“Oh. Well, then we went on till we got to Thorpe’s Howland, and we made Silas sit under a beech-tree while we looked for primroses....”
“You and Linnet Morgan?”
“Yes, I and Mr. Morgan. Silas sat under the tree for a bit, pulling up the moss all round him; then he got up and leant against the tree-trunk, saying more poetry; Shakespeare, I think it was. Mr. Morgan beckoned to me to come and listen, so we crept up on tiptoe, and Silas went on like that for about half an hour; I don’t know how he manages to keep it all in his head. I don’t like it so much when he starts his poetry in the kitchen, but in the wood it seemed all right; it might have been part of the wood,” she said, lowering her voice and hanging her head with her pretty, sudden shyness, and scrutinising her finger nails.
“How do you mean: part of the wood?”
“Well,—there was a lot of patchy sunlight on the ground, coming through the trees, and the moss that Silas had torn up smelt bitter,—like earth,—and the primroses smelt soft and sweet. There was the sort of big sand-pit in the bank, where we had picked them. There were the trees, so gray and naked. There was Silas,—Mr. Morgan whispered to me that Silas looked like a tree himself, a tree that had been blasted by lightning, and when he said that, I saw he was right; even Silas’s arms, waving about, were like the branches.”
“Well, well!” said Calthorpe, scratching his chin.
“Mr. Morgan’s like a son to Silas already,” she went on; “he’s gay with him, and he’s as gentle as a woman. He’s never put out by Silas’s ways—never seems to notice them, in fact. And Silas likes him because he can talk to him by the hour about all the things he thinks about and reads about.”
“But Silas always talks to everybody.”
“Yes, he’s so greedy for an audience that he’ll put up with never getting a sensible answer, sooner than not talk at all. But Mr. Morgan’s got education; he’ll argue with Silas; he’s like a whetstone to a knife. He’ll get Silas into a proper excited rage, and then laugh, and Silas takes it in good part. It was a grand day when he came to live in the cottage.”
“Yes,—well, I must be going,” said Calthorpe, moving away, and he went after a rather sulky good-bye, very unlike his usual friendliness and promises to come again.