On that first evening we were destined to chance upon another blessed thing of the same quality. After our solitary dinner in the stately dining-room, Pelleas and I went wandering in the grounds, very still in the hush of June with June’s little moon lying on the sky. Little Rosemont is a place of well-swept lawns, and orchards then newly freed from the spell of their bloom; it is a place of great spaces and long naves, with groves whose trees seem to have been drawn together to some secret lyre. The house is a miracle of line and from its deep verandas one sees afar off a band of the sea, as if some god had struck it from the gray east. And everywhere at that glad season were the roses, thousands and thousands of roses—ah, fancy using figures to compute roses quite as one does in defraying debts. Though indeed as Pelleas frivolously said, “‘Time brings roses’ but so does money!” For many of those assembled were from Persia and Cashmere and I dare say from Lud and Phut. I think that I have never had an experience of great delight at which a band of familiar, singing things was not present; and when I remember the month at Little Rosemont it is as if the roses were the musical interludes, like a Greek chorus, explaining what is. They hang starry on almost every incident; unless perhaps on that of the night of our arrival, when we are told that Nichola in the servants’ dining-hall produced a basket which she had brought with her and calmly took therefrom her Guinea goat of the day before and ate it, before all assembled, beginning at the horns!
From the driveway on that first walk Pelleas and I looked up to a balcony over which the roses were at carnival. It was the kind of balcony that belongs to a moon and I half suspect all such balconies to be moon-made and invisible by sun or starlight; it was the kind of balcony that one finds in very old books, and one is certain that if any other than a lover were to step thereon it would forthwith crumble away. Pelleas, looking up at the balcony, irrelevantly said:—
“Do you remember the young rector over there in Inglese? The Reverend Arthur Didbin? Who married Viola to Our Telephone the other day?”
“Yes, of course, Pelleas,” said I, listening. What could the Reverend Arthur Didbin have to do with this balcony of roses?
“I’ve been thinking,” Pelleas went on, “that next week, on our golden-wedding day you know, we might have him come up here in the evening—there will be a full moon then—” he hesitated.
“Yes, yes?” I pressed him, bewildered.
“Well, and we might have him read the service for us, just we three up there on the balcony. The marriage service, Etarre—unless you think it would be too stupid and sentimental, you know?”
“Stupid!” I said, “O, Pelleas.”
“Ah, well, Nichola would think we were mad,” he defended his scruples.
“But she thinks so anyway,” I urged, “and besides she will never know. But Mr. Didbin—what of him?” I asked doubtfully; “will he laugh or will he understand?”