Old Valentines Part 18

"With all my heart!" said Sir Peter.

The white tablecloth was laid; the coffee percolator hummed its contented little song. The broiled chicken was delicious; and the browned potatoes. There was a grape jelly; Sir Peter was helped twice to this.

"Do you make it yourself?" he asked Mrs. Farquharson.

"Whoever else?" she answered.

"But you should taste her marmalade at breakfast!" exclaimed John.

"I like a good marmalade; we have the 'Dundee'; which is yours?" asked Sir Peter. He fell into their informal ways so easily.

"We make our own," said Mrs. Farquharson proudly.

"Upon my word," said Sir Peter, as he stirred his coffee with a tiny spoon, and accepted a match for his cigar--"upon my word, I haven't eaten such a dinner in years. So--er--companionable--you know."

At eleven, when they went with him to the door, Mrs. Farquharson met them in the hall.

"Good-night, Farquharson," said Sir Peter.

"Good-night, sir," said Mrs. Farquharson, and handed him a parcel.

"Would you please to slip these gla.s.ses into your greatcoat pocket: two of the jelly, and two of the marmalade. Here are the recipes, written on this paper; Genevieve has copied them out very plain and large. That Mrs. Burbage can read them--with her spectacles."

XII

Two happy, eventful years pa.s.sed.

One evening, as they sat in the long library, John happened to mention Rosemary Suss.e.x,--and the old parsonage, where his boyhood had been spent, untenanted now--in disrepair. Sir Peter asked a casual question or two. For the rest of the evening he schemed in silence.

Shortly thereafter his mysterious absences began. He required an earlier breakfast on certain days; and John and Phyllis sometimes dined alone.

The new parsonage at Rosemary is nearer the church than the old,--but the old parsonage has more land, and its garden slopes gently downward to the little river, slipping murmurously away to the sea.

So long as Sir Peter tried to keep part of his plan a secret from the vestry, he had one failure after another for his pains. Time after time he returned on the early evening train to London, growling into his white mustache. They would not say no, and they did not say yes; he made no progress. But when he pledged a discreet vestryman to confidence, and told him he sought to buy the old parsonage for the son of its former occupant, the Reverend Hugh Landless, and for his wife, the ways were smoothed at once. A morning came, at last, when he could tell them he had a surprise in store for them, and could place the t.i.tle-deed in Phyllis's hands.

"It is my belated wedding-gift," said Sir Peter.

Phyllis will never forget her first glimpse of the gray old house. As the motor-car neared the curve in the road which discloses the view John knew and loved so well, he said to her:--

"Now, dearest; in just a moment. There!"

The house is screened from the road by an ivy-covered wall, great trees, and the shrubbery. But Phyllis caught the very view John wished her to have,--a bit of the west gable, and the window from which his mother's handkerchief had fluttered many gay farewells to him.

Sir Peter stood by the sun-dial, in the garden, and listened, well pleased, to John's eager voice, as he pointed out the spots endeared to him by memories of childhood. The sun-dial! How he had pondered over the quatrain, chiseled in the stone:--

"The Moving Finger writes; and having writ Moves on--nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."

"My father used to sit reading aloud to my mother, near that hawthorn,"

said John, "and if she asked him for the time of day he was whimsical enough to walk over here and consult the sun-dial, rather than his watch."

They loitered in the neglected, overgrown garden,--soon to be bright with flowers again,--a trysting-place for birds.

"My mother planned her garden anew each winter," said John. "She could hardly wait for the soft air of spring to carry out her plans. She loved the flowers. I remember her so clearly, working here, in a broad-brimmed hat, with a pair of my father's gloves on her hands, while I played near by. I had desperate adventures in this garden, and my play often ended in my being half frightened--and seeking safety from imagined terrors, in the refuge of her lap."

They went into every room of the old house; sunny rooms; there was need of repairs, indeed, but Phyllis declared there should be no alteration.

"I want it to be just as it was," she said to Sir Peter.

And so, in June, they were at home there--and the garden was a riot of color.

On a particular afternoon in June, Sir Peter, with his cigar, and John, in flannels, writing, at a table under the trees, both looked up to see Phyllis coming toward them, from the house, with her baby in her arms.

The garden was full of the perfume of roses. They blossomed everywhere.

There was a pink bud in John's b.u.t.tonhole, and a red one in Sir Peter's.

Phyllis had a great bunch of white roses at her waist. Her gown was white, too: soft and lacy and clinging. That would have been John's description of it; and he is a poet.

"Hullo, Phyllis," said John.

"S-h-h," said Phyllis.

"S-h-h, John," said Sir Peter.

Phyllis laid her precious burden in the perambulator, near Sir Peter's chair.

"Mark and Peggy will be here in half an hour," she announced. "She telephoned from Whinstead. Isn't it characteristic of Peggy?--a motor-car wedding-journey. They are having the most glorious time, she said. They can't stay, though; just a call."

"Whinstead, eh?" said John. "Well, if Mark is driving, he will cut that thirty minutes to twenty. I shall barely finish this page before they get here."

He was engaged upon the revision of "Old Valentines, and Other Poems,"

for the second edition. The little book, bound in red, with golden cupids, lay open on the table.

"Uncle Peter, see how beautifully baby is sleeping," said Phyllis.

Sir Peter adjusted his eyegla.s.s, and peeped under the parasol.

"I must speak to Burbage about tea," added Phyllis. "Just keep half an eye--"

"Both eyes, my dear," said Sir Peter. With his foot he drew the perambulator a little nearer to him.

John looked up from his writing.

"Give me a synonym for 'austerity,'" he commanded.

"'Sternness,'" suggested Phyllis.

"'Severity,'" said Sir Peter.