“I’m sure I wish,” she said, “that I could find in those trees the delight your Highness seems to borrow from them. Your Highness looks quite another person since making the little excursion.”
And in what, after all, had their enemies succeeded against these lovers? Surely was never such an impregnable perversity as their faith.
CHAPTER XXV.
DELIRIUM
“The balcony whence our Juliet leaned to whisper to her Romeo.” Do you recall how it was mentioned earlier, with wondering if in these days lunatics still came there to gibber to the moon? I say “still,” for if passion is the reverse of reason, then is not love a sort of madness? And were not these two demented things, to think that, in a chief province of despotism, love would be allowed to override all distinctions of rank and fortune? Or did they really think so, or think that disgrace and ostracism were the worst alternatives they had to face? What does it matter what they thought, or failed to think; their need was not in thinking; the fire of immortality is in the transcendent passions which take no thought, and of their seed is born all that beauty which redeems the ignoble materialism of the world.
At night all the eastern side of the palace, where it faced upon the sunk gardens, was veiled in deep shadow. Only in one place, above a secluded myrtle-grown terrace, a faintly luminous oblong showed where secret wakefulness kept still its vigil in a lighted room.
The hangings in the window parted, revealing momentarily a running shaft of gold, and a man stepped forth, paused an instant on the balcony, then climbed its stone parapet and dropped to the turf beneath. Even as he alighted, another form, that of a “slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl,” appeared, catching light draperies about its neck and bosom, in the opening, and, letting the curtains fall to behind it, stood, ghostly-pale in the darkness, leaning down.
“O, love! You are not hurt?”
He laughed, low and musical. As she leaned, he could reach even up to her shoulders with his hands.
“Only in my vanity.”
“O! why?”