“Good night, good night,” he softly murmured, with a movement of departure.
“Good night,” she answered, in a low and fervent voice, “friend, true and loving, good night.”
A sense of heavenly tenderness rose trembling in their souls, and with meeting lips they were clasped in each other’s arms. Oh, solemn ecstasy of prayer and peace! Oh, mystic passion of a veiled true love!
Was it a dream? She was alone. Standing in the solitary room, her brow bent upon her hand, the dim sweetness of the vision in her mind, she floated away in vague, delicious reverie. Soft light fled pulsing through her spirit; a sacred and passionless perfume floated in her brain; a celestial tenderness tranced her soul. He loved another; his love for her was the love of friend for friend—no more; but she was happier, holier, nobler to have inspired such love, and stronger than ever to resign him now, and to live her life alone. So thinking, like one lost in a blissful dream, she glided away to her pillow.
Was it a dream? How strangely sweet and vague! He was wandering noiselessly down the shadowy street in the wan moonlight, with the cold air blowing on his cheek, as void of coldness as though he had been a phantom, and not a man. When had he left her—how? but his thoughts recalled only the peaceful passion of that moment, and between the lighted room and the moonlit street, there was a blank chasm. Dear moment, never to come again, dear magic flower that bloomed in the sad garden of his love, never to be renewed, yet sweetening life and life’s submissive sacrifice forever. Dear friend, true friend and sweet, whose clasp, whose sacred kiss—the first, the last—gave tokens of no earthly love, but rich memorials and previsions of the love that makes the hills of heaven more fair! So ran the voiceless music of his thought, while memory kept the phantom form of the beloved one in visioned light and odor. To-morrow he would meet her, and the day after, and on for many a day through months and years to come, but never again on the height of the ideal and intimate communion where their spirits had met and said farewell. Years hence, and she a happy wife and mother, how softly this hour would glide from the innermost holiest cloister of memory, and lend a more pensive and tender grace to her beauty, and shed a finer and more ethereal essence on her happiness! Consecrating her forever, its consecration would rest on his own life, pledging him more firmly to lofty and generous effort, and sanctifying all low toils and struggles as with the presence of an angel.
Softly, and without noise, he entered his dark and silent house. A moment, and he had lit his shaded lamp, and conscious of the sleepless vigil in his mind, he opened the volume which held for him the rich lore of Verulam, his unfailing pleasure, and the comfort of his saddest hours, and sat down to read the night away. Within all was still. Without, the wind swept drearily through the wan and shadowy street around the silent dwelling, the lilac odors had died, and the pale moonlight shone with the blue glimmer of swords.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON.
The gibbous moon hung midway down the zenith over the vast and sleeping city, a lob of spectral light in the cold, blue heavens, over a fantastic brood of dreams. Daniel Webster’s liegemen and victims slept, and Black Dan himself, liegeman and victim to a darker power than he, slept also; but the liegemen and victims of Dan Cupid had a more uncertain chance of slumber, and four among them at least had wakeful eyes that night as the moon was going down.