Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/90

 kill—an occasional thick green leaf of a companula or a foxglove hiding among the shelter of leaves provided by the careful Hennery. But there were great gaps of bare earth where nothing grew, stretches which in her childhood had been buried beneath a lush and flowery growth of sky-blue delphinium, scarlet poppies, fiery tritomas, blushing peonies, foxglove, goosefoot, periwinkle, and cinnamon pinks. . . . All were gone now, blighted by the capricious and fatal south wind with its burden of gas and soot. It was not alone the flowers which suffered. In the niches clipped by Hennery in the dying walls of arbor vitae, the bits of white statuary were streaked with black soot, their pure bodies smudged and defiled. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cydnos were no longer recognizable.

In the course of her tour about the little park, her red hair became loosened and disheveled and her cheeks flushed with her exertion. When she again reentered the house, she discovered that her slippers, high-heeled and delicate, were ruined. She called the mulatto woman and bade her throw them away.

On the stairs she encountered her mother, whom she greeted with a little cry of horror. "The garden, Mama, is ruined. . . . Nothing remains!"

The expression on the old woman's face remained unchanged and stony.

"Nothing will grow there any longer," she said. "Besides, it does not matter. When I die, there will be no one to live in the house. Irene hates it. She wants me to take a house in the Town."

Lily, her feet clad only in the thinnest of silk-stockings, continued on her way up the long stairs to her room. Willie Harrison had ever had a chance, even the faintest hope, the January thaw, revealing the stricken garden a fortnight too soon, destroyed it once and for all