V
That night the moon was full and high; the leaden roofs and cupola of the pavilion gleamed like silver plaques; and all the cricket-pitch was covered with a thin, white, motionless tide into which the oblong shadows pushed out like the black piers of a jetty. Millstead was silent and serene. A third of its inhabitants had departed by the evening trains; perhaps another third was with its parents in the lounges of the town hotels; the remainder, reacting from the day's excitement and sobered by the unaccustomed sparseness of the population, was more silent than usual. Lights gleamed in the dormitories and basement bathrooms, but there was an absence of stir, rather than of sound, which gave to the whole place a curious aspect of forlornness; no sudden boisterous shout sent its message spinning along the corridor and out of some wide-open window into the night. It was a world of dreams and spells, and to Speed, standing in the jet-black shadow of the pavilion steps, it seemed that sight and sound were almost one; that he could hear moonlight humming everywhere around him, and see the tremor in the sky as the nine o'clock chiming fell from the chapel belfry.
She came to him like a shy wraith, resolving out of the haze of moonbeams. The bright gold of her hair, drenched now in silver, had turned to a glossy blackness that had in it some subtle and unearthly colour that could be touched rather than seen; Speed felt his fingers tingle as at a new sensation. Something richly and manifestly different was abroad in the world, something different from what had ever been there before; the grey shining pools of her eyes were like pictures in a trance. He knew, strangely and intimately, that he loved her and that she loved him, that there was exquisite sweetness in everything that could happen to them, that all the world was wonderfully in time and tune with their own blind-fold yet miraculously self-guiding inclinations. Tears, lovely in moonlight, shone in her clear eyes, eyes that were deep and dark under the night sky; he put his arm around her and touched his cheek with hers. It was as if his body began to dissolve at that first ineffable thrill; he trembled vitally; then, after a pause of magic, kissed her dark, wet, offering lips, not with passion, but with all the wistful gentleness of the night itself, as if he were afraid that she might fly away, mothlike, from a rough touch. The moonlight, sight and sound fused into one, throbbed in his eyes and ears; his heart, beating quickly, hammered, it seemed, against the stars. It was the most exquisite and tremulous revelation of heaven, heaven that knew neither bound nor end.
"Wonderful child!" he whispered.
She replied, in a voice deep as the diapason note of an organ: "Am I wonderful?"
"You are," she said, after a pause.
He nodded.
"I?" He smiled, caressing her hair. "I feel—I feel, Helen, as if nothing in the world had ever happened to me until this night! Nothing at all!"
"I do," she whispered.
"As if—as if nothing in the world had ever happened to anybody until now."
"You love me?"
"Yes, Kenneth."
"I love you."
"I'm—I'm—I'm glad."
They stood together for a long while with the moonlight on their faces, watching and thinking and dreaming and wondering. The ten o'clock chimes littered the air with their mingled pathos and cheer; the hour had been like the dissolving moment of a dream.
As they entered the shadows of the high trees and came in sight of Milner's, a tall cliff of winking yellow windows, they stopped and kissed again, a shade more passionately than before.
"But oh," she exclaimed as they separated in the shadow of the Head's gateway, "I wish I was clever! I wish I was as clever as you! I'm not, Kenneth, and you mustn't think I am. I'm—I'm stupid, compared with you. And yet"—her voice kindled with a strange thrill—"and yet you say I'm wonderful! Wonderful!—Am I?—Really wonderful?"
"Wonderful," he whispered, fervently.
She cried, softly but with passion: "Oh, I'm glad—glad—I'm glad. It's—it's glorious to—to think that you think that. But oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, don't find out that I'm not." She added, very softly and almost as if reassuring herself of something: "I—I love you very—very much."
They could not tear themselves away from each other. The lights in the dormitories winked out one by one; the quarter-chimes sprinkled their music on the moon-white lawns; yet still, fearful to separate, they whispered amidst the shadows. Millstead, towering on all sides of them vast and radiant, bathed them in her own deep passionless tranquillity; Millstead, a little forlorn that night, yet ever a mighty parent, serenely watchful over her children.