He went home in an ecstasy of delight and anguish. How beautiful she was! what a grace enveloped her! Her very name was a ravishment—a name of spring and flowers and pure bright skies. May! He dared to whisper it, and he tingled from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May! May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame! His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his waistcoat Paul was a poet, and should have had a soul above buttons; but before the phantom of that missing button his soul grovelled, until it sprang up once more to hover round her foot, her hand, her eyes, her voice, her name of May! May! May! and, with shudders of frostiest self-reproach and richest pleasure, round the memory of that kiss!
In a week or two Paul had grown devoutly religious, and had no idea of the real why. The Church Vale cousins were ardent churchgoers, for the girls were at the time of life for ardour, and both the Vicar and his Curate were unmarried. Paul, whose proper place of Sabbath boredom was Ebenezer, was welcome as a proselyte, and had a seat in the family pew, and the rapture of walking homeward sometimes by the side of the feminine magnet.
So the dweller at the tent door sees himself at church, a pious varier from chapel. The July sunbeams are falling through stained glass; the roof-beams of the nondescript old building are half visible in shadow. The windows are open, and a warm, spiced wind flutters through in pleasantly successful disputation with odours of dry-rot and chilly earth and stone. The sheep are bleating amongst the mounded graves, and the curate is bleating at the lectern. A yearning peace is in Paul’s heart, and the pretty distant cousin is near at hand, with a smell of dry lavender in her dress. The first twining of feeling and belief is here, the earliest of many of those juggleries of Nature which make a fool of reason. Oh, sweet hour! oh, happy world! oh, holy place, where she is! Oh, harmless, innocent calf-love! A jolly old throstle is singing away in the elm which overhangs the parson’s gate. There is a disembodied skylark voice somewhere high up in the mare’s-tail clouds which veil the earth from too much heat and brightness; and the young heart is unhardened and unspotted from the world.
And oh! oho! the elysium of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul, and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate, gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry sunshine; there is no such nectar any more as foamed in the shining pail.
On the way from Church Vale to Beacon Hargate there is a brook, which now runs ink and smells of evil, and in those days flowed so clear that you could count the parcel-coloured pebbles at the bottom, through water which was sometimes pellucid as diamond, and sometimes of a cairngorm colour. The arched pathway over it, with its weather-stained, square-cut timber guards at either side, was called June Bridge, and above and below the bridge, in curved hollows of the banks where the bed of the brook was earthy, water-lilies floated, sliding with the stream, and tugging back on their oozy anchorage. Paul found his goddess leaning on this bridge, watching the lilies, and began to hum whilst he was yet out of hearing,
‘May, on June bridge, in July weather,’ and to make a song in his head.
‘Can ee swim, Paul?’ asked his goddess.
‘Oh yes,’ said Paul, ‘I can swim right enough. Want them lilies?’ She nodded, smiling. ‘I’ll get ‘em for you.’
He climbed the bridge, and dropped into the meadow.
‘I’ll wait for ee,’ said May, and sauntered on out of sight.