An involuntary sigh escaped him. The beating wings of a swallow flying from its nest under the old gabled eaves above him flashed a reflex of quivering light against his eyes; and away in the wide meadow beyond, where the happy cattle wandered up to their fetlocks in cowslips and lush grass, the cuckoo called with cheerful persistence. One of old Chaucer's quaintly worded legends came to his mind,--telling how the courtly knight Arcite, "Is risen, and looketh on the merrie daye All for to do his observance to Maye,-- And to the grove of which that I you told, By aventure his way he gan to hold To maken him a garland of the greves, Were it of woodbind or of hawthorn leaves, And loud he sung against the sunny sheen,-- 'O Maye with all thy flowers and thy green, Right welcome be thou, faire, freshe, Maye! I hope that I some green here getten may!"
Smiling at the antique simplicity and freshness of the lines as they rang across his brain like the musical jingle of an old-world spinet, his ears suddenly caught the sound of young voices singing at a distance.
"Here come the children!" he said; and stepping out from his open window into the garden, he again bent his ear to listen. The tremulous voices came nearer and nearer, and words could now be distinguished, breaking through the primitive quavering melody of 'The Mayers' Song' known to all the country side since the thirteenth century: "Remember us poor Mayers all.-- And thus do we begin, To lead our lives in righteousness, Or else we die in sin.
We have been rambling all this night, And almost all this day, And now returning back again, We bring you in the May.
The hedges and trees they are so green, In the sunne's goodly heat, Our Heavenly Father He watered them With His Heavenly dew so sweet.
A branch of May we have brought you---"
Here came a pause and the chorus dropped into an uncertain murmur. John Walden heard his garden gates swing back on their hinges, and a shuffling crunch of numerous small feet on the gravel path.
"G'arn, Susie!" cried a shrill boy's voice--"If y'are leadin' us, lead! G'arn!"
A sweet flute-like treble responded to this emphatic adjuration, singing alone, clear and high, "A branch of May---" and then all the other voices chimed in: "A branch of May we have brought you And at your door it stands, 'Tis but a sprout, But 'tis budded out By the work of our Lord's hands!"