“Not here,” she whispered, hurried and febrile—“not here. Take me where he cannot see us.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE CRY IN THE GARDEN
The clocks were pointing near to midnight; the village was long silent; the flurry of the day had subsided everywhere, and sleep and quiet had usurped throughout the palace the place of tumult. Only in that one remote corner above the terrace, where the bridal myrtles grew, was a shrouded light still burning, unquenchable, it seemed, as the steadfast spark that glows before a shrine. And there was the young wakeful postulant for Love’s service, awaiting, half rapt, half fearful, the mystic call.
Somewhere in the shadows there was a watch ticking. Its tiny pulse beat out the seconds in a fury to outstrip the lagging hours; for it had been worn near its mistress’s heart, and the throb of its hairspring had fallen into time with the fever of impatience it had touched there. But at length the end was in sight, and the round of long-drawn minutes rolled up to the starward-pointing hands. Isabella’s own hands were cold, as she lifted for the last time the little restless engine to consult it.
All day she had lived for this moment that was near. Truthful as she could not but be, her headache had served her for no guileful pretext; but it had served her nevertheless, since it was solitude she craved. She had some things to do—not many, but essential: to write a letter to her father was one of them. And she wrote it from her simple heart—a little plea so pathetic, so impossible, that it might well have wrung a colder breast than his. Perhaps it affected him when he came to read it; for he was not uncompassionate when the end was gained. But of that we have no knowledge.
There were some jewels she would take with her—indisputably her own. She would not come to her lover empty-handed, to be a burden on his charity. But the part of Jessica was impossible to her, and she robbed no one.
At this last she had only herself, for all vital purposes, to depend on. Fanchette, whom alone it had once been possible to take into her confidence—Fanchette, the fallen and unclean in her eyes, was no longer an auxiliary to be trusted with other than the material aids to these meetings. For the purer, finer sympathies she was necessarily disqualified. Isabella blamed herself for this judgment, for what was she herself better than Fanchette, save in the constitution of her passion? Yet surely that alone redeemed her; for love to her was nine-tenths a spiritual ecstasy, and only the little residue the mortal drug to achieve it. For all the best it meant to her, she could have been content to play St. Catherine to the pure divinity in love.
Well, we may doubt; but she was chaste, at least—chaste in the sense of utter truth to one supreme ideal. This man was her God, to whom she had given herself body and soul; and if earthly passion was a detail of that surrender, there is no use or profit in calculating its proportion to the whole.
Now, all things prepared, she set herself to abide, with what patience she might, the weariful interval. But first she took off her betrothal ring, and looking at it remorsefully a moment, placed it gently with the letter on her dressing-table. Often during the long day she would caress her basil, and speak to it as if it were a sentient thing, and chide it for its too tardy blossoming. It was not keeping faith, she said; for surely now the longed-for hour of their union was approaching, and yet its stubborn little twigs remained tight-closed. All day she would hear, faint and afar, the low thunder of life returning to deserted rooms and echoing corridors; and, listening, was conscious of an already strange sense of detachment from the world of her knowledge. She could think of it tenderly, kindly, but without one emotion of regret for its loss. There had never been that in common between them which a first glimpse of the eternal truth of things could not dissipate; and truth had come to her, when it did, in a transcendent form. Her soul stood on tiptoe, foreseeing only the moment when love was to call it to the starry altitudes.
Night, when it fell at last, came with a little moaning wind, which ever seemed to grow in fitful spasms as silence deep and deeper settled on the house. Listening, she seemed to hear without a sound of small voluble voices, and little footsteps running like pattering leaves, and giggling laughter that caught at her heart with fear. But it was nothing—only the mad spirits of the dark taking toll of the unrest which served to cover their antics. In the pauses of the wind they would all stop as still as mice; and then again, when the blast rose high, star its shrill volume with their bodiless cries.