CHAPTER IX
THE LIGHTS ON ST. AGATHA'S PIER
The night is still, the moon looks kind,
The dew hangs jewels in the heath,
An ivy climbs across thy blind,
And throws a light and misty wreath.
The dew hangs jewels in the heath,
Buds bloom for which the bee has pined;
I haste along, I quicker breathe,
The night is still, the moon looks kind.
Buds bloom for which the bee has pined,
The primrose slips its jealous sheath,
As up the flower-watched path I wind
And come thy window-ledge beneath.
The primrose slips its jealous sheath,—
Then open wide that churlish blind,
And kiss me through the ivy wreath!
The night is still, the moon looks kind.
—Edith M. Thomas.
On my way home through St. Agatha's I stopped to question the two guards. They had heard nothing, had seen nothing. How that girl had passed them I did not know. I scanned the main building, where she and Miss Pat had two rooms, with an intervening sitting-room, but all was dark. Miss Helen Holbrook was undeniably a resourceful young woman of charm and wit, and I went on to Glenarm House with a new respect for her cleverness.
I was abroad early the next morning, retracing my steps through St. Agatha's to the stone bench on the bluff with a vague notion of confirming my memory of the night by actual contact with visible, tangible things. The lake twinkled in the sunlight, the sky overhead was a flawless sweep of blue, and the foliage shone from the deluge of the early night. But in the soft mold of the path the print of a woman's shoe was unmistakable. Now, in Ireland, when I was younger, I believed in fairies with all my heart, and to this day I gladly break a lance for them with scoffers. I know folk who have challenged them and been answered, and I have, with my own eyes, caught glimpses of their lights along Irish hillsides. Once, I verily believe, I was near to speech with them—it was in a highway by a starlit moor—but they laughed and ran away. The footprints in the school-path were, however, no elfin trifles. I bent down and examined them; I measured them—ungraciously, indefensibly, guiltily—with my hand, and rose convinced that the neat outlines spoke of a modish bootmaker, and were not to be explained away as marking the lightly-limned step of a fairy or the gold-sandaled flight of Diana. Then I descended to St. Agatha's and found Miss Pat and Helen loitering tranquilly in the garden.
America holds no lovelier spot than the garden of St. Agatha's, with its soft slopes of lawn, its hedges of box, its columned roses, its interludes of such fragrant trifles as mignonette and sweet alyssum; its trellised clematis and honeysuckle and its cool background of vine-hung wall, where the eye that wearies of the riot of color may find rest.