November, 1915 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



123 



to see a youth, who must understand his local condi- 

 tions and climate, go elsewhere for study, and then 

 return to work out his local problems. It is en- 

 couraging. 



"The old method of the education of the youth 

 by travel had much to recommend it, especially 

 where horticulture and gardening are concerned. 

 I should advise it also for our city officials, so that 

 they would not regard methods of proved value in 

 Paris or Berlin, or Vladivostok as dangerous ex- 

 periments. And he should travel early in his youth, 

 before his opinions become hardened. I am glad 

 that Major Fielding keeps to the old idea and in- 

 sists that his son travel before settling down. But 

 he should send him to Italy, to France. 



" You should travel, Roberta. There's nothing 

 so valuable as what one gets through the eye! 

 Not the printed page, but the vision — the vision!" 

 With that the old gentleman went into his private 

 office. 



"Is it thrue?" asked Michael, when he met Ro- 

 berta in the long packing shed the morning after 

 Fielding's departure. 



"Is what true?" 



"Is it thrue that the long lad has had the sinse to 

 go back to his native swamps?" 



"Mr. Fielding has gone back to South Carolina," 

 said Roberta. 



" Tis well," said Michael with satisfaction. " 'Tis 

 the place — is swamps — f'r the long-legged kind, an' 

 no place at Roseb'ry Gardens f'r lads that buy no 

 plants at all, at all. If he was thrainin' f'r to be a 

 worrkin' gardener — that's one thing he'd larn to buy 

 fr'm the right place; but to larn to grow something 

 to sell to us — I've no use f'r him, nor the like of 

 him!' 



Roberta laughed. " Can't you ever think of trees 

 except to sell them, Michael?" 



"Miss Davenant," he said soberly, "it's — it's pie 

 to me. I don't know what I'd do in Hiven if I 

 couldn't sell trees!" 



"But come," he continued briskly, "come out and 

 see the ardisias! The house is full av them an' 

 you've not looked at them yet!" 



Roberta duly admired the sturdy little plants 

 with their circlets of stiff, shining green leaves held 

 like an umbrella above the smaller circlet of faintly 

 colored berries, placed with that precision that 

 marks so many of the Japanese plants. It required 

 no small amount of skill, in fact, to have the ardisias 

 color at exactly the right time. If they were not 

 vermilion for Christmas, the sale would be lost; if 

 they colored too early, the best" might be passed. 



"Ivery wan of them sold already," said Michael, 

 proudly. "Five hundred to Char-les Frear, five 

 hundred to Mawson — I've the rest all down in me 

 book!" and he pulled it out, and counted them over 

 happily. 



Roberta had not realized how much of color and 

 life Paul Fielding would take with him from Rose- 

 berry Gardens, nor the relief that the young fellow's 

 gladsome presence had been in the prevailing elderly 

 and middle-aged personnel of the place. In the 

 spring, in the riot of color, it was unnoticed; but in 

 the autumn, now that quietness was settling down 

 on the gardens, she missed the dull clatter of his 

 horse's hoofs on the earth road, and the joyous 

 greeting through the window. 



She herself had delighted Roseberry Gardens by 

 her own warmth and color and eagerness, and was 

 all the young life there. Roseberry Gardens had 

 seemed so out of the world, so full of a quiet, dreamy, 

 potent charm of its own, with its elderly workmen 

 and silver haired directors. Her part had been that 

 of Miranda to the Prosperos, while Paul had in- 

 truded as a possible Ferdinand; or she felt a little as 

 Ulysses might have felt, if, while on Calypso's isle, 

 some carrier pigeon had brought him a Grecian news- 

 paper and then, after bringing that much of disturb- 

 ing element, had flown away. Perhaps the truth 

 was, that like most New England young folk, the girl 

 needed a little play. 



But Paul was right about Miss Adelaide. Ro- 

 berta found her constantly engrossed in time tables 

 and pamphlets, and the question of whether the rail 

 or steamer would be the more interesting. The two 

 other aunts — Miss Marcia and Miss Elizabeth — 

 were but fainter, less positive echoes of Miss Adel- 

 laide. 



"Neither Marcia nor Elizabeth would think of 

 traveling," said she. 



"And are you, Aunt Adelaide?" asked Roberta. 



"I have a very courteous letter from Major Field- 

 ing, speaking of our great kindness to his son, and 

 wishing that he might be honored by our presence 

 there at Christmas. He believes that we are re- 

 lated through the Dalrymples. It might be very 

 interesting, very beneficial, and both Major Field- 

 ing and his son seem so anxious for it that I dislike 

 to disappoint them!" said Miss Adelaide, giving, 

 like a true New Englander, every other excuse than 

 her own preference. 



Roberta smiled. "And you wouldn't dislike 

 going? " 



"No, oh no," said her aunt, hastily. "On the 

 contrary it might be most interesting, but both Mar- 

 cia and Elizabeth refuse to go; they say it is too 

 far." 



"You would like me to go with you?" asked Ro- 

 berta, who had something of the business man's 

 liking for plain facts. 



"Well, my dear, you are becoming so used to af- 

 fairs, to shipments and railroads, and the like, that 

 I should feel quite safe with you." 



"I'll do what you wish, Aunt Adelaide," said Ro- 

 berta who also was New Englander enough to feel it 

 necessary to dress a pleasure in the sheep's clothing 

 of a duty, in order that it might stand at the right 

 hand. 



" But there's no need whatever of deciding at once, 

 except that I must answer Major Fielding's letter. 

 A very charming letter," she remarked, taking it 

 up and holding it carefully as she left the room. 

 "I shall use my gilt-edged paper to answer it and 

 the Davenant seal." 



Chapter XXII 



The young secretary could have been seen the 

 next day, coming home a bit early. She walked 

 rapidly down the path beside the plantations and 

 more slowly down the elm-fringed street. At the 

 Davenant house she closed the gate softly, went up 

 the narrow cobblestone path, opened the door 

 quietly — it was never locked for nobody locked doors 

 in Meadowport — and stepped into the dusk of the 

 wide, dim hall. 



For a reason she could not explain, she closed the 

 door softly, went softly through the wide hall which 

 ran straight through the house, and out the door on 

 the other side where a broad grassed terrace' over- 

 looked the river. 



Davenant House had always reminded Roberta 

 of her aunts, and her aunts of the house. She never 

 was quite sure whether it had taken its color and 

 atmosphere from them, or they from it. There was 

 the same handsome, but rather grimly forbidding 

 aspect of the street-side, the conventional side. 

 Heavily shaded was the house by two great maples 

 set too close. And then, past the somewhat clois- 

 tral dimness of the hall, was the sunny pleasantness 

 of the broad terrace open to the morning sun, which 

 one who knew the house only from the street would 

 never have suspected. The garden was lik,e Ro- 

 berta — utterly unrelated and apart. 



The terrace, twenty feet wide and running the 

 whole length of the house, was more Southern than 

 New England in character. It was defined by a low 

 box hedge and a broad, flagged path ran down the 

 centre. At one end were huge lilac bushes, at the 

 other house corner a grapevine sent one branch 

 around for decoration, while its other did its proper 

 duty as arbor by the kitchen door. The terrace was 

 one of the many traces Roberta's' mother had left. 

 Before her coming the rear of the house had been 

 completely ungraced — only a slope of uncared-for 

 grass cut by a straggling footpath. She had won 

 the terrace, not by insistence of a right, but, as she 

 usually won things, by coaxing. 



"Anything you like," Robert Davenant had said. 

 "Turn the old house upside down. I daresay it 

 will like it. But do it without upsetting Adelaide; 

 she's a dear old thing, but hates changes." 



And Margery had laughed. "I'm the most ra- 

 dical change she could possibly have — and she does 

 not hate me, Robert! A terrace is mild beside me, 

 she won't mind; she'll let me cut the southeast 

 window down to a French window, so you can al- 

 most let the roses in to breakfast with us! You New 

 Englanders keep flowers at such a distance! " 



"There'll be hardly any difference at all, Ade- 

 laide," she had urged. "Only two steps down in- 

 stead of a slope — and you'll like it, Adelaide! And 



when the little fellow comes," — she had been sure her 

 baby was a boy — "he will trot up and down under 

 your window, and look up at you and laugh, and you 

 will say, 'Robin, don't step off the flagging until the 

 grass is dry!' just as you say to me. But I'm ter- 

 ribly afraid, if there's some bright colored flower over 

 by the hedge, he will toddle over after it in spite 

 of that!" For Mrs. Robert Davenant had had a 

 vivid and pictorial imagination. 



So the traditional downstairs bedroom w 7 as 

 changed into a sunny little breakfast room, and on 

 warm June mornings the roses over the French 

 window almost did come in for breakfast, and under 

 the house windows were poet's narcissus and tulips, 

 and later tall hollyhocks which looked in sociably at 

 the windows. 



"I shall teach the little fellow to say 'good morn- 

 ing' to that very friendly hollyhock, Robert," — a 

 great rose-colored one that crooked its stalk to look 

 in. "You've no idea on what very intimate terms 

 flowers will be if you let them!" 



And she would make her husband choose a rose 

 to take with him to his dingy, musty Main Street 

 office, by way of talisman. "It's better than a rab- 

 bit's foot," she would say. 



She would have a small table moved out on the 

 terrace, and breakfast there with her husband with 

 the elderly lilacs and the friendly roses for observers, 

 and coax a socially inclined squirrel until he would 

 almost come to her chair for bits. 



Which things were unheard of in Meadowport, 

 and would have worried it sorely, but Meadowport, 

 fortunately, could not look through the old house 

 to the sunny terrace nor around the corner of the lilac 

 bushes. But it all charmed Robert Davenant. 

 Like most New Englanders he had no idea how much 

 of poetry and charm could be put into the so-called 

 common things, and felt as if, in his House of Life, 

 he had been living all these years with shades drawn 

 down and shutters closed, with no knowledge of the 

 sunshine and flowers outside until this sudden open- 

 ing of them to its radiance. 



But the sunshine had gone from the terrace when 

 Roberta stepped out on it that afternoon — it only 

 touched the tops of the lilac bushes. "Margery's 

 terrace," her aunts always called it, and the girl 

 thought, as she had often thought before, that it 

 was a lovely thing to have left through all these years 

 so definite an impress of a blithe personality. Ro- 

 berta had never known her mother, but for the first 

 time she felt a bit lonely without her. The aunts, 

 kind as they were, seemed as apart from life, from 

 the vivid, active, joyous, pulsating life, as if they 

 were pictures on the wall. Her mother, dead these 

 nineteen years, seemed more vital. 



The girl walked with her quick, sure, noiseless 

 step along the smooth-clipped grass, down the 

 broad steps by the lilac bushes, across the lawn 

 shaded by great elms, and opened the white-painted 

 gate and passed into the garden, down the long centre 

 path between the rows of ardent marigolds to the 

 little Jatticed summer house at its foot. She sat down 

 and looked across the garden — dwarf fruit trees 

 framed it on the side toward Major Pomerane's place 

 — toward the orchard, by a long, low grape-arbor, 

 where now the vines were hung with heavy, ripening 

 clusters. The garden itself lay all gold and purple 

 in the late September sunshine, rows of ardent mari- 

 golds, late larkspurs sending up a secondary bloom 

 and already seeding, tall, straggling Michaelmas 

 daisies in royal purple over by the dwarf apples 

 which showed crimson through their foliage. 



But Roberta was not thinking of the garden; her 

 mind was off and away at Paradise Park, and over 

 and over in her head she was turning the question — 

 to go, or not. Much of it fascinated and called her, 

 and yet she knew perfectly, with that inside knowl- 

 edge that women have, that down there, Paul 

 Fielding would speak more definitely. Did she wish 

 him to? That was the question. If she didn't, 

 ought she to go? 



A swallow flew in and out again of the little arbor, 

 on seeing the intruder. Her eyes rested on the op- 

 posite bench; an inch- worm was slowly and uncon- 

 cernedly measuring his way across, looking neither 

 to the right nor to the left. The girl pushed back 

 her hair with an impatient gesture — why need one 

 look across and beyond, and around the corner? 

 "It's not my fault if I have a notion of what may 

 happen," she said to herself. 



(To be concluded) 



