The outward physical change was, possibly, of the slightest, yet wore just that touch of significant alteration which conveyed authority. The tall, lithe figure moved with an imperial air; she raised her arm towards the open window; she spoke. The voice was very quiet, but it held new depth, sonority and accent. She had not seen me yet where I stood in the shadows by the wall, for Julius screened me somewhat, but I experienced that familiar clutch of dread upon the heart that once before—ages and ages ago—had overwhelmed me. Memory poured back upon my own soul too.
“Concerighé,” she uttered, looking full at Julius while her hand pointed towards the moonlit valley. “They stand ready. The air is breaking and the fire burns. Then where is he? I called him.”
And Julius, looking from her face to mine, answered softly: “He is beside you—close. He is ready with us too. But the appointed time—the Equinox—is not quite yet.”
The pointing hand sank slowly to her side. She turned her face towards me and she—saw. The gaze fell full upon my own, the stately head inclined a little. We both advanced; she took my outstretched hand, and at the touch a shock as of wind and fire seemed to drive against me with almost physical violence. I heard her voice.
“Silvatela—we meet—again!” Her eyes ran over in a smile of recognition as the old familiar name came floating to me through the little room. But for the firm clasp of her hand I should have dropped, for there was a sudden weakness in my knees, and my senses reeled a moment. “We meet again,” she repeated, while her splendid gaze held mine, “yet to you it is a dream. Memory in you lies unawakened still. And the fault is ours.”
She turned to Julius; she took his hand too; we stood linked together thus; and she smiled into her husband’s eyes. “His memory,” she said, “is dim. He has forgotten that we wronged him. Yet forgiveness is in his soul that only half remembers.” And the man who was her husband of To-day said low in answer: “He forgives and he will help us now. His love forgives. The delay we caused his soul he may forget, but to the Law there is no forgetting possible. We must—we shall—repay.”
The clasp of our hands strengthened; we stood there linked together by the chain of love both past and present that knows neither injustice nor forgetting.
Then, with the words, as also with the clasping hands that joined us into one, some pent up barrier broke down within my soul, and a flood of light burst over me within that made all things for a moment clear. There came a singular commotion of the moonlit air outside the window, as if the tide that brimmed the valley overflowed and poured about us in the room. I stood transfixed and speechless before the certainty that Nature, in the guise of two great elements, flooded in and shared our passionate moment of recognition. A blinding confusion of times and places struggled for possession of me. For a tempest of memories surged past, driven tumultuously by sheeted flame and rushing wind. The inner hurricane lasted but a second. It rose, it fell, it passed away. I was aware that I saw down into deep, prodigious depths as into a pool of water, crystal clear; veil lifted after veil; memory revived.
I shuddered; for it seemed my present self slipped out of sight while this more ancient consciousness usurped its place. My little modern confidence collapsed; the mind that doubts and criticises, but never knows, fell back into its smaller rôle. The sum-total that was Me remembered and took command. And realising myself part of a living universe, I answered her:
“With love and sympathy,” I uttered in no uncertain tones, “and with complete forgiveness too.”