“And my daughter has been drinking the same tainted milk. Will she be stricken, do you think?” he asked, with an awful calmness.
“God forbid! Lola has such a fine constitution and the antecedent circumstances are different. I’ll go and have a look at my patients, and come back to you late in the evening with the last news.”
They parted by a little gate at the corner of a thick yew hedge, which admitted Mr. Greswold into his wife’s flower-garden: a very old garden, which had been the care and delight of many generations; a large square garden, with broad flower-beds on each side, a stone sundial in the centre of a grass-plot, and a buttressed wall at the end, a massive old wall of vermilion brickwork, honeycombed by the decay of centuries, against which a double rank of hollyhocks made a particoloured screen, while flaunting dragon’s-mouth and yellow stonecrop made a flame of colour on the top.
There was an old stone summer-house in each angle of that end wall, temples open to the sun and air, and raised upon three marble steps, stained with moss and lichen.
Charming as these antique retreats were to muse or read in, Mildred Greswold preferred taking tea on the lawn, in the shadow of the two old cedars. She was sitting in a low garden-chair, with a Japanese tea-table at her side, and a volume of Robertson’s sermons on her lap.
It was a rule of life at Enderby Manor that only books of pious tendency should be read on Sundays. The Sunday library was varied and well chosen. Nobody ever found the books dull or the day too long. The dedication of that one day in seven to godliness and good works had never been an oppression to Mildred Greswold.
She remembered her mother’s Sundays—days of hasty church, and slow elaborate dressing for afternoon or evening gaieties; days of church parade and much praise of other people’s gowns and depreciation of other people’s conduct; days of gadding about and running from place to place; Sunday luncheons, Sunday musical parties, Sunday expeditions up the river, Sunday in the studios, Sunday at Richmond or Greenwich. Mrs. Greswold remembered the fussy emptiness of that fashionable Sunday, and preferred sermons and tranquil solitude in the manor gardens.
Solitude meant a trinity of domestic love. Husband, wife, and daughter spent their Sundays together. Those were blessed days for the wife and daughter, since there were no business engagements, no quarter-sessions, or interviews with the bailiff, or letter-writing, to rob them of the society they both loved best in the world. George Greswold devoted his Sundays entirely to his Creator and his home.
“Where is Lola?” he asked, surprised to find his wife alone at this hour.
“She has a slight headache, and I persuaded her to lie down for an hour or so.”