The old woman rambled on from subject to subject, glancing at each, so lightly, that one less used to her ways would not have suspected the very shrewd and bitter critic hidden beneath the charm of the superficial nature. Roger felt somehow that the critic was alert in her, that she resented something in his manner or dress. He concluded that he was late, or that she, perhaps in her zeal for him, had put on the joint too early. As usual, when she was not pleased, she served the dinner muttering personal remarks, not knowing (as is the way with lonely old people, who talk to themselves) that they were sometimes audible. "I'll do you no peas for your supper, my man," was one of her asides, when he helped himself sparingly to peas. "It's easy seen you're only an Englishman," was another, at his national diffidence towards a potato. Roger wondered what was wrong, and how soon he would become again "the finest young man ever I remember, except perhaps it was your da. Indeed, Mr. Roger, to see your da, and him riding wast in a red coat, you would think it was the Queen's man,* or one of the Saints of God. There was no one I ever seen had the glory on him your da had, unless it was yourself stepping." Roger's da had died of drink there, after a life passed in the preservation of the game laws.
* The late Prince Consort.
When his baggage arrived, he dressed carefully, and set out up the hill to Ottalie's house, which he could see, even from his cottage, as a white, indeterminate mass, screened by trees from sea-winds. The road branched off into a loaning, hedged with tumbled stone on each side. As he climbed the loaning, the roguish Irish bulls, coming in a gallop, at the sound of his feet, peered down at him, through hedges held together by Providence, or left to the bulls' imagination. A lusty white bull followed him for some time, restrained only by a foot-high wire.
"Indeed," said an old labourer, who, resting by the way, expressed sympathy both for Roger and the bull, "he's only a young bull. He wad do no one anny hurrt, except maybe he felt that way. Let you not trouble, sir."
Up above Ottalie's house was the garden. The garden wall backed upon the loaning. A little blue door with peeling, blistered paint, let him into the garden, into a long, straight rose-walk, in which the roses had not yet begun to bloom. A sweet-smelling herb grew by the door. He crumpled a leaf of it between his fingers, thinking how wonderful the earth was, which could grow this fragrance, out of mould and rain. The bees were busy among the flowers. The laurustine was giving out sweetness. In the sun of that windless afternoon, the smell thickened the air above the path, making it a warm clot of perfume, to breathe which was to breathe beginning life. Butterflies wavered, keeping low down, in the manner of butterflies near the coast. Birds made musical calls, sudden delightful exclamations, startling laughter, as though the god Pan laughed to himself among the laurustine bushes.
He felt the beauty of the late Irish season as he had never before felt it. It stirred him to the excitement which is beyond poetry, to that delighted sensitiveness, in which the mind, tremulously open, tremulously alive, can neither select nor combine. He longed to be writing poetry; but in the open air the imagination is subordinated to the senses. The lines which formed in his mind were meaningless exclamations. Nature is a setting, merely. The soul of man, which alone, of created things, regards her, is the important thing.
The blinds of the sunny southern front were drawn down; but the marks of carriage wheels upon the drive shewed him that she had returned. After ringing, he listened for the crackled tinkle far away in the kitchen, and turning, saw a squirrel leap from one beech to another, followed by three or four sparrows. Footsteps shuffled near. Somewhere outside, at the back, an old woman's voice asked whiningly for a bit of bread, for the love of the Almighty God, since she was perished with walking and had a cough on her that would raise pity in a martial man. A younger voice, high, clear, and hard, bidding her whisht, and let her get out of it, ceased suddenly, in her prohibition. The door opened. There was old Mary Laverty, the housekeeper.
"How are you, Mary? Are you quite well?"
"I am, sir. I thank you."
"Is Miss Fawcett in?"