Many Kingdoms | Page 5

he saw the haze, saw the familiar streets, saw her far, far ahead of him, and hurrying onward, saw her turn a sharp corner, caught one backward look from her dear brown eyes as she vanished--and awoke! He gave much thought to that look in the months which followed. He was a modest youth, singularly unconscious of his own charms; but the eloquent glance had conveyed to him a sense of longing--of more than longing.
Quite an interval elapsed before she came again. There was, first of all, the inevitable filmy effect, but, in the vision that succeeded it, instead of finding himself in the little town, he was in the depths of a great old forest, and in horrible agony. Some accident had occurred--he did not know what. He only knew that he was shot, suffering, dying! He groaned, and even as he writhed in a spasm of pain he saw her sitting on the sward beside him. He turned glazed eyes on her. Her brown ones looked back into his with a great love and pity in their depths.
"Oh, my dear," she whispered, "I know it seems terribly hard to you. And because you think you suffer, it is almost as hard for you as if you did. But you are not really hurt, you know. You are not suffering. It is all in the dream. You are sound asleep, far, far away."
He forced a sardonic laugh from his stiff throat.
"Not this time," he managed to articulate. "Whatever the others may have been, this is no dream. This is the real thing--and death!"
She smoothed the hair back from his damp brow with a beautiful, caressing touch. He felt her fingers tremble.
"No," she said. "It is a dream, and almost over."
"Then will you stay with me," he gasped, "to the end?"
"Yes," she promised. "Try to bear it just a moment longer. Courage, dear heart! for already you are waking--you are waking--_you--are-- awake!_"
He was, and it was daylight, and around him were the familiar objects of his own room. He wiped his forehead, which was cold and wet. He felt utterly exhausted.
"Stay with me to the end!"
If she only would! If he could find her--find her in this warm, human world, away from that ghastly border-land where they two met. For in that hour he knew he loved--what? A woman or a ghost? A creature of this world or a fantasy of the night? Wherever she was, whatever she was, he loved her and he wanted her. And in that hour of his agony her eyes had told that she loved and wanted him.
It was eight months before they met again. Varick's friends thought him changed, and quite possibly he was. The insouciant boy of twenty- eight had become a man, a sympathetic, serious, thoughtful man, still given to sports and outdoor life, but more than all devoted to a search which had taken him to no end of out-of-the-way European towns. He was sleeping in one of these one night (not the one, alas!--he had not found that) when the veil, now so warmly welcome, fell for the fourth time.
He was in an exquisite Italian garden, a place all perfume and May breezes and flooding sunshine and overarching blue sky. As he entered it he saw her coming to meet him, and he went forward to greet her with his pulses bounding and a light in his eyes which no eyes but hers had ever seen there. Even in that supreme moment the wonderfully real atmosphere of it all impressed him. He heard a dry twig crack under his foot as he walked, and he recognized the different perfumes of the flowers around him--the heavy sweetness of a few belated orange blossoms, the delicate breath of the oleander, the reminiscent perfume of the rose. Then their hands met and their eyes, and each drew a long breath, and neither spoke for a moment. When Varick found words they were very commonplace.
"Oh, my love, my love!" he said. And she, listening to them with sudden tears in her brown eyes, seemed to find in them the utmost eloquence of the human tongue.
"It has been so long, so long!" he gasped. "I began to think I was never to see you again."
They drifted side by side along a winding, rose-hedged path, past an old sun-dial, past a triumphant peacock strutting before his mild little mate, past a fountain whose spray flung out to them a welcome. She led the way with the accustomed step of one who knew and loved the place. They came to a marble seat, half hidden by a tangle of vines and scarlet blossoms, and sheltered by overhanging oleander branches; there she sat down and moved her skirts aside that he might sit close to her. Her brown