“About what? I can’t think of anything but you, Princess.”
She clapped her hands. “Splendid. Let’s talk about me. You start.”
He bent forward, smiling into her eyes, grateful for the chance. “There’s so much to tell. All day I’ve been making discoveries. I’ve found out that you’re half-a-dozen persons—not just the one person whom I thought you, Desire. Sometimes you’re Joan of Arc, with dreams in your eyes and your hands lying idly in your lap. Sometimes you’re Nell Gwynn, utterly unshockable and up to any naughtiness. That’s the way you are now—the way I like you best. And sometimes you’re a faery’s child, a Belle Dame Sans Merci, a beautiful witch-girl, who won’t come into my life and won’t let me forge.”
She became extraordinarily interested. At last he had absorbed her attention. “That Belle Dam whatever you call her, she sounds rather lurid. Tell me about her.”
All through the meal, to the alternate thunder of the sea and the jiggling accompaniment of rag-time, he told her. How La Belle Dame Sans Merci lay in wait in woodlands to tempt knights aside from their quests and, when she had made them love her, left them spell-bound and unsatisfied. They forgot time and place as they talked. The old trustful intimacy held them hanging on each other’s words. They were children again in the meadows at Ware, hiding from Farmer Joseph; only now Farmer Joseph was their fear of their own shyness.
“I did something last summer,” he said; “it was just before I met you. Perhaps it’ll make you smile. I’d just come to success, and I wanted to tell you; but I hadn’t an idea where to find you in the whole wide world. I tried to pretend that you were still in the woodland beside the pond. I went there and stayed all day, willing that you should come. You couldn’t have been so far away; you may have been in London. Well, I had that poem with me, and—— You know the way one gets into moods? It seemed to me that you weren’t a truly person and never had been—that you were just a faery’s child, a ghost in my mind.”
‘I set her on my prancing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.’