"Grandmother?"
"I hear you, Dick. Good-night."
"Is there anything you want done? Think, dear grandmother."
"Don't let Exmouth come to my funeral. I don't want him--grinning
over--my coffin."
"Any other thing?"
"Put me beside Jack Capel. I wonder--if I shall--see Jack." A shadow,
gray and swift, passed over her face. Her eyes flashed one piteous look
into Hyde's eyes, and then closed forever.
And while in the rainy, dreary London twilight Lady Capel was dying,
Katherine was in the garden at Hyde Manor, watching the planting of
seeds that were in a few weeks to be living things of beauty and
sweetness. It had ceased raining at noon in Norfolk, and the gravel
walks were perfectly dry, and the air full of the fragrance of
innumerable violets. All the level land was wearing buttercups. Full of
secrets, of fluttering wings, and building nests were the trees. In the
apple-blooms the bees were humming, delirious with delight. From the
beehives came the peculiar and exquisite odour of virgin wax. Somewhere
near, also, the gurgle of running water spread an air of freshness all
around.
And Katherine, with a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with
the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them. No one who had
seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have
imagined the splendour of her matured beauty. She had grown "divinely
tall," and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious
stateliness of manner. Her complexion was wonderful, her large blue eyes
shining with tender lights, her face full of sympathetic revelations.
Above all, she had that nameless charm which comes from a freedom from
all anxious thought for the morrow; that charm of which the sweet secret
is generally lost after the twentieth summer. Her basket of seeds was
clasped to her side within the hollow of her left arm, and with her
right hand she lifted a long petticoat of quilted blue satin. Above this
garment she wore a gown of wood-coloured taffeta, sprigged with
rose-buds, and a stomacher of fine lace to match the deep rufflings on
her elbow-sleeves.
Little Joris was with his mother, running hither and thither, as his
eager spirits led him: now pausing to watch her drop from her white
fingers the precious seed into its prepared bed, anon darting after some
fancied joy among the pyramidal yews, and dusky treillages, and cradle
walks of holly and privet. For, as Sir Thomas Swaffham said, "Hyde
garden looked just as if brought from Holland;" and especially so in the
spring, when it was ablaze with gorgeous tulips and hyacinths.