After supper Ruth Seer went and sat with him. The stars looked down with clear bright eyes. The night wind brought the scent of a thousand flowers. An immense peace and beauty filled the heavens. Yet, as she sat, she fancied she heard again the low monotonous boom from the Channel to which people had grown so accustomed through the long war years. She knew it could not really be; it was just fancy. But suddenly her eyes were full of tears. She had lost no one out there—she had no one to lose. But she was an English woman. They were all her men. And there were so many white roads, from as many stations.
The next morning the stranger dog had vanished, after, so Miss McCox reported bitterly at 6 A. M., a night spent on the spare-room bed. It was a perfect wonder of a morning. Even on that first morning when the stars sang together it could not have been more wonderful, thought Ruth Seer, looking, as she never tired of looking, at the farm that was hers. The five Shorthorns chewed the cud in the four-acre field. The verdict of Miss McCox, the cowman and the boy, upon them was favourable. To-morrow morning Ruth would have her first lesson in milking. The Berkshire sow, bought also at Uckfield market, had produced during the night, somewhat unexpectedly, but very successfully, thirteen small black pigs, shining like satin and wholly delectable.
The only blot on the perfection of the day was the behaviour of Selina. At 11 A. M. she was detected by Miss McCox, in full pursuit of the last hatched brood of chicken. Caught, or to be fair to Selina, cornered, by the entire staff, at 11.30, she was well and handsomely whipped, and crept, an apparently chastened dog, into the shelter of the house. There, however, so soon as the clang of the big bell proclaimed the busy dinner hour, she had proceeded to the room sacred to the slumbers of Miss McCox and, undisturbed, had diligently made a hole in the pillow on which Miss McCox’s head nightly reposed, extracting therefrom the feathers of many chickens. These she spread lavishly, and without favouritism, over the surface of the entire carpet, and, well content, withdrew silently and discreetly from the precincts of Thorpe Farm.
At tea time she was still missing, and Sarah alone, stiff with conscious rectitude, sat in front of Ruth and ate a double portion of cake and bread-and-butter. Visions of rabbit holes, steel traps, of angry gamekeepers with guns, had begun to form in Ruth’s mind. Her well-earned appetite for tea vanished. Full forgiveness and an undeservedly warm welcome awaited Selina whenever she might choose to put in an appearance.
Even Miss McCox, when she cleared away the tea, withdrew the notice given in the heat of discovery, and suggested that Selina might be hunting along the stream. She had seen the strange dog down there no longer than an hour ago.
It seemed to Ruth a hopeful suggestion. Also she loved to wander by the stream. In all her dreams of a domain of her own always there had been running water. And now that too was hers. One of the slow Sussex streams moving steadily and very quietly between flowered banks, under overhanging branches. So quietly that you did not at first realize its strength. So quietly that you did not at first hear its song.
It was that strange and wonderful hour which comes before sunset after a cloudless day of May sunshine, when it is as if the world had laughed, rejoiced, and sung itself to rest in the everlasting arms. There is a sudden hush, a peace falls, a strange silence—if you listen.
Ruth ceased to worry about Selina. She drifted along the path down the stream, and love of the whole world folded her in a great content. A sense of oneness with all that moved and breathed, with the little brethren in hole and hedge, with the flowers’ lavish gift of scent and colour, with the warmth of the sun, a oneness that fused her being with theirs as into one perfect flame. Dear God, how good it all was, how wonderful! The marshy ground where the kingcups and the lady smocks were just now in all their gold and silver glory, the wild cherry, lover of water, still in this late season blossoming among its leaves, the pool where the kingfishers lived among the willows and river palms.
And, dreaming, she came to a greensward place where lay the stranger dog. A dog well content, who waved a lazy tail as she came. His nose between his paws, he watched no longer a lonely road. He watched a man. A man in a brown suit who lay full length on the grass. Ruth could not see his face, only the back of a curly head propped by a lean brown hand; and he too was watching something. His absolute stillness made Ruth draw her breath and remain motionless where she stood. No proprietor’s fury against trespassers touched her. Perhaps because she had walked so long on the highway, looking over walls and barred gateways at other people’s preserves. She crept very softly forward so that she too could see what so engrossed him. A pair of kingfishers teaching their brood to fly.
Two had already made the great adventure and sat side by side on a branch stretching across the pool. Even as Ruth looked, surrounded by a flashing escort, the third joined them, and there sat all three, very close together for courage, and distinctly puffed with pride.