Lacrima saw a look upon her cousin’s face that boded ill for their future relations if she did not make some kind of effort. She rose to her feet.
“Come, Mr. Andersen,” she said, giving James a wistful look. “Let us take a little stroll, and then return again to these young people.”
James rose obediently, and they walked off together. They passed from the orchards belonging to Mr. Romer’s tenant, and entered those immediately at the foot of the vicarage garden. Here, through a gap in the hedge they were attracted by the sight of a queer bed of weeds growing at the edge of a potato-patch. They were very curious weeds, rather resembling sea-plants than land-plants; in colour of a dull glaucous green, and in shape grotesquely elongated.
“What are those things?” said Lacrima. “I think I have never seen such evil-looking plants. Why do they let them grow there?”
James surveyed the objects. “They certainly have a queer look,” he said, “but you know, in old days, there was a grave-yard here, of a peculiar kind. It is only in the last fifty years that they have dug it up and included it in this garden.”
Lacrima shuddered. “I would not eat those potatoes for anything! You know I think I come to dislike more and more the look of your English vegetable gardens, with their horrid, heavy leaves, so damp and oozy and disgusting!”
“I agree with you there,” returned the wood-carver. “I have always hated Nevilton, and every aspect of it; but I think I hate these overgrown gardens most of all.”
“They look as if they were fed from churchyards, don’t they?” went on the girl. “Look at those heavy laurel bushes over there, and those dreadful fir-trees! I should cut them all down if this place belonged to me. Oh, how I long for olives and vine-yards! These orchards are all very well, but they seem to me as if they were made to keep out the sun and the wholesome air.”
James Andersen smiled grimly. “Orchards and potato gardens!” he muttered. “Yes, these are typical of this country of clay. And these Vicarage shrubberies! I think a shrubbery is the last limit of depression and desolation. I am sure all the murders committed in this country are planned in shrubberies, and under the shade of damp laurel-bushes.”
“In our country we grow corn between the fruit-trees,” said Lacrima.