There was not a sound except the sound of the evening wind bending the palms and ceibas gently like the caress of a vast hand.
Here they found themselves alone at last.
He took her hands in his; then, releasing them, he held her round the waist whilst their lips met and clung together in an endless kiss.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE FATEFUL LIGHT
When Martinique was a young colony, when Versailles was the palace of a king, away in those sunlit times before the storm of the Revolution, the Jardin des Plantes of St. Pierre was a garden. The most curious and the most beautiful in the world. The spacious imagination that conceived Versailles touched the tropical forest, and the hand that laid out Luciennes fell upon the ceibas, the palmistes and the loseille bois. The poetry and perfect beauty of the tropical trees, the splendour of the creeping plants, fathoms of convolvulus, air gardens where orchids swung suspended by the cables of the Liantasse, tree ferns, trumpet flowers, star flowers, all lay there waiting for the gardener, just as in life all the splendour of passion, the beauty of love, and the mystery of death lie waiting for the poet.
He came and the cutlasses sounded amidst the air shoots and the lianas, he destroyed nothing needlessly, pushing the forest back where a path should go, making here a fairy lake—less a lake than a mirror for the tree ferns to see themselves in—here a glade, a twilit home for a statue. He heard the murmur of the waterfall, whose voice still sounds like a voice of mourning for the ruin of his work, and he brought the waterfall into the scheme of things. You can fancy how beautiful it was, this garden in the old day, scented, languorous, sunlit, twilit, filled with the notes of the bell bird and the siffleur de montagne, the whisper of the trees and the voice of the waterfall.
As certainly as there were flowers in that garden there were lovers; men fought and killed one another in the allée des duels; what a volume of romance lay here brightly written, vivid in colour, of which remains nothing but a few torn leaves; faded pictures where the forest had half blotted out the garden paths and the glades from which the statues have vanished.
The fer de lance hides amidst the leaves and makes the place frightful with death. He is the crowning fascination of the ruined garden.