“I’ve been obedient. I’ve laid myself down on the threshold that you might walk over me and take possession. Have you no reward for me? Are you just some strange cell of my own brain suddenly awake and working, or are you some other—what?—but nearer to me than breathing, as near as my own soul?”
The longing grew inarticulate and stronger, like the dumb yearning instincts which move the world of unspeaking creatures. It seemed to her that she sent her soul through the night pleading, pleading. Then very slowly she relaxed into sleep as she lay in the moonlight—deep, soul-satisfying sleep. And so dreamed.
She stood in the Shalimar Garden of the dead Mogul Empresses in Kashmir. How well she knew it, how passionately she loved it! She and Sidney Verrier had moored their houseboat on the Dal Lake not far away one happy summer and had wandered almost daily to the Shalimar, glorying in the beauty of its fountains and rushing cascades, and the roses—roses everywhere in a most bewildering sweetness. How often she had gone up the long garden ways to the foot of the hills that rise into mountains and catch the snows and stars upon their heights. It was no wonder she should dream of it. So in her dream she walked up to the great pavilion supported on noble pillars of black marble from Pampoor, and the moon swam in a wavering circle in the water before it, and she held back a moment to see it break into a thousand reflections, and then became aware of a man leaning with folded arms by the steps: his face clear in the moonlight.
Instantly she knew him, as he did her—the man of her dream of the Temple of Govindhar.
As before he turned and came toward her.
“I have waited for you by the temple and here and in many other places. I wait every night. How is it you come so seldom?” he said. His voice was stronger, his bearing more alert and eager than at Govindhar. He spoke with a kind of assurance of welcome which she responded to instantly.
“I would have come. I didn’t know. How can I tell?”
He looked at her smiling.
“There is only one way. Why didn’t you learn it in India? It was all round you and you didn’t even notice. You don’t know your powers. Listen.”
Beatrice Veronica drew towards him, eyes rapt on his face, scarcely breathing. Yes—in India she had felt there were mighty stirrings about her, thrills of an unknown spiritual life, crisping the surface like a breeze, and passing—passing before ever you could say it was there. But it did not touch her with so much as an outermost ripple. She was too ignorant. Now—she could learn.