Chapter 8

The next day, Friday, at five o’clock by the sun-dial, the large bow-window of Mrs. Jerome’s parlour was open; and that lady herself was seated within its ample semicircle, having a table before her on which her best tea-tray, her best china, and her best urn-rug had already been standing in readiness for half an hour. Mrs. Jerome’s best tea-service was of delicate white fluted china, with gold sprigs upon it—as pretty a tea-service as you need wish to see, and quite good enough for chimney ornaments; indeed, as the cups were without handles, most visitors who had the distinction of taking tea out of them, wished that such charming china had already been promoted to that honorary position. Mrs. Jerome was like her china, handsome and old-fashioned. She was a buxom lady of sixty, in an elaborate lace cap fastened by a frill under her chin, a dark, well-curled front concealing her forehead, a snowy neckerchief exhibiting its ample folds as far as her waist, and a stiff grey silk gown. She had a clean damask napkin pinned before her to guard her dress during the process of tea-making; her favourite geraniums in the bow-window were looking as healthy as she could desire; her own handsome portrait, painted when she was twenty years younger, was smiling down on her with agreeable flattery; and altogether she seemed to be in as peaceful and pleasant a position as a buxom, well-drest elderly lady need desire. But, as in so many other cases, appearances were deceptive. Her mind was greatly perturbed and her temper ruffled by the fact that it was more than a quarter past five even by the losing timepiece, that it was half-past by her large gold watch, which she held in her hand as if she were counting the pulse of the afternoon, and that, by the kitchen clock, which she felt sure was not an hour too fast, it had already struck six. The lapse of time was rendered the more unendurable to Mrs. Jerome by her wonder that Mr. Jerome could stay out in the garden with Lizzie in that thoughtless way, taking it so easily that tea-time was long past, and that, after all the trouble of getting down the best tea-things, Mr. Tryan would not come.

This honour had been shown to Mr. Tryan, not at all because Mrs. Jerome had any high appreciation of his doctrine or of his exemplary activity as a pastor, but simply because he was a ‘Church clergyman’, and as such was regarded by her with the same sort of exceptional respect that a white woman who had married a native of the Society Islands might be supposed to feel towards a white-skinned visitor from the land of her youth. For Mrs. Jerome had been reared a Churchwoman, and having attained the age of thirty before she was married, had felt the greatest repugnance in the first instance to renouncing the religious forms in which she had been brought up. ‘You know,’ she said in confidence to her Church acquaintances, ‘I wouldn’t give no ear at all to Mr. Jerome at fust; but after all, I begun to think as there was a maeny things worse nor goin’ to chapel, an’ you’d better do that nor not pay your way. Mr. Jerome had a very pleasant manner with him, an’ there was niver another as kept a gig, an’ ‘ud make a settlement on me like him, chapel or no chapel. It seemed very odd to me for a long while, the preachin’ without book, an’ the stannin’ up to one long prayer, istid o’ changin’ your postur. But la! there’s nothin’ as you mayn’t get used to i’ time; you can al’ys sit down, you know, before the prayer’s done. The ministers say pretty nigh the same things as the Church parsons, by what I could iver make out, an’ we’re out o’ chapel i’ the mornin’ a deal sooner nor they’re out o’ church. An’ as for pews, ourn’s is a deal comfortabler nor aeny i’ Milby Church.’

Mrs. Jerome, you perceive, had not a keen susceptibility to shades of doctrine, and it is probable that, after listening to Dissenting eloquence for thirty years, she might safely have re-entered the Establishment without performing any spiritual quarantine. Her mind, apparently, was of that non-porous flinty character which is not in the least danger from surrounding damp. But on the question of getting start of the sun on the day’s business, and clearing her conscience of the necessary sum of meals and the consequent ‘washing up’ as soon as possible, so that the family might be well in bed at nine, Mrs. Jerome was susceptible; and the present lingering pace of things, united with Mr. Jerome’s unaccountable obliviousness, was not to be borne any longer. So she rang the bell for Sally.

‘Goodness me, Sally! go into the garden an’ see after your master. Tell him it’s goin’ on for six, an’ Mr. Tryan ‘ull niver think o’ comin’ now, an’ it’s time we got tea over. An’ he’s lettin’ Lizzie stain her frock, I expect, among them strawberry beds. Mek her come in this minute.’

No wonder Mr. Jerome was tempted to linger in the garden, for though the house was pretty and well deserved its name—’the White House’, the tall damask roses that clustered over the porch being thrown into relief by rough stucco of the most brilliant white, yet the garden and orchards were Mr. Jerome’s glory, as well they might be; and there was nothing in which he had a more innocent pride—peace to a good man’s memory! all his pride was innocent—than in conducting a hitherto uninitiated visitor over his grounds, and making him in some degree aware of the incomparable advantages possessed by the inhabitants of the White House in the matter of red-streaked apples, russets, northern greens (excellent for baking), swan-egg pears, and early vegetables, to say nothing of flowering ‘srubs,’ pink hawthorns, lavender bushes more than ever Mrs. Jerome could use, and, in short, a superabundance of everything that a person retired from business could desire to possess himself or to share with his friends. The garden was one of those old-fashioned paradises which hardly exist any longer except as memories of our childhood: no finical separation between flower and kitchen garden there; no monotony of enjoyment for one sense to the exclusion of another; but a charming paradisiacal mingling of all that was pleasant to the eyes and good for food. The rich flower-border running along every walk, with its endless succession of spring flowers, anemones, auriculas, wall-flowers, sweet-williams, campanulas, snapdragons, and tiger-lilies, had its taller beauties, such as moss and Provence roses, varied with espalier apple-trees; the crimson of a carnation was carried out in the lurking crimson of the neighbouring strawberry-beds; you gathered a moss-rose one moment and a bunch of currants the next; you were in a delicious fluctuation between the scent of jasmine and the juice of gooseberries. Then what a high wall at one end, flanked by a summer-house so lofty, that after ascending its long flight of steps you could see perfectly well there was no view worth looking at; what alcoves and garden-seats in all directions; and along one side, what a hedge, tall, and firm, and unbroken, like a green wall!

It was near this hedge that Mr. Jerome was standing when Sally found him. He had set down the basket of strawberries on the gravel, and had lifted up little Lizzie in his arms to look at a bird’s nest. Lizzie peeped, and then looked at her grandpa with round blue eyes, and then peeped again.

‘D’ye see it, Lizzie?’ he whispered.