Read Online White Narcissus by Raymond Knister - Free Book Online

told her with an assumption of country jocosity. It seemed that for surprise of joy he could have leaped the high gate before her.
    “I am? I hadn’t any particular place in view –”
    “Just out for a walk?” he interrupted urgently. “Then you may as well come with me.”
    She looked back over her shoulder at the forest into which the lane ran. “But I just did come out of that bush. I rather expected,” she drawled softly, “that there might be some wild flowers there. Perhaps I’m too late. But then I didn’t happen to think of them before….”
    “Never too late! Orange lilies, jack-in-the-pulpits, we’ll find some! Come. I must explore the whole country while I’m here!”
    They walked along the grass of the wide, rail-fenced lane, down and up the slopes of which twined branching cow-paths, worn in other years by droves of belling, tranquil animals. The morning was passing in a mellow green quiet, which seemed to Richard Milne loud with another clamourthan that of the city: his awakened hopes, a tumult of memories and desire. Looking at her beside him, he heaved a great breath and said:
    “I can hardly believe it, but here I am. Here are you, what’s more. Here are we!” he sang suddenly in the echoes of the trees. “Whatever foundling gods take the place of Pan, we are here!”
    She smiled slightly at his enthusiasm of a boy; her generous lips seemed trembling to a smile as they walked. “I’m inclined not to come out very often. I think to-day is the first since winter that I have left the farm like this. In winter, spring, autumn, it’s good to come and see that there is growth, change, and death, nothing of which is bitter or gay, simply because it does return again. It does return again. … Yet in that way, too, it is very precious. But you don’t wish me to be serious,” she laughed.
    He was silent, not knowing how to convey his risen spirits, and not daring to try for fear of jarring on her mood. She had kept inviolate for a few far-parted days of the year this desire to commune with nature, and had avoided the chafing with which day-by-day intercourse would have blunted her love. And this to her was everything, everything tangible of beauty beyond the poignant and trivial dullness of her days. After all, she scarcely had realized, save as a rumour, that there was another world beyond these fields. Had she not known the world of poetry, ideas, she perhaps would not have been conscious of loving them, nor ever have known the fear of love, that fear that she could grow to hate them, though her bitterness would be the mere working of monotony. Then she would wish that, like the clod-like people about her, she had never learned to love them. She looked about her with quiet eyes, not asking of the forest that it be to them rest from vainstudy, but that it be its strange self as it had been to her childhood memories, when in earlier spring she never forgot to come out for wild flowers, and sometimes little Dick Milne went beside her, and they raced each other to clustered violets or more common wet-rooted mayflowers, shy lady-slippers.
    They paused as they had done in those times, and looked up the long trunks of rough trees, to the feathery, cloudy upper branches, and there, as in an old afternoon, circled a crane, its long, thin legs and neck stuck straight out against the sky: soared and soared in the opening above the feathery boughs, huge, until they thought they were staring up phantom trees, pillars of a dream, immeasurably high.
    “Oh, it makes me dizzy!” The girl lowered her head.
    “We must have looked up quite a while,” the man muttered. “Ada, do you remember the time we saw a crane when we were children? We stared and stared just the same, and you were dizzy that time too. Seems impossible to believe that bird’s not going to do something interesting. Does he see our faces in the rift of treetops, and wonder what those strange, wavering bulbs are going to do, whether they