His hair was black and oily, and hung down about his shoulders in round artificial curls. Black, heavy-browed eyes looked out surlily from above fat bags of dissipation upon his cheeks. His nose was heavy, and seemed turned under at the end, so that he was always smelling his thick mustaches which were curled at either extremity. His lower lip hung down exactly like a grizzled old bulldog’s mouth, and it was there that I hit him while he mumbled more grotesqueries. They were picking him up, unconscious, when I turned about and his lady fell fainting into my arms.
With the feel of that soft arm in silks under my hand, forgotten was Rabnon, and the inn, and the crowd. I picked her lightness up; people were about me, but I shouted, “Make way,” and we two were soon alone by the spring in the courtyard. I was bathing her face with her own small handkerchief, and sobbing. “At last! I have touched you at last, you whom I have seen in so many guises, and who have escaped my grasp as often as you have eluded my pen. Oh, perfection! It cannot be that you are a part of my dreams, for there is nothing within me as perfect as you. Oh, my dear, my dear; I cannot imagine you, I cannot move you, and now, I cannot help you, when, in these hours, it would be my power to awaken anyone else!” And I went on mumbling and mixing my tears with the water I poured on her dainty wrists.
Presently she opened her eyes, and looked at me. “You!” she said. “Why have you always vanished from my dreams just as I was becoming interested in you? I have always suspected you of being not one of my creatures, for I had no control over you whatsoever, and when you were about, my own dream-people did amazing things. You are not at all like anyone of my imaginings, yet I like you far better than the lot of them.”
I would have taken her pretty lips to mine, she was so natural and so weak now, but I remembered my cloth and kept myself kissing her hands. Then I burst out laughing: “The Brushwood Boy!” She smiled. “Were you thinking that too? I’m so glad you have read it. But they had no trouble meeting in their dreams. Look, we must talk this matter out, now, for combined, we can make our evenings bring us together as much as we desire—” And she put her lovely arm about my neck and pulled my head down. “I think I should like to be together with you—in my dreams—forever—”
I had known she would say something of the kind and had steeled myself against it. Women always speak first. “To-night,” I said, “which is todreamday,—I should like to start a long series of dream-days together. And it is true that whatever one wants badly enough may be materialized in a dream; it is thus that we have at last gotten together.
“But to-night I am a friar, and sworn to the observance of celibacy; to-night I have duties elsewhere, so I must see you safely cared for and fare onward into the dusky places of the dream.” She rose, sorrowfully, and supporting her on my arm, I continued, “We can only hope for another meeting at another time. Neither of us can be untrue now to the artistry we have begun. You too must have your destiny to-night?”
“Your Camereau had spoiled it,” she said, as we turned again to the gate. “I was looking, it seemed, for a lover to-night, but he met me on the road.”
I could not help interjecting a smile. “A Freudian pickup!” I laughed. But she would have no levity. “My evening is over,” she said. “I shall stop writing, and awake. Let me precede you into the inn.” And with a vague little glance she turned and went in; I did not see her again.
Shortly, Rabnon came out, and we went on our way again, but my blood was no longer boiling with the spring, and I had no carnal arguments, for I was thinking neither of philosophy nor of Franciscan tenets. After we had walked a mile or so I turned to Rabnon and said, “You are right. A woman will drive our God out of the heart of a man. For a woman is God to a man who is in love.” Rabnon very seriously and apparently irrelevantly, answered as he looked into my face, “We must travel far to-day, my friend.”
And because I was a maudlin artist I could not help writing a soft breeze into the trees that stood by the wayside so that they sighed and shivered as we went down a hill and left Camereau behind us.