And this flower, too—this strange, waxen flower that made us a little afraid because we said it looked beautiful as death, not knowing then how near we had come to its name. We found it growing in the depths of the woods, a haunted, lonely thing, and we plucked it as one might pluck mandragora, almost expecting weird cries and lamentations rising from the ground. The innocent children call it “Indian’s-pipe.” Some call it “corpse-flower.” What shall we call it, Miranda?
And here again is a flower no one shall rob me of. A simple, childish flower indeed. Only a spray of Crimson Rambler. At least you will let me keep that, Miranda. You will not deprive me of that.
I have just found something else pressed between the pages of a letter: another kind of flower—a butterfly. A great, yellow butterfly with tails to his wings. I caught it for fun, not meaning to hurt it; and then suddenly an impulse came over me, and I crushed it between the pages of a book we were reading, as though one should capture a sunbeam of some summer-day on which we were very happy. When I opened the book again—Do you remember the book?—the flower wings were quiet as any other petals, and we both looked at each other with a feeling of fear, of omen. We who hated cruelty and abhorred death had killed a little, beautiful, innocent creature; and we felt afraid, and said little as we went homeward; but our eyes said:
“Suppose it were love we killed to-day, that ‘Psyche,’ that frail butterfly thing—Animula, Vagula, blandela!”
I wonder again, as the little wings fall from the folded sheet. At all events, that was our last day together in the fields. Since then the arrowhead has flowered in the brook—but not for us. That was our last summer-day.
Our last summer-day! I let your letters fall from my hands, Miranda, as I say over to myself, “Our last summer-day”—for it is again summer, “a summer-day in June.” How strange it seems, after all: summer again, and no Miranda. I could almost say with the sad Irish poet:
“Has summer come without the rose,
And left the bird behind?”
For you, Miranda, seemed very summer herself. The sun-goddess you seemed, the blonde young mother of the green boughs and the knee-deep grass. When you looked upon the meadows they filled like the sky at evening with blue flowers, and when you spoke, the woods rang with a thousand birds. The very fish leaped up out of the talking stream to catch a glimpse of your shining hair. Wherever you passed life sprang up, abundant, blossoming, filled with the laughter of immortal summer.
Ah! to what enchanted youth, this “summer-day in June,” in what Broceliande of green boughs, or nymph-haunted secrecy of rocky pools, are you teaching the lesson of summer?
“A summer-day in June!” As I say those words over to myself, do you wonder, Miranda, that I should sorrow to part with the beautiful history of eight summers?