“You will surely be here?”
“Ah!”
The word was less a word than a sigh.
Surely be there?—nothing but death would stop her from being there, mornes, and mountains, endless roads to be travelled by her little feet, heat of day, or storm, nothing overcomable by human heart and will could stop her from being there, and she said it all in that sigh which was half a word.
He took her hand and held it to his lips for a moment. It was their first kiss. Then side by side they began to descend the steep way to the city. It was late for St. Pierre where people went to bed shortly after sundown, the moon was just lifting above the mountains and the sound of the sea came up from the bay, breathing through the empty streets and mixing with the rippling and tinkling of the fountains and water courses.
The Street of the Precipice was filled with moonlight. The old street, to-night, was Romance itself made visible. The heavy-shuttered houses, the coigns of shadow, the causeway of moonlight leading the eye downward to the ghost of a silver sea.
At the entrance to the street she turned and gave him her hand. She did not wish him to come further, Man’m Charles would be sitting up to let her in. She had never been so late before and though she felt no qualms at all at the cause of her lateness she did not wish her aunt to hear her saying good-bye to Gaspard, that would mean explanations. All that day, its blueness, its fragrance, its mystery; the sunlight, and the hills, the distant ocean, the twilight in which her soul had met and touched the soul that had come to find her from far across the sea, all that seemed like some mysterious flower coloured with the colours of earth but immortal as the light of the stars.
Finotte, Florine, Lys, wandering in the fields of youth had plucked roses, lilies, flowers of a moment. She wandering alone, had found this flower of light, deathless, and indestructible. Let the world pass, let the man she loved betray her, let come what might, her flower would never fade.
He watched her as she passed away down the Street of the Precipice, she, whose grace Theocritus might have sung in the warmth of some Sicilian night, and as he watched her, just for a moment, there came upon him, untutored as he was, a breath from long ago. It was as though doors had been flung open to all the songs, the perfumes, and the starlight of all the nights of the past, nights by the Sicilian sea before Taormina had become a desolation, love songs blown across the roses, roses casting their fragrance to the sea and stars.
He saw the little figure, now, away down the street pausing before a house on the right hand side, then it vanished, leaving the Street of the Precipice deserted. He turned homewards, walking slowly; it was still early as Europeans reckon earliness, yet St. Pierre was already asleep. In a French town at this hour the cafés would be still blazing, the streets filled, theatres not yet empty; but St. Pierre, like a child, went to sleep with the dark; hushed by the murmur of the sea below and the woods above, and lit by the fireflies and the stars.