Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/298

 "Yes—her voice," said Roland musingly.

But Sorrell's garden was there to be enjoyed, wide-eyed and ready to smile, a mute-lipped garden, fortuitously beautiful, unselfconscious, and not crying—"Come and look at me." Nor did Sorrell's self stand in the middle of it, smirking, "Ha, ha, my dear chap, see what—I—have done." The happy amateur in him had not done too much. He had taken the vegetable garden and the little orchard behind the cottage, and leaving many of the old fruit trees standing, he had run a broad turf path down the centre to meet the orchard grass. He had curbed Bowden's inclination to cut down and to tidy up, and to make flower beds of geometrical exactness and to edge them with blue tiles. "Them trees be'nt no use. Better have 'em down." Certainly many of the trees were old, and poor bearers, but Sorrell had left them there, and planted clematis and honeysuckle against the trunks of some of them. His flower beds looked like coloured tapestries flung down casually upon the grass. He had not meddled too much, and the result had come to him as a piece of irresponsible and blessed magic, a cottage garden idealized, with flowers and trees and roses, and bits of yew hedge, and fruit and lilies, and here and there a flowering shrub in disorderly and delightful freedom, so that there seemed no end to it and no beginning, and no fixed boundaries.

Roland, after wandering over this quarter of an acre of charming confusion, and losing himself among violas and pzonies and sweet-smelling stocks, came to rest against the trunk of an apple tree with the air of a man to whom life never ceased to be surprising.

"What incalculable creatures we are, Stephen. And this is your idea of a garden?"

"It grew like this. Either it had to,—or I have a muddled mind."

"And you—an expert hotelier, the man of detail who must organize the very stair-rods and the bath taps! You are a grandfather, old chap,—and this garden is your grandchild. One is supposed to be more easy with one's grandchildren."

"Things that grow are different—somehow. You have to let them have their way, unless—of course—you are out for profits."