A Garden of Peace: A Medley in QuietudeMoore, Frank Frankfort
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A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude
Moore, Frank Frankfort
Gardens -- Fiction
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD
WE, were working at the young campanulas when our friend Heywood came
upon us--Heywood, for whose intelligence we have so great a respect,
because he so frequently agrees with our outlook upon the world of woman
and other flowers cherished by us. Heywood is a good artist; but because
he believes that Womankind is a kind woman indefinitely multiplied,
he paints more faithful portraits of men than of women; he also paints
landscapes that live more faithfully than the human features that
he depicts and receives large sums for depicting. He is a student of
children, and comes to Rosamund quite seriously for her criticism. She
gives it unaffectedly, I am glad to notice; and without having to make
use of a word of the School-of-Art phraseology.
We have an able surgeon (retired) living close to us here, and he is
still so interested in the Science he practised--he retired from the
practice, not from the science--that when he is made aware of an unusual
operation about to be performed in any direction--London, Paris, or (not
recently) Vienna, he goes off to witness the performance, just as we go
to some of the most interesting _premières_ in town. In the same
spirit Heywood runs off every now and again to Paris to see the latest
production of his old master, or the acquisition of an old Master at
one of the galleries. It lets him know what is going on in the world, he
says, and I am sure he is quite right.
But, of course, Atheist Friswell has his smile--a solemn smile it is
this time--while he says,--
“Old Masters? Young mississes rather, I think.”
“Young what?” cried Dorothy.
“Mysteries,” he replied. “What on earth do you think I said?”
“Another word with the same meaning,” says she.
But these artistic excursions have nothing to do with us among our
campanulas to-day. Heywood has been aware of a funny thing and came to
make us laugh with him.
“Campanulas!” he cried. “And that is just what I came to tell you
about--the campanile at St. Katherine's.”
Yardley Parva, in common with Venice, Florence, and a number of other
places, has a campanile, only it was not designed by Giotto or any other
artist. Nor is it even called a campanile, but a bell-tower, and it
belongs to the Church of St. Katherine-sub-Castro--a Norman church
transformed by a few-adroit touches here and there into the purest
Gothic of the Restoration--the Gilbert Scoti-Church-Restoration period.
But no one would complain with any measure of bitterness at the
existence of the bell-tower only for the fact that there are bells
within it, and these bells being eight, lend themselves to many feats
of campanology, worrying the inhabitants within a large area round about
the low levels of the town. The peace of every Sabbath Day is rudely
broken by the violence of what the patient folk with no _arrière pensée_
term “them joy bells.”
“You have not heard a sound of them for some Sundays,” said Heywood.
“I have not complained,” said I. “Ask Dorothy if I have.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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