Now Theodora touched a small bell and suddenly the marble floor yawned asunder and the banquet table with all its accessories vanished underground with incredible swiftness. Then the floor closed again. The broad centre space of the hall was now clear of obstruction and the guests roused themselves from their drowsy postures of half-inebriated languor.
Tristan drank in the scene with eager, dazzled eyes and heavily beating heart. Love and hate strangely mingled stole over him more strongly than ever, in the sultry air of this strange summer night, this night of sweet delirium in which all that was most dangerous and erring in his nature waked into his life and mastered his better will.
Outside the water lilies nodded themselves to sleep among their shrouding leaves. Like a sheet of molten gold spread the lake over the spot where Roxana and Fabio had found a common grave.
Surrounding this lake spread a garden, golden with the sleepy radiance of the late moon, and peacefully fair in the dreaminess of drooping foliage, moss-covered turf and star-sprinkled violet sky. In full view, and lighted by the reflected radiance flung out from within, a miniature waterfall tumbled headlong into a rocky recess, covered and overgrown with lotus-lilies and plumy ferns. Here and there golden tents glimmered through the shadows cast by the great magnolia trees, whose half-shut buds wafted balmy odors through the drowsy summer night. The sounds of flutes, of citherns and cymbals floated from distant bosquets, as though elfin shepherds were guarding their fairy flocks in some hidden nook. By degrees the light grew warmer and more mellow in tint till it resembled the deep hues of an autumn sunset, flecked through the emerald haze, in the sunken gardens of Theodora.
Another clash of cymbals, stormily persistent, then the chimes of bells, such as bring tears to the eyes of many a wayfarer, who hears the silvery echoes when far away from home and straightway thinks of his childhood days, those years of purest happiness.
A curious, stifling sensation began to oppress Tristan as he listened to those bells. They reminded him of strange things, things to which he could not give a name, odd suggestions of fair women who were wont to pray for those they loved, and who believed that their prayers would be heard in heaven and would be granted!
With straining eyes he gazed out into the languorous beauty of the garden that spread its emerald glamour around him, and a sob broke from his lips as the peals of the chiming bells, softened by degrees into subdued and tremulous semitones, the clarion clearness of the cymbals again smote the silent air.
Ere Tristan, in his state of bewilderment, could realize what was happening, the great fire globe in the dome was suddenly extinguished and a firm hand imperiously closed on his own, drawing him along, he knew not whither.
He glanced about him. In the semi-darkness he was able to discern the sheen of the lake with its white burden of water lilies, and the dim, branch-shadowed outlines of the moonlit garden. Theodora walked beside him, Theodora, whose lovely face was so perilously near his own, Theodora, upon whose lips hovered a smile of unutterable meaning. His heart beat faster; he strove in vain to imagine what fate was in store for him. He drank in the beauty of the night that spread her star-embroidered splendors about him, he was conscious of the vital youth and passion that throbbed in his veins, endowing him with a keen headstrong rapture which is said to come but once in a lifetime, and which in the excess of its folly will bring endless remorse in its wake.
Suddenly he found himself in an exquisitely adorned pavilion of painted silk, lighted by a lamp of tenderest rose lustre and carpeted with softest amber colored pile. It stood apart from the rest, concealed as it were in a grove of its own, and surrounded by a thicket of orange-trees in full bloom. The fragrance of the white waxen flowers hung heavily upon the air, breathing forth delicate suggestions of languor and sleep. The measured cadence of the waterfall alone broke the deep stillness, and now and then the subdued and plaintive thrill of a nightingale, soothing itself to sleep with its own song in some deep-shadowed copse.