Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Before the tulip petals have fallen, the peonies have opened out great heavy heads of flowers that can’t keep upright. The scarlet oriental poppies with their blue-black centres make masses of colour that have to be kept very much to themselves or they kill every other flower within reach; these are therefore planted near the clumps of white irises, and the deep blue and pure white perennial lupins, that make a beautiful show all down one border.

Speaking of lupins reminds me of the tree-lupins. Virginia brought some harmless-looking little plants with her one year, remembering my love for lupins.

“These are tree-lupins,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t know what they will grow into, but the man said they were just like lupins, only much more so; therefore I bought them. Don’t blame _me_ if they die.”

She planted them comfortably and cosily in a bed along with white foxgloves and pink pentstemons, all the members of this happy family looking about the same size.

The following year when Virginia visited the cottage she asked, “Where are my tree-lupins?” She was shown great bushes each the size of a round dining-table, and each holding aloft hundreds of yellow spikes, and filling the air with the scent of a bean-field. There were the tree-lupins all right! But where were the foxgloves and pentstemons?

* * * * *

Perhaps you think there must be large, dull spaces when the wallflowers cease blooming, but in between the wallflower plants are others coming on, and by the time the wallflowers have finished—and are ready to be pulled up—these beds are filling with sweet williams and snapdragons. The young plants were there, and they come into bloom as the wallflowers finish. And then, where only a short time before there were beds all purples and yellows and browns, you have now reds and pinks and every shade of rosy tint that the bright eyes of the sweet williams can produce.

The snapdragons once played a joke on the garden. I was ordering some seeds from Sutton’s, and said, “I want some very hardy snapdragons, that will stand being planted in the windiest part of the garden where nothing of any height will grow.” The seeds were guaranteed to grow in the most uprooting of hurricanes.

In due time the seedlings appeared above ground, and Ursula devoted several back-aching evenings to planting them out into the windswept beds. By the middle of the following summer those jaunty snapdragons had each grown six feet high, and there, waving in that exposed place, where any well-conducted plant would have sternly refused to grow more than a foot high, was a plantation of great flowers, each tied to a stout stake like hollyhocks, and the blooms seemed to have outgrown their normal size just as the rest of the plants had done.

Of course, people came from ever so far to gaze at these snapdragons; and unbelievers surreptitiously pulled out tape-measures and two-foot rules, and one and all, after meditating seriously on the subject, and looking at it from all points of view, would finally shake their heads and say, “Well, I’ll just tell you what it is—the place evidently suits them.” We never got any further than that!

By every law and reason known to properly-trained gardeners and horticulturists, this garden ought to be able to produce nothing but low-growing flowers and shrubs. Every local resident kindly volunteered this information directly he or she set eyes on the cottage; they said it was too high up, too bleak in winter, too exposed, too dry, too rocky, or too glaringly sunny—for anything above six inches high to have a chance in it.

And yet Nature goes on laughing at the pessimists, and so do those who tend this flower-patch. And the columbines, yellow, pink, pale blue, purple, and white, send up tall heads of flower. The coreopsis plants grow so big and bushy they have to be staked. The cornflowers, a streak of blue at the end of the cabbage bed, are taller than the broad beans adjoining. Then there are the hollyhocks and the larkspurs—these hold their heads as high as anyone could desire, and the tall red salvias are not far behind. The foxgloves are also a brave sight (though I do not include in this category those that are buried under the tree-lupins!).

Of course, there are low-growing things in the garden as well as the more lofty-minded. There is one bed that is a ramping mass of giant mimulus of various colours. Convolvulus minor spreads about the ground in one of the white lily beds; and eschscholtzias cover the earth for another row of lilies. Pansies rove about at their own sweet will in this garden, and the old-fashioned white pinks and the pink variety spread themselves out over the big stones that edge the borders.

The mignonette bed has a row of lavenders at the side, and mounds of nasturtiums grow where the earth is too rocky and barren to support anything else.

Naturally, there are hedges of sweet peas; sometimes they are heavy with flowers, sometimes the slugs or birds settle the matter at the beginning of the season. One hedge runs along at the back of the herb garden, and the herbs have so spread themselves out that the sweet peas were getting swamped. Virginia has been cutting them back.

Do you know what the scent of cut herbs is like on a hot summer day, with sweet peas in the background? In this herb garden there is sage, with its lovely blue flowers, lemon thyme, silver thyme, savory, hyssop, lavender, rosemary, rue, balm, marjoram, black peppermint, spearmint and parsley.

In this bed also grows the old-time bergamot, with its heavily-scented leaves and lovely tufts of crimson flowers.

But though one part of the garden is set apart for herbs and another for vegetables, you must not imagine that they are only to be found there. Fine clumps of parsley have planted themselves in among the annual larkspurs; mint persists in running riot among the pink and white mallows (but the mint family never remains quietly at home); a sturdy scarlet runner comes up, year after year, beside a great bush of gum cistus, which makes me think it might be treated as a perennial; it seems impossible to get the artichokes to part company with the Michaelmas daisies, while raspberry canes shoot up among the old-fashioned red fuchsia bushes; radishes are flourishing like the green bay-tree underneath the sweetbriar; a regiment of pickling onions is living on most neighbourly terms with a row of cup-and-saucer Canterbury bells; and as for rhubarb—well, what can you expect when one man, whom I employed for a brief spell, remarked:

“You’ll see where I’ve put in that thur special rubbub, miss, because I’ve planted a traveller’s joy a-top of he to mark the spot.”

* * * * *

Cupid’s Border is another section of this garden that may interest you. Here you naturally find Love-in-a-mist and Love-lies-bleeding. The flowers which the country folks call Love-lockets dangle pink and white from their graceful curving stems; (alas, in catalogues and places where they know, this plant is merely regarded as dielytra). In this border you of course find forget-me-nots “that grow for happy lovers”; bachelor’s buttons, too, hold up their heads in a very sprightly manner, and please notice that they are getting nearer and nearer to the clump of Sweet Betsy. But the bachelor’s buttons have a rival, for the other side of Sweet Betsy stands lad’s love—and though not so showy as the bachelor’s buttons, lad’s love claims to be of more solid worth. I leave them to settle the matter between themselves, however; I’m not one to interfere in such affairs.

At the other side of the border stands a maiden’s blush rose, and gallantly waving beside it is a clump of Prince’s Feather (sometimes referred to in common parlance as “they laylock bushes”). At the edge of the border you naturally find heartsease, not the stiff, over-developed article of modern flower-shows, but the old-fashioned sort, all streaks and splashes of rich purple and yellow.

There is no time now to go round the vegetable garden—not that this can be regarded as an entirely separate part of the estate, for the vegetables have got mixed up in a terribly haphazard way with the rest of things, as I hinted just now. The potato-plot, for instance, has a border of golden wallflowers all round and double daisies at the edge, with a row of giant sunflowers, hollyhocks, and clumps of honesty at the back.

This mixture is partly in the nature of a compromise. The gentleman who wields the spade has to be taken into account. No matter who he is, no matter how often he discharges me and I have to beg yet someone else to “oblige” me, it is always the same, the tiller of the soil regards space given over to flowers as a grievous waste, not to say an indication of feeble-mindedness! Therefore he inserts a row of vegetables or seeds whenever I happen to have cleared out some flowering plants and left a morsel of space _pro tem._ It seems a prevailing idea among the non-qualified working classes, in rural districts, that the cultivation of flowers ranks about on a level with doing the washing—work derogatory to a man and only fit for women!

To the credit of the handy man I must say that on one occasion he did kindly present me with a load of pig manure. He put it on the flower garden the day before we arrived, as a pleasant surprise, which it certainly was! Next day we all had relatives with broken legs, who needed our immediate return to town.

* * * * *

Nevertheless the vegetables play their part, and assume no small importance, in due course; for it is another unwritten law of this cottage that visitors shall go out and select the day’s vegetables, and cut them with the dew on; of course, if they are superlatively lazy, they can meanly get some early riser to do it for them; also they can confer together, or each can gather her own choice.

Hence you will see Virginia or Ursula in a large hat that is all brim, with basket on arm, and wearing an apron (not a lacy, frilly muslin thing, but a good-sized, well-made, old-fashioned lilac print apron), going up the garden and gathering broad beans, cutting young cauliflowers, or “curly greens,” or turnip tops, or a marrow, forking up potatoes, pulling carrots, collecting lettuces, spring onions, cress and other salading—all according to the season.

And if it should chance that you have never yourself put on a big apron, and cut your own vegetables before the dew is off them, then Virginia will be truly sorry for you.

* * * * *

There is plenty of time to be lazy, however; and a hot summer day means long leisure in this garden; for when the sun is high the brown pitcher rests (though the brown teapot does not) until the fir-trees throw shadows from the west.

All day you can sit in the shade at the bottom of the garden, looking up the hill at the wonderful mass of colour before you. Along the ridge of the cottage roof perches a row of swallows, chirping and chattering in their usual way. The starlings, who have built under the tiles, are ordering their respective families to cease clamouring for more, explaining that hunting caterpillars is hot work. Most other birds are quiet when the sun is fiercest, but over all the garden there is the hum, hum of thousands of industrious bees, while literally hundreds of white butterflies keep up a perpetual flutter over the tall blue spikes of bloom on the lavender bushes.

Even the small white dog with the brown ears ceases to tear about the garden, and bark at nothing in a consequential way; he just lies down on the edge of somebody’s dress, and hangs out a little pink tongue for air.

This is the time when the flower-patch among the hills spells REST.

An old woman passing up the lane a few nights ago paused at the gate. “How them pinnies do blow, miss!” she said, gazing admiringly at a clump of peonies. Then she added—

“Ain’t it strange, now, that it do take a woman to make a flower garden? A man ain’t no good at that; he simply can’t help hisself a-running to veg’tables!”

But after thinking this over, and despite all that strong-minded womankind tells me to the contrary, I cannot really believe that there is such total depravity in the other sex!

VI

That Jane Price!

WHEN Abigail announced, “Mrs. Price says can you spare a minute to see her, please, ma’am,” you would have known by the toss of her nose that the lady-caller was not very _nearly_ related to the aristocracy.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Price, or “that Jane Price,” as she is more usually styled, is held in no great esteem in our village. Yet everything is said to fulfil some useful purpose, and if Mrs. Price does nothing else, at least she and her family serve as conspicuous moral warnings and give us something to throw up our hands about at intervals, when we exclaim:

“_Did_ you EVER!!”

She is a widow of ample and well-fed proportions, owning her cottage, some bees and a pig, and apparently getting a fairly good living out of doing remarkably little sewing. If, under a mistaken sense of duty, you strive to encourage local industry, and seek to engage her services, she has to consider before she consents to undertake the bit of sewing you offer her to do, at three times the amount you would have to pay for having it done in town. And as often as not she replies that she “really _can’t_ oblige you” this time, as she’s got a “spell” on cruel bad, that has gone all down her back to her knees, making her head feel nohow.

You turn away not even worried about her condition, since she seems as cheerful as a daisy and as comfortably complacent as a cow. And you also know, even though you may have been acquainted with the lady only a few months, that however cruel the spell may be, and however long it may last and prevent her working, her children will be some of the most elaborately dressed in the Sunday school, and from the cottage door there will radiate the most appetising of odours as regularly as the mealtimes come round.

How it is that she manages to do so well with so little visible means of subsistence, only a stranger would stop to inquire. The residents know only too well that her pockets are large; that the shawl she invariably wears on weekdays has voluminous folds; that her carrying and stowing-away capacity is almost worthy of a professional conjurer. Kleptomania (to give it as refined a name as we can) is her besetting sin. Unfortunately her family follow in her footsteps.

Mrs. Price seems to have a positive gift for turning everything to profitable account; and her methods of raising money are as ingenious as they are varied.

Knowing her idiosyncrasies, I asked Abigail where she was at the moment.

“In the kitchen, sitting in my wicker easy-chair,” Abigail replied, still with elevated nose. “She just walked right in and plumped herself down.”

Whereupon I indicated, by dumb pantomime, that she was on no account to be left there without personal oversight; and Abigail intimated, by means of nods and becks and wreathèd scowls, that she was keeping her left eye on the visitor, over her shoulder, even while she was talking to me. We both knew that all was fish that came to Mrs. Price’s net, and she would negotiate with absolute impartiality a piece of soap, a duster, or a half-crown, should they lie in her way.

* * * * *

Not long before, Miss Bretherton, the Rector’s niece, a middle-aged lady who keeps house for him, had tried to give one of the Price girls—Esmeralda by name—a good start in life, taking her into the rectory kitchen. But things disappeared with such alarming rapidity during the first month she was in residence, that she had to be sent back home again.

She left on a Saturday after middle-day dinner. In the afternoon the house was observing the all-pervading quiet that was customary on Saturdays while the Rector was in his study preparing for Sunday.

Miss Bretherton, requiring something in the dining-room that adjoined the study, went in on tiptoe so as not to disturb him, when, to her amazement, she came upon the discharged Esmeralda sitting on the floor beside an open sideboard cupboard where some jars of pickles were stored, ladling out pickled walnuts as fast as she could into one of the maternal pudding basins. Seeing Miss Bretherton, she just picked up her basin, walnuts and all, and hastily retired the same way that she had come, through the French window.

Now, obviously her ex-mistress—over fifty years of age and liable to rheumatism—couldn’t chase after her in house-slippers and minus a bonnet, seeing it was raining; so the bereft lady just closed the sideboard door and communed with her own feelings, womanfully stifling her desire to burst into the study and tell the Rector about it, even though it was his Saturday silence time.

Next morning, Sunday, just as she was buttoning her gloves, preparatory to crossing the rectory lawn by the short cut to the church, the cook came to her with the agitated inquiry: Had the mistress done anything with the leg of mutton left by the butcher yesterday morning?

No, of course not! Why should she? etc.

Well, they hunted high and they hunted low, and the church bell gave its final peremptory clang when they were still hunting, but no leg of mutton was found either in the master’s boot cupboard, or under the bed in the spare room, or in the bookcase in the library, or in the woodshed, or in any other of the equally likely places which they searched. Indeed, no one had ever expected that it would be found once its absence was discovered; they just looked darkly at each other and murmured, “That Esmeralda, of course.” Cook declares that her mistress added “the good-for-nothing baggage” under her breath; but I can’t credit that of Miss Bretherton, who always manages to maintain a wonderful calm and self-restraint under the most trying circumstances.

At any rate, she told cook they must have fried ham and eggs for dinner—if you ever heard of such a thing on a Sunday at the rectory! and the Archdeacon of Saskatchewan preaching in the morning on behalf of the C.M.S. too!

Moreover, Miss Bretherton was ten minutes late for church, a thing never known before in the memory of the oldest inhabitant; and then, still more remarkable, instead of waiting to speak to people after church, she set off at a terrific pace for Mrs. Price’s cottage, and walked in to find the kitchen full of a delightful aroma, and a fine leg of mutton just being taken from the roasting-jack by Esmeralda and placed on the table, which was already adorned with a saucer containing pickled walnuts.

Miss Bretherton knew better than to say, “That’s my leg of mutton.” Our village understands all about “having the law on ’un,” if anyone upsets their feelings in any way. Therefore, swallowing hard, and determining for the hundredth time not to lose her temper, she said, “Where did you get that leg of mutton from, Mrs. Price?”

Had the woman replied, “From the butcher,” that would have been fairly incriminating, because, of course, we don’t require more than one sheep a week for home consumption in the village, and, as everybody knows, each sheep has only two legs, and it wouldn’t require a Sherlock Holmes to track those two legs any week in the year. As it happened, this week’s other leg had gone to my house. Had Mrs. Price claimed it as her own, she would have been undone.

But she was too shrewd for that; she promptly replied, with a look of surprised innocence at such a strange question being asked by Miss Bretherton at such a time—

“That leg of mutton, do you mean, miss?” (as though there was a meat market to choose from!) “Yes; ain’t it a fine one; it weighs seven pound, if it weighs an ounce.” (Miss B. knew that; she had studied the butcher’s ticket only that morning.) “I couldn’t get it into the oven, so we had to roast it afore the fire. I expect you find the kitchen a bit ’ot. But as I was saying” (Miss B. had to press her lips together very hard), “it ain’t often as I get a windfall like this, but my brother-in-law come up to see us yesterday from Penglyn, and he brought it me for a birthday present; that’s why I had to send ’Sm’ralder round to the rectory in the afternoon to fetch my pudding basin as she’d left behind—the one she brought round that day with some new-laid eggs in, what I give her for a present for cook’s mother who were bad.”

Miss Bretherton pressed her lips still tighter, and walked out. She knew the brother-in-law wouldn’t speak to “that Jane” if he met her in the same lane—such was the love between the two families—much less bring her a leg of mutton; besides, he had none too many joints for his own family. She also knew that cook’s mother had not been ill, and if she had, it wouldn’t have been Mrs. Price who would have supplied the new-laid eggs.

But she also knew the futility of attempting to circumvent a woman of this type, and she hated to have her stand there and tell still more untruths, the children hovering round.

So she returned silently, and served the ham and eggs, and listened while the Archdeacon explained the difference between Plain Cree and Swampy Cree (which, he was surprised to find, she had hitherto confused in her mind, or at best regarded as one and the same language) with all the Christian grace and forbearance she could muster.

Only once did this nearly give out, and that was when, after she had apologised to their guest for such frugal fare and had briefly outlined the reason for the same, the Rector looked with his usual absent-minded benignity through his glasses at his plate, and said—

“Well, my dear, I hadn’t noticed any difference: I thought this was what we usually have for dinner on Sundays.”

Just think of it! And for the Archdeacon to go home and tell his wife! So like a man!

* * * * *

This much as a general survey of Mrs. Price’s characteristics. She doesn’t make an idyllic picture, I admit, nor seem likely to be in the running for a stained glass window in the Parish Room. But then villages no less than towns are made up of varied assortments of human nature—and don’t forget we are none of us perfect.

Nevertheless, making all allowances for human frailty, you don’t wonder that I wasn’t anxious for Mrs. Price to have the free run of my kitchen, and Abigail, remembering that she had left her purse on the dresser, hurried back.

I finished the letter I was writing, and then went out to see her. As I approached, I could hear her:

“‘Sally,’ he says, ‘don’t let the kids fergit me,’ and then ’e was gone. It’s this new disease they’ve got from America—the ‘germs,’ they calls it—and they do say as ’e makes a beautiful corpse, though I shouldn’t never have thought it of ’e, the Prices being none of them pertickerlelly well favoured, even if he was me own pore husband’s brother. But thur, thur, I say speak nothing but good of them what’s gone.”

She rose when I appeared, and, with a good deal of side-tracking on to irrelevant matters, chiefly connected with the excellence of her own children, she explained that her late husband’s brother had just died “over to Penglyn,” a little town fifteen miles away across the hills, and in a most un-get-at-able corner of the county.

The funeral was to-morrow, and neither she nor the family of the deceased had a scrap of black, “leastways, exceptin’ this bonnet, which don’t look really respeckful to ’im as is gone, being me own husband’s own brother.” I admit the item that had been placed upon her head—whether for use or adornment it was hard to decide—resembled a jaded hen’s nest more than anything else! The rest of her attire consisted of a green skirt, a crimson blouse, and a very light fawn coat (portions of costumes that had started life in considerably higher social circles in the village), and a purple crochet scarf.

Dimly it occurred to me that I had not seen Mrs. Price in bright colours before, for although she never wore the conventional widow’s weeds, she was usually in something black or dark; the matrons in our village haven’t gone in for skittish skirts or glaring colour-combinations as yet! I concluded, however, that her black clothes were too shabby. She was saying—

“And I didn’t know where to turn, m’m. Everybody saying they hadn’t none when I called, and there didn’t seem to be a soul left to go to, and that pore dear sister-in-law of mine—leastways same as, being me poor husband’s brother’s wife—with not a scrap to put on ’cept his best overcoat what she’s cuttin’ down for one of the boys.

“And then I bethought me of you, it come to me all of a suddint. I put down the pan of ’taters I was peeling and come straight up. ’Sm’ralder says to me, ‘But, mother, you can’t wear that ole bonnet up to _that_ house!’ But I says to her, ‘It’s certain I can’t wear what I haven’t got, and the Queen haven’t sent me one of her done-with crowns yet.’ So I just come as best I could.”

I was a little surprised to hear that she had been refused at every door, for, irrespective of personal reputation, the better-off residents are always very good to any of the villagers who may be in want or in trouble; indeed, we have only one mean woman among us, she who once remarked to a paid lady-companion, newly-arrived from a freezingly cold journey, and badly in need of a cup of tea to eke out her skimpy cold-mutton-bone lunch: “I’m sure you will enjoy a glass of water. We have really _beautiful_ water here. Pray help yourself when_ever_ you like.”

* * * * *

Still, it was possible no one had had any black.

I meditated a moment on my own wardrobe and Mrs. Price’s capacious waist-measure! Virginia’s things would be still less use, as she is the size of a sylph.

“I’m afraid I haven’t anything that would fit you in the way of a skirt,” I began, “but I’ve a large winter jacket if you don’t think it will be too warm for June.”

“Oh, thank you, m’m. It’s only the first week in June. I’m a _very_ chilly person” (no one looking at her buxom proportions would have thought so!), “and a thick jacket is just what I’m needin’ terrible bad. And if you had a skirt, it ’ud be jest the size for my pore dear sister-in-law. Ah, I can feel for her, being a widow myself, and left with them children. She said to me on’y yesterday, ‘Jane, do try to get me a black skirt from anywhere, if on’y you can.’ She says——”

“But you told me just now that you hadn’t seen her since before her husband died,” blurted in Abigail, forgetful of her usual good manners, and begrudging to see the family wardrobe being disbursed in this way, as she rather regarded my coats and skirts as her perquisites.

Mrs. Price turned full upon Abigail that look of surprised innocence that stood her in such good stead. “She said it in a letter she writ me yesterday,” she replied with dignified composure.

Finally I told her I would look her out something if she sent Esmeralda up for it in the evening. Mrs. Price lingered to recite further tales of woe to Abigail, till she, kind girl, in spite of her private estimate of the lady, bestowed on her a pair of black lisle thread gloves, as she spoke so pathetically about having to go to the funeral with bare hands and not being able to afford any gloves.

* * * * *

When Virginia came in from “sticking” sweet peas in the garden, I told her about Mrs. Price.

“Well, I don’t consider her a worthy object for charity as a rule,” she remarked. “But at the same time, if Fate kindly supplies me with an opportunity to get rid of that big black hat of mine that I’ve never liked and never intend to wear again, I’m not the one to disregard it, especially as it will save my carrying that huge hat-box back to town. But whether she or the ‘sister-in-law-same-as’ wears it, either will find it good weight for the money.”

So we left the winter jacket, and the hat, and a black blouse Ursula added to the parcel, and my black cloth skirt for the sister-in-law, against Esmeralda should come for them. And then we started out to make some calls.

* * * * *

Passing Miss Primkins’ house, we just stopped to leave a book I had promised to lend her. Miss Primkins is a pleasant middle-aged lady, of very small independent means, who lives in a cottage by herself. The door stood open as usual. She looked over the stairs when I knocked, then explained that she would be down in a moment if we would go in.

“I’ve been turning out things in the box-room—in order to find a little black for that Mrs. Price. Her husband’s brother has just died, and the funeral is to be to-morrow, and she says no one in the place has any black in hand. So she came and asked me if I would mind _lending_ her a black mantle!—_lending_ it to her indeed!

“I asked her what she had done with that black dolman I gave her not three months ago—you remember that dolman trimmed with black lace that I was rather fond of? I bought it—oh, it must be at least ten years ago—for my uncle’s funeral. It was trimmed with two bands of crêpe, one about four inches deep, and the other three inches, or perhaps two-and-three-quarters; very stylish it looked, too. Then I had the crêpe taken off and some black silk put on it—very good ottoman silk it was—that had originally been part of a black silk dress belonging to my sister. Next I had it covered with fancy net with velvet appliqué for a change—not that I liked it, or would have thought of having it done had I known what it was going to cost. But they do take you in so at those town shops; why, I could have got a new dolman for what it cost to cover that one! And then it lasted no time, used to catch in everything, so I had next to no wear out of that.

“I had it taken off, and the dolman _thoroughly_ turned—every bit; and the dressmaker put on some fringe, a sort of wavy fringe; but I had to have it taken off, because that Gladys Price, when she came home for a holiday, had on a silk coat trimmed with fringe exactly like it, so there again I got taken in, as you might say.

“After that, I put my brown fur trimming on it, but for the winter only; and then for the summer I put on some deep black lace. I hadn’t had that lace on more than six months when I gave her the dolman. (I remember quite well sitting up late that night to pick the lace all off it.) Altogether, you can’t say I had so much wear out of any of it, and it was a constant expense. And yet, would you _credit_ it, when I asked her what she had done with it, she said it had ‘wored out’! Why, _I_ could have had it another ten years in good use, without its being ‘wored out.’ She’s a thriftless woman, that’s what she is. Still, I suppose it isn’t for us to judge her.”

* * * * *

We had to hurry on. I wanted to call on Miss Bretherton, who had sprained her ankle and needed commiseration. We found her in that state of suppressed and bottled-up-in-a-Christian-manner irritation that is common to very active women who are suddenly tied to a chair with some of their machinery out of gear; and, like most other women under similar conditions, she was trying to do ten times as much as she ought to have done, in order to prove to everybody that there was nothing the matter with her.

“You’ll just have to come into the midst of all this muddle,” she sighed, “for I can’t move myself into another room.”

“Sorting things for a jumble sale?” I inquired, looking at sundry piles of garments strewn about her.

“It almost amounts to that; though I really started out to get a few things together for a woman in the village who seems to be rather needy at the moment, that Jane Price. Her brother-in-law has just died—you remember Zebadiah Price, who lived at Briar Bush Cottage before they took a little place at Penglyn? We lost sight of them after they left here—it’s such a cross-country place they’ve gone to. I’m rather surprised they haven’t asked the Rector to bury him, he thought a good deal of Zebadiah; but all the same I’m glad they haven’t, for it takes you the best part of a day to cover that fifteen miles, and he has a slight cold. It seems she’s going to the funeral to-morrow.

“I admit there are several women in the parish I should feel a greater pleasure in helping—she does try my patience at times—but I felt I ought to do what I can in this particular case, as she doesn’t seem able to get any black from anyone else. Everybody says they gave theirs to the last jumble sale, she tells me, though _I_ didn’t see any of it!

“She is wanting some for Zebadiah’s family too; they are left in bad straits, she says. I was only too glad to find that she and her sister-in-law have buried the hatchet at last; they’ve been at loggerheads for years; she really spoke very nicely about it. She said the older she got the more she felt life was too short to spend it in quarrelling, and at a time like this she thought bygones should be bygones. I don’t like to misjudge the woman,” Miss Bretherton continued with a sigh. “Sometimes she seems so anxious to do right. Her bringing up was against her. And yet——” And then the Rectoress closed her lips firmly determined to say no uncharitable thing, even about “that Jane Price.”

I’m afraid I didn’t think too highly of Mrs. Price at that moment. I remembered the parcels of black garments waiting at my house and again at Miss Primkins’. Moreover, Mrs. Price’s occasional lapses into fervent piety annoyed me very much, because I suspected they were developed for my benefit. She always gave me a long recital of woes and financial difficulties whenever she saw me, and invariably finished up with, “But thur, thur, I don’t let it worry me, for I always say, ‘The Lord will provide.’” I much objected to her taking the Name in vain in this manner, more especially as it generally happened that she gave Providence every assistance in the matter by helping herself to anything that lay within reach of her hand!

* * * * *

We did not stay long at the rectory, as I wanted to call on the lady of the manor. She kept us waiting a few minutes before she appeared; but explained, as she apologised for the delay, “I’ve just turned out five trunks, two cupboards, and four chests of drawers—and goodness knows how many more I should have set upon if you hadn’t come! It’s a pastime that seems to grow upon one like taking to drink or gambling—the more you have the more you want!

“I only meant to look through one chest for a black bonnet I thought I had put there—I’m trying to find some funeral wear for that Mrs. Price. Her husband’s brother has died, Zebadiah Price; they live over the hills at Penglyn. While he was alive, she hadn’t a good word to say for his wife; but now he’s gone, her conscience seems to worry her, and she says she feels the very least she can do is ‘to show respeck to the remains,’ and she wants to help his family. So I’ve been going over a good deal of ancient history in my search for garments calculated to show a sufficiency of respect. She said she was afraid that what she had on might give a wrong impression.”

“If she wore the same set of glad rags that she had on when she came to see us, likewise asking for mourning,” Virginia interpolated, “she’d give the impression of a ragged rainbow gone wrong and turned inside out, rather than a funeral.”

“Oh, she’s been to you, has she? She told me she couldn’t think of making so bold as to intrude her troubles on other people, and only came to me because she knew I had been so kind to Zebadiah years ago when he was ill; and added that my clothes always suited her so well!”

When we got outside, Virginia suggested with a twinkle that we should call on a few more people. We did, and at every house we were met with the sad intelligence of Zebadiah Price’s death and his sister-in-law’s quest for suitably respectful apparel.

Surely Royalty could not have been more universally mourned—in our village, at any rate!

* * * * *

Next Sunday we were rather puzzled on entering the church to see an ample lady clad in the most resplendent of widow’s weeds, sitting in solitary state in the very front row—a seat usually patronised only by the halt and maimed.

Her dress and mantle were of dull black silk trimmed with crêpe about a quarter of a yard in depth. True, it was not quite new, but its cut and style were unmistakable; anyone who possessed such a dress could afford to wear it even after its first newness had worn off; it stamped the wearer as a lady of means. A long weeper, black kid gloves, and a black-bordered handkerchief completed all we could see of the lady. We could only conclude that the distinguished stranger must be very deaf indeed, to take the front seat.

By this time all the congregation as it came in was interested. Such a stylish stranger would naturally attract attention. She kept her head devoutly bent, and used the handkerchief frequently; we couldn’t see her face. She might have been a peeress-in-waiting, judging by the dignity and decorum of her bearing.

It was just as the Rector was repeating the opening sentences that the resplendent one turned round to see the effect she was making on the congregation, and behold—that Mrs. Price!

I am afraid I only just saved myself from making the time-honoured remark, “_Did_ you EVER!”

* * * * *

“But what I want to know is this,” said Miss Primkins (as several of us walked together along the high road after church, leaving Mrs. Price giving details of the funeral, and the innumerable wreaths, to her friends). “Where did she get those weeds from? There isn’t a widow among us, nor a relative of a widow, so far as I know. Now who gave them to her?”

But we none of us knew. It certainly looked suspiciously as though Mrs. Price had used the poor late Zebadiah as an excuse for dragging the whole county!

I wasn’t surprised that she herself had donned fresh weeds, for as we are remarkably healthy upon these hills, we are apt to make the most of a funeral when it chances our way, and the opportunity to wear mourning, carrying with it, as it does, a certain personal distinction, is not to be passed over lightly.

On one occasion I remember meeting a farmer’s wife on Sunday morning in deep black (that had done duty for several previous family bereavements), weeping into her handkerchief as she went along the road to church. We stopped to inquire about her trouble.

“My poor old mother’s gone at last,” she sobbed. We were truly sorry for her grief, and asked when she had died.

“Well, I ’spect it would be about three or four this morning; that’s the time they usually go. I had a letter last night saying as how they didn’t reckon she’d live the night. So she’ll be gone by now. My poor mother! I’ll never see her again!” and she wept afresh.

I’m glad to say the mother is still alive, and very flourishing.

* * * * *

It was about a fortnight later that Virginia gave me the wildly-exciting information, culled from the local paper, that some Roman remains had just been excavated. I murmured “Oh!” in that absent-minded way people will do when their thoughts are called off the subject of What shall we have for the midday meal? to higher things.

I was thinking like this: “I did intend to have steak and kidney pudding, but as the butcher is late, there won’t be time to cook it; there isn’t enough cold tongue—at least, that knobbly end part is no use—we have plenty of eggs in the house, so we must just make out with that soup left over from yesterday and omelettes; or we might easily have——”

“Either a viaduct or an amphitheatre or a villa; they aren’t sure as yet which it is,” went on Virginia. “You read about it yourself; it’s awfully interesting. There; in that column—see? ‘Roman Remains at Penglyn.’”

“At Penglyn? It can’t be Zebadiah,” I commented; “he wasn’t as old as _that_!”

Nevertheless, we aren’t particular to a few hundred years in our village. For I remember last year an old woman telling me, “Have you heard, m’m, of the great news in the village? The Black Prince is staying at the Inn! Yes, to be sure! And he seems to understand our language beautiful, he do; though they say he does speak the foreign to a gentleman what’s staying there with him. The only thing I was surprised about was to see how young he do look, considering of his age. Why, I remember hearing tell about him when I was at school!” Later on I found the historic potentate was a harmless Indian law-student.

Virginia kept on about the Roman excavations, and announced her intention of going to see them. I protested that I wasn’t going to be hauled across a stony mountainous region in a wagonette, and then change twice by slow train, an hour or so to wait at each change, and ditto to get back, all to see a few brick walls, when the garden so badly needed weeding.

She was indignant, said she should prefer to go alone to having unsympathetic and uninformed society; reminded me of the histories of nations that had been found embedded in brick walls, waxed eloquent on the subject of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone, skipped lightly from the pointed apex of the Pyramids to the significance of the flat roofs of Thibet, examined the walls of the buried cities in central Asia, and before I had fully realised that I was really travelling in the East, I found that she was examining the designs on the Aztec pottery of ancient Mexico.

Fearing that we should have this sort of thing straight on end for a week, I said we would go next day, weather permitting, if only she would help me decide whether to have the omelette plain, or a cheese omelette, or would they prefer macaroni cheese? I have found in the past that the crystallisation of thought necessary to follow Virginia, when she is in an informing mood, creates a vacuum, and then I get a cold in my head.

I also inquired whether she would prefer to drive all the way, or go by train.

She replied, still with her eyes glued to the interesting newspaper treatise on antiquarian relics, that she would rather I settled these minor details, adding that she always liked to leave the arrangement of everything to me, as it gave her such opportunities to point out to me the feebleness of my methods and ideas.

I decided to go with her, simply because I knew that unless she had some firm, restraining force beside her, she would go and buy that Roman viaduct, amphitheatre, or villa, and order it to be sent home; and, for all I knew, she might give _my_ address in a fit of wandering-mindedness, and what should _I_ do with it when it arrived? You can’t pack an amphitheatre away in the empty pigsty, and all the other space was occupied with seedlings and things!

Besides, she has no bump of locality (neither have I, for the matter of that); but I thought it would look better if two of us were arrested for wandering about without any visible means of subsistence; at least, I could say I was her keeper.

Next morning we inquired of the barometer as to the weather prospects. By the way, that barometer is a unique treasure. V. and U. gave it to me one birthday; I had long been craving one that was a genuine antique. There was no doubt about this one—its antiquity, I mean; for the rest, until you get on speaking terms with it, I admit that it does seem a trifle ambiguous.

But I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I’ll say no more on this point, save that we tapped it vigorously; whereupon the long hand flew wildly round and round one way, while the short hand did a whirligig, equally excitedly, in the opposite direction.

We waited till they both got tired of spinning round, and then, as the long hand pointed to “Much Rain,” with leanings towards “Stormy,” we knew we could rely on a very fine day.

But we tapped it once again, just to make sure it knew its own mind. After it had wiggled giddily round as before, the long hand stopped midway between “Set Fair” and “Very Dry.” Of course that confirmed our former calculations, and we got out our new summer hats, and left our umbrellas at home. Virginia had worn _her_ new hat indoors most of the previous day, in order to get her money’s worth out of it, because she said she never got her money’s worth out of any of her garments, save her raincoat and her umbrella. [N.B.—Is an umbrella a garment?]

* * * * *

It was market day when we got there, and all the town was of course wending its way either to or from the market-place. One of the very first people we ran against was Mrs. Zebadiah Price; but, to our surprise, she was wearing neither my black cloth skirt nor Ursula’s black blouse. On the contrary, she was in quite gay attire—a brown coat and skirt, a blue blouse, a lace collar, a string of pearls as large as marbles, and a tuscan straw hat trimmed with roses and purple geraniums. I had known her in the past, when she lived in the village; so I stopped and spoke to her.

“I was so very sorry to hear of your sad trouble,” I began. Yet the subdued tones I used and felt necessary to the occasion seemed curiously out of place beside all that market-day finery.

“Yes, thank you, m’m; it did upset me awful,” she said, looking very woe-begone.

“I’m sure it did,” I said feelingly.

“You wouldn’t believe how I fretted over ’un. Seems kind o’ foolish I s’pose when I’ve got the children. But I got that attached to ’un.”

“I can _quite_ understand it,” I murmured sympathetically. “After all, children can’t take the place of the one that is gone.”

“No, m’m; that’s what I say.”

“And it was very sudden, wasn’t it?”

“Yes’m; taken bad and gone in a few hours,” she continued. “And that was the second I lost in two months. I don’t have no luck somehow.”

“The second in two months!” I repeated in surprise.

“Yes’m, and I feel that downhearted about it, I don’t think I’ll go in for another. I said so only last night to my husband.”

“Your husband?” I echoed again. It was beginning to sound like bigamy!

“He said at the time he thought the £15 I give was a swindle for the brindled cow.”

“The brindled cow?” I said feebly. I really didn’t know what else to say. Virginia need not have laughed!

Then I rallied my senses. “But I thought you had trouble about a fortnight ago—your husband, Zebadiah Price—I heard——”

“My Zeb? About a fortnight ago? Let’s see?”—thoughtfully turning her left eye in the direction of the church spire, and thereby tilting her hat askew. “Ah, I expect you mean about last February; to be sure, he did have a touch of this ’ere influenza; and he were a bit queer for a couple of days, he were: but that was nothing to my losing my calf!”

“I’m glad it was no worse,” I said heartily. “Why, Mrs. Jane Price told me she was coming to the funeral.”

“_Jane!_” ejaculated Mrs. Zebadiah. “Jane Price said she was coming to _his_ funeral? Not if I know’d it, and it had been me very own even, she wouldn’t; the _hussy_—begging your pardon, m’m, for using sech a word. She knows better than to try to put so much as a shoenail of her foot inside our door. She never aren’t and she never shan’t. Though for brazenness there ain’t their beat in the county. Why, p’raps you’ve heard how that there Gladys Price has started an ole clothes shop in the town here, right under our very nose, and my husband as respected as he is. There it is for everybody to read over the door—‘G. PRICE. Ladies and Gents’ Hemporium’—whatever that may be! Coming to his funeral, indeed! It makes me _broil_!” And Mrs. Z. went off fairly sizzling with indignation.

* * * * *

When we had duly found (after long search) and surveyed the Roman remains (which consisted of three upright stones, something like those used for kerbstones in the streets, and stood in the middle of a very boggy field), and had failed to decide whether they were the viaduct, the amphitheatre, or the villa, I suggested a speedy return to the station, as it was now coming down a steady drizzle, with indications of still more to follow. But Virginia said—

“I’d like, while we’re here, just to have a look into the hemporium window, to see what she has marked that hat of mine.”

When we reached it, behold, it was like taking a regretful look back into the past, for most of the garments there displayed we had formerly known when they walked our village street in decorous Sunday glory. And they included: a grey cloth coat of mine that had disappeared most mysteriously; a long silk scarf of Ursula’s that, so far, she had never missed; and a bead-bag I had often admired when carried by the lady of the manor, and which, we felt sure, she had never given away.

“Talk about excavating Roman remains!” I exclaimed; but Virginia’s conversational powers were only equal to “_Did_ you EVER!”

And we damply faded away in the direction of the station.

VII

Just Being Neighbourly

THOSE superior Londoners who know nothing at first hand about Nature “unimproved,” the type who find complete satisfaction for soul, body and mind at some loud and crowded seaside resort, sometimes say to me: “I can’t think how you can endure the terrible isolation of the country—with absolutely nothing to look at, no one to say a word, nobody to take the slightest interest in you, dead or alive. Well, _I_ should go out of my mind in such solitariness! But then, I am _so_ human; I do like a little life,” etc.