I
The rain and the wind had ceased, and in the garden the Painted Lady butterflies were tremulously enjoying the blue Michaelmas daisies, and an old man was gathering seeds of hollyhock, evening primrose, and foxglove, and putting them into white cups on the garden paths. In the hedges the bryony coils were crimson and green among thorn and hazel; the sparrows were thick in the elms, whose branches had snatched straws from passing waggons; one bare ash tree was all in bud with singing linnets. Over all was a blue sky, with throbbing clouds of rooks; and beyond all, over leagues of rocky pastures and grim oaks, the mountains,—and upon one of them a white flower of cloud or snow, above which presently rose many clouds, and in the midst of them a narrow pane of sky full of misty golden light, and behind that a land where Troy is still defended,—where still Camilla, loving war and maidenhood eternally, bounds over the unbending corn,—and where, in the hall of a castle, four-and-twenty damsels are embroidering satin, and the least lovely of them is lovelier than Gwenhwyvar, the wife of Arthur, "when she has appeared loveliest at the Offering, or on the day of the Nativity, or at the feast of Easter."
II
The last village was far behind. The last happy chapel-goer had passed me long ago. A cock crowed once and said the last word on repose. The rain fell gently; the stems of the hazels in the thickets gleamed; and the acorns in the grassy roads, and under the groups of oaks, showed all their colours, and especially the rosy hues where they had but just before been covered by the cup. One by one I saw the things which make the autumn hedges so glorious and strange at a little distance: the yellow ash trees, with some green leaves; the hoary and yellow willows; the hawthorns, purple and crimson and green; the briers, with most hips where there were fewest leaves; the green brambles with red fruit and black; tall, grey, and leafless thistles with a few small crimson flowers; the grey-green nettles with purple stems; the ragwort flowers; and on the long, green, wet grass the fallen leaves shining under red and yellow oaks; and through the olive lances of hazel the fields shining in patines of emerald. Doves cooed in the oaks, pheasants gleamed below. The air was full of the sweetness of the taste of blackberries, and the scent of mushrooms and of crumbling, wild carrot-seeds, and the colour of yellow, evening grass. The birches up on the hills above the road were golden, and like flowers. Between me and them a smouldering fire once or twice sent up dancing crimson flames, and the colour and perfume of the fire added themselves to the power of the calm, vast, and windless evening, of which the things I saw were as a few shells and anemones at the edge of a great sea. The valley waited and waited.
Then by the roadside I saw a woman of past middle age sitting silently. Her small head was poised a little haughtily on a blithe neck; her fine, grey, careful hair spared gloomy white forehead and round ears, which shone; her full, closed lips spoke clearly of both the sadness of to-day and the voluptuousness of yesterday. She was beautiful, and not merely because she had once been a beautiful girl. She had become mortal through grief, and though I could not see her crown, yet crowned she was.
Will you always, O sad and tranquil Demeter, sit by the wayside and expect Persephone?
III
It was the last day of the month, and in a gently heaving land, which was broken every three or four miles by a sudden, castled crag, Autumn was perfect, but with just a touch of sublimity added to its beauty by the thought that, on the next day or the next, winter would fall upon her unsuspected, as Pizarro and the Spanish cavalry fell upon that noble Indian, Atahualpa, who had come up to them in peace and meekness and pomp, upon a golden litter, among thousands of his gentle subjects, making music and decorated with gold, and expecting to meet the gods.
ST. CATHERINE'S ROCK, TENBY