Part 24 (1/2)
Miss Graeme did not answer. She was not accustomed to consider things seriously. A good girl in a certain true sense, she had never yet seen that she had to be better, or indeed to be anything. But she was able to feel, though she was far from understanding him, that Donal was in earnest, and that was much. To recognize that a man means something, is a great step towards understanding him.
”What a lovely garden this is!” remarked Donal after the sequent pause.
”I have never seen anything like it.”
”It is very old-fas.h.i.+oned,” she returned. ”Do you not find it very stiff and formal?”
”Stately and precise, I should rather say.”
”I do not mean I can help liking it--in a way.”
”Who could help liking it that took his feeling from the garden itself, not from what people said about it!”
”You cannot say it is like nature!”
”Yes; it is very like human nature. Man ought to learn of nature, but not to imitate nature. His work is, through the forms that Nature gives him, to express the idea or feeling that is in him. That is far more likely to produce things in harmony with nature, than the attempt to imitate nature upon the small human scale.”
”You are too much of a philosopher for me!” said Miss Graeme. ”I daresay you are quite right, but I have never read anything about art, and cannot follow you.”
”You have probably read as much as I have. I am only talking out of what necessity, the necessity for understanding things, has made me think. One must get things brought together in one's thoughts, if only to be able to go on thinking.”
This too was beyond Miss Graeme. The silence again fell, and Donal let it lie, waiting for her to break it this time.
CHAPTER XXII.
A TALK ABOUT GHOSTS.
But again he was the first.
They had turned and gone a good way down the long garden, and had again turned towards the house.
”This place makes me feel as I never felt before,” he said. ”There is such a wonderful sense of vanished life about it. The whole garden seems dreaming about things of long ago--when troops of ladies, now banished into pictures, wandered about the place, each full of her own thoughts and fancies of life, each looking at everything with ways of thinking as old-fas.h.i.+oned as her garments. I could not be here after nightfall without feeling as if every walk were answering to unseen feet, as if every tree might be hiding some lovely form, returned to dream over old memories.”
”Where is the good of fancying what is not true? I can't care for what I know to be nonsense!”
She was glad to find a spot where she could put down the foot of contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the neighbours called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt upon everything characterized as superst.i.tion: she had now something to say for herself!
”How do you know it is nonsense?” asked Donald, looking round in her face with a bright smile.
”Not nonsense to keep imagining what n.o.body can see?”
”I can only imagine what I do not see.”
”n.o.body ever saw such creatures as you suppose in any garden! Then why fancy the dead so uncomfortable, or so ill looked after, that they come back to plague us!”
”Plainly they have never plagued you much!” rejoined Donal laughing.
”But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of night?”
”Never once,” answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of indignation.