“Spare yourself a little for our sakes,” the princess was saying.
“Never fear, my princess!” said Iona with a smile. “I have a presentiment that I shall come back here at last to die. It is the only thing that I ask for myself. If I should not be so happy, I know that you will bring my body back. It is pleasant to think of lying asleep in our great quiet dormitory when one can work no longer.”
“The whole earth should not hide you from us, nor keep you back!” was the fervent reply.
“Inaction, or even moderate action, is impossible with the vision that I have of the world,” Iona went on. “You think that you know it. Ah, you do not know a thousandth part! You were safe in your family, guarded and protected. What if you had been poor and friendless? I tell you that to such human society is sometimes a society of wolves and tigers. Nor is an active and conscious malignity necessary. Narrow sympathies, self-complacent egotism and conventional slavery suffice. Why, who shall say that a tiger may not rend a man, or a child, with an approving conscience, if conscience he have!
“Life has become like a cane-brake duel, where two men enter, each from an opposite side, creeping and searching for each other with the dagger-hand drawn back, and the blade up-pointed for the stoccata. Ah! Let us not think of it. For the work needed to-day, the soul must not stop to think, but must march straight on in the name of God. I will think of my coming back and of my rest at last. It is sweet. Carry me up at sunrise, and give me a rose in my hand. I would that I could have a palm. But a rose is the flower of love; and whether it has seemed so, or not, I have loved so much! I have loved so much!”
She bent, and softly kissed the sleeping infant; and rising to go away, glanced back toward the unseen cemetery.
As she looked, a swift change passed over her face, a keen present interest took the place of her forward-looking. Her raised brows fell and were drawn together. She was facing the signal-station connected with the Pines, and it changed as she looked. Already they knew by signals from the castle that three strangers had passed the night at the Olives, that a messenger was coming in to give them details, that Pierre was on his way to the station to meet Elena, and that the strangers had also gone. From the Pines they knew that all was prepared for Elena’s entrance.
“What does this mean?” said Iona. “Can it be that Alexander’s wife is alone at the Pines! Tacita, will you call Dylar?”
Tacita went to the gallery from which she could see her husband’s cottage, and him sitting at a table covered with papers inside the open door, and she blew a trilling note on a silver whistle she carried in her girdle.
He looked up quickly, and came out. It was the first time she had ever called him down.