Was there no refuge, no escape, nor safety anywhere; no retreat, nor harbor, but in hopeless longing; always the far-off lightning and threatening of storm? Peering into the future she was filled with apprehension. In dreams she saw Gabrielle’s innocence hanging over a black abyss; in dreams saw a fawn torn by ravening wolves. She awoke, starting up, crying out! There was nothing but the night. Yet she arose from her bed, and, crouched by her crucifix, prayed for her daughter as she never had prayed for herself.
At adolescence Gabrielle was a vision of delight. In temperament she was ardent as is a summer shower, which gives, when it gives, all that it has to give, in a rush of wind and rain. Unspoiled by knowledge, unruined by folly, too innocent to be perplexed by life’s anxieties, her soul mistook Earth for the pathway to Paradise, and nothing as yet had discovered her error. With her each hour began afresh the tale of life, a long, sweet, glad surprise.
Rose-winged days and golden nights were come to Gabrielle, whose feet stood at the smiling gate of the Primrose Way. But Margot’s days and nights were filled with passionate anxiety, as with increasing doubts and fears she confronted destiny.
The inner house-door gave upon a little paved court, where two twisted old fig-trees grew, many-branched candelabra, tipped in spring with green-leaved lights. Green-leaved shadows wavered below on a duck-pool’s marble bowl, stained green from the copper tenons which tied its stones together. Here ducks praised Jove with yellow bills, and splashed viridian wings. In the pool, glimmering, one saw the stuccoed cottage-wall, on the irregular surface of which old colors showed in broken chequers through the new until the wall was patched with unpremeditated beauty. Across the pool the silvery sunlight glimmered like a streak of flame. But the fairest thing reflected there was Gabrielle, dancing on the old stones which paved the court,—dances fantastic as her mood; sarabands to the stately rhythm of odd old songs, deliberately slow; canzons whose pathos was lost in a pirouette; minuets which mimicked the swallows overhead with their swift glissades among the trees and undulating sweeps among the flowers,—snatching the poppies as she passed, and thrusting them in her hair, and pausing at last like a wind-blown flower above her reflection in the pool,—Gabrielle, singing old songs by the world forgotten,—strains of wild beauty, that by wayward loveliness have a peculiar power to please, with old melodies, alluring and sweet; songs such as long ago stole the souls of saints determined upon salvation, and gave themes for many troubadour lays, of which, though all are lovely, the greater part are sad, being memories of loveliness departed into the dust: one of life’s paradoxes, that the memory of beauty should be bitter.
Here, remote from the curious world, preserved by the cloistral hedges from prying indiscretion, flowed her secluded existence. Few ever saw her. Such as by chance observed her through some green interstice, dazzled by her beauty, hurried off to spread the tale of an enchanted princess in an enchanted wood; hedge-balked and bewildered, few had ever seen her twice; by which she had been the more thought of through being the less seen.
Many had sought the courtyard; but none had found the way. Margot kept it a solitude lest Gabrielle suffer corruption, and around her maintained a veritable nunnery of care, hovered over her, and kept her as close withdrawn as a novice in a convent-garth.
But beauty cannot be sequestered always safely anywhere. Cloistral life is very well for souls of cloistral nature and of the convent sort; but youth and spring hate convents, and will have life’s novitiate, or none. There is a crevice in every hedge, no matter how tall or how thick it may be, and through it, ever, Gabrielle peeps.
Spring followed winter; May’s warm slow, yellow, moonlit nights were come.