Iden could not find a carpenter good enough to make his gate in the hamlet; he sent for one ten miles, and paid him full carpenter’s wages. He was not satisfied then, he watched the man at his work to see that the least little detail was done correctly, till the fellow would have left the job, had he not been made pliable by the Goliath ale. So he just stretched the job out as long as he could, and talked and talked with Iden, and stroked him the right way, and drank the ale, and “played it upon me and on William, That day in a way I despise.” Till what with the planing, and shaving, and smoothing, and morticing, and ale, and time, it footed up a pretty bill, enough for three commonplace gates, not of the Iden style.
Why, Iden had put away those pieces of timber years before for this very purpose, and had watched the sawyers saw them out at the pit. They would have made good oak furniture. There was nothing special or particular about this gateway; he had done the same in turn for every gateway on the farm; it was the Iden way.
A splendid gate it was, when it was finished, fit for a nobleman’s Home Park. I doubt, if you would find such a gate, so well proportioned, and made of such material on any great estate in the kingdom. For not even dukes can get an Iden to look after their property. An Iden is not to be “picked up,” I can tell you.
The neighbourhood round about had always sneered in the broad country way at Iden’s gates. “Vit for m’ Lard’s park. What do he want wi’ such geates? A’ ain’t a got no cattle to speak on; any ould rail ud do as good as thuck geat.”
The neighbourhood round about could never understand Iden, never could see why he had gone to such great trouble to render the homestead beautiful with trees, why he had replanted the orchard with pleasant eating apples in the place of the old cider apples, hard and sour. “Why wouldn’t thaay a’ done for he as well as for we?”
All the acts of Iden seemed to the neighbourhood to be the acts of a “vool.”
When he cut a hedge, for instance, Iden used to have the great bushes that bore unusually fine May bloom saved from the billhook, that they might flower in the spring. So, too, with the crab-apples—for the sake of the white blossom; so, too, with the hazel—for the nuts.
But what caused the most “wonderment” was the planting of the horse-chestnuts in the corner of the meadow? Whatever did he want with horse-chestnuts? No other horse-chestnuts grew about there. You couldn’t eat the horse-chestnuts when they dropped in autumn.
In truth Iden built for all time, and not for the little circumstance of the hour. His gate was meant to last for years, rain and shine, to endure any amount of usage, to be a work of Art in itself.
His gate as the tangible symbol of his mind—was at once his strength and his folly. His strength, for it was such qualities as these that made Old England famous, and set her on the firm base whereon she now stands—built for all Time. His folly, because he made too much of little things, instead of lifting his mind higher.
If only he could have lived three hundred years the greater world would have begun to find out Iden and to idolize him, and make pilgrimages from over sea to Coombe Oaks, to hear him talk, for Iden could talk of the trees and grass, and all that the Earth bears, as if one had conversed face to face with the great god Pan himself.
But while Iden slumbered with his head against the panel—think, think, think—this shallow world of ours, this petty threescore years and ten, was slipping away. Already Amaryllis had marked with bitterness at heart the increasing stoop of the strong back.
Iden was like the great engineer who could never build a bridge, because he knew so well how a bridge ought to be built.
“Such a fuss over a mess of a gate,” said Mrs. Iden, “making yourself ridiculous: I believe that carpenter is just taking advantage of you. Why can’t you go into town and see your father?—it would be a hundred pounds in your pocket”—as it would have been, no doubt. If only Mrs. Iden had gone about her lecture in a pleasanter manner perhaps he would have taken her advice.
Resting upon the brown timber in the grass Amaryllis and Amadis could just see a corner of the old house through the spars of the new gate. Coombe Oaks was a grown house, if you understand; a house that had grown in the course of many generations, not built to set order; it had grown like a tree that adapts itself to circumstances, and, therefore, like the tree it was beautiful to look at. There were windows in deep notches, between gables where there was no lookout except at the pears on the wall, awkward windows, quite bewildering. A workman came to mend one one day, and could not get at it. “Darned if I ever seed such a crooked picter of a house!” said he.
A kingfisher shot across above the golden surface of the buttercups, straight for the brook, moving, as it seemed, without wings, so swiftly did he vibrate them, that only his azure hue was visible, drawn like a line of peacock blue over the gold.
In the fitness of things Amaryllis ought not to have been sitting there like this, with Amadis lost in the sweet summer dream of love.
She ought to have loved and married a Launcelot du Lake, a hero of the mighty arm, only with the income of Sir
