The philosopher sat barefoot in the hollow of his valley, and wrote diligently in a book. He paused, pen in hand, and looked over the folds of the hills where the haze of heat hung blue, and brown at the edges. It lay upon the hill-tops like a mist. The sky was grey, and the land was pale, burned to the bone. Heavy masses of trees in the hanging wood showed lifeless and black. No bird sang, but there were crickets in the bents, shrilling inconceivably. The swoon of midsummer was over all, and Sanchia was coming.
He knew that she was coming before he saw her. She came along the edge of the plain above him springing barefoot. He saw her legs gleam under her swirling skirts. He strained his eyes to her, but could not see her face for the mist over them. He waited for her, watching, feeling her approach. She began the descent of the scarp timidly, as if she was playing with the thought of his bliss, which she held daintily in her hands. “Dangerously beautiful, my Beautiful One, art thou. Heedless always of thyself. Now a wind blows from thee to me. Thy herald, O Thou that shrillest on the wind!”
He heard her gay and confident voice. “Jack! Jack! Where are you?” He rose and went to meet her; she saw him, and suddenly faltered in her stoop. She stopped, poised as if for flight; he saw her wings fold behind her, and lie quivering where they touched each other.
Her heart urged her. “Go to him.”
She looked at him. “I can't see him perfectly, and can't trust myself.”
Her heart cried, “I have brought you so far. I daren't stop.” Still she stood and flickered.
Senhouse mounted to meet her. Blushful and bashful she stood; but her eyes, deeply watchful, never left him.
He, too, had lost his tongue. “Queen Mab! I knew that you were coming.”
Her eyes were timid and her tongue tied. She was like a rueful child.
“How did you come, my dear?”
“I don't know.”
“You came last night?”
“Ah, you knew me?”
“Well, Queen Mab?”
She had nothing to say.
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he asked her, “why are you come?”
“I can't tell you if you don't know.” She looked at him, and he knew.
“You came to me—not because I love you?”
“No, no! Not for that!”
“You are beautiful beyond belief, Queen Mab. And you are the soul of truth. My dear one, do you love me?”
She hung her head, and looked up from under her long lashes. He saw, not heard, her answer.
He encircled her with his arm, and felt her trembling at his side. “My dear,” he said, “I was writing my Memoirs. Now we'll burn the book, for I see that I am now going to be born.”
She looked up at him laughing. She was the colour of a flushed rose. “My bride,” he said, and kissed her lips. She turned in his arm and clung to him. The storm swept surging over her; passion long pent made her shiver like a blown fire. They took their wild joy....
He led her by her hand to the shade of the valley, where the deep turf is hardly ever dry. She was barefoot, as he was, and bareheaded. In her bosom was a spray of dog-rose.
“You are blue-gowned, like Despoina,” he told her, “and, indeed, that is your name. I am to have a fairy wife.”
“Artemis no more,” she laughed.
“You fulfil all the goddesses. Artemis was your childhood. But let's be practical. What is to be done?” She faltered her answer.
“I have found out by myself what to do,” she said. And then she kissed him. “It's done now.”
They picked up their lives where they had dropped them. They were content to wait for the fulness of their joy. He busied himself with food for her; he cooked, and she helped him; they talked of his affairs as if they had always been hers.
Something stirred the practical side of him. She was to see him as near a man of the world as it was possible for him to be. It might have been a shock to her, but its simplicity was all his own.
“I must see one person, and you must see one. I'll go to your father, and you shall tell Ingram what's going to happen. We don't owe him much, but there's that, I think. I've a great idea of treating the world with civility. The one thing it has worth having is its sense of manners. Let us have manners, then. Don't you think so?” He held her close as he spoke, and with a strange discrepancy between sight and sound, looked at her with dim eyes of love, before which she had to close down her own. To his, “Don't you think so?” she could only murmur without breath, “You mustn't love me so much—not yet, not yet!” but he pressed her the nearer and laughed his joy of her. “What! After eight years! And if I don't hold her very close, Mab, the tricksy sprite, may slip me.”
Then he returned to his moralisings. “You'll see Ingram, my blessed one, don't you think?”
She said gravely, with hard outlook upon the distant wold, “Yes, I must see him—” and then, with a sudden turn to him and a wondrous veil of tenderness upon her eyes, “You know that I think what you think from now onwards.” Their lips sealed the pact.
He broke away at last. “Practice! Practice! Do let's be practical. Think of this. My house is yours until we marry; that can't be for a week.” A week! This was Senhouse practical. She blushed her answer.
“What will you do? I mustn't turn you out.” He opened his arms wide to the airs of the down.
“I sleep in the open. The stars for me. They shall see you wedded. Meanwhile, I shall wait upon you. But do let us be practical. We wait a week; we marry; but then what shall we do? Shall we reform the world? I think we shall do that in spite of ourselves; for if two people dare to be simple, there's no reason why two million shouldn't.” She lay at peace considering; her blue eyes, searching wonderfully into his, saw peace like a crown of stars.
“I'll tell you what I should like to do,” she said. “I've thought about it this minute. It never occurred to me before, but I should like to teach better than anything in the world.”
He looked far out to the white rim of horizon. He took her very seriously. “It's the highest profession of all, of course. Let's think. I've begun on it already, oddly enough. And yet, you know, it's not odd. Nothing is after our experiences.... We will teach. Woodcraft, weathercraft, husbandry, beast-craft, sky-craft. I can do that much for them. Lit., hum., Greek, Latin, English, Dante. History, shadowy; geography, practical. Tinkering, carpentering, planting. No mathematics; I can't add two to two.”
“But I can,” she told him. “I'll teach the babies, for we must have babies.”
His eyes flashed upon hers for one beating second of full interchange. Then he turned them away, and scanned again the hazy hills. But hers remained on their watch, charged with their wistful dream.
“Our school,” he presently resumed, “I see it. We teach first of all Nature's face and the love of it. We lead their hungry mouths to Nature's breast. No books! No books for them to glue their eyes upon. They shall learn by ear; their eyes have a better book to read in. Classics by ear and by heart, eh?”
She glowed at a memory. “You wrote to me about that. You said that, before the Printing Press, people used to get poetry by heart.”
He looked down at her where she lay at ease. “'As I have got you,' I said.” She dreamed beneath her flickering eyelids.
“You had me then. I didn't know it; but you had. And you have me still. That's wonderful. But now I have got you!” She lay awhile under the spell of him and the thought, and glowed and blossomed under them until at last, flowering like a rose, she turned and hid her face in his arm. Senhouse, grave and strong, let her lie where she was; but he felt the pulsing of her bosom, and was moved to utterance. Nothing in the eyes he bent down to her beauty, and nothing in his words betrayed the passion of his heart.
{Illustration: Senhouse came back to her bedside and put a little flower into her hand}
“The loveliest thing in all the world to me,” he said, “is a beautiful thing bent in humility, stooping to serve. I shall see you teaching your children. They will be at your knees, on your knees; you will kiss them, and I shall go mad with joy. Flowers and you! Yes, we'll have our school. We'll teach people the beauty of their own business by means of the most beautiful things. Flowers and you!”
They talked long and late, walking down the valley to the farmstead for bread. On this, with milk and fruit, they supped after Sanchia had bathed, and clad herself in one of his Moorish robes. Hooded and folded in this she sat at meat, and Senhouse, filled with the Holy Ghost, discoursed at large. The past they took for granted; the present was but a golden frame for the throbbing blue of the days to come.
Very early on the morning after the night when, as has been foretold, she was made a wife under the stars, Senhouse came back to her bedside and put a little flower into her hand. It woke her out of her dreams; glozed and dewy from them she looked at it, and smiled at him through it. In grey-green leafage, dewy and downy, lay a little blossom of delicate pink, chalice-shaped, with a lip of flushed white. Watching him, she laid it to her lips. “My flower, our flower,” she said, and watching him still put it deep within her bosom. “My dear one, we have earned it.”
“'Rest-Harrow,'” said Senhouse, in a sententious mood, “'grows in any soil.... The seed may be sown as soon as ripe, in warm, sheltered spots out of doors.... It is a British plant.' So says Weathers, the learned.”
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