He looked stupefied: “I believe you are my true friend indeed,” he stammered; and she laughed, and snapped her fingers in his face, and left him feeling as if he had suddenly pulled up on the brink of an abyss.
A pretended intrigue! The very thought was profanation to his love—an outrage and a shame. But it embodied a quasi-revelation which was even more ashaming. Fanchette knew; his affectation of artless misunderstanding of her hints and innuendoes was exposed, and finally, for the guilty sham it was. He positively blushed like a child detected in a lie.
Was it a fact, too, that gossip was beginning to whisper? He had been so absorbed in his dream, had held it in truth so sacred from the world, that he had never so much as imagined that danger from without. Not while the dream lasted—the mad impossible beatitude. And was it already threatening to an end? He would not believe it—so perfect and so uplifted, risen above the reach of mortal hurts. These shadows were but conditions of its brightness.
After all, what had he done but follow the path appointed him, and if by the way he had wandered into paradise, that chance was in the itinerary. He had not abused his paradise; he had simply turned its inspiration into song. In appearance, at least, there was nothing to convict him.
And so he ended with derision for that monstrous suggestion, and a determination utterly to discard it. Yet the thing being always in his mind may have given him thenceforth in Fanchette’s company an air of self-consciousness, which the vicious might interpret if they would into a secret understanding.
Let all that pass for the moment. Our theme is still of Isabel and her “young palmer in love’s eye” wandering, yet unchallenged, in their unsoiled Eden.
Now June with these bewitched lovers drifted down a golden haze into July, and July itself burned stilly on towards harvest-time. It was the midsummer of their happiness—all the world one soundless tide of light on which their dreaming hearts, like the fairy nautilus, made rainbow sail by mystic strands, and silent moon-drenched gardens, and paths of rippling flame which ran into the sunset. All time was rapture to them, and most when they were silent and together; for speech is but the sorry change of thought, and cannot for all its volume match one golden maxim of the soul. What they felt, each to the other, was better understood unspoken; in sleep alone it found the perfect utterance.
One day, loitering so rapt, they came upon a terrace-corner by the house where, at a man’s height above the ground, was a window with a little balcony looking towards the lower gardens. Here were myrtle bushes growing and loading the air with their scent. Beyond, the turf shelved down to meet the leafy margin of the thickets, which enshrined the flowery walks and lily ponds dear to the girl’s heart. She paused and pointed to the window.
“Did you know,” she asked, “that was my bower, my oratory?”
He shook his head, smiling.