She stepped aside. The old man closed his eyes again, and his head fell back. Leonard touched her arm, and they left the room. At the door Constance turned to look at him. He was asleep again.
“He murmured something in his sleep. He was disturbed. He looked terrified.”
“It was your presence, Constance, that in some way suggested the memory of his dead friend. Perhaps your face reminded him of his dead friend. Think, however, what a shock it must have been to disturb the balance of such a strong man as that. Why, he was in the full strength of his early manhood. And he never recovered—all these seventy years. He has never spoken all these years, except once in my hearing—it was in his sleep. What did he say? ‘That will end it.’ Strange words.”
The tears were standing in the girl’s eyes.
“The pity of it, Leonard—the pity of it!”
“Come into the gardens. They were formerly, in the last century—when a certain ancestor was a scientific gardener—show gardens.”
They were now entirely ruined by seventy years of neglect. The lawns were covered with coarse rank grass; the walks were hidden; brambles grew over the flower-beds; the neglect was simply mournful. They passed through into the kitchen-garden, over the strawberry-beds and the asparagus-beds, and everywhere spread the brambles with the thistle and the shepherd’s-purse and all the common weeds; in the orchard most of the trees were dead, and under the dead boughs there flourished a rank undergrowth.
“I have never before,” said Constance, “realized what would happen if we suffered a garden to go wild.”
“This would happen—as you see. I believe no one has so much as walked in the garden except ourselves for seventy years. In the eyes of the village, I know, the whole place is supposed to be haunted day and night. Even the chance of apples would not tempt the village children into the garden. Come, Constance, let us go into the village and see the church.”
It was a pretty village, consisting of one long street, with an inn, a small shop, and post-office, a blacksmith’s, and one or two other trades. In the middle of the street a narrow lane led to the churchyard and the church. The latter, much too big for the village, was an early English cruciform structure, with later additions and improvements.