And then we dropped purposely behind the crowd, who were sweeping in all directions down the hill.
“Let us go back to the chapel, Harold,” she whispered. “We may never see the view on such a night again. Even the tropics couldn’t supply a scene to smile more sweetly on our love.”
“No, that they couldn’t, dearest. What is it the poet says?—
‘Come away! the heavens above
Just have light enough for love.’
Well, the heavens have been kinder still to you and me, Marion, and lighted us a lamp by which I can read every glance in your eye, and every smile on your lips. And are you really happy, dear, I wonder? I can never hear you say it too often.”
“Yes, Harold, happy as I never expected or deserved to be.” And then she would say no more—only drew closer to my side—for she was new and strange to the expression of her love. “By the way,” she added, “don’t you wonder how they got up the turret-stairs to light the lamp? I’ve tried them again and again and could never manage more than half of them, even in the daylight. Many of them are gone altogether, and all of them are crumbling and dangerous.”
“Ah! that was part of the secret, dear, they kept so well, though I thought that you at any rate had been entrusted with it. The girls, you see, wanted a man to manage that for them, and so they condescended to trust me with the business. There have been carpenters at work in the tower for days, but always in the late evening and when no one was about. And they’ve made quite a decent flight of wooden steps. Suppose we try them. The view from the top will be finer even than this; and, better still, we shall be alone together for once in the day.”
We did well to climb the turret, for the panorama all around us was clear as on the clearest day.
The chapel hill, on which we stood, rose from the centre of a valley which was itself encompassed by a ring of distant hills, except on the side towards the sea, on which two or three small steamers were passing, like flies across a silver shield.
All the deep places of the valley were shrouded in a moonlit mist. Only here and there a tree-top, or some ruined fragment of the monastery beneath, rose high enough to pierce the silver cloud. In the distance the hills shone bright and clear, their smooth and regular outline broken at intervals by rounded tumuli, fit emblems of the Mighty Mother who had taken her children back again to her bosom for their last sleep.