Jeremy got up one morning to feel that somewhere behind the thick wet mists of the early hours there was a blazing sun.After breakfast,opening the window and leaning out,he could see the leaves of the garden still shining with their early glitter and the earth channelled into fissures and breaks,dark and hard under the silver-threaded frost;beneath the rind of the soil he could feel the pushing,heaving life struggling to answer the call of the sun above it.Far down the road towards the Orchards a dim veil of gold was spreading behind the walls of mist;the sparrows on the almond tree near his window chattered like the girls of the High School,and blue shadows stole into the dim grey sky,just as light breaks upon an early morning sea;the air was warm behind the outer wall of the frosty morning,and the faint gold of the first crocus beneath the garden wall near the pantry door,where always the first crocuses came,caught his eye.Even as he watched the sun burst the mist,the trees changed from dim grey to sharp black,the blue flooded the sky,and the Cathedral beyond the trees shone like a house of crystal.
All this meant spring,and spring meant hunting for snowdrops in the Meads.Jeremy informed Miss Jones,and Miss Jones was,of course,agreeable.They would walk that way after luncheon.
The Meads fall in a broad green slope from the old Cathedral battlement down to the River Pol.Their long stretches of meadow are scattered with trees,some of the oldest oaks in Glebeshire,and they are finally bounded by the winding path of the Rope Walk that skirts the river bank.Along the Rope Walk in March and April the daffodils first,and the primroses afterwards,are so thick that,from the Cathedral walls,the Rope Walk looks as though it wandered between pools and lakes of gold.In the Orchards on the hill also they run like rivers.
Upon this afternoon there were only the trees,faintly pink,along the river and the wide unbroken carpet of green.Miss Jones walked up and down the Rope Walk,whilst Mary told her an endless and exceedingly confused story that had begun more than a week ago and had reached by now such a state of "To be continued in our next"that Miss Jones had only the vaguest idea of what it was all about.
Her mind therefore wandered,as indeed,did always the minds of Mary's audiences,and Mary never noticed but stared with the rapt gaze of the creator through her enormous glasses,out into an enchanted world of golden princesses,white elephants and ropes and ropes of rubies.Miss Jones meanwhile thought of her young days,her illnesses and a certain hat that she had seen in Thornley's windows in the High Street.Jeremy,attended by Hamlet,hunted amongst the trees for snowdrops.
Hamlet had been worried ever since he could remember by a theory about rabbits.He had been told,of course,about rabbits by his parents,and it had even been suggested to him that he would be a mighty hunter of the same when he grew to a certain age.He had now reached that age,but never a rabbit as yet had he encountered.He might even have concluded that the whole Rabbit story was a myth and a legend were it not that certain scents and odours were for ever tantalising his nose that could,his instinct told him,mean Rabbit and only Rabbit.These scents met him at the most tantalising times,pulling him this way and that,exciting the wildest hopes in him,afterwards condemned to sterility;as ghosts haunt the convinced and trusting spiritualist,so did rabbits haunt Hamlet.He dreamt of Rabbits at night,he tasted Rabbits in his food,he saw them scale the air and swim the stream--now,he was close on their trail,now he had them round that tree,up that hill,down that hole .
sitting tranquilly in front of the schoolroom fire he would scent them;always they eluded him,laughed at him,mocked him with their stumpy tails.They were rapidly becoming the obsession of his nights and days.
Upon this afternoon the air was full of Rabbit.The Meads seemed to breathe Rabbit.He left his master,rushed hither and thither,barked and whined,scratched the soil,ran round the trees,lay cautiously motionless waiting for his foes,and now and then sat and laughed at himself for a ludicrous rabbit-bemused idiot.He had a delightful afternoon.
Jeremy then was left entirely to himself and wandered about,looking for snowdrops under the trees,talking to himself,lost in a chain of ideas that included food and the sea and catapults and a sore finger and what school would be like and whether he could knock down the Dean's youngest,Ernest,whom he hated without knowing why.
He was lost in these thoughts,and had indeed wandered almost into the little wood that lies at the foot of the Orchards,when he heard a deep rich voice say:
"I suppose you 'aven't such a thing as a match upon you anywhere,young gentleman?"He liked to be asked for a match,a manly thing to be supposed to possess,but,of course,he hadn't one,owing to the stupidity of elderly relations,so he looked up and said politely:"No,I'm afraid I haven't."Then how his heart whacked beneath his waistcoat!
There,standing in front of him,was the very figure of his dreams!
Looking down upon Jeremy was a gentleman of middle-age whom experienced men of the world would have most certainly described as "seedy."Jeremy did not see his "seediness."He saw first his face,which was of a deep brown copper colour,turning here and there to a handsome purple;ill-shaved,perhaps,but with a fine round nose and a large smiling mouth.He saw black curling hair and a yachting cap,faded this last and the white of it a dirty grey but set on jauntily at a magnificent angle.He saw a suit of dark navy blue,this again faded,spotted too with many stains,ragged at the trouser-ends and even torn in one place above the elbow,fitting also so closely to the figure that it must have been at bursting point.He saw round the neck a dark navy handkerchief,and down the front of the coat brass buttons that shook and trembled as their owner's chest heaved.
