The White Shadow | Page 3

knows?" she laughed, and leaned over to pick a blade of wild wheat. She coloured faintly a moment later, and said: "I didn't mean that, Jack."
And so Sweetheart took her first step across that threshold of mystery, the Temple of Idols. And of the gilded idols within the temple, one shall turn to living flesh at the sound of a voice. And lo! where a child had entered, a woman returned with the key to the Temple of Gilded Idols.
"Jack," said Sweetheart, "you are wrong. No day is too fair to kill in. I shall pick my arms full--full of flowers."
Over the yellow fields, red with the stalks of the buckwheat, crowned with a glimmering cloud of the dusty gold of the golden-rod, Sweetheart passed, pensive, sedate, awed by the burden of sixteen years.
I followed.
Over the curling fern and wind-stirred grasses the silken milkweed seeds sailed, sailed, and the great red-brown butterflies drifted above, ruddy as autumn leaves aglow in the sun.
On the sand-cliff there are marigolds," said Sweetheart.
I looked at the mass of wild flowers in her arms; her white polished skin reflected the blaze of colour, warming like ivory under their glow.
"Marigolds," I repeated; "we will get some."
"The sand slides on the face of the cliff; you must be careful," she said.
"And I may see one of those rare cliff butterflies. I haven't any good examples."
I fancy she was not listening; the crows were clamouring above the beech woods; the hill winds filled our ears with a sound like the sound of the sea on shoals. Her gray eyes, touched with the sky's deep blue and the blue of the misty hills, looked out across the miles of woods and fields, and saw a world; not a world old, scarred, rock-ribbed, and salt with tears, but a new world, youthful, ripe, sunny, hazy with the splendour of wonders hidden behind the horizon--a world jewelled with gems, spanned by rose-mist rainbows--a world of sixteen years.
"We are already at the cliff's edge," I said.
She stepped to the edge and looked over. I drew her back. The sand started among the rocks, running, running with a sound like silver water.
"Then you shall not go either," she said. "I do not care for marigolds."
But I was already on the edge, stooping for a blossom. The next instant I fell.
There was a whistle of sand, a flurry and a rush of wind, a blur of rock, fern, dead grasses--a cry!
For I remember as I fell, falling I called, "Sweetheart!" and again "Sweetheart!" Then my body struck the rocks below.
III.
Of all the seconds that tick the whole year through, of all the seconds that have slipped onward marking the beat of time since time was loosed, there is one, one brief moment, steeped in magic and heavy with oblivion, that sometimes lingers in the soul of man, annihilating space and time. If, at the feet of God, a year is a second passed unnoted, this magic second, afloat on the tide of time, moves on and on till, caught in the vortex of some life's whirl, it sinks into the soul of a being near to death.
And in that soul the magic second glows and lingers, stretching into minutes, hours, days-- aye, days and days, till, if the magic hold, the calm years crowd on one by one; and yet it all is but a second--that magic moment that comes on the tide of time--that came to me and was caught up in my life's whirl as I fell, dropping there between sky and earth.
And so that magic moment grew to minutes, to hours; and when my body, whirling, pitching, struck and lay flung out on the earth, the magic second grew until the crystal days fell from my life, as beads, one by one, fall from the rosaries that saints tell kneeling.
Those days of a life that I have lived, those years that linger still aglow in the sun behind me, dim yet splendid as dust-dimmed jewels, they also have ended, not in vague night, but in the sunburst of another second--such a second as ticks from my watch as I write, quick, sharp, joyous, irrevocable! So, of that magic second, or day, or year, I shall tell--I, as I was, standing beside my body flung there across the earth.
I looked at my body, lying in a heap, then turned to the sand cliff smiling.
"Sweetheart!" I called.
But she was already at my side.
We walked on through fragrant pastures, watching the long shadows stretch from field to field, speaking of what had been and of all that was to be. It was so simple--everything was clear before us. Had there been doubts, fears, sudden alarms, startled heartbeats?
If there had been, now they were ended forever.
"Not forever," said Sweetheart; "who knows how long the magic