“Just so,” he answered, “but you could see over no bushes in those days, and more’s the pity that you can see over them now, in the Duke’s garden as well as in life, for it’s only one more dream spoiled, my dear Nan.”
“Oh! there is not much blateness there! You are coming on, John Hielan’man.” But this was to herself.
“Then to you this is just the same as when we lost our way?”
“The same and not all the same,” he admitted. “I can make it exactly the same if I forgot to look at you, for that means sensations I never knew then. I cannot forget the place has been here night and day, summer and winter, rain and sun, since we last were in it, and time makes no difference; it is the same place. But it is not the same in some other way, some sad way I cannot explain.”
The night was full of the fragrance of flowers and the foreign trees. There was no breath of wind. They were shades in some garden of dream compelled to stand and ponder for ever in an eternal night of numerous beneficent stars. No sound manifested except the lady’s breathing, that to another than the dreamer would have told an old and wholesome Panic story, for her bosom heaved, that breath was sweeter than the flowers. And the dryads, no whit older as they swung among the trees, still all childless, must have laughed at this revelation of an age of dream. Than that sound of maiden interest, and the far-off murmur of the streams that fell seaward from the woody hills, there was at first no other rumour to the ear.
“Listen,” said Gilian again, and he turned an anxious ear towards that grey grassy sea. His hand grasped possessingly the lady’s arm.
“Faith, and you are not blate,” said she whimsically, but indifferent to remove herself from a grasp so innocent.
She listened. The far bounds of the lawn were lost in gloom, in its midst stood up vague in the dusk a great druidic stone. And at last she could distinguish faintly, far-away, as by some new sense, a murmur of the twilight universe, the never-ending moan of this travailing nature. A moment, then her senses lost it, and Gilian yet stood in his rapt attention. She withdrew her arm gently.
“Hush, hush!” he said. “Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?”
“I do?” she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly sense of laughter as at a child “Bees and midges, late things like ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies.”