If he receives her into his arms, even in the mechanical and prosaic civility of assisting her to bestride a five-barred gate, she knows that were ten thousand dead Bills and living Ruperts to interpose their pale prohibitions, the inevitable must happen.
Lavinia has spoken accurately. The pleasant spot in which their agility has landed her and her companion is not a wood. It is merely one of those low green tangles of hazel and maybush, sapling chestnut, and gnarly willow, whose woof is nowhere too thick to let in a thrifty shower of temperate sunbeams; and through the woof of whose carpet the blue hyacinth dye runs dim and rich. A path not wide enough to admit of any couple save a lover-pair walking abreast, girdles the little sheet of water at quiet play with its dancing flies and leaping fish and placidly oaring moorhens. From the heart of one of those brakes, whose semi-privacy seems to provoke the nightingale to uttermost extremity of song, one is now turning his whole little brown body, dimly seen sitting on a hawthorn bough, into a shout of heavenly self-congratulation upon finding himself in such a beautiful May world, and with a demand for love too exquisitely worded to be denied.
Arrived at the pool-side, within a few yards of him, the human couple, of whom he is so much too joyful to be the little spokesman, stand quite still, in fear of scaring him; but in his happy little heart there is no room for fear, and from the look of the poor souls he knows that they are not enemies.
“I told you that he would save us the trouble of talking,” says Lavinia under her breath.
He has saved the lesser singers of his own genus the same trouble, apparently; for whether quelled or entranced, or learning those imitations which they will afterwards practise with clever inferiority, they are dumbed.
Lavinia listens at first with a sense of relief. The divine organ that lies in that little parcel of feathers is uttering all the longings, all the merging of two into one, all the fruition-nearing desires to which she may never, never give voice. To the deceit of that seeming relief succeeds an intolerable revolt. Why should she of all creation alone be silent? Why should not she for once speak out? Why, since this little island of time upon which they stand is their very own, since they have no future, since they have been ironically given this one half-hour to show them what life might have been,—why should not they be wise, and, pushing aside those dim ghosts which they themselves have quixotically interposed between the aching reality of their own bruised hearts, slake their terrible thirst for each other in one first and last draught?
The temptation to throw herself upon his breast is so strong, that to her dazed senses she almost seems to herself to have already yielded to it, though in effect she has only stood in pale maidenliness at his side; but the illusion is so vivid, and the reactionary shock of horror at herself so potent, that she walks with unsteady haste away from her companion towards the singer, whom her movement puts to flight.
“You have frightened him away!” says the young man, standing still on the path.
“Yes; I am glad.”
“Glad! That is not a word that one seems to have much use for just now!”