The Small House at Allington | Page 9

garden," said Bell, with that hypocritical pretence so
common with young ladies when young gentlemen call; as though they
were aware that mamma was the object specially sought.
"Picking peas, with a sun bonnet on," said Lily.
"Let us by all means go and help her," said Mr Crosbie; and then they
issued out into the garden.
The gardens of the Great House of Allington and those of the Small
House open on to each other. A proper boundary of thick laurel hedge,
and wide ditch, and of iron spikes guarding the ditch, there is between
them; but over the wide ditch there is a foot-bridge, and at the bridge
there is a gate which has no key; and for all purposes of enjoyment the
gardens of each house are open to the other. And the gardens of the
Small House are very pretty. The Small House itself is so near the road
that there is nothing between the dining-room windows and the iron rail
but a narrow edge rather than border, and a little path made with round
fixed cobble stones, not above two feet broad, into which no one but
the gardener ever makes his way. The distance from the road to the
house is not above five or six feet, and the entrance from the gate is

shut in by a covered way. But the garden behind the house, on to which
the windows from the drawing-room open, is to all the senses as private
as though there were no village of Allington, and no road up to the
church within a hundred yards of the lawn. The steeple of the church,
indeed, can be seen from the lawn, peering, as it were, between the
yew-trees which stand in the corner of the churchyard adjoining to Mrs
Dale's wall. But none of the Dale family have any objection to the sight
of that steeple. The glory of the Small House at Allington certainly
consists in its lawn, which is as smooth, as level, and as much like
velvet as grass has ever yet been made to look. Lily Dale, taking pride
in her own lawn, has declared often that it is no good attempting to play
croquet up at the Great House. The grass, she says, grows in tufts, and
nothing that Hopkins, the gardener, can or will do has any effect upon
the tufts. But there are no tufts at the Small House. As the squire
himself has never been very enthusiastic about croquet, the croquet
implements have been moved permanently down to the Small House,
and croquet there has become quite an institution.
And while I am on the subject of the garden I may also mention Mrs
Dale's conservatory, as to which Bell was strenuously of opinion that
the Great House had nothing to offer equal to it--"For flowers, of
course, I mean," she would say, correcting herself; for at the Great
House there was a grapery very celebrated. On this matter the squire
would be less tolerant than as regarded the croquet, and would tell his
niece that she knew nothing about flowers. "Perhaps not, Uncle
Christopher," she would say. "All the same, I like our geraniums best";
for there was a spice of obstinacy about Miss Dale--as, indeed, there
was in all the Dales, male and female, young and old.
It may be as well to explain that the care of this lawn and of this
conservatory, and, indeed, of the entire garden belonging to the Small
House, was in the hands of Hopkins, the head gardener at the Great
House; and it was so simply for this reason, that Mrs Dale could not
afford to keep a gardener herself. A working lad, at ten shillings a week,
who cleaned the knives and shoes, and dug the ground, was the only
male attendant on the three ladies. But Hopkins, the head gardener of
Allington, who had men under him, was as widely awake to the lawn

and the conservatory of the humbler establishment as he was to the
grapery, peach-walls, and terraces of the grander one. In his eyes it was
all one place. The Small House belonged to his master, as indeed did
the very furniture within it; and it was lent, not let, to Mrs Dale.
Hopkins, perhaps, did not love Mrs Dale, seeing that he owed her no
duty as one born a Dale. The two young ladies he did love, and also
snubbed in a very peremptory way sometimes. To Mrs Dale he was
coldly civil, always referring to the squire if any direction worthy of
special notice as concerning the garden was given to him.
All this will serve to explain the terms on which Mrs Dale was living at
the Small House--a matter needful of explanation sooner or