nursery fare which Cicely spread before them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.
“I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things before I can eat them,” Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from a beaker of milk.
Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his stepdaughter’s exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness. The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a marsh-wren’s nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.
Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird’s winter pilgrimage, with glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long southern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.
“Oh, what a good life—how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look down people’s chimneys twice a year!” Justine laughed, tilting her head back to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.
The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she had thrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black in the hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely dragged down a plumy spray of traveller’s joy and wound it above her friend’s forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved against the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit who had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.
She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread, and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in the scrub-oaks.
“Is that what you’d like most about the journey—looking down the chimneys?” Amherst asked with a smile.
“Oh, I don’t know—I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming over half the earth—seeing it born again out of darkness every morning! Sometimes, when I’ve been up all night with a patient, and have seen the world come back to me like that, I’ve been almost mad with its beauty; and then the thought that I’ve never seen more than a little corner of it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I’d had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret—the secret of snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried cities—and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to—and when winter came I’m sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!”
“But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys,” the practical Cicely suggested.
“Yes—and that would remind me of home!” Justine cried, swinging about to pinch the little girl’s chin.
She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and eyes. Amherst had never seen her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to the burden and toil of existence.
“Isn’t it strange,” she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, “that the bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest in the thick of everyday life?”
Her eyes met Amherst’s. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you’re like that yourself—loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life.”
She raised her dark brows laughingly. “So I imagine—but then you see I’ve never had the long flight!”
Amherst smiled. “Ah, there it is—one never knows—one never says, This is the moment! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he’d nothing left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a difference it was said!”
She pondered. “Yes—but it was the best, after all—the moment in which he had nothing left….”
“Oh,” Cicely broke in suddenly, “do look at the squirrel up there! See, father—he’s off! Let’s follow him!”
As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and eyes, her fair hair—of her mother’s very hue—making a shining haze about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches. Scarcely three years ago—and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the leaden hue of reality….
