Teresa felt a strange sensation of relief; here it was back again—old, foolish, meaningless, Merry England. She realised that, during the last half hour, she had been in another world—it was not exactly life; and she remembered that sense of almost frightening incongruity when she had first heard of David’s vocation.
3
Soon it was real spring: the trees became covered with golden buds, with pale green tassels; the orchard was a mass of white blossom; the view became streaked with the startling greenness of young wheat; and the long grass of the wild acre beyond the orchard was penetrated with jonquils, and daffodils, and narcissi, boldly pouting their corollas at birds and insects and men. While very soon every one grew so accustomed to the singing of the birds that one almost ceased to hear it—it had entered the domain of vision, and become a stippled background to the velatura of trees and leaves and flowers.
David had settled down very happily at Plasencia, and had proved himself to be a highly domesticated creature—always ready to do odd jobs about the house or garden.
Shortly after his arrival Concha had gone up to Scotland to stay with Colonel Dundas, so it fell upon Teresa to entertain him.
They would go for long walks; and though they talked all the time, never, after that first conversation, did they touch on religious matters.
Sometimes he would tell her of his childhood in Scotland, and it soon became almost a part of her own memories: the small, dark, sturdy creature in a shabby kilt, a “poke of sweeties” in his sporran, at play with his brothers and sisters, dropping, say, a worm-baited bootlace into the liquid amber of the burn—their chaff, as befitted children of the Manse, with a biblical flavour, “Now then David, my man, no so much lip—Selah, change the tune, d’ye hear?” And the hillsides tesselated with heather and broom, and the sheep ruddled red as deer, and the beacon of the rowans flashed from hill to hill; while down the bland and portly Spey floated little dreams, like toy boats, making for big towns, and the sea, and over the sea.... Then all would melt into the tune of the “Old Hundred”:
Awl peeeople thaat own errrth dew dwell.
What time James Grant, the precentor with the trombone-voice, rocked his Bible up and down, as though it were a baby whose slumbers he was soothing with an ogre lullaby.
All this was a far cry from his Holiness, the Immaculate Conception, the Sacred Heart of Jesus ... and yet ... it was not quite Plasencia; there was something different about it all: again she remembered the incongruity of the minarets of the Sacré-Cœur.