“Yes,” Rosamond echoed. “Tell some more about you.”
“About me?” He looked past the little group, whose limited and selfish ideas of human joy and the means to happiness had brought them into Villa Rose to know envy and suspicion and to call one another names; and he saw the river and its valley painted by the dawn. Earth and sky were agleam with the fires that precede the rising sun. The rhythms of earth’s beauty, flowing to meet and heal the human need, came to his ear in the lilt of a verse such as a child’s lips might shape, as it went dancing, barefoot, through the radiant valley.
“I? Why I am....”
I am Prince of the Nameless Land.
I have set my throne on the azure steep,
And rimmed it round with a starry band,
For the hearts that stray and the eyes that weep.
Faith rears my walls o’er a garden slope;
My dreams are camped on the hills of Hope;
White stone is my castle crest.
Peace is my sentry and Mirth my guard,
My gates are wide and my doors unbarred
For the feet of the human guest.
Joy is my sceptre, and Tenderness
The crown on my august brow;
The ring on my finger is Gratitude
To God, who has sealed my vow,
And set his song in my waiting lips,
His love in my writing hand.
And made me Lord of the Things Men Dream—
The Prince of their Nameless Land!
The rosy glow from the sky stole into the room; and, to the Nature-man and song-maker, it came like music. So Love had come to him there: at last, the song with words, fitting the measures of its plain telling to the old rhythms of his daily faith and desire. She—the woman—was the gift to him of all the dawns he had watched alone.
A crashing of hoofs on the hill-road called the singer and his companions back to Roseborough.
“What rapid riding!” Mrs. Witherby exclaimed. She went to the verandah, followed by Howard. “Can it be someone coming here?”
“Oh dear!” Corinne sighed. “Roseborough will never see a night like this again.”