‘I love you,’ read Isabel slowly.
Hitherto few words had passed. Words, in that blanched silence, seemed futile and impertinent. There was in that vast loneliness of the mist a sense of intimacy too close to be profaned by speech; man and woman were alone, two halves of one primitive creature, in a primitive, floating chaos, where nothing else, as yet, had taken shape. How could such a drifting void hold anything so formal as speech? Speech belonged to that forgotten world of things visible and tangible, that world where other human beings lived, and there was light, sound, movement. Here, in the level, immovable silence of the primeval twilight, Kingston and Isabel found the intervening ages swept away.
They had gone back into the dim time before the dawn of the world, when there was nothing more than this poised existence, vague, voiceless, pervasive.
‘I love you,’ repeated Isabel, studying the tourist’s device—the blatant modern cry breaking into the abysmal stillness of old chaos.
Kingston, with an effort, tore himself from the white mist of fantasy that had closed in upon his mind. The gloom suddenly held dangers; they loomed ahead. He had a dim sense that something unseen was moving towards him out of the swirling uncertainties around.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘We shall have to stay here till the clouds lift a bit. I simply can’t pretend to know my way. We should probably wander half over the moors, and go on in a circle till we got hopelessly lost or fell in a pothole. What a fool I was not to watch the sky! However, if the worst comes to the worst, you can shelter in that little shanty, and I don’t expect Gundred will be anxious; she never is.’
‘Read what this creature has written,’ said Isabel. ‘It sounds better in a man’s voice.’
Kingston looked down at the straggling stone letters at his foot. ‘I love you,’ he read. Then he looked up at Isabel.
She was facing him. The motto lay between them. Her face, against the luminous pallor of the mist, was burning, aglow, filled with a strange triumphant challenge. Suddenly, with an appalling crash of thunder, the fantastic world in which he had lived so long shattered and broke about his head. He saw the call in her eyes, understood it, answered to it, helplessly as a bound slave. This was the one woman in the world. He had known her since the beginning of time, been with her since the creation; now at last she threw aside her veils, and stood before him, no longer a stranger, but the lost part of his own soul—that lost part for which he had so long been vainly seeking. Now, in an instant, he recognised the cause of all his enmity, his unrest, his gnawing hunger, the incessant angry cravings which had tormented him. Hitherto he had not seen the truth; he had guessed it. And those guesses, painful, secret, stifled—they had engendered all the throbbing hostility, all the restless enmity with which he had regarded this half-recognised intruder into his life. Now he knew her, now his heart heard the lost language for which it had pined, now his soul stood complete again in the acquisition of its lost part.
Isabel saw that the answer to her call had come. At last she was known. ‘Old friend,’ she whispered, smiling into his eyes.