Part 14 (1/2)

”Not that I don't care very much for the purple ones,” said Aubrey; ”they are most beautiful flowers, most beautiful; but it's wild in woods, that I like best to see them. It will be a business to replant; dear me! It took me a day of hard work to establish my white ones in that haphazard-looking little colony down there.”

”Gardening is all hard work,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, ”and all disappointment, for the most part, too. It's only the things you didn't expect to succeed that ever do, and any effect you particularly count on is pretty sure to fail you.” She tempered her grimness by a slight, bleak smile, however, for she and Aubrey Westmacott understood each other and had the gardener's soul, for which no work is too hard and no disappointments too many.

”It will be very wonderful to have the intervals of pink to look forward to, though,” Aubrey found the atonement. ”They are singularly lovely, aren't they? Will you think me very silly, now, I wonder, or sillier than you always think me?”

”I don't think you silly, my dear Aubrey,” Mrs. Pomfrey interposed, ”only guileless; you are very guileless; I've thought that ever since you were taken in by that dreadful cook of yours, who had red hair, and got drunk and rubbed the whitebait through a sieve.”

”Well,” Aubrey continued, smiling his gentle, tentative smile, ”my foxgloves, at all events, can't take me in, and since they are so very unusual and so lovely I thought I'd ask a few people in to-day to see them. The Carews, you know, and Barton, and Mrs. and Miss Pickering. And you--if you can come. I'll put it off till to-morrow, if that will secure you, only the foxgloves may not be quite so lovely by then.”

”I will come with pleasure, my dear Aubrey,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, ”and though n.o.body will appreciate your foxgloves as you do, we shall all enjoy your tea.”

”Miss Pickering cares very much for flowers, you know, very much. We've talked a great deal about flowers,” said Aubrey, swinging his eyegla.s.s and nodding as he looked at his old friend.

”Does she? She doesn't know much about 'em though.”

”No; all those years in India, and in towns. She has lived so much in towns. Such an inappropriate life it seems for such an exquisite creature.”

”Does it?” said Mrs. Pomfrey. She added after a moment, as if with concession, ”She is a very pretty girl.”

Aubrey Westmacott was not acute. ”Isn't she?” he said eagerly. ”A beautiful and n.o.ble and lovely head, isn't it? like a flower; she is altogether like a flower, with her slenderness and height. Do you know,”

he went on, swinging his gla.s.ses more quickly, while he kept his ingenuous eyes on his friend, ”can you guess the flower she makes me think of? In that pale pink dress, that pink dress she wore the other day at the rectory garden party, and with that white hat lined with pink. Can you guess?” His eyes overflowed with their suggestion.

Mrs. Pomfrey moved hers from his face to the foxgloves. ”Like those, I suppose you mean.”

”_Isn't_ she?” he repeated. ”Now, isn't it quite remarkable? You see it, too.”

”Yes; I see it,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. She studied the flowers and again, after a deliberating pause, went on, ”Do you think Mrs. Pickering is like purple foxgloves?”

Aubrey's eyegla.s.s tumbled from his hand. He was astonished, almost indignant. ”Mrs. Pickering?”

”She looks like her daughter,” said Mrs. Pomfrey; ”as much like her, that is, as a purple foxglove looks like a pink one.”

”I can imagine nothing more unlike a flower than Mrs. Pickering,” said Aubrey, with gathered repudiation.

”No; certainly; she's not at all like a flower. She's more like a sparrow--something sharp and commonplace and civic. I only intended an a.n.a.logy, for she must have been a very pretty girl.”

”Nothing could be less sharp or commonplace or civic than Miss Pickering.” Aubrey was now deeply flushed.

”Oh, of course not, my dear Aubrey; she is very unusual looking,” Mrs.

Pomfrey again conceded. ”And she is tall and her mother is short. Old Colonel Pickering, too, was tall, I remember. I saw him once or twice when they were living at Cheltenham the year before he died! a bleached, dull, oppressed old man, a much better type than the wife; she ruled him, I heard, with a rod of iron. One may be sure that she doesn't rule Miss Leila. She is a young lady with a will of her own, unless I am much mistaken in her.”

”A will of her own; yes, yes”--Aubrey eagerly, pathetically to Mrs.

Pomfrey's ear, gathered up the ambiguous fragments--”and great firmness of will; great decision of character; and the serenity, you know, the sweet dignity that go with it, that so often go with it. You have noticed her serenity, her dignity. And she is very silent--a great contrast to her mother. I often wonder what brought them here. It's very fortunate for all of us; but Mrs. Pickering is, as you say, so civic, yes, so commonplace, that I don't understand what she can find in this quiet place to please her. She certainly doesn't care about her garden.

Those beds about The Cottage are very distressing; they distress Miss Pickering.”

”It's quite clear to me why they came,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. ”They can't afford London, and, I suppose, know n.o.body there if they could; and there is more chance of a pretty girl like Miss Leila marrying well here than there is in Cheltenham. She doesn't hunt, it's true; but the hunting makes a difference, and there is a good deal going on in one way and another. Mrs. Pickering hoped to capture Arthur Barton; she made that very evident. But he has never looked at another woman since his wife died, and never will, I imagine; at all events, he didn't look at Miss Leila.”

Aubrey's eyes, dwelling on her, expressed reprobation and almost horror.

”She tried to marry her daughter to Barton! That lovely child and Barton! What a terrible woman!”