Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction; Historical fiction
With a gentle sound the fountain rose and fell in a gray stone basin.
Around it were set the rose-trees, and beyond the roses tall box and yew
most fantastically clipped screened from observation the fairy spot.
Damaris, slowly entering, became at once the spirit of the place. She
paced the fountain's grassy rim to a rustic seat and took it for her
chair of state, from which for a while, with her white hands behind her
head, she watched the silver spray and the blue midsummer sky. A lark
sang, but so high in the blue that its joyous note jarred not the
languor of the place. Damaris opened her book--but what need of written
poesy? The red roses smelled so sweet that 'twas as though she lay
against the heart of one royal bloom. She left her throne and trod the
circle, and in both hands she took the heavy blossoms and pressed them
to her lips. The odor was like warm wine. "Now and for all my life,"
said Damaris, "for me one faded rose! Afterwards, two in a garden like
this--like this!"
The grass was so green and warm that presently she lay down upon it, her
head pillowed upon her arm, her eyes gazing through the fountain mist
and down the emerald slopes to where ran the elmwood avenue. She gazed
in idleness, through half-shut eyelids, wrapped in lullabies and drowsy
warmth. Hoof-beats between the elms troubled her not. When through the
mist of falling water and the veil of drooping leaves she saw riding
towards the house a youth clad in blue, the horse and rider seemed but
figures in a piece of tapestry. Her satin eyelids closed, and if other
riders presently showed in the tapestry she saw them not, for she was
sound asleep. She dreamed of a masque at Hampton Court, long ago, and of
the gown she had worn and how merry she had been, and she dreamed of the
Queen. Then her dream changed and she sat with Henry Sedley on the sands
of a lost sea-coast, stretching in pale levels beyond the ken of man.
The surf raced towards them like shadowy white horses, and a red moon
hung low in the sky. There was music in the air, and his voice was
speaking, but suddenly the sea and its champing horses and the red moon
passed away. She stirred, and now it was not her brother's voice that
spoke. Green grass was beneath her; splendid roses, red and gold, were
censers slowly swinging; the silver fountain leaped as if to meet the
skylark's song. Slowly Damaris raised herself from her grassy bed and
looked with widening eyes upon an intruder. "I--I went to sleep," she
said. "Is't Heaven or will this rose also fade?" She closed her eyes for
a moment, then, opening them, "O my dream!" she cried. "Go not away!"
The sunlight fell upon his lifted head, and on his dress, that was as
rich as any bridegroom's, and on a sword-knot of silver gauze. "Look you
thus in Heaven, O my King?" she breathed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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