The summer had been dry and fine, the foliage unusually rich and heavy, all the young wood ripening well. Consequently the turn of the leaf was very brilliant that year. The sweetly, sober, English landscape seemed to have run mad and decked itself, as for a masquerade, in extravagant splendours of colour. The smooth-stemmed beeches had taken on every tint from fiery brown, through orange and amber, to verdigris green touching latest July shoots. The round-headed oaks, practising even in carnival time a measure of restraint, had arrayed themselves in a hundred rich, finely-gradated tones of russet and umber. While, here and there, a tall bird-cherry, waxing wanton, had clothed itself like the Woman of Babylon in rose-scarlet from crown to lowest black-barked twig. Higher up, the larch plantations rose in crowds of butter-coloured spires. Amethystine and blood-red, white-spotted toadstools, in little companies, pushed through the light soil on either side the road. Trailing sprays of bramble glowed as flame. Rowan berries hung in heavy coral bunches, and the dogwood spread itself in sparse china-pink clusters. Only the undergrowth of crooked alders, in swampy, low-lying places, kept its dark, purplish green; and the light foliage of the ash waved in shadowy pallor against its knobbed and knotted branches; and the ranks of the encircling firs retained their solemn habit, as though in protest against the universal riot.
The stream hidden away in the hazel coppice gurgled and murmured. Beech-masts pattered down, startling the stillness as with a sudden dropping of thunder rain. Squirrels, disturbed in the ingathering of their winter store, whisked up the boles of the great trees and scolded merrily from the forks of the high branches. Shy wild things rustled and scampered unseen through the tangled undergrowth and beds of bracken. While that veil of bluish haze touched all the distance of the landscape with a delicate mystery, and softly blotted the vista of each wide shooting drive, or winding pathway, to left and right.
And as Richard rode onward, leaves gay even in death fluttering down around him, his mood began to suffer change. He ceased to think and began to feel merely. First came a dreamy delight in the beauty of the scene about him. Then the sense of mystery grew upon him—of mystery, not merely hanging in the delicate haze, but dwelling in the endless variety of form and colour which met his eyes, of mystery inviting him in the soft, multitudinous voices of the woodland. And as the minutes passed this sense grew increasingly provocative, became too increasingly elusive. The light leapt into Dickie's eyes. He smiled to himself. He was filled with unreasoning expectation. He seemed—it was absurd, yet very charming—to be playing hide-and-seek with some glad secret which at any instant might be revealed to him. It murmured to him in the brook. It scolded at him merrily with the scolding squirrels. It startled the surrounding stillness, with the down pattering beech-masts and fluttering of leaves. It eluded him deftly, rustling away unseen through the green and gold of the bracken. Lastly when, reaching the summit of the ridge of hill, he entered upon the levels of the great table-land, it hailed him in the long-drawn sighing of the fir forest. For a wind, suddenly awakened, swept towards him from some far distance, neared, broke overhead, as summer waves upon a shingly beach, died in delicious whispers, only to sweep up and break and die again. Meanwhile the gray pall of cloud parted in the west, disclosing spaces of faint yet clearest blue, and the declining sun, from behind dim islands of shifting vapour, sent forth immense rays of mild and misty light.
Richard laughed involuntarily to himself. For there was a fantastic, curiously alluring influence in all this. It spoke to him as in delicate persuasion. His sense of expectation intensified. He would not ride homeward and shut himself within four walls just yet; but yield himself to the wooing of these fair sylvan divinities; to that of the spirit of the evening wind, of the softly shrouding haze, and of the broadening sunlight, a little longer.
A turf-ride branches away to the left, leading along a narrow outstanding spur of table-land to a summer-house, the prospect from which is among the noted beauties of Brockhurst. This summer-house or Temple, as it has come to be called, is an octagonal structure. Round-shafted pillars rise at each projecting angle. In the recesses between them are low stone benches, save in front where an open colonnade gives upon the view. The roof is leaded, and surmounted by a wooden ball and tall, three-sided spike. These last, as well as the plastered, windowless walls are painted white. Within, the hollow of the dome is decorated in fresco, with groups of gaily clad ladies and their attendant cavaliers, with errant cupids, garlands of flowers, trophies of rather impossible musical instruments, and cages full of imprisoned, and therefore doubtless very naughty, loves. The colours have grown faint by action of insweeping wind and weather; but this lends a pathos to the light-hearted, highly-artificial art, emphasising the contrast between it and its immediate surroundings.
For the Temple stands on a platform of turf at the extreme point of the spur of table-land. The hillside, clothed with heather and bracken, fringed lower down with a coppice of delicate birches, falls steeply away in front and on either hand. Outstretched below, besides the panorama of the great woods, lies all the country about Farley, on to Westchurch, and beyond again—pasture and cornlands, scattered hamlets and red-roofed farms half-hidden among trees, the glint of streams set in the vivid green of water-meadows, and soft blue range behind range of distance to that pale uprising of chalk down in the far south. Upon the right, some quarter of a mile away, blocking the end of an avenue of ancient Scotch firs, the eastern façade of Brockhurst House shows planted proudly upon the long gray and red lines of the terrace.
Richard checked his horse, pausing to look for a moment at that well-beloved home. Then musing, he let his horse go forward along the level turf-ride. The glistering, gray dome and white columns of the Temple standing out against the spacious prospect—the growing brightness of this last, still chastened by the delicious autumn haze—captivated his imagination. There was, seen thus, a simplicity and distinction altogether classic in the lonely building. To him it appeared not unfit shrine for the worship of that same all-pervasive spirit of mystery, not unfit spot for the revelation of that same glad, yet cunningly elusive secret, of which he suffered the so fond obsession.
And so it was that when, coming abreast of the building, the sound of young voices—women's voices—and finely modulated laughter saluted his ear, though startled for no stranger had the right of entry to the park, he was by no means displeased. This seemed but part of the all-pervasive magic of this strange afternoon. Richard smiled at the phantasies of his own mood; yet he forgot to be shy, forgot the distressing self-consciousness which made him shrink from the observation of strangers—specially those of the other sex. The adventure tempted his fancy. Even familiar things had put on a new and beguiling vesture in the last half hour, so there were miracles abroad, perhaps. Anyhow he would satisfy himself as to the aspect of those sweet voiced and, as yet, unseen trespassers. He let his horse go forward slowly across the platform of turf.
CHAPTER III