Gaspard, releasing the lips of the girl, and holding her warm body close to him, kissed her eyes, her forehead, her hair. Beyond the gates, the roadway like a great white lamp burned in the sun trying to pierce the gloom. The world seemed trying to peep at them, and the forest with its great green sleeve to shelter them from the world.
“Come here—here!—here! forget the world and the road—follow me where the ferns are high—into the twilight—come here!—here!”
A siffleur de montagne in the gloom of the garden was calling to his mate; they scarcely heard him yet they came, taking a path on the left, a path hemmed on either side by tree ferns and hundred feet soaring palms.
“You love me!”
“Ché—I have loved you since the world began.”
The reply held all the truth of love.
She had loved him since the world began. Aeons before Martinique saw the white men from the East, in the dawn of time, dim, cometic, her being had been projected towards his, that she might stand in the Jardin des Plantes clasped in the arms of Gaspard a million ancestors had lived and loved, and died; that he might stand clasping her in his arms a million ancestors had fought the battle of life. This embrace was the victory of the dead over death, the triumph of life over time. In eight words she had spoken the secret which all lovers feel vaguely in the depths of their being. “I have loved you since the world began.”
The voice of the waterfall came now through the trees, a burst of light shewed where the palms and angelines, the ferns, and the ceibas, gave place to the lake into which the torrent falls leaping, rainbowed, dim with mist from amidst the foliage of the cliff; a hundred feet of cascading water, every drop a gem. It seemed alive and laughing, if water spirit ever lived she surely lived here. Then, as they stood watching it, just as though the spirit had lost its gaiety, the rainbow dazzle passed away and dimness spread through the glade. The sun was sinking above the treetops.
Marie glanced up.
“Come,” she said, “the light is fading—ah, the sun, could he not have waited a little longer! but he waits for no one, not even for us.”