But she was often conscious of the decades that lay between them, the leagues and leagues, of which the milestones were little cultured jokes at Chelsea tea-parties, and Cambridge epigrams, and endless novels and plays. The very language he spoke was twenty or thirty years behind her own; such expressions as “a very refined lady,” or “a regular earthly Paradise,” fell from his lips with all their pristine dignity. And yet she could talk to him simply and spontaneously as to no one else.
Since he had been there she had left off reading mediæval books, and her brain felt like a deserted hive.
Easter was very late that year, and the Catholics at Plasencia were wakened very early on Easter morning to an exquisite, soft, scented day, almost like summer.
Teresa, looking out of her window as she dressed, saw that her parents were already walking in the garden. She gazed for some seconds at her father’s sturdy back, as he stood, as if rooted to the earth, gazing at some minute flower in the border.
St. Joseph of Arimathea, she thought, may have been just such a kindly self-indulgent person as he; dearly loving his garden. And if her father had been asked to allow the corpse of a young dissenter to lie in _his_ garden, though he might have grumbled, he would have been far too good-natured to refuse. And, if that young dissenter had turned out to be God Almighty, her father would have turned into a Saint, and after his death his sturdy bones would have worked miracles. She smiled as she pictured the Doña’s indignant surprise at finding her husband chosen for canonisation—the College of Cardinals would have had no difficulty in obtaining an _advocatus diaboli_.
And as to the garden—surely the contact of Christ’s body would have fertilised it, a thousand times more than Lorenzo’s head the pot of basil, making it riot into a forest of fantastic symbolic blossoms: great racemes, perhaps, which, with their orange-pollened pistils protruding like flames from their seven long, white, waxy blossoms, would recall the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple; bell-flowers shaped like chalices and stained crimson inside as if with blood; monstrous veronicas, each blossom bearing the impress of the Holy Face.