The Palace in the Garden Part 6

A slight look of disappointment--it was really disappointment, and it made me feel still more sorry--crossed grandpapa's face at my words.

Then he smiled again, but this time I was sorry to see there _was_ a little of the old smile in it.

"You are candid, at least, my dear granddaughter. Ah, well! we must take the goods the G.o.ds send us, and not expect impossibilities, I suppose!

And that any one should be glad to see _me_, in the ordinary acceptation of the words, comes within that category, naturally."

He used such long words, he puzzled me. (I must tell you that I have been helped here and there to write things that grandpapa said by some one who knows quite well his sort of way, otherwise I couldn't have got it quite right, though I remember it all in my own way.) I looked up and said, "Grandpapa, I don't understand you."

Then his face grew nicer again, and he stooped down to kiss us in his usual way, saying to me as he did so, "Never mind; such understanding comes soon enough."

And Tib, who, I suppose, had been gathering courage all this time, then looked up, and said very prettily--Tib _is_ very pretty, you know, and that makes what she says pretty too, I think--

"Grandpapa, perhaps we could understand some things--nice things--better than you think. We do understand that you're very good to us--it was very good of you to let us come here. We are so happy!"

Grandpapa put his hand under Tib's chin, and raised her face so that he could see straight into her blue eyes.

"Has any one been putting that into your head, Mercedes?" he said, almost sternly. "The truth, now, child--for Heaven's sake let me see if you are true! _Can_ she be with those eyes--those very same eyes?" he added to himself, so low that no one but I--for I have dreadfully quick ears--heard it. Tib didn't; she told me so afterwards, but that was perhaps because she was thinking so what she should answer. But she looked up fearlessly, and she didn't get red.

"Mrs. Munt has been speaking to us very nicely, grandpapa," she said.

"But she didn't tell me to say anything to you--oh no, grandpapa. All she did was to make us think perhaps better than we have ever done before how very good you are to us;" and then, with the last words Tib's courage began to go away, and the tears came welling up into her eyes.

Grandpapa looked at her still for a minute, and then he said quietly--

"What I do is no more than you have a right to. Still, at your age the less thought about rights--and wrongs too--the better, no doubt. And so you are happy here?"

"Very," we all replied, heartily. And then Gerald--oh, that tiresome boy!--must needs add--

"And it is _so_ nice without Miss Evans!"

Grandpapa laughed at this, really laughed; but Tib and I could have pinched Gerald. For, alas! grandpapa added--

"That's right--not to have let me forget about finding a new Miss Evans;" and if he saw--which I don't know--Tib's and my faces when he said that, he must have been satisfied that we could _look_ what we felt very candidly.

Grandpapa only stayed two days; but his visit was really much nicer than we had fancied it would be. He took us to church on Sunday himself. But, rather to our disappointment, not to the pretty old church we had pa.s.sed on first entering the village, but to one at least three miles off, which was not at all pretty nor interesting. There was n.o.body at all there except very stupid-looking, poor country people, and the sermon was very long, and the clergyman very dull and stupid himself. To be sure, the driving there and back in the dog-cart a _little_ made up for it; but still, we were very vexed when grandpapa said we were to come to this church every Sunday, if it was fine, in the dog-cart, Tib in front beside Reeves the groom, and me behind with nurse, and Gerald stuck in beside Tib; and if it was rainy, in the old fly from the inn in the village.

We heard grandpapa giving these orders to Reeves on the way home.

"Oh, grandpapa!" I said--I was sitting on the back seat, so I felt more courageous, I suppose--"must we go every Sunday to that stupid little church? I'm sure the one in the village is much nicer."

"Have you been there?" said grandpapa, very sharply.

"No, grandpapa," I replied; "we've not been anywhere at all in the village. But we saw the church the day we came."

"Then you cannot possibly know anything about it; and if you were even capable of having an opinion, it would not make the slightest difference to mine," he said, in his very horridest cold way.

But he got nicer again after a bit. He even took us a little walk with him in the afternoon, round a very pretty way, going away down the lane into which the gate of Rosebuds opens, and into some woods and copsey sort of places that were awfully nice. Grandpapa was very quiet, and didn't speak much; but he wasn't sharp or catching up. Once or twice he stood still, and looked about him with an expression on his face I had never seen there before, and he said to us--

"I remember these woods--every tree in them, I believe--as long as I remember myself;" and then he gave a little sigh.

"Do you really, grandpapa?" we said. "Won't you tell us a little about when you were a little boy?"

"Can you remember so long ago? Was it as much as a hundred years ago?"

asked Gerald, opening his mouth very wide.

"Not quite so long--but too long ago to tell you stories about," he replied, and then he walked on without speaking.

Grandpapa had taken us an in-and-out sort of way--we hadn't exactly noticed where we were going, and we were surprised to find ourselves suddenly quite near home again. We had come up another lane, on the other side of Rosebuds, as it were; this lane was skirted by a high stone wall, a wall that looked something like the one that bordered our "tangle."

"Is inside there our garden, then?" asked Tib, for grandpapa had just said to us we were close to home.

"No," said grandpapa, but without looking in the direction she pointed, "that is not the Rosebuds' garden yet."

"Then what's behind there, please?" said Gerald, in his slow way. I didn't expect grandpapa to take the trouble of answering him, but he did.

"There is another garden behind there," he replied, "the garden of another house, that is to say. But it is a house that has been uninhabited for a great number of years--the garden must be a perfect wilderness by now--the place is going to be sold immediately, and the house pulled down most likely, or else turned into a mere farmhouse--the owner of the farm over there," and he pointed over our heads, "wants to buy it. So much the better."

There was a sort of dreaminess in the way grandpapa spoke, as if his thoughts were looking back somehow far beyond his words.

"May we play in that garden if there's n.o.body there?" asked Gerald.

"Why should you want to play there?" said grandpapa. "It does not belong to me."

"And I'm sure we couldn't have a nicer garden than our own, and it's very big too," said I.

"We may go anywhere we like in _our_ garden, mayn't we?" said Gerald.

"Yes," said grandpapa.

"And if we _could_ get through the door in the wall, we might, mightn't we?" Gerald continued in his slow, drawly way. He speaks better now, but then he had a way of going on once he began, all in the same tone so that you really hardly noticed that he was talking. I have thought since that grandpapa didn't in the least know what he was consenting to, when for the second time he replied "yes."

Gerald would have gone on, no doubt, but Tib interrupted him.

"Does that door lead into a tool-house, grandpapa?" she said. Her voice was soft and gentle. It was only I that had a quick, sharp way of speaking.

"A tool-house?" repeated grandpapa, "oh, yes, I fancy so." He must have thought that Tib was asking him if there was a tool-house in the garden.

"Oh," she said in a rather disappointed tone. There wasn't much mystery about a tool-house!

Just then the lane stopped, and we came out on a path bordered by a field on one side, and on the other by a wall which _was_ that of our own garden. Very near the foot-path in the field lay two or three ponds or pools of water close together, and on one of them floated some large leaves looking like water-lily leaves, with some bushy high-growing green among them. Tib darted forward.

"Oh, look, Gussie," she said, "there'll be the most lovely water forget-me-nots here in the summer, and--" But she stopped short in a fright, for grandpapa had caught her by the arm and was pulling her back.

"Child, take care," he said sharply, "another minute, and you would have been in the water. The edge is as slippery as gla.s.s. If the field were mine, I would soon have these pits filled in," he went on, looking round as if he wished there were some one at hand to give the order to on the spot.

"But they are such little pools, grandpapa, they don't take up much room," I objected, "and if there were water-lilies, and forget-me-nots there in the summer, it would be a dreadful pity to take them away."

"And when the lilies and forget-me-nots come out, what is more likely than that you or Mercedes should be stretching over to get them and fall in," said grandpapa.

"But if we did it wouldn't hurt us," said I. "If Tib fell in, I would pull her out, and if I fell in, she would pull me out."