The flight of hours, the decline of day, the season’s turn, all things which preface change are presages of parting, and, like the proximity of the tomb, though wreathed in bloomy myrtle, are subtly fraught with sadness and regret. All love’s farewells are so oppressed. Though with absolute confidence in themselves and in each other, sure of the imperishable structure of their love, a nameless apprehension fills the hearts of all who part, and casts a melancholy shade on partings. “Until to-morrow!” Ah, to-morrow! “To-morrow I will come again!” she says. They go, with trembling hands, each, shaken by departure, saying, “Shall we meet again?”
“To-morrow!” Gabrielle had said, as she took her lips away. “To-morrow I will come again!” and was gone.
In the warm heart of the midsummer night he dreamed again among the hedges, a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight. Her lips were pomegranate blossoms; her cheeks were wild peach flowers; it was a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight! Her waist was as a willow-withe, her voice a bird in the deep wood calling; her feet danced fantasies in his heart. He came all in the daze of a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s desire. With every eager breath he drew in the hyacinthine fragrance of the night.
All day long, like a sullen army, a great cloud heaved and gloomed along the west, with wind-blown vapors streaming around its thunderous heights. All day long, in awe of it, men put off going here and there, gave over plans, and stood oppressed by its tremendous imminence. The day was darkened by the dominion of the cloud. At evening it rolled off across the plain, obliterating leagues of lesser storms, with fire stabbing at its breast, and distant bellowings of tremendous sound. Heaving slowly against the twilight stars, rolling in sullen majesty upon the gale, pale moonlight falling on its peaks, and the gray rain trailing down below, in its heart innumerable lightnings, thunder grumbling in its front, it left the drenched field to the moon. Beyond the edge of the world it hung, gloomily brooding upon the splendor of the night.
In the magic of the moonlight Lilac lane lay ghostly as a dream, hushed, alluring, unfamiliar. The strange, white light of the immense full moon lay dead on everything; the hedge-rows were hung with the shadows and darkness of strange delight; the cicada chittered in the almond tree; the great moths flapped heavily among the wet moon-flowers; a slow, scarcely perceptible wind blew, languid-sweet, hardly moving the heavy leaves of the magnolias; a gray bird pitched a wild song somewhere deep within a hedge.
In Margot’s garden everything was wrapped in night’s singular fantasy. In the pallor of the moonlight the garden lay like an enchanted realm of goblin loveliness. The lilies stood as pale and chill as flowers carved of marble; among the drowsy poppies hung garlands of nocturnal vine whose folded blooms in chaplets clustered colorless in the pallid moonshine. The whole place trembled in a pale, strange beauty which the silence made lovelier still. Like an island in a silvery mist Margot’s house stood blind asleep, its little windows curtained deep with shadows, dim, blue, and dark, and on the woodwork of the door, like petals of dismantled flowers, wax-wet, wind-blown, walked moths thrown there by the whining wind, slowly blowing across leagues of lonely marsh; and, among the moths, the glow-worms, faintly lighted and phosphor-green, crawled up and down, up and down, to nowhere: it looked like the door of the way to oblivion, so lonely it seemed and so still. The garden was utterly empty; the house yard was deserted.
He looked; he listened; and his heart stood still; save for the glow-worm and the moth there was nothing alive there but him. Like the chill which creeps across the matted grass of evening in the last fair days of autumn, full of the faded fragrance and haunted dusk of fall, a wordless dread stole over him. The moonlight gleamed on the cottage-wall with a singular, mournful splendor; a heavy wind began to stir the trees; immensely mournful, faint and far-away, there came a boom of thunder from beyond the rim of the world; joy all at once was gone from the midsummer night; the haunting strangeness crept into his heart. The place was full of the heavy fragrance of dead flowers. Here and there a palsied rose, its faded leaves relaxed, broke, and fell without a sound.
Under the fig-trees he paused a moment, undecided,—to listen, shivering a little, and peering along the wall. There was no sound of human life. Though the wind had set the great leaves stirring, all was ghostly as a dream. One white star above the roof-peak sailed among the broken clouds; the moon, desolate, splendid, hung in the magnolia, mournfully gleaming through the black boughs; in the still air the moonlight stood; the shadows lay like solid things upon the cottage wall.
At the corner of the house he paused and listened again. In the strange, unanswering silence a sense of disaster gripped him. There was no sound anywhere; his heart almost ceased beating.