But above all it was the liquidness, the coolness of shady moisture, the absence of dust that made the essential charm of the place. Half a mile only away ran the motor-tortured highway to Oxford, a place of scurrying monsters of steel, in which sat strange goggled drivers, plunging through these seas of dust; a place of hootings and acrid petroleum smells, where the grit of the road stood all day like a pillar of cloud above the much-travelled route, while where by the roadside there should have stretched green borders of grass, starred with meadow-sweet and ragged-robin and the bright gilt of the buttercups, a blanket of gray dust lay over everything, as if some volcano had strewn its dead ashes over the country. But here for the dust-ridden road there was the liquid waterway; for the gray roadside herbs the fresh velvet of the lawn; and for the hoarse metallic sounds of the flying traffic the scud and flutter of thrushes and their liquid outpouring of song, or on the river itself the cluck and gurgle and drip of oars and the whisper of the broad-faced punt as it was propelled leisurely along, or, when the winds were still, the low cool sound of the outpouring of the weir a hundred yards above. All this on those who, like Peggy when in London, crammed the work and movement of forty-eight hours into every twenty-four, acted like some soothing spell. Nature and running water were a cooling and tranquilising medicine to the fevered mind even as to the London-wearied body.
Moreover, the house, as has been said, was very small, and there was no possibility even if she had wished it, of Peggy’s asking any party down here. Consequently, the mental and emotional atmosphere of the place had for her, and for those who came here, a restful coolness which corresponded well with its physical characteristics. Nobody ever made any efforts here, unless his natural inclination was to make efforts, or attempted for any sake of social duty to entertain, or expected to be entertained. She only asked here those whom she ungrammatically but intelligibly called the “friendest of her friends,” who would without the slightest sense of restraint neither speak nor move all the time they were here, unless they wished to, and who were free, on the other hand, if they liked, to take their rest, as Hugh generally did, by beginning the day about six with a bath in Odney Weir, rowing or punting on the Thames for many violent hours, talking as if in a little time their lips were going to be dumb, and playing wild Indians with the children. That to her and also to her guests was, in a word, the charm of the place.
At the lower edge of the lawn and close to the margin of the river there was a big white tent, planted, like the righteous, by the water side, where, whenever the weather was warm, all meals were served. It was toward this, ten minutes after Hugh and Peggy had gone upstairs, that Mrs. Allbutt was walking across the grass, for the night was deliciously hot and still, and her maid had told her that dinner would be outside. And certainly there was some sense in the feeling that it was worth while to live a dozen years with an impossible husband if the effect at the age of forty-two was to render a woman in the least like her. She had her sister’s dark skin and her sister’s height, with an inch or an inch and a half perhaps—which makes a huge difference to those already tall—thrown in; but there the resemblance between them ceased with a very decided break. Nature had tried no experiments in dealing with her as she had in the case of Peggy, with her pale hair and dark skin, but had used one of her most marked though least common types. On her head she had set coils of hair so black that the lights in it, of which it was full, looked almost blue; she had given her the short nose, the short upper lip, the full generously carving mouth that usually speaks of southern blood; but then, a miracle of design, she had shown the Saxon race in the blue eyes that looked out with a child’s directness of gaze from below the straight line of eyebrow. They were blue of no uncertain hue, so that they seemed now gray and now hazel, but were of the colour that remains true and vivid even in the evil yellow of gaslight. And the years, those sore and tortured years that had passed over her head, had left there, now that her struggle was over, no trace of their trouble; they had but brought her to the full bloom and maturity of the type that had always been so beautiful. Her dark complexion, of the colour which so often after youth is past, tends to get grayish and of rather leathery texture, had still the clear freshness that as a rule only pale skins preserve at the age of forty. But age at this moment seemed to be a thing apart from her. She existed now in her full bloom of beauty, and the mere clumsy measure of years, you would have said, had no significance as regards her. She was poised at the midsummer of life, and the storms of spring that she had gone through, the storms and chills of autumn that might follow, seemed at this moment to stand off from her, just as on this perfect evening of mid-June winter and spring and autumn all seemed remote, beyond the horizon of circumstance.
So Juno went slowly across the lawn, pausing once or twice by this or that standard rose, and, when the little twilight breeze came to her from the bed of lilies, standing still for a long moment, drinking in the heavy swooning fragrance. It was already close on half-past eight, and the sun had set, and now the dusk, like some gentle, beautiful animal, was drinking up the colours of the sky, as stags drink when night comes on. It had drunk the green from the Cliveden woods opposite, leaving them gray till the sun should pour the river of colour over them again at dawn; it had drunk the blue from the sky, leaving it hueless, dove-coloured, and only in the west, like flaming dregs in the cup of the heavens, lingered on the horizon a streak of crimson that faded through yellow, through pale watery green into the velvet tonelessness of the sky. Very remotely the first stars glimmered there, which would move closer to the earth, so it seemed, as the layers of darkness were spread over the sky; and, as if to compensate for the withdrawal of light, a hundred delicate perfumes, imperceptible in the clang and triumph of sunshine, were born out of the flower-beds, out of the lawn, out of the liquid river, and streamed through the hedge from the shorn hay of the meadow beyond.
It seemed to her, too, that in this soft slow movement, so to speak, of dusk, as opposed to the brilliant allegro of sunshine, the sounds, as well as the lights, though slower and more subdued, were of the same delicate and subtle perfection. The chorus of birds, that half an hour ago were so busy over the rapture of their evensong, was still, or at the most from one bush or another some two or three notes were drowsily fluted by a thrush, or for a moment the shrill chiding of a company of swifts sounded and was silent. But the myriad noises of summer night, unheard during the clatter and triumph of day, now made themselves audible. Soft little ghost-like breezes stirred in the flower-beds, answering each other in whispered fugue-like passages; the subject was taken up and repeated, low but more sonorously, from tree to tree; the liquid note of the mill-stream soothing the sun-scorched banks was there; overhead the high harmonics of wheeling bats made staccato notes, and little