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We could see the Auvergne hills at no great distance on our left the Puy de Dome above them and we four were riding together. We had fallen an unusual thing to the rear of the party. Our road at the moment was a mere track running across moorland, sprinkled here and there with gorse and brushwood. The main company had straggled on out of sight.
From far below clouds boil up as if the valleys smoked after a destroying fire, and through flying mists flush the ruddy earth, turning the white film to pinkish gauze. Crimson and purple stones shine like uncut jewels, and cascades of yellow gorse, under red-flowering trees, pour down over low-growing white flowers, which embroider the rose-coloured rocks.
The gorse on the slopes of the hills was a marvel, and when the hawthorns came out beside it, or flung their bloom along the hedgerows and the streams; when far and near the cuckoo's voice made the new world of blossom and growth articulate; when furtive birds slipped joyously to and fro between the nests above and a teeming earth below; when the west winds veering between south and north, and driving the great white clouds before them, made, every day, a new marvel of the sky Marcia would often hold her breath and know within herself the growth of an answering and a heavenly spring.
There was too much business before the meeting for dancing to be kept up very long, but when the violin solo was over, at a sign given by the fiddler, the dancers took seats wherever they could find them, on the grass, or gorse, or heather, or on the stones. After order had been secured, the chairman of the meeting read regrets from those who had been invited but could not be present.
"I will go with you," he said eagerly, "and you will lend me your bladders to get back with." "You would never get back to L'Etat in the dark" and he knew that that was true. "We of Sark can see, but you others " "I shall be in misery till I know you are all right," he said anxiously. "I will run home. My things are in the gorse above Brenière.
Gorse tore their hands; and as they baled the sand from the grave, it was often discoloured with their blood. An hour passed of unremitting energy upon the part of Morris, of lukewarm help on that of John; and still the trench was barely nine inches in depth.
The hills were bare and bleak in their austere yet rounded strength, stripped of trees, clothed only in resplendent gorse, here a squat haystack dumped upon a ridge against the sky, there a great patch of plough let into the green. "By Jove!" cried the young man; and the girl thrilled to him because she felt he loved what was so much to her.
By some freak of soil or aspect every tuft of the low-lying cushion gorse that covered the slopes and hummocks as far as the eye could see was in full bloom, not a dry bush to be seen bloom so thickly set that hardly a green prickle was visible; bloom of one pure vivid yellow, undimmed in the distance, unmarked to closest view, a yellow that was pure essence of that colour untinged by any breath of aught else.
First I noticed and liked it some day, perhaps, when it was purple and yellow with gorse and heather and broom, and the honey scents drew bees and butterflies and birds. But soon I saw and was drawn by another thing. How young was I that afternoon when I sat in the deep window and watched the low, soft whiteness creeping out and hovering over the heather as if the moor had breathed it?
Ten days after Lady Chaffinch's ball, I was obliged to tear myself away from my kind aunt and my dear cousin, and with only Tom-tit for my companion, to return to this dismal Gorse Bush, which I used to think the sweetest of homes. Now I do nothing but wonder how long it will be before my aunt invites me to London again.
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