The Garden of Memories

by Henry St. John Cooper

So now, she sat on top of the old rose red wall and looked down on the other side and saw a green tangle of brambles and grass and other things that grew rankly and luxuriously in that deserted place.

It was easier to descend the wall than to climb it, for here was a friendly tree that held out an inviting branch. Sho seized it, with small brown hands and lightly swung herself to the ground and then drew a sigh of relief and pleasure.

It was forbidden ground! Were there not many notices that announced the fact that "Trespassers Would Be Prosecuted"? But she cared nothing for these, the notice that she dreaded most of all was "This Desirable Historical Family Mansion, with Seven Hundred and Fifty Acres of Land, to be Sold."

How she dreaded lest one day someone should come and see and covet this place and buy it and so shut her out forever from its delights and its pleasures. But that someone had not come yet.

So she made her way through the tangle of the growth, and came presently to a great garden, a wonderful garden once, but now a weed-grown place of desolation.

Always this garden attracted her; to-day it brought a soft, tender light into her eyes as she stood with clasped hands and looked at it! She could see the old broken stone-paved pathway that led through the heart of the garden. She knew where that stone pathway opened out into a great circle in the midst of which was set a sundial, a sundial of stone chipped and green and the gnomon of the dial rusted away so that never again should its shadow fall upon the dial and mark the passing of the brighter hours. And about this circle, she knew, were old stone seats, green now like the pedestal of the dial and through the crevices of the paving grew and flourished and blossomed foxglove and dandelion, hollyhock and groundsell.

It had been a very, very beautiful garden long years ago, when ladies had tapped up and down the stone pathway in their little red-heeled shoes. Ladies who wore wide flounced skirts and powdered hair and cunning little patches on their fair cheeks. The garden with its roses, with its stately hollyhocks, its cloves and sweet-williams, its rosemary and lavender and all the sweet things that grow in English gardens, must have been a very lovely and perfect place then. But to this little maid with the dreamy eyes, it was a very wonderful place now. There was no other place like it in all the world; she had come here by sunshine and by moonlight, for sometimes in the night the garden had seemed to call to her and she had risen from her bed under the thatched roof of her old grandmother's cottage and had come stealing here to watch it, all bathed in the silver light of the moon. Perhaps she loved it best by moonlight, for then strange dreams seemed to come to her, dreams that never came when the sun was shining.

It seemed as if some kindly gentle hand touched lightly on the chords of memory, and then—the weeds and the tall rank grass, the decay of the present, the rioting growth, all were gone and she saw the old garden as it had once been, and she saw folk, strangely dressed folk, whom never in her life could she have met. These came and went, men with strange affected antics and gestures, gestures she might have smiled at, yet never did, and sweet, gracious ladies who moved with stately dignity through the old garden.

But always there was one, a young man whose clothes were plain and lacking all the finery that made the others seem so grand. She knew him for a servant, for one who worked in the garden, for often she would see him stooping over some trim bed, or with keen scythe sweeping the short grass.

They were dreams, only dreams that the old garden seemed to bring to her, when she came when the world was sleeping. Dreams, and yet she seemed to be so curiously awake.