—I had no wish to disparage Miss Stacy's cousin's heroism, which, nevertheless, I had not relied upon in the least. 'I don't think I thought about being drowned,' I said.
'That proves it!' she cried in triumph. 'Your confidence was so perfect that it was unconscious! Sweetest mother—there, I won't say another word; not another syllable, mother mine, shall pass your daughter's lips! But one does like to show one's self in the right, doesn't one, Miss Wick?'—and Mrs. Stacy surrendered to an impulsive volume of embraces which descended from behind the sofa, chiefly upon the back of her neck.
How pleasant it was, that five o'clock tea-drinking in the old-fashioned drawing-room, with the jessamine nodding in at the window and all the family cats gathered upon the hearthrug—five in number, with one kitten. The Stacy's compromise in the perpetually-recurring problem of new kittens was to keep only the representative of a single generation for family affection and drawing-room privileges. The rest were obscurely brought up in the stables and located as early as was entirely humane with respectable cottagers, or darkly spoken of as 'kitchen cats.' There had been only one break in the line of posterity that gravely licked itself on the rug, or besought small favours rubbingly with purrs—made by a certain Satanella, who ate her kittens! and suffered banishment in consequence. But this was confided to me in undertones by the second Miss Stacy, who begged me not to mention the matter to Dorothy. 'We don't talk about it often, for Satanella was her cat, you know, and she can't get over her behaving so dreadfully.' Each cat had its individual history, and to the great-great-grandmother of them attached the thrilling tale, if I remember rightly, of having once only escaped hanging by her own muscular endurance and activity; but none bore so dark a blot as covered the memory of Satanella. Perhaps it is partly owing to my own fondness for pussies, but ever since I made the acquaintance of the Stacys I must confess to disparaging a family with no cats in it.
It was naturally Dorothy who took me out to see the garden—sweet, shy Dorothy, who seemed so completely to have grown in a garden that Lady Torquilin, when she brought her pink cheeks afterwards to gladden the flat in Cadogan Mansions, dubbed her 'the Wild Rose' at once. At any rate, Dorothy had always lived just here beside her garden, and never anywhere else, for she told me so in explaining her affection for it. I thought of the number of times we had moved in Chicago, and sighed.
It was not a very methodical garden, Dorothy remarked in apology—the dear sweet things mostly came up of their own accord year after year, and the only ambition Peter entertained towards it was to keep it reasonably weeded. A turn in the walk disclosed Peter at the moment with a wheelbarrow—the factotum of garden and stable, a solemn bumpkin of twenty, with a large red face and a demeanour of extreme lethargy. His countenance broke into something like a deferential grin as he passed us. 'Can you make him understand?' I asked Miss Dorothy. 'Oh, I should think so!' she replied. 'He is very intelligent!' From his appearance I should not have said so. There was nothing 'sharp,' as we say in America, about Peter, though afterwards I beard him whistling 'Two lovely black eyes' with a volume of vigorous expression that made one charge him with private paradoxical sweethearting. But I was new to the human product after many generations of the fields and hedges.
It was a square garden, shut in from the road and the neighbours by that high old red-brick wall. A tennis-court lay in the middle in the sun; the house broke into a warmly-tinted gable, red-roofed and plastered and quaint, that nestled over the little maids in the larder, I think, at one end; a tall elm and a spreading horse-chestnut helped the laurestinus bushes to shut it in from the lawns and the drive and any eyes that might not fall upon it tenderly. We sat down upon the garden-seat that somebody had built round the elm, Dorothy and I, and I looked at the garden as one turns the pages of an old storybook. There were the daisies in the grass, to begin with, all over, by hundreds and thousands, turning their bright little white-and-yellow faces up at me and saying something—I don't know quite what. I should have had to listen a long time to be sure it was anything but 'Don't step on me!' but I had a vague feeling that every now and then one said, 'Can't you remember?' Dorothy remarked it was really disgraceful, so many of them, and Peter should certainly mow them all down in the morning—by which her pretty lips gave me a keen pang. 'Oh!' I said, I what a pity!' 'Yes,' she said, relentingly, 'they are dear things, but they're very untidy. The worst of Peter is,' she went on, with a shade of reflection, 'that we are obliged to keep at him.'
I dare say you don't think much of daisies in the grass—you have always had so many. You should have been brought up on dandelions instead—in Chicago!
Then there were all the sweet spring English flowers growing in little companies under the warm brick wall—violets and pansies and yellow daffodils, and in one corner a tall, brave array of anemones, red and purple and white. And against the wall rose-bushes and an ancient fig-tree; and farther on, all massed and tangled in its own dark-green shadows, the ivy, pouring out its abundant heart to drape and soften the other angle, and catch the golden rain of the laburnum that hung over. And this English Dorothy, with her yellow hair and young-eyed innocence, the essence and the flower of it all.
Near the stables, in our roundabout ramble to the kitchen-garden, Dorothy showed me, with seriousness, a secluded corner, holding two small mounds and two small wooden tablets. On one the head of a spaniel was carved painstakingly and painted, with the inscription, 'Here Lies a Friend.' The second tablet had no bas-relief and a briefer legend: 'Here Lies Another.' 'Jack,' said she, with a shade of retrospection, and Jingo. Jack died in—let me see—eighteen eighty-five. Jingo two years later, in eighteen eighty-seven. I didn't do Jingo's picture,' Miss Dorothy went on, pensively. 'It wasn't really necessary, they were so very much alike.'
About the kitchen-garden I remember only how rampant the gooseberry-bushes were, how portentous the cabbages, and how the whole Vegetable Kingdom combined failed to keep out a trailing company of early pink roses that had wandered in from politer regions to watch the last of the sunset across the river and beyond the fields.