How quiet it was in the long room, where the myrtle candles gave out their
faint perfume and the low fire leaped upon the hearth! Thus for a time;
then, growing faint with her happiness, she put up protesting hands. He
made her sit in the great chair, and knelt before her, all youth and fire,
handsome, ardent, transfigured by his passion into such a lover as a queen
might desire.
"Hail, Sultana!" he said, smiling, his eyes upon her diadem. "Now you are
Arpasia again, and I am Moneses, and ready, ah, most ready, to die for
you."
She also smiled. "Remember that I am to quickly follow you."
"When shall we marry?" he demanded. "The garden cries out for you, my
love, and I wish to hear your footstep in my house. It hath been a dreary
house, filled with shadows, haunted by keen longings and vain regrets. Now
the windows shall be flung wide and the sunshine shall pour in. Oh, your
voice singing through the rooms, your foot upon the stairs!" He took her
hands and put them to his lips. "I love as men loved of old," he said. "I
am far from myself and my times. When will you become my wife?"
She answered him simply, like the child that at times she seemed: "When
you will. But I must be Arpasia again to-morrow night. The Governor hath
ordered the play repeated, and Margery Linn could not learn my part in
time."
He laughed, fingering the red silk of her hanging sleeve, feasting his
eyes upon her dark beauty, so heightened and deepened in the year that had
passed. "Then play to them--and to me who shall watch you well--to-morrow
night. But after that to them never again! only to me, Audrey, to me when
we walk in the garden at home, when we sit in the book-room and the
candles are lighted. That day in May when first you came into my garden,
when first I showed you my house, when first I rowed you home with the
sunshine on the water and the roses in your hair! Love, love! do you
remember?"
"Remember?" she answered, in a thrilling voice. "When I am dead I shall
yet remember! And I will come when you want me. After to-morrow night I
will come.... Oh, cannot you hear the river? And the walls of the box will
be freshly green, and the fruit-trees all in bloom! The white leaves drift
down upon the bench beneath the cherry-tree.... I will sit in the grass at
your feet. Oh, I love you, have loved you long!"