The Wanderer started at the touch, as though he would have drawn back. But she held him fast, and so far, at least, he was utterly subject to her. His brow contracted darkly, and his face grew paler.
“Read it there,” she cried. “Enter into my soul and read what love is, in his own great writing. Read how he steals suddenly into the sacred place, and makes it his, and tears down the old gods and sets up his dear image in their stead—read how he sighs, and speaks, and weeps, and loves—and forgives not, but will be revenged at the last. Are you indeed of stone, and have you a stone for a heart? Love can melt even stones, being set in man as the great central fire in the earth to burn the hardest things to streams of liquid flame! And see, again, how very soft and gentle he can be! See how I love you—see how sweet it is—how very lovely a thing it is to love as woman can. There—have you felt it now? Have you seen into the depths of my soul and into the hiding-places of my heart? Let it be so in your own, then, and let it be so for ever. You understand now. You know what it all is—how wild, how passionate, how gentle and how great! Take to yourself this love of mine—is it not all yours? Take it, and plant it with strong roots and seeds of undying life in your own sleeping breast, and let it grow, and grow, till it is even greater than it was in me, till it takes us both into itself, together, fast bound in its immortal bonds, to be two in one, in life and beyond life, for ever and ever and ever to the end of ends!”
She ceased and she saw that his face was no longer expressionless and cold. A strange light was upon his features, the passing radiance of a supreme happiness seen in the vision of a dream. Again she laid her hands upon his shoulder clasped together, as she had done at first. She knew that her words had touched him and she was confident of the result, confident as one who loves beyond reason. Already in imagination she fancied him returning to consciousness, not knowing that he had slept, but waking with a gentle word just trembling upon his lips, the words she longed to hear.
One moment more, she thought. It was good to see that light upon his face, to fancy how that first word would sound, to feel that the struggle was past and that there was nothing but happiness in the future, full, overflowing, overwhelming, reaching from earth to heaven and through time to eternity. One moment, only, before she let him wake—it was such glory to be loved at last! Still the light was there, still that exquisite smile was on his lips. And they would be always there now, she thought.
At last she spoke.
“Then love, since you are mine, and I am yours, wake from the dream to life itself—wake, not knowing that you have slept, knowing only that you love me now and always—wake, love wake!”
She waved her delicate hand before his eyes and still resting the other upon his shoulder, watched the returning brightness in the dark pupils that had been glazed and fixed a moment before. And as she looked, her own beauty grew radiant in the splendour of a joy even greater than she had dreamed of. As it had seemed to him when he had lost himself in her gaze, so now she also fancied that the grim, gray wilderness was full of a soft rosy light. The place of the dead was become the place of life; the great solitude was peopled as the whole world could never be for her; the crumbling gravestones were turned to polished pillars in the temple of an immortal love, and the ghostly, leafless trees blossomed with the undying flowers of the earthly paradise.
One moment only, and then all was gone. The change came, sure, swift and cruel. As she looked, it came, gradual, in that it passed through every degree, but sudden also, as the fall of a fair and mighty building, which being undermined in its foundations passes in one short minute through the change from perfect completeness to hopeless and utter ruin.
All the radiance, all the light, all the glory were gone in an instant. Her own supremely loving look had not vanished, her lips still parted sweetly, as forming the word that was to answer his, and the calm indifferent face of the waking man was already before her.
“What is it?” he asked, in his kind and passionless voice. “What were you going to ask me, Unorna?”