‘Splendid!’ said Jane. ‘Why, we hardly ever take anything on Monday – it’s a glorious beginning!’
‘You didn’t either of you catch cold last night?’ he hoped.
‘More likely you,’ said Jane. ‘I’m afraid you were awfully uncomfortable here. No, don’t be polite about it – because, of course, the truth’s the truth. Have you been into the garden yet – by daylight, I mean?’
‘Rather! It’s a beautiful place – but … well … the sooner I get to work the better. Is there a scythe? Nothing short of that will make any sort of successful attack on your armies of docks and nettles.’
‘Those sort of things are in the toolshed among the lilacs beyond the summer-house. Of course, there might be a scythe there, but I’ve never seen one.’
‘Yes,’ he said, but still he lingered.
‘Look here,’ he said quickly, looking out of the window over the cedar lawn, ‘you must just let me say “thank you” once – I won’t keep on saying it. I’ve been in London for months – all grey and black and grimy – everything greasy with being rubbed up against by the bent shoulders of unhappy people. And all the faces – anxious, worried, sad. And the noises – the screaming machines rushing about. The motor-vans begin at three in the morning. This morning the birds woke me. I was out in the garden by five. I’d almost forgotten what dawn was like in a green place.’
He went out abruptly without looking at them. And they very carefully avoided looking at each other.
The morning seemed unusually long; there were no more sales. When they had swept and dusted the garden room there was nothing more to do but to wonder whether their landlord would come again to-day, to-morrow, every day, every other day.
‘You know,’ said Jane, ‘if dear Uncle James is going to live next door, so to speak, and if we’re liable to be dropped down on at any hour of the day or night –’
‘He didn’t drop down exactly,’ said Lucilla.
‘Oh, didn’t he? Liable to be dropped in on, then – we shall never feel safe. I do like him, too – but he’s so sudden.’ And it was then that she explained how exactly the elder Mr Rochester had resembled the eldest of the three bears.
To Mr Dix, sweltering in mid-day sunshine, amid swathes of mown grass and groundsel, dock and comfrey, nettles and thistle and willow herb, came a bright vision of basket-bearing maidens in flowered gowns, all pink and green and blue and purple.
‘Dinner,’ said one of them.
And, ‘You’ll want to wash,’ said the other; ‘lock up the garden room when you’ve done, won’t you? And when you come you might bring the plates and glasses off the table – and the jug of lemonade.’
They spread the cloth by the fishpond – dry now and over-grown with the thorny arrogance of rambler roses all thick with the promise of countless little pointed buds.
It was a very nice dinner – the cold lamb from yesterday, and what was left of the gooseberry-pie, and lettuces and radishes, and what sounds so nice when you call it (fair white bread). The sun shone, the green leaves flickered and shivered in the soft airs of May. The peonies shone like crimson cannon-balls, and the flags stood up like spears; the birds sang, and three very contented people ate and talked and laughed together. It is idle to pretend that three is not sometimes a much better number than two. Jane realised this.
‘So long as it’s not four,’ she told herself, and ever and again her eye scanned the shadowy shrubbery beyond which lay the gates by which, if at all, the fourth must come. And the more she liked Mr Dix – and she did go on liking him more and more – the more certain she felt that the fourth, if that fourth should be Mr John Rochester, would not like Mr Dix so much as she did.
There was a breathless feeling of being on the edge of things.
They made conversation:
‘I wish Shelley hadn’t said that about the lamb that looks you in the face,’ said Lucilla. And that kept them going for a while.
Then: ‘This gooseberry-pie ought to have cream with it,’ said Jane; ‘but the cream here doesn’t seem real somehow. Let’s write to Gladys to post us some from Mutton’s, shall we? Gladys was one of the maids at school.’
Then they told Mr Dix about Gladys.
They all laughed a great deal and ate up everything that there was to eat.
When the meal was over, Lucilla produced with an air of conscious pride a crumpled packet of cigarettes.
‘You’d like to smoke?’ she said, offering also matches.
The cigarette which Mr Dix extracted from the packet was bent but not broken. He straightened it and lit it. Not for worlds would he have produced the new crisp cigarettes that he had bought that morning. Something about that timeworn little packet of Lucilla’s convinced him that neither of the ladies smoked. Still, he put the question.
‘But you?’ he asked. ‘What am I thinking of?’ and he proffered the broken-backed case.
‘We don’t,’ said Jane. ‘I believe everyone else does, so we tried. But we don’t like it.’
‘Gladys smokes,’ said Lucilla. ‘It was Gladys who got us the cigarettes to try; we only tried one each. They didn’t make us ill … Gladys said they did some people – but they don’t really taste nice, and we couldn’t smell the flowers or the wet grass or pine-woods nearly so well afterwards. So we didn’t go on with it.’
‘You don’t dislike my smoking? Doesn’t it poison the air for you?’ he asked, laying down the cigarette.
‘Oh no!’ said both together.
‘It smells all right here,’ Lucilla explained, and Jane added:
‘It makes you feel that this is the great world: so different from school. Do go on.’ And he did.
‘It was jolly clever of you to think of those cigarettes,’ Jane said later; ‘it was a score to you. But I expect he’d really bought some already. No, I don’t really – don’t look so dismal; it was a splendid thought. If he’d been the snub-nosed charwoman you couldn’t have made him happy with cigarettes. I say, Luce, we never offered Uncle James his share of the money.’
‘No more we did. Now we shall have to calculate what ten per cent of all our shop money comes to. What a way to spend a bright day in May!’
‘You’d rather spend it sitting by the edge of the fishpond watching our gardener smoke.’
‘Yes – and so would you! Instead of which we’ll mind the shop – and let Uncle James jolly well find us minding it if he drops down – I mean in – on us this afternoon.’
But it was Mr John Rochester who dropped in.
‘I thought perhaps you would,’ said Lucilla, rather out of politeness than as a statement of fact, ‘because of the stables, you know.’
‘Ah – the stables!’ said Mr John Rochester. ‘I kept the stables dark yesterday because I didn’t know exactly how we stood with Uncle. I wasn’t sure that there mightn’t be a recurrence of grumpiness on the part of Uncle. About the crocks and the sticks, you know.’
‘And was there?’
‘No – on the contrary. I have never known him so amiable. Our noble work in cleaning off the gas-green paint has gone straight to his heart. He could talk of very little else.’
‘We were just wondering how to find out how much ten per cent of all our shop money would come to. You know that was what we settled to pay your uncle – as rent for the garden room, you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Mr Rochester, ‘but I don’t think you need bother about that. He’s changed his mind.’
The girls looked at each other in dumb horror. Mr Rochester was getting some keys out of his pocket, and did not see their faces. The keys of the stable, no doubt. But what did stable or cottages or tennis-lawn matter if their landlord changed his mind? Somehow they had never thought of his doing that.
Jane was the first to find words.
‘He doesn’t want us to go on with the garden and the garden room? He doesn’t want us to go on as we are?’
‘No,’ answered John Rochester absently, and still busy with the keys. ?
??He doesn’t want you to go on as you are. You see, he’s decided not to keep the house empty any longer.’
An end, then, to everything!
I think it is to the credit of my Jane and Lucilla that the first thought of each as they caught breath under the assault of this wave of misfortune was:
‘And we’ve just engaged a gardener! Oh, poor Mr Dix!’
CHAPTER XVI
‘I think,’ said Jane, in a small, flat voice, ‘that I would rather go before he comes.’
‘Before who comes?’ Mr Rochester was laying the keys out on the table, one by one, in a row.
‘Your uncle.’
‘But he isn’t coming,’ said Mr Rochester, still intent on the keys. ‘Why can’t people use key-rings? These were on a cord, and it’s broken. They were all in a certain order. Only two labelled A and B – the rest en suite. A silly game. No – he’s not coming. He’s gone to Thibet. There’s a Buddhist manuscript there that he must see, or perish. So he’s gone to see it. But I’ve got a letter for you from him.’
‘You can post it to us,’ said Lucilla, in a voice smaller and flatter than Jane’s.
‘No need for that – I’ll give it you in half a minute. I’m only trying to remember how these things go. My dear girl,’ he ended, in a quite changed voice, ‘whatever is the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Jane, now sufficiently recovered to bristle defensively. ‘Everything’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Marcus Aurelius said, didn’t he? Only those unexpected things do rather take your breath away. I daresay our new gardener can take down the board. I don’t mind in the least,’ she went on, and she was now, indeed, a little breathless; ‘but I must say I think it would have been better to have let us alone, and not let us begin to work here and hope and plan things, and then spring this on us.’ She walked to the window and stood looking out at the cedars, which looked, to her eyes, twisted and rainbow-rimmed.
‘Springing what?’ asked Rochester in complete bewilderment. ‘Tell me – what?’ But Jane could find no voice to tell him what.
‘Springing what?’ he asked again.
‘What you told us,’ said Lucilla, in a sort of faint, timid growl, and then she too became speechless, and turned to the other window and gazed out at the gates and the board, also, to her, prismatically coloured.
‘But I haven’t told you anything yet,’ Rochester protested. Four eyes bright with unconcealable tears turned on him astonished reproach.
The bewildered young man was quite overcome. He gazed from Lucilla to Jane; his heart experienced a twinge at the sight of Lucilla’s brimming eyes, but when he saw the dejected droop of Jane’s head he lost his own.
‘Ah, don’t!’ he said, in a voice of extreme tenderness, and he took two steps and put his hand over Jane’s hand, which lay on the window-ledge. ‘Please, please don’t. I must have been incredibly stupid – I don’t know what I’ve done, but …’
Will it be believed that Mr Dix chose this exact moment to appear at the glass door and ask cheerfully where the wheelbarrow was kept? He looked very handsome though; his classic brow was dotted with beads of sweat, and his blue shirt, open at the neck and rolled up as to the sleeves, accentuated the blue of his eyes. He spoke with perfect respect, of course, but it was the respect of the young man to the woman who is his social equal, not the respect of the gardener to his employer.
‘I can’t find the wheelbarrow anywhere,’ he said.
‘We hid it behind the laurels,’ said Lucilla, ‘in case of burglars. We couldn’t get it into the shed. I’ll show you,’ and felt herself being tactful. The spectacle of Mr Rochester laying his hand on Jane’s, and Jane not whisking her hand abruptly from this unusual contact until Mr Dix’s voice was heard at the door, made Lucilla extremely anxious to get away, somehow, from the garden room. But Jane also appeared anxious for flight.
‘No – I’ll go,’ she said, and was out of the door like a flash.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Mr Rochester, when she was gone.
‘Mr Dix. He was going to be our gardener.’
‘Oh,’ said Mr Rochester coldly; ‘why only “was”?’
‘Well – we don’t need a gardener at Hope Cottage, and since we’re not going to go on here …’
‘Oh,’ said Mr Rochester slowly, ‘I begin to see. Well, it’s no use my trying to remember what I said – something more than usually idiotic, I suppose – but what I came down to say was this: my uncle is so charmed with the panelling, and the tea, and you, and Miss Quested, and everything, that he’s changed his mind completely; he says you can have the whole of Cedar Court to do exactly as you like with – no restrictions. Only in return he wants to have Hope Cottage kept exactly as it is – not let – but kept as it is.’
‘Just as it is? No one to live in it? Like a museum?’
‘More like a sacred relic of the past.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Lucilla; ‘but then I don’t understand anything this morning. Let me go and tell Jane.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Mr Rochester. ‘Who is this Mr Dix?’
‘A friend of ours,’ said Lucilla cautiously.
‘Known him long?’ asked Mr Rochester – ‘though, of course, I’ve no earthly right to ask.’
‘No,’ said Lucilla, with some spirit, ‘I don’t think you have – any earthly.’
And a gloomy silence fell between them. The young man broke it by a laugh that was not very merry.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘this is like a nightmare! I couldn’t sleep last night – literally and actually I couldn’t sleep – for thinking how frightfully pleased you’d both be. And now you’re quarrelling with me, and she’s gone off crying with that Dixy fellow, and everything’s about as damnable – I beg your pardon, but it really is – as it can possibly be.’
‘Well,’ said Lucilla, ‘it’s no use making it worse by being silly; of course Jane and I both wanted to go off and look for the wheelbarrow – anything to get away from you. You don’t suppose we enjoyed standing and snivelling at you like silly, hysterical schoolgirls, do you?’
‘Look here,’ said Mr Rochester, ‘about that man Dix, or whatever his wretched name is …’
‘Well, what about him?’
‘Don’t be prickly. Do tell me about him.’
‘All right. I will. We made his acquaintance at Madame Tussauds and – and we asked him to tea. Jane asked him to be our gardener. And now what about it?’
‘You mean to say you just met him like that – you don’t know anything about him?’
‘No more than we knew about you when we asked you to tea. Now look here, Mr Rochester, we like you very much as a friend, but we aren’t going to have you as a duenna. Yes, I daresay I’m vulgar, but there it is. We choose our own friends. You oughtn’t to forget that we chose you. And you can’t expect us to go through life without any friends except you. And you can’t expect us not to have a gardener. And do think what a much better number four is than three for tennis.’
‘That’s true,’ he admitted thoughtfully.
‘If I knew you well enough to ask a favour …’
‘But you do – you do.’
‘Then I should ask you to be very nice to Mr Dix. There’s every reason why you should. Look here, Mr Rochester. I’m beginning to understand what you said just now. If we’re really to have Cedar Court, this is our day of days – the birthday of our life. And we’re spoiling it with silliness. Put the black dog up the chimney. Fie, fie! Unknit that angry, threatening brow, and tell me I’m not dreaming, and that your uncle really is the angel you said he was. Are you going to be nice? Are you?’
He was smiling by this time.
‘How eloquent you are!’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard you say so much at once since I’ve known you.’
‘I’m never eloquent when Jane’s there,’ said Lucilla – ‘she does it so much better than I do; and you will be nice?’
‘I’ll do anything you like. I’ll even try to a
dmire your far too admirable gardener. Please forgive me, and let’s enjoy the day of days.’
‘Mr Dix will have to be allowed to enjoy it too,’ she stipulated.
‘Out of working hours,’ he urged. ‘If he’s a gardener, let him jolly well garden.’
‘And now,’ she said, smiling as April smiles, ‘let’s go and find Jane, and tell her. Monday’s early-closing day – at least it ought to be. We’ll lock up the shop and be free for happiness.’
They found Jane on the stone seat in the nut-walk at the far end of the garden. On the way, Mr Rochester noted with some satisfaction that the gardener was jolly well gardening. He had his wheelbarrow and was pitchforking weeds into it with due energy.
Mr Rochester thought he had never seen anything so satisfying as the light of half incredulous joy that shone in Jane’s eyes when Lucilla – without any beating about the bush – broke out with:
‘It’s all right, Jane. It’s the exact opposite of what we thought. We’re to have all Cedar Court, my dear – and do just what we like with it.’
‘You’re not – not joking?’ Jane asked, afraid to take this new joy in her hands.
‘Joking?’ said Lucilla. ‘Not much. It’s dream-like, but it’s true. Mr Rochester’s got the keys. Let’s go now, this very minute, and see all over everything.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Jane. ‘Oh, who would have thought my blundering down those stairs that day would have led to this!’
‘If people only knew what results you get there wouldn’t be enough stairs in the world for all the people who’d be tumbling over each other to tumble down them,’ said Lucilla.
‘You’re wandering, dear,’ said Jane. ‘Oh, Mr Rochester, is it really true?’
‘As true as taxes,’ said Mr Rochester.
And so, led by Mr John Rochester, who by a curious coincidence had on boots as new as Mr Dix’s – boots that creaked too – they explored the house. It was, they both felt, a great moment. Those trembling joys of their first furtive raid on Cedar Court, those breathless glimpses, those hurried peeps at forbidden treasures of cabinet and banner-screen – these surely would be as nothing compared with the mature joy of this absolutely lawful exploration.