Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

To this Burbidge didn’t give direct assent, but like a true Shropshire man, he declared that it was his belief, if the Lord was on earth, it might pleasure Him to see the place, for the whole of the red-walled garden was a garland of flowers. “There be irises, and roses, and peonies; and it be hard to tell the colours. There be all sorts and all shades, most like a glass window in the Abbey Church at Shrewsbury.” And Burbidge added, with that true sense of poetry that belongs to the peasant, that “the Wrekin doves they be cooing and fluttering round the firs, same as in a real poem.”

A POSY OF ROSES

Burbidge laid the bunch of roses close beside me, for they had slipped off the sofa whilst he was talking. Before going, he vouchsafed the information that there be a Reine d’Angleterre three parts in blow. He pronounced the French words strangely, but I understood from many talks what was meant in Gallic, and that he would bring it to me. “And ’tis a great deal, I think, the sight of a new rose – leastways, ’tis to me; for it allus pleases, and it never can be uncivil like many Christians,” he said. After which profound dictum, my good old gardener hobbled off. These kind gifts and little attentions touched me. I appreciated much Auguste’s thoughtful kindness, and Burbidge’s pity for my misfortune, for it was his invariable rule that a “first blow,” must show itself first in a garden. “Don’t ’e interfere with the Lord’s system,” he once said to me, when I wanted to gather a new tree peony. “Let it pleasure itself first time in the garden, and arter yer may please yerself.”

I smelt my bunch of roses, the fragrance was delicious, soft and sweet, and only to be fully appreciated by dipping one’s nose well into the centre of the sweetest.

Certainly a rose is a lovely flower, and it is wonderful what gardeners have done to tend, improve, and develop it, and it was hard to imagine that any of the great double complex blossoms that I held in my hand, were first cousin, and lineally descended from the wild rose of the hedges. Yet delicious as roses are, and beloved by most men, and women, there have been, and may be, for aught I know, some who still cordially hate them, as cordially as Lord Roberts is said to dislike the presence of a cat, or a certain Duchess that I have been told of, the approach of horses.

Marguerite of Navarre, the wife of Henry IV. of France, is said to have found the perfume of roses so repellent, that she fainted if one was brought her; and I remember in Evelyn’s Diary of 1670, an account of a dinner-party at Goring House, in which he tells us that, “Lord Stafford rose from table in some disorder, because there were roses stuck about the fruit at dessert.”

Sir Kenelm Digby also told a story of the same kind of Lady Selenger (St. Leger). Her antipathy to this flower he declared to have been so great, that some one laying a rose beside her cheek when asleep, thereby caused a blister to rise. Whether the story was true it is too long ago to tell; but by all accounts Sir Kenelm “was a teller of strange things.”

Whilst I was thinking over these old-world stories, I was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of my little girl.

“Oh, mamma,” cried Bess, with tears in her eyes, “only to think he – Hals – has to go, to go in two days.”

“Do not cry, little one,” I replied. “Papa and I have settled that I am to go off for a week to the seaside, and you shall come too; and even Mouse shall have her ticket.”

At this Bess was comforted, for the prospect of the sea, the sands, and a spade of her very own, were very consolatory. But the day that little Hals left us, she came to me just before going off to bed.

“Mum,” she said, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes, dear,” I replied.

“I’ve been thinking,” pursued Bess, “that somehow there ought to be – a way to keep a boy. Grown-up girls have husbands, I know,” she said. Then, after a momentary pause, “You have a great, great book of Harrod’s. Surely, somewhere, mamsie, they have a boy stall.”

I laughed and kissed my little girl. “We are poor creatures,” I said, “we girls and women. We have all for centuries wanted to buy some boy, and haven’t yet found out where or how to do it.”

“GOOD-BYE! GOOD-BYE!”

A few days later, Bess and I found ourselves on the Wenlock station platform. Masses of boxes surrounded us, and Mouse, with a label tied to her collar, sat watching us intently.

“Why aren’t you glad to go – glad as I am, mamsie?” cried Bess, impetuously. “You know the doctor said that it would make you quite better, and we can bathe together in the sea. Besides,” added my little maid, with wisdom beyond her years, “if you only go, you are always much gladder to come back.”

We jumped into a carriage, and Mouse looked out of the window. Burbidge took my last injunctions. Then the train moved off, and the ruins and old town of Wenlock faded before my eyes. “Good-bye, dear old place!” I murmured. And as we dashed on, faintly sounding on the breeze, I caught the last notes of the distant chimes – “Good-bye! Good-bye!”