“The treacle-moon is over. I am awake and find myself married.”
Gordon read the lines in the diary he held, by the fading daylight. He sat in the primrosed garden of his town house on Piccadilly Terrace, beside a wicker tea-table. The day was at its amber hour. The curtains of the open windows behind him waved lazily in the breeze and the fragrance of hawthorn clung like a caress across the twilight. What he read had been the last entry in the book.
He smiled grimly, remembering the night he had written it. It was at Seaham, the home of his wife’s girlhood, the final day of their stay—the end of that savorless month of sameness and stagnation, of eating fruit and sauntering, playing dull games at cards, yawning, reading old Annual Registers and the daily papers, listening to the monologue that his elderly father-in-law called conversation, and watching the growth of stunted gooseberry bushes—the month in which he had eaten of the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. To-day he recalled the trenchant features of that visit distinctly: the prim, austere figure of Lady Noël, his wife’s mother, presiding at the table; Sir Ralph opposite, mumbling for the third time, over a little huddle of decanters which could neither interrupt nor fall asleep, the speech he had made at a recent tax-meeting; his own wife with eyes that so seldom warmed to his, but grew keener each day to glance cold disapproval; and Mrs. Clermont, Lady Noël’s companion and confidante, black-gowned, bloodless, with noiseless gliding step and observant gaze—Jane Clermont’s aunt, as he had incidentally learned.
“The treacle-moon is over!” And that satiric comment had been penned almost a year ago!
Gordon moved his shoulders with a quick gesture, as though dismissing an unpleasant reflection, and took from his pocket a little black phial. He measured out a minute quantity of the dark liquid into a glass and poured it full of water. He drank the dull, cloudy mixture at a draft.
“How strange that mind should need this!” he said to himself. “My brain is full of images—rare, beautiful, dreamlike—but they are meaningless, incoherent, unattached. A few drops of this elixir and they coalesce, crystallize, transform themselves—and I have a poem. I have only to write it down. I wrote ‘Lara’ in three evenings, while I was undressing from the opera. It shan’t master me as it has De Quincey, either. Why, all my life I have denied myself even meat. My soul shall not be the slave of any appetite!”
He smiled whimsically as he set down the glass: “What nonsense it is to talk of soul,” he muttered, “when a cloud makes it melancholy, and wine makes it mad!”
He paused, listening intently. A low sound, an infant’s cry, had caught his ear. His eyes grew darker violet. His look changed.
“Ada! Ada!” he said in a whisper.
In his voice was a singular vibrant accent—intense, eager, yet the words had the quality of a sacrament and a consecration.