The nightingales trilled into silence. The last sweet note seemed to drift out over the water, and then Anne heard another sound, the deep low murmur of the Caribbean Sea. Her mind swung to Byam Warner, to the extraordinary poem which ten years ago had made his fame and interpreted this unceasing melancholy of the sea's chant into a dirge over the buried continent and its fate. With the passionate energy of youthful genius abandoning itself to the ecstasies of imagination, he had sung the lament of Atlantis, compelled the blue sepulchre to recede, and led a prosaic but dazzled world through cities of such beauty and splendour, such pleasant gardens and opulent wilds as the rest of Earth had never dreamed of. He peopled it still with an arrogant and wanton race, masters of the lore and the arts that had gone with them, awaiting the great day when the enchantment should lift and the most princely continent Earth has borne should rise once more to the surface of the sea, lifting these jewelled islands, her mountain peaks, high among the clouds.

It had been Byam Warner's first epic poem, and although he had won the critical public with his songs of the Caribbean Sea and of Nevis, the island of his birth, it was this remarkable achievement, white-hot from first to last with poetic fire, replete with fascinating pictures and living tragedy, that gave him as wide a popularity as any novelist of the day. He had visited London immediately after, and, in spite of some good folk who thought his poem shockingly immoral, was the lion of the season, and a favourite at court. But he had soon wearied of London, and although he had returned several times with increasing fame, he had always left as abruptly, declaring that he could write nowhere above the equator; and, notwithstanding revels where he shone far more brilliantly than when in society, where indeed he was shy and silent, that he cared for nothing else.

Little gossip had come to Warkworth Manor but Anne had read "The Blue Sepulchre" when she was seventeen, and after that her allowance went for his books. When a new volume appeared it was an event in her life comparable only to marriage or birth in the lives of other women. She abandoned her soul to this young magician of Nevis; her imagination, almost as powerful as his own, gave her his living presence more bountifully than had the real man, cursed with mortal disenchantments, companioned her. So strong was her power of realisation that there were hours when she believed that her thoughts girdled the globe and drew his own into her mental heaven. In more practical hours, when tramping the moor, or sailing her boat, she dismissed this hope of intelligent response, inferring, somewhat grimly, that the young, handsome, and popular poet had excited ardour in many a female breast besides her own. Nevertheless, she permitted herself to return again and again to the belief that he loved her and dreamed of her; and certainly one of his most poignant sonnets had been addressed to the unknown mate whom he had sought in vain.




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