Part 45

The Chapel is chiefly white and gold. Two large Donatello angels, warm ivory-coloured, from the Manifattura di Signa, carry the red Sanctuary lamps. One is certainly the real Donatello—the other, we fear, a poor foundling. But they both look very well.

There is a great window over the moor.

The few small statues are, we think, attractive; chiefly decorated with bronzy golds and deep colours. There is St. Louis, King of France, specially carved by a Bavarian artist; a slender noble figure with a face of grave asceticism, holding up the Crown of Thorns. And there is a sternly warlike St. Michael, all golden, resting on his sword. And a St. Anthony ‹a real discovery this› lifting a pale countenance that seems on fire with ardour towards the Divine Infant who stands on his book—St. Anthony is “in glory”; his habit golden over the brown. St. George, a fine splash of colour, charges the dragon over the fireplace. It is a most satisfying dragon with red jaws open and a green claw tearing at the lance that has conquered him. St. George’s iron-grey horse, with flowing crimson trappings, starts aside and rolls a distraught eye—as well he might. It is all in plaster and in rather deep relief. Two tall golden wood-carved Roman church candlesticks flank it on either side, fitted with electric light.

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We have placed square Compton pots with Italian wreaths, filled with palms and flowering plants, one on each side of the altar step.

At night, when there is no light in the Oratory, except that of the Sanctuary lamps, the shadows of the palms look like angels’ wings, crossing and re-crossing....

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But, just as to a Garden there is no end—no end to its wants or to our desires for it; to its phases, its transmutation surprises; to our joys and disappointments in it—so there is no end to a Garden and Country House gossip. We might go on for ever—like Tennyson’s Brook! And meanwhile the year is passing on, in its stately pomp.

Full Summer is once more upon the Garden. The Delphiniums are rampant. We are in the centre of a heat wave, and our dry hill-side pants in the sun. At the fall of eve our souls rejoice in the sound of the refreshing showers when the watering begins; for one thirsts sympathetically with the cherished borders....

The moor is deepening to purple. The trees wear the deep green that precedes the turn. Life is rushing by with us so quickly that it seems but the “blink of an eye,” as the Germans say, since we were peering for the first bulb shoot.... In a little while the Ramblers and Wichurianas will be one blaze of glory; and in a little while again the Autumn winds will be shouting up the valley and the Bracken turning gold over the rolling hills; and again in a little while again it will be the Winter and the snow and we shall be watching for the Spring.

And it will be all even as before and yet all quite different. And so year by year.... And one day our garden will bloom for other eyes than ours.

Nunc tibi—mox aliis, the Book-Lover’s motto has it. How true also of the beloved Garden!... Another “eye-blink.”

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