The garden of resurrection

by E. Temple Thurston

"It was what I expected," he added, "after the condition we found her in when she first came here. She was half-starved."

"How is she now?" I asked.

"Not very lively. She'll get all right again though, if she takes it quietly."

So we crept silently through the month of March to that glorious First of April, when the whole world awakes to the great gladness of its folly. For the first two weeks of that month of March I was not permitted to see her. Then I would spend my mornings in the park, intent no longer upon watching the romance of others, but contemplating in long silences the wonderful possibilities of my own. What would it be when she was well again? All hope that I might win her for myself I counted beyond the utmost probability. Such disfigurement as is mine, once a woman has expressed her horror of it, is not forgotten so easily as that. So at least it seemed to me. And as I sat or walked in the park, journeying so far sometimes as the gardens in Kensington to see the crocuses and the young tulips rising above the earth, I thought it all out, making in my imagination the future I would have for her.

I built a cottage then in the country—an old-fashioned place standing far back from the road, with a tiny orchard of gnarled apple trees and a garden where all the sweet peas in the world could grow in such profusion as would shame even Cruikshank himself. It should be within fifty miles of London, so that whenever she needed me I could easily reach her. For a few hundred pounds the freehold of a place like that could be bought, and it should be her very own. The little that it would cost for her to live there, she would surely accept at my hands.

"She's at my mercy," I told myself, cheerfully. "Can she possibly want anything better than that?"

There were other schemes too. I spent a glorious morning devising them. But none pleased me better than this, and I longed for the moment when I might tell her of it.

In the afternoons of that fortnight I wrote long letters to Bellwattle, telling her everything, leading up slowly by the most gradual degrees to that moment when I could ask for my gift to be returned to me. It is a mean thing to do, to give a thing and take a thing. Surely there is some condemnatory couplet which treats of such instability as this.

"Give a thing and take a thing—"

I have long forgotten how it goes. But surely, with a lonely man and his dog it were excusable. I had word from her that he was happy enough when out on the cliffs alone with her, where there was ever the great adventure of the chase. But she hinted sometimes how in the long evenings he would sit thoughtfully before the fire taking no notice of any word that was said to him. I like to think it was then that he thought of me.