Two miles away on the downs, another kind of haze caught the eye of Robert Formby as he strode across them, the golden glimmering haze which indicates intense heat; the sun had not yet set, but its rays struck the short herbage as though they must scorch it, and made the white streak of road which threaded the undulating tract positively glitter. But yonder was Oakleigh Wood, heavily green in its luxuriance of summer foliage. As Robert swung along, with the fierce sunshine beating on his brown neck and hands, he pictured it to himself: first, the grove of firs with all its spicy scents streaming forth at this hour, then the open space where the rabbits would presently frolic, then, stretching away, the wide dense coppice of hazel and oak and ash. He thought of the broad drives where the feet sank deep in cool lush grass, and of the narrow and more secret paths between serried green walls, where scarce a single burning ray might penetrate, though far, far away at the very end of a long vista, a peep of luminous sky was to be had.
Robert dwelt on it all, not as a poet or an artist would have dwelt on it, revelling in its beauty, but as a man thinks of familiar and undeniably pleasant things.
The young gamekeeper shifted his gun to the other shoulder to ease himself, and swung his now disengaged arm, whistling as he walked. Oakleigh Wood was situated on a Dorset down, but Robert Formby was a North-countryman. He had probably Danish blood in his veins, for his big, loose-limbed figure, his blue eyes and yellow hair and beard, would seem to belong to the race; his complexion, too, had been fair but was now bronzed, though when, impatient of the heat, he threw open the collar of his flannel shirt, the lower part of his throat showed white as milk.
A very energetic, sensible, clear-headed fellow was Robert, full of zeal, and most laudably anxious to do his duty. It was this zealous anxiety which brought him to Oakleigh Wood on this particular occasion. It was just possible that evil-disposed persons might take advantage of the universal relaxation to trespass in these coverts; it behoved Robert to see to that, he conceived.
Here were the woods at length, the undulating outlines of which had wooed him from afar with such enticing promise; Robert’s feet fell almost noiselessly on a crumbling carpet of pine-needles, and he paused a moment to sniff the aromatic scent approvingly; then he went on. Now the green depths engulfed him on every side; all was gentle gloom, exquisite undefinable fragrance; silence the more palpable because of the never-ceasing stir which seemed to pervade it. What a variety, what a multiplicity of scarcely perceptible noises go to make up the breathing of the wood! The flapping of leaf against leaf, the swaying of twigs, the rattle of falling nuts or sticks, the falling apart of fronds of moss, the dripping of tiny drops of dew or rain, the roamings of minute insects—each sound infinitesimal in itself, yet repeated at thousands and millions of points—in this harmony of life and motion, combining with but never subduing the stillness of the forest, lies its magnetism.
Sharper sounds break the all-pervading hush from time to time without disturbing it; the cooing of a dove, the flight of blackbird or thrush, the tapping of a woodpecker, the croaking of a frog, the hasty passage of a mouse through dry leaves; while the barking of a dog in some distant village, and the clanging of sheep-bells far away seem nevertheless to form part of the mysterious whole.
Robert pushed his hat to the back of his head, rested his gun against a forked sapling of birch, and, taking out his pipe, was proceeding to fill it, when he suddenly started and threw back his head, inhaling the air with a frown. A certain acrid penetrating odour was making its way towards him, drowning the more delicate essences of the forest growths.
“’Tis wood smoke!” said Robert, and then his brow cleared. “Mayhap somebody is burnin’ weeds nigh to this place,” he said, and went on filling his pipe.
But before lighting it he once more raised his head and shot a suspicious glance down the long green vista which faced him: a faint bluish haze seemed to cling to the over-arching boughs of the hazels. It was not the mist of evening, for it proceeded from a certain point about half-way up the narrow stretch, and, moreover, as Robert gazed, little fresh wreaths came eddying forth to join the ethereal cloud afore-mentioned. Restoring his pipe to his pocket, and catching up his gun, Robert strode off in this direction as rapidly as the narrowness of the path and the breadth of his shoulders would admit of. He had indeed to proceed in a curious sidelong fashion, turning now the right shoulder forward, now the left, so that he looked almost as if he were dancing. The cloud of smoke increased in volume as he advanced, and presently he could actually hear the hissing of flames and the crackling and snapping of twigs; and now bending low, and peering beneath the interlaced branches, he could see the fire itself. A rather large beech-tree stood in the middle of the massed saplings, with a small open space around it. In the centre of this space a fire was burning briskly, and by the side of the fire a girl sat with her elbows resting on her knees and her chin sunk in her hands. Her hat was hung on one of the beech-boughs, and a small open basket lay beside her, from beneath the raised lid of which protruded the brown spout of a teapot.
“My word!” said Robert to himself.