He was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was his feet that started toward the oak; his eye that searched for the figure half fainting under the bough; for him the bed of moss and violets—the hair falling over the eyes—the loosened girdle—the breasts of hawthorn white and pink—the listening song of the nightingale—the silence of the summer woods—the seclusion—the full surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape the penalty of their own death.
The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them—the old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense nostrils.
And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his lips—tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the room fell his words:
“Bride of the Mistletoe!”
The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on the vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about himself.
“This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine,” he said quietly.
She was sitting there before him—the mother of his children, of the sleeping ones, of the buried ones—the butterfly broken on the wheel of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
She sat there with the whiteness of death.