On the greenish face of the sundial, weather-stained and tarnished, the shadow of the gnomon seemed to rest, so slowly the sun moved on his high summer circle. Love and Time were idle, but the reapers toiled in the corn.
Red berries and pink flowers were on the sprays of the brambles that thrust forth from the thicket of hawthorn. There were nuts on the hazel-rods among the hawthorns, and along the edge of the grass disks of knapweed, and yellow bedstraw, and purple vetch. Where the terrace sloped to the meadow two or three harebells drooped; the light air scarcely swung them.
Butterflies, whose blue wings were edged with another blue, came up the terrace, and fluttered along its verge. Bees visited the clover still flowering in the long grass. In the air, invisible, many thousand insect-wings vibrating: beat it to a continuous hum.
The light feet of squirrels in the beeches and among the ferns and moss scarcely made a rustle, unless they moved a dry leaf; the rushing of the water over the hatch at the trout-pond farther away now lifted itself and now decreased, the sound floated among the tree-trunks. As the dry, warm air came from the corn, the round dots of sunlight shot to and fro on the sward, following the leaves above.
A fervour of heat and light glowed in the atmosphere and was caught and held in the haze. Over the beech-tree the blue shone with light. Rolling along, the boom from the sea passed like a great organ-note, and the earth and air, the grass and living things responded; the light was yet more brilliant, the colours yet more warm; the earth offered the fullness of the harvest.
Two lovers, but one only loving. Martial had yielded and slumbered at the feet of love, yet he did not love. As the vehement August heat causes a slumberous feeling, so the vehement passion of Felise overthrew him, and his nature slumbered at her feet. He was there, and yet he was not hers.
Felise made no inquiry. It was enough that he was there; she wanted him, she did not ask if he needed her. All she required was that he should be where she could give herself to him.
For she had given herself to him from the depth of her soul. With tenfold quickened perceptions she saw the beauty of the earth, and with that beauty she loved.
She saw the clear definition of the trees, their colour, and the fineness of the extended branches—she was aware of the delicate leaves; she saw the hues of the wheat, shading from pale yellow to ruddy gold; her senses were alive to the minutest difference of tint or sound; to the rustle of the squirrel touching the dry leaf, the rush of the falling water, the hum of the insect-wing; keen to the difference of motion, the gliding of the dots of sunlight on the sward, the broad flutter of the peacock-butterfly, the quick vibration of the wasp-fly’s vane. Her exalted passion strung her naturally fine and sensitive nature; she seemed to feel the sun’s majestic onward sweep in the deep azure—her love made earth divine.
Sometimes under the power of sweet music from an organ—sweet, yet deep and noble—there wakes up within the heart another consciousness, till we seem capable of perceiving more than is usually apparent to the senses. Invisible things are shadowed forth and stand in the air.
Tenfold more so her heart, listening to the music of its own passion, was able to perceive the deeper knowledge shut and closed except to love. This was inwardly; outwardly she saw hitherto unknown glories in the light and beauty of the day, an art divine in these things.
There came the low boom of the distant thunder; but the hills slumbered, and the clouds were still. The reapers laboured in the corn.
All the unwritten and inexpressible aspirations of her nature, her noble nature, crowded into this one emotion. In her love was her all, her existence, her breath, her thought, the very expression of her form; as a flower grows and bears its one colour and perfume, so she lived and bore this one feeling. Of all else, of the world and of herself, she was utterly careless and unconcerned.
So great was her joy in her love, it seemed the width of the dome of the sky was not wide enough to express it.
Upon the green and tarnished face of the ancient sundial there was written in worn letters, Nihil nisi umbra—Nothing without shadow; no, not even love. The fervour of passion must needs cast the deepest shadow beside it. Let us welcome the shadow if only we can have the sunlight of love.
Through Martial’s mind, as he reclined beside her, there passed images of ancient Greece—of the ideal of human beauty expressed in marble as Aphrodite sought the bath, expressed in words resounding to this day. The idea of perfect human beauty—the idea of shape and curve and motion—flows through all their works, even those of pure thought, as Plato’s. Without direct mention or description, still the idea is there. These images passed through Martial’s mind—this beauty was hers. In life, in flesh and blood, and actual reality, the ideal was there with him. He worshipped her beauty, and said to himself, “I do not love.”
Her soul pursued his. She felt as if his man’s intellect gave a godlike meaning to the beauty of the sunlight and of the earth. In the expanse of loveliness through which she had wandered dreaming for years—through wood and mead, by stream and hill and wide sea—she had found the central figure, that which made all things plain and completed them.
Till he came the fields, the woods, the hills,
