“Doing what, Tom?” asked Polly, anxiously, as they stopped.
“Loading railroad ties from the saw mill yonder, to carry south. He was just visiting around the docks and saw a tie slip into the river, and it knocked off a little chap with it, Dicky Button, it was, and Uncle Bardwell went in after him, and just then a boat come along, and her swell swashed the schooner up against the dock, and when they got him out he was dead, but Dicky’s alive.”
The girls listened and made up their minds they wanted to see the rose garden then and there. It was only nine, Polly said, and the train couldn’t possibly get through the village without everybody knowing it was there. So Tom tied the colts to the hitching post, and they went in to call on Mrs. Cynthy Bardwell.
Ruth started to walk up the front path, but Tom told her they had better go around to the back door, so they followed him obediently along the graveled path, bordered neatly with clam shells turned face downward in the mould. Then came “old hen and chickens,” as Kate called them, mignonette, sweet alyssium, marigolds, and pansies. And in the center of each bed there rose up stocks, pink and white, and so fragrant and lovable, that the girls begged for some at once.
“Well, I do declare!” exclaimed a sweet, friendly voice so near to them they nearly jumped. “I’m right here at the buttery window, girls, and I saw you and Tom coming. Wait a minute till I change my apron.”
“It gave me quite a turn to see such a lot of youngsters in my garden so early,” she told them, when she appeared, tying the strings of her apron as she talked. “Come and see my roses.”
It seemed as if nothing but roses grew in that long back garden, shaded with horse chestnut trees, excepting the tall lilac bushes along the fence and the lilies of the valley that grew thickly on the ground beneath them.
“They’ve gone by long ago,” Mrs. Bardwell said, “but they’re real sweet in the spring.”
On the white and green trellis work above the kitchen portico, a crimson rambler climbed sturdily to the “ell” roof. A sweetbrier hung over the gate, with little white roses nearly gone. Then there were bushes of old-fashioned blush roses, so delicately pink and sweet that Polly declared all she could think of was her grandmother’s wedding chest at home, with its flat silk bags of dried rose leaves, still heavy with fragrance from roses that had bloomed half a century ago.
“Yes, they’re sweet, but I have a leaning towards the white brides,” said Mrs. Bardwell, moving from bush to bush like a white bride herself, with her silver white curls, pink cheeks, and fresh white apron. “And the bees love them best too. They’re all gone by, now. I can generally count on them along in June. The crimson rambler’s real hardy, but it’s beginning now to shake its petals. I suppose you folks down south have roses so much you hardly appreciate them, but we love them. Summer’s kind of late up here, and I’ve had roses for my table clear to the end of August. These here were American Beauties. I never tried them before this year, but a man come along last fall and sorter talked me into taking them, and they did bloom up real sightly, but terrible thorny. This bush I raised from a slip my mother gave me the day I was married. It’s a cabbage rose. ’Tain’t a pretty name, but I love the bush, and the flower too. It looks more like a lot of little rosebuds all clustered together than just one flower, don’t it? There’s moss roses down in that corner by the fence, but they went by last month too. These here, they call them Gloriana Wonders. I always feel like shaking them same as you would a child that won’t behave. They bloom all to once, and just open up their whole hearts in a day, and the wind blows them to Halifax.” She laughed happily, touching the leaves with tender, lingering fingers as you would the flushed cheek of a baby. “I suppose I’m foolish over them, but they’re all I’ve got to love and care for now. I used to have five babies of my own, and they’re all lying over yonder around their father, the Captain, in the little cemetery across from the lighthouse, on the east shore.”