He strolled along out through the garden into a solitary upland of bush-besprinkled turf. Wild flowers of downland, the rock-rose, the harebell, orchids, and meadow-sweet carpeted the short grass, and midsummer held festival. But this morning his thoughts were distracted from the Nature-world in which he lived, and he found himself dwelling on the human beings among whom for a few days he would pass his time. It was natural from the attitude of this last year that Evelyn Dundas and Mrs. Home should be of the party in the house the most congenial to him, and the simplicity of them both seemed to him far more interesting than the greater complexity of the others. It would, it is true, be hard to find two examples of simplicity so utterly unlike each other, but serene absence of calculation or scheming brought both under one head. They were both, in a way, children of Nature; Mrs. Home on the one hand having arrived at her inheritance by cheerful, unswerving patience and serenity with events external to herself; while in the case of the other, his huge vitality, coupled with his extreme impressionableness to beauty, brought him, so it seemed to Tom Merivale, into very close connection with the essentials of life. But, as he had told his friend, Evelyn’s attitude to life was instinctively Pagan; immoral he was not, for his fastidiousness labelled such a thing ugly, but he had apparently no rudiments even of conscience or sense of moral obligation. And somehow, with that curious sixth sense of prescience, so common in animals, so rare among civilized human beings who, by means of continued calculation and reasoned surmise of the future, which has caused it to wither and atrophize, Tom felt, just as he could feel approaching storms, a vague sense of coming disaster.
The sensation was very undefined, but distinctly unpleasant, and, following his invariable rule to divert his mind from all unpleasantness, he lay down on the short turf and buried his face in a great bed of thyme which grew there. All summer was in that smell, hot, redolent, the very breath of life, and with eyes half-closed and nostrils expanded he breathed it deeply in.
The place he had come to was very remote and solitary, a big clearing in the middle of trees, well known to him in earlier years. No road crossed it, no house lay near it, but the air was resonant with the labouring bees, and the birds called and fluted to each other in the trees. But suddenly, as he lay there, half lost in a stupor of happiness, he heard very faintly another noise, to which at first he paid but little attention. It was the sound apparently of a flute being played at some great distance off, but what soon arrested his attention was the extremely piercing character of the notes. Remote as the sound was, and surrounded as he was by the hundred noises of the summer noon, it yet seemed to him perfectly clear and distinct through them all. Then something further struck him, for phrase after phrase of delicious melody was poured out, yet the same phrase was never repeated, nor did the melody come to an end; on the top of every climax came another; it was a tune unending, eternal, and whether it came from earth or heaven, from above or below, he could not determine, for it seemed to come from everywhere equally; it was as universal as the humming of the bees.
Then suddenly a thought flashed into his mind; he sprang up, and a strange look of fear crossed his face. At the same instant the tune ceased.
FOURTH
