Father, what e’er of earthly bliss
Thy sovereign will denies,
Accepted at Thy throne of grace
Let this petition rise:
Give me a calm, a thankful heart,
From every murmur free;
The blessings of Thy grace impart
And make me live to Thee.
Like one with an impeccable ear, but with small esteem for his gifts as a singer, Gerald murmured the melody after her, just audibly, to show he cared to have his share in her memories.
But mainly the two of them thought of each other.
Gerald, regarding Aurora’s hands as they lay in her lap–innocent-looking, loyal-looking, rather large hands, which during his illness he had liked to think were Madonna hands, but when seen in health they were not, really–was amazed to remember the day when their making passes over his face had filled him with perverse repugnance.
And Aurora, remembering the first time she had seen 394Gerald and nicknamed him Stickly-prickly, while feeling him more than three thousand miles removed from her, was amazed....
So they sat, two little dots, two trembling threads, against the screen of the universe and eternity, and their two selves, under the spell of a world-old enchantment, loomed so large to each that the universal and the eternal were to them two little dots, two threads.
Gerald saw how the afternoon was mellowing toward sunset.... And the important things of the day had not been touched upon.
Our hero had traversed great spaces in the region of sentiment during the two days allowed the Hermitage to stand or crumble without him. The first of them had been spent far from it, even as Aurora supposed, for the sake of letting the impression of having been laughed at wear off a little. Already for some time before that forced climax Gerald had been haunted by the feeling that he ought to offer himself to Aurora, as it were to regularize his status in her house. After hanging around as he had been doing, one might almost say that good manners demanded it. Her fashion, on that evening in the garden, of treating the idea that he could be enamoured of her assured him that she would refuse. He would have done his duty, and they would continue to drift, he shutting his eyes to the penalty awaiting his self-indulgence, the taxes of pain rolling up for the hour when her necessary departure would involve the uprooting of every last little flower in that wretched garden of his heart. With such a mental pattern of the future he had gone to bed at the end of the first day.
395On the next morning something perhaps in deep dreams which he did not remember, or in the happy manner of the new day lighting a scarlet geranium on the terrace ledge, or simply perhaps the whisper of an angel, had effected a change. A heart-throb, a stroke of magic, had so lifted him up that over the top of the wall edging the road of life for him he had seen a thrilling garden outstretched, smiling in the sun, a sight that so enkindled him with the witchery of its promises that he felt he should seek for a way into that garden till he found it; should, if necessary, demolish the wall.