VIII
A FOUNTAIN OF GARDENS
Indeed, to have remembered that morning at Miss Deborah Ware’s was enough to bring back to us the very youth of which the morning was a part. It seems to Pelleas and me that most of the beautiful things that have come to us have been a part of our old age, as if in a kind of tender compensation. But that beautiful happening of our youth we love to remember, the more because it befell in the very week of our betrothal. And though our betrothal was more than fifty years ago, I suppose to be quite truthful that there is very little about those days that I do not recall; or if there be any forgotten moments I grieve to confess them. There are, however, I find to my amazement, many excellent people who conscientiously remember the dates of the Norman Conquest and the fall of Constantinople, and who are yet obliged to stop to think on what day their betrothal fell. As for me I would far rather offend my conscience in a matter of Turks than in a matter of love-knots.
On a delicate day in May, Eighteen Hundred and Forty-five, Pelleas and I were quite other people. And I do protest that the lane where we were walking was different, too. I have never seen it since that summer; but I cannot believe that it now wears anything like the same fabric of shadow, the same curve of hedgerow or that season’s pattern of flowers. The lane ran between the Low Grounds and the property of the Governor, on one side the thatched cots of the mill folk and the woodsmen, and on the other the Governor’s great mansion, a treasure-house of rare canvas and curio. That morning the lane was a kind of causeway between two worlds, and there was no sterner boundary than a hedge of early wild roses. I remember how, stepping with Pelleas along that way of sun, I loved him for his young strength and his blue eyes and his splendid shoulders and for the way he looked down at me, but I think that he must have loved me chiefly for my gown of roses and for the roses in my hat. For I took very little account of life save its roses and I must believe that a sense of roses was my most lovable quality. We were I recall occupied chiefly in gathering roses from the hedgerow to fill my reticule.
“Now, suppose,” Pelleas said, busy in a corner of green where the bloom was thickest, “suppose we were to find that the hedges go on and never stop, and that all there is to the world is this lane, and that we could walk here forever?”
I nodded. That was very like my conception of the world, and the speculation of Pelleas did not impress me as far wrong.
“Do you wish this morning could last forever, Etarre, do you?” asked Pelleas, looking down at me.
“Yes,” said I truthfully, “I do.” I hope that there is no one in the world who could not from his soul say that at least once of some hour of Spring and youth. In such a moment, it is my belief, the spirit is very near entering upon its own immortality—for I have always held that immortality must begin at some beautiful moment in this life. Though as for me, at that moment, I confess myself to have been thinking of nothing more immortal than the adorable way that Pelleas had of saying my name.
“But by and by,” Pelleas went on, “I think we would come to a garden. Who ever heard of a love story without a garden? And it will be a ‘different’ garden from all the rest—the trees will be higher and the shadows will be made differently and instead of echoes there will be music. And there will be fountains—fountains everywhere; and when one has gone in the garden a fountain will spring up at the gate and no one can get out—ever. What do you think of that for a garden?” asked Pelleas.
“I think,” said I, “that the garden we will come to will be Miss Deborah Ware’s.”