The Scent of Water Read Online Free PDF

all I can say is, they lie.”
    “Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own,” said Mary. “I think it’s fear. We don’t want to come too near in case we’re sucked in and have to share it.” She was silent, but she did not feel the shrinking of which she had spoken. She wished she could have shared Cousin Mary’s bad times. She was ashamed that she had not and presently she said to Mrs. Baker, “I only saw my cousin once. My father brought me to see her when I was a little girl. Then he died and I never came again. When she left me her house I could not believe it.”
    “She knew what she was doing,” said Mrs. Baker. “Such as poor Miss Lindsay, they’ve their own wisdom. Often they’ll know what’s right when a normal person would only know what was expedient.”
    Mrs. Baker’s understanding both astonished and supported Mary. She was aware that her new life was not going to be altogether a pastoral idyl. She was going to need Mrs. Baker. “You will help me as you helped my cousin, won’t you?” she asked. “How many hours a week did you work for her?”
    “Miss Lindsay’s lawyer, Mr. Judson, paid me to come for two hours three mornings a week, dear,” said Mrs. Baker. “Would that suit you?”
    “Could it be every morning just at first?” pleaded Mary. “Could you manage that, or have you other people to work for?”
    “I don’t work for anyone else,” said Mrs. Baker. “I do oblige occasionally here and there but nothing regular. You see, the old lady—” She caught herself up. “Yes, I could come every morning until you’re straight.”
    A suspicion began to dawn in Mary’s mind and she remembered that Mrs. Baker had said her husband had worked in the garden for love. “I believe you worked for my cousin for many more hours than you were paid, Mrs. Baker,” she said.
    “Well, I was in night and morning,” agreed Mrs. Baker. “She needed me, poor soul.”
    “We must put that right,” said Mary.
    She had said the wrong thing, for Mrs. Baker stiffened. Her mouth tightened and her eyes flashed. Mary inwardly quailed before her, and she was not by nature a quailer. There was steel and fire in Mrs. Baker, she realized, and a sense of what was right and proper that could not be outraged. This indigenous country pride was something she had not encountered before and she would have to learn about it. “I understand,” she said gently. “I’m sorry. You loved my cousin, of course. And Mr. Baker, will he be so good as to continue to do a bit in the garden?” She smiled. “Not this time for love.”
    “You could ask him,” said Mrs. Baker. “He’ll be around soon to carry up your luggage. Come to that, he’s here now.”
    Mr. Baker was knocking at the back door. He was as tall as his wife was tiny, and cadaverous as Don Quixote. He had ginger hair, a walrus mustache, a sad thin mouth and receding chin. He wore corduroy trousers tied below the knee with string and a strange duffel coat that hung so loosely from his gaunt shoulders that Mary was sure it had been bought at a jumble sale. When she smiled and held out her hand his answering smile was so gentle and deprecating, and the stare of his china-blue eyes so sweet and blank, that for a moment she wondered if he was perhaps a little childish. Then his great hand took hers in a fearful grip and his eyes abruptly focused upon hers with a hard and penetrating look that seemed to come out at the back of her head. She was extremely alarmed but she managed to ask him if he would continue to help in the garden. There was a long pause and his Adam’s apple began to work in his long thin throat. His voice, when it came, was that of a bronchitic corncrake.
    “Might do,” he said at last.
    “I don’t know the rate of pay here,” said Mary, “but you and Mrs. Baker will tell me.”
    Mr. Baker’s Adam’s apple was again working. “I’ve never worked in this garden for pay,” he brought out.
    “But you will