‘Long or short horns, since Bertha is not here to make me call them antennæ. I must take him home to draw, as soon as I have gathered some willow for my puss. You are coming home with me?’
‘I meant to drink tea with you, and be sent for in the evening.’
‘Good child. I was almost coming to you, but I was afraid of Mervyn. How has it been, my dear?’
Phœbe’s ‘he is very kind’ was allowed to stand for the present, and Honora led the way by a favourite path, which was new to Phœbe, making the circuit of the Holt; sometimes dipping into a hollow, over which the lesser scabious cast a tint like the gray of a cloud; sometimes rising on a knoll so as to look down on the rounded tops of the trees, following the undulations of the grounds; and beyond them the green valley, winding stream, and harvest fields, melting into the chalk downs on the horizon. To Phœbe, all had the freshness of novelty, with the charm of familiarity, and without the fatigue of admiration required by the show-places to which Mervyn had taken her. Presently Miss Charlecote opened the wicket leading to an oak coppice. There was hardly any brushwood. The ground was covered with soft grass and round elastic cushions of gray lichen. There were a few brackens, and here and there the crimson midsummer men, but the copsewood consisted of the redundant shoots of the old, gnarled, knotted stumps, covered with handsome foliage of the pale sea-green of later summer, and the leaves far exceeding in size those either of the sapling or the full-sized tree—vigorous playfulness of the poor old wounded stocks.
‘Ah!’ said Honor, pausing, ‘here I found my purple emperor, sunning himself, his glorious wings wide open, looking black at
first, but turning out to be of purple-velvet, of the opaque mysterious beauty which seems nobler than mere lustre.’
‘Did you keep him? I thought that was against your principles.’
‘I only mocked him by trying to paint him. He was mine because he came to delight me with the pleasure of having seen him, and the remembrance of him that pervades the path. It was just where Humfrey always told me the creatures might be found.’
‘Was Mr. Charlecote fond of natural history?’ asked Phœbe, shyly.
‘Not as natural history, but he knew bird, beast, insect, and tree, with a friendly hearty intimacy, such as Cockney writers ascribe to peasants, but which they never have. While he used the homeliest names, a dish-washer for a wagtail, cuckoo’s bread-and-cheese for wood-sorrel (partly I believe to tease me), he knew them thoroughly, nests, haunts, and all.’