But her ear detected temper in his tone, and with a newborn fear of him she hastened to appease him. “Oh no!” she said. “You were going to show me the gardens!”
“Such as they are. Well, so you will see what there is to be seen. It is a sorry sight, I can tell you.” She rose and, taking her arm, he led her some fifty yards along the alley in which they were, then, turning to the right, he stopped. “There,” he said. “What do you think of it?”
They had before them the long, dank, weed-grown walk, broken midway by the cracked fountain and closed at the far end by the broad flight of broken steps that led upward to the terrace and so to the great lawn. When Audley had last stood on this spot the luxuriance of autumn had clothed the neglected beds. A tangle of vegetation, covering every foot of soil with leaf and bloom, had veiled the progress of neglect. Now, as by magic, all was changed. The sun still shone, but coldly and on a bald scene. The roses that had run riot, the spires of hollyhocks that had risen above them, the sunflowers that had struggled with the encroaching elder, nay, the very bindweed that had strangled all alike in its green embrace, were gone, or only reared naked stems to the cold sky. Gone, too, were the Old Man, the Sweet William, the St. John’s Wort, the wilderness of humbler growths that had pressed about their feet; and from the bare earth and leafless branches, the fountain and the sundial alone, like mourners over fallen grandeur, lifted gray heads.
There is no garden that has not its sad season, its days of stillness and mourning, but this garden was sordid as well as sad. Its dead lay unburied.
Involuntarily Mary spoke. “Oh, it is terrible!” she cried.
“It is terrible,” he answered gloomily.
Then she feared that, preoccupied as she was with other thoughts, she had hurt him. She was trying to think of something to comfort him, when he repeated, “It is terrible! But, d—n it, let us see the rest of it! We’ve come here for that! Let us see it!”
Together they went slowly along the walk. They came by and by to the sundial. She hung a moment, wishing to read the inscription, but he would not stay. “It’s the old story,” he said. “We are gay fellows in the sunshine, but in the shadow—we are moths.”
He did not explain his meaning. He drew her on. They mounted the wide flight which had once, flanked by urns and nymphs and hot with summer sunshine, echoed the tread of red-heeled shoes and the ring of spurs. Now, elder grew between the shattered steps, weeds clothed them, the nymphs mouldered, lacking arms and heads, the urns gaped.
Mary felt his depression and would have comforted him, but her brain was numbed by the discovery which she had made; she was unable to think, without power to help. She shared, she more than shared, his depression. And it was not until they had surmounted the last flight and stood gazing on the Great House that she found her voice. Then, as the length and vastness of the pile broke upon her, she caught her breath. “Oh,” she cried. “It is immense!”