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For here in front of me was the great green fern-bed, green no longer but transformed into a radiant shrine of flowers. Nine feet long it was, and not much less in width, and its solid oaken sides rose some two feet from the floor.
"Hello, then! Who's there?" said a voice inside. I waited, but no one came. It was no good talking through a door, so I lifted the latch doubtfully and put in my head. It was a large wide room, larger than Jeanne Falla's kitchen at Beaumanoir, and though there was no fern-bed and it was the first living-room I had seen without one there was a look of great warmth and comfort about it.
Is it that the injured and indignant soul so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says, unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, "There is in me a life no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement, darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown, there is that within that God alone can vanquish, yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight, the dark green leaves of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth, the bending sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me, swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind, the tiny scarlet cups of moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood, the shrinking and wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom, every half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence, the rough seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks, the light that pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson: all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.
Carried beyond himself perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit he actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight, when when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon! By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers a boiling kettle. "Fegs!
"I shall have no peace if you are here all alone...." But she shook her head dismally, with no sign of yielding. "It has been very lonely," he said. "You and the boy " And she looked up at him, and the hunger of his face seemed to strike her suddenly. She got up from the fern-bed and said, "Yes, we will come. My troubles have made me selfish." "Now, God be praised!
As he lay that night on the fern-bed in the cottage above the chasm, he thought of Rachel Carré, and what might have been if Martel's father had only been properly drowned on the Hanois instead of marrying the Guernsey woman. Rachel and he might have come together, and he would have made her as happy as the day was long.
She was lying there upon the fern-bed, half asleep, her head fallen back upon the pillow, and the book she had been reading dropped from her hand. Her dress was of some coarse, dark-green stuff, which made a charming contrast to her delicate face and bright hair. The whole interior of the cottage formed a picture.
"I am strong now, Majella," answered Alessandro. And indeed he did already look like a renewed man, spite of all his fatigue and anxiety. "I am no longer weak; and to-morrow I will sleep, and you shall watch." "Will you lie on the fern-bed then?" asked Ramona, gleefully. "I would like the ground better," said honest Alessandro. Ramona looked disappointed. "That is very strange," she said.
She was dragging me by the hand all the time, and now halted me in front of the great square fern-bed in the corner between the window and the hearth, and stood looking up into my face with the air of an artist awaiting approval of her latest masterpiece.
He was full of such imaginings, when at last he fell asleep, and he dreamt that he and Martel met in a lonely place and fought. And so full of fight was he that he rolled off the fern-bed and woke with a bump on the floor, and regretted that it was only a dream.
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