His eyes fell upon the garden,
and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast
pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it
was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for
the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to
form the sentence:
DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them.
Brown looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the
barrow had suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn
with its incredible inscription. Another man might have thought he
had gone mad, but Brown did not. When romantic ladies gushed over
his V.C. and his military exploits, he sometimes felt himself to
be a painfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew he
was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have thought himself
a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not easily
believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the garden
arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it
extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money like
water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to
offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man,
and waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with six
legs.
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