XLIII A MAY AFTERNOON
XLIV "MY DEAREST REST"

HERB OF GRACE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCES A LOVER OF THE PICTURESQUE

Our adventures hover round us like bees round the hive when
preparing to swarm.--MAETERLINCK.

From boyhood Malcolm Herrick had been a lover of the picturesque. In
secret he prided himself on possessing the artistic faculty, and yet,
except in the nursery, he had never drawn a line, or later on spoilt
canvas and daubed himself in oils under the idea that he was an embryo
Millais or Turner. But nevertheless he had the seeing eye, and could
find beauty where more prosaic people could only see barrenness: a
stubble field newly turned up by the plough moved him to admiration,
while a Surrey lane, with a gate swinging back on its hinges, and a
bowed old man carrying faggots, in the smoky light of an October
evening, gave him a feeling akin to ecstasy. More than one of his
school-fellows remembered how, even in the cricket field, he would
stand as though transfixed, looking at the storm clouds, with their
steely edges, coming up behind the copse, but the palms of his hands
were outstretched and he never failed to catch the ball.

"Nature intended me for an artist or a poet," Malcolm would say, for he
was given at times to a hard, merciless introspection, when he took
himself and his motives to pieces, "but circumstances have called me to
the bar. To be sure I have never held a brief, and my tastes are purely
literary, but all the same I am a member of the legal profession."

Malcolm Herrick used his Englishman's right of grumbling to a large
extent; with a sort of bitter and acrid humility, he would accuse
himself of having missed his vocation and his rightful heritage, of
being neither "fish, flesh, nor good red herring;" nevertheless his
post for the last two years had pleased him well: he was connected with
a certain large literary society which gave his legal wits plenty of
scope. In his leisure hours he wrote moderately well-expressed papers
on all sorts of social subjects with a pithy raciness and command of
language that excited a good deal of comment.

Herrick was a clever fellow, people said; "he would make his mark when
he was older, and had got rid of his cranks;" but all the same he was
not understood by the youth of his generation. "The Fossil," as they
called him at Lincoln, was hardly modern enough for their taste; he was
a survival of the mediaeval age--he too