How they changed their faces, the
conifers--so fervent and friendly at this hour, so forbidding at
nighttime! Rifts of blue sky now gleamed through its network of
branches; drenched in the sunny rays, the tree seemed to shudder and
crackle with warmth. He listened. There was silence among those
coralline articulations. Soon it would be broken. Soon the cicada would
strike up its note in the labyrinth of needles--annual signal for his
own departure from Nepenthe. He always waited for the first cicada.
Northwards!
To his little place in the Highlands, at first. The meager soil and
parsimonious culture, the reasonable discourse of the people, their
wholesome disputatiousness, acted as a kind of purge or tonic after all
this Southern exuberance. Scotland chastened him; its rocks and tawny
glinting waters and bleak purple uplands rectified his perspective. He
called to mind the sensuous melancholy of the birches, the foxgloves,
the hedgerows smothered in dog-roses; he remembered the nights, full of
fairy-like suggestion and odours of earth and budding leaves--those
wonderful nights with their silvery radiance, calm and benignant,
streaming upwards form the luminous North.
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