The Good Comrade Part 29

But by the time Joost Van Heigen arrived, the Captain was quite amiable again. He had had a quiet morning with nothing to do after the turnip tops were brought in and the knives cleaned, and Johnny had had a long tiring walk home from church in a hot sun and a high wind, which Captain Polkington felt to be a just dispensation of Providence to reward those who stopped at home and cleaned knives. Joost arrived not long after Mr. Gillat; Julia heard the gate click as she was taking the meat from before the fire.

"Who is that, Johnny?" she asked.

Johnny, who had just come down-stairs after taking off his Sunday coat, looked out of the window.

"I don't know," he said; "a young man."

Julia, having deposited the joint on the dish, went to the kitchen door. "Put the meat where it will keep hot," she said to Johnny; "I expect it's some one who thinks the last people live here still; fortunately there is enough dinner."

She pushed open the unlatched door and saw the visitor going round to the front. "Joost!" she exclaimed. "Why, Joost, is it really you?"

She ran down the garden path after him and he, turning just before he reached the front door, stopped.

"Good-morning, miss," he said solemnly, removing his hat with a sweep.

"I hope I see you well. I do not inconvenience you--you are perhaps engaged?"

"Come in," Julia answered; "I am glad to see you!"

There was no mistaking the sincerity of her tone; Joost's solemn face relaxed a little. "You are not occupied?" he said; "I do not disturb you?"

"Yes, occupied in dis.h.i.+ng up the dinner," Julia said, "which is just the best of all times for you to have come. Johnny!" she called; "Johnny, Joost is here."

Mr. Gillat, who had been carefully placing the dish where the cinders would fall into it, came to the door.

"This is Mr. Gillat, a very old friend of mine," Julia explained, and Joost bowed deeply, offering his hand and saying, "I hope that you are well, sir."

Whereupon Mr. Gillat impressed, imitated him as nearly as he could, and Julia looked away.

They had dinner in the kitchen on Sundays as well as week days, they made no difference to-day. Joost looked round him once or twice; he had never seen a place like this. It was the front kitchen; the cooking and most of the house-work was done in the back one, a big barn-like place with doors in all corners. The front one was half a kitchen and half a sitting-room, warm-coloured, with red-tiled floor and low ceiling, heavily cross-beamed and hung with herbs and a couple of hams, in great contrast to the whiteness of the kitchen at the bulb farm. There were bra.s.s and copper pots and pans such as he knew, but they reflected an open fire, a dirty extravagance unknown to Mevrouw.

Joost glanced at the fire, and it is to be feared that he was at heart a traitor to his native customs. Then he looked at the open window where the suns.h.i.+ne streamed in--as was never permitted in Holland--and he wondered if it really spoilt things very much, and, being a florist, thought it certainly would spoil the tulips in the mug that stood on the wide sill.

During dinner they spoke English for the sake of the Captain and Mr.

Gillat; Joost spoke well, if slowly, with a careful and accurate precision. He also observed much, both of outside things, as the fact that Johnny and the Captain cleared the table while Julia sat still, contrary to Dutch custom. And also of things less on the surface--as that Julia was head of the household and that Captain Polkington was not the impressive and authoritative person Mijnheer seemed to think.

Concerning this last fact he made no remark when, on his return home, he described the ways and customs of Julia's cottage to his parents.

The description served Mevrouw at least, as representative of all English households ever afterwards.

When dinner was done and everything cleared up, or rather Julia's part, she took Joost into the garden.

"Now," she said in Dutch, "let us come out and talk and look at things."

They went out and he began to admire her orderly garden and to tell her why this plant had done well and that one had failed. He did not speak of the blue daffodil, he thought he could better ask about that a little later. She did not speak of it either by name; he and it were so inseparably connected in her mind.

"Come along," she said, when he stopped to look into a tulip to see if its centre was as truly black as it should have been. "Come and see it."

He followed her obediently, but asked what it was he was to see.

"The blue daffodil, of course," she said.

He stopped dead. "You have got it here?" he exclaimed. "You have not sold it?"

"Certainly not."

"But why--why?" he stared at her in amazement. "You wanted money, it was for that you wanted the bulb, to sell; you told me so. Do you not want money now?"

"Oh, yes," Julia said; "but that is an incurable disease hereditary in our family."

"You do want money?" he inquired mystified. "This inheritance is small, not enough? Why, then, did you not sell the bulb?"

Julia shrugged her shoulders. "I could not very well," she said.

"But why not? You thought to do so at one time; your intention was to sell it if you had--"

"Stolen it? Yes, that is quite true, and it would not have mattered then. If I had stolen it I might as well have sold it; one dishonourable act feels lonely without another; it generally begets another to keep itself company."

Joost looked at her uncomprehendingly. "But why," he persisted, clinging to the one thing he did understand, "why did you not sell it?

It was for that I gave it to you, to do with as you pleased; I knew you would do only what was right and necessary."

Julia could have smiled a little at this last word; it seemed as if even Joost had learnt to temper right with necessity to suit her dealings, but she only said, "That was one reason why I could not sell it. You expected me to do right, so I was obliged to do it; faith begets righteousness as dishonour begets dishonour."

"I do not quite understand," he began, but she cut him short.

"No," she said; "we always found it difficult to make things quite plain, it is no use trying now. Come and see the daffodil, you will understand that, at all events, and better than I do. It is not quite fully out yet, but very nearly, and--please don't be disappointed--it is not a real true blue daffodil at all."

She took him to the chosen spot and showed him the plant--a bunch of long narrow leaves rising from the brown earth, and in the midst of them a single stalk supporting a partly opened flower. In shape it was single, like the common wild blossom, only much bigger; but in colour, not blue as was expected, but streaked in irregular unblended stripes of pure yellow and pure blue. The marking was as hard and unshaded as that of the old-fas.h.i.+oned brown and yellow tulips which children call bulls'-eyes, and the effect, though bizarre, was not at all pretty. Julia did not think it so, and she did not expect any one else to either; but Joost, when he saw the streaky flower, gave a little inarticulate exclamation and, dropping on his knees on the path, lifted the bell reverently so that he might look into it.

"Ah!" he said softly; "ah, it is beautiful, wonderful!" He looked up, and Julia, seeing the rapt and humble admiration of his face, forgot that there was something ludicrous in the sight of a young man kneeling on a garden path reverently wors.h.i.+pping a striped flower. It was no abstract admiration of the beautiful, and no cultivated admiration for the new and strange; it was the love of a man for his work and appreciation of success in it, even if the success were another's; also, perhaps, in part, the expression of a deep-seated national feeling for flowers.

"Is it what you wished?" Julia asked gently, conscious that she was, as always, a long way off from Joost.

"I did not wish it," he said, "because I did not foresee it. No one could foresee that it would come, though it always might. It is a novelty, an accident of nature perhaps, but beautiful, wonderful!"

"Is it a real novelty?" Julia asked. "Just as much as your first blue daffodil was? Oh, I am glad! Then you have two now."

"I?" Joost said in surprise. "No, not I; this is yours, not mine; you have grown it."

"That's nothing," Julia returned easily; "you gave me the bulb; it is really your bulb; I only just put it into the ground, I have had nothing to do with the novelty."

But if she thought to dispose of the matter in that way she soon found she was mistaken; there were apparently laws governing bulb growing which were as inviolable as any governing hereditary t.i.tles. The man who bloomed the bulb was the man who had produced the novelty--if novelty it was; he could no more make over his rights to another than a duke could his coronet. In vain Julia protested that it was by the merest chance that Joost had hit on this particular sort to give her, that it was only an accident which had prevented him from blooming it himself. He said that did not matter at all, and when she failed to be convinced, added that possibly, had he kept the bulb, the result might not have proved the same; her soil and treatment were doubtless both different.

Julia laughed at the idea, saying she knew nothing about soil and treatment. But she made no impression on Joost and apparently did not alter the case; the laws of the bulb growers were not only like those of the "Medes and Persians which alter not," but also refused to be bent or evaded even by a Polkington.

"It is yours," Joost said, as he took a last look at the flower before he rose from his knees; "the great honour is yours, and I am glad of it."

There was something in his tone which reminded Julia of that talk they had had in the little enclosed place on the last day she was at the bulb farm. She hastily submitted so as to avoid the too personal.

"What am I to do with the honour?" she asked. "I do not know, that is one reason why it is absurd for me to have it."

"You must name your flower," he told her; "and then you must exhibit it. Fortunately you are in time for the show in London."