This Man's Wife

by George Manville Fenn

And that evening. The garden unchanged in the midst of change. The old golden glow coming through the clump of trees in the west beyond the row of cucumber-frames—those trees that Dr Luttrell told his wife he must cut down because they took off so much of the afternoon sun. But he had not cut them down. He would as soon have thought of lopping off his own right hand.

Everything in that garden and about and in that house seemed the same at the first glance, but there had been changes in King’s Castor in the course of years.

There was a stone, for instance, growing very much weather-stained, relating the virtues of one Daniel Gemp; and there was the same verse cut in the stone that had been sent round on the funeral cards with some pieces of sponge cake, one of which cards was framed in the parlour at Gorringe’s, his crony, who still cut up cloth as of old.

Mrs Pinet, too, had passed away, and the widow who now had the house, and let lodgings, painted her pots green instead of red, and robbed the dull old place of one bit of colour.

But the doctor’s garden was the same, and so thought Christie Bayle, as he stood in the gathering gloom six months after his return to England, and shortly after his acceptance of the vicarage of King’s Castor—at his old friend’s wish.

There were the old sweet scents of the dewy earth, that familiar one of the lately cut grass; there was the old hum of a beetle winging its way round and round one of the trees; and there before him were the open French windows, and the verandah, showing the lit-up drawing-room furniture, the old globe lamps, and the candles on the piano just the same.

Had he been asleep and dreamed? and was he still the boyish curate who fell in love and failed?

Yes; there was little Miss Heathery going to the piano and laying down the reticule bag, with the tail of her white handkerchief hanging out. And there was Thickens with his hands resting on his drab trousers; and there was the doctor, and little pleasant Mrs Luttrell, going from one to the other, and staying longest by, and unable to keep her trembling hands off that tall, dark, beautiful woman, who smiled down upon her in answer to each caress.

No change, and yet how changed! How near the bottom of the hill that little grey old man, and that rosy little white-haired woman! How querulous and thin sounded Mrs Thickens’s voice in her old trivial troubadour Heathery song! The years had gone, and in spite of its likeness to the past, what a void there was—absent faces!

No; that carefully dressed old gentleman was half behind the curtain, and he has risen to cross to the doctor, pausing to pat the tall, graceful woman on the arm, and nod at her affectionately by the way. There is another familiar face, too, that of Thisbe’s in a most wonderful cap, carrying in tea, to hand round, and Tom Porter obediently “following in his commodore’s wake,” his own words, and handing bread-and-butter, sugar and cream.