Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/21

Rh sometimes—in a mere idle wonder, when he saw her in her beautiful home at Penmorval—whether it would have been possible for him to make her life happier than Julian Wyllard had made it; whether in his uttermost adoration he could ever have been a better husband to her than Julian Wyllard had been. He had looked searchingly for any flaw in the perfection of that union, and he had perceived none. He was generous-minded enough to be glad that it was so.

The carriage drove slowly up a long hill, and across a wide expanse of heathy ground, before it entered the gate of Penmorval, which was two miles from the town. It was a beautiful old place, standing on high ground, yet so richly wooded as to be shut in from the outer world. Only the Cornish giants, Roughtor and Brown Willie, showed their dark crests above the broad belt of timber which surrounded the good old Tudor mansion. A double avenue of elms and yews led to the old stone porch. The long stone façade facing northward looked out upon a level lawn divided from the park by a haw haw. The southern front was curtained with roses and myrtle, and looked upon one of the loveliest gardens in Cornwall—a garden which had been the pride and delight of many generations—a garden for which the wives and dowagers of three centuries of Cornish squires had laboured and thought. Nowhere could be found more glorious roses, or such a treasury of out-of-the-way flowers, from the finest to the simplest that grows. Nowhere did April sunlight shine upon such tulips and hyacinths, nowhere did June crown herself with fairer lilies, or autumn flaunt in greater splendour of dahlias, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums. The soil teemed with flowers. There was no room left for a weed.

For a childless wife like Dora Wyllard a garden such as this is a kind of spurious family. She has her hopes, her fears, her raptures and anxieties about her roses and chrysanthemums, just as mothers have about their girls and boys. She counts the blossoms on a particular Gloire de Dijon. She remembers the cruel winter when that superb John Hopper succumbed to the frost. She has her nostrums and remedies for green-fly, as mothers have for measles. That glorious old garden helped to fill the cup of Mrs. Wyllard's happiness, for it gave her inexhaustible employment. Having such a garden she could never say, with the languid yawn of the idle and the prosperous, "What can I do with myself to-day?" But Dora was not dependent on her garden for occupation. Exacting as the roses and lilies were, manifold as were the cares of the hothouses and ferneries and wildernesses, Mrs. Wyllard's husband was more exacting still. When Julian was at home she could give but little time to her garden. He could hardly bear his wife to be out of his sight for half an hour. She had to be interested in all