Audrey, in her brown dress, with the color yet in her cheeks, entering at
the moment, Mistress Deborah attempted no response to her husband's
adjuration. Darden turned to the girl. "I've done with the writing for
the nonce, child," he said, "and need you no longer. I'll smoke a pipe and
think of my sermon. You're tired; out with you into the sunshine! Go to
the wood or down by the creek, but not beyond call, d'ye mind."
Audrey looked from one to the other, but said nothing. There were many
things in the world of other people which she did not understand; one
thing more or less made no great difference. But she did understand the
sunlit roof, the twilight halls, the patterned floor of the forest.
Blossoms drifting down, fleeing shadows, voices of wind and water, and all
murmurous elfin life spoke to her. They spoke the language of her land;
when she stepped out of the door into the air and faced the portals of her
world, they called to her to come. Lithe and slight and light of foot, she
answered to their piping. The orchard through which she ran was fair with
its rosy trees, like gayly dressed curtsying dames; the slow, clear creek
that held the double of the sky enticed, but she passed it by. Straight as
an arrow she pierced to the heart of the wood that lay to the north. Thorn
and bramble, branch of bloom and entangling vine, stayed her not; long
since she had found or had made for herself a path to the centre of the
labyrinth. Here was a beech-tree, older by many a year than the young
wood,--a solitary tree spared by the axe what time its mates had fallen.
Tall and silver-gray the column of the trunk rose to meet wide branches
and the green lace-work of tender leaves. The earth beneath was clean
swept, and carpeted with the leaves of last year; a wide, dry, pale brown
enchanted ring, against whose borders pressed the riot of the forest. Vine
and bush, flower and fern, could not enter; but Audrey came and laid
herself down upon a cool and shady bed.
By human measurement the house that she had left was hard by; even from
under the beech-tree Mistress Deborah's thin call could draw her back to
the walls which sheltered her, which she had been taught to call her home.
But it was not her soul's home, and now the veil of the kindly woods
withdrew it league on league, shut it out, made it as if it had never
been. From the charmed ring beneath the beech-tree she took possession of
her world; for her the wind murmured, the birds sang, insects hummed or
shrilled, the green saplings nodded their heads. Flowers, and the bedded
moss, and the little stream that leaped from a precipice of three feet
into the calm of a hand-deep pool spoke to her. She was happy. Gone was
the house and its inmates; gone Paris the schoolmaster, who had taught her
to write, and whose hand touching hers in guidance made her sick and cold;
gone Hugon the trader, whom she feared and hated. Here were no toil, no
annoy, no frightened flutterings of the heart; she had passed the
frontier, and was safe in her own land.