"How should I know? Back into your cloud, I guess--dear goddess." The
last words were very low, and to himself, but she heard them. Instantly
and against all reason, she, who had never meant to be happy again,
laughed ecstatically.
"Think," she said, "a month ago I didn't know you were in the world."
"Oh, yes, you did. Peter told you he had a kind of a brother, that
worked on the farm. But I didn't know you were in the world."
"Of course," she deliberated softly, "I knew Peter had a brother. But I
didn't know it was you."
The moonlit air was as beguiling to him as it was to her. Everything was
different and everything was possible. He put his hand to his head and
tried to recall old prudences. In vain. The still, bright world told
him, with a voice so quiet that it was like a hand upon his heart, that
it was the only world. The daylight one of doubts and dull expediency
had been arranged by man. This was the home of the spirit. For a moment
he felt himself drowning in that sea of life. Then, perhaps lifted by
his striving will, he seemed to come out again to the free air that had
touched him at her coming. Again he was at peace and incredibly exalted.
He tried to bring lightness into their talk.
"I suppose," said he, "you are one of the charmers."
"What do you mean by charmers?"
"Don't ask me what I mean, when you know. If you do that, we shall
forget our language."
"What do you mean by our language?"
"Yours and mine. Don't you hear it going on, question and answer,
question and answer, all the time our tongues are talking? Those are the
things we never can speak out loud."
"Yes, I hear them. But I couldn't tell what I hear."
"Of course you couldn't. Only when we really speak with our lips, we
must tell each other the truth. If we don't, we shall jar things. Then
the other voices will stop."
When she spoke her words had a note of pain, mysteriously
disproportioned, he thought, to the warning he had given.
"I don't think I have told you what wasn't true," she faltered. Life had
gone out of her.
The tenderest comforting seemed to him too harsh for such pathetic
sorrow. But he clung to his lighter, safer mood.
"We've simply got to tell each other the truth. When we don't, it's like
the clanging of ten thousand bells. Of course that drowns the other
voices. So when I ask you if you are one of the charmers, you mustn't
ask what I mean. You must answer."
She began to laugh. His heart rejoiced at it.
"Yes," she owned gleefully. "Yes, I am."
"That's a good lady. You're very beautiful, too, aren't you?"
"Yes," she corroborated. "Oh, I'd swear to anything!"
"If it's true," he corrected her. "What are your accomplishments, missy?
Do you play the piano?"
For his life, Osmond could not have told why he addressed her as he did,
or how he got the words. Some strange self seemed to have sprung up in
him, a self that had a language he had not learned from books nor used
to woman. The new self grew rapidly. He felt it wax within him. It was
loquacious, too. It seemed to have more to say than there would be time
for in a million years; but he gave it head.
"I play a little," said Rose. She was meeting him joyously. "I sing,
too."
"Yes, you sing. I guessed that. Let me hear you."
At once she folded her hands on her knees and sang like a child in
heaven, with the art that is simplicity. She sang "Nous n'irons plus au
bois," and Osmond felt his heart choking with the melancholy of it. His
own voice trembled when he said,--
"You must not sing that often. It's too sad."
"Are we never to be sad?" She asked it in a quick tone full of eager
confidence, as if whatever he told her was bound to come to pass.
"Not when we are together."
Premonition chilled him there. Why should they ever be together again?
Why was it not possible that this was his one night, the first and the
last? So if it was to be the last, he would taste every minute of it,
and make it his to keep.
"Well," he said consideringly, "so you are a charmer. You can charm a
bird off a bush. That would be one of the first tricks."