“Pelleas,” I said, “I think, if we look, the well and the shepherd with his pipes will be over there.”
“And the shrine,” Pelleas said.
We stood at the stile, and it seemed to us that the dusk had shaped itself to be our garden at whose gate, when one has entered, a fountain will spring so that, as Pelleas had said, “no one can get out—ever.” At the last we looked long in each other’s eyes. And I think that we read there the secret of the garden that lies not in Etruria, or Tuscany, or Tempe; and we knew its living waters and its spices and its incommunicable spirit of rhythm and of echo.
IX
THE BABY
Our grandniece, Enid, is older than Lisa, her sister. Indeed, Enid was twenty-two that Spring, and had been for two years happily married in spite of the fact that Pelleas and I had had no hand in the wooing. To see Enid with her baby in her arms was considerably like watching a wild rose rock a butterfly, and no one can fancy how tenderly we two observed her. I think that few sweet surprises of experience or even of wisdom have so confirmed our joy in life as the sight of our grandniece Enid with her baby.
It chanced that when the baby was but a few weeks old David, Enid’s young husband, was sent to The Hague upon some government business, a state of affairs for which it seemed to Pelleas and me that the United States should be called to account. For experience shows that the government will go irresistibly forward but I protest that the baby’s father never can be compensated for that absence; and I would like to have any one object who can believe differently.
For all his impatience to see whether the little child had grown to manhood in those six weeks or so, David was obliged to report at Washington immediately upon his return. When the steamship was almost due Enid found that she could wait for him to see the baby not one day longer than that on which the boat was to arrive. So she took train from somewhere in Connecticut with that very little child and arrived at our house in a sad state of collapse, a few minutes before her telegram. Enid has no nurse maid. They are very young married people indeed.
The night on which Enid and her baby reached us Pelleas and I had been sitting in the dark of our drawing-room, with the fire almost burned out. It was one of the nights when all the little shadows that live near come creeping forth. They came when we were not aware and there they were in the room, saying nothing. The ghosts that come to the platforms of Elsinore do not often speak.
“We dreamed it differently, Etarre,” Pelleas had said.