“Yes, do, Martin,” she said. “I will take you back after our skate.”
“Ah, I had forgotten,” he said.
She laughed divinely.
“But I had not. And you will be kind to me, as I asked you?” she added.
He dwelt on his answer.
CHAPTER XII
It was a March day of glorious windy brightness, a day that atones and amends with prodigal, open-handed generosity for all the fogs and chilly darknesses of autumn and winter. Heavy rain had fallen during the night before, cold, chilly rain, but an hour before morning it had ceased, and a great warm, boisterous wind came humming up from the southwest. Like some celestial house-clearer it swept the clouds from the face of the sky, and an hour of ivory starlight and setting moon ushered in the day.
That same wind had awakened Helen with the sound of the tapping, struggling blind drawn over her open window, and with eyes suffused with sleep she had got out of bed to quiet the rattling calico by the simple process of rolling it up. And having rolled it up, she stood for a moment at the window, her hair stirred by the wind, drinking in the soft cool breath of the huge night that blew her night-dress close to her skin. The clean smell of rain was in the air, but the sky was all clear, and to the east behind the tower of Chartries church the nameless dove-coloured hue of coming dawn was beginning to make dim the stars. Then she went back to bed with a vague but certain sense that some change had come—winter was over; in her very bones she felt that.
Gloriously did the morning fulfil her expectations. White fleecy clouds, high in the heavens, bowled along the blue, their shadows racing beneath them across the brown grass of the downs; the wind, warm and pregnant with spring, drove boisterously out of the west, and the sun flooded all that lived in a bath of light. Round the elms in the church-yard there had been wrought that yearly miracle, that mist of green leaf hovering round the trees, and paler and more delicate it hung round the slim purple-twigged birches in the woods that climbed up the hillside beyond to Chartries. Here after breakfast her path lay, for she had a parish errand to an outlying hamlet beyond, and with eye and ear and nostril and open mouth she breathed and was bathed in the revivification of spring. That morning, so it seemed to her, all the birds in the world sang together,—thrushes bubbled with the noise of chuckling water and delicious repeated phrases of melody, as if to show, brave musicians, that the “first fine careless rapture” is perfectly easy to recapture, if you happen to know the way of the thing; blackbirds with liquid throat and tawny bill scudded through the bushes; above swifts chided in swooping companies, and finches and sparrows poured out staccato notes. One bird alone was silent, for the nightingale waited till summer should come and love.