Part 16 (1/2)

But Dan'l grumbled, as gardeners will.

”Blights is offle,” he said. ”It's the blightiest garden I ever see, and a man might spend all his life keeping the birds down with a gun.”

But Dan'l did not spend any part of his life, let alone all, keeping the birds down with a gun. The doctor caught him shooting one day, and nearly shot him out of the place.

”How dare you, sir?” he cried. ”I will not have a single bird destroyed.”

”Then you won't get no peace, sir, nor not a bit of fruit.”

”I shall have the place overrun with slugs and snails, and all kinds of injurious blight, sir, if you use that gun. No, sir, you'll put nets over the fruit when it's beginning to ripen. That will do.”

The doctor walked away with Helen, and as soon as they were out of sight, behind the great laurustinus clump, Helen threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him for saving her pet birds.

Consequently, in addition to abundance of fruit, and although it was so close in the town, there was always a chorus of song in the season; and even the nightingale came from the woodlands across the river and sang within the orchard, through which the river ran.

That river alone half made the place, for it was one of those useless rivers, so commercial men called it, where the most you could do was pleasure-boating; barges only being able to ascend to Coleby Bridge, a sort of busy colony from the town, two miles nearer the sea.

”Yes, sir,” Sir James Danby had been known to say, ”if the river could be deepened right through the town it would be the making of the place.”

”And the spoiling of my grounds,” said the doctor, ”so I'm glad it runs over the solid rock.”

This paradise of a garden was the one into which Dexter darted, and in which Dan'l Copestake was grumbling that morning--

”Like a bear with a sore head, that's what I say,” said Peter Cribb to the under-gardener. ”Nothing never suits him.”

”Yes, it do,” said Dan'l, showing a very red face over a clump of rhododendron. ”Master said you was to come into the garden three days a week, and last week I only set eyes on you twice, and here's half the week gone and you've only been once.”

”Look here,” said Peter Cribb, a hard-looking bullet-headed man of five-and-twenty; and he leaned on his broom, and twisted one very tightly trousered leg round the other, ”do you think I can sit upon the box o' that there wagginette, drivin' miles away, and be sweeping this here lawn same time!”

”Master said as it was your dooty to be in this garden three days a week; and t'other three days you was to do your stable-work--there.”

”Didn't I go out with the carriage every day this week?”

”I don't know when you went out with the carriage, and when you didn't,”

said Dan'l; ”all I know is as my lawn didn't get swept; and how the doctor expects a garden like this here to be kept tidy without help, I should be glad to know.”

”Well, you'd better go and grumble at him, and not worry me, and--pst!

Lookye there.”

He pointed with his broom, and both men remained paralysed at the sight which met their eyes.

It was not so much from its extraordinary nature as from what Dan'l afterwards spoke of as its ”imperence.” That last, he said, was what staggered him, that any human boy should, in the very middle of the day, dare to do such a thing in his garden.

He said _his_ garden, for when speaking of it the doctor seemed to be only some one who was allowed to walk through it for a treat.

What the two men gazed at was the figure of a boy, in s.h.i.+rt and trousers, going up the vinery roof, between where the early and the late houses joined and there was a sloping brick coping. From this they saw him reach the big wall against which the vinery was built, and there he sat for a few moments motionless.

”Why, who is he?” said Peter, in a whisper. ”He went up that vinery just like a monkey.”

Peter had never seen a monkey go up the roof of a vinery, but Dan'l did not notice that.