“Shall we, Etarre?”
And I made him know that it was what I would have above all other
things, if Miss Deborah was willing. And as for Miss Deborah, she
leaned back in her low chair, her eyes shining and a little pink spot
on either cheek, and she said only:--
“I told you! I tell everybody! It’s you heaven-and-earth kind of people
with a ballast of flowers that know more about your entrance fee to
the garden than anybody else.”
We wondered afterward what she could have meant; for of course there
could be no question of our having paid an entrance fee to our garden
in the sense that she had intended, since what we were proposing to do
was to us no payment of a debt or a fee, but instead a great happiness
to us both.
“Are you sure, Miss Deborah, that they want it for the Governor’s house
_now_?” Pelleas asked in sudden anxiety.
“They were here again yesterday to ask me,” Miss Deborah assured us;
and I think there was a certain radiance in her face.
So Miss Deborah told Mitty and Joel--dear little maid, dear honest
young lover; shall I ever forget the look in their eyes when they
knew? And, remembering, I am smitten with a kind of wonderment at the
immortality of the look of happiness in another’s eyes. For many and
many a time when Pelleas and I have been stepping through some way
of shadow we have, I know, recalled the look on those luminous young
faces; and we have said to each other that life can never be wholly
shadowed or wholly barren while there remain in the world wistful faces
to whom one may bring that look. It is so easy to make eyes brighten,
as I hope every one in the world knows.
And so our fountain of gardens tossed up such a rainbow as the
happiness of Mitty and Joel--Mitty with the starched flaxen braids and
Joel with the brown shining face to whom the picture had suggested only
the green of a woodshed roof. Pelleas and I had quite forgotten that
we had meant to give the picture to some one who should understand the
garden better than we--one who should “walk in beauty.” Something of
the significance of this stirred vaguely in our thought even then; but
I think that we have since come to regard this change of purpose as
holding one of the meanings of life.
Mitty and Joel left Miss Deborah’s house just before us, and Pelleas
and I lingered for a moment in her doorway.
“That young artist,” said Miss Deborah, “who paints pictures better
than his cook makes crumpets--I shall write to him to-night. I shall
tell him that even if he never paints another picture he will not have
been an artist in vain.” She leaned toward us, smiling and nodding a
little. “There will be other entrance fees,” she said; “watch for them.”
We went up the twilight lane that led between the Governor’s
treasure-house of canvas and curio and the thatched cots of the Low
Grounds. Save for the shadowy figures of Mitty and Joel walking before
us, and waving their hands at the lane’s turning, nothing was changed
since the morning. Yet now the spirit of the place lived not only in
its spell of bloom but it lived also in us. Some door had been opened
and we had entered.
When we reached the upper meadow, Pelleas suddenly caught my hand.
“Ah, look--look, Etarre!” he cried.
In the dimness the meadow lay, all of tender, early green, like that of
our Wonderful Picture, with half-evident boughs of indeterminate bloom
pleasant with freshness and with sweet surprise at some meaning of the
year.
“Pelleas,” I said, “I think, if we look, the well and the shepherd with
his pipes will be over there.”
“And the shrine,” Pelleas said.
We stood at the stile, and it seemed to us that the dusk had shaped
itself to be our garden at whose gate, when one has entered, a fountain
will spring so that, as Pelleas had said, “no one can get out--ever.”
At the last we looked long in each other’s eyes. And I think that
we read there the secret of the garden that lies not in Etruria, or
Tuscany, or Tempe; and we knew its living waters and its spices and its
incommunicable spirit of rhythm and of echo.