They had never met until a month ago, yet their address had been familiar almost from the first; on her side, through a large-eyed, childlike fearlessness; on his—he could not have answered why. He watched her as one watches a clear planet glow steadily from the soft, golden sky, but he seemed nevertheless to know all her characteristics without studying them,—he imagined that to one weary of trifle and artifice and the hollow way of the world, here was the rest divine. Yet beyond a point, he found this cool, remote being inaccessible,—as though there had been a gulf between them. He knew not how to call the blush to her cheek, the sparkle to her eye; if she had been some alien creature she might have been nearer,—to enrich her with human love was as fruitless an effort as scattering the pollen of a rose into the heart of a cold white lily. And yet, Reymund knew—as if through the same natural operations as those by which his pulse was made to beat, his breath to draw—that Orient’s soul needed his for its entireness; that his soul required hers, all as much as a star needed its atmosphere, a flower its fragrance, the earth itself its spheral roundness. It was not so much that he already loved her passionately, as that he felt himself lost without her; he had been in Orient’s presence, it seemed, all the time that he had ever lived; how could he then depart from it? If that which was a clod suddenly found itself a bed of blossom, how could it ever return again to dreary earthiness?
He watched her now approaching. Had any one said that she trailed lustre behind her as she walked, he would have answered that he had seen it. But to speak to her of any grace or charm or perfection that she possessed,—why, these things were herself, her identity, sacred and secret; as easily to some skyey messenger of solemn heaven commend his airy flight!
“In what wonderful ways these mountains change their expression!” said Reymund, as she joined him again at last.
“Yes,” she replied, “they are different beings every hour.”
“A little while ago,” he continued, “they seemed like an army of giants sitting down to besiege the valley; now they are a wall between us and mankind; death cannot break through it, sickness cannot cross it.”
“They are more alive than that,” said Orient. “This old sombre one moved aside just now to make room for the little alp laughing over his shoulder, with the rosy vapor streaming high on her face.”
“Perhaps you hear what they are saying to one another, then?” he asked, half jestingly.
“I often do.”
“And you will translate?”
“No. In the first place you would laugh; in the last place disbelieve.”