At the last moment reason and experience whispered in his ear: "_Don't_
be a fool--_don't_ spoil everything. If you tell her you love her and
she says she loves you, why the least you can do is to kiss her, and you
know as well as I do that _if you touch them they vanish_."
So the Poor Boy walked with Joy that day and the next and the next, and
they were never very far apart, and he got to love her more and more.
And the more he loved her the more dangerous was it to tell her so, for
things got to such a point that if she had suddenly vanished, the blow
would almost have broken his heart.
X
But it was the heart of winter, not the Poor Boy's that was to be
broken. March came, and a wind from the south. Snow melted in sunny
corners, to freeze again at night, and melted and froze; and April came,
and wherever the Poor Boy went with his love there was a sound of water
falling, running, and roaring. The ice in lakes and streams wore thin
along the shores, broke, lost its grip, tinkled in the brooks, clashed
and cracked in the river. In the lakes the margin of water between the
ice islands and the shore grew wider and wider. In open spaces, faced
south, the snow melted and thinned until black soil showed in patches.
Rain came, more and more frequently, until no day passed without rain,
and the land was washed clean of winter, and rinsed, and became deep
mud, that oozed and gasped under foot.
The Poor Boy had been happier than he had ever hoped to be again. And
since Joy's coming (she still stopped with Lord Harrow's daughter, who
conversed pearls) there had been an ecstasy in his happiness and a
thrilling quality of romance. No man who has not endured solitude in
long doses knows how vivid, real, and necessary people and things of the
imagination may become. Sometimes the Poor Boy laughed at himself, but
more often he surrendered to his inventions, his people, his dams,
powerhouses, and schemes of amelioration, as you surrender to an opiate.
His valley from his own house to the sea was a thriving and virtuous
state; on terms with other governments. Ships came and went; there were
exports and imports, newspapers, news. News of inventions, of romances,
of misunderstandings righted by Solomonian judgments; of successes,
promotions; and almost every day in the foreign columns were to be found
reversals of those judgments by which his friends and the citizens of
his little state had been convicted of sins and crimes of which they had
never been guilty.
But daily and sometimes nightly through the complex evolutions of his
dreams the Poor Boy never lost grip upon his own personal love-affair.
It had become more real, and with the bursting of woods and meadows into
carpets of spring flowers more necessary to him than anything in life.
It was joy for him, and rapture--a dizzy path into unknown lands where
only the footprints of the "True Romance" marked the way. But suddenly
sometimes in the very heyday of his ecstasy the tragedy of it smote him,
you may say, between the eyes--so that villages vanished, homes,
institutions, and all the creatures of his brain, and he saw himself, as
another might have seen him, a very young man, all alone, thrust out
forever and ever.
The thought that all unknown to him the real Miss Grey might love
another, belong to another, tortured him. Tortured him, too, the
knowledge that if this was so he had no right to entertain that beloved
phantom that he had made of her in his North Woods. Or it tortured him
to remember that his love for her could come to nothing--nothing. He
must not tell her that he loved her; he must not, upon a night flooded
with moonlight and the odor of flowers, so much as touch her hand,
because he knew too well--too well--that "when you touch them they
vanish."
Old Martha and Joy will never forget a certain June night. The Poor Boy
did not come home for his dinner; supper of the most tempting nature and
variety did not tempt him. He was drunk, ethereally drunk with the
beauty of the night and with love. He opened many windows, and sat at
his piano in the moonlight. The two women drew as near as they dared, to
listen, while the Poor Boy's tantalized soul went out in splendid,
beseeching singing. Until after midnight Schubert and Schumann and other
lovers sang through the Poor Boy to their loves, and the women listened
and cried and trembled, or were carried upward as it were upon angel
wings into regions of pure and disembodied bliss.
At last there fell a long silence.
It was now the Poor Boy who listened. He had sent forth his questing,
questioning soul, and he waited for an answer. But in those regions,
that night, all things were still; and not so much as the hoot of an
owl answered him nor the chirp of a cricket.
"Oh," he thought, "there is no answer for me in all the world, no
answer. I have said all that I can say. And she--she doesn't hear--she
will not hear--she can not hear."
[Illustration: His fingers began to follow an air that flowed with
eternal sadness like blood from a broken heart.]
His fingers found their way once more to the keys, and for a while
harmonies rose in slow, quiet succession like a meditation, and took
more shape presently as if something had been decided on, and began to
follow an air that flowed with eternal sadness like blood from a broken
heart ... and then once more the Poor Boy was singing:
"Let us go hence, my songs, she will not hear,
Let us go hence, together, without fear.
Keep silence now, for singing time is over,
And over all things old, and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me, as all we love her.
Yea! Though we sang as angels in her ear,
She would not hear."
He broke off abruptly. The knob had rattled in a door!--a door had
opened, and been swiftly closed. The Poor Boy leapt to his feet. He
thought he had heard _her_ voice.
He stood, and trembled....
* * * * *
That "Yea! though we sang as angels in her ear, she would not hear," had
been too much for Joy. She had sobbed and said things, and had tried to
go to him. It was her voice that he had heard.
Martha had dragged her out of danger and sent her to bed with a
scolding. "The conceit of some people!" she had exclaimed. "To be always
thinking it's themselves as is grouped in the lime-light of another's
thoughts!"