I heard his low reply:
“Never, through all eternity, can _we_ go--away from one
another--except for moments.”
She partly understood, I think, for a great sigh, but half suppressed,
escaped her.
“Moments,” she murmured, “that are very long ... and lonely.”
It was then, as she said the words, that I noticed the change which so
long had been rising, establish itself definitely in the luminous eyes.
That other colour fastened on them--the deep sea-green. “Mrs. LeVallon”
before my sight sank slowly down, and a completer, far more ancient
self usurped her. Small wonder that my description halts in confusion
before so beautiful a change, for it was the beginning of an actual
transfiguration of her present person. It was bewildering to watch
the gradual, enveloping approach of that underlying Self, shrine of a
million memories, deathless, and ripe with long-forgotten knowledge.
The air of majesty that she wore in the sleep-walking incident gathered
by imperceptible degrees about the uninspired modern presentment that
I knew. Slowly her face turned calm with beauty. The features composed
themselves in some new mould of grandeur. The perplexity, at first so
painfully apparent, but marked the singular passage of the less into
the greater. I saw it slowly disappear. As she lay back in that rough
chair of a peasant’s châlet, there was some calm about her as of the
steadfast hills, some radiance as of stars, a suggestion of power that
told me--as though some voice whispered it in my soul--she knew the
link with Nature re-established finally within her being. Her head
turned slightly towards me. I stood up.
Instinctively I moved across the room and drew the curtain back. I
saw the stars; I saw the dark line of mountains; the odours of forest
and meadow came in with sweetness; I heard the tinkling of the little
stream--yet all contained somehow in the message of her turning head
and shoulders.
There was no sound, there was no spoken word, but the language was
one and unmistakable. And as I came slowly again towards the fire
Julius stood over her, uttering in silence the same stupendous thing.
The sense of my own inclusion in it was amazing. He smiled down into
her lifted face. These two, myself a vital link between them, smiled
across the centuries at one another. We formed--I noticed then--with
the fire and the open window into space--a circle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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