Leaving the grave of Dr Storm they moved together towards the house, Nelly silent and preoccupied, pondering something.
Suddenly she turned to him with shining eyes. ‘Do you know what I’m going to do with you?’ she cried. ‘I’m going to take you for a picnic! I often do that with my best friends — with Mrs Shotover for example—’ and she shot a whimsical glance at Richard which was received, this time, very amiably. ‘Grace will look after Father. He hates picnics. Besides, he’ll want his rest after lunch. And we’ll go off and have all the afternoon to ourselves till tea time! Shall we do that? Would you like to? Unless you’d prefer to look at the painted ladies again!’
Richard’s contentment at this proposal was so evident that it did not need his feeble joke, ‘I prefer them unpainted!’ to show her what he was feeling.
Gay and radiant, with a happiness in their hearts only permitted once or twice in a lifetime to the sons and daughters of men, they went together into the kitchen and assisted Grace, who leered at them both like the sly Shakespearean wench she was and even winked at her young mistress, in preparing sandwiches and cake and bread and butter and jam.
Hearing their voices and laughter the old naturalist came in too after a while. Richard was surprised at the friendly humorous chuckles he bestowed on the expedition and at the alacrity with which he added to their basket of provisions, a flask of wine from his study cupboard.
‘A shame to leave any of this for the good man who comes after me!’ he said, with chuckling unction and maliciously twinkling eyes. ‘It’s what I use in my Mass; and if you young people drink it up, there won’t be any left for the Eidolon Vulgaris!’
He escorted thme to the gate and wished them good luck with such mellow and ironic benevolence that Richard could not help thinking of the dignified bonhomie of the Rabelaisian Grangousier.
Nelly did not hesitate for a moment as to the direction they should take. She led him along a little secluded path bordered by blossoming elders which emerged after a mile or two of circuitous ascent upon a high ridge of arable upland, covered at the season by a waving sea of green rye and barley.
She led him across these cornfields, walking with swinging youthful steps in front of him along the narrow chalk path; every now and then stopping and turning round to point out to him how red-bright the fumitory was and to indicate to him some little plant associated with her earlier memories.
When they reached the further brink of this ridge, where the ryefield ended in a thickset hedge and the path in a three-barred well-worn stile, Richard cried aloud with delight at the beauty of the valley that lay stretched before them. It was enclosed on the further end by a wood of oaks and hazel; and the edges of it, sloping down by soft degrees to a grassy level floor, were covered with thyme and cistus, milkwort and trefoil.
‘Don’t you like it?’ cried the girl in a voice of such thrilling happiness that it made even the turtle dove’s crooning seem less golden in contentment. ‘I call it the Happy Valley. I never come here unless I’m in my best mood of all.’ And she added after a pause, ‘I haven’t been here for two years!’
Richard helped her over the stile and they lifted the basket across. ‘How heavy it is!’ she said with a quick frown of solicitude. ‘I oughtn’t to have let you carry it all that way. How thoughtless I am! I quite forgot the old thing. Here, let’s hide it under the hedge. We don’t want it yet do we? We can come back for it when I’ve shown you the Happy Valley.’
Richard was certainly relieved to get rid of the weight when it actually was out of his hands, but he had not been conscious of it as a burden. He felt that day as if all the baskets in the world might be piled on his back and he would be oblivious to it.
They ran down the thyme-scented slope hand in hand, and when they reached level ground he pressed her fingers so tightly in his own before releasing them that poor Canyot’s engagement ring hurt her severely.
It may have been the sharpness of the ring bringing melancholy thoughts, or it may have been the shy happiness of a heart too full for expression, but she walked very silently by his side through the rest of the Happy Valley. It was Richard, not she, who exclaimed with astonished delight at the huge masses of budding honeysuckle that overspread the bushes above them. It was Richard, not she, who pointed to the sprays of wild roses, the first he had seen that year.
When they reached the end of the valley, where the path they were following entered the wood, they stopped by mutual consent and leaned over the old weather-worn gate covered with a minute grey lichen and looked into the cool leafy shadows.
‘Why don’t you take off your hat?’ he said suddenly, in a voice that to himself sounded strange and forced. ‘Like you did in the Selshurst garden,’ he added in a louder tone, making an effort, so it seemed to himself, to conceal the wild beating of his heart.
As he spoke he flung down his own hat and stick on to the bracken fronds beside them.
Her breath came unevenly, in funny little gasps. She put her hands feebly up to her head and pulled out the hat pins one by one; and then holding the hat on the top of the gate stuck the pins she had removed into it, one by one again, her fingers visibly trembling. High up in a beech tree above them a little invisible warbler kept uttering its own name in a monotonous chant, as if drunk with the sunshine and the pride of its well-hidden nest. ‘Chiff-chaff! Chiff-chaff! chiff-chaff!’ that invisible owner of those leafy solitudes kept repeating.
Richard took her hat and laid it gently down, balancing it carefully upon a last year’s plant of hart’s tongue fern, still glossy and unfaded.
As he did so one of those weakly fluttering pale-coloured moths, which frequent shadowy places and move so helplessly when they’re disturbed, flew against his face.
When he turned to her again he noticed that her eyes were so large and bright that it was as if a disembodied spirit was gazing into his very soul. The slight movement he instinctively had made towards her was stopped suddenly by that look and he clutched the top of the gate and drew a deep breath.
Then it was that the brightness in her eyes softened, melted, grew infinitely passive and tender, and by an impulse that seemed to come from some power outside themselves they threw their arms around each other and clung together, their lips joined and their hearts beating as if they were two hearts in one body.
‘Chiff-chaff! chiff-chaff! chiff-chaff!’ repeated the little invisible lord of the sanctuary they had invaded, giving to their encounter the winged blessing of the very Eros of the woods.
Very gently the girl released herself and a sigh of happiness that seemed beyond even the happiness of that place of enchantment rose from her lips and floated away among the leaves.
Then she nestled against him, her head bent so low that he could not see her face.
For a long space they stood thus silently together, he leaning against the gate and she leaning against him. Then with his hands on each side of her fair head he lightly lifted up her face as if it had been a delicate white flower and holding it away from him kissed her with a long silent kiss that seemed to throw so strange a trance upon them both that even after he had released her and she leaned, with her head on her hands, against that confederate gate-bar, and he rested motionless beside her, his arms about her body, they seemed like people drugged, spellbound, magnetized, ‘entoiled in woofèd fantasies’.
‘Chiff-chaff! chiff-chaff! chiff-chaff!’ repeated the relentless warbler; and neither of the two to the end of their lives forgot that particular sound. It blended with the faint, relaxed, indescribably sweet languor that took possession of the maiden, and it blended with the infinitely tender if less deep emotion that filled the heart of the man.