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The temper and obstinacy in the eyes began to yield to the weak complacency which was their more normal expression. There was silence for a minute or two. Bessie sat with her hands on her lap and her face turned towards the open door. Beyond the cherry-red phloxes outside it the ground fell rapidly to the village, rising again beyond the houses to a great stubble field, newly shorn.
Bunches of bass hung from nails above the shelf; and on the wall opposite, a coloured advertisement, representing phloxes of so fierce an intensity of hue that nature was put to the blush, had been tacked by some admirer of Art. Five minutes later, when Gimblet emerged once more into the open, he carried in one hand a garden rake.
The garden, instead of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the farmers' wives of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones, wallflowers, and pansies.
"The country" to quote an account written some years ago "was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down farm-yard, the cottage down the lane."
A few tall firs climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down towards the village at its foot a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks, the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red walls, and the masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and the gaiety of an Elizabethan song.
In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, giant poppies, pinks, Madonna lilies, wallflowers, hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies, lavender, starworts, cornflowers, Lychnis chalcedonica, and bulbs packed in wherever bulbs could go. These are the borders that were so hardly used by the other gardener.
He don't seem to care no more whether the flowers blooms or doesn't. Them phloxes up against the west wall now a finer show I never seen an' as for the lilum candidum, they're a perfect picter.
Among the roses, compassing them about and jostling one another, some later, some earlier in bloom, most of them together in the glad summer days, one could find to his hand wall-flowers and primroses, sweet-william and dusty-miller, daisies red and white, forget-me-nots and pansies, pinks and carnations, marigolds and phloxes of many varieties.
It was all so well done that one wonders almost apologetically for German thoroughness that any of the human rats escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on lurking bayonets. One old woman, hearing her son's deathcry, rashly looked out of her door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies; and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured.
In among the crests of the willows, he caught a glimpse of a mill near-by on a branch stream, and of the thatched roof of the mill-house where the house-leeks were growing. For all ornament, the quaint cottage was covered with jessamine and honeysuckle and climbing hops, and the garden about it was gay with phloxes and tall, juicy-leaved plants.
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