Free Little, Big by John Crowley Page B

tell him that they were all over in any case. Her heart for a moment grew great and hollow, and he seemed to sense it, because he pressed the arm he held, very slightly. "Other worlds," he said dreamily. "Worlds within worlds." He drew her to one of the many small benches set against a curving, clipped wall of box-hedge. The complex housefront beyond, buffcolored and patent in the late afternoon sun, seemed to her severe yet smiling, like Erasmus' face in a frontispiece she had seen over Father's shoulder.
    "Well," she said. "Those ideas, about worlds within worlds and all that, those are Father's ideas. I don't know."
    "But you've been there."
    "Father says I have." She crossed her legs and covered an old ineradicable brown stain on her muslin dress with interlaced fingers. "I never expected this, you know. I only told him about . . . all that, what had happened to me—because I hoped to lift his spirits. To tell him it would be all right, that all the troubles were part of the Tale."
    "Tale?"
    She grew circumspect. "I mean I never expected this. To leave home. To leave . . ." Them, she almost said, but since the night at the Theosophical Society—the last straw!—she had resolved not to speak any more about them. It was bad enough to have lost them.
    "Miss Bramble," he said. "Please. I certainly wouldn't pursue you, pursue your . . . your tale." That wasn't true. He was rapt before it. He must know it: know her heart. "You won't be bothered here. You can rest." He gestured toward the cedars of Lebanon he had planted in that careful lawn. The wind in them spoke in a childish gabble, faint presage of the great grave voice they would speak in when they were grown. "It's safe here. I built it for that."
    And she did feel, despite the deep constraints of formality that seemed laid on her here, a kind of serenity. If it had all been a terrible error telling Father about them, if it had inflamed not settled his mind and sent the two of them out on the road like a pair of itinerant preachers, or a gypsy and his dancing bear more nearly, to make their living entertaining the mad and the obsessed in glum lecture-halls and meeting rooms (and counting afterwards their take, good Lord!) then rest and forgetfulness were the best issue it could have. Better than they could have expected. Only . . .
    She rose, restless, unreconciled, and followed a radiating path toward a kind of stage-set wing of arches that protruded from a corner of the house. "I built it," she heard him say, "for you really. In a way."
    She had passed through the arches and come around the corner of the house, and suddenly out of the plain pillared envelope of the wing a flowered valentine was unfolded and offered her, whitewashed and American, bright with flowerbeds and lacy with jigsaw work. It was a wholly different place; it was as though the severe face of Erasmus had tittered behind his hand. She laughed, the first time she had laughed since she had shut the wicket on her English garden forever.
    He came almost at a run, grinning at her surprise. He tilted his straw hat on the back of his head and began to talk with animation about the house, about himself; the quick moods came and went in his big face. "
Not
 usual, no," he laughed, "not a thing about it's usual. Like here: this was to be the kitchen-garden, you see, where anybody'd put a kitchen-garden, but I've filled it with flowers. The cook won't garden, and the gardener's a great one with flowers, but says he can't keep a tomato alive. . . ." He pointed with his bamboo walking-stick at a pretty, cut-out pumphouse—"Just like," he said, "one my parents had in their garden, and useful too"—and then the pierced, ogee arches of the porch, which broad grape-leaves had begun to climb. "Hollyhocks," he said, taking her to admire some that the bumblebees were engaged on. "Some people think hollyhocks are a weed. Not me."
    "'Ware heads, there!" called out a broad, Irish voice above them. A maid upstairs had