After André left him, he went down into the garden.
From a little distance the house, against the sky, looked insubstantial, a water-colour, painted in grey and amber on a field of luminous blue. If he had wished it, he could have bathed himself in flowers; hyacinths, crocuses, jonquils, camellias, roses, grew round him everywhere, sending up a symphony of warm odours; further on, in the grass, violets, anemones, celandine; further still, by the margins of the pond, narcissuses, and tall white flowers-de-luce; and, in the shrubberies, satiny azaleas; and overhead, the magnolia trees, drooping with their freight of ivory cups. The glass doors of the orangery stood open, a cloud of sweetness hanging heavily before them. In the park, the chestnuts were in full leaf; and surely a thousand birds were twittering and piping amongst their branches.
'Oh, bother! How it cries out for a woman,' said Paul. 'It's such a waste of good material'
The beauty went to one's head. One craved a sympathetic companion to share it with, a woman on whom to lavish the ardours it enkindled. 'If I don't look out I shall become sentimental,' the lone man told himself. 'Nature's so fearfully lacking in tact. Fancy her singing an epithalamium in a poor fellow's ears, when he doesn't know a single human woman nearer than Paris.' To make matters worse, the day ended in a fiery sunset, and then there was a full moon; and in the rosery a nightingale performed its sobbing serenade. 'Please go out and give that bird a penny, and tell him to go away,' Paul said to a servant. It was all very well to jest, but at every second breath he sighed profoundly. I'm afraid he had become sentimental. It seemed a serious pity that what his heart was full of should spend itself on the incapable air. His sense of humour was benumbed. And when, presently, the frogs in the pond, a hundred yards away, set up their monotonous plaintive concert, he laid down his arms. 'It's no use, I'm in for it,' he confessed. After all, he was out of England. He was in Gascony, the borderland between amorous France and old romantic Spain.
I don't know whom his imagination dwelt the more fondly with: the stricken Queen, beyond there, alone in the darkness and the silence, where the night lay on the forest of Granjolaye; or the pale horse-woman of the morning.
But surely, as yet, he had no ghost of a reason for dreaming that the two were one and the same.
VI.
'Now, let's be logical,' he said next morning. 'Let's be logical and hopeful—yet not too hopeful, not utopian. Let's look the matter courageously in the face. Since she rode there once, why may she not ride again in the Sentier des Contrebandiers? Why mayn't she ride there often—even daily? I think that's logical. Don't you think that's logical?'
The person he addressed, a tall, slender young man, with a fresh-coloured skin, a straight nose, and rather a ribald eye, was vigorously brushing a head of yellowish hair, in the looking-glass before him.
'Tush! But of course you think so,' Paul went on. 'You always think as I do. If you knew how I despise a sycophant! And yet—you're not bad looking. No, I'll be hanged if I can honestly say that you're bad looking. You've got nice hair, and plenty of it; and there's a weakness about your mouth and chin that goes to my heart. I hate firm people.—What? So do you? I thought so.—Ah, well, my poor friend, you're booked for a shocking long walk this morning. You must summon your utmost fortitude.—Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me?' he carolled forth, to Marzials's tune. 'But come! I say! That's anticipating.'