At this simple speech she raised her head; she stood up as lightly as a young girl, and leaning over Hubert began to cover his face with passionate kisses, then, knitting her brows and making an effort, as it were, over herself, she left him, drew her hands over her eyes, and said in a calmer, though still uncertain voice:
"I am foolish; we must go out. I will go and put on my bonnet and we will take a drive. Will you be so kind as to ask for a carriage?" she added in English.
When she spoke this language her pronunciation became something perfectly graceful and almost child-like; and giving him a coquettish little salute with her hand she left the drawing-room by a door opposite to that of Hubert's apartment.
This same mixture of fond anxiety, sudden exaltation, and tender childishness continued on her part through the whole drive, which, to both of them, was made up of a sequence of supreme emotions. By a chance such as does not occur twice in the course of a human life, they found themselves placed precisely in such circumstances as must lift their souls to the highest possible degree of love. The social world, with its murderous duties, was far away. It had as little existence for their minds as the driver, who, perched up behind them and invisible, drove the light cab in which they found themselves alone together, along the route from Folkestone to Sandgate and Hythe. The world of hope, on the other hand, opened up before them like a garden arrayed in the most beautiful flowers. They saw themselves rewarded—he for his innocence, and she for the reserve imposed by her upon her reason, with an experience as delicious as it is rare: they enjoyed the intimacy of heart which usually comes only after long possession, and they enjoyed it in all the freshness of timid desire. But this timid desire had in both cases a background of intoxicating certainty, lucid to Theresa though still obscure to Hubert; and it was in a vast and noble landscape that they were filled with these rare sensations.
They were now following the road from Folkestone to Hythe, a slender ribbon running along by the sea. The green cliff is devoid of rocks, but its height is sufficient to give the road over which it hangs that look of a sheltered retreat which imparts a restful charm to valleys lying at mountain bases. The shingle beach was covered by the high tide. Not a bird was flying over the wide, moving sea. Its greenish immensity shaded to violet as the closing day shadowed the cold azure of the sky. The vehicle went quickly on its two wheels, drawn by a strong-backed horse, whose over-large bit forced him at times to throw up his head with a wrench of his mouth. Theresa and Hubert, close to each other in their sort of sentry-box on wheels, held each other's hands beneath the travelling plaid that was wrapped about them. They suffered their passion to dilate like the ocean, to tremble within them with the plentitude of the billows, to grow wild like that barren coast.
Since the young woman had asked that singular oath of her lover, she seemed somewhat calmer, in spite of flashes of sudden reverie which dissolved into mute effusions. On his side, he had never loved her so completely. He could not refrain from taking her ceaselessly to him and pressing her in his arms. An infinite longing to draw still more closely to her mounted to his brain and intoxicated him, and yet he dreaded the coming of the evening with the mortal anguish of those to whom the feminine universe is a mystery. In spite of the proofs of passion that Theresa showed him, he felt himself in her presence a prey to an insurmountable impotence of will, which would have grown to pain had he not at the same time had an immense confidence in the soul of this woman. The feeling of an unknown abyss into which their love was about to plunge, and which might have terrified him with an almost animal fear, became more tranquil because he was descending into the abyss with her. In truth she had a charming understanding of the troubles which must agitate him whom she loved; was it not in order to spare his overstrung nerves that she had brought him for this drive, during which the grandeur of the prospect, the breeze from the offing, and the walking at intervals, kept both herself and him above the disquietude inevitable to a too ardent desire.
They went on in this manner until the tragic hour when the stars shine in the nocturnal sky, now walking over the shingle, now getting into the little carriage again, ceaselessly following the same paths again and again, without being able to make up their minds to return, as though understanding that they might again experience other moments of happiness, but of happiness such as this, never! The dim intuition of the universal soul, of which visible forms and invisible feelings are alike the effect, revealed to them, unknown to themselves, a mysterious analogy, and, as it were, a divine correspondence between the particular face of this corner of nature and the undefined essence of their tenderness. She said to him:
"To be with you here is a happiness too great to admit of a return to life," and he did not smile with incredulity at these words, as she felt assured when he said to her:
"It seems to me that I have never opened my eyes upon a landscape until this moment."
And when they walked it was he who took Theresa's arm and leaned coaxingly upon it. Without knowing it he thus symbolised the strange reversal of parts in this attachment in accordance with which he, with his frail person, his entire innocence, and the purity of his timorous emotions, had always represented the feminine element. Certainly she, on her part, was quite a woman, with the suppleness of her gait, the feline refinement of her manners, and those liquid eyes which threw themselves into every look. Nevertheless she appeared a stronger creature and one better armed for life than the delicate child, the fragile handiwork of the tenderness of two pure women, whom she had enmeshed in so slight a tissue of seduction, and who, scarcely taller than herself by a quarter of an inch of forehead, surrendered himself with fraternal confidence; while the mere movement of their gait spoke clearly enough in its perfect, rhythmical harmony, of the complete union of their hearts, causing them to beat at that moment closely together.