When I walk in my garden I still go as I please, trampling down the borders, treading underfoot the grass plots, endangering the flowers, until the new gardener—who by himself alone only too ably replaces Tem Bossette, Mimi Pachoux, and the Hanged—cries out in a voice of consternation:
“Do take care, sir!”
I must excuse him. He does not know that I am walking in my garden of long ago.
To complete this portrait of the house, there still is lacking—oh, almost nothing! Almost nothing yet almost everything, two things indeed, a shadow and a footstep.
The footstep was my father’s; no one ever mistook it. Rapid, regular, resonant, it was his and no other’s. Once it was heard on the threshold a magic change passed over everything. Tem Bossette plied his spade with unsuspected vigour, Mimi Pachoux, till then invisible, popped up like an imp out of a bottle. The Hanged tackled the heaviest casks, Mariette stirred her fire, all of us children came to order, and grandfather—I don’t know why—went out. Was there a difficulty to solve, a trouble to bear, a danger to fear? Let some one say, “Here he is,” and it was all over, every anxiety dissipated, every one taking a long breath as after a victory. Aunt Deen especially had a way of saying, “Here he is,” which would have put to flight the most daring aggressor. It was as much as to say, “Just wait! You will see what will happen. It won’t take long: Another minute and justice will be done!” Once aware of his presence, we felt in ourselves an invincible strength, a sense of security, of protection, of an armed peace, and also a sense of being under command. Each had his own part. But grandfather loved neither to command nor to be commanded.
And the shadow—it was my mother’s, there behind the half closed window blind, whenever all the family was not gathered around her. She is waiting for father, or for our return from school. Some one is absent, and she is anxious. Or the weather is threatening—she is looking at the sky? wondering whether to light the blessed candle.
A different sort of peace emanates from her, a peace—how shall I describe it?—that reaches beyond the things of life, that enters into one and calms the nerves and heart, the peace of love and prayer. That shadow, which I used to look for every time I came in, that I look for now, though well enough I know that it is not there, that it is elsewhere—that shadow was the soul of the house, showing through it as thought shows in a face.
Thus were we guarded.
Beyond the house was the town, on a lower level, as was fitting, and still beyond a great lake and the mountains, and more distant still, the rest of the world. But all these were simply dependencies of The House.