Left once more to himself, May examined the stores that had been left by his familiar upon the oaken table. The inspection seemed to be satisfactory. He then consulted his watch, and found with a start of surprise that it was already afternoon. The watch was an elaborate repeater, giving the hour, minute, and second, the signs of the zodiac, the year of our Lord, and the day of the month. This latter was August 14th, as has been said; the time, after twelve.
May’s behavior upon this discovery was precipitate and peculiar. First, he arranged with great care the calcium light apparatus so that it commanded the front stoop of the house; then he carefully closed all the shutters of the pavilion save the one toward the house. By this window he sat, peering through the slats of the blind. The sun, getting into the west, shone full upon the stone front porch; and May kept still there, watching it, in the silence of the midsummer afternoon.
III.
PAUL AND VIRGINIA.
Thus fortified in a material way against the approach of any enemy, and exalted in spirit above the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the minutes seemed hours and space and time but mediums of his own control. When his first pipe was finished he threw it aside and walked openly out upon the lawn. The very birds were sleepy, and the park lay spellbound in the shimmer of its own warm light. Austin took his way along the margin of the pool; it was studded with white still lilies that lay dreamily upon the green water; great gaudy dragon-flies hung motionless upon the lily-petals, like silk-robed ladies in some spotless marble hall.
What was it that gave such interest to the little familiar pool to him, who had smoked his cigar by the lotos-pools of Yeddo’s moats, or dreamed these same summer hours away by the fountain of the Court of Lions in far Granada? Well enough knew Mr. Austin May what memory it was that hung about the place; and he smiled his mature and mocking smile as he remembered his boyish love. Many times had they two wandered there, May Austin and himself, wandering together through crusty Uncle Austin’s strange demesne; his uncle Austin, her aunt’s husband. Old John Austin had married for love a poor and beautiful cousin whose mother had engineered the marriage against the girl’s will; and they had hated one another very cordially. Too proud to be divorced, John Austin had built himself this strange pavilion where his wife had promised she would never go. She kept her word faithfully; and he never went into the house without first sending in his card. They met in company, and with the greatest courtesy, and gave their grand due dinners of sixteen, each at one end of the long table, with a splendid high épergne between. Mrs. Austin had taken May Austin into her lonely bosom, and Uncle John had had Austin May home from college, where his bounty kept him, and had given him his taste for claret, and tried to give his knowledge of the world. And they used to sit there, he and his uncle, in this same pavilion, smoking, close hedged in from womankind. And when the old man had fallen asleep, Austin would creep out into the park, and walk there with his lovely cousin May. And on one summer day, for all the world like this, he won her heart, this gay young Harvard senior, all among the rushes by the lily-pool. And Austin had gone back into the pavilion, quaking, to tell his uncle, and found the latter very dignified and dead, a bottle of the famous Eclipse Lafite close by his elbow. As with the old French poet
“Hear ye, who are soon to die,
What Villon did before he started—
He drank one glass of Burgundy;
This he did; and then, departed.”
the claret had not been wasted; its very last glass had been savored by its master before his spirit took flight.