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"Oh, Sylvia!" he said, and just for a second there was a palpable uneasiness in his manner. He had not merely started. He seemed also to her to have been startled. But he recovered his composure. "You see, my dear, I have been thinking of you," he said, and he pointed to a man at work among the flower-beds. "I saw how you loved flowers, how you liked to have the rooms bright with them.
He remembered the first day when it had suddenly struck him that the geometrically shaped flower-beds were designed after a pattern, and he had counted, with his nurse, the loops and circles in the design. There, again, were the fountains with their silver spray, in whose basins, by the inexorable but utterly unintelligible law of the nursery, he had never been allowed to play.
There was not a blade of grass to be seen in the paths, or a weed in the flower-beds; no fine lady ever trained and watered her geraniums, her cacti, and her rhododendrons, with more pains than this hitherto unseen gardener bestowed upon his little enclosure. Monte Cristo stopped after having closed the gate and fastened the string to the nail, and cast a look around.
I hired a man with plow and horse for a day or two and we made a path from the piazza to the road, set out an arbor-vitae hedge, made two or three small flower-beds, and had the kitchen-garden ploughed. The man planted the potatoes and corn in a field next the garden, but the kitchen garden was my hobby, and with all the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy I took personal possession of it.
When the Squire issued forth, he was accosted, before the door, by the old, paralytic gardener, with a face full of trouble, reporting, as I supposed, the devastation of his flower-beds, and the destruction of his wall-fruit.
And in their own place they had a nice grass-plot, some flower-beds, and several fruit-trees, beside a grape-trellis. He thought his mother would be less homesick if she could see some bloom and greenery. It was the last of March, 1843, that the little girl came to New York. Mrs. Underhill believed it only an experiment.
I could readily understand the regard of the family for so beautiful a place, which, I have no doubt, cost less than one of the great flower-beds that we see on the grounds of wealthy people, and see without admiring, so formal and artificial are they, and so suggestive of professional work duplicated in other gardens until the very monotony of them becomes an offence to the eye of the man or woman who believes in individuality and originality.
Everything at present was bare and sere, but when the spring opened it would require but little labor, and that of a pleasant description, to prepare a garden that should delight the heart of any housekeeper; and the flower-beds in the front of the house, which were now covered and protected by branches of fir, would in due season blossom into spots of beauty.
Just after you left, Stephen ploughed up all the land in front of your new house, every inch of it, all up and down the road, between the fence and the front doorstep, and then he planted corn where you were going to have your flower-beds. He has closed all the blinds and hung a "To Let" sign on the large elm at the gate. Stephen never was spiteful in his life, but this looks a little like spite.
This is the "fence," from which the children hang by their arms, freeing their legs from the heavy weight of the body and strengthening the arms. This fence has also the advantage of being useful in a garden for the purpose of dividing one part from another, as, for example, the flower-beds from the garden walks, and it does not detract in any way from the appearance of the garden.
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