University of Virginia Library

SCENE II

[The Mountain-side near Castle Tourbillon.]
EVE.
I am a little tired.

LUCIFER.
Lean on me, dear.
We will turn homeward.

EVE.
If you love me less,
You veil it nobly.

LUCIFER.
Less I do not love you:
And wherefore should I?

EVE.
I have awoke your dream,
The dream that was to you reality;
And you have nothing now but my poor love,
Which seems so little, severed from your dream.
I wish that I could help it for your sake;
But Heaven has got a hostage for my faith,
And I with Heaven perforce must keep my pledge,
Or forfeit hope to see my babe again.
Tell me you do not love me less?

LUCIFER.
I do not.
You never can take back the gift you gave,
Or I repay the giver; and, if wed
To soothe a later longing, I forget not,
And you must never ask me to foget,
You loved me, still unwedded.

EVE.
Then remember.
The violet, though rifled by the wind,
Doth keep some fragrance in it; and I still,
Despite of that I have surrendered, may
Perfume your life a little. Is it so?

LUCIFER.
'Twas the surrender made you sweet; as flowers
Are scentless till the chilly morning dew
Is shaken off them, though without the dew
'Tis true they never had been sweet at all.
And only let the secret night employ
Its mystic power upon them, lo! afresh
The dew returns and trembles in their heart.

EVE.
O yes, I know my heart will fresh remain,
If Love can keep it so. It is my mind,
My faltering mind, that makes me fearful lest
You get too distant as I drop behind.

LUCIFER.
There was a time I thought that as the snow
High on the mountain's wintry brow must melt
Before the vernal torrents leap and sing,
So must the icy summits of the mind
Feed the glad streams with which Love fills the heart.
Look on me now! look well! And if you meet
A gaze less near and tender than of old,
Then look on it no more!

EVE.
My Prince! my husband!
But though I love you more than love e'er loved
That has no sorrow in it, tell me, tell me,
Is it not pain to you that I can be
The perfect shadow of your thought no more?

LUCIFER.
Pain, yes, at first it was. But as you see
Low-lying mists drawn by the sovran sun
To topmost regions of the air, and so
Melted to ether, the effulgent mind
Can call up sorrow to its own great height,
And dissipate it there!

EVE.
Have you no news
From the great Realm I lost you?

LUCIFER.
News, to-day.
They have proclaimed Count Abdiel King.

EVE.
And he?

LUCIFER.
Accepts their homage gravely. I outrun
Your eager thought; for true it is that he
Secretly mocks the Creed they have proclaimed,
As openly he mocked it, preached by me.

EVE.
But should they change their mood?

LUCIFER.
He will change his
More nimbly e'en than they; being, sooth, in that,
A very model Ruler for To-day,
Whose fetich, if you peel it to the core,
Public opinion, is no more than this,
What people think that other people think.

EVE.
Love fails me here. I do not understand.

LUCIFER.
'Tis not worth understanding. Kiss me, sweet.
Who loves knows all. The rest is ignorance,
Pretentiously tricked out, mere strutting sound
And noisy nothingness.

EVE.
I love your thoughts,
E'en when I cannot follow them, as we love
To gaze on distances we may not reach.
But, O, be sure, I do not love you less,
But more, whene'er I pray.

LUCIFER.
Then, pray, pray on;
And on love's neutral territory, dear,
Let conflict be suspended.

EVE.
Strange that you,
You, of all soaring minds, should never feel
A self within yourself above yourself,
Like stars within the hollow of the sky,
Prompting a yearning infinite.

LUCIFER.
I feel it.
For every note our finite music strikes
Awakes kin note within the Infinite,
Heard distantly.

EVE.
May this not be
A mother's answer to an infant's cry?
And though we cannot see the far-off face,
Is not the voice responsive present proof
'Tis hiding somewhere?

LUCIFER.
Sweetly thought and said.
It may be.

EVE.
But will Elspeth not rejoin
Count Abdiel in his kingdom?

LUCIFER.
You forget.
He erstwhile married her, and thus no place,
She can accept, awaits her in his Realm.
She, like the moon, must take her way alone,
Wearing the pale light of an absent lord.

EVE.
O what a depth of difference doth divide
Short-memoried lust and long-remembering love!
How can he leave her lonely to support
A double recollection?

LUCIFER.
'Tis that he
Is cynical as common sense can make him,
And, worldly-wise, is no Idealist.

EVE.
As is my Lucifer. O be one always!
For if you saw me actual, I should fade
Into a simple shepherdess.

LUCIFER.
'Tis well
To see all things in heavenly fantasy:
Ourselves, and others, even as we scan
The inaccessible bright stars, and deem
Their silence music; so that nothing gross
Can reach the elevation of our thoughts,
Wherein we dwell transfigured!

EVE.
O, that voice!
Lucifer! Lucifer! that dulcet voice
Is incantation o'er me, and I feel
That you are wizarding my soul away
Into the skies of dreaming. Lucifer!
Who once has doubted never quite believes.

LUCIFER.
Who once believed will never wholly doubt.