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“I thought you saw it coming,” said he hanging his head.
“What coming?”
“This.”
“You have given me a blow, Guy—I thought that you were a sincere friend.”
“So I was—I am. But I can’t help loving you all the same. Great Queen of Sheba, you don’t fancy that what you call Platonic friendship can go on beyond a certain point. It’s all very well for a beginning; it makes a good enough basis for a start—but, hang it all, you don’t think that a chap with any self-respect would be content—when there’s a pretty girl like you—the prettiest and the dearest girl that ever lived—— Who the mischief is bawling out there?”
“They are calling to me from the launch,” said Amber. “It is just as well. Guy, I am not angry—only disappointed. You have disappointed me. I thought that you at least—they are getting impatient. I must go.”
She hastened away to the open window and he followed her with a face of melancholy so congenial with the prevailing note of the house that an artist would have been delighted to include him in a picture of “The Gables from the River.”
She ran through the long grass and reached the launch so breathless that she could with difficulty explain that she had been watching a rat.
Every one in the boat knew that Guy had been asking her to marry him. Chaps only have that hangdog expression, worn with some distinction by Guy Overton, when they have been proposing to girls, the two-month husband explained to his wife.
A girl only shakes hands with a man so cordially as Amber had shaken hands with Guy, when she has just refused to marry him, Josephine knew.
And the boatman shifted the lever.
There was a field of wheat not so far from The Weir. It was approached by a stile from the roadway and a narrow path went through it to the Clieve-don Woods as evenly as a canal divides a landscape. At the further end there was another stile and a bank of low trees, with a hollow and a slope overgrown with green grass and a myriad of wild flowers beloved by bees. A grass meadow with a little stream creeping through it, and here and there a tuft of rushes; behind all the long high ridge of the woods—these are the details of which one becomes aware when one has begun to recover from the vast wonder of the field of wheat.
Josephine was not wearing a hat. She had merely picked up a crimson sunshade after breakfast on the Monday, and had gone alone strolling through the garden, a magazine under her arm. She had given her maid instructions to be ready to start for town after lunch—the other guests, with the exception of Pierce Winwood, had already taken their departure, and Pierce Winwood had gone to Marlow with Lady Severn and Amber. That was how Josephine came to be alone, and to be glad to be alone. She had become aware of the fact that she had something to think about, and she hoped that half an hour on the green shorn breadths of grass with the river at her feet and the whisper of the weir in her ears would be a relief to her.
She strolled down the lawn to the river, but a steamer with people aboard drinking out of bottles and playing on banjos, when the sexes had duly exchanged hats, was hooting for the lock-keeper, so she turned away to the upper part of the garden. She found that she had more to think about than the garden would contain, so she passed out by the little gate to the silent road and stood for a moment looking along its dusty curve to where it got lost in the dimness of overshadowing trees, and then, in the other direction, where it twisted round by the boathouse at the bridge. She began to walk in this direction, slowly and listlessly, and when she came to the stile leading to the wheatfield, she mounted it, and remained for some time on the topmost step gazing along the surface of that yellow flaming plain lost in the marvel of it, when there came a wind too light for her to feel upon her face, and fanned the moveless breadth of flame into a thousand flickers, and the whole wide field of a hundred acres became quickly alive, and full of the whisperings of newly acquired vitality.
She felt that she had never seen anything so beautiful before. She leaped down from the topmost step to the path, with all the delight of the swimmer springing into the sea. The waving mass closed on her head for a moment but when she recovered herself she was head and shoulders above the grain. She strolled along the flat track by the side of the little bank, with blue wild flowers on one hand and flaring poppies on the other, breathing of the fresh warm sunlight that seemed to be enclosed between the green bank and the serried lines of the ripe grain.
And then, where a space had been cleared by the reaping-machine, and the bundles of grain lay at regular intervals along the ground, there arose from under her very feet a flock of blue and white wood pigeons, and flew for a few dozen yards ahead, then fell in an exquisite curve, the sunlight gleaming for a moment upon every white feather in succession until all had dropped at the brink of the field.
When she reached the farther stile with the woods at her back she seated herself, feeling that she never wished to get back to the world again,—that she had at last reached a spot where all the joy of life was to be had. There was nothing better than this in all the world—this breathing of warm air, this listening to the hum of insects, this watching of the myriad butterflies, fluttering, and flitting and poising over everything that was sweet smelling on the bank and in the grass, this gazing on the rippling flames that burned yellow into the distance where no ripple stirred. The beauty and the quietness of it all! The satisfied sense of waiting without emotion for the heat of the noontide, of waiting, without longing, for the poppy sunset—for the sounds of the evening, the cooing of the wood pigeons, the cawing of the rooks, with now and again the rich contralto of a blackbird’s note.
And then the warm silence of a night powdered with stars, as the soft blue of the sky became dark, but without ceasing to be blue! Oh that summer night!
The thought of it all as she could imagine it, meant rest.
That was what every one needed—rest; and she felt that she had wandered away from man and into the very heart of the peace of God.
The thought that she had a thought which was not one suggested by the landscape irritated her. She felt that she had a good reason for being irritated with Ernest Clifton who was responsible for her failure to continue in this dream of perfect repose. She felt irritated with him just as one is with a servant who blunders into the room where one is in a sleep of divine tranquillity.
