Honora felt as if she must flee! If she were to hear any more she should be ready to banish young Randolf to Canada, were he ten times her heir. Had she lived to hear Humfrey’s new barn, with the verge boards conceded to her taste, called ramshackle? And she had given her word!
As she left Beauchamp, and looked at her scraggy pine-trees cresting the hill, she felt as though they were her own no longer, and as if she had given them up to an enemy. She assured herself that nothing could be done without her free-will, and considered of the limitations that must be imposed on this frightful reformer, but her heart grew sick at the conviction that either she would have to yield, or be regarded as a mere incubus and obstruction.
With almost a passionate sense of defence of Humfrey’s trees, and Humfrey’s barns, she undid the gate of the fir plantations—his special favourites. The bright April sun shed clear gleams athwart the russet boles of the trees, candied by their white gum, the shadows were sharply defined, and darkened by the dense silvered green canopy, relieved by fresh light young shoots, culminating in white powdery clusters, or little soft crimson conelets, all redolent of fresh resinous fragrance. The wind
whispered like the sound of ocean in the summit of the trees, and a nightingale was singing gloriously in the distance. All recalled Humfrey, and the day, thirty years back, when she had given him such sore pain, in those very woods, grasping the shadow instead of the substance, and taking the sunshine out of his life as well as from her own. Never had she felt such a pang in thinking of that day, or in the vain imagination of how it might have been!
‘Yet I believe I am doing right,’ she thought. ‘Humfrey himself might say that old things must pass away, and the past give place to the present! Let me stand once more under the tree where I gave him that answer! Shall I feel as if he would laugh at me for my shrinking, or approve me for my resolution?’
The tree was a pinaster, of lengthy foliage and ponderous cones, standing in a little shooting-path, leading from the main walk. She turned towards it and stood breathless for a moment.
There stood the familiar figure—youthful, well-knit, firm, with the open, steadfast, kindly face, but with the look of crowned exultant love that she had only once beheld, and that when his feet were already within the waters of the dark river. It was his very voice that exclaimed, ‘Here she is!’ Had her imagination indeed called up Humfrey before her, or was he come to upbraid her with her surrender of his charge to modern innovation! But the spell was broken, for a woodland nymph in soft gray, edged with green, was instantly beside him, and that calmly-glad face was no reflection of what Honora’s had ever been.
‘Dear, dear Miss Charlecote,’ cried Phœbe, springing to her; ‘we thought you would come home this way, so we came to meet you, and were watching both the paths.’
‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Honor. Could that man, who looked so like Humfrey, be thinking how those firs would cut up into sleepers?
‘Do you know,’ said Phœbe, eagerly, ‘he says this wood is a little likeness of his favourite place in his old home.’