“How can I say? Old pictures, old hauntings, young dead faces—the air is full of their streaming, the wind of their voices. And I know them, yet they are strange to me; I hear them, yet they utter no word. They were all born and perished ages before I reached the world; they come out of the wild beautiful places, the mists and mysteries of the green gardens where I kissed your eyes—yes, your beautiful eyes, beloved.”
“Not to part?” she whispered.
He did not answer, but he put his lips to the dead flower before he hid it in his breast.
“Are you terrified of me?” he said. “Do you think me mad?” And she answered, dwelling on his face: “Be mad, if to abandon me were reason.”
Drowned in that sunny ecstasy, they both stood silent for awhile. Then Tiretta sighed and stretched his shoulders, as if in blissful waking from a dream; and he looked with a tender humour at his comrade.
“I am not all moonstruck,” he said. “I would not have you think that of me, lady. I have rubbed shoulders with life. I can be practical on occasion. This tendency to rhapsodising is a sort of possession that visits me at times. It puts visions in my mind and words on my lips. Hold the North responsible for it.”
“You speak so strangely of the North,” she said wistfully; “and often I think your eyes are turned to it.”
“Over the long wastes of water. It shines there so mistily,” he answered; “it blossoms so full of faint entreating faces. Is it the way home, I wonder—the path to that real unknown God, the God of utter love, to whom, shrinking from the Jehovah of Israel, we are for ever blindly stretching out our arms—the God to whom we turn, as the poor world-broken turns from the high-altar to the pitiful Mother, the lovely and grief-hushing in some wonderful, inexplicable way? So it seems to me, my Isabel—the long far lands of home—the shores of unutterable consolation. Shall we go home together some day?”
She answered like Ruth, a very passion of emotion in her voice.
“Sweet love,” he said, deeply moved; “so dear and strange the North seems to me—a symbol and a mystery. And to reach it at last, just a sleep and a returning. You did not know I was of northern blood?”