Husband and wife -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Each on the lips of the other, their souls were drowned in oblivion;
for if he kissed her, she as openly kissed him; and if her cheeks were
drenched with tears, they certainly were not all of her own shedding.
Tempestuous, tragic emotion overflowed the hearts of both. In the
delicious anguish of their embrace, the memory of life with its pitiful
conventions dropped from them. Loyalty was an empty word, pity a name.
Their clinging arms its walls, their shining eyes its stars, they stood
apart in a universe new-made.
And from the old, old sky the moon that watches over this paltry world
of man with his misery and his bliss,--the moon looked down on them.
Changing her position on her cloudbank, like a head lolling lazily on a
pillow, the moon bestowed on the pair of bewildered children the same
glance of remote indulgence she recently had bestowed on the lovers in
the Garden of Eden. She threw her brightness over their clasping arms
and eloquent faces, and with her radiance mischievously deepened the
glamour of that supreme moment in their infinitesimal lives. Then
sinking amid the down of her pillow, she temporarily disappeared.
"Rachel, what did you mean by leaving me the way you did this
afternoon?" Emil whispered, pausing long enough between his kisses to
hold back her head, while he looked down into her eyes with his own
which were fierce and wet; "Didn't you know it would be useless?"
His words roused her from the spell that had enwrapped her. Freeing
herself with violence, she turned on him. The crimson had dropped from
her cheek like the colours from a mast head.
"Emil, leave me!"
His eyes glowed with a peculiar brilliance:
"Leave you, my own? I'll never leave you! and you'll never leave me
again; that couldn't happen more than once!"
And as she looked at him, she understood that he could conceive of
nothing strong enough to deter him from following the dictates of his
pagan and powerful nature.
"Go away, Emil," she said dully, "if you have any love for me--any pity
even." Her brows drew together with hopeless obstinacy. She turned.
With one stride he was beside her and had caught her hand. "Listen to
me, love," he cried, and a curious mingling of command, entreaty and
supplication trembled in the words, "to-morrow is Sunday, there is a
train in the afternoon at six; I'll wait for you in that little grove
near the station. Do you understand?"
"No;" and she stared back at him, all in a blaze.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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