who plied pick and shovel stopped to spit, and to apply foul adjectives to their foul job. The business went on briskly day by day under the long wall, which was steeped from end to end in the ripe autumn warmth. Above its mellowed bricks red rose shoots took the sun, and flourished lightly in the still air. At night, for the nights were misty and moonless, a red lantern-red as if it glimmered through brooding miasma-tied on crossed bits of wood, announced where danger lay to home-comers from the Hand and Flower. Brydon saw the scene under all aspects; apart from any business-like interest in it, it seemed to fascinate him. He would loiter at a little distance, and gaze at the wall with a doubtful expression. He was moody, haggard, irritable. One night as he went slowly homeward from his office, smoking his cigar, he paused in Garden Lane, and uttered a fierce ejaculation under his breath. "6 By God!" he said. "When it comes to the point, I'm no more to be depended on than the rest!" Eddington told him he looked ill. The mill-owner answered with an inarticulate sound, conveying scorn, and stood with a hang-dog expression, biting his nails. "You'd better run down to Salthaven, too," said the good-humoured old gentleman. "You're overdoing it-overdoing it. Α little sea air would do you all the good in the world-your own prescription, you know." think of. "Very delicate." Yes, very likely. Probably that meant that if she were uprooted she would feel it acutelyperhaps die. Mary Wynne had begun to teach him the meaning of the old garden. He found himself unable to imagine her apart from it; all the beautiful life which had been fostered through many generations within its walls seemed to him to have blossomed in her. He had come to Brenthill with his head too full of schemes for enlarging his business, and benefiting the workers in his factory, to have time to think much about women. Philanthropy, according to Brydon, had to be made to pay, and required to be sharply looked after. He would neither rob others of their wages nor forego his own. He was deaf to all distant cries for help; earthquakes, colliery explosions, Indian famines, fires, could not extract a halfpenny from his pocket; the facts were sad, but they were not in his department, and he was not, as he bluntly said, either big enough or fool enough to undertake the world's work. Given health, he meant to do his own, and it was as much as he could manage. He would never have looked at Mary Wynne if she had not been thrown in his way as an obstacle; he would have paid her the price of her garden, and forgotten everything but her name where it stood in his cheque book. But when she thwarted all his schemes, and left him no more than the daily routine of business to fill his mind, he began to think of her with the absorption with which he would otherwise have thought of plans and builders' estimates. Common justice-Brydon wanted to be just-compelled him to own her legal right to refuse to sell, and to try to discover any honest reason for such refusal, with the possibility of which she might be credited. For weeks he seemed to stand face to face with her, questioning her, judging her, gazing at her, and then all at once he woke to the knowledge that this tender, appealing woman had won her way into his stronghold, that he was fighting with her still, but in his own heart. How had he thought of women before? Well, he had thought mostly of those who worked in his factory, and he had thought of them with a rough sense of pity and fair play. "Give 'em a chance," he had said scores of times, "let 'em be decently housed, fed, and clothed-yes, and decently taught, and they'll be decent women." And for that he had planned his cottages. It was all right enough and as true as ever, but Brydon was thinking now of something beyond decency. The walled garden had 824 become to him a part of Mary Wynne's charm-the one explained the other. In destroying it he would destroy possibilities, perhaps blight the flowering of other delicate souls. One might grow a very good sort of woman in his little houses, but not Mary Wynne. Nor was that all. He had thought much of the clean and well appointed dwellings which he would erect, but when he saw how utterly earth, air, and water could be defiled, he stood aghast. No doubt while he lived he could guard his property, but, if he should die, might not the evil which had befallen Garden Lane come upon his cottages too? Might they not be let and sublet, and swarming families pour in to multiply in their squalor and improvidence where Mary's bushes of myrtle and bay, Mary's great cedars and clustered roses, were rooted now? So to deface what she loved seemed a thing impossible, like laying cruel and violent hands on Mary herself. Nevertheless, through all these troubled thoughts the man in a blind fashion did feel that he ought to cling to the work which he had undertaken. Before ever he saw Miss Wynne he had pledged himself to old Mrs. Humphreys, and shrill Betsy Barnes, and Ada and Minnie and the rest of the bold, pale-faced girls who worked at the mill. If he deserted them who would take up their cause? And he would not try to persuade himself that Mary Wynne could ever share his philanthropic hopes. Gentle and kindly she would always be, but she would never go down amongst the poor as some women will. She would shrink from their coarse words and ways, from the hideous revelations of brutality and want and wrong, she would be sickened and terrified, her very soul would ache with fruitless compassion. She must live in a walled home, but how sweet that home would be! If it were his-Brydon quivered at the thought-if it were his? Even so, might not he come out of his paradise to work for his poor in the lane? Why not? And yet in his clear-sighted honesty he said "No" as soon as he had Never looked the question in the face. then would he do anything that could limit Mary's pleasures, or in the smallest degree Wife and children imperil her future. before all the world! There was his mother too, at Brighton-he could never risk life or health or money, when all he was and all he had No, it was were needed by these dear ones. a choice between the garden and Garden Lane. It seemed to Brydon Was it a choice? that the choice was made for him. How was he to tear this new and strange influence Brydon answered these questionings with So the days went by in their unresting procession, the momentous days that were yet so strangely uneventful. Garden Lane resumed its customary aspect, only with a stony strip down the middle of the roadway, where the main excavation had been. Mrs. Humphreys and the rest turned themselves round discontentedly, and settled down into as much of their former dirt as they could find. At Salthaven the autumnal migration of visitors had set in, and though the lodginghouse keepers mechanically put up cards in every window, till the place looked as if a shower of remarkably large snow-flakes bad fallen all over it, they did not really expect to attract any one by the announcement of It was not likely. The "Apartments." Deepwell band had ceased to come, there were many vacant seats in the little church which had been so crowded in August, and only four or five bathing-machines went The season crawling after the grey tide. was over, Miss Eddington was gone, and Miss Wynne was packing her trunk, and writing "Brenthill" upon her luggage labels. Nothing had happened, and Mary said to herself that nothing was going to happen. It drizzled as she went home. She buttoned herself in her waterproof, and sighed at the thought of the grey days that were at hand. Springtime would come again, no doubt, but if she had given up her garden it would hardly be spring to her. Yet, though she assured herself that all was over, she carried a faint hope on her journey through the drizzling afternoon. In the omnibus, in the booking office, in the train, which as she neared home slid ever and anon out of the foggy dusk into wayside stations where gaslights shone with watery lustre on tarpaulin and mackintosh, in every pause she looked for some one or some thing to interpose at that eleventh hour. Even on the crowded platform at Brenthill a possibility lingered, fading slowly as she drove homeward through the ugly familiar streets, dying as her own door closed behind her, and she was received by a melancholy maid who had face-ache, and who said that nothing had happened, and nobody had called. The next morning a note was delivered at the factory. "Dear Mr. Brydon," it said, "you told me that afternoon you came to my tennis party that you would say no more about the garden till the new year came, but that the offer you had made for it should hold good till then. I have been thinking the matter over at Salthaven, and I have made up my mind to accept it. I believe it is the right thing to do. I have just written to Mr. Eddington to ask him to call on you about it and settle everything. "Believe me, "Yours sincerely, "MARY WYNNE. "I shall go away from Brenthill as soon as possible, and then you can begin at once. I hope the loss of this summer will not make any great difference." Lower on the page was written hurriedly, "Don't give me too much for it." Brydon read this letter with a surprise so curiously compounded that he hardly knew whether he were glad or sorry. Glad-yes, of course he must be glad, and yet-by Jove! but he was sorry. He had lost the strange and humiliating delight of sacrificing his noblest ambition to the woman he loved. He had determined to give up the garden with all that it involved for Mary Wynne's sake, and she had forestalled him. She had given it up to him, but not for him. She had done it for conscience' sake, he knew that very well, he could read it in every line of her note. She would not take it back, her conscience would not let her. She was pledged to make the sacrifice, and if he did not build his cottages she would only reproach herself that she had not yielded earlier. He threw the letter on the table, thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood staring at it. The more he looked at it the less he liked it. He had nothing now to give up for her. To give up his sacrifice that was an absurdity, and yet that was what he found it hard to do. Why had he sent her away to Salthaven to think it over in solitude, with that delicate remorse of hers? He might have known what would come of it, he might have been sure that she would yield. "And she has yielded," he raged, "but not to me!" Eddington found him haggard of face and moody in manner that afternoon when he called. He suspected that Brydon, thus suddenly summoned to pay, regretted the extravagance of the offer he had made six months earlier. That however was the young man's business, his own was to keep him to the bargain in his client's interest. Perhaps Brydon really had rather the air of a hunter snared in his own toils, but he offered no opposition to the lawyer's arrangements, only interrupting him once to say, "I suppose Miss Wynne came to this decision entirely of her own free will?" "Entirely," said the old gentleman with emphasis, and added to himself, "you don't creep out through that loophole, my good fellow." "I thought as much," said Brydon. VII. ALL OF ONE MIND. THE news of Brydon's triumph ran rapidly round the circle of Miss Wynne's acquaintances, and re-awakened their flagging interest. "Well!" Jessie Lee exclaimed, "Ethel Hillier made me promise I'd write and tell her when this happened, but I didn't expect to have to do it. I suppose the money was too much for her." That was the general opinion in Brenthill, that the mill-owner's money had proved irresistible. People could no longer call Miss Wynne a fool, but they transferred the charge of folly to the young man who was paying a ridiculous price for her bit of ground. Eddington came out of the affair with great glory. It was understood that he had opposed the sale till the utmost penny had been wrung out of Thomas Brydon, and then had persuaded his client to yield. The young folks had been puppets in his hands and he had pulled the strings very skilfully indeed. Brydon ought to have known that he could not be a match for the lawyer. It was really sublime, the way in which Eddington had turned Miss Wynne's sentimental fondness for the garden to profit. The Brenthill Guardian took the matter up in an article headed "APPROACHING DESTRUCTION OF AN INTERESTING RELIC." The young man who wrote it looked up a book about Brenthill, printed many years earlier by a local archaeologist, and found the old garden mentioned several times-once when there was a dispute about a boundary, on the settlement of which the wall in Garden Lane was built, and on two or three occasions when bits of the land were sold. He ascertained that the factory which was about to swallow up the last remnant of "this historic pleasure ground" stood on a fragment of it. The house was comparatively modern. The worst of it was that, historic as this pleasure ground might be, the intelligent young man who called it so could not discover that any one had ever owned it, or spoken of it, or visited it, who was of the smallest interest to mankind. The garden had no tradition beyond that of its blossoming summers. He did not lose courage, however, but went to the Mechanics' Institute, brushed up his history a little, and wrote almost a column more about all the wonderful things that the possessors of the garden might have seen. If they had not seen them they must have heard of them, which did as well. What tidings of bloodshed and terror and revolution, of heroism and crime, of storm and fire and plague, had stirred the air beneath those leafy boughs! And with these memories he mingled little allusions to bygone customs and things, to sedan chairs, coaches, and highwaymen, to country fairs and bull-baitings, to May Day dancing and fashionable assemblies, to hoops and patches and powder, to melodious tinkling of spinets and clavichords. He touched very lightly, the authority not being so readily accessible, on the changes in horticulture, the new and vivid blossoms that had opened under English skies since the old garden was first planted, and when he had thus arrived at the end of his column he felt rather pleased with himself. He thought, hesitatingly, that it was a little in Macaulay's manner. The young lady to whom he was engaged was sure it was-only better. It answered its purpose, anyhow, for the readers of the Guardian got an indistinct impression that there was something monumental about the patch of ground which our energetic fellow townsman was about to lay waste. Jessie Lee added a postscript to her letter: "I send you our newspaper which will tell you all about the history of the garden. I never knew it was so old or so interesting, did you? What a pity it is going to be destroyed!" And a committee of ladies, who were planning a bazaar for charitable purposes to be held early in the summer, sprang at the idea of utilising the historic spot. Such a delightful chance of wearing Old English dresses-illustrating all the different periods, you know-and such a sentiment about the whole thing, all the trees and shrubs doomed, and spared just for that last day. Would it not be touching? And one might sell plants and flowers from Ye Olde Gardenne. That would be charmingly pathetic, such a sweet idea, and all clear profit, since everything must be rooted up when the bricklayers began to work. It could not make any real difference to Mr. Brydon, he would only have to put off his building a little, and Garden Lane had gone on as it was so long that there could not be any hurry about the new cottages. And when he was told that it was for a charity, and that the ladies of Brenthill asked it as a personal favour, he would not of course refuse. The matter was as good as settled. Meanwhile the garden, every inch of whose surface was so soon to be laid bare to the gaze of the whole town, had never been so jealously guarded as it was this October. Mary Wynne shut herself up in it, did not go out, even to church, and refused to see visitors. It appeared that she was suffering, at her leisure, from headache. She was well enough however to loiter round the mossy walks, listening to the cawing of the rooks, and looking at every plant and tree with gentle eyes that filled with tears. Even if there had been no thought of Philip she would have been sad. It was such a short and piteous span of life that yet remained to all around her, and it was she who had decreed that it should end. She felt like a murderess, and yet nobody loved each leaf and flower as she did. "There will never be any more spring," she said under her breath, amid the sad splendour of autumn colouring. "Oh, my poor double thorn, you will never blossom like tiny white roses again!" Her heart ached for the shrubs and plants which were making ready for their winter rest; She she even thought of the bulbs, asleep long since in the black earth at her feet. fancied something menacing and strange in the gloom of the great unchangeable cedars. She raised her eyes to them, "You are dead," she said, trying to realise the truth she uttered. " Dead-and I have killed you." Later in the month the leaves had almost all fallen from the lime-trees, and the strong pulses of the looms throbbed behind the bare red wall. Elsewhere in the garden the thinned foliage, out of which all the summer greenness was gone, the delicate twigs etched on the faint blue of the October sky, the chill that crisped the air, the autumn crocuses and purple violets, combined to make a kind of mockery of March, as if a phantom spring had come to bid its haunt farewell. The was Mary thought this one morning as she went down the walk by the limes. shining of the pale sun overhead pathetic, her soul was heavy with repentance, a thousand regrets were gnawing at her. Oh, why had she ever yielded, and sinned against her love? She did not forget the shameful misery which lay huddled beyond the wall, but she could not recall that vivid sense of it which had prompted her renunciation. Her imagination was blunted. "And yet," she reminded herself, "it is all there-it is as real and as hideous as it was then. If I could only feel it!" She went to the little door and stood with her hand upon the latch. "Now," she said, "I have only to lift this and I shall see it all. I shall see all the ugly wretchedness I could not bear even to think of at Salthaven She lifted the latch and stood face to face with Philip. It was as if the whole world had gathered itself into his eyes. It was more than she could bear, it was pain. Her heart seemed to stand still, her sight failed. For a fraction of a second his face went out like a light in darkness. "Yes, when you had time to think about it. Ah! the old garden, just the same as ever." He had closed the gate behind him, and without offering to advance stood gazing round. His lips began to curve and his nostrils to widen a little, in quick appreciation of the subtle autumn odours of earth and fallen leaf. He drank the golden air as if it were delicate wine, and his glancing eyes brightened in recognition of bush and tree. "Yes," he smiled, "as beautiful as ever, isn't it?" "It was summer when you were here before," she said. "You like the summer best? Well, perhaps yet this suits the occasion. You know the old place is going to be turned into building ground?" His tone spoke volumes, and the white roses of her cheeks bloomed suddenly pink. Evidently he did not know that she had sold it. Yes, of course," she said; "you never heard 66 66 May I?" he asked as he followed. "Are you staying here, then? They told me nobody could get in, and I was wandering round the enchanted ground, devising all manner of expedients to effect an entrance, when you came to the rescue, and I assure you, Miss Medland, you realised my idea of a beneficent fairy." "Did I? How very nice!" She was growing desperate, and snatched at the chance of explanation he gave her. "But you are behind the time-you don't know that I'm not Miss Medland any longer." (Oh, what would he say when he found that she had sold the garden?) Wargrave stopped, stared, arched his brows. "What! married?" he cried with cheerful readiness. "You don't say so!" A pleasant light of congratulation was dawning in his eyes. It was all over. The bright indifferent smile was like a flood of sunlight on pale dreams, and Mary woke. "No, no," she |
