There was a piece of sacking lying on the road; it must have dropped from the carrier’s cart. He picked it up and put it over his shoulders.
‘A deeper disguise,’ he said, and walked on.
[p75]
He walked steadily for a long, long way as it seemed, and the world got darker and darker. But he kept on. Surely he must presently come to some village, or some signpost.
Anyhow, whatever happened, he could not go back. That was the one certain thing. The broad stretches of country to right and left held no shapes of houses, no glimmer of warm candle-light; they were bare and bleak, only broken by circles of trees that stood out like black islands in the misty grey of the twilight.
‘I shall have to sleep behind a hedge,’ he said bravely enough; but there did not seem to be any hedges. And then, quite suddenly, he came upon it.
A scattered building, half transparent as it seemed, showing black against the last faint pink and primrose of the sunset. He stopped, took a few steps off the road on short, crisp turf that rose in a gentle slope. And at the end of a dozen paces he knew it. Stonehenge! Stonehenge he had always wanted so desperately to see. Well, he saw it now, more or less.
He stopped to think. He knew that Stonehenge stands all alone on Salisbury Plain. He was very tired. His mother had told him [p76 about a girl in a book who slept all night on the altar stone at Stonehenge. So it was a thing that people did—to sleep there. He was not afraid, as you or I might have been—of that lonely desolate ruin of a temple of long ago. He was used to the forest, and, compared with the forest, any building is homelike.
There was just enough light left amid the stones of the wonderful broken circle to guide him to its centre. As he went his hand brushed a plant; he caught at it, and a little group of flowers came away in his hand.
‘St. John’s wort,’ he said, ‘that’s the magic flower.’ And he remembered that it is only magic when you pluck it on Midsummer Eve.
‘And this is Midsummer Eve,’ he told himself, and put it in his buttonhole.