Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (517 page)

Before another word could be said, the impenetrable old man stepped forward, with the utmost composure, and entered on the question of his own personal interests, as if nothing whatever had happened, and nobody was present but his new master and himself.

“I bid you humbly welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir,” said this ancient of the gardens. “My name is Abraham Sage. I’ve been employed in the grounds for more than forty years; and I hope you’ll be pleased to continue me in my place.”

So, with vision inexorably limited to the horizon of his own prospects, spoke the gardener, and spoke in vain. Allan was down on his knees on the gravel walk, collecting the fallen flowers, and forming his first impressions of Miss Milroy from the feet upward.

She was pretty; she was not pretty; she charmed, she disappointed, she charmed again. Tried by recognised line and rule, she was too short and too well developed for her age. And yet few men’s eyes would have wished her figure other than it was. Her hands were so prettily plump and dimpled that it was hard to see how red they were with the blessed exuberance of youth and health. Her feet apologized gracefully for her old and ill fitting shoes; and her shoulders made ample amends for the misdemeanor in muslin which covered them in the shape of a dress. Her dark-gray eyes were lovely in their clear softness of colour, in their spirit, tenderness, and sweet good humour of expression; and her hair (where a shabby old garden hat allowed it to be seen) was of just that lighter shade of brown which gave value by contrast to the darker beauty of her eyes. But these attractions passed, the little attendant blemishes and imperfections of this self-contradictory girl began again. Her nose was too short, her mouth was too large, her face was too round and too rosy. The dreadful justice of photography would have had no mercy on her; and the sculptors of classical Greece would have bowed her regretfully out of their studios. Admitting all this, and more, the girdle round Miss Milroy’s waist was the girdle of Venus nevertheless; and the passkey that opens the general heart was the key she carried, if ever a girl possessed it yet. Before Allan had picked up his second handful of flowers, Allan was in love with her.

“Don’t! pray don’t, Mr. Armadale!” she said, receiving the flowers under protest, as Allan vigorously showered them back into the lap of her dress. “I am so ashamed! I didn’t mean to invite myself in that bold way into your garden; my tongue ran away with me — it did, indeed! What can I say to excuse myself? Oh, Mr. Armadale, what must you think of me?”

Allan suddenly saw his way to a compliment, and tossed it up to her forthwith, with the third handful of flowers.

“I’ll tell you what I think, Miss Milroy,” he said, in his blunt, boyish way. “I think the luckiest walk I ever took in my life was the walk this morning that brought me here.”

He looked eager and handsome. He was not addressing a woman worn out with admiration, but a girl just beginning a woman’s life; and it did him no harm, at any rate, to speak in the character of master of Thorpe Ambrose. The penitential expression on Miss Milroy’s face gently melted away; she looked down, demure and smiling, at the flowers in her lap.

“I deserve a good scolding,” she said. “I don’t deserve compliments, Mr. Armadale — least of all from
you
.”

“Oh, yes, you do!” cried the headlong Allan, getting briskly on his legs. “Besides, it isn’t a compliment; it’s true. You are the prettiest — I beg your pardon, Miss Milroy!
my
tongue ran away with me that time.”

Among the heavy burdens that are laid on female human nature, perhaps the heaviest, at the age of sixteen, is the burden of gravity. Miss Milroy struggled, tittered, struggled again, and composed herself for the time being.

The gardener, who still stood where he had stood from the first, immovably waiting for his next opportunity, saw it now, and gently pushed his personal interests into the first gap of silence that had opened within his reach since Allan’s appearance on the scene.

“I humbly bid you welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir,” said Abraham Sage, beginning obstinately with his little introductory speech for the second time. “My name — ”

Before he could deliver himself of his name, Miss Milroy looked accidentally in the horticulturist’s pertinacious face, and instantly lost her hold on her gravity beyond recall. Allan, never backward in following a boisterous example of any sort, joined in her laughter with right goodwill. The wise man of the gardens showed no surprise, and took no offense. He waited for another gap of silence, and walked in again gently with his personal interests the moment the two young people stopped to take breath.

“I have been employed in the grounds,” proceeded Abraham Sage, irrepressibly, “for more than forty years — ”

“You shall be employed in the grounds for forty more, if you’ll only hold your tongue and take yourself off!” cried Allan, as soon as he could speak.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” said the gardener, with the utmost politeness, but with no present signs either of holding his tongue or of taking himself off.

“Well?” said Allan.

Abraham Sage carefully cleared his throat, and shifted his rake from one hand to the other. He looked down the length of his own invaluable implement, with a grave interest and attention, seeing, apparently, not the long handle of a rake, but the long perspective of a vista, with a supplementary personal interest established at the end of it. “When more convenient, sir,” resumed this immovable man, “I should wish respectfully to speak to you about my son. Perhaps it may be more convenient in the course of the day? My humble duty, sir, and my best thanks. My son is strictly sober. He is accustomed to the stables, and he belongs to the Church of England — without incumbrances.” Having thus planted his offspring provisionally in his master’s estimation, Abraham Sage shouldered his invaluable rake, and hobbled slowly out of view.

“If that’s a specimen of a trustworthy old servant,” said Allan, “I think I’d rather take my chance of being cheated by a new one.
You
shall not be troubled with him again, Miss Milroy, at any rate. All the flower-beds in the garden are at your disposal, and all the fruit in the fruit season, if you’ll only come here and eat it.”

“Oh, Mr. Armadale, how very, very kind you are. How can I thank you?”

Allan saw his way to another compliment — an elabourate compliment, in the shape of a trap, this time.

“You can do me the greatest possible favor,” he said. “You can assist me in forming an agreeable impression of my own grounds.”

“Dear me! how?” asked Miss Milroy, innocently.

Allan judiciously closed the trap on the spot in these words: “By taking me with you, Miss Milroy, on your morning walk.” He spoke, smiled, and offered his arm.

She saw the way, on her side, to a little flirtation. She rested her hand on his arm, blushed, hesitated, and suddenly took it away again.

“I don’t think it’s quite right, Mr. Armadale,” she said, devoting herself with the deepest attention to her collection of flowers. “Oughtn’t we to have some old lady here? Isn’t it improper to take your arm until I know you a little better than I do now? I am obliged to ask; I have had so little instruction; I have seen so little of society, and one of papa’s friends once said my manners were too bold for my age. What do
you
think?”

“I think it’s a very good thing your papa’s friend is not here now,” answered the outspoken Allan; “I should quarrel with him to a dead certainty. As for society, Miss Milroy, nobody knows less about it than I do; but if we
had
an old lady here, I must say myself I think she would be uncommonly in the way. Won’t you?” concluded Allan, imploringly offering his arm for the second time. “Do!”

Miss Milroy looked up at him sidelong from her flowers “You are as bad as the gardener, Mr. Armadale!” She looked down again in a flutter of indecision. “I’m sure it’s wrong,” she said, and took his arm the instant afterward without the slightest hesitation.

They moved away together over the daisied turf of the paddock, young and bright and happy, with the sunlight of the summer morning shining cloudless over their flowery path.

“And where are we going to, now?” asked Allan. “Into another garden?”

She laughed gayly. “How very odd of you, Mr. Armadale, not to know, when it all belongs to you! Are you really seeing Thorpe Ambrose this morning for the first time? How indescribably strange it must feel! No, no; don’t say any more complimentary things to me just yet. You may turn my head if you do. We haven’t got the old lady with us; and I really must take care of myself. Let me be useful; let me tell you all about your own grounds. We are going out at that little gate, across one of the drives in the park, and then over the rustic bridge, and then round the corner of the plantation — where do you think? To where I live, Mr. Armadale; to the lovely little cottage that you have let to papa. Oh, if you only knew how lucky we thought ourselves to get it!”

She paused, looked up at her companion, and stopped another compliment on the incorrigible Allan’s lips.

“I’ll drop your arm,” she said coquettishly, “if you do! We
were
lucky to get the cottage, Mr. Armadale. Papa said he felt under an obligation to you for letting it, the day we got in. And
I
said I felt under an obligation, no longer ago than last week.”

“You, Miss Milroy!” exclaimed Allan.

“Yes. It may surprise you to hear it; but if you hadn’t let the cottage to papa, I believe I should have suffered the indignity and misery of being sent to school.”

Allan’s memory reverted to the half-crown that he had spun on the cabin-table of the yacht, at Castletown. “If she only knew that I had tossed up for it!” he thought, guiltily.

“I dare say you don’t understand why I should feel such a horror of going to school,” pursued Miss Milroy, misinterpreting the momentary silence on her companion’s side. “If I had gone to school in early life — I mean at the age when other girls go — I shouldn’t have minded it now. But I had no such chance at the time. It was the time of mamma’s illness and of papa’s unfortunate speculation; and as papa had nobody to comfort him but me, of course I stayed at home. You needn’t laugh; I was of some use, I can tell you. I helped papa over his trouble, by sitting on his knee after dinner, and asking him to tell me stories of all the remarkable people he had known when he was about in the great world, at home and abroad. Without me to amuse him in the evening, and his clock to occupy him in the daytime — ”

“His clock?” repeated Allan.

“Oh, yes! I ought to have told you. Papa is an extraordinary mechanical genius. You will say so, too, when you see his clock. It’s nothing like so large, of course, but it’s on the model of the famous clock at Strasbourg. Only think, he began it when I was eight years old; and (though I was sixteen last birthday) it isn’t finished yet! Some of our friends were quite surprised he should take to such a thing when his troubles began. But papa himself set that right in no time; he reminded them that Louis the Sixteenth took to lock-making when
his
troubles began, and then everybody was perfectly satisfied.” She stopped, and changed colour confusedly. “Oh, Mr. Armadale,” she said, in genuine embarrassment this time, “here is my unlucky tongue running away with me again! I am talking to you already as if I had known you for years! This is what papa’s friend meant when he said my manners were too bold. It’s quite true; I have a dreadful way of getting familiar with people, if — ” She checked herself suddenly, on the brink of ending the sentence by saying, “if I like them.”

“No, no; do go on!” pleaded Allan. “It’s a fault of mine to be familiar, too. Besides, we
must
be familiar; we are such near neighbours. I’m rather an uncultivated sort of fellow, and I don’t know quite how to say it; but I want your cottage to be jolly and friendly with my house, and my house to be jolly and friendly with your cottage. There’s my meaning, all in the wrong words. Do go on, Miss Milroy; pray go on!”

She smiled and hesitated. “I don’t exactly remember where I was,” she replied, “I only remember I had something I wanted to tell you. This comes, Mr. Armadale, of my taking your arm. I should get on so much better, if you would only consent to walk separately. You won’t? Well, then, will you tell me what it was I wanted to say? Where was I before I went wandering off to papa’s troubles and papa’s clock?”

“At school!” replied Allan, with a prodigious effort of memory.

“
Not
at school, you mean,” said Miss Milroy; “and all through
you
. Now I can go on again, which is a great comfort. I am quite serious, Mr. Armadale, in saying that I should have been sent to school, if you had said No when papa proposed for the cottage. This is how it happened. When we began moving in, Mrs. Blanchard sent us a most kind message from the great house to say that her servants were at our disposal, if we wanted any assistance. The least papa and I could do, after that, was to call and thank her. We saw Mrs. Blanchard and Miss Blanchard. Mistress was charming, and miss looked perfectly lovely in her mourning. I’m sure you admire her? She’s tall and pale and graceful — quite your idea of beauty, I should think?”