Jeffray lay back in the chaise as though he were weary.
“What it means to be an idealist!” he said.
“Live on a desert island and you may succeed,” quoth the painter, with a smile.
The day was one of those magical days in May when the earth seems radiant as for a bridal. A pearly haze hung like a great veil of gossamer, tempering the blue of the cloudless heavens. The wind that came from the east was scarcely strong enough to set the bluebells nodding in the woods, or to scatter the fading blackthorn blossom from the boughs. Despite his unlovely recollections of Rodenham village, Jeffray’s spirit kindled as the chaise threaded the green, and he saw the chaffinches darting in the hedgerows, and the larks shivering and singing in the sun. Over the ploughed lands the crops were thrusting up a myriad emerald spears, and already the buttercups were gilding the quiet meadows.
They came to the lane that branched off from the high-road, and wound over green hills and plunged into forest hollows towards the hamlet of Thorney Chapel. The woods rose up before them with all the deepening mystery of May as Dame Meg drew the chaise between the hedgerows. Dome on dome, and height on height, the trees were piled towards the blue. The spirits of spring were spinning everywhere, bronze for the oak, silver and gold for the poplar and the willow, shimmering green for the birch, beech, and thorn. Yonder a great larchwood rose solemn and stiff beneath a thousand emerald spires. Dark yews and pines stood black amid the lighter multitude. About the pillared fore-courts of the forest the gorse was fringed and seamed with gold. Purple orchids had speared through their sheaths. Bluebells dusted each lush green knoll. The broom blazed like living fire.
The lane had turned down from the woods into a shallow valley that ran east and west under the shadows of Pevensel. Meadow-land filled it, with here and there a pine thicket isleted amid the green, while astride the road lay the hamlet of Thorney, some half a score timbered cottages huddled about a tumble-down inn. To the east of the hamlet, and divided from it by a small stream and a fourteen-acre meadow, stood Thorney Chapel, a squat, sombre-colored building of stone with an open belfry and a wooden porch.
