CHAPTER XIII.
AT SCHOOL—THE LILAC-BUSH—BRIDGET’S POSIES—SUMMER—HEALTH.
We knew when it was summer at Bush House, because there was a lilac-tree by the gate, which had one large bunch of flowers on it in the summer when Eleanor and I and Matilda were at school there. As we left the house in double file to take our daily exercise on the high-road, the girls would bob their heads to catch a whiff of the scent as they passed, or to let the cool fragrant flowers brush their foreheads. On this point Madame, our French governess, remonstrated in vain. We took turns for the side next to the lilac, and sniffed away as long as there was anything to smell. Even when the delicate colour began to turn brown, and the fragrance vanished, we were loth to believe that the blossoms were fading.
“I think I have got a cold in my head,” said Matilda, who had plunged her nose into the cluster one day in vain.
“You have a cough, ma foi! Mademoiselle Buller,” replied Madame, who seemed to labour under the idea that Matilda rather enjoyed this privilege. But I had tried the lilac-bush myself with no better success.
“I think,” I whispered to Eleanor, in English, “that we have smelt it all up.”
“Parlez-vous français, mesdemoiselles!” cried Madame, and we filed out into the dusty street, at the corner of which sat another of our visible tokens of the coming of the season of flowers; a dirty, shrivelled old Irishwoman, full of benedictions and beggary, who, all through the summer, sold “posies” to the passers-by. We school-girls were good customers to her. We were all more or less sentimental, more or less homesick, and had more or less of that susceptibility to the influence of scents which may, some day, be the basis of a new school of medicine. One girl had cultivated pinks and Roses de Meaux in her own garden “at home,” and Bridget was soon wise enough to discover that a nosegay composed of these materials was an irresistible temptation to that particular customer. Another had a craving for the sight and smell of southernwood (or “old man,” as Eleanor called it), and preferred it in combination with bachelor’s buttons.
“There was an old woman ‘at home’ whom we used to go to tea with when we were children—my brother and I,” she said; “there were such big bunches of southernwood by her cottage. And bachelor’s buttons all round the garden.”