Christian Science -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction
There were narrow paths bordered with dusty dwarf-box, with queer-shaped
flower-beds bearing four-o’clocks, touch-me-nots, phlox, azaleas, and
sweet-william. Then there were beds upon beds of a flower no Northerner
ever sees,--the old-fashioned pink, before gardeners, wiser than their
Maker, attempted to graft it. In its heavy, double beauty it always
bursts its calyx and falls of its own weight of fragrance, to lie
prostrate on the ground, dying of its own heavy sweetness. Against a
crumbling wall were tea-roses. In another spot grew a great pink
cabbage rose, as flat as a plate when in full bloom, with its inner
leaves still so tightly crinkled that its golden heart was never
revealed except by a child’s curious investigating fingers. And
curiously twisting in and out of the branches of this rose-tree was a
honeysuckle vine. Over one end of the porch climbed a purple clematis.
Over the other a Cherokee rose. But the great glory of the garden was
over against the southern wall, where roses of every sort bloomed in
riotous profusion. Evidently they bloomed of their own sweet will, and
with little care, for the garden was almost as neglected as the rest of
the place.
Still it was the first thing which brought back to Carolina "a memory of
something" she "never had seen," as she told Cousin Lois when she went
in, and she made an excuse to go out alone after supper was over and the
three ladies were comfortably seated in rocking-chairs on the front
porch.
"Don’t sit in that chair, Mrs. Winchester," Carolina heard Miss Sallie’s
voice say, as she ran down the steps into the garden. "That chair has
no seat to it, and the back is broken to this one. Sit in this chair.
I think it won’t be too damp here to wait for Moultrie."
The girl could smile now, for the witchery of the evening was on the
garden, and its perfume enthralled her senses. She walked until she got
beyond the sound of voices on the front porch, and, at the head of a set
of shallow terraces, set like grassy steps to lead down to the brook
which babbled through the lower meadow, she sat down to let her mind
take in the sudden change in her life.
She rested her chin on her hands and was quite unaware that, in her thin
blue dress, with frills of yellow lace falling away from the arms above
the elbows, and with her neck rising from the transparent stuff like an
iris on its slender stem, she made anything of a picture, until she
became aware that some one was standing quite still on a lower terrace
and looking at her with so fixed an expression that she turned until her
eyes met his. Most girls would have started with surprise, but to
Carolina it was no surprise at all to find the stranger of the
Metropolitan Opera and the stranger who had borrowed her brother’s
dog-cart, a part of the enchanted garden, and to feel in her own heart
that he was no stranger to her, nor ever had been, nor ever could be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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