Adam Johnstones Son | Page 9

She noticed it this time, as something she
had never felt until that afternoon, but she would not yield to it. She
walked on, looking straight at the back of her mother's head. Then she
heard quick footsteps on the tiles behind her, and Brook's voice.
"I beg your pardon," he was saying, "you have dropped your shawl."
She turned quickly, and met his eyes as he stopped close to her, holding
out the white chudder which had slipped to the floor unnoticed when
she had risen from her seat. She took it mechanically and thanked him.
Instinctively looking past him down the long hall, she saw that the little
lady in white had turned in her seat and was watching her. Brook made
a slight bow and was gone again in an instant. Then Clare followed her
mother and went out.

"Let us go out behind the house," she said when they were in the broad
corridor. "There will be moonlight there, and those people will
monopolise the terrace when they have finished dinner."
At the western end of the old monastery there is a broad open space,
between the buildings and the overhanging rocks, at the base of which
there is a deep recess, almost amounting to a cave, in which stands a
great black cross planted in a pedestal of whitewashed masonry. A few
steps lead up to it. As the moon rose higher the cross was in the shadow,
while the platform and the buildings were in the full light.
The two women ascended the steps and sat down upon a stone seat.
"What a night!" exclaimed the young girl softly.
Her mother silently bent her head, but neither spoke again for some
time. The moonlight before them was almost dazzling, and the air was
warm. Beyond the stone parapet, far below, the tideless sea was silent
and motionless under the moon. A crooked fig-tree, still leafless,
though the little figs were already shaped on it, cast its intricate shadow
upon the platform. Very far away, a boy was singing a slow minor
chant in a high voice. The peace was almost disquieting--there was
something intensely expectant in it, as though the night were in love,
and its heart beating.
Clare sat still, her hand upon her mother's thin wrist, her lips just parted
a little, her eyes wide and filled with moon-dreams. She had almost lost
herself in unworded fancies when her mother moved and spoke.
"I had quite forgotten a letter I was writing," she said. "I must finish it.
Stay here, and I will come back again presently."
She rose, and Clare watched her slim dark figure and the long black
shadow that moved with it across the platform towards the open door of
the hotel. But when it had disappeared the white fancies came flitting
back through the silent light, and in the shade the young eyes fixed
themselves quietly to meet the vision and see it all, and to keep it for
ever if she could.

She did not know what it was that she saw, but it was beautiful, and
what she felt was on a sudden as the realisation of something she had
dimly desired in vain. Yet in itself it was nothing realised; it was
perhaps only the certainty of longing for something all heart and no
name, and it was happiness to long for it. For the first intuition of love
is only an exquisite foretaste, a delight in itself, as far from the bitter
hunger of love starving as a girl's faintness is from a cruel death. The
light was dazzling, and yet it was full of gentle things that smiled,
somehow, without faces. She was not very imaginative, perhaps, else
the faces might have come too, and voices, and all, save the one reality
which had as yet neither voice nor face, nor any name. It was all the
something that love was to mean, somewhere, some day--the airy lace
of a maiden life-dream, in which no figure was yet wrought amongst
the fancy-threads that the May moon was weaving in the soft spring
night. There was no sadness in it, at all, for there was no memory, and
without memory there can be no sadness, any more than there can be
fear where there is no anticipation, far or near. Most happiness is really
of the future, and most grief, if we would be honest, is of the past.
The young girl sat still and dreamed that the old world was as young as
she, and that in its soft bosom there were exquisite sweetnesses untried,
and soft yearnings for a beautiful unknown, and little pulses that could
quicken with foretasted joy which only needed face and name to take
angelic shape of present love. The