EPILOGUE
It was a March day of glorious windy brightness, and all down the glades of Molesworth, where Bertie and Amelie had sat one hot morning in June last year, innumerable companies of daffodils danced and flickered in the sun. The great trees were yet for the most part bare of leaves, but round the birches a green mist hovered, and the red buds on the limes were ready to burst. Boisterous, but warm and fruitful, and teeming with the promise of the opening year, the wind shouted through the branches, and bowled, as a child bowls a hoop, great fleecy clouds across the blue of the sky. Movement, light, fruitfulness of the warm earth, were all triumphant; the strength of all that lived was renewed; spring was there.
To-day Amelie was pacing alone up and down the glade near the fallen tree-trunk where she had sketched before. She walked briskly, for it was not yet a day to loiter in; and as she came to the end of her beat within sight of the house, she looked eagerly towards it as if expecting someone. But the brilliance of her face and of the smile that every now and then hovered round her lips was in no way diminished when she turned again without seeing him whom she waited for. It seemed she was content to wait, and, though eager, did not fear disappointment.
The grass where she walked was all bright with the springing shoots of young growth, and the daffodils nodded and tossed their heads all round her. Not yet was the full note of woodland summer sounding, but the great orchestra of nature, as it were, was tuning up for the concert. Somehow the fragmentary broken sounds and scraps of summer melody strangely pleased her; often she stopped in her walk, and looked with her brilliant smile to right and left. Once she threw her arms wide, so that her red cloak stood away from her bosom, as if to take the world to it.
At last he came, and her heart embraced him ere yet he reached her. He was hatless, and the yellow gold of his hair was tossed by the wind. At the sight of him her whole being leaped towards him with stronger ecstasy than she had known yet, for the love between them seemed perfect; and she, woman-like, and loving her task, knew that a little word of comfort and sympathy was demanded of her.
' Dear one,' she said, and ' Dear one ' again. ' Poor Bertie! you look tired. You should have waited the night in London, and come down this evening.'
' Should I, when you were waiting?' he asked. ' Oh, what a morning from God! And you, Amelie, among the daffodils.'
She put her arm into his.
' Tell me,' she said, ' did you get there in time? Did your father know you?'
Bertie shook his head.
' No; he knew no one from the time of his seizure. But I am glad I went. He will be buried here on Friday.'
She pressed his arm; that sympathy of touch was more eloquent to him than words.
' And the baby?' he asked.
' Oh, Bertie, so wonderful! Nurse says he will speak in no time at all if he goes on like this. She says she never saw such a clever baby.'
Bertie laughed.
' That is a remark I never heard before,' he said.
' Then you will hear it lots of times in future,' said Amelie with some dignity; ' nurse says it nearly every day.'
They had passed out of the shade of the trees on to the lawn near the house. Just in front of them was an ugly patch of black-looking earth, on which, however, the new growth of grass was beginning to show, Amelie stopped when they came to it.
' Ah, Bertie, those weeks!' she said—' those weeks when we were strangers! This black patch, where the bore-hole was begun, makes them more vivid to me than my memory of them. It is like them—a black patch.'
' Yet the grass springs again,' said he.
She took both his hands in hers.
' Yes, Bertie,' she said, ' the grass springs again, for the winter is past; I read it this morning only. It says beautiful things. “ The flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is come.” That is now, is it not? Then, further on, “ My beloved is mine, and I am his.” '
' And that is the best of all,' said he.
THE END