“Shut up,” was the young woman’s reply, as she breathlessly stretched herself along the length of a fallen branch, and endeavoured to reach the damp moist stalks and cool leaves with her forehead and lips.
“How silly it is, having one’s hair done up,” she cried presently, raising herself on her hands from her prone position, and kicking the branch viciously with her foot.
“You’d have liked me with my hair down, Mr. Dangelis,” she continued. “Lying like this,” and she once more embraced the fallen bough, “it would have got mixed up with all those blue-bells and then you would have had something to paint!”
“Bad girl!” cried the artist playfully, switching her lightly with a willow wand from which he had been stripping the bark. “I would have made you do your hair up, tight round your head, years and years ago.”
He offered her his hand and lifted her up. Once in possession of those ardent youthful fingers, he seemed to consider himself justified in retaining them and, as the girl made no sign of dissent, they advanced hand in hand through the thick undergrowth.
The place was indeed a little epitome of the season’s prolific growth. Above and about them, elder-bushes and hazels met in entangled profusion; while at their feet the marshy soil was covered with a mass of moss and cool-rooted leafy plants. Golden-green burdocks grew there, and dark dog-mercury; while mixed with aromatic water-mint and ground ivy, crowds of sturdy red campions lifted up their rose-coloured heads. The undergrowth was so thick, and the roots of the willows and alders so betraying, that over and over again he had to make a path for her, and hold back with his hand some threatening withy-switch or prickly thorn branch, that appeared likely to invade her face or body.
The indescribable charm of the hour, as the broken sunlight, almost horizontal now, threw red patches, like the blood of wounded satyrs, upon tree-trunks and mossy stumps, and made the little marsh-pools gleam as if filled with fairy wine, found its completest expression in the long-drawn flute-music, at the same time frivolously gay and exquisitely sad, of the blackbird’s song. An angry cuckoo, crying its familiar cry as it flew, flapped away from some hidden perch, just above their heads.
Not many more blackbird’s notes and not many more cuckoo’s cries would that diminutive jungle hear, before the great midsummer silence descended upon it, to be broken only by the less magical sounds of the later season. Nothing but the auspicious accident of the extreme lateness of the spring had given to the visitor from Ohio these revelations of enchantment. It was one of those unequalled moments when the earth seems to breathe out from its most secret heart perfumes and scents that seem to belong to a more felicitous planet than our planet, murmurs and voices adapted to more responsive ears than our ears.
It was doubtless, so Dangelis thought, on such an evening as this, that the first notion of the presence in such places of beings of a finer and yet a grosser texture than man’s, first entered the imagination of humanity. In such a spot were the earth-gods born.
Many feathered things, besides blackbirds and cuckoos abounded in the mill spinney.