She kissed her radiant friend with a sigh, doubting that even conquest of Lord Hunsdon would make herself look like a goddess, and rode on.
Anne went her way, even more slowly than before. She was in no haste to face Mrs. Nunn, and she would re-live the morning hours before other mere mortals scattered those precious images in her mind. Warner had taken her up to his hut concealed in a hollow of the mountain and surrounded on all sides by the jungle, then, while she sat on the one chair the establishment boasted, he had cooked their breakfast, a palatable mess of rice and plantains, and the best of coffee. They had consumed it with great merriment under a banana tree, then washed the dishes in a brook. Afterward he had shaken down several young cocoanuts and they had pledged themselves in the green wine. Then they had returned to the shade and talked—what had they not talked about? Anne opened the sealed book of the past five years of which he had been the hero. He read it with amazement and delight, but contrite that he had received no message from that turbulent young brain by the North Sea. But he atoned by confessing that he had recognised her as his own the moment he laid eyes on her, that she was all and more than he had once modelled in the mists of his brain. He demanded every detail of that long union, so imaginative and so real, and told Anne that never before had a poet had the fortune to meet a woman who was a locked fountain of poetry, yet who revealed the sparkling flood by a method of her own with which no words could compete.
“And will you write my poems?” Anne had asked eagerly. But he had drawn down a broad leaf between his face and hers. “I told you that I was a poet no longer—merely a lover. To know absolute happiness in two forms in this world you must take them in turn. I shall write no more.”
“Were you perfectly happy when you wrote?” asked Anne, a little jealously.
“Perfectly.”
“I can almost understand it.”
“I can no more express it than I have ever been able to tell in verse the half of what I blindly conceived.”
“I should think that might have clouded your happiness.”
“Yes—when a poem was revolving and seething in my distracted head. Never tempt me to write, for while the thing is gestating I am a brute, moody, irritable, unhappy. The whole poem seems to work itself out remorselessly before I can put pen to paper, and at the same time is enveloped in a mist. I catch glimpses like will-o’-the-wisps in a fog bank, sudden visions of perfect form that seem to turn to grinning masks. It is maddening! But when the great moment arrives and I am at my desk I am the happiest man on earth.”
By tacit consent the subject of the stimulants under which he had always written was ignored, as well as the terrible chapter of his life which it was her blessed fortune to close. They had discussed the future, talked of practical things. He had told her that his house could be put in order while they travelled among the islands, and that he made quite enough to support her properly if they lived on Nevis. She had three hundred a year and would have more did she consent to let the manor for a longer term, and he had assured her that hers was a fortune on Nevis outside of Bath House. They finally decided to marry at once that he might show her the other islands before the hurricane season began.