“A plant—a plant is a regular tomboy when you’re making a new home for it,” she was murmuring archly to herself, five minutes later, her dark eyebrows lifting over the busy trowel. “You have to make a nice little mound of earth, deep in your hole, for it to sit on and swing its legs, its roots, just like a boy or girl. And—and it likes a snug fit, too! There now, my bluets are in a nice, comfy hole.... And the little Quaker Ladies will never know what happened to them!”
She started. Something was happening to her. Breathlessly she kneeled upright—earthy knuckles pressed against her lips, ear intent.
“Goodness! this—this isn’t the first time when I’ve been up early, before anybody else was around—Pemrose, anybody—that—I thought—I thought I heard a strange sound from the wood. There it is again! Faint hum—silvery hum—all round us in the air! Don’t you—don’t you hear it?”
She turned half wildly to the Quaker Ladies, who seemed to be settling into their new home to music—if music the faintest, vaguest murmur could be called.
“It—it comes from the wood, but it isn’t the trees—pines or beeches—it isn’t, oh! it isn’t any sound in Nature, at all.” Una waved her trowel, in utter bewilderment. “What can be doing it—making it? That distant ‘surgy’ hum, rising, falling, murmur, murmuration! Silvery murmuration!” The little peculiar cast in her fascinated eye, too slight to be a blemish, shone, a morning star of marvel, now as she gazed off towards a low, stone wall about a hundred feet away, beyond which was a dark, slowly lighting pine wood.
“If I were to say anything about this to Pemrose, she’d laugh at me—think it was all imagination. She’s—so different. Full of ‘pep’—a radio amateur!”
The girl, the dark-eyed girl whose nature was more woven of poetry than “pep”, who put morning songs into the heads of her flowers, continued to kneel “possessed”, upon a dew-silvered stone beside the rock garden, continued to stare, bewitched, at the dusky green of the early wood.
To her, the vague, sweet murmur which, like a silver cloud, enwrapped her, was not unnatural; it was part of the fairy wonder of the sunrise; of a May sun rising, dim and silvery, like a moon—like a young moon calf—behind shrubbery trees.
“Extra-ordinary!” Her earthy fingers sought each other, restlessly intertwining. “It can’t be a bee? Big, droning bumble bee—Canny Nannie, as the mountain children call it! A whole swarm of Canny Nannies! But there isn’t a bee in sight at this hour; and, if there were, ’twould have to be a glorified—glorified one for me to hear it—at this distance from the wood.”
She stumbled to her feet now, dropping the trowel almost upon the long-suffering heads of the Quaker Ladies, and wandered down a dewy pathway towards a point still nearer to the pine woods, where a gray old sundial upon its four-foot pedestal, shimmered at sunrise, like a huge primrose.