A REUNION
425
he had to agree that I'd been right. You recall the reason? That she
loved this special red? I have no doubt other friends of mine have
wondered, but they've been too tactful to enquire."
"Too tactful?"
"Why, yes, to be sure. Isn't that a kind of tact? To speak as little
as possible of the dead to the bereft?"
He had stopped some paces from the gravestone and had turned
away from me to pluck a dying leaf from an azalea plant, but I knew
that his face, in spite of the changes of age, wore an expression of
anger and yet of satisfaction that I had seen so often from the earliest
days of my childhood. For, adroitly, he had trapped me into revealing
for the millionth time, my ignorance (he had, seven years ago, called
it my "willful ignorance") of his grief which, like a precious flower,
had under his care become immortal, as fresh, as faultless as on the
day she died and I was born. And yet, he liked to coax a canker to
its immaculate petals to cherish them the more when he had cleansed
them. Just a<> he was pulling off the limp yellowing leaf from the
azalea, gently, so as not to disturb the delicate living tissues of the
plant, so he was removing my careless blight from his heart's rose.
He was reluctant to leave the garden and in that hallowed place
- for eve1y flower and tree and bush was dedicated like the appoint–
ments of an altar-we would not quarrel, not even in lowered voices
and not even in the language so shrewdly civil we had used, on the
other occasion, to deceive the servants who might be eavesdropping.
It occurred to me, seeing
him
delay our return to the house by exam–
ining the soil about the oleanders and rambling thoughtfully about
the lily pond, consuming more than half an hour in an aimless survey
of his consecrated grove, that if he were able to predict me better, he
would like ·to prolong my stay; for who but I could so often and yet
so impotently threaten his exquisite obsession? Whose guilt was so
ineradicable? And I wondered if this was why he had written me
after so many years: a curiosity to know
if
I
had
become more pre–
dictable, and if he could now check me before I had gone too far.
He had been careful to name no term for my visit. At any moment,
he might say, as he had done before, "Of course you may stay as
long as you like, but surely you are intelligent enough to see that we
can never be at peace with one another."
"I have put a new floor in the summer house," he said. "Perhaps
you would like to see it.
If
I remember rightly, the summer house was
all you really cared about in my little garden." He smiled beseechingly
at me like the great lady deprecating her "little house" to her poor
cousins. Indeed, I had liked the summer house and had often played
