But at this Burbidge waxed wroth. “The nope,” he retorted angrily, “be pure varmint for gardens, same as stoats be for poultry, and squirrels for trees; and as to his colour, ’tis like looks in lasses, it hath nought to do with character. I don’t see things, marm, as you does. When yer sweats for a thing, there be no halves in the matter. What’s a friend to my garden, I be a lover to; but what’s foreign, I be a foreigner to,” and the old man walked away in a huff.
After “our bullfinch war,” as Bess called it when I recounted to her later the little episode, I walked up the path that is edged by rows of double primroses. How lovely they were in the neatest of little clumps, white, yellow, and mauve, with here and there tufts of hen and chicken daisies, roots of the single blue primroses, brilliant polyanthuses, and the curious hose-in-hose variety, which an old South Country nurse of ours used to call “Jack-a-Greeners.” A little further on, I saw some plants of the soft Primula Cashmeriana, which bore leaves which looked as if they had been powdered with milk of sulphur, and carried umbrella-like mauve heads of blossom.
A little higher up the path I saw some fine plants of Primula Japonica with its red whorls of blossom; and at the top of the garden I came across a line of beautiful auriculas. The most beautiful of all the primulas, I think, is “Les Oreilles d’Ours,” as the French call these flowers, with their sweet distant smell, like downs covered with cowslips on dewy mornings, or golden apricots ripening on southern walls. As I passed back to the Abbey, I plucked a shoot off a black-currant bush. How fragrant the budding shoots were. They recalled the perfume of the bog myrtle on Scottish moors, only that the scent had something homely and useful, but none the less delicious.
Ten minutes later, and I was seated before my embroidery. To-day I had a blue dragon to work. I tried to see and to reproduce in my mind’s eye Burne Jones’ wonderful tints of blue with brown shades and silver lights, and so the hours passed.
“A PATIENT HAS VIRTUES”
In the afternoon Bess visited Thady. “Mama,” she cried, “I think Thady will soon be well, for all he was so lame on Sunday. You see he wants to get well so badly, and what people want badly they generally get. I took him some pudding and some cake, and Nana gave him some ointment. Nana,” said Bess, presently, “seems quite kind now. Do you know, mamsie, since Thady has taken her medicine, and rubbed on her lily stuff, she seems quite to like Thady.”
“Ah, my little girl,” I laughed, “you are discovering a very old truth. Nana has found a patient, and a patient always has virtues.”
Bess did not quite understand, but declared it was a good job that Nana had given up disliking Thady, for in Thady, Bess found a most delightful and useful friend. He had already made my little maid a whistle, and was then engaged in making her a crossbow, and he is a wonderful hand in whittling an ash or hazel stick in elaborate designs, all of which are delightful and rare accomplishments in Bess’s eyes.
All the week Bess ran up and down to the Red House. Bess repeated her verses for the fête to Miss Weldon, and gained what her governess called “word accuracy,” but all gestures and action Constance taught her, I heard. Besides this, I was told about the dance which was being practised for the great day by eight little town maidens in the disused room over the stables of the Red House, and of the music which Constance’s nice parlourmaid played. Constance endeavoured to get eight little boys to dance also; but the little lads were too shy, what an old woman, speaking of her grandson, calls “too daffish and keck-handed to learn such aunty-praunty antics,” and all that Constance could get in the way of male support was to induce eight little lads to look on, bend their knees, and bow at intervals, whilst the maidens sang and danced.