XVI

In August the loveliest day is when the thunder booms far off at sea, while over the cornfields the sun shines with increased brilliance. The sky over the wheat is blue, but in the distance some large clouds stay motionless. The upper slopes of these mount-like vapours reflect the rays of the sun, beneath they melt away in an indefinite mist which does not throw back the light. The massy ridges above have no foundation beneath reaching to the horizon; they do not threaten; they add to the beauty of the level azure, as hills about a plain.

Rolling in from the south comes, the wave of heavy sound, too distant to cause uneasiness⁠—the boom of an immense breaker on the shore of heaven. After each burst the sun seems to glow fiercer, the warm haze thickens, the rich blue sky is richer, the insects in the air vibrate their wings more rapidly, and a shriller hum arises; butterflies are busier, and in the wheat the reapers bend, cutting at the yellow straw.

Instead of uneasiness the thunder increases the sense of luxurious, tropical sunlight, colour, and glowing life. All things appear aware that the lightning will not approach⁠—it will remain miles at sea⁠—and they throb and pant with pulses quickened by the discharge of electricity.

The lovers were sitting on a green dry bank near the sundial, in the shade of a beech. Round spots of sunlight came through its branches and dotted the grass at their feet. Behind them there was a belt of beeches, on the right hand a thick and high yew-hedge, on the left a great thicket of hawthorn trees; so that they were enclosed on three sides, but in front the view was open. A square of green sward, raised like a terrace, was before them; at its edge the ground dropped a few feet, and the meadows commenced. Far down their slope the brook passed, and beyond it were the cornfields, undulating away to the hills.

Meadow and brook, wheatfields and hills⁠—a simple landscape, yet such as is not to be surpassed by any on the earth. A common landscape⁠—there are hundreds such in our England⁠—yet beyond compare. There are none like it elsewhere in the wide world.

This green raised platform, like a deck, was the only spot at Beechknoll where a view could be obtained without ascending the steep coombeside by the copse. Mr. Goring had planted himself so round about with trees that nothing could be seen beyond them except in this one place. He had placed a trunk of oak, prepared as a seat, near the sundial under a sycamore by the yew-hedge, but the lovers today preferred the dry green bank.

Beyond the brook in the rising field reapers were labouring at the wheat; afar off the yellow slopes were scarce distinguishable in the August haze. It was one of those loveliest of August mornings when the idle thunder booms at sea.

Felise had dreamed here so many, many times in the past, it was natural she should bring him here. Nominally they were examining a broad portfolio of etchings; in truth they were purely idle.

The reapers were working hard in the dry, hot wheat, the straw warm to the touch, the earth warm beneath and opening in crevices with heat; a dry rustling of straw; a dry impalpable dust filling their throats. The days are long in August, but never long enough for the reapers.

On the greenish face of the sundial, weather-stained and tarnished, the shadow of the gnomon seemed to rest, so slowly the sun moved on his high summer circle. Love and Time were idle, but the reapers toiled in the corn.

Red berries and pink flowers were on the sprays of the brambles that thrust forth from the thicket of hawthorn. There were nuts on the hazel-rods among the hawthorns, and along the edge of the grass disks of knapweed, and yellow bedstraw, and purple vetch. Where the terrace sloped to the meadow two or three harebells drooped; the light air scarcely swung them.

Butterflies, whose blue wings were edged with another blue, came up the terrace, and fluttered along its verge. Bees visited the clover still flowering in the long grass. In the air, invisible, many thousand insect-wings vibrating: beat it to a continuous hum.

The light feet of squirrels in the beeches and among the ferns and moss scarcely made a rustle, unless they moved a dry leaf; the rushing of the water over the hatch at the trout-pond farther away now lifted itself and now decreased, the sound floated among the tree-trunks. As the dry, warm air came from the corn, the round dots of sunlight shot to and fro on the sward, following the leaves above.

A fervour of heat and light glowed in the atmosphere and was caught and held in the haze. Over the beech-tree the blue shone with light. Rolling along, the boom from the sea passed like a great organ-note, and the earth and air, the grass and living things responded; the light was yet more brilliant, the colours yet more warm; the earth offered the fullness of the harvest.

Two lovers, but one only loving. Martial had yielded and slumbered at the feet of love, yet he did not love. As the vehement August heat causes a slumberous feeling, so the vehement passion of Felise overthrew him, and his nature slumbered at her feet. He was there, and yet he was not hers.

Felise made no inquiry. It was enough that he was there; she wanted him, she did not ask if he needed her. All she required was that he should be where she could give herself to him.

For she had given herself to him from the depth of her soul. With tenfold quickened perceptions she saw the beauty of the earth, and with that beauty she loved.

She saw the clear definition of the trees, their colour, and the fineness of the extended branches⁠—she was aware of the delicate leaves; she saw the hues of the wheat, shading from pale yellow to ruddy gold; her senses were alive to the minutest difference of tint or sound; to the rustle of the squirrel touching the dry leaf, the rush of the falling water, the hum of the insect-wing; keen to the difference of motion, the gliding of the dots of sunlight on the sward, the broad flutter of the peacock-butterfly, the quick vibration of the wasp-fly’s vane. Her exalted passion strung her naturally fine and sensitive nature; she seemed to feel the sun’s majestic onward sweep in the deep azure⁠—her love made earth divine.

Sometimes under the power of sweet music from an organ⁠—sweet, yet deep and noble⁠—there wakes up within the heart another consciousness, till we seem capable of perceiving more than is usually apparent to the senses. Invisible things are shadowed forth and stand in the air.

Tenfold more so her heart, listening to the music of its own passion, was able to perceive the deeper knowledge shut and closed except to love. This was inwardly; outwardly she saw hitherto unknown glories in the light and beauty of the day, an art divine in these things.

There came the low boom of the distant thunder; but the hills slumbered, and the clouds were still. The reapers laboured in the corn.

All the unwritten and inexpressible aspirations of her nature, her noble nature, crowded into this one emotion. In her love was her all, her existence, her breath, her thought, the very expression of her form; as a flower grows and bears its one colour and perfume, so she lived and bore this one feeling. Of all else, of the world and of herself, she was utterly careless and unconcerned.

So great was her joy in her love, it seemed the width of the dome of the sky was not wide enough to express it.

Upon the green and tarnished face of the ancient sundial there was written in worn letters, Nihil nisi umbra⁠—Nothing without shadow; no, not even love. The fervour of passion must needs cast the deepest shadow beside it. Let us welcome the shadow if only we can have the sunlight of love.

Through Martial’s mind, as he reclined beside her, there passed images of ancient Greece⁠—of the ideal of human beauty expressed in marble as Aphrodite sought the bath, expressed in words resounding to this day. The idea of perfect human beauty⁠—the idea of shape and curve and motion⁠—flows through all their works, even those of pure thought, as Plato’s. Without direct mention or description, still the idea is there. These images passed through Martial’s mind⁠—this beauty was hers. In life, in flesh and blood, and actual reality, the ideal was there with him. He worshipped her beauty, and said to himself, “I do not love.”

Her soul pursued his. She felt as if his man’s intellect gave a godlike meaning to the beauty of the sunlight and of the earth. In the expanse of loveliness through which she had wandered dreaming for years⁠—through wood and mead, by stream and hill and wide sea⁠—she had found the central figure, that which made all things plain and completed them.

Till he came the fields, the woods, the hills, the broad sea were incomplete; to all he gave a meaning. She endowed him with all that she perceived in the glory and mystery around her by day and by night.

Of old time the shadow of the gnomon glided over marble; sometimes they built great structures to show the passage of the shadow more distinctly⁠—observatories of shadow. Not only on this round horizontal disk of greenish metal, not only on those ancient marble slabs, but over the whole earth the shadow advances, for the earth is the gnomon of night. The sunlight and the night, year by year, century by century, cycle by cycle; how long is it? Can anyone say? So long has love, too, endured, passing on and handed down from heart to heart.

The long Roll of Love reaching back into the profoundest abyss of Time, upon it fresh names are written day by day.

Felise’s love was pure indeed; yet what is there that the purest love is not capable of for the one to whom the soul is devoted?

Self-immolation, self-sacrifice, death⁠—is there anything love refuses?

Still the shadow slips on the green rust of the dial. Let even life pass from us if only we can have love.

Felise saw the beauty of the earth, and with that beauty she loved; the cool green flags in the meadow-brook; the reeds which moved forward and advanced as if about to step forth from the water as they swayed; the deep blue of the sky; the ruddy gold of the wheat under the pale yellow haze.

The rolling boom of the thunder came through the fields of light, the earth glowed warmer.

That the wonderful mechanism of the mind, the heart, of life, should be capable of emotion so divine, and yet should so soon perish⁠—is it not unutterably cruel?

So many, and so many, who have loved in the long passage of time, but are gone as the shadow goes from the dial when the sun sinks. Are, then, our noblest feelings to fade and become void?

Upon the sundial there were curious graven circles and interwoven angles, remnants of the ancient lore which saw fate in the stars and read things above nature in nature. Symbols and signs are still needed, for the earth and life are still mysterious; they cannot be written, they require the inarticulate sign of the magician.

Let us not outlive love in our days, and come to look back with sorrow on those times.

You have seen the ships upon the sea; they sail hither and thither thousands of miles. Do they find aught equal to love? Can they bring back precious gems to rival it from the rich south?

The reapers have been in the corn these thousand years, the miners in the earth, the toilers in the city; in all the labour and long-suffering is there anything like unto love? Any reward or profit in the ships, the mines, the warehouses?

What are the institutions of man, the tawdry state, the false law, the subsidized superstition, and poor morality, that pale shadow of truth⁠—what are these by love?

Could but love stay, could but love have its will, and no more would be needed for eternity.

Overcome with her beauty, he was at her feet as at the feet of an immortal, such as moved among the violets in the early days.

Her dress was transparent to his eyes⁠—the image of the beautiful knees dewy from the bath could never fade. No dress could hide her. He slumbered in worship at her knees.

The reapers laboured cutting at the wheat, and with bowed backs bound up the sheaves; the doves came out from the copse and fed among the stubble. Among the beech-trees there floated the sound of the falling of water on its way to the cool green flags of the brook. Faint rustling of squirrels’ feet, the hum of invisible insects, the flutter of butterflies’ wings, the hum of a humble bee wandering among the fern, the call of the grasshoppers in the grass, the amorous sigh of the breeze, the quick maze of the sunlight dots, the sense of all summer things, the distant thunder deepening with the pressure of its note the voices of the sunlit earth, the fullness of the harvest, the touch of a loving hand.

His head rested upon her left knee⁠—not on her lap, but on her left knee. His weight had been there so long it had compressed a vein, and her limb was growing numb. What of that? if the limb had been dying she would not have moved, she would not have changed her position one iota. She was sitting higher on the bank than he was, so that his head naturally rested there. He remembered the white knee dewy from the water; it was on that he really rested. Her arms like a bower hung over embracing; he looked up, he saw her loving eyes; her lips descended upon his.