III
The woman was the first to speak.
“Why! You’re the soldier who climbed toward me day before yesterday, out of the fog.”
Nathan’s voice was steady.
“Out of the Fog, yes!” he replied. “And you were the Good Angel who saw me trying to get out of the Fog and came down and helped me to make the Top.”
“I suppose we should introduce ourselves, as there’s no one apparently to do it for us. I am Madelaine Theddon from Springfield, Massachusetts.”
The breeze stopped blowing for a moment. All sounds softened into eternal silence. Even the sunlight waited. Nathan never took his eyes from that cameo face.
“Forge is my name, Miss Theddon,” he said. “Nathaniel Forge! I’m from Vermont.”
Off over the rim of the world, washed by the crisp whitecaps of a mazarine sea, once was a coral island which no man’s chart has ever compassed. There had never been a gray day upon that coral island. The sunlight started there. Deep in its heart were bowered valleys and acres of flowers, and in the vesper hour sweet notes came down the evening silence, played upon reeds. It was the island of Arcadie. And far, far back before the lid of Pandora’s Box was opened, loosing its swarm of griefs and troubles upon the world, Everyman dwelt there and in the starlit dark Someone came to him, Someone who was part of himself—and covered him—with the wealth of her hair.
The gods were jealous of those who lived upon that coral island. They destroyed it. And ever since, Everyman has been hunting, hunting, up and down the worlds, for the one who came to him as a Whisper and a bit of Incense, in that dark. Sometimes that search ends beautifully. Nathan was not so far wrong in his youthful poetry after all.
“Forge!” cried the woman. “Nathaniel Forge!”
“Yes,” the man answered. He never knew why she spoke his name as she did. He only knew that, gazing deep into her face, he saw the blood die out and an expression come as though she would cry aloud. He knew that she dropped the book and half-raised her arms toward him.
A man’s brain may play queer pranks in life’s Great Moments. Came to Nathan then some lines he had written long ago, even as it was coming to the woman, intuitively, subconsciously, that both of them, in some far, previous incarnation had met so, had stood so, had spoken so,—long before.
“... the toil and tears we may know, dear heart,
Must some day reach an end;
Through miles and years we must search sometimes,
Ten thousand for one friend.
Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright,
In some vast, open space,
You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,
And triumph on your face.
“I know few words will be needed then,
Lament nor name nor plea,
We’ll let our eyes speak the message sweet;
‘Grow old along with me!’
The soul of man has a thousand lives,
Yet Love has only one,
That leaps alive to the Glory Cry:
‘Dear Heart, the trek is done!’”
Nathan had builded better than he ever knew. It was his!—and hers!—that noontime. The trek was done.
Madelaine’s eyes were starry, starry as they had never been before in all her days. This copper-hued, clear-eyed, lean-jawed, firm-voiced man was Nathaniel Forge! This was the one who had written a little poem which she had folded away in lavender and old lace and placed in a little casket deep beneath her Inner Shrine, turning piteously from the poignant fantasy that it could possibly have been meant for her.
Romance? What was Romance? This was Romance! This was Romance—the height and the depth and the width and the breadth of it—idealism unfathomable—the most beautiful thing in the world.
On a thousand nights in her orphaned heart she had wondered what he could be like, how he could appear, how his voice might sound. But that wonder had been forcibly sent away, off to the mystic vales behind the sunset where all our little unborn wishes go. Kismet, however, could be kind. This was a world after all in which action and reaction could be equal. There were still rewards and fairies. The man of her little heart-locked romance stood before her in the flesh at last. And he was all that she had ever dreamed a man could be and more.
Yes, it was all there,—all there on his face.
“Let us walk together, you and I,” said Madelaine, when her heart throbbed again and the great cog-wheels of the universe turned once more.
But in the woman’s suggestion lay a far deeper significance than Nathan grasped at the time.