In design it was a Greek cross. Surrounded on all sides by deep balconies, ornate with cornice and Corinthian columns, its four arms afforded as many entrances, of which the southern portal was formal front, from which an avenue of arbor-vitæs led down to the canopied landing at the bayou's bank at the foot of the decline.
The house had been designed and built by Harold's father, in an exuberance of youthful enthusiasm, upon his early marriage. He it was who had planted the trailing roses and wistaria-vines, whose gnarled trunks, now woody and strong as trees, topped the balconies, throwing profusions of bloom adown their pillars and along their balustrades. Here Lamarque, Solfaterre, Cloth-of-gold, Musk-cluster, Lady-bank, Multi-flora—all the cherished climbing roses of an earlier period—mingled in harmonious relations with honeysuckle, woodbine, and clematis.
The most beautiful of them all, the single yellow-centered Cherokee rose of the soil,—good enough in itself for anywhere, but ostracized through caste exclusion from distinction of place about the home,—lay in heavy tangles in the tall, impenetrable hedges which bounded the garden on three sides meeting the bayou at the base of the knoll.
Within its inclosure a resident colony of choice flowers—exotics mainly, but domiciled and grown hardy in this protected spot—had waxed riotous in the license of years of neglect, and throwing off traditions, as many another aristocrat in like circumstances has done before, appeared now in novel forms developed in life's open race with children of the soil.
Here in season were great trees of camellia, white and red, with each a thousand waxen blooms, stalwart woody growths of lemon-verbena, topping sweet olives and answering the challenge of the stately oleanders, which, in turn, measured heads against the magnolias' shoulders.
Appropriating any available support, great scarlet geraniums ten feet high, knowing no winters, laid hands upon the trellises and matched pennies with the locust blooms, red petal against white, affiliating, weak-spined as they were, with scrub-trees which counted real trees at least in their Louisiana pedigrees.
"Cape jasmine borders" had risen into hedges, fencing in certain beds, while the violets, which originally guarded fantastic forms in outline, had gregariously spread into perennial patches of green and purple.
And everywhere there were orange-trees—not a grove here, but always one or more in the range of vision. Their breath was over the garden, and even the bees in the locust-trees, with all their fuss and scattering of honey sweets, could not dispel their all-pervading suggestion of romance—the romance of life incarnate ever expressed in their peerless exhibits of flower, fresh fruit and yellow, all growing together upon a maternal tree rich in life and tone.
Too many words about an old garden? Perhaps so, and yet—
The spirit of a venerable garden as it rises and shows itself to memory is such a benediction that one seeing the vision may sometimes wonder if, if life, per se, be eternal, and the resurrection of certain so-called "dead" a fact, we may not some day wander again in the risen gardens of our childhood, recognizing them by verification of certain familiar faces of flowers who may know us in turn and bloom again—taking up life, which ever includes love and immortality, at the point of suspension, as a mother, waking from a nap, goes back to her window, and catching up her broken song held in the cobwebs of sleep, sings it through, while she finishes a little sleeve, her foot again upon the cradle at her side.