Part 64 (1/2)
And surmises something of what remains unseen. And imagines more, perhaps.... I wonder if you love me--enough.”
”Dearest--dearest--”
”Let it remain unsaid, Clive. A girl must learn one day. But never from the asking. And the same sun shall continue to rise and set, whatever her answer is to be; and the moon, too; and the stars shall remain unchanged--whatever changes us. How still the woods are--as still as dreams.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”She suddenly sat upright, resting one slender hand on his shoulder.”]
She lifted her head, looked at him, smiled, then, freeing herself, sprang to her feet and stood a moment drawing her slim hand across her eyes.
”I shall have a tennis court, Clive. And a canoe on Spring Pond....
What kind of puppy was that I said I wanted?”
”One which would grow up with proper fear and respect for Hafiz,” he said, smilingly, perplexed by the rapid sequence of her moods.
”A collie?”
”If you like.”
”I wonder,” she murmured, ”whether they are safe for children--” She looked up laughing: ”_Isn't_ it odd! I simply cannot seem to free my mind of children whenever I think about that house.”
As they moved along the path toward the new home he said: ”What was it you saw in the woods?”
”Children.”
”Were they--real?”
”No.”
”Had they died?”
”They have not yet been born,” she said in a low voice.
”I did not know you could see such things.”
”I am not sure that I can. It is very difficult for me, sometimes, to distinguish between vividly imaginative visualisation and--other things.”
Walking back through the soft afternoon light the girl tried to tell him all that she knew about herself and her clairvoyance--strove to explain, to make him understand, and, perhaps, to understand herself.
But after a while silence intervened between them; and when they spoke again they spoke of other things. For the isolation of souls is a solitude inviolable; there can be no intimacy there, only the longing for it--the craving, endless, unsatisfied.
CHAPTER XXIII
Over the garden a waning moon silvered the water in the pool and picked out from banked ma.s.ses of bloom a tall lily here and there.
All the blossom-spangled vines were misty with the hovering wings of night-moths. Through alternate bands of moonlight and dusk the jet from the pool split into a thin shower of palely flas.h.i.+ng jewels, sometimes raining back on the water, sometimes drifting with the wind across the gra.s.s. And through the dim enchantment moved Athalie, leaning on Clive's arm, like some slim sorceress in a secret maze, silent, absent-eyed, brooding magic.
Already into her garden had come the little fantastic creatures of the night as though drawn thither by a spell to do her bidding. Like a fat sprite a speckled toad hopped and hobbled and scrambled from their path; a tiny snake, green as the gra.s.s blades that it stirred, slipped from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl, tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows, distantly, the elfin whistle of plover answered.