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Page 23
The bedrooms and two of the sitting-rooms at San Salvatore were
on the top floor, and opened into a roomy hall with a wide glass window
at the north end. San Salvatore was rich in small gardens in different
parts and on different levels. The garden this window looked down on
was made on the highest part of the walls, and could only be reached
through the corresponding spacious hall on the floor below. When Mrs.
Wilkins came out of her room this window stood wide open, and beyond it
in the sun was a Judas tree in full flower. There was no sign of
anybody, no sound of voices or feet. Tubs of arum lilies stood about
on the stone floor, and on a table flamed a huge bunch of fierce
nasturtiums. Spacious, flowery, silent, with the wide window at the
end opening into the garden, and the Judas tree absurdly beautiful in
the sunshine, it seemed to Mrs. Wilkins, arrested on her way across to
Mrs. Arbuthnot, too good to be true. Was she really going to live in
this for a whole month? Up to now she had had to take what beauty she
could as she went along, snatching at little bits of it when she came
across it--a patch of daisies on a fine day in a Hampstead field, a
flash of sunset between two chimney pots. She had never been in
definitely, completely beautiful places. She had never been even in a
venerable house; and such a thing as a profusion of flowers in her
rooms was unattainable to her. Sometimes in the spring she had bought
six tulips at Shoolbred's, unable to resist them, conscious that
Mellersh if he knew what they had cost would think it inexcusable; but
they had soon died, and then there were no more. As for the Judas
tree, she hadn't an idea what it was, and gazed at it out there against
the sky with the rapt expression of one who sees a heavenly vision.
Mrs. Arbuthnot, coming out of her room, found her there like
that, standing in the middle of the hall staring.
"Now what does she think she sees now?" thought Mrs. Arbuthnot.
"We are in God's hands," said Mrs. Wilkins, turning to her,
speaking with extreme conviction.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Arbuthnot quickly, her face, which had been
covered with smiles when she came out of her room, fall. "Why, what
has happened?"
For Mrs. Arbuthnot had woken up with such a delightful feeling of
security, of relief, and she did not want to find she had not after all
escaped from the need of refuge. She had not even dreamed of
Frederick. For the first time in years she had been spared the nightly
dream that he was with her, that they were heart to heart, and its
miserable awakening. She had slept like a baby, and had woken up
confident; she had found there was nothing she wished to say in her
morning prayer, except Thank you. It was disconcerting to be told she
was after all in God's hands.
"I hope nothing has happened?" she asked anxiously.
Mrs. Wilkins looked at her a moment, and laughed. "How funny,"
she said, kissing her.
"What is funny?" asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, her face clearing because
Mrs. Wilkins laughed.
"We are. This is. Everything. It's all so wonderful. It's so
funny and so adorable that we should be in it. I daresay when we
finally reach heaven--the one they talk about so much--we shan't find
it a bit more beautiful."
Mrs. Arbuthnot relaxed to smiling security again. "Isn't it
divine?" she said?
"Were you ever, ever in your life so happy?" asked Mrs. Wilkins,
catching her by the arm.
"No," said Mrs. Arbuthnot. Nor had she been; not ever; not even
in her first love-days with Frederick. Because always pain had been
close at hand in that other happiness, ready to torture with doubts,
to torture even with the very excess of her love; while this was the
simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the
happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just
is.
"Let's go and look at that tree close," said Mrs. Wilkins. "I
don't believe it can only be a tree."
And arm in arm they went along the hall, and their husbands would
not have known them their faces were so young with eagerness, and
together they stood at the open window, and when their eyes, having
feasted on the marvelous pink thing, wandered farther among the
beauties of the garden, they saw sitting on the low wall at the east
edge of it, gazing out over the bay, her feet in lilies, Lady Caroline.
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