Many Kingdoms | Page 6

eyes, raised now to his hungry gray ones, looked at him with the softened brilliance he had sometimes seen in those of a happy child.
"Should you have missed me," she asked, softly, "if you had never seen me again? Should you have been sorry?"
He drew a long breath.
"I love you," he said. "Whatever you are, wherever you come from, whatever all this means, I love you. I don't understand anything else, but I know that. It's the one sure thing, the one real thing, in all this tangle."
Without a word she put her hand in his. He could feel distinctly its cool, soft, exquisite texture. With an exclamation of delight he drew her toward him, but she held herself away, the expression of her beautiful face softening the effect of the recoil.
"Not yet, dear," she said, gently. "We must be very careful. You do not understand. If you do anything abrupt or sudden you will wake--and then we shall be parted again, who knows for how long!"
There were tears in her eyes as she spoke. Seeing them, he buried his face in his hands and groaned, while the sense of his utter helplessness rolled over him like a flood.
"God!" he broke out, with sudden fierceness. "What devil's trick is this? It's not a dream. It can't be a dream. Here we are, two human beings in a human world--I'll swear it. Smell that oleander. Listen to that bird sing. Hear the trickle of that fountain. And yet you tell me that we are asleep!"
She laid her head in the curve of her arm, resting on the ivy-covered back of the low seat. Bending over her, he saw that her cheeks were wet. The sight made him desperate.
"Don't!" he cried, hoarsely. "Don't do that! Tell me what is expected of me. Whatever it is, no matter how hard it is, or how long it takes, I'll do it."
She did not reply, but she made a quick little gesture with the hand nearest him. It signified hopelessness, almost despair. Darkness began to fall, and an early moon hung pale in the heavens. Somewhere in the thick bushes near them a nightingale began to sing. To Varick's excited fancy there was a heart-breaking pathos in the soft notes. They seemed to have been together, he and she, for a long time--for hours. He bent his head till it touched hers.
"But you love me?" he asked. She moved a little and wiped her eyes with an absurdly tiny, lace-edged square of linen. One corner, he noticed, bore an embroidered coronet.
"Yes," she said, very quietly, "I love you."
Her tone as she spoke expressed such entire hopelessness that the full sense of her words did not at once come to him. When it did, slowly, sweetly, she was speaking again.
"But oh, dearest, dearest!" she broke out, "why do we love? To what can love lead us--two poor shadows in a dream world, in which alone we can meet?"
He was silent. There seemed, somehow, nothing that he could say, though later he thought of many words with which he might have filled that throbbing silence. The dusk deepened around them. Off in the thicket the nightingale still warbled passionately, and now the stars began to come out over their heads, pale as yet against the warm blue of the heavens. Varick, sitting stiffly on the old marble bench, became conscious of an odd dizziness, and set his teeth with a sudden determination to show no evidence of it. She had risen and was moving about among the rose-bushes just behind them. Almost before he missed her she had returned, holding in her hand a beautiful salmon-hued rose, with a flame-colored, crumply heart. He had never before seen one like it. As she held it near him it exhaled an exquisitely reminiscent perfume--a perfume which seemed to breathe of old joys, old memories, and loves of long ago.
"Is it not beautiful?" she said. "It is called the Toinnette. Take it, dear, and keep it--for memory." Then, as he took it from her, her eyes widened in a sudden anguish of dread and comprehension.
"Oh, you're leaving me!" she said. "You're waking. Dearest, dearest, stay with me!"
The words and the look that accompanied them galvanized him into sudden action. He sprang to his feet, caught her in his arms, held her there, crushed her there, kissing her eyes, her hair, her exquisitely soft mouth.
"I will not leave you!" he raved. "I swear I won't! I defy the devil that's back of this! I swear--" But she, too, was speaking now, and her words came to his ears as from a long, long distance, sobbingly, with a catch in the breath, but distinct.
"Alas!" she cried, "you have ruined everything! You have ruined everything! You will never see me again. Dearest, dearest--"
He