It seemed good to be a , if life could be all sunshine, and quietude, and beauty like that. As you waited in the shadow of the great stone-flagged , while your coming was announced, this feeling grew deeper with every moment. The garden sloped down to the river’s edge, footway, and green lawn, and kitchen-plot all alike girdled and with rich-hued autumn flowers. Through the mass of fuchsia and many-coloured dahlia and hollyhock, of pink and white geranium with stems as thick as your wrist, ancient apple-trees under their burden of fruit, crowding jungles of roses, you could see the bright waters by, and hear their busy sound as they won a way amidst the rocky the bed of the Devon stream.
Here and there in the sunny field-of-view visible through the arched , black-robed figures were quietly at work: some digging; others apples in the ; one sturdy brother was the Abbot’s lawn, the bright blade coming near his fluttering skirts at every stroke; another went by trundling a wheelbarrow full of green vegetables for the refectory table. There was a distant cackle of , blending oddly with the solemn chant that came from the hard by. sang everywhere, and starlings clucked and whistled in the valerian that topped the great encircling wall. But wherever you looked, whatever drew away your attention for the moment, you were sure to come back to the consideration of one preponderant yet thing. A steady, deep note was upon the air. Rich and , it seemed to come from all directions at once. The dim, grey-vaulted entrance-porch was full of it. Looking up into the dusk of oaken beams overhead, there it seemed at its strangest and loudest. Queerest fact of all, it appeared to have some mysterious with the sunshine, for when a stray white argosy of cloud came drifting over the and obscured for a minute the glad light, this full, note died suddenly away, rising as swiftly again to its old power and volume when the sunbeams glowed back once more over the garden, and over the riverside that shed their gold of dying leafage with every breath of the soft south wind.
It was not until you stepped outside, and looked upward over the face of the old building, that you realised what it all meant. From its foundation to the highest stone of the ancient bell-turret, the whole front of the place was thickly with in full flower, and every yellow tuft of blossom was with bees. There seemed tens of thousands of them, and humming everywhere; and thousands more arriving with every moment out of the blue air, or off again , and away to some invisible bourne over the ruddy roof of orchard trees.
Intent on this wonder, you do not catch the footfall on the gravel-path in your rear, or see the sombre figure of the Abbot as he comes towards you, the sweep of his black frock setting all the marigolds nodding behind him, as though from a sudden flaw of wind. And now you have another pleasurable disillusionment as to conditions of being. along the deep-cut Devonshire lanes on your way to the Abbey, through the rain of falling autumn leaves, you pictured the place to yourself as a kind of sacred sink of desolation, inhabited by a crew of sour-visaged anchorites, who found only godlessness in sunshine, and in cakes-and-ale nothing but assured perdition. But here, coming towards you, smiling, and with outstretched hand, is the last kind of human being you expected to see. Clad from head to foot in sober black, with, for , but the one plain silver cross swinging at his breast, the Abbot shows, unmistakably, for a gentleman of cultured and enlightened . A fine, swarthy face, kind, calm eyes behind gold spectacles, a voice like an old violin, and a grip of the hand that makes you with its welcome, all combine to set you there and then at your ease; and talk begins at once on the old, familiar plane among bee-keepers—the quick, enthusiastic interchange, each participant as ready a listener as learner, common all the world over, wherever flowers grow and men love bees.
The brothers of the old Benedictine monastery—so the Abbot tells you, as he leads the way towards the hives, through the sun-riddled labyrinth—have kept bees, probably, for more than a thousand years. There is no doubt that the original abbey building stood there, in the wooded
Join or Log In!
You need to log in to continue reading
(Left Keyword <-) Previous:
CHAPTER XIV CONCERNING HONEY
Back
Next:
CHAPTER XVI BEES AND THEIR MASTERS
(Right Keyword:->)