But the back of Plasencia had another glory—its superb herbaceous border, which, waving banners of the same hues, only brighter, marched boldly into the view, and became one with it. Now in September it was stiffened by annuals: dahlias, astors, snapdragon, sunflowers; Californian poppies whose whiteness—at any rate in the red poppyland of East Anglia—always seems exotic, miraculous, suggesting the paradoxical chemical action of the Blood of the Lamb. There were also great clumps of violas, with petals of so faint a shade of blue or yellow that every line of their black tracery stood out clear and distinct, and which might have been the handiwork of some delicate-minded and deft-fingered old maid, expressing her dreams and heart’s ease in a Cathedral city a hundred years ago. As to herbaceous things proper, there was St. John’s wort, catmint, borrage, sage; their stalks grown so long and thick, their blossoms so big and brave, that old Gerard would have been hard put to see in them his familiars—the herbs that, like guardian angels, drew down from the stars the virtue for the homely offices of easing the plough-boy’s toothache, the beldame’s ague.
A great lawn spread between the border and the house; it was still very threadbare owing to the patriotic pasturage that, during the last years of the War, it had afforded to half a dozen sheep, but it was darned in so many places by the rich, dark silk of clover leaves as almost to be turned into a new fabric.
Well, then, the view and border lay simmering in the late sunshine. A horse was dragging a plough against the sky-line, and here and there thin streams of smoke were rising from heaps of smouldering weeds. In the nearer fields, Teresa could discern small, moving objects of a dazzling whiteness—white leghorns gleaning the stubble; and from time to time there reached her the noise of a distant shot, heralding a supper of roast hare or partridge in some secluded farm-house. Then, like a Danish vessel bound for pillage in Mercia, white, swift, compact, a flock of wood pigeons would flash through the air to alight in a far away field and rifle the corn.
But so _pintado_ was the view, so under the notion of art, that these movements across its surface gave one an æsthetic shock such as one would experience before a mechanical device introduced into a painting, and, at the same time, thrilled the imagination, as if the door in a picture should suddenly open, or silver strains proceed from the painted shepherd’s pipe.