The Lovely Lady | Page 8

to his cheek and watching Peter across it, "that I think it is a very good sign that you are willing to ask. The most of poor men will sit about and rail and envy the rich, but hardly one would think to ask how it is done, or believe if he were told. They've a notion it's all gouging and luck, and you couldn't beat that out of them if you tried. Very few of them understand how simple success is; it isn't easy often, but it is always simple."
Peter supposed that he really ought to go after that, though he did not know how to manage it until Mrs. Dassonville smiled at him over her husband's shoulder and asked him what sort of work he did. "Oh, if you know about gardens," she interrupted him, "you can help a little. There are such a lot of things coming up in mine that I don't know the names of."
It flashed out to Peter long afterward that she had simply provided an easy way for him to get out of the house now that his visit was terminated. She held the white fold of her shawl over her head with one hand and gathered the trailing skirts with the other. They rustled as she moved like the leaves of the elms at night above the roof, as she led him along the walk where little straight spears of green and blunt flower crowns faintly tinged with colour came up thickly in the borders. So by degrees she got him down past the hyacinth beds and the nodding buds of the daffodils to the gate and on the road again, walking home in the chill early twilight with the pricking of a pleasant excitement in his veins.
It was that, perhaps, and the sense of having got so much more out of it than any account of his visit would justify, that kept Peter from saying much to his mother that night about his talk with the rich man; he asked her instead if she had ever seen Mrs. Dassonville.
"Yes," she assured him. "Mr. Dassonville drove her over to Mrs. Tillinghurst's funeral in October. They had only been married a little while then; she is the second Mrs. Dassonville, you know; the first died years ago. I thought her a very lovely lady."
"A lovely lady," Peter said the phrase under his breath. The sound of it was like the soft drawing of silken skirts.
His mother looked at him across the supper table and was pleased to see the renewal of cheerfulness, and then, motherlike, sighed to think that Peter was getting so old now that if he didn't choose to tell her things she had no right to ask him. "Your walk has done you good," was all she said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden before it was all full of spring bulbs and the scent of daffodils. The Princess came walking in it as before, but she was no Princess now, merely a woman with her dark hair brushed up in a half moon from her brow and her skirts drawing after her with a silken rustle; her face was dim and sweet, with only a faint, a very faint, reminder of Ada, and her name was the Lovely Lady.

PART TWO
IN WHICH PETER BECOMES INVISIBLE ON THE WAY TO GROWING RICH

PART TWO
IN WHICH PETER BECOMES INVISIBLE ON THE WAY TO GROWING RICH
In the late summer of that year Peter went up to the city with Mr. Greenslet to lay in his winter stock and remained in canned goods with Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium. That his mother had rented the farming land for cash was the immediate occasion of his setting out, but there were several other reasons and a great many opinions. Mr. Greenslet had a boy of his own coming on for Peter's place; Bet, the mare, had died, and the farm implements wanted renewing; in spite of which Mrs. Weatheral could hardly have made up her mind to spare him except for the opportune appearance of the cash renter. With that and the chickens and the sewing, she and Ellen could take care of themselves and the interest, which would leave all that Peter could make to count against the mortgage.
They put it hopefully to one another so, as they sat about the kitchen stove, all three of them holding hands, on the evening before his departure. But the opinions, which were rather thicker at Bloombury than opportunities, were by no