She paused a moment; then looked at him with those level kindly eyes. Then she checked what was in her mind before it came to the tongue.
“Besides, we have to see the woodshed,” she added instead.
Thereafter the time till lunch was very fully occupied. A vixen of a cat flew at Hugh, who, in spite of warning, had entered the dangerous woodshed, and he retreated with cries of dismay, leaving a globe of spitting, scowling motherhood in possession of the doorway. Then the unhusbanded hen-yard gave rise to philosophic reflection arising from the fact that if a man practises polygamy his death, if he is loved, is polygamously painful, and in any case must result in widows’ disputation of the property. On the other hand, in the case of hens, it was easy—in fact, it was going to be done this afternoon—to substitute another husband for the lately deceased, and nobody would know the difference. Then the kitchen garden was visited, and from thence a gardener, even in the very act of nailing up a peach-tree, was sent to look for a tortoise-shell slug on the second slice of potato counting from the far end, and for any other slugs. The pot of brine, Mrs. Allbutt told him, was in the middle of the gravel walk and could not be missed. Then they skirted the bramble-grown chalk-pit, passed through the beech-wood, and went out of the gate in the wooden fence to walk a little way up the steep down-side from where they could get a comprehensive view of house, garden, and wood. All the myriad wild flowers of downland were in bloom and fragrance—cistus, hairbell, thyme, and dwarf meadow-sweet, and the company of low-growing clovers. From where they paused they could see over the pale green beech-wood through which they had just come to where the red house, with just a thin coil of blue smoke going up from one chimney and soon vanishing in the gold-suffused blue of the noon, stood sunning itself, and looking from under the sun-blinds of its windows, as if from half-shut eyes, on to the jewelled flower-garden and the level sea of vivid green that bordered the chalk-stream. The white riband of the road, dusty and sun-grilled, that passed by its fence was quite cut off from it by the belt of trees that grew within, and it stood embowered in boughs and green, alone with its enchanting company of quiet living things.
She stopped when they had climbed this hundred feet or so of down.
“There,” she said, “that is my favourite view of my dear home, for though I have been here so few weeks, it has become wonderfully homey to me. I come up here every day, and really envy the fortunate person who lives there. Though she is so cut off, I feel sure she cannot be lonely. She ought indeed to be very busy, and find every day much too short, if she takes the least pleasure in or care for all her trees and flowers.”
Hugh moved a step nearer.
“Ah, go on,” he said; “I like hearing about her! Tell me more about her.”
“Well, she has been very busy all the time she has been here, out of doors most of the day, and leaving a quantity of letters unanswered in consequence. And sometimes her friends come and see her, and she finds that very pleasant also. And sometimes she goes up to town and flies about as if she were quite young still, but it rather tires and confuses her, and finds she is glad to get back. And when autumn comes she will see her trees flame in the sunset of their year, and she will still be busy, putting her flowers to bed for the winter, and tucking them up, and seeing that all is comfortable. Indoors, too, she has another garden of books, and when winter comes and days are short and dark, with weeping skies overhead and fretful angry rain flung against her window-panes, she will be busy with her indoor garden, and again find the days too short. There will be fine days as well, and she hopes to walk over these downs that will be all gray and flowerless in those crystal winter suns, and often too she will have things to do in Mannington, for she really is a friendly person, and no doubt will find friends there; and perhaps some day, out of the years that have passed and out of what she has learned and is still learning, her mind will put out a little flower of its own. And often too in the winter she hopes her friends will still come and see her, and consent to bury themselves for a day or two now and then in the country.”
Again she paused and smiled at Hugh, who was looking at her with his eager boyish gaze. And since he, with all the rest of the world, would soon know what she had in her mind, it did not matter whether he knew it a little earlier than the rest or not. Besides, the impulse to tell him somehow was irresistible—and in a way, since what she had written had indirectly anyhow decided his career, he had a certain right to know.
But for the moment he interrupted her.