CHAPTER VI
Inan affair of this kind it is best to keep one's own counsel. I find it necessary to warn myself in this fashion, for it has ever been that women have found an easy prey in me. I know, moreover, that Bellwattle is already curious of my confusion at breakfast. What she thinks it would be impossible to say; but that she has finally made up her mind about it, of that I am certain. Such a child of Nature as she is must have instinct alive in her to her finger-tips.
Doubtless, she imagines I am in love. Without the shadow of a doubt, she believes a woman to be in some way concerned. For here it is that women think more elementally, more simply and, therefore, nearer to the truth than their brothers. There is nothing that a lonely man can do, but what a woman will trace therein the influence of her sex. And it is damnable to have to admit it, but she is right.
Now with Cruikshank, whose mind is for ever working in complicated theories about the grafting of roses and who, in his day at Oxford, was thought well of as a mathematician, with him and his highly elaborated intelligence, I know that I could trust myself all day. I might lead him a thousand times in the direction of Clarissa's prison, and he would never adjust the facts to a definite assumption of my behavior. It would not be so with Bellwattle.
As I left them after breakfast in the morning-room, Cruikshank said to me, "You know, I'm glad you thought of coming over for the fishing. From something I heard yesterday I believe we're going to have some fish up the stream after all."
I echoed most heartily that I was glad of it, and I left the room. But outside the door I stopped. There was a broad passage leading down to the hall door which stood wide open, and through a break in the trees, where stretched in the distance a sea of emerald, there stood the blood-brown sail of a Kerry fishing-boat. I stopped to watch it, flapping its wings in an idle breeze like a tortoise-shell butterfly in a green meadow. Then, as I suppose, thinking I had departed altogether, I heard Bellwattle's voice within the room.
"I like him very much," said she, for which silently I thanked her from the bottom of my heart. "But," she added, "what a pity he's so ugly."
Now, if there be those who do not follow from this how I knew that she had connected me at once in her mind with the mystery of some woman, I must leave it unexplained for the benefit of those who do. To give it words were to tangle it a thousand times. It is far too dainty for that.
I walked on then out into the garden, wandering up this path, down that. Everywhere there were those little sticks, neatly written on, marking the spots where seeds were in the earth. I picked up one and read it—"Sweet Pea—Lady Grizel Hamilton"—and all about that spot there was a cluster of little Lady Grizels, neat and clean in their tiny fresh green pinafores. Next door—for all the world like boys and girls at a country National school—stood a crowd of sturdy, young Lord Nelsons. Upon my soul I should not have known which was which had it not been for the kindly information of those little slips of wood directing me.
And then it suddenly occurred to me how strange it was, how dearly does all humanity cling to life; for whereas in God's Acre the little slips of wood mark out the places where the dead lie buried, it is not so with man. In that little acre which, with such simple vanity, he calls his own, his garden, a man will plant his tiny slips of wood to mark the spot where life is hidden for a while; hidden, only to come forth and blossom for his happiness. When, then, I had thought so far as that, there came with a rush into my mind the words in Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird," "There are no dead," and suddenly I saw it all.
The body of a man holds a seed. Through life it ripens, as all seeds do. Then, when the sun has parched it dry and you would say "there is no life in it"; then comes the hand of God to lay it in the earth once more that it may flower again.
In a strange, weird picture, then, I saw a vision of the Lady Grizel Hamilton planting a seed of the sweet pea of her name. With gentle, loving fingers she laid it in her garden's acre, and in the warm brown mould she placed a slip of wood, washed white with lime, on which she wrote—"The Lady Grizel Hamilton."
That vision passed, and then I saw the hand of God stretch forth and take the gentle lady in His grasp. With fingers just as tender, He laid her in a corner of His acre and, whitening a little cross of stone, He wrote—"The Lady Grizel Hamilton."
"Can it be that there is philosophy in the very air of this country?" thought I to myself, and then, before the fancy of it vanished quite away, I said the name again. I must have said it aloud. "The Lady Grizel Hamilton," said I, and looking up, I saw Cruikshank on the other side of the bed smiling at me.
"Picking out the best?" said he. "The Lady Grizel is a wonderful pale mauve."
"Are these little mites of things going to bear a mauve flower?"
"Are they going to bear baskets full of them?" he said. "Baskets and baskets full! Wait till you see them when they're standing as high as my arm can reach."
"You're boasting," said I.
"I'm not, on my oath. I stand six foot, and they come high above my head. In these beds here, with this aspect, I can grow the best sweet peas in the South of Ireland."
"Go on," said I, "I like to hear it. No man's a gardener until he can say his garden is the best. It's the colossal and superb self-satisfaction of the creation all over again. You find it all good. And they would say man was not made in God's image! What color does Lord Nelson wear?"
"A faint blue."
"Good—and Black Knight?"
"Oh, a most wonderful deep black scarlet."
"Out of that little tuft of green!"
I looked up and found his eyes were watching me.
"Why do you ask?" he said. "You're not a gardener."
I agreed I was not.
"I want to get at your philosophy," said I.
"I'm not a philosopher," he replied; "I'm a gardener."
"But what do you get out of it?"
He pointed down to the little Lady Grizels in their green pinafores.
"Nothing else?"
He took out a pocket-knife and cut a little twig from a standard rose tree, cut it off just above a tiny red shoot that was thrusting itself forth from the bare, dry wood.
"Preparing a garden," said he, "is like laying the foundations of a perfect city. Every path is a street, every bush is a dwelling-place, every flower is a beautiful being. Sometimes it seems like that. And sometimes it seems like an adventure of Sinbad the Sailor, an engrossing business of dealing with the earth for the treasures she holds. You don't know what colors there are in that dull brown mould until you come to drop into it a little withered seed the size of a pin's head, a magnet, drawing out of the ground colors that no artist would have the courage to mix upon his palette. A little while ago I pruned the rose trees of the front of the house. It was a blazing hot day. I had to get a ladder and lean it up against the wall. When I climbed up the ladder there was a warm breath of air, coming from the bricks, and when I stretched out, leaning right up against it, seeing all those young shoots of the rose tree just bursting with life, it was like leaning up against the world and knowing that the whole scheme of things was perfect."
He had still more to say. I could see that the whole heart of him was full of it, but suddenly he stopped in confusion.
"What did you make me talk like that for?" he asked.
"Just for what I wanted to know," said I. "Your philosophy. It proves what I always believe."
"What's that?"
"Philosophy's not a matter of expediency. You don't evolve a philosophy to help you through life; life evolves it for you, and the only philosophy that counts is one of beauty. But there's something more beautiful than sweet peas."
"I quite agree," said Cruikshank. "I much prefer lilies myself."
"I was thinking of human beings," said I, and at that moment came Bellwattle out of the house.
"Now," I asked her, "what's the most beautiful thing in the world?"
She heard not a single word of my question, but she answered it nevertheless.
"Where's Dandy?" said she.
Upon my soul, I don't know which of us is right.