As she left the room to watch for the post-boy, and herself place the fruit of her morning labour in the bag, Giles, with tipsy gravity and mechanical neatness, was posting his too long disused cellar book up to date:
June 24th., 1823.
Comet Port. Bin V. Bottle: One.
CHAPTER V
EVIL PROMPTER, JEALOUSY
Great bliss was with them and great happiness
Grew, like a lusty flower, in June’s caress.
—Keats (Pot of Basil).
July over the meadows, sweeter in death than in life, where the long grass lay in swathes and the bared earth split and crumbled under the fierce sun. July in the great woods, with leaves at their deepest green, nobly still against the noble still azure, throwing blocks of green shade in the mossy aisles and wondrous grey designs of leaf and branch on the hardened ground. July in the drowsy hum of the laden bee; in the birds’ silence and the insects’ orchestra—those undertones of sounds—everywhere; July in the sweet hearted rose, in the plenitude of summer fulfilment. July over garden and cornfield and purple moor....
So it had been all day, a long, gorgeous day, busy and yet lazy, full to the brim of nature’s slow, ripe work. And now the evening had come; the fires of the sunset had cooled and a deep-bosomed sky had begun to brood over the teeming earth, lit only by the sickle of a young moon that had hung, ghost-like, in the airs the whole afternoon.
The fields of heaven were yet nearly as bare of stars as the meadows of their murdered flowers; but here and there, with a sudden little leap like a kindling lamp, some distant sun—white Vega or ruddy Arcturus—began to send its gold or silver messages across the firmament where the summer sun of our world held lingering monarchy.