The Cottage Across the Lane

Miss Beatrice Loam had been called a spinster for so long that she had decided, somewhere about her thirty-fifth year, to take the word away from the people who used it as a small unkindness, and keep it for herself. It was not, after all, an unpleasant thing to be, once you owned it rather than suffered it. A spinster, in Beatrice's considered definition, was a woman who had been left in sole and undisputed possession of her own days. She rose when she pleased. She dined when she pleased. She had read every book in the lending library at Welbury twice over, some of them three times, and she answered to no one's opinion of how a woman of two-and-forty ought to spend a Tuesday. And she had her garden. The garden was the great fact of Beatrice's life, and she made no apology for it. Her brother, who had a wife and five children and a great many opinions, had once observed that it was a pity Beatrice had poured into a patch of earth the care she might have given to a family of her own, and Beatrice had poured him a second cup of tea and said nothing, because there was nothing to say to a person who believed that love given to roses was love wasted. Her roses had never once disappointed her. Her roses had never told her she was a pity. The garden behind Lark Cottage was, after twenty years of her hands in its soil, the nearest thing to a finished sentence that Beatrice had ever written, and on a fine June morning, standing among the delphiniums with the dew not yet off them, she considered herself a thoroughly contented woman, and was not even slightly pretending. Which made it all the more irritating that the cottage across the lane had been let. Rose Cottage — the names of the lane's two houses had been chosen, generations ago, by someone with no imagination and a fondness for the obvious — had stood empty for two years, since old Mrs. Tannock died, and Beatrice had grown fond of its emptiness. An empty cottage across the lane was a kind of company that asked nothing of you. So when she came out on that June morning and saw a cart drawn up at Rose Cottage's gate, and trunks being carried in, and a tall grey-haired man standing in the middle of the overgrown front garden looking about him with the bewildered expression of a person who has bought something he does not know how to use, Beatrice felt her contentment develop a small, definite crack. The man saw her looking. There was no helping it; the lane was narrow, and she had been caught frankly staring over her own gate, and a woman of two-and-forty is too old to pretend she had been doing anything else. "Good morning," the man called, across the lane, in a voice that had the carry of someone accustomed to being heard over weather. "I am told the woman in the cottage opposite is the person to ask about gardens. I do hope that is you, madam, because I have just been handed the keys to a quarter-acre of something, and I have spent thirty years at sea, and I give you my word I do not know a rose from a runner bean, and I find the prospect more alarming than any Frenchman ever managed to." Beatrice, against her own intentions, felt the crack in her contentment do something unexpected. It did not widen into annoyance. It curved, very slightly, at the edges. "That depends," she said, "on whether you mean to do something with the quarter-acre, or merely to let it alarm you from indoors. The previous tenant chose the second course. The garden has not forgiven her." The man laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of him, the laugh of a person who had not expected the woman over the gate to have any edges at all. "My name is Captain Josiah Hart," he said. "Retired, lately, from the naval surgeons, and entirely at the mercy of a garden I do not understand and a parish I have never seen. I had braced myself for loneliness, madam, as a sensible man braces for bad weather. I had not braced myself to be told off about runner beans within the hour. I find it" — he searched, openly, for the word — "I find it a considerable improvement on what I expected. Might I know the name of my instructress?" "Miss Beatrice Loam," said Beatrice. "And I have instructed no one. I have merely observed that your garden is in a disgraceful state, which is not instruction, it is simply the truth, and the truth is free." "Then I shall hope," said Captain Hart, with a bow that was a little rusty and entirely sincere, "that the instruction, when it comes, is more expensive, for I should be glad of a reason to pay it often." Beatrice Loam, contented spinster of two-and-forty, sole and undisputed possessor of her own days, went back into her garden that morning and found, to her very great surprise, that she had spent rather a long time smiling at a delphinium for no reason the delphinium had provided.