Chapter XXIV: Rapture

“It is only for one hurried moment. I dare not stop. O, my heart beats so!”

He held her hands; he gazed as if he could never fill the hunger of his soul; for a minute he failed to speak. In all his passionate dreams he had never pictured her as returning to him like this--black clad--like an angel of death. The contrast between her lily complexion and the deep sadness of her robe was even startling. In his first glowing stupefaction, an odd thought hung like a mote in his mind--like a travelling speck under closed lids. It was a perplexed association of this mourning with something he had just been thinking about. With something--with what? Dead men and green things that blossomed! What was it? He expanded his chest over the idleness of the fancy, easing it away in a great rapturous sigh. And then it came to him. The dead mother! And he had been thinking only of dead love.

He drew her towards him without a word; and she made no resistance. She lifted her face to his as he bent, and conceded to him all that he wished.

“Now” he said deeply, “it is all as if it had never been--these dark disastrous months. Shut your eyes, my soul’s beloved, and listen. Hark! that was a bat that flew past: and do you hear the whispering wash of the moonlight against the trees, and the tiny crackle of the stars? What is all this talk about a parting, to us who have never moved from this balcony where to-night we put an everlasting seal upon our love? Have we been dreaming while we clung together? Though it were a dream, Isabel, tell me I was not forgotten in it.”

“They slandered you, dear love. Do you think I believed them?”

“No more, lady, than I believed that you were happy in my banishment.”

In a passion of emotion she clung about his neck, laying her soft cheek to his bronzed one.

“Let all the lies and the slanders go,” she whispered. “They are not worth one thought from us. O, cancel them with these cruel months! We have never left the balcony; we have never been parted. There is no explanation needed from either of us to the other.”

“Not one, Isabel. It was a dream.”

“We have awakened from it to find the truth.”

“Yes, awakened. Cling close, my soul, and whisper. Does the thought of to-morrow still terrify you?”

“How can I help it? O, my love, my love!”

“Will you come with me now, away from all the stress and sorrow, into the wild white places where we can hide and be forgotten?”

“Bonbec--not now; it is impossible.”

“To-morrow, then. I will have horses ready--I----”

“I must not stay. My gouvernante is waiting for me in the road. To-night----”

“Yes, to-night, Isabel?”

“After the gates are shut. Come to the little wicket in the eastern wall. My maid will let you in.”

“Fanchette?”

“Ah, yes! You know her.”

“Enough to mistrust her. But if she is our friend----?”

“She is always her own best friend, I think. But she will be there.”

“And I.”

“You know the way?”

He held her apart, questioning with impassioned eagerness the face which drooped a little from his, its lids half closed, its cheeks just tinged with flame; then bending, put his lips to the soft white rapture of the throat.

“Isabel! The little balcony above the myrtles?”

“It is secret there. I must go--I dare not stop to say more--Bonbec, let me go. We can talk there alone, and decide what is best to be done. But not now.”

Lingeringly, reluctantly, he let her slip from his arms. She put a finger to her lips.

“Stay here,” she whispered, with a radiant smile. And then once more she approached him, as if irresistibly, and looked with wistful ecstasy into his face.

“How thin and worn you are, dear love,” she said pitifully. “And yet, how can I wish you to have grieved less?”

Once more, moved beyond endurance, he caught her to his heart, and shamed the rosy colour to her lips and neck, until, gently upbraiding him, she broke away.

“Until to-night, soul of my soul,” he said.

The faithful Bissy was waiting for her in the grove. She kept him blithely chatting a little while, and then, hoping the best for her face, went on to rejoin her maid.

Fanchette acknowledged her reappearance as tart as crabs.

“I’m sure I wish,” she said, “that _I_ could find in those trees the delight your Highness seems to borrow from them. Your Highness looks quite another person since making the little excursion.”

And in what, after all, had their enemies succeeded against these lovers? Surely was never such an impregnable perversity as their faith.