The garden of the hotel at Sydenham had originally belonged to a private house. Of great extent, it had been laid out in excellent taste. Flower-beds and lawns, a handsome fountain, seats shaded by groups of fine trees at their full growth, completed the pastoral charm of the place. A winding path led across the garden from the back of the house. It had been continued by the speculator who purchased the property, until it reached a road at the extremity of the grounds which communicated with the Crystal Palace. Visitors to the hotel had such pleasant associations with the garden that many of them returned at future opportunities instead of trying the attraction of some other place. Various tastes and different ages found their wishes equally consulted here. Children rejoiced in the finest playground they had ever seen. Remote walks, secluded among shrubberies, invited persons of reserved disposition who came as strangers, and as strangers desired to remain. The fountain and the lawn collected sociable visitors, who were always ready to make acquaintance with each other. Even the amateur artist could take liberties with Nature, and find the accommodating limits of the garden sufficient for his purpose. Trees in the foreground sat to him for likenesses that were never recognized; and hills submitted to unprovoked familiarities, on behalf of brushes which were not daunted by distance.
On the day after the dinner which had so deplorably failed, in respect of one of the guests invited, to fulfill Catherine's anticipations, there was a festival at the Palace. It had proved so generally attractive to the guests at the hotel that the grounds were almost deserted.
As the sun declined, on a lovely summer evening, the few invalids feebly wandering about the flower-beds, or resting under the trees, began to return to the house in dread of the dew.
Catherine and her child, with the nursemaid in attendance, were left alone in the garden. Kitty found her mother, as she openly declared, "not such good company as usual." Since the day when her grandmother had said the fatal words which checked all further allusion to her father, the child had shown a disposition to complain, if she was not constantly amused. She complained of Mrs. Presty now.
"I think grandmamma might have taken me to the Crystal Palace," she said.
"My dear, your grandmamma has friends with her--ladies and gentlemen who don't care to be troubled with a child."
Kitty received this information in a very unamiable spirit. "I hate ladies and gentlemen!" she said.
"Even Captain Bennydeck?" her mother asked.
"No; I like my nice Captain. And I like the waiters. They would take me to the Crystal Palace--only they're always busy. I wish it was bedtime; I don't know what to do with myself."
"Take a little walk with Susan."
"Where shall I go?"
Catherine looked toward the gate which opened on the road, and proposed a visit to the old man who kept the lodge.
Kitty shook her head. There was an objection to the old man. "He asks questions; he wants to know how I get on with my sums. He's proud of his summing; and he finds me out when I'm wrong. I don't like the lodge-keeper."
Catherine looked the other way, toward the house. The pleasant fall of water in the basin of the distant fountain was just audible. "Go and feed the gold-fishes," she suggested.
This was a prospect of amusement which at once raised Kitty's spirits. "That's the thing!" she cried, and ran off to the fountain, with the nursemaid after her.
Catherine seated herself under the trees, and watched in solitude the decline of the sun in a cloudless sky. The memory of the happy years of her marriage had never been so sadly and persistently present to her mind as at this time, when the choice of another married life waited her decision to become an accomplished fact. Remembrances of the past, which she had such bitter reason to regret, and forebodings of the future, in which she was more than half inclined to believe, oppressed her at one and the same moment. She thought of the different circumstances, so widely separated by time, under which Herbert (years ago) and Bennydeck (twenty-four hours since) had each owned his love, and pleaded for an indulgent hearing. Her mind contrasted the dissimilar results.
