, and a rosary swung in the other. She stood opposite to her tombstone for a minute, her lips moving softly, and then, after turning her pleasant face towards the wealth of flowers about her, she bowed deeply, as if saluting the morning. A little time later I heard the gate of the front garden swing and shut, and I knew she had gone to hear Mass.
The garden was left alone, busy in its quiet way; growing, dying, perpetuating its kind. The bees were industriously singing as they worked; lordly butterflies danced rigadoons and ravanes over the flowers; a thrush, after a long hearty tug at a fat worm, swallowed it, and then, perching on the tombstone, poured out its joy in full clear notes. And Death was cheated of his sting.
VIII
THE COTTAGE GARDEN
For the same reason that your town man keeps a pot of Geraniums on his window-sill, and a caged bird in his house, your countryman plants bright-coloured flowers by his door, and regales his children with news of the first cuckoo. They pull as much of Heaven down as will accommodate itself to their plot of earth.
Any man standing in the centre of however small a space of his personal ownership—a piece of drugget in a garret, a patch of garden—makes it the hub of the universe round which the stars spin, on which his world revolves. Within a hand-stretch of him lie all he is, his intimate possessions, his scraps of comfort scratched out of the hard earth: books, pictures, photographs showing the faces of his small world of friends and his tiny travels—how little difference there is between a walk through Piccadilly and a journey across Asia: your great traveller has little more to say than the man who has found Heaven in a penny bunch of Violets, or heard the stars whisper over St. James’s Park—within his reach are the things he has paid the price of life for, and they are the cloak with which he covers his nakedness of soul against the all-seeing eye he calls his Destiny.
With all this, commenced perhaps in cowardice—for the earth’s brown crust is too like a grave, the garret floor too like a shell of wood—your man, town or country, grown to know love of little things, nurses a seedling as if it were his conscience, patches his drugget as if it were a verse he’d like to polish. Out of the vast dreary waste of faces who pass by unheeding, and the unseeing world that does not care whether he lives or dies, he makes his small hoard of treasures, as a child hides marbles, thinking them precious stones—as, indeed, they are to those who have eyes to see—and, be they books, or pictures, pots of plants, or curious conceits in china, they all answer for flowers, for the bright-coloured spots of comfort in a life of doubt.
No man thinks this out carefully, and sets about to plan his garden in this spirit: he feels a need, and meets it as he can. In this manner we are all cottage gardeners.