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The Saint Luke’s Summer
by
“Uncle Bob does not seem to care to talk much about his farming,” I ventured one day. “Perhaps he wishes to forget it for a little while.”
“My dear,” said Aunt Emmy rebukingly, “when you are as old as I am, you will know that the only thing men really care to talk of is their business. My dear father always talked of stocks, and shares, and–and bonuses. He said I could not understand about them, as indeed I could not, but it interested me very much to listen. And your Uncle Tom, as you may remember”–I did indeed–“did the same. It is natural that Mr. Kingston’s mind should dwell on agricultural subjects.”
Presently wicked men began to mow the bracken with great scythes, and to carry it away in carts which tilted and elbowed their way down the mossy, heather-fringed tracks. Here and there the down-stretched arms of the firs caught the topmost fronds of bracken and swept them from their murdered brethren, and held them precariously suspended, only to drop them when the first wind went by.
I left the cottage for a week to visit my husband’s relations, and when I returned the forest was bare. An indefinable sadness seemed to brood over it, and to have reached Aunt Emmy as well. Mr. Kingston had also been away to visit his relations, and had returned, and was staying at the little inn on the edge of the forest, from which he could more readily run up daily to town to have his shoulder massaged, which still troubled him.
Aunt Emmy told me all this in her garden, where she was dividing her white pinks. I knew she intended to make a fresh border, but the action filled me with consternation.
“But Aunt Emmy,” I said (the foolish words jolted out of me by sudden anxiety), “will you–will you be here next spring?”
I could have struck myself the moment the words were out of my mouth.
The trowel dropped from her hand.
“Oh no!” she said confusedly. “Neither I shall. I was forgetting. I shall be in Australia.”
She looked round the little garden which she had made with her own hands, and back to the white cottage, up to its eyes in Michaelmas daisies, which had become such an ideal home, and in which, poor dear! she had taken a deeper root than she knew, and a bewildered pain passed for a moment over her face. It was as if she had been walking in her sleep, and had suddenly come in contact with some obstacle, and had waked up and was not for the first moment certain of her surroundings.
“He is more to me than any cottage,” she said, recovering herself with a little gasp. “I had hoped perhaps he would have come and lived here, and let me take care of him, after all his years of hard work. But it was a selfish idea. He has told me that he cannot leave his work or his uncle, who has been so kind to him, and who is very infirm now–partially paralysed, and needing the greatest care. I shall–let the cottage.”
“What is the place in Australia like?” I said with duplicity, for of course I knew by this time exactly what it was like. But I wanted to change her thoughts.
She led the way indoors, and pointed to a sheaf of unmounted photographs. I took them up, and examined them as if for the first time. My heart sank as I looked at the inoffensive figure of the poor old uncle in the verandah, whom Aunt Emmy was of course to nurse. The house which that hard-working old man had built himself stood nakedly upon a piece of naked ground. There was not a tree near it. Beyond were the great cattle-yards and farm buildings, and what looked like an endless, shrubless field. And on the right was the new two-windowed room, no longer very new, which Mr. Kingston had built seventeen years ago for Aunt Emmy. I knew how much labour that hideous addition meant, which was a sort of degraded cousin many times removed from the pert villa drawing-rooms, peering over portugal laurels on the road to Muddington. I knew that Mr. Kingston had papered and painted that room with his own hands. I knew also, but Aunt Emmy did not, that he had repapered and repainted it several times while it waited for her. And yet by no wildest effort of the imagination could I picture Aunt Emmy living there, though her heart had been there all her life.