“Are you sure, Miss Deborah, that they want it for the Governor’s house now?” Pelleas asked in sudden anxiety.
“They were here again yesterday to ask me,” Miss Deborah assured us; and I think there was a certain radiance in her face.
So Miss Deborah told Mitty and Joel—dear little maid, dear honest young lover; shall I ever forget the look in their eyes when they knew? And, remembering, I am smitten with a kind of wonderment at the immortality of the look of happiness in another’s eyes. For many and many a time when Pelleas and I have been stepping through some way of shadow we have, I know, recalled the look on those luminous young faces; and we have said to each other that life can never be wholly shadowed or wholly barren while there remain in the world wistful faces to whom one may bring that look. It is so easy to make eyes brighten, as I hope every one in the world knows.
And so our fountain of gardens tossed up such a rainbow as the happiness of Mitty and Joel—Mitty with the starched flaxen braids and Joel with the brown shining face to whom the picture had suggested only the green of a woodshed roof. Pelleas and I had quite forgotten that we had meant to give the picture to some one who should understand the garden better than we—one who should “walk in beauty.” Something of the significance of this stirred vaguely in our thought even then; but I think that we have since come to regard this change of purpose as holding one of the meanings of life.
Mitty and Joel left Miss Deborah’s house just before us, and Pelleas and I lingered for a moment in her doorway.
“That young artist,” said Miss Deborah, “who paints pictures better than his cook makes crumpets—I shall write to him to-night. I shall tell him that even if he never paints another picture he will not have been an artist in vain.” She leaned toward us, smiling and nodding a little. “There will be other entrance fees,” she said; “watch for them.”
We went up the twilight lane that led between the Governor’s treasure-house of canvas and curio and the thatched cots of the Low Grounds. Save for the shadowy figures of Mitty and Joel walking before us, and waving their hands at the lane’s turning, nothing was changed since the morning. Yet now the spirit of the place lived not only in its spell of bloom but it lived also in us. Some door had been opened and we had entered.
When we reached the upper meadow, Pelleas suddenly caught my hand.
“Ah, look—look, Etarre!” he cried.
In the dimness the meadow lay, all of tender, early green, like that of our Wonderful Picture, with half-evident boughs of indeterminate bloom pleasant with freshness and with sweet surprise at some meaning of the year.