University of Virginia Library

24

15. XV.
THE TWO.

THE next week to Sir Rohan passed in a delirious
rapture; every hour with its blessings
repaid him for a year's pain; and Miriam, crowning
his ecstasy to-day with her sweet gravity, to-morrow
with a triumph of wild and overflowing
gayety, filled him at first with keen delight, and
then with an alarm as exquisite, lest some sudden
sorrow should fall and quench the flame. In her
felicity he believed as fully as in his own.

St. Denys, glad as and more hilarious than
they, left the lovers by themselves, and made
arrangements for their departure, whose day he
finally fixed.

When Sir Rohan considered his happiness, it
appeared too great a thing to be true; and if Miriam
left his side for a time, he feared lest it should
prove some illusion that would shortly refuse to

deceive him. He felt himself again in the vernal
flood of youth, and cast not a thought on the dark
tide between, for

As for Miriam, she was more glowing, more
radiant, than a Mænad. Her eyes flashed vivid
lightnings all day; existence was to her like a
sculptured frieze, a perpetual scene of never-varying
enjoyment. The contrast which they presented
was that between a picture blazing with
gorgeous Venetian tints and another abounding
only in quiet cinereous colors and stern outlines;
but his tranquillity was as grateful to her as cool
draughts from a rocky well to one in midsummer.
Her life was full of salient points, each one beaked
in sunshine. He was still and grave: she needed
toning down. Their difference in age exceeded
twenty years; nevertheless, he was still young,
and that was all she was. At least, so Miriam
felt.

As St. Denys saw them thus together, he remembered
that in the midst of the fierce August
heats that brood over a languishing land and
sting out the red bells and pricking growth of

later summer, there sometimes comes a day that
scents the fresh stir of advancing autumn, the
clear air washing a cool retiring blue with frosty
sparkles of vigor and hope, and all the earth turning,
as it seems, to a new phase of fine and sweet
maturity.

One asks what is this love that never palls, that,
shift the kaleidoscope as you will, presents a new
configuration. It must be the universal sympathy
alone, you answer, which will not suffer it to
tire. About ambition, jealousy, and crimes, the
world varies; that age demands a good hater, this
repudiates him. But Love is the flower of every
age, and foreign to no clime. Is it any fable, the
flower-juice dropped on sleeping lids? Is it not,
rather, the fanciful expression of a broad truth? In
what subtle atmosphere do lovers move, that, once
breathed, intoxicates with all imaginative freaks of
infatuation? What delicate ether is it that creeps
from heart to heart to bathe both in one medium?
Whence come the threads that knit each to the
caprices of the other's slavery? What lodestone,
what cynosure, with all magnetic secrets and
latent force, equals the fearful and delicious attraction
that draws either soul into eternal subjection

and revolution. We know the secrets of the
earth's magnetism, her currents, her poles, her meridians;
we know nothing of this airy evanescence
that flees at a glance, and baffles all our ponderous
pursuit, yet swings a planet at its will, and is the
Viceroy of creation. What wise magician shall ever
come to read the ancient and mystical book of its
lore, text and commentary, to translate to us the
strangest of familiar things, the simplest of enchantments,
the most terrible of blisses — to tell
us what is Love. It is the crown of all experience,
say its prophets. It is a fulness, an imperial
largess from overflowing spirits, a wealth of
joy like generous sunlight, a strength, a glory, an
aureole, say its devotees. It is a void, a need, a
pain, say its victims. And those who stand without,
who see the dance and do not hear the music,
— what more weird fantastic folly, the madness of
the saturnalia, the sacred fury of eleusinian or
evantian choir, ever dawns upon their dazzled
darkness!

What drew these two (of whom the story tells)
together, what made of them a single creature,
with one wish, one thought, one life, nothing
clearly defines; but no rod of divination is needed

to detect the kindred quality of each. A stream
that runs its melancholy race in dark, subterranean
caverns, is no less the same when it bursts to
light above in joyous flashes filled with the sun so
long denied, — no less it falls from its brilliant frolic
and flows on quietly to the great sea beyond.

In any unseen vase of flowers we discriminate
the odors, and there is honeysuckle, we think, that
mignonette, this sweetbrier. But that of two oriental
coronations — no more nor less than twin
garden pinks — with its ineffable spice of clove
and cassia, who thinks of separating? The two
do not emit different rays of perfume, but slipping
into each other, form one. They are the
same thing. What else were Sir Rohan and Miriam?
And what more frail and perishable than
their unsupported happiness?

I linger a moment over these few brief days,
days marred by nothing, days coming but once.
They have for me that fragrance of a book where
I have pressed a rose, and a shade of soft sadness
always tinges such in the remembrance, — it may
be, like an attraction of opposite poles. And thus
the image of Miriam, resplendent in loveliness,
bathed in wafts of light and grace, a flowery thing

of smiles and joy, standing in the dark halls of
the gray old house, beneath the stone heraldic
cope, — if seen through this magic lens that mellows
all the landscape and imparts a golden air,
borrows from it also that pathos which distance
and excessive beauty give.