The Garden of Memories

by Henry St. John Cooper

"Oh, yes, I remember, some other Langworthy, quite so."

"I'll bet a shilling," Coombe whispered under his breath, "I'll bet a shilling, my lord, as you remember me a sight better than you pretend you do."

Gowerhurst regarded Coombe's hot red face coldly and critically.

"I never, I never remember anyone I prefer to forget, my dear Mr. Groom," he said. "It's an excellent plan—eh? An excellent plan, saves a great deal of trouble and annoyance, eh?"

And now Kathleen was alone, she had come to her room, she had locked the door on herself. She sat down by the window and put her elbows on the sill and rested her chin on her hands.

He had come back.

It had almost stunned her, its unexpectedness and suddenness. She had not had time to realise what it all meant, all that she could realise was, that he was here.

She saw herself now, as she had been, a girl of eighteen, a girl deeply, desperately in love; she remembered how she had lain through long, sleepless nights, tossing on her pillow. How willingly in those days she would have gone with him into direst poverty, the deeper the poverty how much more would she have gloried in it. To tramp the roads by his side, to sing in the streets with him, to crouch beside him under some friendly hedge for the night—yes, she would have done that very willingly and yet—yet perhaps common sense, perhaps the hereditary instinct of her kind had kept her from such folly.

But she had loved him. Now, sitting here, she was realising that perhaps she had loved him more—more after he had gone and left her as she believed forever, than she had actually loved him while he was yet with her.

It is often the way, when the beloved object ceases to be real and tangible, when he becomes a memory—with what virtues can we clothe him? In memory we only recall all the good, the best that was in him—memory charitably forgets the numerous little faults, the tiny acts of selfishness, the little outbursts of foolish temper. No, they are all gone. So, because he was the beloved object, memory is eager to idealise him.