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Updated: August 18, 2024
The window was half open to the first mild day of March; beside it stood a bowl of growing daffodils, and a pot of freesias that scented the room. Outside a robin was singing, the murmur of the river came up through the black buds of the ash-trees, and in the distance a sheep-dog could be heard barking on the fells. So quiet it was the spring sunshine and so sweet.
The hall was now a charming place, scented, moreover, on this January evening by the freesias and narcissus that Elizabeth had managed to rear in the house itself, and Pamela, who had always been ashamed of her own ill-kept and out-at-elbows home, as compared with the perfections of Chetworth, had been showing Arthur and Beryl Chicksands what had been done to renovate the old house since they were last in it 'and all without spending a penny! with a girlish pleasure which in the Captain's opinion became her greatly.
We were there in spring-time, and hundreds of blue-and-white porcelain vases, of the sort we use as garden ornaments, were gorgeous with flowering azaleas of all hues, or fragrant with freesias. All the mortuaries, though of different sizes, were built on the same plan, in two compartments, separated by pillars with a carved wooden screen between them.
That brown soft earth of the Catacombs, the stuff you would scratch off the damp walls with your nail; rotting stone, rotting bone: the very soil of Rome lilackish like cocoa, friable, light, which used somehow to give me the horrors already as a child; the soil in which the gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without a spade or hoe visible anywhere; the soil which seems to demand no plough; the farthest possible from the honest and stiff clay, demanding human work, of nature; the Roman soil, a compost, as Whitman would say, ready manured!
Then something beyond the easel caught her eye a mass of flowers, freesias, narcissus, tulips, tumbled on a table; then a pile of new books; and finally, a surprising piece of furniture. 'What have you been doing now? she asked him, wondering, and, as Hester thought, shrinking back a little. 'It's from Cicely' he said apologetically. 'She made me bring it.
Mollie shook her head but did not argue any more. She dropped her chain and looked round the garden. Although the sun was so warm and bright the flowers were those which grow in springtime in England. Daffodils, narcissus, freesias, and violets grew thickly in the borders and under the trees, which seemed to be mostly fruit-trees, though Mollie did not recognize them all.
She liked it; she liked it best of all. It had the Judas tree and an umbrella pine, it had the freesias and the lilies, it had a tamarisk beginning to flush pink, it had the convenient low wall to sit on, it had from each of its three sides the most amazing views to the east the bay and mountains, to the north the village across the tranquil clear green water of the little harbour and the hills dotted with white houses and orange groves, and to the west was the thin thread of land by which San Salvatore was tied to the mainland, and then the open sea and the coast line beyond Genoa reaching away into the blue dimness of France.
She bowed her face over the flowers the freesias so sweet and spring-like, the scarlet anemones flaunting over the table. It was like him to have those flowers. He moved about the room with a certain sureness of touch, swift and relentless and quiet. She knew she could not cope with him. He would escape like a weasel out of her hands. Yet without him her life would trail on lifeless.
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