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Updated: June 23, 2025
Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender green-and-white, nymph-like figure, against the background of sun-hot, shadow-flecked, lichened stone, looking at him. The rosy light bathed her in its radiance. And as she looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in that face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the realisation of his dreams, his hopes, his desires.
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new.
At last I came out upon another gravelled walk, low down on the hillside, lying parallel with the river and open to it. Nothing lay between but some masses of granite rock, grey and lichened, and a soft fringe of green underbrush and small wood in the intervals.
Beside it was an orchard full of very old lichened trees, with patches of green moss about their boles, and beyond this there seemed to be a garden in a very neglected state, while surrounding all was a wide black moat.
Then suddenly he stopped stock-still and looked back along his trail nearly blind save for a few patches of flattened dead leaves which his moccasined tread had patted smooth in the shadier stretches where moisture lingered undried by the searching rays of the sun. For a few moments the unknown man searched his own back-trail, standing as motionless as the trunk of a lichened beech-tree.
Behind the trees rough, lichened rock and stony slopes ran up to a bare ridge, silhouetted against the roseate glow of the morning sky. The sun had not risen, the water lay in shadow; it was very quiet and rather cold, and Lisle was surprised to see Millicent Gladwyne picking her way cautiously over a bank of stones.
Now Mother Melldrum kept her winter in this vale of rocks, sheltering from the wind and rain within the Devil's Cheese-ring, which added greatly to her fame because all else, for miles around, were afraid to go near it after dark, or even on a gloomy day. Under eaves of lichened rock she had a winding passage, which none that ever I knew of durst enter but herself.
Just to touch the lichened bark of a tree, or the end of a spray projecting over the path as I walked, seemed to repeat the same prayer in me. The long-lived summer days dried and warmed the turf in the meadows. I used to lie down in solitary corners at full length on my back, so as to feel the embrace of the earth.
It was like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden, finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh fragments of broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather, more like a morning in the Cathedral Library at Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturicchio: amused, delighted, not moved nor fascinated; finding every moment something new, some charming piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery in a sort of world of Prince Charmings, the real realm of the "Färy Queen," quite different in enchantment from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with its pale allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical, and its make-believe allegorical ogres and giants.
Yet not many days after this, while the early autumn weather was still soft-aired and mellow-lighted over our blue-misted bogland, where the leaves and berries were brightening, and even the little frosty-grey cups on the lichened boulders getting a scarlet thread at the rim, on one clear, dew-dashed morning, who but Denis O'Meara himself should come stepping into Lisconnel?
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