Even then I hardly understood until I saw him come from the wings—Endymion, in the shepherd’s cloak, with the shepherd’s crook in his hands. And as he went near to her and stood looking down at her, Bonnie opened her eyes and saw what I saw, that her Endymion was that young god of an under-gardener. Erect, splendid, crowned with oak leaves—it was Karl’s hour, too, and he had come to her. As the rose-light went stealing across the picture, embracing the shadows, glowing in her awakened face, he opened his arms to her and caught her and held her to him. The light burned vividly and beautifully; and, all her hair rippling on his shepherd’s cloak, she clung to him, before those people who sat and never guessed, under the moon. It was their hour, the hour of Bonnie and Karl, and Pelleas and I were really looking toward a place of enchantment and on immortal things.
The curtain of vines swept together in a soft thunder of applause. Who were they, every one was asking, but who were they, who had given to the tableau a quality that was less like a picture than like a dream? “Hobart, Hobart,” I said, trembling, “how did you dare?”
Hobart Eddy was smiling at the ineffectual entreaties of the audience for a repetition of the picture. In vain they begged, the curtain of vines did not lift; the music swelled to a note of finality and lights leaped up.
“He wasn’t so faint-hearted,” said Hobart Eddy. “To be sure, I was obliged to make him do it. But then he did it. Faint Hearts aren’t like that.”
“Hobart,” said I raptly, “you are the fairy godmother, after all.”
“Ah, well,” Hobart Eddy said dissentingly, “I only did it because I wanted that minute when she opened her eyes. I’d go miles to see two who are really devoted. And I was in love with her myself, confound it! But then,” he added philosophically, “if I’d been there to take her in my arms I couldn’t have looked on.”
In the intermission before the open-air play Pelleas gave me a certain signal that we know and love and he rose and slipped from our box of boughs. I followed him without, and stepped with him across the green to the edge of the wood. There we took our way, as we had done on the night of our coming, by the path in the trees, the path that was just wide enough for, say, two violets when they venture out to walk two by two in the safe night. “I was afraid we might not be able to come here again,” Pelleas explained, “and I thought we ought ...” he added vaguely. But I understood for I had wanted to come no less than he.
“Pelleas,” I said, as we stepped along the narrow way, “suppose it had been as we fancied? Suppose it had all been some enchanted place that would have vanished with us?”
“Every time we fail to vanish from this world,” Pelleas said reflectively, “something charming happens. I suppose it is always so.”
“O, always,” I echoed confidently.