Yet she was peacefully happy and quietly alive to the blessing of such a husband. Her temperament found him a daily meal of bread and butter—nourishing, pleasant to a healthy appetite, easy to digest. But, while he had feared for his happiness, she had already asked herself if his consistent stability would ever pall. She knew him so thoroughly, and wished that it was not so. It exasperated her in secret to realise that she could foretell to a nicety his speech and action under all possible circumstances. There were no unsuspected crannies and surprises in him. Surprises had ever been the jewels of Honor's life, and she believed that she might dig into the very heart's core of this man and never find one.
"He seems to be gold all through," she thought once. "Yet I wish he was patchy for the sake of the excitement."
But Myles by no means wearied his wife in these halcyon hours. She was very proud of him and his strength, sobriety, common sense. She enjoyed testing these qualities, and did so every day of the week, for she was a creature of surprises herself, and appreciated juxtaposition of moods as an epicure desires contrary flavours. She never found him wanting. He was as patient as the high Moor; and she believed that she might as easily anger Cosdon Beacon as her husband. He ambled by her side along the pathway of life like a happy elephant. If ever they differed, it was only upon the question of Honor's own share in the conduct of the farm. Formerly she had been energetic enough, and even resented the man's kindly, though clumsy attempts to relieve her; since marriage, however, she appeared well content to let him do all; and this had not mattered, in the opinion of Myles, while Honor found fresh interests and occupations to fill those hours formerly devoted to her affairs. But she did not do so; she spent much time to poor purpose; she developed a passing whim for finer feathers than had fledged her pretty body as a maiden; she began buying dresses that cost a ten-pound note apiece. These rags and tags Myles cared nothing for, but dutifully accompanied to church and upon such little visits of ceremony as the present. Then he grew uncomfortable and mentioned the trifle to Mark Endicott, only to hear the old man laugh.
"'Tis a whim," he said; "just one blind alley on the road towards happiness that every woman likes to probe if she can; and some live in it, and, to their dying day, get no forwarder than frocks. But she won't. Praise the new frill-de-dills when she dons them. Please God there's a time coming when she'll spend money to a better end, and fill her empty time with thoughts of a small thing sprung from her own flesh. No latest fashions in a baby's first gear, I believe. They don't change; no more do grave clothes."
Man and wife walked homeward beside tall, tangled hedges, full of ripeness and the manifold delicate workmanship and wrought filigrane of seed-vessels that follow upon the flowers. Honor was in worldly vein, for she had now come from calling upon folks whose purse was deeper than her own; but Myles found the immediate medley of the hedgerow a familiar feast, and prattled from his simple heart about what he saw there.
"You hear so often that it's a cheerless hour which sees the summer flowers dying, but I don't think so, do you, sweetheart? Look at the harvest of the hedges in its little capsules and goblets and a thousand quaint things! But you've noticed all this. You notice everything. Take the dainty cups, with turned rims, of the campions; and the broadswords or horse-shoes of the peas-blossomed things; and the cones of the foxgloves and the shining balls of starry stitchworts; and the daggers of herb Robert; and the bluebell's triple treasure-house; and the violet's; and the wood-sorrel, that shoots its grain into space; and the flying seeds of dandelions and clematis. And the scarlet fruits—the adder's meat, iris, the hips and aglets, bryony and nightshade; and the dark berries of privets and madders and wayfaring-tree and dogwood; and then the mast of oak and beech and chestnut—it is endless; and all such fine finished work!"
She listened or half listened; then spoke, when he stopped to draw breath.
"Poor Christo used to say that he saw Autumn as a dear, soft, plump-breasted, brown woman sitting on a throne of sunset colours—sitting there smiling and counting all the little cones and purses and pods with her soft hazel eyes, until falling leaves hid her from his sight in a rain of scarlet and gold and amber, under crystalline blue hazes. And sometimes he saw her in the corn, with the round moon shining on her face, while she lingered lovingly in the silver, and the ripe grain bent to kiss her feet and stay her progress. And sometimes"—she broke off suddenly. "You have an eye like a lynx for detail, Myles. Nothing escapes you. It is very wonderful to me."
He was pleased.
"I love detail, I think—detail in work and play. Yet Yeoland taught me more than he learned from me. The seeds are symbols of everlasting things, of life being renewed—deathless."