She drew him down to the ivory bench beside her. He flushed as deep as the rose-tinted mountains in the setting sun.
“Now tell me of your Garden called Paradise, while I can feel your thoughts flowing into mine through the palm of your hand. This is Paradise enough for me.”
“Your hand, dear Princess, throbs too hard for the peace of that Garden. It is a Garden where there is eternal light, nor suffering, nor care, nor sorrow, nor dark, nor sleep to miss one hour of joy.”
“That, too, I like,” she said. “Let us not miss this hour of joy.”
“It is watered by the Rivers of Eternal Life. God’s thoughts are the seeds. They bloom in human flowers. ’Tis ours to keep those human flowers from running into poisonous weeds. The flowers of this your earthly garden are fixed by roots, where they are planted, but the human thought seeds have power of choice like wings to bear them where they will to go; and I would that you would will to join our Unseen Garden, not made with hands but thoughts—”
She drew his hand between her breasts and drank his eager gaze like one athirst.
“See yonder above the Sea is Istarte, the Evening Star of love, Onesimus! Will love dwell in our garden there as it shone in the Garden of Daphne long ago, when first I read your dear blue eyes?”
“The God of Love is the Sun of that Garden, Princess,” he answered, gently loosening her passionate grasp and placing in her emptied palm the cyclamens she had let fall. “You bade me tell you of that Garden and Apollos’ teaching. You know how the caves and grottos of the Jordan from the Dead Sea to Damascus are filled with the Nazarenes, who have fled from the siege of Jerusalem, which our Lord foretold. In all the cities of Decapolis, Apollos preached in the Temples of the Sun. You know these cities of the Greeks love and worship the Sun; but it was the Son of God, Apollos preached, which John the Hermit foretold; and so when the priests had sung the psalms, Apollos would sound out in his great thunder voice like a silver trumpet: ‘Lift up your heads, oh, ye gates, and let the King of Glory in! Who is this King of Glory? The Lord of angel hosts, He is your King of Glory’; and when the multitude had settled to listen, he would tell them of Ardath, the Garden of God in Paradise, where God’s thoughts are seeds and bloom in human flowers. Once, I mind, when a woman came weeping whose child had been slain in the siege as she escaped, after she heard Apollos she left the Temple rejoicing because her child had become a flower of light in the Garden of God; and a lover, whose bride had been slain, went out, weeping no more, because his bride was not dead, but waiting him in the Garden of God; and a soldier mad with remorse that his cruelty had killed his wife left all calmed because he had faith she, too, had gone to the Garden and had sent him Apollos to teach the way.”
Bernice plucked the snowy cyclamens again from their stems. Her slim hand trembled.
“Show me the way, Onesimus.”