Part 12 (1/2)

”Oh, look at those beauties! I must have them!” And she pointed to where, on a vividly green patch of marsh, a whole grove of cotton-gra.s.s stood up in the glow of the setting sun. The golden light poured through the silky tufts, making of each a flake of fire, all raining at the same slight slope from hair-fine stems. Against the turf they looked for all the world like Chinese lanterns swung for some miniature revel of the fairies--they seemed literally to diffuse light upon the air. Ishmael stood staring, stung to excitement by that suddenly-glimpsed beauty; but Phoebe darted forward, and the next moment had withdrawn a foot whose stout country shoe and white stocking were dripping greenly.

”Here, let me!” cried Ishmael; but she waved him back.

”No, you're too heavy; you'd go through at once. Hold my hand while I lean over;” and she swung outwards from his grasp, her other hand stretching vainly.

”Best leave that lot,” advised Ishmael; ”there's some much easier to get at just along there.”

She turned her head, body still swung forward, and followed the line of his pointing finger to where a cl.u.s.ter of gra.s.s as fine, but untrans.m.u.ted, stood in shadow.

”Oh, but that hasn't the sun on it!” she exclaimed navely. The next moment she had seen the absurdity of her own speech, and, pivoting to the path beside him, joined in his laughter.

”Well, it seemed sense to me when I said it,” she protested.

”So it would have been if you could have picked the sun too.”

”But I suppose it was only the sun that made me want them at all.

Aren't I a goose? Va.s.sie would say I shall never get sense.”

”I like that sort of nonsense; it's rather jolly, somehow. I say, Phoebe, I shall think of you as the girl who wanted to pick the sun.

Doesn't it sound ripping?”

”Oh, my feet are so wet!” cried Phoebe. ”I must hurry home. Mother will fuss so over me, you can't think.”

”Shall I just get you that sunny gra.s.s before we go?”

Phoebe hesitated, and then some instinct, finer than her comprehension of it, prompted her to a refusal, and the cotton-gra.s.s was left to swing its gossamer globes of light till the sun should have dipped below the rim of the moor.

When Ishmael had delivered Phoebe up to the tender agitations of the fussy, weakly mother, and himself got away from the too-enthusiastic welcome of the father, he struck towards the cliffs and the Vicarage with a younger heart than had been his all the evening. Quite naturally life had slipped through from a film of darkness on to a brighter plane, and he greeted Boase with none of the gruffness that would have weighed on him earlier. This also had the result of breaking the reticence which would otherwise have kept him from telling anything of his real feelings. Now that his family and the life before him no longer seemed rayless, he could speak of the blight that had, for him, settled even over the future as he sat in that fearsome parlour.

Boase listened, glad that the boy seemed to be growing more articulate; it would make his help, when it was needed, easier to give. He kept Ishmael for supper, feeling that consideration for Annie was not the most important thing just then, and after it he walked with the boy as far as the stile that gave on to the cliff path. Ishmael was far from having given way to one of his old unbalanced fits of chattering, but it had been a pleasure to him to talk freely to the person with whom he was most intimate. It was long--unnaturally long for expansive youth--since he had talked so freely, for Killigrew had left St. Renny a year before him to study painting in Paris. It was the time when the great Barbizon school was in its prime, when Diaz and Rousseau and Harpignies and the rest of that goodly company were heading the return to Nature which the epoch needed, just as later it was to need, with equal sincerity, a return to the primitive in art. Killigrew was absorbed by the fervour of his new creed and wrote but rarely, and his letters were all but incomprehensible to Ishmael. Not in his moments of freest intercourse with Phoebe that evening had it been possible to exchange anything beyond the chatter and playfulness of children, but there was that in Ishmael to-night which, he being young, had to find outlet. For youth is the period of giving, as gathering age is of withholding.

Coming home after so long, coming home, moreover, with a meaning portentous beyond the ordinary attached to the act, had excited Ishmael unknown to himself. Physically he felt very tired, which he told himself was absurd, but mentally he was of a joyous alertness. Leaning upon the stile, he drew a deep breath of the salt air and raised his eyes to the night sky curving, so high was he placed, for an immense arc about his tiny form. To the north the Plough trailed its length, but south, high over the dark blot which to the keen sight of love meant Cloom, Spica, brilliant crown of Virgo, pulsed whitely, while the glittering sisterhood of Aquila and Lyra, Corona and Libra swept towards the east, ushering up the sky the slim young moon, as bright as they but more serene, like a young mother amidst a flock of heedless girls. How often had Ishmael counted these same clear callous eyes from sleeping St.

Renny, but never with the answering gleam in his breast that he felt now he saw them over his own land.

”So life is going to be good, after all,” remarked the Parson abruptly.

”Rather. It seems jolly good to-night, anyway. All my life I've been looking forward to this, just this, coming back here and making something of it all ... and the funny thing is now it's come I'm not disappointed.”

”Why should you be?”

”I dunno. Only one expects to be when one's been expecting to be happy.

That sounds Irish, but you know what I mean.”

”Yes, I know, but then I'm older than you. Why should you have found that out?”

”Some things--things like that--one doesn't find out by what happens.

One sort of knows them to start with. It's funny too, because what I'm so c.o.c.k-a-hoop about to-night is that life's so full of things just ahead, things that are going to happen. I say, look at that moon; I sort of feel as though I could jump over her if only I tried hard enough!”