though he had
never lost his habit of calling a sunset a sunset and a view a view,
however deeply they might move him. But nowadays Nature actually made him
ache, he appreciated it so. Every one of these calm, bright, lengthening
days, with Holly's hand in his, and the dog Balthasar in front looking
studiously for what he never found, he would stroll, watching the roses
open, fruit budding on the walls, sunlight brightening the oak leaves and
saplings in the coppice, watching the water-lily leaves unfold and
glisten, and the silvery young corn of the one wheat field; listening to
the starlings and skylarks, and the Alderney cows chewing the cud,
flicking slow their tufted tails; and every one of these fine days he
ached a little from sheer love of it all, feeling perhaps, deep down,
that he had not very much longer to enjoy it. The thought that some
day--perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not five--all this world would
be taken away from him, before he had exhausted his powers of loving it,
seemed to him in the nature of an injustice brooding over his horizon.
If anything came after this life, it wouldn't be what he wanted; not
Robin Hill, and flowers and birds and pretty faces--too few, even now, of
those about him! With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the
orthodoxy he had worn in the 'sixties, as he had worn side-whiskers out
of sheer exuberance, had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before
three things alone--beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property;
and the greatest of these now was beauty. He had always had wide
interests, and, indeed could still read The Times, but he was liable at
any moment to put it down if he heard a blackbird sing. Upright conduct,
property--somehow, they were tiring; the blackbirds and the sunsets
never tired him, only gave him an uneasy feeling that he could not get
enough of them. Staring into the stilly radiance of the early evening
and at the little gold and white flowers on the lawn, a thought came to
him: This weather was like the music of 'Orfeo,' which he had recently
heard at Covent Garden. A beautiful opera, not like Meyerbeer, nor even
quite Mozart, but, in its way, perhaps even more lovely; something
classical and of the Golden Age about it, chaste and mellow, and the
Ravogli 'almost worthy of the old days'--highest praise he could bestow.
The yearning of Orpheus for the beauty he was losing, for his love going
down to Hades, as in life love and