Part 39 (1/2)
Persis was dressed warmly, and she had put on high boots and a short, thick mackinaw jacket. But she s.h.i.+vered with the midnight chill and with a kind of ecstatic terror.
Forbes had planned his route. He would avoid the ascending stairway to the temple of Enslee's wors.h.i.+p, and lead her to the sunken gardens, which he had longed to explore with her at his side.
They did not wade out into the mid-sea of the lawn. He remembered Persis' dictum that behind the blinds there are always eyes. Like snickering truants they skirted the bal.u.s.trade, the shadowy privet hedge, the ma.s.ses of juniper and bay and box, till they reached the point where the winding stairway dropped down between its high brick walls.
The shadows were doubly dense here, and Persis hung back, but Forbes laughed at her for a poltroon, and she refused to take the dare. He was so afraid that she might fall that he finally suggested:
”If you are afraid of stumbling here, I--I'm not forgetting my promise; but I just wanted to say that I--I don't mind holding on to you, if you want to ask me to.”
She declined with whispered thanks. Down, down the walk drifted. At length they heard a murmur--the mysteriously musical noise of a fountain. They rounded a few more curves and came upon a niched Cupid riding a dolphin, from whose mouth an arc of water poured with a sound of chuckling laughter. The green patina that covered the bronze was uncannily beautiful in the moonlight, and the water was molten silver.
They stood and watched it like children for a long while. Then Forbes urged Persis along to the lowest of the circular levels.
There he led her to a bench and dropped down beside her. They both looked off into the huge caldron of the hills, filled with moonlight as with a mist.
The ragged woods in the distance were superb now in blue velvet.
Everything was enn.o.bled--rewritten in poetry. Everything plain and simple and ugly took on splendor and mystic significance. Every object, every group of objects, became personal and seemed to be striving to say something.
Persis and Forbes sat wors.h.i.+ping like Pa.r.s.ees of the moon, in awesome silence, till Forbes could no longer hush the clamor in his heart.
”Miss Cabot,” he said, ”I promised not to annoy you. Would it annoy you if I told you that--that I love you with all my heart and soul and being?”
”How could you love me?” she answered, softly, hoping to be contradicted. ”You've known me only a few days.”
”There are some people we live with for years and never like nor understand; others we know and love the moment our eyes meet.”
”And did you love me the moment our eyes met?”
”Long before that. I loved the back of your hat and one shoulder.”
”Do you tell everybody you meet the same thing? It's rather a stale question to ask a man, but you do seem rather impulsive on so short an acquaintance.”
”Short acquaintance? We've seen each other more than most people see of each other in six months. I know you and I know myself, and I know that I shall never be happy unless I can be trying to make you happy.”
”I am very happy just now,” she murmured.
”But we can't sit here forever, and we can't even be together for more than a day or two. I want you for my own. I don't want to see you only--only on--Mr. Enslee's property.”
”Which reminds me,” Persis said, with a tone of dispelled romance, ”that we are still on Mr. Enslee's property, and it doesn't seem fair to him.”
”Then let's leave Mr. Enslee's property.”
”How? In an airs.h.i.+p?”
”See that wall down there. That is one of the boundary lines. If we were over that I could tell you some things that I've got to tell you.”
”It's an awfully long way.”
”Not so long as you think.”
”No, no; it's easy to descend to Avernus, or whatever it was; but to get back! I'd never have the strength for that.”