Part 2

Of course there was the gardener--I shall have to allude to him occasionally--but just now I will only mention the fact that his greatest admirer could not have accused him of taking care of the garden.

Then there was his Reverence; he was by way of being in charge of everything, me included, I suppose, and of course nominally it was so. He had the parish and the church, and the rectory and his family, and the men-servants and the maid-servants, a horse and a pony and the garden! He managed most things well, I will say, and the kitchen garden gave some account of itself, but in the flower garden desolation cried aloud.

I was moved one day to say I thought it disgraceful. "There are no flowers anywhere; nothing but some semi-red geraniums and some poverty-stricken calceolarias and scraggy lobelias. We have none of those nice high blue things, what do you call them? or those yellow round things with red fringes, like daisies, which are not daisies; we have no sweet-Williams even, though they are the sort of flowers that grow in every cottage garden!"

There was a twinkle in his Reverence's eye.

"You seem to know a good deal about flowers, Mary; I can't even follow your descriptions. I try my best with the carrots and onions. You must acknowledge you have vegetables."

"Oh, vegetables!" I cried with a tone of contempt.

"Yes, vegetables! You don't seem to despise them at dinner."

"No, but vegetables! Anyone can buy vegetables."

"Anyone can buy flowers, I suppose, if they have the money to spend."

"They can't buy the look of flowers in the garden," I argued; "that is what one wants; not a few cut things on the table."

"Well, I spend," began his Reverence, and then paused, and looked through a little drawer of his table that contained account-books.

An idea struck me. I waited eagerly for his next words.

"Let me see," continued his Reverence, running his eye down long rows of figures. "Ah! here is one of last year's bills for seeds, etc. Just on ten pounds, you see, and half of that certainly was for the flower garden. There were new rose trees."

"They are mostly dead. Griggs said it was the frost," I interpolated.

"And some azaleas, I remember."

"They don't flower."

"And bulbs."

"Oh! Griggs buried them with a vengeance."

"Well, anyway, five pounds at least was--"

"Was wasted, sir; that is what happened to that five pounds. Now, look here."

His Reverence looked.

"Give me that five pounds."

"That particular one?"

"Of course not. Five pounds, and I will see if I can't get some flowers into the garden. Five pounds! Why, my goodness, what a lot of things one ought to get with five pounds. Seeds are so cheap, sixpence a packet I have heard; and then one takes one's own seeds after the first year. Come, sir, five pounds down and every penny shall go on the garden."

"Dear me! but according to you five pounds is a great deal too much. I can't say that it has produced very fine results under Griggs's management; but at sixpence a packet!"

"No, sir, it is not too much really," I said gravely. "I shall have to buy a heap of things besides seeds, I expect. But you shall see what I will do with it. I want that garden to be full of flowers."

His Reverence looked out of the study window. It was a bleak, windy day towards the end of November. A few brown, unhappy-looking leaves still hung on the trees; but most of them, released at last, danced riotously across the small grass plot in front of the old red brick house, until they found a damp resting-place beneath the shrubbery. The border in front looked unutterably dreary with one or two clumps of frost-bitten dahlias and some scrubby little chrysanthemums.

"Full of flowers!" The eye of faith was needed indeed.